John McGahern - The Barracks

Mullins’s pig was slaughtered. She heard its screams without any emotion, she’d seen too many pigs stuck when she was a child. She could visualize what was taking place by the varying pitches of the screaming. It’d first start when they tangled it in ropes, rise to its highest when it was caught on the snout-hook for the head to be dragged back and the long knife driven in to the heart between the shoulder-blades, the screaming choke into silence as the knife was pulled out for the blood to beat into the basin that caught it so that they’d be able to make black pudding. Then the carcass would be scalded with boiling water and the white hairs shaved away.

As the screaming died Casey came running up from the dayroom to call, “Did you hear the roars, Elizabeth? It’s all over.”

He began to smoke and pace nervously about the kitchen.

“Do you know what?” he said heatedly. “He wanted me to give a hand. Some people have a hard neck and there’s no mistake. The very thought of it is enough to make me sick! I told him it was a barbarous custom, but that I’d do b.o. and let Brennan go. And he’d the neck to laugh into me face and say that I’d ate a nice bit of pork steak quick enough. It’s simple barbarity for savages, that’s what it is, Elizabeth,” he complained.

A sudden vision of pampered dogs being walked between the plane trees in the parks of London came and went in her mind before she answered, all a London evening held there for a moment.

“It’ll be the end of a lot of talk,” she said.

“A lot of rubbish,” Casey said, “skim milk and did you ever hear the bate of the notion, windfall apples to sweeten the bacon. God, Elizabeth, that pig got more publicity than a Christian.”

“You’ll have to hear about this morning, won’t you?”

“Yes. There’ll be a runnin’ commentary and nothin’ left out,” he said with such distaste that she had to laugh in secret.

She felt she was getting weaker; and she grew more afraid that she’d pass out some day and that they’d find her before she had time to recover, and confine her to bed. As they were the days were futile enough, and the whole feeling of them seemed to gather into the late evening in December they came tipsy from the District Court, nothing obviously resolved in the pub or on the bikes home or in the dayroom, and they landed finally in the kitchen, anything that’d prolong the evening so that they’d not have to go home.

“It’s a sure prophecy, and with these bombs they have now the end of the world can’t be far away. Anything that’s ever med grows into use,” Mullins was declaiming before they’d taken their chairs, and it was not popular.

“If it’ll come it’ll come and talkin’ won’t stop it,” Reegan said.

“There was a famous Jesuit once and he was asked if he was playin’ cards at five minutes to midnight and the end of the world was announced for midnight what would he do?” Brennan took up, and there was an immediate air of interest, the human and priestly elements together were certain to give reassurance.

“And do your know what he answered? You’d never guess!” so pleased was Brennan with his moment in the limelight that he tried to prolong it.

“No. What did he answer?” Casey was prompting, when Mullins let drop heavily, “He said he’d keep playin’. One act is as good as the next before God, it’s the spirit of the thing counts, that’s all.”

“Where did you hear that?” Brennan asked in chagrin.

“People hear things, in company. They don’t spend all their life with ignoramuses,” Mullins insulted, he appeared gloomy and surly and more drunken than the others.

“He was a cool man then,” Casey tried to obscure the brutality and to ridicule the conversation into shallower and easier waters. “I’d be inclined to jump on me knees and say an Act of Contrition or pray for more time. Give me five minutes more in your arms above. Isn’t that what you’d be inclined to do, Elizabeth?” he appealed.

“The Jesuits believe in prayer, fasting and alms deeds; not in cushions for chairs and that; and they’d be ready to face their end when it’d come,” Mullins was determined to be surly.

“That’s not fair, that’s hittin’ below the belt. I didn’t bring personal things in, though I could,” he said, the eyes still bright and shallow and gentle.

“Out with it so, be a man, and say it out. There’s nothin’ worse than hintin’,” Mullins attacked furiously.

“That’s enough, it’s nothin’ to get hot about it,” Reegan said, and in the silence Brennan saw a chance again.

“They’re very clever, the Jesuits,” he said. “A Jesuit was the only man ever to get 100 per cent in an exam in Oxford. He was asked to describe the miracle of the Marriage Feast of Cana and do you know how he answered it? All he wrote was, Christ looked at the water and it blushed , and he was the first man ever to get 100 per cent. Not a word wasted, exactly perfect. Christ looked at the water and it blushed .”

“Aren’t miracles strange?” Casey suddenly pondered. “Plane-loads off to Lourdes every summer and they say the amount of cures there are a terror. And every cure has to be certified, so there can be no hookery.”

“There’s no cod and it’s recognized by Rome,” Brennan said.

“Fatima’s recognized too and isn’t it strange that with all its cures they never recognized Knock.”

“A man was cured of paralysis one Sunday I was there,” Brennan said, he and Casey the only two left in the conversation. “We were walkin’ round and round the church and sayin’ the rosary when a sort of gasp went up: there was a cure. A sandy little man, no more than forty; he just got up out of his wheel-chair and walked as if there was never a tap on him.”

“Mr Maguire, the solicitor, says that the reason Knock’s not recognized is because the Papal Nuncio fellows never got on with the clergy here, and it’s for the same reason that we’ve got not first-class saints. It looks be now as if we’ll be prayin’ till Doomsday to shift Matt Talbot and Oliver Plunkett past the Blessed mark. If they were Italians or Frenchmen they’d be saints quick enough, Mr Maguire said,” Casey droned, the evening sagging into the lifeless ache of a hangover.

“It’s a disgrace over about Knock: you never went to Knock yet on an excursion Sunday but they were savin’ hay or some other work over in Mayo. A Papal Nuncio’d want to have an ocean of miracles in front of him when he’d land after seein’ all that sin on a Sunday before he’d recognize the place, “it was Brennan again this time.

“The nearer the church the farther from God,” Casey yawned in answer. Reegan followed Elizabeth’s slow movements as she washed the delf at the table, his eyes desperate with this vision of futility when she turned to come for hot water to the fire. Is this all? Will they never go away? Will this go on for ever? in his eyes.

Mullins rose, Casey and then Brennan, trying to be before the footlights to the last. “I knew a fella once and he used always say when he was jarred,’ I’ll do anything within reason, but home I will not go.’ He’d do anything within reason but home he would not go,” Brennan laughed.

“Such bullshit,” Reegan said when they had gone. “Nothin’ short of a miracle would change that crew, and there’s no mistake.”

She was quiet. Nothing short of a miracle would change any of their lives, their lives and his life and her life without purpose, and it seemed as if it might never come now, she changed his words in her own mind but she did not speak.

Christmas was coming and, in spite of everything, the feeling of excitement grew as always. Cards were bought and sent; and returned to deck the sideboard with tinsel and colour, sleighs and reindeer and the coaches with red-liveried footmen arriving before great houses deep in snow. The plum pudding was wrapped in gauze in the sweet can that stood out of reach on top of the press above the flour-bin; the turkey hung plucked and white, its stiff wings spread, on the back of the scullery door, and they’d all join in burning the down away with blazing newspapers Christmas Eve; ivy and berried holly were twined about the hanging cords of the pictures on the wall. When dark fell Christmas Eve they stripped the windows of their curtains, and a single candle was put to burn in each window till the morning. The rosary was said, and the children sent to bed.