The Barracks

by John McGahern

  “I’m the most important man in the house today, without question or doubt,” he laboured on. “The sole guardian of the fortress! The phone never even rang, not to talk of anybody calling.”

  “It’d give you the willies,” his wife shivered.

  “Not enough money,” he explained. “Not half the men in the woods are working. It’s the same with the council quarries: the tarrin’ of the roads is doin’ away with the stones, and the bogs only last for the summer.”

  “What was it like in Skerries?” Elizabeth asked about his last station, where he’d met and married Teresa.

  “The East Coast is good,” he said. “There was great life there, near the city; the market gardening, places you couldn’t throw a stone without breaking glass; the fishing-boats, and the tourists in the summer. Too busy we were at times, but not so busy that I couldn’t meet me Waterloo,” he laughed towards his wife.

  “It wasn’t always that story,” she flashed. “Do you remember the first night you left me home?”

  He made a rueful face, that was all.

  “We were dancing in the Pavilion,” she continued spiritedly to Elizabeth. “Nothing would do him but to get me out of it before it was over.

  “‘It’s too hot in here. And you can’t dance with the floor crowded, Teresa,’” she mimicked.

  “So he brought me down by the harbour and put me up against Joe May’s gable. You could still hear the music from the Pavilion and it was comin’ across the water from Red Island too, Mick Delahunty playing there that night. There was a big moon over the masts of the fishin’ fleet. I knew he was mad for a court.”

  Elizabeth laughed lowly. She looked at Casey’s embarrassed face and bald head as pale and waxed as candles. She’d have given dearly to see him mad for a court.

  “And just as he was kissin’ me,” she went excitedly on, caught up in the flow of her story, “I pulled back me head and I said: ‘Do you see the moon, Ned?’

  “You’d laugh till your dyin’ day, Elizabeth, if you saw the cut of his face as he searched for the moon. And do you know what he said when he found it?” she rocked in a convulsive fit of laughing on the chair.

  “What?” Elizabeth had to prompt.

  “He said the moon was beautiful,” she roared at last, holding her sides as the fit hurt.

  “That’s a nice story to tell on anybody, isn’t it?” Casey appealed, he was ill at ease, and Elizabeth feared one of those embarrassed silences till his wife retorted, “I might never have married you only for that.”

  “You might never have been asked,” he was able to return and then they laughed quietly together, easy again.

  They talked another three or four minutes and then Casey rose, “Elizabeth will want to get the children’s lunch. We’re only keeping her from her work.”

  “Can I help you to wash or anything, Elizabeth?” she offered.

  Elizabeth refused. They left. The dayroom door shut. She heard them laugh together.

  “He said the moon was beautiful,” she pondered for a still moment, then quickly cast it out to get on with her work. She had less than an hour to prepare the children’s lunch. They had but a half-hour from school and ten minutes of it went going and coming. Their meal would have to be on the table when they came to her, running.

  She put down potatoes and hurried out to the garden for some curly cabbage, the plot just inside the gate at the lavatory, along the netting-wire. Away towards the road and avenue was a rectangle of blackcurrant bushes, the beaten black earth of last year’s potato ridges about it, a strip of wild ground along the river from the ashpit to the bridge at the bottom, lined with tall ash trees and the spaces between them choked with briar and water sally. Across the avenue were the few shops of the village, hidden by sycamores: the church alone stood out visible, areas of stone and glass and slate showing between breaks in the old graveyard evergreens.

  The woman who rang the Angelus came across the bridge on her bicycle. Elizabeth knew it was almost twelve, and she had enough leaves plucked. She waved to the passing woman but was not noticed. The sacristan’s wife rode in the stiff poised way people ride who have learned it in their later age, with no ease of mastery, only a ferocious attention fixed on the bike and road, as if determination alone can achieve everything. Elizabeth smiled to herself. The spirit was willing and marvellous was surely the text of the small riding exhibition, she supposed; but the poor flesh had simply more than it could take.

  Tomorrow she’d have to show her own flesh to the doctor! The detached smiling went. She couldn’t bear to think about it, she’d have to show her own ageing flesh to the doctor, and it was no use trying to think anything, it was too painful, it all got on the same claustrophobic road back to yourself, it was the trick always played you in the end.

  She shut the gate, hurried over the gravel to the house. The few hens she kept gathered about her legs when they saw her come with the basin. She hushed them away. The Angelus rang when she was inside. She did not stop her work to pray. She’d discovered when she stood still, when nothing immediate was there to force her on, anaemia and tiredness and despair swayed in her like sleep or death.

  She kept on, she put the greens down with some slices of bacon, strained the boiled potatoes, laid the table; and when the three children came at twenty-five to one, warm and panting, pulling out their chairs to cry for food, they had not a moment to wait.

  “How did things go today?” she asked as she always did while they were eating.

  “I got a sweet and Willie got two slaps,” Una cried.

  “What did you get the slaps for, Willie?”

  “For talking,” Una answered.

  “I didn’t ask you,” she saw the boy with his head low, on the point of tears.

  “She missed her spellings but she got no slaps because she’s the teacher’s pet,” he accused.

  “I’m not!”

  “You are!”

  ‘It doesn’t matter. These things happen,” she quietened them more by her tone than words. She was on their side, that was all that mattered.

  “And how is Sheila?” she didn’t forget.

  “Sheila is well. No slaps today,” the small girl smiled, knowing in the child’s way that she was the youngest and the favourite.

  Elizabeth was silent now, filled with the rich feeling of care and love. They had need of her, and she would guard them. But they were devouring their meal. They were rushing to get back. With their mouths full of the last scraps they were calling, “Good-bye, Elizabeth! Good-bye, Elizabeth!” their feet already running to grasp the minutes left of play before the bell rang, hardly aware of her existence.

  She mashed their leftover potatoes with some meal for the hens and fed them in old rusty ovens down beside the netting-wire. She washed the dishes and then found she couldn’t go on: she had bread to bake yet, some old clothes to mend, but she felt sick and sat without any will to do anything. She saw Mrs Casey come through the archway with Casey’s lunch and she remembered the morning. She had not seen or heard her leave the dayroom to prepare the lunch. The world was going about its business no matter what she thought or felt. The day was already half-gone. She rose and took some food. Afterwards she was better able to face into the afternoon, but without any joy.

  She got flour out of the bin, soda and salt and sour milk out of the press, and started to knead the dough in the tin basin. It was her will alone kept her working. She could see no purpose, no anything, and she could not go on blindly now and without needing answers and reasons as she could once. Her tiredness was growing into the fearful apprehension that she’d lost all power of feeling: she could no longer feel the sticky dampness of the stuff she was kneading with her hands or taste it if she touched it with her tongue or see it other than through a clear covering of glass—it felt as if the surfaces of her body had turned dead. She was existing far within the recesses of the dead walls and gaping out in mute horror. She tried again to bring herself to the surface: to break out of t
he grip of tiredness and despairing reflection: to live only in the chores and repetitions she knew; and in this plodding way she kept on till the children came from school.

  Their coming gave her a new lease of energy. She buttered and put jam on their slices of bread, to talk with them and smile. They had come hungry and shouting into the kitchen, she’d forgotten about herself, becoming the living miracle of the cripple who walks, having lost thought of his infirmity in one moment of passion.

  “If we tidy the scullery table will you let us go to play with the Mullinses on the quay?”

  She’d to smile at how it began with the effort of bribery, their father would not let them go if he was here, she was an easier mark.

  “Will you promise to be back in an hour?”

  She knew they’d promise anything They spent a bare minute over the scullery table, then were gone. She didn’t hear them answer her warning, “Don’t play on the edge of the quay,” as they went. It had been a landing-stage for the provision boats of the nineteenth century, coming up the Shannon with cargoes of salt and flour and tea and tobacco and barrels of beer; covered now with grass and weeds, only used by the farmers as a dipping-place for sheep and the houseboats that called in summer, the granite wall and four metal bollards the last traces of its history.

  The river was twenty feet deep there, no protection on the wall, and the granite slimy and sheer. She began to grow uneasy. If any of them fell in with Reegan away at court, it was she who had given them permission. She thought of going to the bridge to call them home, but what was the use? She couldn’t now. They were gone. It was unlikely that anything would happen.

  Casey came to listen to the soccer match, leaving a chair against the dayroom door so that he’d hear the phone if it rang or anyone came. He took the sport pages from the newspapers he brought and offered the rest to Elizabeth with the apology, “What I’ve here would be of no interest to you!”

  “Was there anything strange today?” she asked as she took the pages.

  “No—nothing strange. The same old stuff but you read them all the same, don’t you?”

  “And had you callers?” she changed.

  “Peter Mulligan,” he named a farmer. “He wanted a licence to cut trees.”

  “Is it difficult to get a licence now?” the conversation continued while he waited for the football to begin. The radio had been turned on, it was playing a sleepy waltz.

  “What are licences for only for gettin’?” he laughed cynically. “Unless I wanted to stop him, that’s all! And why would I stop anybody from gettin’ anything, Elizabeth?”

  “There’ll be no trees soon,” she more mused to herself than answered.

  “There’ll be no country soon, never mind trees, if you ask me, Elizabeth! But I suppose there’ll be always some eejit left to sound The Last Post. That’s how it’s always supposed to be, isn’t it?”

  The waltz ended. The commentary was announced. Casey had no further interest in the conversation. He pulled up a chair to the radio and with twenty Gold Flake, a box of matches and the sport pages settled himself in anticipation of existing pleasurably for the next hour on the voice coming over the air.

  Elizabeth looked through the newspapers. The radio was low above the sawing in the distance. Surely the evening was coming, the light turning, blue with the cigarette-smoke, the aroma an evocation of a thousand evenings where her life had happened while cigarettes were smoked. The starkness of individual minutes passing among accidental doors and windows and chairs and flowers and trees, cigarette-smoke or the light growing brilliant and fading losing their pain, gathered into oneness in the vision of her whole life passing in its total mystery. A girl child growing up on a small farm, the blood of puberty, the shock of the first sexual act, the long years in London, her marriage back into this enclosed place happening as would her death in moments where cigarettes were smoked. No one, not even herself, could measure it by slide or rule. No one could place a finger on it in judgement and say this or that without all they said being just easy trash. Her life was either under the unimaginable God or the equally unimaginable nothing; but in that reality it was under no lesser thing; and the reality continued, careless of whether the human accident was a child waking up in terror or two people bored together, whether it was the rejoicing of a marriage or a man listening to the radio and smoking and a woman turning the pages of a newspaper.

  She rose to pile wood on the fire in a deep joy, to sprinkle and sweep the floor. Casey started up and tried to shrink in against the wall when he saw her with the brush. She’d to assure him several times that he wasn’t in the way before he’d sit again and he’d put himself to so much inconvenience for her that she felt she owed it to him to ask, “Is the match good?”

  He described it as if accuracy was a matter of life and death: its importance in the League Table, if Wolves lost the teams it’d bring back into the running; the stars, the transfers, the internationals, the three Irishmen playing.…

  It seemed he could go on for ever but frenzied noises from the commentator and background cheering glued him again to the set.

  “It’s a goal,” he shouted. “One all. Now we’re in for the fireworks!”

  He lit another cigarette, and marked the time and score and the scorer down on the page of newspaper, sitting erect with excited attention, his ear close to the set so as not to lose a word.

  Fragments drifted to Elizabeth as she idled over the sweeping.

  “Throw in to Wolves. Smith takes it. Long pass out to Atkinson. The game opening out more now. Atkinson beats Morgan on the turn. Coming into the edge of the penalty area. Shoots ——”

  She saw Casey go tense and rise in the chair and then relax as the tones turned to an anticlimax of disappointment. “Oh, straight at O’Neill. O’Neill safely gathers, hops the ball, comes out to the edge of the penalty area. Long throw out to Henshaw.…”

  It seemed that nothing could ever change. The sunshine, the curtains, the daffodils in the white vase on the sill, the voice rising and falling. She heard the chug-chug-chug of a riverboat coming downstream, hugging the black navigation sign at the mouth of the lake, the timber rising out of the hold, only the man at the tiller on deck, in greasy overalls and sailor cap. She read The Old Oak as it passed the house. The screen of vegetation between the boles of the ash trees shut it out of sight as its trail of foam swayed in the centre of the river and the water began to ramp against the banks.

  Neither phone nor caller disturbed Casey as he listened, completely absorbed, searching the pages now and then for information. When it was over he announced the result to Elizabeth with the comment, “Not one of the forecasts were right!”

  “The season will soon be over?” she entered into a conversation.

  “In four weeks, with the Cup Final,” he said, “and then it’ll be the cricket and our own stalwarts of the G.A.A. on Sundays with Michael O’Hehir. “Bail o Dhia oraibh go leir a chairde Gael o Phairc an Chrocaigh. Hello everyone from Croke Park and this is Michael O’Hehir,” he mimicked and they both laughed together, the performance marvellously ridiculous and accurate.

  “Shure there’d have to be something,” he said as he left, “or we’d all go off our rockers. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

  He was gone as the children came exultant and rosy-cheeked from playing on the quay, willing to do anything rather than submit to the discipline of their homework. She loathed this badgering and coaxing she had to do.

  “We haven’t much this evening—we’ll have plenty of time after tea,” they protested.

  “But if you do them now you’ll be finished and done with them for the whole evening,” she reasoned.

  “We’ll have plenty of time after tea,” the same old excuse came back and then the sulky cry from Willie, “Why do we have to do all these lessons anyhow?”

  He’d need to write and read and add to live in modern society; to penpush his way to sixty-five in some city office; discipline his formless w
ill and not to be for ever the child of his own longing, and there were other reasons, she knew. And if they were let follow their own longings now they’d accuse back: “You never gave me a chance, Elizabeth! I didn’t know what was right and you didn’t care enough to show me,” and they had the right, she supposed, to grow to knowledge of everything and perhaps the desperate satisfaction of knowing for certain that there is nothing that can be really known here and now.

  But did these children want to get their way? Did they not in their hearts want her to enforce the rules of their lives so that they could assert themselves against them without real danger, they wanted to shake their fists at the skies but not for the skies to crash about their heads? They too had need of their laws and gods, they wanted to feel secure. It was all difficult and complicated, it might be this and it might be that, nothing real about the lives of people could ever be known, but she’d enough of thinking and reasoning and arguing for one evening.

  “You must do your lessons now,” she commanded firmly and they obeyed. She saw them unbuckle the blue cloth schoolbags she’d made them out of an old tunic of Reegan’s, get the bottle of ink from the sideboard and bend over their blue-lined copies, and she felt as defeated as they did.

  “I’ll help you in anything you want,” she tried to atone for the severity, and listened to their nibs scrape in the silence with anxiety. She was afraid her firmness would harden them against her till Sheila raised great dark eyes and asked her how to do a problem that she began to read out of the Arithmetic. She stooped over her to help. The small child soon understood. She was able to continue on her own. Then Una asked something else out of jealousy; and later, Willie, “Is b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l the way to spell beautiful, Elizabeth?”

  She told him it was and asked how he wanted to use it. She felt she was part of their whole lives as they worked. She watched them for a few minutes in a perfect wonder of peace. Then she went to the window to touch the heads of the daffodils with her fingers. The sun had gone down close to the fir-tops across the lake. The level glare stained a red roadway on the water to the navigation signs and the grass of the river meadows was a low tangle of green and white light. It came so violently to the window that she’d soon to turn away, spelling the word Willie had asked her in inarticulate wonder. They were pestering her with questions. She forgot the cysts in her breasts, the cancer, the doctor, the changing moods that swept her day.