John McGahern - The Barracks

Reegan was on edge all this Christmas Eve, the worst evening of the year for the policemen with drunkenness and brawling, the lockup had been cleaned out days before in readiness. Reegan was hardly aware of Elizabeth as he struggled into the cumbersome greatcoat and put on his peaked cap to go out on patrol. He didn’t wear the baton in its leather sheath but slipped it naked into his greatcoat pocket, the vicious stick of lead-filled hickory shining yellow before it was hid, only the grooved surface of the handle and the leather thong hanging free.

She watched him get ready to go, her sense of his restlessness ctarting to gnaw: she could do nothing, and yet she felt she’d failed him somehow, something at some time that she could have done for him that she had failed to do, though she could never know what it might have been and all she was left with was sense of her own failure and guilt and inadequacy. There was nothing she could do or say, only watch him go, listen to him tell her that he wouldn’t be back till late. His lips touched her face. His boots faded down the hallway and the dayroom slammed to leave silence in the house. She set about doing the few jobs that were left, and managed to shut all thought of their life together out of her mind. At half-eleven the first bell for midnight Mass rang, ten clear strokes. This would be the first Christmas since she’d come to the village to find her away from that Mass, there was always such a crush of people, and she couldn’t trust her strength there any more, far safer to wait for the deserted church in the morning. The cars began to go past. She heard a burst of drunken singing in the village, the last bell rang at midnight, then what seemed the drift of a choir came, and the sense of silence and Christmas began to awe and frighten her as she hurried to get through the few jobs that remained.

The thought of the stable and the birth, the announcement of glad tidings, shepherds, kings, reaching out and down to her in this kitchen drifted into her mind, and it was awesome as she worked to feel it run to this through the dead months and years. She was covering the mug, out of which Reegan drank barley water every night of his life, with a saucer, a narrow blue circle above its handle, the earthenware pale brown; she’d leave it there beside the raked fire in the hope that it’d stay warm till he’d come. To see the first Christmas and to follow it down to his moment, joined in her here and ending in her death, and yet the external reality would run on and on and on as the generations. Perhaps it should be the rhetoric of triumph that it ran so but who was she and what was it? Her thought could begin on anything for object and still it travelled always the same road of pain to the nowhere of herself, it was as far as anything seemed to go.

“Get rid of your mind, Elizabeth: distract it; get away. It is late. You’ve only to leave the presents into the children’s rooms and then you can get to sleep at last,” beat at her till she took the football boots and a pair of identical dolls and went. She left them quietly in the rooms, the doors creaked, but the deep breathing of their sleep did not break. An ironical smile rose to her features as she recollected the bitterness of her own disillusionment as a child, the marvellous world of Santa Claus collapsing in a night into this human artifice, and now she was playing the other part of the game. It seemed as a person grew older that the unknowable reality, God, was the one thing you could believe or disbelieve in with safety, it met you with imponderable silence and could never be reduced to the nothingness of certain knowledge. She tried to shut that away as she closed the doors. No blinds or curtains were on the windows tonight, the candle-flame burned and waved in the black shine of the glass like a small yellow leaf, and there was a blaze of light in the village about the church. Out there in the night Reegan was patrolling or at Mass, she knew.

He was with Mullins. At eleven they had started to clear the pubs, meeting hostility and resentment in every house, and in McDermott’s at the church a familiar arm was put round Mullins’s neck and he was told, “Never mind the auld duty, John. Have a drink on the house, forget it all, it’ll taste just as sweet in the uniform.” The invitation was greeted by a storm of cheering, Mullins was furious and Reegan had to order him to be still. When the cheering died Reegan said, “I’m givin’ every man three minutes to get off these premises. I’ll summons every man on these premises in three minutes’ time.”

He spoke with quiet firmness: a sullen muttering rose but they gulped their drinks and left.

“No respect for anything, just like the bloody animals in the fields,” Mullins was muttering as the pub cleared, and he gave full vent to his rage on a man they found pissing in public against the churchyard wall as they came out.

“Get out of it,” Mullins roared in a fury of assertion.

“Sugar off home outa that with yourself and mind your own business,” the man swayed erect to mutter, certain it was some one trying to joke him out of his position or else a puritan madman he was determined to put in his place. In a flash Mullins was beside him with drawn baton. “Get out of it. Have you no shame, young girls passin’ here to Mass, or are you an animal?”

“You wouldn’t mind handlin’ those fillies closer than ever my pissin’ll get to them, you narrow-minded auld bastard,” the drunk shouted as he buttoned his fly and a cheer went up from the outhouses.

“What did you say to me ? What did you say? Do you see this ?” Mullins thrust the baton before the man’s face, gripping him by the shoulder, mad with rage. “Do you know what this is? Would you like a taste of this?”

“No,” the man jabbered, the hard wood of the baton against his face, and he saw the silver buttons, the peaked cap: he was dealing with the police. Painfully the drunken brain was made to function in the space of seconds: he’d be up in court; his name would be in the newspapers; he’d be the laughing-stock of the country.

“I’m sorry,” he tried to slide. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry now! It’s never too late to be sorry, is it? You weren’t that a minute ago and young girls pass this way to Mass, you know! And what kind of language was that you were usin’ to officers of the law? Do you see this? Do you see this, do you? Would you like to get the tannin’ you deserve with this and find yourself in court later?” Mullins ground threateningly with the baton, but growing placated, he was master now.

The man watched the baton close to his face, the shock had left him cold sober beneath the depression of alcohol, he was past caring what happened now, he shivered, he hoped it was all a passing nightmare. The cheering had died in the outhouses. Reegan moved close for the first time.

“What’s your name?” Reegan demanded.

The name was hopelessly given.

“What do you do?”

“A sawyer.”

Reegan knew the man’s name, what his work was, but the demanding of the information was an old bullying trick policemen learn and it had become a habit by this.

“Shouldn’t you know better than to be at something like that,” he began in the official moral tone, but grew disgusted, and with an impatient movement told him to be gone. Mullins had subsided into approving growls, but as the man made good his escape woke to shout, “Get home outa that you disgraceful blaguard and never let me catch you at that in public again.” Reegan watched Mullins coldly: the cheeks seemed flushed in the weak light of the candles in the windows.

“Such a disgrace and young girls passin’. Such language. No better than the animals in the fields,” Mullins tried to justify himself to Reegan, who only smiled sardonically at the moral indignation, remembering Mullins’s gloating stories of the gunshot nights and through blood and sand and shit MacGregory will ride tonight.