John McGahern - The Barracks

It was little use to Elizabeth as she lay racked with pain. She couldn’t pray. I believe, O God. Help my unbelief , rose to her lips and sounded as dishonest as something intended to be overheard, she’d never made it part of her life, it was not in her own voice she spoke. The childhood terror of hell came back and she was afraid but she could not adapt herself to living now in its presence. She’d have to try to go on as she had come to live, without fear or hope or despair, there was a passing moment in life.

“O Jesus Christ, get me out of this fix. I can’t stand it. God blast it! Blast it! Blast it,” broke from her lips but it was nothing but wretched cries against her suffering.

She put her free hand to the railing of the bed, it was iron and cold as ice in her hand. If she could knock herself out against that iron railing, if she could manage to do that it would all be marvellously over.

She had been through as much pain as this before. She had tried to knock herself unconscious against bed and wall before, and those nights had passed, they seemed nothing now. What she was suffering now would soon seem nothing too, she thought; though it did her no good, it was only this intolerable present that mattered. A nurse heard her cry and came to the bed.

“How do you feel, Mrs Reegan?”

“I can’t stand it much more,” she breathed. “Can you not give me something?”

“Try and bear it a little while more. It’ll be better that way and when I give you something it may put you to sleep. You’ll try another while, won’t you?”

The voice was kind and Elizabeth tried to smile her old smile. She’d try to stick it out: and she had to smile again with bitter self-knowledge when the nurse had gone: she’d been seduced far more often throughout her life by goodness than by any evil, and now it was no different. She should have made such a nuisance of herself that they’d have to give her something — to get some relief was the one thing she craved.

Soon, soon it’d be over, it couldn’t go on like this, and the next time she called they did give her morphia. It dulled the pain a little. Her night’d crawl towards morning by these four-hour stages, from dose of morphia to dose of morphia. The visitors arrived and left, the trolleys came with supper, the night staff relieved the day, the lights went out and the roar of traffic from the city never ceased, eased perhaps for a while in the small hours, and resumed with more fever than ever before the morning.

The hours went, without complications. The tube in the breast was rotated and eased somewhat in the afternoon of this next day. Her suffering grew much less. The tube was removed altogether the day afterwards, the real pain was all over. The breast was dressed each day, the tube opening touched with antiseptic till it began to heal, the alternate sutures removed on the tenth day, and the remainder two days later. She had to be helped with her food and washing and clothes and hair these first days and she had to do arm exercises. Whenever she thought she was getting more than her share of the lash she had only to think back on the pit of suffering out of which she had just come for everything to be treasured and alive again. By the tenth day she could touch the back of her head with her hand and she had hours of happiness such as she never remembered.

The white sprouts of the potato seed forced their way through the earth about the barracks, grew leaves and green as they got the light, and the slender cabbage plants held their heads in the air. Most of the turf was cut and not firm enough to be handled. There was no rush. When the turf firmed their days would be a constant rush. Now they could sow beans and lettuce and parsley in little raked squares, and talk. A young pig that Mullins had been given as a bribe to keep his eyes shut to some stealing of timber he had noticed from the woods was much in those conversations.

He kept him in a shed that used hold old rubbish and his bicycle. He’d got a cartload of green rushes for bedding and levied buckets of skim milk each day from the creamery carts passing through the village; later in the year he’d get windfall apples to sweeten the bacon, he said; and he’d kill him in November.

Sometimes they talked about cancer and Elizabeth, they knew she had come through the operation, they expected a letter, and she’d be home. As always, the children sprinkled rushes and wild flowers on the doorstep for Our Lady’s Eve and kicked away their boots to go barefoot, it was May.

The turf dried. Mullins and Brennan switched their patrols of the imagination to the bog, where Reegan already slaved. He had hired several banks and day labourers to do the cutting but he’d have to save the turf himself if he was to make much profit. He’d sell it in the town and if it went lucky it’d more than pay for Elizabeth and he’d be able to leave the police. He didn’t want to have to go to the city to open and shut swing doors in some ice-cream parlour to supplement what pension he’d get. He’d buy a small farm and work how he liked for himself. With what he had saved and the gratuity he was owed he should be able to do this if the turf paid for Elizabeth: he wasn’t staying in the police till he was blind and weak at sixty, no matter what came or went, was the one thing he was certain of.

At daybreak he was out of bed to cycle the two miles to the bog, he’d work in a kind of frenzy there till eight, and rush back to shave and change into his uniform, gulp the breakfast the children would have prepared, to be in the dayroom to call the roll at nine.

Mrs Casey cooked their dinner all these days. Casey had his meal with them in the kitchen and was much loved by the children. He never forgot to pay them some attention, he was light and gay, and didn’t oppress them with the sense that he was being slowly crucified by time and care, as many did.

They had to go to the bog every evening after school. The work was monotonous and tiresome, continual stooping to lift the sods off the ground into windrows and clamps, but not heavy, a child could do as much as a man. It was a novelty first, Reegan incited them with sweets and odd bottles of lemonade or an orange, but it was soon too much. They’d hear shouts of other children playing as they lifted dreary sod after sod. The mud matted in the hair of their legs and it was painful to rub it clean with hard sedge, standing to their knees in water to let it soften. Sometimes one of the little girls’d scream when the yellow of a frog’s belly flashed before their eyes, leaping from under a sod they had moved; with terror they saw the black leeches crawl on the mud; they sucked blood, the old people said. They were left with no energy to face into their lessons and got into trouble in school the next day. Their faces began to shut, a mask on the weariness and bitterness, they laughed little, and started to grow twisted as the roots of a tree between rocks.

Reegan saw nothing. All he saw was turf saved and the money that’d give him the freedom he craved. He drove them with the same passion that drove himself, without thinking that it might not be to them the road to the vision of sky and sun that he saw. Their faces shut. When they laughed it was with the bright metal of observant people, not with their hearts, and mostly they watched, nothing but watch.

Reegan drove himself mercilessly, working every chance he got during the day, and grew more greedy and careless, taking risks every new week that he would not have taken the week before, even though he knew Quirke was prowling.

Late one night he wrote to Elizabeth, his greatcoat was over the back of the chair, his peaked cap on the table where he wrote. He had worked all day at the turf and he had just finished a patrol to see that the pubs were closed. The children, and Brennan in the dayroom, were asleep. He paused several times as he wrote: to put his hand to his forehead and to gaze wearily at his face in the sideboard mirror. He had nothing to say to Elizabeth. He hoped she’d be home soon and then he had the pages to fill with gossip. He felt no connection with what he wrote, it was his duty — with the turf and potatoes and the money that’d get him out of the police he was connected, and they could bring him to violent life and excitement, but this letter didn’t rouse anything, except his dislike of intimacy, and when it was finished the quiet conscience of having done his duty.