John McGahern - The Collected Stories

It was the day in February 1947 that they buried Michael Bruen. Never before or since had he experienced the Mystery in such awesomeness. Now, as he stood at the gate, there was no awe or terror, only the coffin moving slowly towards the dark trees on the hill, the long line of the mourners, and everywhere the blinding white light, among the half-buried thorn bushes and beyond Killeelan, on the covered waste of Gloria Bog, on the sides of Slieve an Iarainn.

He did not know how long he had stood in that lost day, in that white light, probably for no more than a moment. He could not have stood the intensity for any longer. When he woke out of it the grey light of the alders had reasserted itself. His hand was still on the bar of the gate. Gillespie was still sawing, bent over the saw-horse, his boot on the length of beechwood, completely enclosed in the roaring rise-and-fall of the saw. The priest felt as vulnerable as if he had suddenly woken out of sleep, shaken and somewhat ashamed to have been caught asleep in the actual day and life, without any protection of walls.

He was about to rattle the gate again, feeling a washed-out parody of a child or old man on what was after all nothing more than a poor errand: to tell the Gillespies that a bed had at long last been made available in the Regional Hospital for the operation on Mrs Gillespie’s piles, when his eyes were caught again by the quality of the light. It was one of those late October days, small white clouds drifting about the sun, and the watery light was shining down the alder rows to fall on the white chips of the beechwood strewn all about Gillespie, some inches deep. It was the same white light as the light on snow. As he watched, the light went out on the beech chips, and it was the grey day again around Gillespie’s sawing. It had been as simple as that. The suggestion of snow had been enough to plunge him into the lost day of Michael Bruen’s funeral. Everything in that remembered day was so pure and perfect that he felt purged of all tiredness, was, for a moment, eager to begin life again.

Making sure that Gillespie hadn’t noticed him at the gate, he turned back. The bed wouldn’t be ready for another week. The news could wait a day or more. Before leaving he stole a last look at the dull white ground about the saw-horse. The most difficult things always seem to lie closest to us, to lie around our feet.

Ever since his mother’s death he found himself stumbling into these dead days. Once, crushed mint in the garden had given him back a day he’d spent with her at the sea in such reality that he had been frightened, as if he’d suddenly fallen through time; it was as if the world of the dead was as available to him as the world of the living. It was also humiliating for him to realize that she must have been the mainspring of his days. Now that the mainspring was broken, the hands were weakly falling here and falling there. Today there had been the sudden light on the bits of white beech. He’d not have noticed it if he hadn’t been alone, if Gillespie had not been so absorbed in his sawing. Before, there must have been some such simple trigger that he’d been too ashamed or bewildered to notice.

Stealthily and quickly he went down the dirt-track by the lake till he got to the main road. To the left was the church in a rookery of old trees, and behind it the house where he lived. Safe on the wide main road he let his mind go back to the beech chips. They rested there around Gillespie’s large bulk, and paler still was the line of mourners following the coffin through the snow, a picture you could believe or disbelieve but not be in. In idle exasperation he began to count the trees in the hedge along the road as he walked: ash, green oak, whitehorn, ash; the last leaves a vivid yellow on the wild cherry, empty October fields in dull wet light behind the hedges. This, then, was the actual day, the only day that mattered, the day from which our salvation had to be won or lost: it stood solidly and impenetrably there, denying the weak life of the person, with nothing of the eternal other than it would dully endure, while the day set alight in his mind by the light of the white beech, though it had been nothing more than a funeral he had attended during a dramatic snowfall when a boy, seemed bathed in the eternal, seemed everything we had been taught and told of the world of God.

Dissatisfied, and feeling as tired again as he’d been on his way to Gillespie’s, he did not go through the church gate with its circle and cross, nor did he call to the sexton locking up under the bellrope. In order to be certain of being left alone he went by the circular path at the side. A high laurel hedge hid the path from the graveyard and church. There he made coffee without turning on the light. Always when about to give birth or die cattle sought out a clean place in some corner of the field.

Michael Bruen had been a big kindly agreeable man, what was called a lovely man. His hair was a coarse grey. He wore loose-fitting tweeds with red cattleman’s boots. When young he had been a policeman in Dublin. It was said he had either won or inherited money, and had come home to where he’d come from to buy the big Crossna farm, to marry and grow rich.

He had a large family. Men were employed on the farm. The yard and its big outhouses with the red roofs rang with work: cans, machinery, raillery, the sliding of hooves, someone whistling. Within the house, away from the yard, was the enormous cave of a kitchen, the long table down its centre, the fireplace at its end, the plates and pots and presses along the walls, sides of bacon wrapped in gauze hanging from hooks in the ceiling, the whole room full of the excitement and bustle of women.

Often as a boy the priest had gone to Michael Bruen’s on some errand for his father. Once the beast was housed or the load emptied Michael would take him into the kitchen. The huge fire of wood blazed all the brighter because of the frost.

‘Give this man something.’ Michael had led him. ‘Something solid that’ll warm the life back into him.’

‘A cup of tea will do fine,’ he had protested in the custom.

‘Nonsense. Don’t pay him the slightest attention. Empty bags can’t stand.’

Eileen, the prettiest of Michael’s daughters, laughed as she took down the pan. Her arms were white to the elbows with a fine dusting of flour.

‘He’ll remember this was a good place to come to when he has to start thinking about a wife.’ Michael’s words gave licence to general hilarity.

It was hard to concentrate on Michael’s questions about his father, so delicious was the smell of frying. The mug of steaming tea was put by his side. The butter melted on the fresh bread on the plate. There were sausages, liver, bacon, a slice of black-pudding and sweetest grisceens.

‘Now set to,’ Michael laughed. ‘We don’t want any empty bags leaving Bruen’s.’

Michael came with him to the gate when he left. ‘Tell your father it’s ages since we had a drink in the Royal. And that if he doesn’t search me out in the Royal the next Fair Day I’ll have to go over and bate the lugs off him.’ As he shook his hand in the half-light of the yard lamp it was the last time he was to see him alive. Before the last flakes had stopped falling, when old people were searching back to ‘the great snows when Count Plunkett was elected’ to find another such fall, Michael Bruen had died, and his life was already another such watermark of memory.

The snow lay eight feet deep on the roads, and dead cattle and sheep were found in drifts of fifteen feet in the fields. All of the people who hadn’t lost sheep or cattle were in extraordinary good humour, their own ills buried for a time as deep as their envy of any other’s good fortune in the general difficulty of the snow. It took days to cut a way out to the main road, the snow having to be cut in blocks breast-high out of a face of frozen snow. A wild cheer went up as the men at last cut through to the gang digging in from the main road. Another cheer greeted the first van to come in, Doherty’s bread van, and it had hardly died when the hearse came with the coffin for Michael Bruen. That night they cut the path up the side of Killeelan Hill and found the family headstone beside the big yew just inside the gate and opened the grave. They hadn’t finished digging when the first funeral bell came clearly over the snow the next day to tell them that the coffin had started on its way.