The Barracks

by John McGahern

“Leave the key on the sill,” Reegan called, “in case Brennan comes.”

  “He’s not likely to come now but I’ll leave it there. Well, I’m off at last in God’s truth,” he laughed, did a kind of dance shuffle with his feet, swept off his cap in mock flourish, and was gone whistling down the hallway.

  “It’s better they’re makin’ them these days,” Reegan smiled dryly and they were at ease again.

  They took their evening meal. Elizabeth couldn’t take her eyes off Reegan. What was he thinking? His face was a mask. Was he fed up with her? Was he thinking of the hospital bills? Was he thinking that this was another shackle to hold him longer in the police? Was he regretting ever marrying her?

  “It’ll be a devil to get to sleep for the next weeks with that cryin’,” was all he remarked as the mating call of the foxes came loud and fierce from the brushwoods.

  At exactly seven the phone rang and he asked: “Will you go down, Elizabeth?”

  “No. You go down,” she said.

  The ringing came above his boots on the cement as he went, above his boots on the boards of the dayroom. He did not shut the door. They heard his, “Hello”, as the ringing stopped.

  “Is there something wrong, Elizabeth?” Willie asked, sensing the tenseness.

  “Why?” she responded neurotically.

  “No why, Elizabeth. I just thought with the phone and that,” he bent his head, rebuffed.

  Her whole attention was on the conversation between Reegan and the doctor. The barracks was dead still, but she could hear nothing, the doctor obviously doing most of the talking, the little Reegan said muffled by the receiver.

  Then it was over. The receiver clicked as it was laid back in its cradle.

  There was that terrible moment of searching blank features for information when he came, information that was given seconds later, “He got a bed for tomorrow. The ambulance will be here at four,” he said.

  “The ambulance,” she repeated, with visions of the cream van with the red cross coming in the avenue.

  “The whole village will know,” she said.

  He came close to her. Then he saw the three children gazing with open curiosity. He stopped to shout, “Have you no lessons to do tonight? Have you nothing to do but stand there?” and he watched them pretend to go to their schoolbags.

  “It doesn’t matter, everybody gets the ambulance, it’s there for us as well as the next,” he said. “I can’t go tomorrow and it’ll be better and quicker that way. He says you may be only a few days there. What does it matter about them knowin’? They’ll know anyhow, nothing can be kept secret in a place as small as this.”

  He wouldn’t ask Quirke for a free day, it would seem like asking a favour, she suspected; but there was no charity in that thinking. The children were staring again in open curiosity.

  “It doesn’t really matter,” she said. “You’re quite right. And, it’d be better to tell the children now.”

  “I am going away to hospital tomorrow,” she confided. “Not for long. Only for a few days.”

  Tears came in their eyes. Their own mother had gone to hospital years ago and never came back. She had gone to heaven.

  They hadn’t seen coffin or hearse or anything. She’d been taken from the hospital to the church in the evening and buried the next afternoon. The slow funeral bell had tolled both times, they’d heard noise of heavy traffic, the blinds of the house were down in the broad daylight, but they’d seen nothing. Afterwards, they were allowed out to play on the avenue.

  Two men they knew who often brought them down the river meadows came in the avenue with fishing-rods. They rushed to meet them, “Will you bring us down the meadow today?”

  The pair of men were put ill at ease. They searched each other’s face.

  “Not today. Some other day.”

  “Please, please, please … You brought us before?”

  “Did you not hear about your mother?”

  “They told us. She is being buried now, but they said we could play. Please, can we go?”

  “Not today,” they refused. “Some other day. And we’ll catch a big pike,” and they watched them go with longing, the flowers shining out of the thick greenness of the meadows, white stones on the shore of the river, the cattle standing with the water to their bellies in the heat and the fish rising.

  The people came from the funeral and they had asked, “When is Mammy coming back from heaven?”

  “When God tells her. Very soon, if you pray to God.”

  They’d got tired asking and getting the same answer. Elizabeth had come and they’d almost forgotten. Now it was Elizabeth who was going to hospital.

  “I’ll be only a few days there,” she persuaded. “You must finish your exercises for school tomorrow. If you don’t do them now, how can I expect you to do them when I’m away?’

  They brushed their tears and settled themselves to their work.

  “That’s the way,” she encouraged. “You were making a big thing out of nothing.”

  Reegan had moved to the window, made to feel out of place by the delicacy of the scene between the woman and children.

  “It’s all right about the ambulance,” he said.

  “It’s all right,” she answered.

  The blinds were down, the lamp lit, the children at their exercises, and the night repeating itself in the same order of so many nights. Once she had wanted to protect this calm flow of life against Reegan, she’d succeeded, and what did it matter? Did it make any real difference? Tomorrow night she’d be in a hospital bed and this’d continue or break up without her.

  She started to lay out the things she’d need there and she then went to their bedroom. It was lonely and intensely quiet in the room, with the flame of the small glass oil-lamp blowing in the draughts.

  She unlocked the wooden trunk she’d brought about with her all her life. It held bundles of letters and photos and certificates and testimonials, a medal she had won in her final examination, some books, a withered plane leaf, a copybook of lecture notes, and other things that’d be junk to everybody else—except what her hands sought, a roll of money.

  So she hadn’t trusted much, she’d been afraid. Was this why it had failed? she pondered. With this money she could always be in London in the morning. She had not given herself fully, she had always been essentially free.

  “You can only give one thing really to anybody—that’s money. Love and sympathy and all that kind of stuff is just moonshine and ballsology. Give a person money and tell them to take a tour for themselves. Tell them to go and look about themselves. That’s all you can do, if you feel yourself moved,” she had heard Halliday say bitterly once. Many of the letters in the trunk were his, all the books. She did not know. She might never get back to this house. Maybe, she should destroy these things now, she’d hate anybody else reading through them, but then what did the dead care? She locked the trunk, leaving everything undisturbed, except the money she took. She’d take it to the hospital. But when she saw Reegan and the children in the bare kitchen she began to be tortured with what was still too present to be called remorse, she should tell them, they were all together, it was their money as much as hers; but she could not, she wished she had long ago, it’d be too complicated and dreadful now to tell. And if it all came out when she was dead, how could she be hurt then? She would not even think. “No, no, no, no,” came on her breath, the echo of the mind’s refusal to endure more torture.

  Mullins came. “I got back at last,” he stated.

  “No one came since,” Reegan informed him.

  “You could sit down there for a year and nothing’d happen and then the once you’d take a chance you’d be caught out,” Mullins said and stood awkwardly there till he managed to say, “I hope you don’t think that I’m too full of curiosity, but is it right that you’re goin’ to the hospital, Elizabeth?”

  She met Reegan’s eyes: he had said that nothing could be kept secret in a place as small as this.

 
“I have to go tomorrow,” she said.

  “I’m very sorry to hear that but I hope it’ll be all right.”

  “It’s only for a check-up.”

  “With the help of God it’ll be nothing and if there’s anything I can do …” he offered.

  “No, no. Thank you, John. It’ll be only for a few days.”

  “I’m glad to hear it’s not serious,” and he had nothing more to say and still no excuse to go with ease. He stood there waiting for something to release him. The children watched. It was Reegan who finally relieved the awkwardness.

  “Will you put me out on patrol? It’ll save me going down to the books.”

  “Where?” Mullins beamed to life.

  “Some of the bog roads. Some place where not even Quirke’s huarin’ car can get.”

  “So it’s a patrol of the imagination so,” Mullins laughed the barrack joke.

  “A patrol of the imagination!” Reegan laughed agreement.

  “As sound as a bell so! It’ll be done while Johnny Atchinson is thrashin’ ashes in Johnny Atchinson’s ash hole! I bet you not even Willie’d say that quick without talkin’ about arse holes.…”

  He was his old self. He laughed as he pounded down the hallway and the house shivered with the way he let the dayroom door slam.

  “Some people should ride round this house on bulldozers,” Reegan said as he put down a newspaper on the cement and let the beads run into his palm. “We better get the prayers over because, unless I’m mistaken, this house’ll be full of women soon.”

  They came before Elizabeth had her packing finished, all the policemen’s wives, Mrs Casey and Mrs Brennan and Mrs Mullins. They were excited, the intolerable vacuum of their own lives filled with speculation about the drama they already saw circling about this new wound.

  “It’s only for a few days. It’s only for an examination,” Elizabeth tried to keep it from taking wild flight, but they were impatient of any curb. They went over the list of things she’d need. They offered the loan of some things of their own. They talked about their experiences in hospitals and doctors and nurses and diseases. They gave pieces of advice. Tea was made. The children were sent to bed.

  Reegan had no part in the conversation. He moved restlessly about the house, not wanting to leave Elizabeth on her own.

  Ten came and there was no sign of them going. He turned on the radio full blast to listen to the news and let it blare away up to eleven through the Sweepstake programme.

  Eventually he found a pair of shoes to mend and it became a real battle. The ludicrously loud belting of the nails above the radio music and the deliberate scraping of the last on the cement made it painful to try to talk but they stayed militantly on till he gave up.

  Elizabeth felt herself near madness by the time it was over. She didn’t wait to listen to his curses when they’d gone. She let him do all the small jobs she’d always done herself before sleep, and struggled to their room without caring what kind of unconsciousness overcame her there as long as it came quickly.

  4

  The ambulance took her away at four the next day and spring came about the barracks that week as it always did, in a single Saturday: bundles of Early York, hundredweights of seed potatoes and the colourful packets of flower and vegetable seed the children collected coming from the Saturday market. Spades and forks and shovels, cobwebs on the handles, were brought out into the daylight; the ball of fishing-line that kept the ridges straight was found after a long search, beneath the stairs. In the night Reegan sat with a bag of the seed potatoes by his side, turning each potato slowly in the lamplight so as to see the eyes with the white sprouts coming, and there was the sound of the knife slicing and the plopping of the splits into the bucket between his legs.

  Mullins and Brennan were splitting the seed in their kitchens exactly as he was there, and Monday they’d be planting in the conacre they rented each year from the farmers about the village. Reegan alone had the use of the barrack garden, but he’d not be able to spend as much time there as they would in the fields—it was open to the village road and anybody passing. The other two would do nothing but plant in the next weeks, all their patrols would be patrols of the imagination as they joked, carried out on these plots of ground. They knew Reegan didn’t care and always a child was posted on the bridge to warn them if Quirke or the Chief Super appeared. They couldn’t afford to buy vegetables and potatoes for their large families: their existence was so bare as it was that Mullins was never more than a few days on the spree when they were getting credit in the shops or borrowing or going hungry.

  Casey hated manual work. It was as much as his wife could do to get him to mow the lawn and keep the weeds out of the gravel and dig the beds for the roses she put down so as not to be shamed by the school-teacher who had the next rooms. Not having children to feed he wasn’t forced to take part in this burst of spring industry; he still brought his cushion down with him on b.o. days, kept his gloves on when he wheeled or rode the bicycle, read newspapers and listened to the end of the season’s soccer and the boxing matches and Sports Stadium on Friday nights; and he fenced, “It’s a bloomin’ bad country that can’t afford one gentleman!” when Mullins or more seldom Brennan chaffed.

  This was the time when poor Brennan’s best-in-Ireland act started up for the year in real earnest and it went on obliviously till the crops were lifted in October. “Ten ridges, twenty-nine yards long, meself and the lads put down yesterday. Not a better day’s work was done in Ireland,” he’d boast at roll-call, while the others winked and smiled.

  Reegan was happy too in this spring, the frustrations and poisons of his life flowing into the clay he worked.

  It was good to be ravenously hungry in these late March and April evenings with the smell of frying coming from the kitchen! Would it be the usual eggs and bacon, or might they have thought of getting the luxury of fresh liver or herrings, if the vans brought some to the shops? It was such satisfaction to drag his feet through the gate and look back as he shut it at an amount of black clay stirred, so many ridges shaped and planted; his body was tired and suffused with warmth, the hot blood running against the frost, and there was no one to tell him the work wasn’t done fully right, they were his own ridges, he had made them for himself. And these evenings could be so peaceful when the sawing and stone-crushing stopped and the bikes and the carts and the tractors had gone home. The last of the sun was in the fir tops, the lake a still mirror of light, so close to nightfall that the birds had taken their positions in the branches, only an angry squawking now and again announcing that the unsatisfied ones were trying to move.

  He’d wash the dried sweat away inside in front of the scullery mirror and change into fresh clothes before he sat to eat in the lamplight, he’d laugh and make fun with the children and feel the rich communion of being at peace with everything in the world. Never did he get this satisfaction out of pushing a pen through reports or patrolling roads or giving evidence on a court day.

  All his people had farmed small holdings or gone to America and if he had followed in their feet he’d have spent his life with spade and shovel on the farm he had grown up on or he’d have left it to his brother and gone out to an uncle in Boston. But he’d been born into a generation wild with ideals: they’d free Ireland, they’d be a nation once again: he was fighting with a flying column in the hills when he was little more than a boy, he donned the uniform of the Garda Siochana and swore to preserve the peace of The Irish Free State when it was declared in 1920, getting petty promotion immediately because he’d won officer’s rank in the fighting, but there he stayed—to watch the Civil War and the years that followed in silent disgust, remaining on because he saw nothing else worth doing. Marriage and children had tethered him in this village, and the children remembered the bitterness of his laugh the day he threw them his medal with the coloured ribbon for their play. He was obeying officers younger than himself, he who had been in charge of ambushes before he was twenty.

  T
hat movement in his youth had changed his life. He didn’t know where he might be now or how he might be making a living but for those years, but he felt he could not have fared much worse, no matter what other way it had turned out. But he’d change it yet, he thought passionately. All he wanted was money. If he had enough money he could kick the job into their teeth and go. He’d almost enough scraped together for that as it was but now Elizabeth was ill. He should have gone while he was still single; but he’d not give up—he’d clear out to blazes yet, every year he had made money out of turf and this year he rented more turf banks than ever, starting to strip them the day after he had the potatoes and early cabbage planted. He’d go free yet out into some life of his own: or he’d learn why. He was growing old and he had never been his own boss.

  That week-end he brought Elizabeth home. They had taken the biopsy of the breast and sent it to Dublin for analysis. The final diagnoses had come back: she had cancer.

  As the next-of-kin Reegan saw the surgeon the Saturday he took her home. He was told she’d have to go to Dublin to have the operation: she’d be let home for only a few days, until such time as a bed was ready, the only reason she was being allowed out at all was that she had pleaded to be let spend the spare days she had between the hospitals in her home.

  He wouldn’t say what her chances were—she had definitely a slight chance. If the operation proved successful she might live for ten or even more years. If it wasn’t—a year, two years, he didn’t care to say, he had only taken the biopsy, he was forwarding all his particulars to the Dublin surgeon. He could assure Reegan that she would be in the best hands in the country.

  The formality of it was terrifying, the man’s hand-tailored grey suit and greying hair, the formal kindness of his voice. A thousand times easier to lie in a ditch with a rifle and watch down the road at the lorries coming: you had the heat of some purpose, a job to do, and to some extent your life was in your own hands: but this, this.… It was too horrifying, a man or woman no more than a caged rat being given over to scientific experiment. He thought the interview would never be over. He wanted to forget, forget, forget. This wasn’t life or it was all a hell of a flop. It was no use doing anything: it’d be better to take a gun and blow your brains out there and then, but at least Elizabeth was waiting smiling for him, and he couldn’t get her quickly enough away and home.