The Collected Stories

by John McGahern

  Papers rustle in the benches, there’s a quick expectant buzz. Outside, the three stone walls of the playground run down to the lake, the centre wall broken by the concrete lavatory, above it the rapid sparkle of pinpoint flashes of sunlight on the wings of the blackdust swarm of flies; and on the windowsill in a jam jar a fistful of primroses some child has gathered from the May banks. In the stream of sunlight across the blackboard the chalkdust floats, millions of white grains, breathed in and out all day, found at night in the turnups of trousers, all the aridity of this empty trade.

  ‘You, Murphy, tell me where the Shannon rises?’

  A blank face answers in a pretence of puzzled concentration, and why should he know, his father’s fields and cattle will see him through.

  ‘Please, sir.’

  The room is full of hands.

  ‘Tell Murphy where the Shannon rises, Handley.’ A policeman’s son who’ll have to put his trust in his average wits.

  ‘Shannon Pot, sir, in the Cuilceach Mountains.’

  ‘Can you tell the class now, Murphy, where it rises?’

  ‘Shannon Pot, sir, in the Cuilceach Mountains.’ A look of triumph shows on his well-fed face as he haltingly repeats it.

  ‘Where does it flow, Mary?’

  ‘Southwards into Lough Allen close to the town of Drumshambo,’ the quick answer comes.

  ‘What factory have they there?’

  ‘Breffni Blossom jams.’

  ‘Anybody’s father send apples there?’

  Three hands.

  ‘Prior? Tell about the sending of the apples.’

  ‘We pick them, sir. Put them in a heap, same as potatoes, but on the ground we cover them with straw.’

  ‘Why do you cover them with straw?’

  ‘Frost, sir.’

  A low knock comes on the door that leads to the infant classroom, and my one assistant, Mrs Maguire, appears. She is near retirement: the slack flesh fills the ample spaces of the loose black dress, but the face in contrast is curiously hard, as if all the years of wrestling with children had hardened it into an intransigent assurance.

  ‘When Mrs Maguire says something Mrs Maguire means what she says.’ The third-person reference punctuates everything she says. Now a look of anxious concern shows in the unblinking eyes.

  ‘What happened with the Canon?’

  ‘He thrashed Walshe for breaking into one of the poorboxes.’

  I didn’t want her to stay, though I too had often used the glow of fabricated concern to hurry or escape the slow minutes of the school day.

  ‘Terrible. Awful.’ She echoes a dull safety, hers and mine.

  ‘We’ll talk about it at lunch, then.’

  ‘The world, the world,’ she ponders as she withdraws to her own room.

  I look at the clock, the crawl of the minutes, never the happiness of imagining it two o’clock and looking up and finding it half past three.

  ‘Will you be an absorbed teacher? Will your work be like a game? Or will you be a clockwatcher?’ Jordan, the Professor of Education, asked, more years ago than I care to remember, after a lecture. It was his custom to select one student to walk with him through the corridor, gleaming with wax and the white marble busts of saints and philosophers on their pedestals along the walls.

  ‘I hope I’ll be absorbed, sir.’

  ‘I hope so too for your sake. I can imagine few worse hells than a teacher who is a clockwatcher, driven to distraction by the children, while the day hangs about him like lead.’

  I could answer him now. I was a clockwatcher. The day hung mostly like lead, each morning a dislocation of your life in order to entice or bend the children’s opposing wills to yours, and the day a concentration on this hollow grapple. It seems to be as good as anything else and easier to stay than move.

  ‘We’ll leave the apples for a time and go on with the Shannon.’

  The class drags on until the iron gate on the road sounds. A woman comes down the concrete steps.

  A mother coming to complain, I think, and instinctively start to marshal the reassuring clichés. ‘The child is sensitive and when it loses that sensitivity will surprise us all. To force the child now can only cause damage. You have nothing to worry about.’

  ‘That was my trouble too at that age. I was too sensitive. I was never understood,’ she’d reply.

  ‘Thank you for coming to see me.’

  ‘I feel less worried now.’

  In the beginning everybody was sensitive and never understood, but hides hardened.

  This time, no mother, a Miss Martin: she lived with her brother across the empty waste of wheat-coloured sedge and stunted birch of the Gloria Bog. Her brother made toys from used matchsticks in the winter nights.

  ‘I wonder if I could take young Horan from his lessons for a few minutes, sir. It’s the ringworm.’

  ‘Luke, see Miss Martin in the porch.’ The boy goes quietly out to the porch, already charmingly stolid in the acceptance of his power, Luke, magical fifth in a line of male children unbroken by girls; and while he wailed under the water of his baptism at the stone font in Cootehall church a worm was placed in his hand – either the priest didn’t see or was content to ignore it – but the Horans rejoiced, their fifth infant boy would grow up with the power of healing ringworm.

  On Tuesdays and on Fridays, days of the sorrowful mysteries, he touched the sores thrice in the name of the Father and Son and Holy Ghost, power of magic and religion killing the slow worm patiently circling.

  ‘Did you wash your hands, Luke?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I used the soap.’

  ‘Show them to me.’

  ‘All right. You can get on with your work.’

  The last to come before lunch was the tinker, with pony and cart, the brass shining on the harness, to clean out the lavatory, and as I give him the key we make polite professional remarks about the flies and heat.

  ‘Ah, but not to worry, sir, I’ll bury it deep.’ He touches his cap.

  Soon, soon, they’ll come and flush him and me into the twentieth century, whatever the good that will do, and I grow ashamed of the violence of the thought, and, as if to atone, over lunch, give Mrs Maguire a quiet account of the beating young Walshe received for rifling the poorbox.

  After lunch he comes, dressed all in black, with a black briefcase, the half-collar of the Christian Brother on the throat instead of the priest’s full collar, a big white-haired man, who seemed more made to follow ploughing horses than to stand in classrooms. The large hand lifts the briefcase on the table.

  ‘My name is Brother Mahon and Canon Reilly kindly gave me permission to speak to the senior boys about a vocation to the Irish Christian Brothers.’ I wonder if he knows that I too had been once as he is now, if he looks at me as a rotten apple in the barrel; but if he does he says nothing, all glory to the power of the Lie or Silence that makes people easy in the void, all on our arses except the helping hand they give us on our way.

  ‘I told Canon Reilly I’d take the other children out to the playground while you spoke.’

  ‘Lucky to have such a fine manager as the Canon, takes a great interest in schools.’

  ‘Couldn’t ask for a better manager,’ I answer. The brick supports the brick above it. I’m a rogue and you’re another. ‘I’ll just take them outside now.’

  ‘All except the boys of the sixth class take your English book and follow me outside,’ and again, because I feel watched, the voice is not my own, a ventriloquist’s dummy that might at any minute fall apart.

  The Brother motions the scattered boys closer to the table, ‘It’ll only be just a man to man chat,’ as I take the others out, to sit against the white wall of the school in the sun, facing the lake, where the tinker is putting the green sods back above the buried shit, the flies thick above the cart and grazing pony.

  Through the open window the low voice drifts out into the silence of the children against the wall in the sun, and I smile as I listen. If one could only wait long
enough everything would be repeated. I wonder who’ll rise to the gleaming spoon and find the sharpened hooks as I did once.

  ‘I want you to imagine a very different lake shore to your own little lake below your school.

  ‘Hot sands.’ His words drift out. ‘Palm trees, glittering sea, tired after fishing all the night and washing their nets. A tall dark man comes through the palms down to the water.

  ‘We have laboured all the night and have taken nothing, the fishermen answer. The two boats were so full of fish that they began to sink. They fall on their knees on the sand, and the tall man, for it was Jesus, lifted them up and said to them follow me. From henceforth you will catch men.

  ‘In this schoolroom two thousand years later I bring you the same message. Follow me and catch men. Follow me into the Irish Christian Brothers, where as teachers you will lead the little children He so loved to Christ.

  ‘For death comes as a thief in the night, the longest life is but a day, and when you go before the Judgement Seat can you without trembling say to Jesus I refused the call even the tired fishermen answered, and what if He refuses you as you refused Him?’

  He sends them out into the porch, and brings them back one by one to interview them alone, while the tinker hands me back the key. ‘I’ve buried it deep, sir. There’ll be no flies,’ and the rise and fall of voices comes from Mrs Maguire’s infant prison house, Eena, meena, mina moo, capall, asal agus bo.

  Name, age, your father’s farm? he asks, and more to silence my own memory than the low chatter of the children I force, ‘Come on now, get on with your reading,’ but after they grow silent, to covertly read my real mood, the chatter grows loud again.

  ‘You have listened to all that I’ve said?’ I’d been asked once too.

  ‘Yes, Brother,’ I’d answered.

  ‘Do you think you could spend your life as a Christian Brother?’

  ‘I’m not sure, Brother.’

  ‘Do you think your parents would have any objection?’

  ‘I don’t know, Brother.’

  ‘What do you say we go and have a little talk with them after I’ve seen the rest of the boys?’

  It was finished then, my mother’s face had lighted when he drove me home. ‘It’d be an honour to have a Christian Brother in the family.’ ‘He’ll get a free education too, the best there is’; and that August I was in the train with the single ticket, fear of the unknown rooms and people. My brother inherited the bare acres in my place, and married, and with the same strength as she had driven me away he put her in a back room with the old furniture of her marriage while his new wife reigned amid the new furniture of the best rooms. Now each summer I take her to her usual small hotel at the sea, and I walk by her side on the sand saying, ‘Yes and yes and yes’ to her complaints about my brother and his wife, until she tires herself into relief and changes, ‘Do you think should I go to the baths after lunch?’ ‘Go to the baths, it’ll do your arthritis good.’

  ‘I think I’ll go, then.’

  I want to ask her why she wanted the acres for my brother, why she pushed me away, but I don’t ask. I walk by her side on the sand and echo her life with ‘Yes and yes and yes,’ for it is all a wheel.

  A light tap comes on the classroom window, a gesture of spread hands that he is finished, and I take the children in. Two of the boys have been set apart, with their school-bags.

  ‘I’m driving John and Jim to their houses. We’ll talk over everything with their parents.’

  ‘I hope it’ll be all right.’

  ‘We’ll see that everything is made clear. Thank you for your help.’

  After the shaking of hands I turn to the board but I do not want to teach.

  ‘Open your English books and copy page forty-one in your best handwriting.’

  I stand at the window while the nibs scrape. Certainly nothing I’ve ever done resembles so closely the shape of my life as my leaving of the Holy Brothers. Having neither the resolution to stay on nor the courage to leave, the year before Final Vows I took to bed and refused to get up.

  ‘The doctor says you’re in perfect health. That there’s nothing the matter with you,’ old Cogger, the boss, had tried to reason. ‘So why can’t you get up when we are even shortstaffed in the school?’

  ‘I can’t get up.’

  ‘What’s wrong with you that you can’t get up?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘If you don’t get up I have no option but to report you to General Headquarters.’

  I did not get up, he had no option, and the result was an order for my dismissal, but as quietly as possible so as not to scandalize my brothers in JC or the good people of the town. Old Cogger showed me the letter. I was to get a suit of clothes, underwear, railway ticket and one pound. It revived me immediately. I told him the underwear I had would do and he raised the one pound to five.

  The next hurdle was how to get my fit in clothes in a small town without causing scandal. Old Cogger dithered till the day before I had to leave, but at nightfall brought home two likely fits. I picked one, and packed it, and off we set by bus for Limerick, to all appearances two Christian Brothers going on some ordinary business, but old Cogger would come back alone. We did not speak on the way.

  Behind a locked door and drawn curtains I changed in the guest room of the house in Limerick. I’ve wondered what happened to the black uniform I left behind, whether they gave it to another CB or burned it as they burn the clothes of the dead. Cogger showed me to the door as I left for the train but I can’t remember if he wished me luck or shook hands or just shut the door on my back. I had a hat too. Yes a brown hat and a blue suit, but I didn’t realize how bloody awful they looked until I met my sisters on O’Connell Bridge. They coloured with shame. Afraid to be seen walking with me they rushed me into a taxi and didn’t speak until they had me safely inside the front door of the flat, when one doubled up on the sofa unable to stop laughing, and the other swore at me, ‘In the name of Jasus what possessed the Christians to sail you out into the world in a getup the like of that or you to appear in it?’ Though what I remember most was the shock of sir when the waiter said ‘Thank you, sir,’ as I paid him for the cup of tea I had on the train.

  Even if the memories are bitter they still quicken the passing of time. It is the sly coughing of the children that tells me the hands have passed three.

  ‘All right. Put your books away and stand up.’

  In a fury the books are put away and they are waiting for me on their feet.

  ‘Bless yourselves.’

  They bless themselves and chant their gratitude for the day.

  ‘Don’t rush the door, it’s just as quick to go quietly.’

  I hear their whoops of joy go down the road, and I linger over the locking up. I am always happy at this hour. It’s as if the chains of the day were worth wearing to feel them drop away. I feel born again as I start to pedal towards the town. How, how, though, can a man be born again when he is old? Can he enter a second time his mother’s bag of tricks? I laugh at last.

  Was it not said by Water and the Holy Spirit?

  Several infusions of whiskey at the Bridge Bar, contemplation of the Shannon through its windows: it rises in the Shannon Pot, it flows to the sea, there are stranger pike along its banks than in its waters, will keep this breath alive until the morning’s dislocation.

  The Beginning of an Idea

  The word Oysters was chalked on the wagon that carried Chekhov’s body to Moscow for burial. The coffin was carried in the oyster wagon because of the fierce heat of early July.

  Those were the first sentences in Eva Lindberg’s loose notes, written in a large childish hand, and she started reading them at the table again as she waited for Arvo Meri to come to the small flat. The same pair of sentences was repeated throughout the notes in a way which suggested that she leaned on them for inspiration. The word Oysters was chalked on the wagon that carried Chekhov’s body to Moscow for burial. The coffin was carried in the oy
ster wagon because of the fierce heat of early July. There was also among the notes a description of Chekhov’s story called ‘Oysters’.

  The father and son were on the streets of Moscow in that rainy autumn evening. They were both starving. The father had failed to find work after trudging about Moscow for five months, and he was trying to muster up enough courage to beg for food. He had drawn the tops of a pair of old boots round his calves so that people wouldn’t notice that his feet were bare under the galoshes. Above father and son was a blue signboard with the word Restaurant and on a white placard on the wall was written the word Oysters. The boy had been alive for eight years and three months and had never come across the word oysters before.

  ‘What does oysters mean, Father?’

  The father had touched a passerby on the sleeve, but not being able to bring himself to beg he was overcome with confusion and stammered, ‘Sorry.’ Then he swayed back against the wall. He did not hear the boy’s voice.

  ‘What does oysters mean, Father?’ the child repeated.

  ‘It’s an animal … it lives in the sea,’ the father managed.

  The boy imagined something between a fish and a crab, delicious made into a hot fish soup, flavoured with pepper and laurel, or with crayfish sauce and served cold with horseradish. Brought from the market, quickly cleaned, quickly thrown into the pot, quick-quick-quick, everyone was starving. A smell of steaming fish and crayfish soup came from the kitchen. The boy started to work his jaws, oysters, blessed oysters, chewing and slugging them down. Overcome by this feeling of bliss he grabbed at his father’s elbow to stop himself from falling, leaned against the wet summer overcoat. His father was shivering with the cold.

  ‘Are oysters a Lenten food, Father?’

  ‘They are eaten alive … they come in shells, like tortoises but .. in two halves.’

  ‘They sound horrible, Father.’ The boy shivered.

  A frog sat in a shell, staring out with great glittering eyes, its yellow throat moving – that was an oyster. It sat in a shell with claws, eyes that glittered like glass, slimy skin; the children hid under the table, while the cook lifted it by its claw, put it on a plate, and gave it to the grown-ups. It squealed and bit at their lips as they ate it alive – claws, eyes, teeth, skin and all. The boy’s jaws still continued to move, up and down; the thing was disgusting but he managed to swallow it, swallowed another one, and then another, hurriedly, fearful of getting their taste. He ate everything in sight, his father’s galoshes, the white placard, the table napkin, the plate. The eyes of the oysters glittered but he wanted to eat. Nothing but eating would drive this fever away.