John McGahern - The Collected Stories

There are no things more cruel than truths about ourselves spoken to us by another that are perceived to be at least half true. Left unsaid and hidden we feel they can be changed or eradicated, in time. Philly gripped Fonsie’s shoulder in a despairing warning that he’d heard enough. They turned into the bog road to the house.

‘We live in no rathole in the desert,’ Philly said quietly. ‘There’s no hotel in Dublin to match where we live, except there’s no booze, and sometimes that’s no bad thing either.’

‘That still doesn’t take anything away from what I said.’ Fonsie would not relent.

Without any warning, suddenly, they were out of the screen of small trees into the open bog. A low red sun west of Killeelan was spilling over the sedge and dark heather. Long shadows stretched out from the small birches scattered all over the bog.

‘What are you stopping for?’ Fonsie demanded.

‘Just looking at the bog. On evenings like this I used to think it was on fire. Other times the sedge looked like gold. I remember it well.’

‘You’re talking through your drainpipe,’ Fonsie said as the car moved on. ‘All I remember of these evenings is poor Mother hanging out the washing.’

‘Wouldn’t she hang it out in the morning?’

‘She had too much to do in the morning. It shows how little you were about the house. She used to wash all of Peter’s trousers. They never were washed from one year to the next. She used to say they were fit to walk around on their own. Often with a red sun there was the frost. She thought it freshened clothes.’

To their surprise there were already six cars on the street as they drew close to the house.

‘News must have gone out already that you’ve bought the world of booze,’ Fonsie said as they drew up in front of the door, and his humour was not improved by having to sit in the car while all the boxes in the boot were carried into the house before the wheelchair could be taken out.

John was getting on famously with the people in the house who had come while his two brothers had been away. In fact, he got on better with strangers than with either of his brothers. He was a good listener. At school he had been a brilliant student, winning scholarships with ease all the way to university; but as soon as he graduated he disappeared into teaching. He was still teaching the same subjects in the same school where he had started, and appeared to dislike his work intensely though he was considered one of the best teachers in the school. Like most of his students and fellow teachers he seemed to live and work for the moment when the buzzer would end the school day.

‘I don’t want to be bothered,’ was a phrase he used whenever new theories or educational practices came up in the classroom. ‘They can go and cause trouble with their new ideas elsewhere. I just want to be left in peace.’

Their mother complained that his wife ran his whole life — she had been a nurse before they married — but others were less certain. They felt he encouraged her innate bossiness so that he could the better shelter unbothered behind it like a deep hedge. When offered the headship of the school, he had turned it down without consulting his wife. She had been deeply hurt when she heard of the offer from the wife of another teacher. She would have loved to have gone to the supermarket and church as the headmaster’s wife. Her dismay forced her to ask him if it was true. ‘You should at least have told me.’ His admission that he’d refused the promotion increased her hurt. ‘I didn’t want to bother you,’ he said so finally that she was silenced.

When the two brothers came back to the house, he gradually moved back into a corner, listening with perfect attention to anybody who came to him, while before he had been energetically welcoming visitors, showing them to the corpse room, getting them drinks and putting them at ease. Once Philly and Fonsie came into the house he turned it all over to them. The new callers lined up in front of them to shake their hands in turn.

‘I’m sorry about poor Peter. I’m sorry for your trouble. Very sorry.’

‘Thank you for coming. I know that. I know that well,’ Philly answered equally ceremoniously, and his ready words covered Fonsie’s stubborn silence.

Despite the aspersion Fonsie cast on the early mourners, very little was drunk or eaten that night. Maggie Cullen made sandwiches with the ham and turkey and tomatoes and sliced loaves. Her daughter-in-law cut the sandwiches into small squares and handed them around on a large oval plate with blue flowers around the rim. Tea was made in a big kettle. There were not many glasses in the house but few had to drink wine or whiskey from cups. Those that drank beer or stout refused all offers of cup or glass and drank from the bottles. Some who smoked had a curious, studious habit of dropping their cigarette butts carefully down the narrow necks of the bottles. Some held up the bottles like children to listen to the smouldering ash hiss in the beer dregs. By morning, butts could be seen floating in the bottoms of several of the bottles like trapped wasps.

All through the evening and night people kept coming to the house while others who had come earlier quietly left. First they shook hands with the three brothers, then went to the upper room, knelt by the bed; and when they rose they touched the dead hands or forehead in a gesture of leavetaking or communion, and then sat on one of the chairs by the bed. When new people came in to the room and knelt by the bed they left their chairs and returned to the front room where they were offered food and drink and joined in the free, unceasing talk and laughter. Almost all the talk was of the dead man. Much of it was in the form of stories. All of them showed the dead man winning out in life and the few times he had been forced to concede defeat it had been with stubbornness or wit. No surrender here, were his great words. The only thing he ever regretted was never having learned to drive a car. ‘We always told him we’d drive him anywhere he wanted to go,’ Jim Cullen said. ‘But he’d never ask. He was too proud, and when we’d take him to town on Saturdays we’d have to make it appear that we needed him along for company; then he’d want to buy you the world of drink. When the children were young he’d load them down with money or oranges and chocolates. Then, out of the blue, he said to me once that he might be dead if he’d ever learned to drive: he’d noticed that many who drove cars had died, while a lot of those who had to walk or cycle like himself were still battering around.’

From the top of the dresser a horse made from matchsticks and mounted on a rough board was taken down. The thin lines of the matchsticks were cunningly spliced and glued together to suggest the shape of a straining horse in the motion of ploughing or mowing. A pig was found among the plates, several sheep that were subtly different from one another, as well as what looked like a tired old collie, all made from the same curved and spliced matchsticks.

‘He was always looking for matches. Even in town on Saturdays you’d see him picking them up from the bar floor. He could do anything with them. The children loved the animals he’d give them. Seldom they broke them. Though our crowd are grown we still have several he made in the house. He never liked TV. That’s what you’d find him at on any winter’s night if you wandered in on your ceilidh. He could nearly make those matchsticks talk.’

It was as if the house had been sundered into two distinct and separate elements, and yet each reflected and measured the other as much as the earth and the sky. In the upper room there was silence, the people there keeping vigil by the body where it lay in the stillness and awe of the last change; while in the lower room that life was being resurrected with more vividness than it could ever have had in the long days and years it had been given. Though all the clocks in the house had now been silenced everybody seemed to know at once when it was midnight and all the mourners knelt except Fonsie and two very old women. The two rooms were joined as the Rosary was recited but as soon as the prayers ended each room took on again its separate entity.