John McGahern - The Collected Stories

‘The sandhills won’t be much of a temptation tonight, Mr Haydon.’

‘No,’ he said, laughing gently with her, ‘but where there’s an old will there’s always an old way.’ In a voice gentle with what sounded like regret he inquired, ‘It was at the Silver Slipper you were last night, wasn’t it, a bird told me?’

‘The bird was right,’ she said. ‘The Blue Aces were playing there.’

‘The rain, the rain at the sea, is deadly.’ He turned absently in tiredness or memory and reached and took a white shell from the mantelpiece and held it to his ear to listen to it roar.

‘It makes everything miserable,’ McVittie said, tired of his complete possession of O’Connor, but all Haydon did was nod heavily as he replaced the shell and turned again to the girl.

The wash of rain on the windows, the light through their mist going dull on the blue sea of the wallpaper, the red and yellow hollyhocks like tall flowering masts of sailing ships; and when a child wiped a clearing on the glass, cabbages showed between the apple trees in the garden, and the green cooking apples were bright and shining in the leaves with rain.

‘Education comes from the Latin educo , to lead forth. People seem to have forgotten that in the modern interpretation of education,’ Ingolsby laboured.

It was some consolation to Ryan that he’d abandoned the poets, but his eyes still apologized to the room. He’d make his position even clearer yet, in his own time.

The turning of the pages without reading, pleasure of delaying pleasure to come. Heroes filled those pages week after week. Rockfist Rogan and Alf Tupper and Wilson the Iron Man. The room, the conversations, the cries of the seagulls, the sea faded: it was the world of imagination, among the performing gods, what I ashamedly desired to become.

Alf Tupper put aside welder and goggles, changed into his country’s singlet to leave the whole field standing in that fantastic last lap, and Wilson, Wilson, the Iron Man, simply came alone into Tibet and climbed to the top of Everest.

They cut the tongues out of the dead foxes brought to the barracks and threw them out to the grey cat or across the netting wire into the garden. They cut the tongues out of the foxes so that they couldn’t be brought back again for the half-crown the government gave for each dead fox in its campaign for the extermination of foxes. Dry mornings they put out the ‘Recruitment’ and ‘Thistle Ragwort Dock’ posters on their boards and took them in again at nightfall and when it rained.

The Sergeant and his policeman, Bannon, had other such duties, for the last crime had been four years before when Mike Moran stole the spare wheel of Guinea McLoughlin’s tractor, but as he threw it in the river they’d not enough evidence to obtain a conviction. As an army in peacetime their main occupation was boredom, and they had similar useless exercises. The Sergeant inspected the solitary Bannon on parade at nine each morning. They’d spent a certain number of hours patrolling local roads on their bikes. One or other of them had always to be on BO duty in the dayroom beside the phone that seldom rang. These regulations the Superintendent in the town tried to enforce by surprise inspections. These inspections usually found the Sergeant at work in his garden. As he’d almost certainly have been signed out in the books on some fictitious patrol, he’d have to run for cover of the trees along the river and stay hidden until the car left. Then he’d saunter in nervously chewing a grass stalk to inquire what had taken place.

All this changed the day he bought one of the lucky dips at Moroney’s auction. The lucky dips was a way to get rid of the junk at the end of the auction. They came in large sugar bags. His bag concealed two canisters of nuts and bolts and a yellowed medical dictionary.

Bannon was now sent out on the bike to patrol the local roads. The Sergeant sat all day in the dayroom poring over the yellowed pages detailing diseases and their remedies. The weeds in the garden started to choke the young lettuce, the edges of the unsprayed potato leaves to fritter black, and when the summer thunder with its violent showers made the growth more rapid he called me down to the dayroom.

‘Sit down.’ He offered a chair by turning it towards the empty fireplace. The dictionary was open among the foolscap ledgers on the table, Patrick Moroney MD 1893 in faded purple copperplate on its flyleaf.

‘You’re old enough to know that nobody can be expected to live for ever?’ he began.

‘Yes.’

‘If you expect something it’s only common intelligence to prepare for it, isn’t that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Our ages being what they are, it’s no more than natural to expect me to be the first to go?’

‘That’ll be years yet.’

‘We thought that once before and we were wrong. One never knows the day or the hour. The foolish virgins are our lesson.’

I sat stiffly on the wooden chair.

‘If I go you’re the oldest and you’ll have to look after the others. I think now is the time to begin to learn to fend for yourselves. This summer I expect you to look after the garden and timber as if I no longer existed. That way there’ll be no danger you’ll be caught napping when the day comes.’

‘But you do exist.’

‘Have I to spell it out?’ he suddenly shouted. ‘As far as the garden and timber goes I won’t exist. And I’ll see to the best of my ability that you’ll learn not to depend on me for ever. It’s no more than my Christian duty. Is that clear now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Begin by informing the others of the state of affairs. There has to be some beginning somewhere. Is that clear now?’

‘Yes.’

I left to go up the long hallway to the living quarters, the noise of the children at play on its stone floor growing louder. ‘I exist, I don’t exist,’ repeated itself over and over as I tried to find words to tell them the state of affairs, bewildered as to what they were.

They laughed when I tried to explain, and then I shouted, ‘I’m no longer joking. He said he’d give us no help. He said we’d have to learn to live without him. That’s what he said we’d have to do.’

It took long tedious hours to weed the garden, our hands staining black with the weeds. The excitement of bringing the timber down by boat from Oakport compensated for the tedium of the gardens and when the stack grew by the water’s edge he approved: ‘The hard way is the only way.’

On hot days he sat outside on one of the yellow dayroom chairs with the dictionary, the young swallows playing between their clay nests overhead under the drainpipe. The laughter from the garden disturbed him. The children were pelting each other with clay. He put down the book to come out where I was backing up the matted furrows, pumping half-canfuls of spray out on the potato stalks.

‘It’s not enough for you to work. You have to keep an eye on the others as well,’ he said.

‘What’ll I do if they won’t heed?’ I was wet and tired backing up the rows of dripping stalks.

‘Get a stick to them, that’s what you’ll do,’ he said and left, anxious to return to the book. ‘I have to get some peace.’

The circuit court saw him in Carrick, and he took home a thermometer in a shining steel case, senna leaves, sulphur, cascara, various white and grey powders, rose-water, and slender glass flagons, in which he began to keep samples of his urine, each morning holding the liquid in the delicate glass to the window light to search for trace of sediment. His walk grew slow and careful.

From the autumn circuit he brought a cow’s head, blood staining the newspaper, and a bomb box, the colour of grass and mud, war surplus. He showed us how to open the head down its centre, scrape out the brains, cut the glazed eye out of the sockets and the insides of the black lips with their rubber-like feelers.