John McGahern - The Barracks

“I was thinking of something. I’m sorry, Willie. We must buy some sweets on our way back. What sort of sweets would you like?”

It drew him away, he answered excitedly. They were on the avenue and then she saw the priest, walking in his soutane at the other end of the limes, reading his breviary. The well was only a little distance, a path between barbed-wire on stakes leading to it from the avenue so that people couldn’t tramp indiscriminately over the meadow, and she hurried, she wanted to be away before he’d reach the end of his walk and turn and see her.

Soon after she had married he approached her to join the local branch of the Legion of Mary, a kind of legalized gossiping school to the women and a convenient pool of labour that the priests could draw on for catering committees. There was no real work for it to do, all the Catholics of the parish attended to their duties, except a few dangerous eccentrics who would not be coerced.

“No, thank you, father,” Elizabeth had politely refused the offer to join.

“Come now, Mrs Reegan,” he wouldn’t accept the refusal. “All the other policemen’s wives are joined. It’s one of the most extraordinary and powerful organizations in the world, it’s spread to every country under the sun, and it was founded by one of our own countrymen, Frank Duff. Do you know, and I think this miraculous, it was organized on exactly the same pattern as Communism: a presidium at the top and widening circles of leadership all the way down to the bottom; and even in this humble parish of ours we must try to do our bit. Come now, Mrs Reegan! You don’t want us to coax you all that much.”

“No. I don’t wish to join,” she said firmly; the half-patronizing, half-bullying tone annoyed her, she’d been too short a time out of London.

“But come now, Mrs Reegan. You must have a reason — why?” he grew hot.

“Because I dislike organizations,” she tossed, betrayed by her annoyance.

“So, my dear woman, you dislike the Catholic Church: it happens to be an organization, you know, that’s founded on Divine Truth,” he countered quickly and she was taken aback; but she saw the roused egotism, the personal fail it’d be if he didn’t make her join now. Meaning or words didn’t matter, except as instruments in the brute struggle — who was going to overpower whom — and this time she was roused too. She was too angry and involved to slip away and leave the field empty. She wanted to brush the my dear woman aside like she would a repulsive arm-clasp or touching of clothes, the assumptions of a familiarity that does not exist.

“No, thank you, father. I won’t join and I must leave you now,” she closed and went, in the succeeding remorse at least she’d escape the pain of brawling. He came to the house several times afterwards but she was prepared and able to thwart him, though one time she’d despaired of him ever giving up. And when he finally did she avoided him as much as was possible in a place as small as this.

She filled the bucket from the well and they managed to be on their way out the avenue before he turned in his slow, reading walk. The gate of the avenue faced the church gate and to the right was the shop and a piece of waste ground hedged with flowering currant where candidates spoke from the roofs of cars at elections. Here she gave the boy money for chocolate and sent him to the shop. She crossed to the church gate and went on the old brown flagstones between the laurels into the church.

It was still as death within, no one entered much this time of day, soon the sacristan would come to close the doors for the night, and the kneeler she let so carefully down frightened her with the way it seemed to crash on the flagstones. Her skin was uncomfortably hot and damp after the blind race to escape the priest.

Pray that you may get well, was her first thought, and then the quietness started to seep into her mind. The long strips of whitewash peeling between the windows, the dark light of blood from the lamp hanging before the tabernacle, late roses and geraniums and tulips in the vases on the altar and no candles burning in the sockets on the gleaming candle-shrines, the wooden communion-rail and pulpit and the Stations of the Cross in their wooden frames, and her mind began to wander dispassionately, an old habit, over the life of Christ. The God made flesh in a woman, preparing thirty years to change the lives of people and being crucified for His trouble after three; the Resurrection and the going away from it all into heaven after declaring it saved; lunatic enough at least to fit the situation it proposed itself to answer. And then odd moments on the way that fascinated her: the absurdity and total humanness of the cry, “Can you not watch one hour with me?” to the apostles asleep in their own lives in the garden, his agony not their drama; and what real good would their watching do, except its little deceit of flattery might obscure for its hour the terror of his loneliness with what he’d have to face anyhow, alone; for even if they did watch they could not take the chalice from his lips, no one can find anybody to suffer their last end for them.

But soon her mind was shifting, not able to stay long on any one thing, her eyes gazing now at the initials cut in the bench where she knelt, some of them covered with so much grime and dust that those who’d carved them there must be long dead, the single letters cut in the wood that lent themselves to so many interpretations having endured longer than the hands that carved them; and a little way from her right hand she noticed the white trade-plate:

HEARNE & CO.

CHURCH FURNISHERS

WATERFORD.

Waterford, a port town in the south, famous for its glass, where there must be a factory that made church furniture. There she woke. Her mind was giving the same attention to this old bench as it had given to the mystery of the world and Christ. There were no answers. All the mind could do was wander and wonder from object to object and find no resting-place, in the end all things were lost in contemplation. That was all, there seemed nothing more, she’d no business to be in the church except she loved it and it was quiet; Willie must be waiting this long while outside, tired to his teeth of her solemn practices.

She found him at the pier, between the bucket and shopping-bag, and she carried the bucket. They went between the churchyard and McDermott’s, the pub giving way to the dwelling-house, and then the stables and sheds, where the animals were kept and the drinkers pissed. They had to pass the men tossing at the forge and when she saw the boy stiffen she said, “Don’t mind, Willie. They’re paying us as much attention as the man in the moon is,” but she saw he didn’t believe her, resented her touching so close on his secret feelings.

When she got past Glinn’s she rested, the weight of water too much for her strength, and the boy coming to himself when she smiled, “We brought the lazyman’s load, didn’t we, Willie?”

“We’ll have to know better next time,” he laughed.

“Why does the Virginia creeper — you know the stuff on the church, Elizabeth — turn red and the ivy stay green?” he asked with the insatiable eagerness to know that took possession of him sometimes.

“Because it changes, because it dies,” she said absently, not really knowing. “That’s what I suppose. The ivy doesn’t change or die. Oh, I never went to school much; I don’t know much, Willie.”

“How long did you go to school for?”

“Till I was fourteen.”

“You’re tired, Elizabeth, aren’t you?” he asked and she started.

“I’m sorry, Willie. I’m afraid I’m not better yet, not fully.”

She’d not been paying him enough attention. Why could she not keep her mind fixed? Half her attention as they walked had been on the orchard underneath where the Caseys lived, the light coming across the lake, between the great oaks standing in the laurels on the avenue, to fall on the apple trees. The blackbirds flew clacking between the low branches to peck the skin of the honeycombs for the wasps to burrow in, so that they’d fall light as leaves, just shells of red and yellow in the trodden grass of the orchard — and she was beginning to make vague analogies, to think of herself, her mind about to go on its futile wanderings again, when she saw she was neglecting everything else. She was growing too engrossed in herself and no matter what she’d think or where her mind might wander she was still a woman on an earthen road with a boy and a bucket.