John McGahern - The Collected Stories

Mullaney’s farm where we’d go to live, small slated house of the herd, fields sloping uphill to the mound, wet ground about the mound where once they’d startled a hare out of its form in the brown rushes; it had paused in the loop of its flight as the shot blasted its tense listening into a crumpled stillness.

Stone walls of those fields. Drudge of life from morning to night to feed the mouths, to keep the roof above their heads. The ugly and skin shapes of starlings, beaks voracious at the rim of the nest, days grown heavier with the burden of the carrying.

‘But you’re not going to die.’

‘All the symptoms point to the one fact that it’s certain.’

‘But the symptoms may be wrong.’

‘No. It’s as certain as anything can be in this life.’

‘Don’t, don’t …’

‘Do you love me, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘If you love me then you must do your best for the others. We can’t order our days. They are willed. We have to trust in the mercy of God.’

‘I’ll have nobody.’

‘You have the key. You’ll open the box with the key when the news comes? Now we have to go to bed. It matters not how long the day.’ He lifted the box by its handle, moved towards the stairs, its weight dragging his right shoulder down. ‘Blow out the lamp. I’ll wait for you.’

Painfully the slow climb of the stairs began. His breathing came in laboured catches. He leaned on the banister rail. Three times he paused, while I kept pace below, the key in my palm, weak moonlight from the window at the top of the stairs showing the hollowed wood in the centre of the steps, dark red paint on the sides of the way.

‘I want you to come to my room to show you where to find it when the news comes.’

He opened the door of his room that stank from the stale air and senna leaves and sweat. The moon from the river window gave light enough, but he gave me matches to light the glass lamp, and grew impatient as I fumbled the lighting.

‘Under the wardrobe,’ he said as he pushed the box between the legs of the plywood wardrobe, its brass handle shining and the silver medallions of the police caps on its top.

‘You’ll pull it out from under the wardrobe when the news comes. You have the key?’

‘But I don’t want you to die.’

‘Now,’ he put his hand on my head, ‘I love you too, but we can’t control our days, we can only pray. You have the key?’

The key lay in the sweat of the palm.

‘You’ll open the box with the key when the news comes.’

The train took him to the hospital the next day but before the end of the same week he was home again. He asked at once if his room was ready and immediately went there. He said he didn’t want anything to eat and didn’t want to be called the next morning. No one ventured near the door till Bannon climbed the stairs. When no answer greeted the timid twice-repeated knock he opened it a small way.

‘You’re home, Sergeant. Are you any better?’

The Sergeant was sitting up in bed with spectacles on, going through the medical dictionary. He looked at Bannon over the spectacles but didn’t answer.

‘I just came up to see if there was anything I could do for you? If you wanted me to ring Neary or anything?’

‘No. I don’t want you to do anything. I want you to get to hell down to the dayroom and leave me in peace,’ he shouted.

A scared and bewildered Bannon closed the door, came down the stairs, and there was no sound from the bedroom for several hours till suddenly a loud knocking came on the floorboards.

‘He wants something.’ ‘You go up.’ ‘No, you go up.’ ‘No.’ It spread immediate panic.

The next knock was loud with anger, imperative.

‘Nobody’ll do anything in this house.’ I spoke almost in his voice as I went up to the room.

It had been relief to see him come home, even joy in the release. None of us knew what to make of him shutting himself away in the upstairs room. The shouts at Bannon had been loud. I still had the key.

‘It took you long enough to come.’

He was lying down in the bed, and the medical book was shut on the eiderdown to one side.

‘I was in the scullery.’

‘You weren’t all in the scullery.’

‘They didn’t want to come.’

‘I want something to eat,’ he said.

‘What would you like?’

‘Anything, anything that’s in the house.’

‘Bacon and egg or milk pudding?’

‘Bacon and eggs’ll do.’

I held the key in my hand. I wanted to ask him what to do with the key, if he wanted it back; and my eyes kept straying under the plywood wardrobe where the bomb box must be; but the face in the bed didn’t invite any questions.

That day and the next he stayed in the room, but at five o’clock the third morning he woke the whole house by clattering downstairs and even more loudly opening and closing cupboard doors and presses, muttering all the time. When we came down he’d gone out. We saw him outside examining the potato and turnip pits, the rows of winter cabbage.

After his breakfast he shaved at the old mirror and carefully combed his receding hair over the bald patches of the scalp, polished his boots, gathered the silver buttons and medallions of the tunic on the brass stick and shone them with Silvo.

On the stroke of nine he went down to the dayroom. I heard his raised voice within minutes. ‘Nothing done right. I’ve told you time in and time out that these records must never be let fall behind,’ and the unfortunate Bannon’s low excuses.

For several weeks I kept the key in my pocket, but each time I tried to ask him what to do with it and if he wanted it back, I wasn’t able. Eventually, one warm evening, with some anxiety, I threw it as far away towards the river as I was able, watching its flight curve between the two ash trees to fall into the sedge and wild nettles a few feet from the water.

‘You saw an execution then too, didn’t you?’ I asked my father, and he started to tell as he rowed. He’d been captured in an ambush in late 1919, and they were shooting prisoners in Mountjoy as reprisals at that time. He thought it was he who’d be next, for after a few days they moved him to the cell next to the prison yard. He could see out through the bars. No rap to prepare himself came to the door that night, and at daybreak he saw the two prisoners they’d decided to shoot being marched out: a man in his early thirties, and what was little more than a boy, sixteen or seventeen, and he was weeping. They blindfolded the boy, but the man refused the blindfold. When the officer shouted, the boy clicked to attention, but the man stayed as he was, chewing very slowly. He had his hands in his pockets.

‘Take your hands out of your pockets,’ the officer shouted again, irritation in the voice.

The man slowly shook his head.

‘It’s a bit too late now in the day for that,’ he said.

The officer then ordered them to fire, and as the volley rang, the boy tore at his tunic over the heart, as if to pluck out the bullets, and the buttons of the tunic began to fly into the air before he pitched forward on his face.

The other heeled quietly over on his back: it must have been because of the hands in the pockets.

The officer dispatched the boy with one shot from the revolver as he lay face downward, but he pumped five bullets in rapid succession into the man, as if to pay him back for not coming to attention.

‘When I was on my honeymoon years after, it was May, and we took the tram up the hill of Howth from Sutton Cross,’ my father said as he rested on the oars. ‘We sat on top in the open on the wooden seats with the rail around that made it like a small ship. The sea was below, and smell of the sea and furze-bloom all about, and then I looked down and saw the furze pods bursting, and the way they burst in all directions seemed shocking like the buttons when he started to tear at his tunic. I couldn’t get it out of my mind all day. It destroyed the day.’