The Barracks

by John McGahern

  “I think it couldn’t be better,” she said, and they sat together to gaze into the fire and out at the grey, steady rain. It wound down, stirred by no breath of wind, barely fouling the mirror of the calm river.

  “It’d put you to sleep, that rain,” he said.

  “It might be good for the fishing though,” she answered.

  “It should, it’s never bad on a dull, rainy evenin’, you always get bites of something.”

  The silence resumed, the kettle murmuring, the drip-drip of rain on the sills. She stirred the fire with the tongs. She tried to get herself to tell about the money, and then she said awkwardly out of the continuing silence, “There’s something I want to tell you that’s not easy.”

  She saw how awful a way it was to break anything, when the words were out: his body went tense, fear came in the eyes. His jerky, “What?” seemed asked more with the muscles than the voice. What could she have to tell him that wasn’t easy, it couldn’t be pleasant, and he wished he didn’t have to hear.

  She wished she hadn’t to tell, but she was driven. There was no reason to this crying need to speak: what did he matter any more than she mattered; he’d have to die into whatever there was too, and all things were believed to be changed in new light then. It made no sense, this need to speak, she’d be as well to try to get the raindrip from the sycamore leaves outside to understand.

  She might as well be honest about why she wanted to speak her truth. It was to ease her own mind. What could it do but disturb his peace or at best leave him indifferent? The Church knew an old trick or two when she said you make your confession to God, and not to the priest in the box, whose understanding or misunderstanding has nothing whatever to do with the Sacrament. But how humanness entered everything. She’d go steeled and prepared to tell the truth to God and end in the squalid drama of trying to get a name printed on a card outside the box, a voice in the darkness, a smell of after-shave lotion to understand.

  She could steel herself, make herself cold as death and inhuman to try to bear witness to the truth, but she was so weak that at its first intimation her preparations and disciplines would crumple up, and she’d become only more truly human than before she ever set out. Oh irony of ironies! The road away becomes the road back.

  There was no end to thinking and she could even think away the need to think. An age of thought can pass before the mind and be lost in the same flash. What she had to do now was state not reason; state it and suffer it in her human self. She had pondered on it for months up to this moment, reasoned it more than once away, and still the need remained.

  Reegan was watching her impatiently, fretting at the wait.

  “It’s money,” she began. “I’ve some money that I never told you about. I meant to and as time went it got harder to tell. I was afraid you mightn’t understand.”

  She broke down, beginning to sob with shame and squalor. Nothing struck Reegan for a moment. He’d been tensed for something painful, and now that this was all he was taken by surprise. He’d often wondered if she’d spent all she had earned in London but they never seemed close enough for him to be able to ask without fear of offence. She was crying now.

  “Don’t, Elizabeth,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. It’s your own money and nobody ever asked you to tell. It’s your own to tell or not to tell and has nothin’ got to do with anybody else.”

  She heard what he said, it did not matter. She tried to pull herself together, out of this breakdown. She’d have to try and see it through to the end once she’d started.

  “No, that’s not right. When I didn’t want to take money for clothes you used say,’ What’s mine is yours. It’s there for you to take as much as me’,” she said.

  “But I married you,” he protested. “It’s a man’s job to keep his wife, she has to keep the home.”

  “I want to give you that money,” she said.

  “No. That’s your money, not mine. You’ll want it to be able to buy things that you’ll need yourself. Nobody wants to depend entirely on somebody else. That money has nothing got to do with me.”

  “I want you to take the money,” she didn’t try to argue. “I want you to take it now. If I need anything I’ll ask you for the money and you’ll give it to me.”

  “You’d get it anyhow. I never refused you for anything, did I? But why?”

  “Don’t mind the why, take it, for my sake. Of course you never refused me anything!”

  “But why?” he puzzled as she left to go quickly upstairs to get the money out of the trunk and hurry down again.

  “Why should you …” he was beginning an argument he’d thought of while she was away but she pressed him with the money.

  “I’ll put it in an account for yourself. I’ll open a new account for you.”

  “No, you must put it in your own.”

  “But why?” he said again.

  “No why, except I want you to, that is all.”

  This useless argument threatened to drag on and on and not till he heard the children did he finally pocket the money.

  Water dripped on the concrete from their soaked clothes, but they were excited. They showed proudly the perch they’d caught, hanging on a small branch that’d been passed through their dead gills and mouths, their scarlet tails and bellyfins shining against the grey blackstriped scales, lying against the sally leaves of the branch that were vivid with wet.

  Elizabeth gave them dry clothes and when they’d changed they skinned some of the perch for their meal. Roasted brown they were sweet as trout, though full of small bones. Through the meal they talked excitedly of their evening’s catch in the rain.

  Afterwards the long, dark evening was let rest in the kitchen. The rosary was said. Reegan lit his carbide bicycle lamp, put on cape and pull-ups to go on patrol, more to break the claustrophobia of the day indoors than to do his duty. They played draughts on the sill when he’d gone, and Elizabeth read. She was strangely content and at peace, she felt no guilt nor worry, and sure of this ease until at least this night’s sleep.

  That broken August crept towards September, the dead sycamore leaves lying on the roof of the lavatory now on calm days, the length disappearing so noticeably out of the evenings that it was all the time in their conversations. Soon the children would be back at school, the summer ended.

  There was little change. She had to go one Friday to the clinic in Athlone, as arranged by the Dublin cancer hospital, and there was no deterioration in her condition. It was her heart they feared most now, the strain of the operation and illness proving too much, and they told her to take things easy. She’d have to be careful, they said; but she paid no attention, how could she stay with them in this barracks and not be occupied. She’d go on as she was, as long as ever she was able. She’d no pain, there was no sign of the cancer stirring, and if her heart went she’d probably go out in a flash, without time for terror or thought.

  Though often too she’d feel herself trapped on this quiet drift of days and grow a moment desperate. They were all the same, they would not change, the same day would follow the same day and day and day, nothing more would happen. On these days she was being drifted to her destruction, disease had started, and her life was almost ended.

  She’d handle objects on the sideboard, lifting them and putting them back in the same place; or go to the window and rest her palms on the sill. The river was out there and the hill and the hedge of whitethorns half-way up; the great sycamore stood inside the netting-wire, a few dead leaves caught in its meshes. All she could do was stay in this kitchen and despair or go some place to break the claustrophobia with distraction. She could wash and comb and dress herself up, these simple acts had saved her many times before; and she could find some of the children and go to the well and shop. One of these evenings was extraordinarily vivid, a lovely evening both green and yellow together, held still between summer and autumn. She’d grown gradually desperate through the day and then made a last effort to live, and when she had wash
ed and dressed herself she began to feel new and better, refreshed, the grime and sweat of the habitual day shed for ever, and desire and eagerness rose in her again.

  She was alone in the kitchen and she went out to find Willie on the avenue. He was searching the laurels and talking to himself and she was delighted somehow, it was a habit of her own. He was glad to offer to come with her when she told him she was going to the well. His sisters had gone with Reegan to the woods for timber in the rowboat and he had remained behind because of some sulk or jealousy and probably tiring of his own company by this. He carried the enamel bucket for her, but she kept the shopping-bag, not to have her hands empty.

  They turned right at the end of the avenue, away from the bridge, the river and lake gleaming behind till they reached the privet hedge before Glinn’s when the block of the barracks and trees about the archway shut it away. Glinn’s was a little general grocery place, far out on the road, four fresh shrubs of boxwood on the grass margin the far side, the pride of Mrs Glinn’s heart. She’d never trouble to cross the road to water them, but came just to her own doorway, and a basin of dish-water went flying across the road to the terror of every one passing, and there’d been more than a few ludicrous accidents with cyclists even since Elizabeth came.

  She’d always an eye on the window or the door open so that no one could go by unnoticed. “A powerful evenin’ we have, Mrs Reegan,” she greeted Elizabeth from inside.

  “It’s a lovely evenin’, Mrs Glinn,” Elizabeth said but didn’t stop. “Stuck-up bitch”, she thought she read in the old barrel-shaped woman’s reaction to her never stopping, but it could be so easily her own apprehensive imagination. Behind the forge the men were at pitch-and-toss, the pennies tossed from pocket-combs, a slight roll and thud when they fell on the tramped earth; she had to pass through and she flinched and tried to smile as they made respectful way and said, ‘Good evenin’, Mrs Reegan,” and she had to force her own quiet reply. The shock of new contact with people was getting more violent than ever, and yet she couldn’t stay alone. She saw the boy impatiently ahead of her now, ashamed before the men of this ageing woman who was not even his mother, and the men neither noticing nor caring. Sometimes the smile turned to a shudder, but it was best to go on and not notice, if you could possibly manage, and declare the whole mess a shocking comedy.

  She left the shopping-bag and the cloth-bound notebook, in which the monthly accounts were written, at the shop and said she’d call for them on her way from the well.

  The well was past the chapel, in the priest’s field where the presbytery stood blue and white for the Virgin Mary at the end of the long avenue of limes. Always it amused her, the great whitewashed front and the Virgin Mary door and windows, one man’s way of proclaiming a love. “He turned from grisly saints, and martyrs hairy To the sweet portraits of the Virgin Mary,” she remembered out of Don Juan, and began to laugh. She wondered if the priest could read those lines and still paint the house blue and white; probably he could, it’d only add strength of indignation to the brush. It was Halliday who’d first showed her the lines and given her the Byron.

  “What’s the joke, Elizabeth?” the boy asked in a neglected tone and she’d quickly to come to earth.

  “I was thinking of something. I’m sorry, Willie. We must buy some sweets on our way back. What sort of sweets would you like?”

  It drew him away, he answered excitedly. They were on the avenue and then she saw the priest, walking in his soutane at the other end of the limes, reading his breviary. The well was only a little distance, a path between barbed-wire on stakes leading to it from the avenue so that people couldn’t tramp indiscriminately over the meadow, and she hurried, she wanted to be away before he’d reach the end of his walk and turn and see her.

  Soon after she had married he approached her to join the local branch of the Legion of Mary, a kind of legalized gossiping school to the women and a convenient pool of labour that the priests could draw on for catering committees. There was no real work for it to do, all the Catholics of the parish attended to their duties, except a few dangerous eccentrics who would not be coerced.

  “No, thank you, father,” Elizabeth had politely refused the offer to join.

  “Come now, Mrs Reegan,” he wouldn’t accept the refusal. “All the other policemen’s wives are joined. It’s one of the most extraordinary and powerful organizations in the world, it’s spread to every country under the sun, and it was founded by one of our own countrymen, Frank Duff. Do you know, and I think this miraculous, it was organized on exactly the same pattern as Communism: a presidium at the top and widening circles of leadership all the way down to the bottom; and even in this humble parish of ours we must try to do our bit. Come now, Mrs Reegan! You don’t want us to coax you all that much.”

  “No. I don’t wish to join,” she said firmly; the half-patronizing, half-bullying tone annoyed her, she’d been too short a time out of London.

  “But come now, Mrs Reegan. You must have a reason—why?” he grew hot.

  “Because I dislike organizations,” she tossed, betrayed by her annoyance.

  “So, my dear woman, you dislike the Catholic Church: it happens to be an organization, you know, that’s founded on Divine Truth,” he countered quickly and she was taken aback; but she saw the roused egotism, the personal fail it’d be if he didn’t make her join now. Meaning or words didn’t matter, except as instruments in the brute struggle—who was going to overpower whom—and this time she was roused too. She was too angry and involved to slip away and leave the field empty. She wanted to brush the my dear woman aside like she would a repulsive arm-clasp or touching of clothes, the assumptions of a familiarity that does not exist.

  “No, thank you, father. I won’t join and I must leave you now,” she closed and went, in the succeeding remorse at least she’d escape the pain of brawling. He came to the house several times afterwards but she was prepared and able to thwart him, though one time she’d despaired of him ever giving up. And when he finally did she avoided him as much as was possible in a place as small as this.

  She filled the bucket from the well and they managed to be on their way out the avenue before he turned in his slow, reading walk. The gate of the avenue faced the church gate and to the right was the shop and a piece of waste ground hedged with flowering currant where candidates spoke from the roofs of cars at elections. Here she gave the boy money for chocolate and sent him to the shop. She crossed to the church gate and went on the old brown flagstones between the laurels into the church.

  It was still as death within, no one entered much this time of day, soon the sacristan would come to close the doors for the night, and the kneeler she let so carefully down frightened her with the way it seemed to crash on the flagstones. Her skin was uncomfortably hot and damp after the blind race to escape the priest.

  Pray that you may get well, was her first thought, and then the quietness started to seep into her mind. The long strips of whitewash peeling between the windows, the dark light of blood from the lamp hanging before the tabernacle, late roses and geraniums and tulips in the vases on the altar and no candles burning in the sockets on the gleaming candle-shrines, the wooden communion-rail and pulpit and the Stations of the Cross in their wooden frames, and her mind began to wander dispassionately, an old habit, over the life of Christ. The God made flesh in a woman, preparing thirty years to change the lives of people and being crucified for His trouble after three; the Resurrection and the going away from it all into heaven after declaring it saved; lunatic enough at least to fit the situation it proposed itself to answer. And then odd moments on the way that fascinated her: the absurdity and total humanness of the cry, “Can you not watch one hour with me?” to the apostles asleep in their own lives in the garden, his agony not their drama; and what real good would their watching do, except its little deceit of flattery might obscure for its hour the terror of his loneliness with what he’d have to face anyhow, alone; for even if they did watch they coul
d not take the chalice from his lips, no one can find anybody to suffer their last end for them.

  But soon her mind was shifting, not able to stay long on any one thing, her eyes gazing now at the initials cut in the bench where she knelt, some of them covered with so much grime and dust that those who’d carved them there must be long dead, the single letters cut in the wood that lent themselves to so many interpretations having endured longer than the hands that carved them; and a little way from her right hand she noticed the white trade-plate:

  HEARNE & CO.

  CHURCH FURNISHERS

  WATERFORD.

  Waterford, a port town in the south, famous for its glass, where there must be a factory that made church furniture. There she woke. Her mind was giving the same attention to this old bench as it had given to the mystery of the world and Christ. There were no answers. All the mind could do was wander and wonder from object to object and find no resting-place, in the end all things were lost in contemplation. That was all, there seemed nothing more, she’d no business to be in the church except she loved it and it was quiet; Willie must be waiting this long while outside, tired to his teeth of her solemn practices.

  She found him at the pier, between the bucket and shopping-bag, and she carried the bucket. They went between the churchyard and McDermott’s, the pub giving way to the dwelling-house, and then the stables and sheds, where the animals were kept and the drinkers pissed. They had to pass the men tossing at the forge and when she saw the boy stiffen she said, “Don’t mind, Willie. They’re paying us as much attention as the man in the moon is,” but she saw he didn’t believe her, resented her touching so close on his secret feelings.

  When she got past Glinn’s she rested, the weight of water too much for her strength, and the boy coming to himself when she smiled, “We brought the lazyman’s load, didn’t we, Willie?”

  “We’ll have to know better next time,” he laughed.