John McGahern - The Collected Stories

Quickly they chased past the Chair that evening, they didn’t even think of stopping. ‘It was nearly winter, the summer had gone, the ground was gettin’ too damp for playin’ on,’ and in ones and twos and threes they branched up their laneways till the girl and boy were left alone on the road to the village again. No rain had fallen, and their canvas shoes rustled through the dead leaves as they set to climb Cox’s Hill as on every other school evening of their lives.

‘Why were they all so quiet today? Was it because of the Chair, Teresa?’ he began at last.

She didn’t answer for a long time and then she smiled, inwardly, sure of her superiority. ‘It might be.’

‘But why, why did they cheer?’ Her playful nonchalance was enough to rouse his anxiety to desperation.

‘You don’t know very much, do you?’ she said.

‘No, but can’t you tell?’

‘You don’t know how you come into the world, do you?’ she said, and he was shocked numb. He’d been told so many ways. He couldn’t risk making a greater fool of himself before Teresa. There was so much confusion.

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Do you know?’

‘Of course I know. Mammy explained everything to me and Maura ages ago, a day we were over at the bathing place in the lake. When we were drying ourselves with the towels after swimmin’ she told us everything.’

In his mind he could see the picture of the lake and bathing suits and the woman talking mysteriously to the girls while they dried their naked bodies with the towels, but he was again bewildered when she added, ‘That’s the cause they shouted when you fell on Nora.’

They shouted, ‘You’re in love,’ when he fell on Nora, he grasped back, desperate. What had the fall on Nora got to do with the way he’d been born? If they were the same thing, all Teresa had to do was to tell, a few words, and everything’d be explained. The cries at the Chair, the fear he’d felt around him all day would be explained — everything would.

If he’d been quiet and had pretended not to care she’d probably have told him then, but immediately he produced the toffee bar, she drew away.

‘If you tell me, I’ll give you the bar,’ he told her softly.

‘Tell you what?’

‘How we be born, why they shouted.’

‘Why should I tell you? Tell you for a toffee bar and commit a mortal sin by telling you?’ and she strode quickly ahead.

‘It can’t be that much harm to tell and the toffee bar is new. I got it in Henry’s yesterday,’ he pleaded, more fearful now, the halo of sin over everything.

‘Have you anything else to give? A toffee bar isn’t enough.’ She began to relent and his heart beat faster. Her eyes were greedy on the bar in his hand, tiny scarlet crowns on its wrapping. He had one thing more, the wheel of a clock, the colour of gold, and it could spin.

‘There’s nothing else,’ he warned anxiously.

‘Give them to me first.’

‘And then you won’t tell?’

‘I’ll cross my heart.’

She thumbed the rough shape of a cross on her dress and he gave her the bar and wheel.

‘Now,’ he urged when she seemed reluctant to begin.

‘I don’t know how to start,’ she said.

‘You crossed your heart.’

‘You have to try and guess first.’

‘You crossed your heart to tell.’

‘Can you not think?’ she ignored. ‘Do you not remember as we came to school Monday? Moran’s bull and Guinea Ryan with the cow? Can you not think?’ she urged impatiently.

The black bull in the field last Monday as they came to school, the chain hooked to his nose, dragging Moran towards the cow that Guinea held on a rope halter close to the gate. The cow buckling to her knees under the first savage rise of the bull. He shuddered at what he’d watched a hundred times related to himself: all the nights his father had slept with his mother and done that to her; he’d been got that way between their sheets; he’d come into the world the way the calf came.

‘Can you not think?’ the girl urged.

‘Is it like the bull and the cow?’ he ventured. It couldn’t be, it would be too fantastic, and he waited for her to laugh.

Instead, she nodded her head vigorously: he had struck on how it was.

‘Now you’ve been told,’ she said. ‘That was why they cheered when you fell on Nora.’

Suddenly, it was so simple and so sordid and so all about him that it seemed he should have discovered it years before.

They were silent now as they went downhill home, a delicate bloom on the clusters of blue sloes along the road, the sudden gleam of the chestnut, the woollen whiteness of the inside of a burst pod in the dead leaves their shoes went rustling through. ‘They’re in love! ‘They’re in love!’ coming again to his ears but it was growing so clear and squalid that there was hardly anything to see.

The whole world was changed, a covering torn away; he’d never be able to see anything the same again. His father had slept with his mother and done that to her, the same father that slept with him now in the big bed with the broken brass bells and rubbed his belly at night, saying, ‘That’s what’s good for you, Stevie. Isn’t that what you like, Stevie?’ ever since it happened the first night, the slow labouring voice explaining how the rubbing eased wind and relaxed you and let you sleep.

He’d come out of his mother’s body the way the calf came — all at school had seen the calves born on their farms. And in Aughoo churchyard, at the back of the sacristy and under the shade of the boundary ash tree, his mother’s body was now buried; the body his father had done that to, out of which he’d come; the body in a rotting coffin, under the clay, under the covering gravel. NT was after her name on the limestone cross they’d bought in Smith’s for thirty pounds. They’d lifted three withered daffodils out of the jam jar when they’d visited it last July, weeded the daisies and dandelions out of the white gravel. And there had been trouble too over the shrub of boxwood their aunt had planted on the grave. It had already taken root, and their father had torn it up in anger. He had called to their aunt’s house on their way home, shouting that she had no business interfering with his wife’s grave and he didn’t want to have them rooting up a stupid tree when it came to his own turn to go the way of all flesh.

His eyes followed his feet as they went through the leaves. He had been shattered by his mother’s going, the unexpected mention of her name could still break him, but even that was growing different. His mother had lain down naked under his naked father years ago, his beginning: it was good to stand in the daylight of the others for once and not to be for ever a child in the dark.

While he walked, his wondering changed to what it would be like to rise on a girl or woman as the bull rose; if he could know that everything would be known. If he could get Teresa to lie down for him some evening on their way, behind the covering of some sloe bushes — could he ever bring himself to ask her to do that for him? His body was tingling and hot as the night in convalescence he’d watched his mother undress and get into the bed that she’d moved into his room at the height of his illness, snowflakes drifting round the windows that winter evening and robins about the sills, the room warm and bright later with the fire and low nightlight, and he’d ached to creep into her bed and touch every part of her body with his lips and the tips of his fingers. Teresa was now walking very fast ahead on her own.

He shuddered as the vision of the animals coupling came again, his father doing that to his mother years ago, out of which he’d come, her body in the clay of Aughoo now with worms and the roots of dandelions, and his father rubbing his belly at nights in the iron bed with the broken brass bells.