John McGahern - The Collected Stories

It was because of help the Sergeant had given with the renewal of a gun licence that they came with the large basket of apples to the barracks. The day had been eventful at the barracks, but only in the sense that anything at all had happened. An old donkey found abandoned on the roads had been brought in that morning. Every rib showed, the hooves hadn’t been pared in years, the knees were broken and twisted and cut, clusters of blue-black flies about the sores. He was too weak even to pluck at the clover on the lawn, and just lay between the two circles of flowerbeds while they waited for the Burnhouse lorry, an old shaky green lorry with a heavy metal box like the lorries that draw stones, too wide to get through the barrack gates.

‘It’d be better if we could get him alive on the lorry. That way it’d save having to winch him up,’ the driver said.

They had to lift the donkey from the lawn and push, shove, and carry the unresisting animal over the gravel and up a makeshift ramp on to the lorry.

‘Whatever you do keep a good hault of his tail.’

‘I have his head. He can’t fall.’

‘Christ rode into Jerusalem on an ass.’

‘He’d not ride far on this one.’

They expected the donkey to fall once they let go of him on the lorry, but he stayed on his feet without stirring while the driver got the humane killer out of the cab. When the back of the metal horn was tapped with the small hammer close to the skull, he crumpled more silently after the shot rang than a page thrust into flame. The tailboard was lifted up, the bar dropped in place. A docket had to be signed.

The Sergeant and two of the policemen signed themselves out on delayed patrol after the lorry had rattled across the bridge with its load. Guard Casey remained behind as barrack orderly and with him the Sergeant’s sixteen-year-old son, Johnny. As soon as the policemen had split out in different directions on their bicycles at the bridge, Casey turned to the boy. ‘What about a game?’

They were friends, and often played together on the gravel, dribbling the ball around one another, using the open gates as goal. The old policeman was the more skilled of the two. Before he’d joined the Force he’d been given a trial by Glasgow Celtic, but he would leave off the game at once if any stranger came to the barracks. What annoyed the boy most during the games was that he’d always try to detain people past the call of their business. He had an insatiable hunger for news.

‘I don’t feel like playing this evening,’ the boy said.

‘What’s biting you?’

‘What’d you do if you caught the owner of that donkey?’

‘Not to give you a short answer, we’d do nothing.’

‘Why?’

‘We’ve trouble enough without going looking for it. If we applied the law strictly in every case, we’d have half the people of the country in court, and you know how popular that would make us.’

‘It’s lousy. An old donkey who’s spent his whole life pulling and drawing for someone, and then when he’s no use any more is turned out on the road to starve. How can that be justified?’

‘That’s life,’ Casey replied cheerfully. He went in and took one of the yellow dayroom chairs and the Independent out on the gravel and started the crossword. Sometimes he lifted his head to ask about the words, and though the boy answered quickly and readily the answers did not lead to further conversation.

It was getting cold enough for both of them to think about going in when they heard the noise of a car approaching from the other side of the river. As soon as Casey looked at his watch he said, ‘I bet you it’s the Colonel and the wife on their way to Charlie’s. I told you,’ he said as soon as the black Jaguar appeared, but suddenly stiffened. Instead of continuing straight on for Charlie’s, the Jaguar turned down the hill and up the short avenue of sycamores to stop at the barrack gate. Casey left the newspaper on the chair to go forward to the gate. Mrs Sinclair was in the car, but it was the Colonel who got out, taking a large basket of apples from the back seat.

‘Good evening, Colonel.’ Casey saluted.

‘Good evening, Guard.’ The effortless sharp return of the salute made Casey’s effort seem more florid than it probably was. ‘Is the Sergeant about?’

‘He’s out on patrol, but his son is here.’

‘That will do just as well. Will you give these few apples to your father with our compliments and tell him the licence arrived?’

Big yellow apples in a bed of green leaves and twigs ringed the rim of the basket, and in the centre red Honeycombs and Beauty of Bath were arranged in a striking pattern.

‘Thank you, sir. They’re very beautiful.’

‘What is?’ The Colonel was taken by the remark.

‘The way the apples are arranged.’ He coloured.

‘Mrs Sinclair did the arranging but I doubt if she ever expected it to be noticed.’

‘Do you want your basket back, sir?’

‘No. Your father can drop it in some time he’s our way. Or it can be left in Charlie’s. But come. You must meet Mrs Sinclair,’ and the boy suddenly found himself before the open window.

‘This young man has been admiring your arrangement of the apples.’ The Colonel was smiling.

‘How very kind. Thank you,’ she said.

In his confusion he hardly knew how the Colonel took leave of them, and he was still standing stock-still with the basket in his hand as the car turned for Charlie’s.

Guard Casey reached down for an apple. ‘One thing sure is that you seem to have struck on the right note there,’ but he was too kind to tease the boy, and after he’d bitten into the apple said, ‘No matter what way they’re arranged they’ll be all the same by the time they get to your belly. Those people spent a lot of their life in India.’

The boy showed his father the basket of apples as soon as he came in off patrol. ‘It’s to thank you for getting them the gun licence. There’s no hurry with the basket. They said we could bring it to the house some time or leave it in Charlie’s.’

‘Of course I’ll leave it to the house. It’d not be polite to dump it in Charlie’s,’ and he was in great good humour after he’d left the basket back with the Sinclairs the very next day.

‘Colonel and Mrs Sinclair have been singing your praises. They said they never expected to come on such manners in this part of the country. Of course it doesn’t say much for the part of the country.’

‘I only thanked them.’

‘They said you remarked on how the apples were arranged. You certainly seemed to have got above yourself. I kept wondering if we were talking about the same person. They want to know if you’d help them in the garden for a few hours after they come back from England.’

‘What kind of help?’

‘Light work about the garden. And they’d pay you. All that work they do isn’t work at all. They imagine it is. It’s just fooling about. What do you say?’

‘Whatever you think is best.’ He was quite anxious to go to the Sinclairs, drawn to them and, consequently, he was careful not to dampen his father’s enthusiasm by showing any of his own.

‘Anyhow, we have plenty of time to think about it. I’d say to go. You never know what might come of it if the Sinclairs started to take an interest in you. More people got their start in life that way than by burning the midnight oil.’ He could not resist a hit at the late hours the boy studied; ‘a woeful waste of fire and light’.

The Sinclairs left for England three days after Christmas, and the Jaguar was absent from Charlie’s in the evenings until the first week in March. The night they returned, as the bell above Charlie’s door rang out, there was gladness in each, ‘They’re back!’ They had become ‘old regulars’. That Saturday Johnny went to the parsonage for the first time.