John McGahern - The Collected Stories

Cattle and a brown horse and sheep grazed on the side of the hill across the track. The sun came and went behind white cloud, and as it did the gravel shone white or dulled on the platform.

‘The train won’t go without you unless I tell it,’ the one official said to an anxious passenger pressing him to open the ticket office and he went on stacking boxes on the gravel where the goods van would come in. When he did open the office and sold tickets there was still time left and the scrape of feet changing position on the gravel grew more frequent.

I had no hangover and no relax-sirs desire and as much reason to go back as come. I’d have hangover and desire in the morning and as much reason then as now. I was meeting Lightfoot in the bar beside the station and would answer ‘How did it go?’ with how it went, repetition of a life in the shape of a story that had as much reason to go on as stop.

I walked through the open carriages. There was nobody I knew. Through the windows the fields of stone walls, blue roofs of Carrick, Shannon river. Sing for them once First Communion Day O River Shannon flowing and a four-leaved shamrock growing , silver medal on the blue suit and white ankle socks in new shoes. The farther flows the river the muddier the water: the light was brighter on its upper reaches. Rustle of the boat through the bulrushes as we went to Moran’s well for spring water in dry summers, cool of watercress and bitterness of the wild cherries shaken out of the whitethorn hedge, black bullrush seed floating in the gallons on the floorboards, all the vivid sections of the wheel we watched so slowly turn, impatient for the rich whole that never came but that all the preparations promised.

Gillespie tested the secondhand McCullagh chainsaw as soon as he came from the auction, sawing some blown-down branches stacked against the wall of the house into lengths for firewood. The saw ran perfectly.

‘Now to get rid of the evidence. For it’ll not be long till he’s up with his nose smelling unless I’m far out,’ he said to the sheepdog when he’d finished. He carried the saw and sawn lengths into the shed, scattering the white sawdust wide into the grass with his boot. Then he farted. ‘A great release that into the evening, thank God,’ he sighed, as he waited for the aroma of the decomposing porter he’d drunk in Henry’s after the auction to lift to his nostrils, his eyes going over the ground beside the stack of blown-down branches again. ‘Not much evidence left that I can see. Nothing to do now but wait for him to arrive up.’

He was waiting at the gate when Boles came on the road, the slow tapping of the cattle cane keeping time to the drag of the old feet in slippers, sharply calling ‘Heel’ to his dog as a car approached from Carrick, shine of ointment over the eczema on his face as he drew close.

‘Taking a bit of a constitutional, Mr Boles?’

‘The usual forty steps before the night,’ Boles laughed.

The two dogs had started to circle, nosing each other, disturbing the brown droppings of the yew. They stood in its shade, where it leaned above the gateway.

‘Lepping out of your skin you are, Mr Boles. No holding the young ones in these days.’

‘Can’t put the clock back. The old works winding down, you know.’

‘No future in that way of thinking. You’re good for ten Beechers yet, if you ask me.’

They watched the dogs trying to mount each other, circling on the dead droppings of the yew, their flutes erect, the pink flesh unsheathed, and far off a donkey braying filled the evening with a huge contentment.

‘At much, this weather?’ Boles asked.

‘The usual foolin’ around. Went to the auction.’

‘See anything there?’

‘No, the usual junk, the Ferguson went for a hundred. Not fit to pull you out of bed.’

‘Secondhand stuff is not the thing, a risk, no guarantee,’ Boles said, and then changed to ask: ‘Did I hear an engine running up this way an hour ago?’

‘None that I know of.’

‘I’d swear I heard an engine between the orchard and the house an hour ago.’

‘Country’s full of engines these days, Mr Boles. Can’t believe your ears where they come from.’

‘Strange.’ Boles was dissatisfied, but he changed again to ask: ‘Any word of Sinclair this weather?’

‘The crowd up for Croke Park saw him outside Amiens Street with an empty shopping bag. They said he looked shook. Booked close enough to the jump.’

‘Never looked very healthy.’

‘The ignorance and boredom of the people of this part of the country is appalling, simply appalling,’ Boles mimicked an English accent quietly. ‘That’s the speech he’ll make to Peter at the gate. A strange person.’

‘Touched, that’s all. I got to know his form well, the summer I bought this place from him and was waiting for him to shunt off. Especially when I was close to the house, mowing with the scythe there between the apple trees, he used to come out and spout to the end of the world. The ignorance and the boredom but nothing about his own, bad, manners and the rain, speaking as one intelligent man if you don’t mind to another, O Saecula Saeculorum world without end Amen the Lord deliver us. He even tried to show me how to put an edge on the scythe.’

‘I knew him fifteen years here.’

‘Fifteen too long, I’d say.’

‘No, he was a strange person. He suffered from the melancholy.’

‘But he had a pension, hadn’t he, from that cable in Valencia?’

‘No, it wasn’t money troubled him.’

‘No reason why we exist, Mr Boles. Why we were born. What do we know? Nothing, Mr Boles. Simply nothing. Scratching our arses, refining our ignorance. Try to see some make or shape on the nothing we know,’ Boles mimicked again.

‘That was his style, no mistaking, nature of the beast. The way he used to treat that wife of his was nobody’s business.’

‘In Valencia he met her, a girl in the post office. He used to cut firewood in the plantation, I remember, and he’d blow a whistle he had when he’d enough cut. She’d come running with a rope the minute she’d heard the whistle. It was a fair sight to see her come staggering up the meadow with a backload of timber, and him strolling behind, golfin’ at the daisies with the saw, shouting fore. ’

‘Poor soft bitch. I knew a few’d give him fore, and the size of him in those plus fours. He should have stayed where he belonged.’

‘I am reduced to the final ambition of wanting to go back to look on the green of the billiard table in the Prince of Wales on Edward Road. They may have taken it away though. Sign of a misspent youth, proficiency at billiards,’ Boles mimicked again.

‘On the same tack to me in the orchard. A strange coot. Luther’s idea about women. The bed and the sink. As good to engage a pig in serious conversation as a woman. All candles were made to burn before the high altar of their cunts. It was no rush of faith, let me tell you good sir, that led to my conversion. I was dragged into your Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church by my male member. I’ll not forget in a hurry how he came out with that spiff.’

‘He had a curious blend of language sometimes,’ Boles said.

‘And he ends up after all his guff with an empty shopping bag outside Amiens Street Station.’

‘A lesson, but I liked him. Great smell of apples in the evening.’

‘Rotting on the ground. Wouldn’t pay you to gather. Except a few hundredweight for Breffni Blossom. They don’t mind the bruises.’

‘Better than wastin’ in the grass.’

The passing cars had their headlamps on now. A mile away, over fields of stone walks, the lighted windows of the nine-twenty diesel rattled past.