The Barracks

by John McGahern

“Why does the Virginia creeper—you know the stuff on the church, Elizabeth—turn red and the ivy stay green?” he asked with the insatiable eagerness to know that took possession of him sometimes.

  “Because it changes, because it dies,” she said absently, not really knowing. “That’s what I suppose. The ivy doesn’t change or die. Oh, I never went to school much; I don’t know much, Willie.”

  “How long did you go to school for?”

  “Till I was fourteen.”

  “You’re tired, Elizabeth, aren’t you?” he asked and she started.

  “I’m sorry, Willie. I’m afraid I’m not better yet, not fully.”

  She’d not been paying him enough attention. Why could she not keep her mind fixed? Half her attention as they walked had been on the orchard underneath where the Caseys lived, the light coming across the lake, between the great oaks standing in the laurels on the avenue, to fall on the apple trees. The blackbirds flew clacking between the low branches to peck the skin of the honeycombs for the wasps to burrow in, so that they’d fall light as leaves, just shells of red and yellow in the trodden grass of the orchard —and she was beginning to make vague analogies, to think of herself, her mind about to go on its futile wanderings again, when she saw she was neglecting everything else. She was growing too engrossed in herself and no matter what she’d think or where her mind might wander she was still a woman on an earthen road with a boy and a bucket.

  “Oh, things get too terrible sometimes, Willie,” she blurted suddenly out and when she saw his worried amazement she was sorry. She lifted the bucket. When she’d have dragged as far as the scullery table she’d try to give him all her attention till the others would get home, she promised.

  The school holidays ended in early September, the kitchen emptier all the mornings and afternoons, and Mrs Casey began to come practically every day and to stay for hours. She had nothing to do, she complained.

  “I didn’t mind at all,” she said; one morning Elizabeth had praised her for taking care of the house while she was in hospital. “There was great excitement, them all were good and helped, and I felt I was needed—it’s when you have nothin’ to do and start thinkin’ that’s the worst.

  “I’ll go off me rocker some day I’m alone up in that elephant of a house, that’s the God’s truth,” she cried. “If you had a child or something you’d be better able to knuckle down! But when you have nothin’, that’s the thing! I was at Ned to adopt one out of the Home but he wouldn’t hear of it. They’d have bad blood or wild, their father’s or mother’s blood, he said. What does he care? He’s down in the dayroom here or at court or out on patrol most of the time but where am I?”

  Elizabeth didn’t know what to do, only let her cry. She liked her, but she was afraid the younger woman was beginning to depend too much on her, and she could drag like deadweight. Mullins’s wife and Brennan’s were hard and vulgarly sure of their positions, always ferociously engaged in some petty rivalry or other, but they were too full of their own things to ever drag. The most they’d want was to make some material use out of you, and it was always easier to deal with them than such as Mrs Casey. You’d only to meet their demands on the one level, and perhaps a person had always to stay on that level to survive as untouched as they were. She’d try and tell Mrs Casey that she was running through a bad time, as every one did, and that it would pass. Though it’d be quite useless as anything else. She’d better make tea. The one thing was that her own situation didn’t seem so desperate when it was confronted with such as this.

  The days grew colder and there came the first biting frosts, the children having to wear their winter stockings and boots, some lovely nights in this weather, a big harvest moon on the lake, and the beating whine of threshing-machines everywhere, working between the corn-ricks by the light of the tractor headlamps. The digging of the potatoes began. And there was great excitement when apples were hung from the barrack ceiling for Hallowe’en and nuts went crack under hammers on the cement through the evening. All Souls’ Day they made visits to the church, six Our Fathers and Hail Marys and then outside to linger awhile beneath the bell-rope before entering again on another visit, and for every visit they made a soul escaped out of purgatory.

  There had only been one month of peace with Quirke after the day Reegan had been caught spraying, though he had kept it from Elizabeth till it erupted again into the open that November. Quirke had paid an early morning inspection, and afterwards Reegan came up to her in the kitchen in a state of blind fury.

  “The bastard! The bastard! I’ll settle that bastard one of these days,” he started to grind and she saw his hands clench and unclench and touch unconsciously the sharp, red stubble on his face.

  “What happened?” she asked when he was quieter.

  “He did an inspection this mornin’ and after the others had gone he said, ‘There’s something I want to tell you, Reegan,’ and I like a gapin’ fool opened me big mouth and said, ‘What?’ So he stared me straight in the face and said, ‘Let me tell you one thing, Reegan: never come down to this dayroom again unshaven while you’re a policeman!’ and he left me standin’ with me mouth open.”

  She saw he desperately needed to tell some one: to ease the hurt by telling, cheapen and wear out his passion by telling, scatter it out of his mind where it was driving him to the brink of madness. Though she found the tremor of hatred unnerving, his face purple as he shouted, “Never come down to this dayroom unshaven again while you’re a policeman, Reegan! Never come down to this dayroom unshaven again while you’re a policeman, Reegan!”

  “You didn’t do anything at all?” she asked.

  “Nothin’. It took me off me feet, that tough is a new line from Quirke. Though I’d probably have done nothin’ anyhow,” he was quieter, he began to brood bitterly now. “I’d not be thirty bastardin’ years in uniform if I couldn’t stand before barkin’ mongrels and not say anything. It’s either take them by the throat and get sacked or stop with your mouth shut, and they know they’ve got you in the palm of their hand. Though they couldn’t sack me now, I’m just thirty years in this slave’s uniform, they’d have to ask me to resign and give me a pension. You can’t victimize an old Volunteer these days!” he began to laugh and then swiftly it turned to rage again. “That bastard! That ignoramus! Never come down to this dayroom again unshaven while you’re a policeman, Reegan!” he shouted.

  “If you want to get out of the police altogether I don’t mind. Don’t let me stand in your way. I was afraid of it before but I don’t think it makes any difference any more,” Elizabeth said.

  “You don’t mind?” he came close to stare.

  “No. You can send in your resignation, whenever you wish.”

  “And what’ll we do then?”

  “Whatever you think best, it’s not for me,” she shuddered from the responsibility. “It won’t be my decision, it’ll be up to you, though I’d give any help. You know that, it must be your decision.”

  “I thought after the summer that we’d have enough to buy and stock a fair farm. That’s what I was brought up to, Reegans as far as you can go worked a farm, not till 1921 did this bastardin’ uniform show itself. With the pension we’d not be worked too much to the bone on a farm, and you’d be your own boss anyhow.”

  “Whatever you think, that seems good,” she nodded, one thing was much the same as the next to her, this game of caring was only something she felt she owed him to play.

  “But Jesus there’s one thing, Elizabeth,” he swore. “There’ll be no goin’ quiet, that’s certain. I’ll do for that bastard before I go. Never come down to this dayroom unshaven again while you’re a policeman, Reegan! There’ll be no goin’ quiet, that’s the one thing that’s sure and certain,” he said between clenched teeth and took his greatcoat and cap to go out on another patrol.

  The heavy white frost seemed over everything at this time, the drum of boots on the ground hard as concrete in the early mornings, voices and every sound haunting and
carrying far over fields of stiff grass in the evenings. The ice had to be broken on the barrels each morning. It was so beautiful when she let up the blinds first thing that, “Jesus Christ”, softly was all she was able to articulate as she looked out and up the river to the woods across the lake, black with the leaves fallen except the red rust of the beech trees, the withered reeds standing pale and sharp as bamboo rods at the edges of the water, the fields of the hill always white and the radio aerial that went across from the window to the high branches of the sycamore a pure white line through the air.

  And then she’d want to go out and lift her hot face and throat to the morning. But it would be only to find her eyes water and every desire shrivel in the cold. She wasn’t able to do that any more, that was the worst to have to realize; and it was driven home like nails one evening she was alone and the first heart attack struck while she was lifting flour out of the bin; she managed to drag herself to the big armchair and was just recovered enough to keep them from knowing when they came home.

  Mullins’s pig was slaughtered. She heard its screams without any emotion, she’d seen too many pigs stuck when she was a child. She could visualize what was taking place by the varying pitches of the screaming. It’d first start when they tangled it in ropes, rise to its highest when it was caught on the snout-hook for the head to be dragged back and the long knife driven in to the heart between the shoulder-blades, the screaming choke into silence as the knife was pulled out for the blood to beat into the basin that caught it so that they’d be able to make black pudding. Then the carcass would be scalded with boiling water and the white hairs shaved away.

  As the screaming died Casey came running up from the dayroom to call, “Did you hear the roars, Elizabeth? It’s all over.”

  He began to smoke and pace nervously about the kitchen.

  “Do you know what?” he said heatedly. “He wanted me to give a hand. Some people have a hard neck and there’s no mistake. The very thought of it is enough to make me sick! I told him it was a barbarous custom, but that I’d do b.o. and let Brennan go. And he’d the neck to laugh into me face and say that I’d ate a nice bit of pork steak quick enough. It’s simple barbarity for savages, that’s what it is, Elizabeth,” he complained.

  A sudden vision of pampered dogs being walked between the plane trees in the parks of London came and went in her mind before she answered, all a London evening held there for a moment.

  “It’ll be the end of a lot of talk,” she said.

  “A lot of rubbish,” Casey said, “skim milk and did you ever hear the bate of the notion, windfall apples to sweeten the bacon. God, Elizabeth, that pig got more publicity than a Christian.”

  “You’ll have to hear about this morning, won’t you?”

  “Yes. There’ll be a runnin’ commentary and nothin’ left out,” he said with such distaste that she had to laugh in secret.

  She felt she was getting weaker; and she grew more afraid that she’d pass out some day and that they’d find her before she had time to recover, and confine her to bed. As they were the days were futile enough, and the whole feeling of them seemed to gather into the late evening in December they came tipsy from the District Court, nothing obviously resolved in the pub or on the bikes home or in the dayroom, and they landed finally in the kitchen, anything that’d prolong the evening so that they’d not have to go home.

  “It’s a sure prophecy, and with these bombs they have now the end of the world can’t be far away. Anything that’s ever med grows into use,” Mullins was declaiming before they’d taken their chairs, and it was not popular.

  “If it’ll come it’ll come and talkin’ won’t stop it,” Reegan said.

  “There was a famous Jesuit once and he was asked if he was playin’ cards at five minutes to midnight and the end of the world was announced for midnight what would he do?” Brennan took up, and there was an immediate air of interest, the human and priestly elements together were certain to give reassurance.

  “And do your know what he answered? You’d never guess!” so pleased was Brennan with his moment in the limelight that he tried to prolong it.

  “No. What did he answer?” Casey was prompting, when Mullins let drop heavily, “He said he’d keep playin’. One act is as good as the next before God, it’s the spirit of the thing counts, that’s all.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Brennan asked in chagrin.

  “People hear things, in company. They don’t spend all their life with ignoramuses,” Mullins insulted, he appeared gloomy and surly and more drunken than the others.

  “He was a cool man then,” Casey tried to obscure the brutality and to ridicule the conversation into shallower and easier waters. “I’d be inclined to jump on me knees and say an Act of Contrition or pray for more time. Give me five minutes more in your arms above. Isn’t that what you’d be inclined to do, Elizabeth?” he appealed.

  “The Jesuits believe in prayer, fasting and alms deeds; not in cushions for chairs and that; and they’d be ready to face their end when it’d come,” Mullins was determined to be surly.

  “That’s not fair, that’s hittin’ below the belt. I didn’t bring personal things in, though I could,” he said, the eyes still bright and shallow and gentle.

  “Out with it so, be a man, and say it out. There’s nothin’ worse than hintin’,” Mullins attacked furiously.

  “That’s enough, it’s nothin’ to get hot about it,” Reegan said, and in the silence Brennan saw a chance again.

  “They’re very clever, the Jesuits,” he said. “A Jesuit was the only man ever to get 100 per cent in an exam in Oxford. He was asked to describe the miracle of the Marriage Feast of Cana and do you know how he answered it? All he wrote was, Christ looked at the water and it blushed, and he was the first man ever to get 100 per cent. Not a word wasted, exactly perfect. Christ looked at the water and it blushed.”

  “Aren’t miracles strange?” Casey suddenly pondered. “Plane-loads off to Lourdes every summer and they say the amount of cures there are a terror. And every cure has to be certified, so there can be no hookery.”

  “There’s no cod and it’s recognized by Rome,” Brennan said.

  “Fatima’s recognized too and isn’t it strange that with all its cures they never recognized Knock.”

  “A man was cured of paralysis one Sunday I was there,” Brennan said, he and Casey the only two left in the conversation. “We were walkin’ round and round the church and sayin’ the rosary when a sort of gasp went up: there was a cure. A sandy little man, no more than forty; he just got up out of his wheel-chair and walked as if there was never a tap on him.”

  “Mr Maguire, the solicitor, says that the reason Knock’s not recognized is because the Papal Nuncio fellows never got on with the clergy here, and it’s for the same reason that we’ve got not first-class saints. It looks be now as if we’ll be prayin’ till Doomsday to shift Matt Talbot and Oliver Plunkett past the Blessed mark. If they were Italians or Frenchmen they’d be saints quick enough, Mr Maguire said,” Casey droned, the evening sagging into the lifeless ache of a hangover.

  “It’s a disgrace over about Knock: you never went to Knock yet on an excursion Sunday but they were savin’ hay or some other work over in Mayo. A Papal Nuncio’d want to have an ocean of miracles in front of him when he’d land after seein’ all that sin on a Sunday before he’d recognize the place, “it was Brennan again this time.

  “The nearer the church the farther from God,” Casey yawned in answer. Reegan followed Elizabeth’s slow movements as she washed the delf at the table, his eyes desperate with this vision of futility when she turned to come for hot water to the fire. Is this all? Will they never go away? Will this go on for ever? in his eyes.

  Mullins rose, Casey and then Brennan, trying to be before the footlights to the last. “I knew a fella once and he used always say when he was jarred,’ I’ll do anything within reason, but home I will not go.’ He’d do anything within reason but home he would not g
o,” Brennan laughed.

  “Such bullshit,” Reegan said when they had gone. “Nothin’ short of a miracle would change that crew, and there’s no mistake.”

  She was quiet. Nothing short of a miracle would change any of their lives, their lives and his life and her life without purpose, and it seemed as if it might never come now, she changed his words in her own mind but she did not speak.

  6

  Christmas was coming and, in spite of everything, the feeling of excitement grew as always. Cards were bought and sent; and returned to deck the sideboard with tinsel and colour, sleighs and reindeer and the coaches with red-liveried footmen arriving before great houses deep in snow. The plum pudding was wrapped in gauze in the sweet can that stood out of reach on top of the press above the flour-bin; the turkey hung plucked and white, its stiff wings spread, on the back of the scullery door, and they’d all join in burning the down away with blazing newspapers Christmas Eve; ivy and berried holly were twined about the hanging cords of the pictures on the wall. When dark fell Christmas Eve they stripped the windows of their curtains, and a single candle was put to burn in each window till the morning. The rosary was said, and the children sent to bed.

  Reegan was on edge all this Christmas Eve, the worst evening of the year for the policemen with drunkenness and brawling, the lockup had been cleaned out days before in readiness. Reegan was hardly aware of Elizabeth as he struggled into the cumbersome greatcoat and put on his peaked cap to go out on patrol. He didn’t wear the baton in its leather sheath but slipped it naked into his greatcoat pocket, the vicious stick of lead-filled hickory shining yellow before it was hid, only the grooved surface of the handle and the leather thong hanging free.

  She watched him get ready to go, her sense of his restlessness ctarting to gnaw: she could do nothing, and yet she felt she’d failed him somehow, something at some time that she could have done for him that she had failed to do, though she could never know what it might have been and all she was left with was sense of her own failure and guilt and inadequacy. There was nothing she could do or say, only watch him go, listen to him tell her that he wouldn’t be back till late. His lips touched her face. His boots faded down the hallway and the dayroom slammed to leave silence in the house. She set about doing the few jobs that were left, and managed to shut all thought of their life together out of her mind. At half-eleven the first bell for midnight Mass rang, ten clear strokes. This would be the first Christmas since she’d come to the village to find her away from that Mass, there was always such a crush of people, and she couldn’t trust her strength there any more, far safer to wait for the deserted church in the morning. The cars began to go past. She heard a burst of drunken singing in the village, the last bell rang at midnight, then what seemed the drift of a choir came, and the sense of silence and Christmas began to awe and frighten her as she hurried to get through the few jobs that remained.