John McGahern - The Barracks

Reegan spent most of these May days on the bog, scattering the barrow heaps out into the drying. The weather was dry and hard, white frost at nights, a still low mist white in the morning that couldn’t be penetrated as far as the navigation signs at the mouth of the lake from the barrack door; the sun would beat it away before ten and rise into a blazing day, getting quite cold again towards evening. It was the best possible weather for saving turf, and Reegan was on the bog with Sheila and Willie the day she died, Una let stay in the house with Mrs Casey because the illness had reached the stage when some one had to be all the time with her in the bedroom.

She had drowsed through the morning, stirred once to get her dose of drugs, and was breathing heavily when the Angelus rang.

“That was the bell, Willie, wasn’t it?” she said to the child.

“’Twas, Elizabeth,” Una answered, and there was noise and smells of Mrs Casey cooking in the kitchen.

“I wasn’t sure, all day I seem to hear strange bells ringing in my mind, church bells. It was the bell, wasn’t it?”

“’Twas,” the child was growing uneasy.

“Did they come from the bog yet?”

“No, not till evenin’, Daddy has a day’s monthly leave, they brought bread and bottles of tea in the socks.”

“But they were to be back to go to devotions, it grows cold on the bog in the evenings. But that was the first bell, wasn’t it?”

“No,’ twas the Angelus, Elizabeth,” the child gave a short laugh, though it couldn’t be possible that Elizabeth was trying to play tricks with her.

“It’s the bell for the Angelus,” Elizabeth repeated, obviously trying to understand.

“It’s the bell for the Angelus, late no more than usual, twenty past twelve on the clock now,” the child said with the faint suggestion of a laugh, the unpunctual ringing of the bells was a local joke.

“But why did you draw the blinds?”

“What blinds?” the child was frightened.

“The blinds of the window.”

“No, there’s no blinds down, but it’ll not be long till it’s brighter. The sun’ll be round to this side of the house in an hour.”

“There’s no clouds?”

“No, no,” the child said, trying to behave as if everything was usual, but she was stiff with fright. The wide window where she stood was open on the summer, changing corrugations of the breeze on the bright lake and river, glittering points; butterflies, white and rainbow, tossed in the light over the meadows, wild flowers shining out of the green, the sickly rich heaviness of meadowsweet reaching as far as the house.

“No, there’s no cloud,” the child said, and stood in terror. Elizabeth’s head fell slack; the breath began to snore and rattle; her fingers groped at the sheets, the perishing senses trying to find root in something physical; and the childran calling to Mrs Casey in the kitchen.

After the first shock, the incredulity of the death, the women, as at a wedding, took over: the priest and doctor were sent for, the news broken to Reegan on the bog, the room tidied of its sick litter, a brown habit and whiskey and stout and tobacco and foodstuffs got from the shops at the chapel, the body washed and laid out — the eyes closed with pennies and her brown beads twined through the fingers that were joined on the breast in prayer. Her relatives and the newspapers were notified, and the black mourning diamonds sewn on Reegan’s and the children’s coats.

Reegan was sent to the town to make the funeral arrangements, and it was the first chance he got to think what had happened since Casey came to the bog with the news. There was such a bustle of activity about the death, and he felt just a puppet in the show. When he got home from the town and undertaker the house was full of people. The wake would last till the rosary was said at midnight; and a few would remain in the room afterwards to keep the early morning vigil, the candles burning close to her dead face while it grew light. All Reegan had to do was stand at the door and shake hands with those offering him their sympathy, answering the customary, “I’m sorry for your trouble, Sergeant,” with what grew more and more idiotic to him as the night progressed, “I know that. I know that indeed. Thank you.”

The next evening she was coffined and taken to the church where she was received by the priest and left beneath the red sanctuary lamp, surrounded by candles in tall black sticks, till she’d be taken to the graveyard in Eastersnow after High Mass the next day.

Cars crept jerkedly in low gear behind the hearse at the funeral, a few surviving horse-traps that seemed to belong more to museums than the living day followed behind the cars, the bicycles came next, and those who walked were last of all. A funeral’s importance was judged by the number of cars behind the hearse and they were counted carefully as they crawled past the shops: Elizabeth had 33 cars at her funeral. The most important funeral ever from the church had 186 cars, it was the record, and labourers hired out for their lives from the religious institutions that reared them to farmers, homeboys, were known to have as few as 5 cars behind their deal coffins, so Elizabeth’s funeral with 33 cars was considered neither a disgrace nor a remarkable turnout.

Mullins and Casey rode in the fourth car behind the hearse, just after the mourning cars, but they had told the driver not to wait for them afterwards, and escaped from the throng about the grave in the first drift-away during the decade of the rosary. They didn’t want to face back to the barracks and relatives and last grisly drinks and sighs with Reegan standing silent like a caged animal, they had more than enough of the bustle of death in the last three days.

By the back way, around by the Eastersnow Protestant church, they escaped, this part of the graveyard thinly populated because there were few of any other religions outside Catholicism left in these western districts. Not till the grave scene was shut out of sight by the church did they feel at ease or speak, the way the little whiskey bottle that held the holy water had shivered to pieces on the corner of the bright brown coffin when the priest threw it into the grave and the scraping of the shovel blades against the stones in the clay and the hollow thudding on the coffin boards still too close, and their satisfaction, “It’s Elizabeth that’s being covered and not me and I’m able to stand in the sun and watch,” not able to take the upper hand in their minds till they got the bulk of the stone church between themselves and the grave.

Before the church door was the King-Harman plot, the landowners of the district before the New Ireland had edged them out, the deer parks of their estate split into farms, the great beech walks being gradually cut down, their Nash mansion that once dramatically overlooked the parks and woods on one side and the lake with its islands on the other burned to the ground, and here Casey and Mullins stopped to light cigarettes, Casey’s attention attracted by some of the inscriptions on the smaller headstones in a corner of the plot and he read:

Thomas Edward, killed in action in Normandy, 4th August 1944 and was buried in an orchard adjoining the churchyard of Courteil, South of Gaumont.

Capt. Edward Charles, Irish Guards, killed in action 6th Nov. 1914 at Klein Billebecke near Ypres and has no known grave; greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends .

Chains hanging between low concrete piers girdled the plot, a concrete path ran down its centre to where a pair of great cypress trees rose, one in each corner, and to the right of the path stood the three baronets’ headstones, large Celtic crosses in old red sandstone, on each of them two fingers raised from a hand clasping a crown to point sky-wards with the inscription: