John McGahern - The Barracks

“And had you callers?” she changed.

“Peter Mulligan,” he named a farmer. “He wanted a licence to cut trees.”

“Is it difficult to get a licence now?” the conversation continued while he waited for the football to begin. The radio had been turned on, it was playing a sleepy waltz.

“What are licences for only for gettin’?” he laughed cynically. “Unless I wanted to stop him, that’s all! And why would I stop anybody from gettin’ anything, Elizabeth?”

“There’ll be no trees soon,” she more mused to herself than answered.

“There’ll be no country soon, never mind trees, if you ask me, Elizabeth! But I suppose there’ll be always some eejit left to sound The Last Post . That’s how it’s always supposed to be, isn’t it?”

The waltz ended. The commentary was announced. Casey had no further interest in the conversation. He pulled up a chair to the radio and with twenty Gold Flake, a box of matches and the sport pages settled himself in anticipation of existing pleasurably for the next hour on the voice coming over the air.

Elizabeth looked through the newspapers. The radio was low above the sawing in the distance. Surely the evening was coming, the light turning, blue with the cigarette-smoke, the aroma an evocation of a thousand evenings where her life had happened while cigarettes were smoked. The starkness of individual minutes passing among accidental doors and windows and chairs and flowers and trees, cigarette-smoke or the light growing brilliant and fading losing their pain, gathered into oneness in the vision of her whole life passing in its total mystery. A girl child growing up on a small farm, the blood of puberty, the shock of the first sexual act, the long years in London, her marriage back into this enclosed place happening as would her death in moments where cigarettes were smoked. No one, not even herself, could measure it by slide or rule. No one could place a finger on it in judgement and say this or that without all they said being just easy trash. Her life was either under the unimaginable God or the equally unimaginable nothing; but in that reality it was under no lesser thing; and the reality continued, careless of whether the human accident was a child waking up in terror or two people bored together, whether it was the rejoicing of a marriage or a man listening to the radio and smoking and a woman turning the pages of a newspaper.

She rose to pile wood on the fire in a deep joy, to sprinkle and sweep the floor. Casey started up and tried to shrink in against the wall when he saw her with the brush. She’d to assure him several times that he wasn’t in the way before he’d sit again and he’d put himself to so much inconvenience for her that she felt she owed it to him to ask, “Is the match good?”

He described it as if accuracy was a matter of life and death: its importance in the League Table, if Wolves lost the teams it’d bring back into the running; the stars, the transfers, the internationals, the three Irishmen playing.…

It seemed he could go on for ever but frenzied noises from the commentator and background cheering glued him again to the set.

“It’s a goal,” he shouted. “One all. Now we’re in for the fireworks!”

He lit another cigarette, and marked the time and score and the scorer down on the page of newspaper, sitting erect with excited attention, his ear close to the set so as not to lose a word.

Fragments drifted to Elizabeth as she idled over the sweeping.

“Throw in to Wolves. Smith takes it. Long pass out to Atkinson. The game opening out more now. Atkinson beats Morgan on the turn. Coming into the edge of the penalty area. Shoots —”

She saw Casey go tense and rise in the chair and then relax as the tones turned to an anticlimax of disappointment. “Oh, straight at O’Neill. O’Neill safely gathers, hops the ball, comes out to the edge of the penalty area. Long throw out to Henshaw.…”

It seemed that nothing could ever change. The sunshine, the curtains, the daffodils in the white vase on the sill, the voice rising and falling. She heard the chug-chug-chug of a riverboat coming downstream, hugging the black navigation sign at the mouth of the lake, the timber rising out of the hold, only the man at the tiller on deck, in greasy overalls and sailor cap. She read The Old Oak as it passed the house. The screen of vegetation between the boles of the ash trees shut it out of sight as its trail of foam swayed in the centre of the river and the water began to ramp against the banks.

Neither phone nor caller disturbed Casey as he listened, completely absorbed, searching the pages now and then for information. When it was over he announced the result to Elizabeth with the comment, “Not one of the forecasts were right!”

“The season will soon be over?” she entered into a conversation.

“In four weeks, with the Cup Final,” he said, “and then it’ll be the cricket and our own stalwarts of the G.A.A. on Sundays with Michael O’Hehir. “Bail o Dhia oraibh go leir a chairde Gael o Phairc an Chrocaigh. Hello everyone from Croke Park and this is Michael O’Hehir,” he mimicked and they both laughed together, the performance marvellously ridiculous and accurate.

“Shure there’d have to be something,” he said as he left, “or we’d all go off our rockers. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

He was gone as the children came exultant and rosy-cheeked from playing on the quay, willing to do anything rather than submit to the discipline of their homework. She loathed this badgering and coaxing she had to do.

“We haven’t much this evening — we’ll have plenty of time after tea,” they protested.

“But if you do them now you’ll be finished and done with them for the whole evening,” she reasoned.

“We’ll have plenty of time after tea,” the same old excuse came back and then the sulky cry from Willie, “Why do we have to do all these lessons anyhow?”

He’d need to write and read and add to live in modern society; to penpush his way to sixty-five in some city office; discipline his formless will and not to be for ever the child of his own longing, and there were other reasons, she knew. And if they were let follow their own longings now they’d accuse back: “You never gave me a chance, Elizabeth! I didn’t know what was right and you didn’t care enough to show me,” and they had the right, she supposed, to grow to knowledge of everything and perhaps the desperate satisfaction of knowing for certain that there is nothing that can be really known here and now.

But did these children want to get their way? Did they not in their hearts want her to enforce the rules of their lives so that they could assert themselves against them without real danger, they wanted to shake their fists at the skies but not for the skies to crash about their heads? They too had need of their laws and gods, they wanted to feel secure. It was all difficult and complicated, it might be this and it might be that, nothing real about the lives of people could ever be known, but she’d enough of thinking and reasoning and arguing for one evening.

“You must do your lessons now,” she commanded firmly and they obeyed. She saw them unbuckle the blue cloth schoolbags she’d made them out of an old tunic of Reegan’s, get the bottle of ink from the sideboard and bend over their blue-lined copies, and she felt as defeated as they did.

“I’ll help you in anything you want,” she tried to atone for the severity, and listened to their nibs scrape in the silence with anxiety. She was afraid her firmness would harden them against her till Sheila raised great dark eyes and asked her how to do a problem that she began to read out of the Arithmetic. She stooped over her to help. The small child soon understood. She was able to continue on her own. Then Una asked something else out of jealousy; and later, Willie, “Is b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l the way to spell beautiful, Elizabeth?”