John McGahern - The Barracks

The evening was coming and she had the hens to feed. The feeding was kept in a wooden tub in the scullery, the red and white fowl flocking round as she went with it down to the ovens at the netting-wire. She’d no business playing games of fancy such as the letter, she talked with herself. She wasn’t a leisured person, all her life she had to work with her hands, the most of her energy had been absorbed by that, little more than a performing animal; her praying and her thinking and reading just pale little sideshows. A few impassioned months of her life had perhaps risen to such a fever as to blot everything else out, but they were only months or maybe but days in so many years. They’d subsided but the work had to go on, grinding, incessant, remorseless; breaking her down to its own dead impersonality, but never quite, and how often she had half-wished to be broken into the deadness of habit like most of the rest, it was perhaps the only escape.

When the hens were fed she had still much to do inside. They’d be home soon and hungry in this cold weather, if she’d neglected them to think or dream she’d see their resentment rise to such intolerance that she’d not be able to endure watching it: she worked in a burst of energy that must have been close to panic, and all the neglected things were done before they came, the lamp lit, the fire blazing and their food warm on the table. No one could resent or fault her, but afterwards she couldn’t stand with tiredness. She thought she had no feeling of the water against her hands as she washed the dishes, nor could she see the real gleam of the white knobs on the yellow press when she returned the dishes to the shelves and hung the cups. She seemed living within the dead husk of herself, as in the weeks before she went to hospital, staring out at life and every sensual contact with it gone, the one desire she had left increasing to overpower her — to sink down within herself to unending sleep and rest.

While this happened the policemen went on as usual in the barracks. The books were kept in order, the b.o. made his bed up each night against the wall of the lock-up and lifted it in the morning, their common sense cut the ridiculous number of patrols demanded of them by the regulations down to bare gestures in this weather of the early year. They did little jobs in their houses — painted or mended utensils or furniture or shoes — played cards in the barrack kitchen, never in the dayroom in case Quirke should surprise them there, and the books brought up for them to write reports on these fictitious patrols.

“Wind from the south-west, sky conditions cloudy, weather showery with bright intervals. I patrolled Knock-narea Road to Woodenbridge and returned via Eslin and Drumgold. I noticed cattle grazing on the Eslin Road and made inquiries, discovered their owner was James Maguire (farmer), and issued due warning. Commencement of patrol 2 p.m. Conclusion of patrol 6.15 p.m. (Signed) Edward M. Casey” they ran.

Elizabeth loved to see them come: there was only the dull silence of the present if they didn’t, Reegan, filling pages of foolscap with profit and loss calculations at the table, the amounts of money he hoped to have at the end of the summer, when he’d leave the police. This year he had secured the contract to supply all the fuel to the laundry the Sisters of Mercy ran in the town, the biggest contract he’d ever got, and if it went lucky he’d have enough money to buy a good farm, he’d be his own master, and with his pension he’d not have to slave too hard. So he whiled away most of the winter evenings dreaming on paper over the root facts the figures these contracts provided. He never noticed how drawn and beaten Elizabeth looked: she’d have to collapse before he’d ever notice now.

His enmity with Quirke did not ease. Reegan was decided and waiting. When he’d have provided against his fear of starvation and that Authority would kick his face in if he missed Quirke’s throat, he’d act, and savagely. A natural perversity set him on to provoke Quirke within the limits he knew were safe, never going too far, avoiding a decisive clash until his time was ripe.

Many of these small clashes continued to reach Elizabeth, she was too worn to be interested in them for their own sake, she saw them as just the accidental revelations of the same thing seething within Reegan: but what she did notice was their changing tone. The bluster and rhetoric and surges of fierce passion were fast disappearing out of his accounts of the clashes, they became far more quiet, controlled, full of a humour that was both malicious and watching, intensely aware of the ridiculous.

“I ran into Quirke today,” he mentioned to her, a wet evening close to the end of February.

“‘It’s a powerful job for exercise, the police, sir,’ I said. ‘I’d be rotten at my age in an office, sittin’ down, but this job takes you out into God’s clear air and the weather of Ireland. This patrollin’ is great for givin’ you an appetite, sir.’ You should have seen the luk on his face.

“‘It gives you an appetite, does it, Reegan?’ he said as if the words were poison. ‘The police has a few other functions besides providing its members with an appetite. Seeing that the people obey the law is not one of the least of its functions.’”

“‘It’s good for the auld appetite too though, it must be admitted; seein’ that the people obey the law isn’t of course, as you say, to be forgotten either,’ I said.

“If looks could kill I’d be dead, Elizabeth,” Reegan roared, laughing on the chair.

“‘It’s good for the appetite! Or do you take me for a fool, Reegan,’ he hissed like a weasel and drove off as if I stank to the high heavens.”

“If you provoke him so much he’ll try to get rid of you before you’re ready to go, he’s bound to get his chance sooner or later, you can’t guard against that if you go on like this,” she pondered tiredly to him, not seeing any reason why people could want to create a hell for each other in cold blood, surely their world had to be a microscopic place for them to have to resort to that.

“He’ll have to get a move on so,” Reegan countered. “He has only till September.”

“You’ve made up your mind definitely to resign in September?”

“Yes, the turf contracts’ll be done then. They say the spring’s the best time to move but you can’t have everything right, and if you keep on waitin’ for the right time you’ll never do anything, that’s what I’ve learned. You have to make the best of what you have.”

He seemed anxious, as if he was afraid she might have changed her mind about the going. “You’ve decided definitely to go then, in September?” she repeated and that was all.

“Yes. Definitely. You don’t mind, do you, Elizabeth?”

“No, no. I’m glad you’ve decided for certain at last,” she said, and closed her eyes as she saw him lift the pages of foolscap that were covered with calculations. He started to explain how much money he had in the bank; the profit he’d make out of the turf; the gratuity he was owed on leaving the police; the little he’d be able to save out of his salary between now and then; what it would all amount to — in September. He was so excited with these plans and calculations that she hadn’t even to interject the occasional question to show her continuing attention. All she did was nod and nod her head and fix attention in her eyes and she was certain he would never notice.

September, September, September, it droned in her mind; in September they’d leave this barracks where they’d lived so long. A haunting and beautiful September, the year at its fullness, the summer lingering and the approaching leaf fall, the sway of the year shifting forward towards its death. There’d be reapers and binders, stacks of corn, the hum of the first red threshing mills; apples falling and rotting, the first waste of the orchards; and those blue, blue evenings that always reminded her of the bloom on Victoria plums. March, April, May, June, July, August: it was just over six months away, spring left yet and the whole of summer and all the things that might change before then.