John McGahern - The Barracks

The sawmill came to a stop, then the stonecrusher in the quarries. Men called to each other and their voices came with haunting clarity across the frozen countryside. A bucket rattled where a woman was feeding calves in some yard. Groups of men from the quarries crossed the bridge on bicycles, their faces pale with the powdered limestone, the army haversacks that carried their sandwiches and bottles of tea wrapped in woollen socks slung from their shoulders. Tractors were ploughing in the distance, using their headlamps now; and the carts came crunching home on the road, the men’s faces white with dust, talking to their horses.

The children slid till they were warm and when they tired scattered buckets of water on the path and smoothed out bumps with an old shovel.

Elizabeth and Reegan were silent together within. She put aside the sewing as the light went. Then when she thought it was all too terrible and hopeless, that he’d gone to brood again over the court day, he asked with tenderness, “Are you feelin’ anything better this evenin’, my girl?”

He turned her face gently with his hands till their eyes met.

“Are you feelin’ tired?” he asked.

She felt she could have no other wish but to fall into his arms and give way to starved emotions. And, still, she could not do that, it would be in no ways fair, neither to him nor to herself. Even if there was no such thing as control or private order, it was better to try to have a semblance, so that they might stay in some measure free, and not be all gathered into a total nothingness. She couldn’t let herself fall into his arms, it’d obscure everything, it would be as if nothing had ever begun or happened.

“I feel full of pity for myself,” she smiled. “I feel as tired as if the whole weight of the world was on my shoulders.”

Once she’d admitted and mocked it the need to weep was gone, as if she’d mastered it by managing to stand upright in the admittance; but a part of her felt utterly cheated as they both smiled together.

“That’s always the way when you’re in the dumps,” he said. “But there’ll be no loss, you’ll be all right.”

“You saw the doctor?” she asked.

“Yes. I didn’t want to tell you with the children there.”

“What time did he say?”

“Ten to twelve are his surgery hours. They would be almost certain. But would it not be better to get him out? It’s a long auld cycle. And I’ve only to go down to the phone to get him out.”

“No — I’ll go in the morning.”

“If you’re sure you want to,” he conceded. “Will one of the girls stop from school?”

“No. Teresa Casey will be down later and I’ll ask her to stop. She hasn’t much to do and she feels she has to pay us back for Una going up nights. She has no way but those foolish presents. She’ll be delighted and Ned can take his meals here till I come.”

He disliked having such intimacy with anybody, but he agreed, he didn’t really care enough not to let her have her way.

“We better call the children and have the rosary over early for once. It gets harder to kneel down the later it gets. It was a long day,” he said quietly.

He went and she heard him call on the street, “The rosary! The rosary! The rosary!” and their shouts from the river path, “Coming, Daddy! Right! Coming, Daddy!”

The night was with them at last, the flames of the fire glittered on glass and delf, the crib on the mantelpiece bathed in the ghastly blood-red of the Sacred Heart lamp. She should take and light the lamp but their faces would fall if it was lit when they came. She’d leave it till the rosary was over. She’d have less scrutiny to fear in the uncertain firelight as she prayed. She took down the white vase that kept their beads as their feet came.

Tomorrow she’d see the doctor and she was frightened in spite of the tiredness and hopelessness. Everything might be already outside her control, nothing she could do would make the slightest difference. She could only wait there for it to happen, that was all. Whether she had cancer or not wasn’t her whole life a waiting, the end would arrive sooner or later, twenty extra years meant nothing to the dead, but no, no, no. She couldn’t face it. Time was only for the living. She wanted time, as much time as she could get, nothing was resolved yet or understood or put in order. She’d need years to gather the strewn bits of her life into the one Elizabeth. She did not know what way to turn, nothing seemed to depend on herself any more. She thought blindly since she could turn no way, the teeth of terror at her heart, “I will pray. I will pray that things will be well. I will pray that things will be well.”

They were with her in the kitchen now. She handed the children the pale mother-of-pearl with silver crosses and took out her own brown beads of wood.

Reegan got his beads from the little cloth purse he always carried in his watch pocket. He put a newspaper down on the cement and knelt with his elbows on the table, facing the dark mirror.

They blessed themselves together and he began:

“ Thou, O Lord, will open my lips ”,

“ And my tongue shall announce Thy praise ,” they responded.

The even, religious tones continued in their unvarying monotony. O Jesus, I must die! I know not where nor how. My happiness is as passing as my evenings and nights and days. I must travel the road of penance and prayer towards my Resurrection in Jesus Christ. It is my one joy and sweetness and hope, and if I will not believe in this Eternal Resurrection I must necessarily live within the gates of my own hell for ever .

Reegan sang out the prayers as he sang them every evening of their lives and they were answered in chorus back, murmurs and patterns and repetitions that had never assumed light of meaning, as dark as the earth they walked, as habitual as their days.

“We offer the holy rosary of this night for a special intention,” he dedicated before the Mysteries.

He didn’t even pause, uttering the prayer in the same monotone as the prayers before and after, but it woke Elizabeth to immediate attention. Could it be possible that he was praying for her?

She felt delusion of happiness run with such sweetness in her for a moment that she felt blessed; but then was it for her he was praying? She couldn’t know. She had no means of knowing. He wouldn’t tell and she could never ask.

She felt the warm wood of the beads in her fingers. They were old and rather rare, she knew, and there was a relic of St Teresa of Avila enclosed in the carved crucifix. She’d been given them by a priest she had nursed in London. Someone had brought them from Spain and they were more than a hundred years old, she remembered he had told her once.

They rose into another white morning, cold as the other days of frost, all of them helping her much, knowing she had to go to the doctor. She had slept little through the night and now she worked in a flame of nervous energy that she’d have to pay for yet. The morning went in a flash: the children gone to school, the roll call over in the dayroom, Reegan gone out on patrol. She never felt it go, she couldn’t believe how it went so fast. She was dressed and Mrs Casey was smoothing down the back of her navy costume.

“You look wonderful today,” she said, and it wasn’t all flattery, the colour high in the usually pale cheeks, the vein in the side of her temple swollen and the eyes bright with fever. She’d know in the next few hours what she had avoided for months: she’d be alive and facing into the summer she loved without mortal anxiety, or she’d have cancer. She put on her dark overcoat and gloves and as she was ready for leaving Mrs Brennan came, a determined little woman with wiry black hair and sharp features that must have been pretty in a cold way once, but whatever luxury of flesh had bloomed there was worn down to skin and hard bone by this. She had heard Elizabeth was going to town and wanted a bottle from the chemist’s for her youngest child. “Would you ever get it in Timlin’s?” she asked and handed over the prescription rolled about a hard pile of silver. Her bright blue eyes lusted with curiosity as she offered conventional hopes about the visit to the doctor, but she was told nothing, and then the talk swung with deadly fixity to doctors and diseases and women’s and children’s ailments till Elizabeth couldn’t escape quickly enough. She’d such a horror of the domestic talk of women that she felt she must be lacking somehow, she got frightened sometimes, it could make her feel shut in a world of mere functional bodies, and she broke away with ill-concealed haste to be gone. It was such relief to feel the frost on her face and see the wide skies. They came with her to the door and went inside as she cycled round the barracks. Mullins heard her tyres come on the gravel and was at the window as she passed.