John McGahern - The Collected Stories

‘As there was no answer, I let myself in,’ she apologized.

‘You were as well,’ he responded.

When she said to him that night, ‘You might get finer women, but you’ll never find another who’ll love you as much as I’ll love you,’ he knew it to be true in some far-off sense of goodness; but it was not his truth. He saw the child at her breast, the faltering years ahead with the Kirkwoods. He shut it out of his mind.

It was still dark and raining heavily when he put the cattle on the road in the morning. All he had with him was a stick and small bundle. The first miles were the worst. Several times he had to cross into the fields and run alongside the cattle where the walls were broken, their hooves sliding on the road as they raced and checked. It was much easier once they tired and it started to get light. The tanglers looking to buy the cattle cheap before they reached the fair tried to halt him on the outskirts of the town, but with a curse he brushed past them towards the Green. People had put tables and ladders out all along the street to the Green to protect doors and windows. He found a corner along the wall at the very top of the Green. All he had to do now was wait, his clothes stuck to his back with perspiration and rain. As the cattle quietened after their long, hard run, their hooves sore and bleeding, they started to reach up and pluck at the ivy on the wall.

He had to hang around till noon to get the true price. Though the attempts at bargaining attracted onlookers and attention, to sell the cattle quickly and cheaply would have been even more dangerous still, and it was not his way.

‘Do you have any more where those came from?’ the big Northern dealer in red cattle boots asked finally as he counted out the notes in a bar off the Green.

‘No. Those don’t come often,’ Eddie Mac replied as he peeled a single note from the wad and handed the luck penny back. The whiskey that sealed the bargain he knocked quickly back. The train was due at three.

Afterwards no one remembered seeing him at the station. He had waited outside among the cars until the train pulled in, and then walked straight on. Each time the tickets were being checked he went to the WC, but he would have paid quietly if challenged. He had more money in his inside pocket than he had ever had in his whole life before.

From Westland Row he walked to the B&I terminal on the river and bought a single ticket to Liverpool a few minutes before the boat was due to sail. When the boat was about an hour out to sea, he began to feel cold with the day’s tiredness and went to the bar and ordered whiskey. Warmed by the whiskey, he could see as simply back as forward.

The whole place would be ablaze with talk once it got out about the cattle. The Kirkwoods alone would remain quiet. ‘His poor father worked here. He was a boy here, grew up here, how could he go and do what he has done?’ old William would say. He had nothing against the Kirkwoods, but they were fools. The old lady was the only one with a bit of iron. When Annie May had to tell them the business, they’d no more think of putting her out on the road than they’d be able to put a dog or a cat out. He could even see them start to get fond of the child by the time it started to wander round the big stone house, old William taking it down by the hand to look at the bees.

‘Nursing the hard stuff?’ a man next to him at the bar inquired.

‘That’s right.’ He didn’t want to be drawn into any talk. ‘Nursing it well.’

The boat would get into Liverpool in the morning. Though it would take them days yet to figure out what had happened, he would travel on to Manchester before getting a haircut and change of clothes. From Manchester the teeming cities of the North stretched out: Leeds, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Glasgow. He would get work. He had no need to work for a long time, but he would still get work. Those not in need always got work before the people who needed it most. It was a fool’s world.

The Sergeant and Guard Deasy would call to the big stone house. They would write down dates and information in a notebook and they would search through the herdsman’s house. They would find nothing. A notice would be circulated for him, with a photo. All the photos they would find would be old, taken in his footballing days. They would never find him. Who was ever found out of England! That circular they would put out would be about as useful as hope in hell.

Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Glasgow — they were like cards spread out on a green table. His only regret was that he hadn’t hit out for one of them years before. He would miss nothing. If he missed anything, it would probably be the tongued boards of the ceiling he had never managed to count. In those cities a man could stay lost for ever and victory could still be found.

A few of the last leaves from the almond saplings that stood at intervals along the pavement were being scattered about under the lamps as he met me off the late bus from the city. He was a big man, prematurely bald, and I could feel his powerful tread by my side as we crossed the street to a Victorian cottage, an old vine above its doorway as whimsical there in the very middle of the town as a patch of thyme or lavender.

‘The house is tied to the school,’ he explained. ‘That’s why it’s not been bulldozed. We don’t have any rent to pay.’

His wife looked younger than he, the faded blonde hair and bird face contrasting with her full body. There was something about her of materials faded in the sun. They had two pubescent daughters in convent skirts and blouse, and a son, a few years older than the girls, with the mother’s bird-like face and blonde hair, a frail presence beside his father.

‘Oliver here will be going back to the uni in a few days. He’s doing chemical engineering. He got first-class honours last year, first in his class,’ he explained matter-of-factly, to the mother’s obvious pleasure and the discomfiture of the son. ‘The fees are stiff. They leave things fairly tight just now, but once he’s qualified he’ll make more in a few years than you and I will ever make in a whole bloody lifetime of teaching. These two great lumps are boarders in The Bower in Athlone. They have a weekend off.’ He spoke about his daughters as if he looked upon them already as other men’s future gardens.

‘We’d give you tea but the Archdeacon is expecting you. He wants you to have supper with him. I hope you like porridge. Whether you do or not, you better bolt it back like a man and say it was great. As long as you take to the stirabout he’ll see nothing much wrong with you. But were you to refuse it, all sorts of moral doubts might start to grow in his old head. He’s ninety-eight, the second oldest priest in the whole of Ireland, but he’ll tell you all this himself. I’d better leave you there now before he starts to worry. The one thing you have to remember is to address yourself like a boy to the stirabout.’

The wind had died a little outside. We walked up the wide street thronged with people in from the country for the late Saturday shopping. There were queues outside the butcher’s, the baker’s, within the chemist’s. Music came from some of the bars. Everywhere there was much greeting and stopping. Pale-faced children seemed to glide about between the shops in the shadow of their mothers. Some of them raised diffident hands or called, ‘Master Kennedy,’ to the big man by my side, and he seemed to know them all by name.

One rather well-dressed old man alone passed us in open hostility. It was in such marked contrast to the general friendliness that I asked, ‘What’s wrong with him ?’

‘He’s a teacher from out the country. They don’t like me. I’m not in their bloody union. Are you in the INTO by any chance?’