The Collected Stories

by John McGahern

  ‘They were right for once, Father.’

  ‘I’m amazed.’

  ‘Why, Father?’

  ‘You’re an intelligent man. You know you can’t do that, Jim.’

  ‘Why not, Father?’

  ‘You don’t need me to tell you that it’d appear as an extreme form of disrespect.’

  ‘If the church can’t include my own old brown hat, it can’t include very much, can it, Father?’

  ‘You know that and I know that, but we both know that the outward shows may least belie themselves. It’d not be tolerated.’

  ‘It’ll have to be tolerated, Father or …’

  ‘You can’t be that mad. I know you’re the most intelligent man round here.’

  ‘Thanks, Father. All votes in that direction count round here. “They said I was mad and I said they were mad, and confound them they outvoted me,” ’ he quoted. ‘That’s about it, isn’t it, Father?’

  ‘Ah, stop it, Jim. Tell me why. Seriously, tell me why.’

  ‘You may have noticed recently, Father,’ he began slowly, in rueful mockery, ‘a certain manifestation that my youth is ended. Namely, that I’m almost bald. It had the effect of timor mortis. So I decided to cover it up.’

  ‘Many lose their hair. Bald or grey, what does it matter? We all go that way.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘When I look down from the altar on Sunday half the heads on the men’s side are bald.’

  ‘The women must cover their crowning glory and the men must expose their lack of a crown. So that’s the old church in her wisdom bringing us all to heel?’

  ‘I can’t understand all this fooling, Jim.’

  ‘I’m deadly serious. I’ll wear my hat in the same way as you wear your collar, Father.’

  ‘But that’s nonsense. It’s completely different.’

  ‘Your collar is the sublimation of timor mortis. What else is it, in Jesus Christ? All I’m asking is to cover it up.’

  ‘But you can’t wear it all the time?’

  ‘Maybe not in bed but that’s different.’

  ‘Listen. This joking has gone far enough. I don’t care where you wear your hat. That’s your problem. But if you wear it in church you make it my problem.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to do something about it then, Father.’

  The priest went very silent but when he spoke all he said was, ‘Why don’t we lock up the school? We can walk down the road together.’

  What faced the priest was alarmingly simple: he couldn’t have James Sharkey at Mass with his hat on and he couldn’t have one of his teachers not at Sunday Mass. Only late that night did a glimmer of what might be done come to him. Every second Sunday the teacher collected coins from the people entering the church at a table just inside the door. If the collection table was moved out to the porch and Sharkey agreed to collect the coins every Sunday, perhaps he could still make his observances while keeping his infernal hat on. The next morning he went to the administrator.

  ‘By luck we seem to have hit on a solution,’ he was able to explain to the teacher that evening.

  ‘That’s fine with me. I never wanted to be awkward,’ the teacher said.

  ‘You never wanted to be awkward,’ the priest exploded. ‘You should have heard me trying to convince the administrator this morning that it was better to move the table out into the porch than to move you out of the school. I’ve never seen a man so angry in my life. You’d have got short shrift, I’m telling you, if you were in his end of the parish. Tell me, tell me what would you have done if the administrator had got his way and fired you?’

  ‘I’d have got by somehow. Others do,’ he answered.

  And soon people had got so used to the gaunt face under the brown hat behind the collection table every Sunday that they’d be as shocked now to see him without it after all the years as they had been on the first Sunday he wore it.

  ‘That’s right, Charlie. What’ll we all do?’ he repeated as he finished the whiskey beside the oil heater. ‘Here. Give us another drop before the crowd start to come in and I get caught.’

  My brown hat and his heart on the wrong side and you tippling away secretly when the whole parish including your wife knows it. It’s a quare caper indeed, Charlie, he thought as he quickly finished his whiskey to avoid getting caught by the crowd due to come in.

  There was no more coursing together again after that Sunday. The doctor’s car was parked a long time outside the white gate that led to the Bawn the next day, and when Tom Lennon’s old Ford wasn’t seen around the roads that day or the next or the next the teacher went to visit him, taking a half-bottle of whiskey. Lennon’s young wife, a warm soft country girl of few words, let him in.

  ‘How is he?’ he asked.

  ‘The doctor’ll be out again tomorrow,’ she answered timidly and led him up the creaky narrow stairs. ‘He’ll be delighted to see you. He gets depressed not being able to be up and about.’

  From the circular room of the tower that they used as a living room he could hear happy gurgles of the baby as they climbed the stairs, and as soon as she showed him into the bedroom she left. In the pile of bedclothes Tom Lennon looked smaller and more frail than he usually did.

  ‘How is the patient?’

  ‘Fed up,’ he said. ‘It’s great to see a face after staring all day at the ceiling.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The old ticker. As soon as I’d eaten after getting home on Sunday it started playing me up. Maybe I overdid the walking. Still, it could be worse. It’d be a damned sight worse if it had happened in five weeks’ time. Then we’d be properly in the soup.’

  ‘You have oodles of time to be fit for the exam,’ the teacher said, hiding his dismay by putting the whiskey down on the dressing table. ‘I brought this little something.’ There was, he felt, a bloom of death in the room.

  ‘You never know,’ the instructor said some hours later as the teacher took his leave. ‘I’m hoping the doctor’ll have me up tomorrow.’ He drank only a little of the whiskey in a punch his wife made, while the hatted man on the chair slowly finished his own half-bottle neat.

  The doctor did not allow him up that week or the next, and the teacher began to come every evening to the house, and two Sundays later he asked to take the hounds out on his own. He did not cross the bridge to the Plains as they’d done the Sunday together but went along the river to Doireen. The sedge of the long lowlands rested wheaten and dull between two hills of hazel and briar in the warm day. All winter it had been flooded but the pale dead grass now crackled under his feet like tinder. He beat along the edges of the hills, feeling that the hares might have come out of the scrub to sleep in the sun, and as he beat he began to feel Tom Lennon’s absence like his own lengthening shadow on the pale sedge.

  The first hare didn’t get more than halfway from where it was lying to the cover of the scrub before the fawn’s speed caught it, a flash of white belly fur as it rolled over, not being able to turn away from the teeth in the long sedge, and the terror of its crying as both hounds tore it began. He wrested the hare loose and stilled the weird childlike crying with one blow. Soon afterwards a second hare fell in the same way. From several parts of the river lowland he saw hares looping slowly out of the warm sun into the safety of the scrub. He knew they’d all have gone in then, and he turned back for Charlie’s. He gave one of the hares to Charlie; the other he skinned and took with him to Tom Lennon’s.

  ‘Do you know what I’m thinking?’ he said that night. ‘I’m thinking that I should take the bitch.’

  He saw sudden fear in the sick man’s eyes.

  ‘You know you’re always welcome to borrow her any time you want.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ he said quickly. ‘I thought just to take her until you’re better. I could feed her. It’d be no trouble. It’d take some of the weight off the wife.’ When he left that evening he took the bitch, which was excited, thinking that she was going hunting again, though it was dark, and s
he rose to put paws on his shoulders and to lick his face.

  She settled in easily with the teacher. He made a house for her in the garden out of a scrapped Ford but he still let her sleep in the house, and there was a lighter spring in his walk each evening he left school, knowing the excitement with which he would be met as soon as he got home. At night he listened to Tom Lennon’s increasingly feverish grumblings as the exam drew closer, and he looked so angry and ill the night after the doctor had told him he could put all thought of the exam out of his mind that the suspicion grew stronger in the teacher’s mind that his friend might not after all be just ill.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked fearfully.

  ‘Do the exam, of course.’ There was determination as well as fear in the sunken eyes.

  ‘But you can’t do it if the doctor said you weren’t fit.’

  ‘Let’s put it this way,’ the sick man laughed in harsh triumph, ‘I can’t not do it.’

  The night before the exam he asked the teacher to bring up the clippers. He wanted a haircut, and that night, as the teacher wrapped the towel round the instructor’s neck and took the bright clippers out of their pale green cardboard box, adjusting the combs, and started to clip, the black hair dribbling down on the towel, he felt for the first time ever a mad desire to remove his hat and stand bareheaded in the room, as if for the first time in years he felt himself in the presence of something sacred.

  ‘That’s a great job,’ Tom Lennon said afterwards. ‘You know, while we’re at it, I might as well go the whole hog and shave as well.’

  ‘Do you want me to get you some hot water?’

  ‘That wouldn’t be too much trouble?’

  ‘No trouble at all.’

  Downstairs as they waited for the water to boil, the wife in her quiet voice asked him, ‘What do you think?’

  ‘He seems determined on it. I tried to talk him out of it but it was no use.’

  ‘No. It doesn’t seem any use,’ she said. A starched white shirt and blue suit and tie were draped across a chair one side of the fire.

  The teacher sat on the bed’s edge and held the bowl of water steady while the instructor shaved. When he finished, he examined himself carefully in the little hand-mirror, and joked, ‘It’s as good as for a wedding.’

  ‘Maybe it’s too risky. Maybe you should send in a certificate. There’ll be another chance.’

  ‘No. That’s finished. I’m going through with it. It’s my last chance. There’ll be no other. If I manage to get made permanent there’d be a weight off my mind and it’d be better than a hundred doctors and tonics.’

  ‘Maybe I should give the old car a swing in readiness for the morning, so?’

  ‘That’d be great.’ The instructor fumbled for his car keys in his trouser pockets on the bed rail.

  The engine was cold but started on the sixth or seventh swing. In the cold starlit night he stood and listened to the engine run.

  ‘Good luck, old Tom,’ he said quietly as he switched it off and took the car keys in.

  ‘Well, good luck tomorrow. I hope all goes well. I’ll be up as soon as I see the car back to find out how it went,’ he said in a singsong voice he used with the children at school in order not to betray his emotion after telling him that the Ford was running like a bird.

  Tom Lennon rose the next morning as he said he would, dressed in his best clothes, had tea, told his wife not to worry and that he’d be back about six, somehow got as far as the car, and fell dead over the starting handle the teacher had left in the engine the previous night.

  When word was brought to the school, all the hatted man did was bow his head and murmur, ‘Thanks.’ He knew he had been expecting the death for some days. When he went to the Bawn a last time he felt no terror of the stillness of the brown habit, the folded hands, but only a certain amazement that it was the agricultural instructor who was lying there and not he. Two days later his hat stood calmly among the scarved women and bareheaded men about the open grave, and when it was over he went back to Charlie’s. The bar was filled with mourners from the funeral-making holiday. A silence seemed to fall as the brown hat came through the partition, but only for a moment. They were arguing about a method of sowing winter wheat that the dead man used to advocate. Some thought it made sense. Others said it would turn out to be a disaster.

  ‘Your old friend won’t hunt again,’ Charlie said as he handed him the whiskey. The voice was hushed. The eyes stared inquiringly but respectfully into the gaunt face beneath the hat. The small red curl of the nose was still.

  ‘No. He’ll not hunt again.’

  ‘They say herself and the child is going home with her own people this evening. They’ll send a van up later for the furniture.’ His voice was low as a whisper at the corner of the bar.

  ‘That makes sense,’ the teacher said.

  ‘You have the bitch still?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘That’s right. I’ll be glad to keep her, but the wife may want to take her with her.’

  ‘That’ll be the least of her troubles. She’ll not want.’

  ‘Will you have something yourself?’ the teacher invited.

  ‘All right, then, Master.’ He paused suddenly. ‘A quick one, then. We all need a little something in the open today,’ and he smiled an apologetic, rueful smile in his small eyes; but he downed the whiskey, as quickly running a glass of water and drinking it into the coughing as if it hadn’t been in the open at all.

  The fawn jumped in her excitement on her new master when he finally came home from the funeral. As he petted her down, gripping her neck, bringing his own face down to hers, thinking how he had come by her, he felt the same rush of feeling as he had felt when he watched the locks of hair fall on to the towel round the neck in the room; but instead of prayer he now felt a wild longing to throw his hat away and walk round the world bareheaded, find some girl, not necessarily Cathleen O’Neill, but any young girl, and go to the sea with her as he used to, leave the car at the harbour wall and take the boat for the island, the engine beating like a good heart under the deck boards as the waves rocked it on turning out of the harbour, hold her in one long embrace all night between the hotel sheets; or train the fawn again, feed her the best steak from town, walk her four miles every day for months, stand in the mud and rain again and see her as Coolcarra Queen race through the field in the Rockingham Stakes, see the judge gallop over to the rope on the old fat horse, and this time lift high the red kerchief to give the Silver Cup to the Queen.

  And until he calmed, and went into the house, his mind raced with desire for all sorts of such impossible things.

  Faith, Hope and Charity

  Cunningham and Murphy had worked as a team ever since they’d met on a flyover site outside Reading. They dug trenches and were paid by the yard. The trenches were in places where machines could not easily go, and the work was dangerous, the earth walls having to be shuttered up as they went along, the shutters held apart by metal bars with adjustable flat squares on both ends. Both men worked under assumed names to avoid paying income tax.

  This money that they slaved for all the year in the trenches they flashed and wasted in one royal month each summer in Ireland. As men obsessed with the idea that all knowledge lies within a woman’s body, but having entered it find themselves as ignorant as before, they are driven towards all women again and again, in childish hope that somehow the next time they will find the root of all knowledge, and the equally childish desire for revenge since it cannot be found, the knife in the unfathomable entrails. They became full of hatred. Each year, as Murphy and Cunningham dug trenches towards their next royal summer, their talk grew obsessional and more bitter. ‘It’s a kind of a sort of a country that can’t even afford a national eejit so they all have to take turns.’

  What slowed them up the most was not the digging but the putting up of the shuttering behind them. As August drew close they grew careless and their greed for money grew in order to make an even bigger splash
this summer than ever before. Little by little the spaces between the metal bars lengthened. They felt invulnerable: no matter how careless they were the bad accident was bound to happen elsewhere.

  Murphy was standing on top of the trench watching Cunningham wield the pick below, behind him the fence of split stakes on Hessell Street. The midday sun beat mercilessly down on the trench, and they worked it turn and turn about, coming up every five minutes or so to cool in whatever air stirred from the Thames.

  The only warning given was a sudden splintering of timber before the trench caved in. Murphy fell backwards from the edge but Cunningham had no time. The boards and clay caught him. His head and shoulders remained above the earth.

  He stayed alive while they dug him out, but as soon as they released the boards he died. The boards had broken his back.

  All that got through Murphy’s shock as he rode with the body in the ambulance to the London Hospital was, ‘The police’ll be in on this. The assumed names will come out. I might have to have an earlier holiday than I expected.’

  The men stood about the site in small silent groups after the ambulance had gone, the different engines idling over, until Barney, the old gangerman, stormed about in his black suit and tie and dirty white shirt, as if he’d suddenly gone epileptic. ‘What the fuck are yous all doing? Come on. Get a move on. Do yous think you get fukken paid for standin’ about all day?’

  As the site reluctantly moved back to life, a sudden gust of wind lifted an empty cement bag and cartwheeled it across the gravel before wrapping it against the fence of split stakes on Hessell Street.

  It was a hot day in Ireland too when the phone rang in the village post office to relay the telegram of the death. The hired girl Mary wrote it down on the official form, closed it in the small green envelope with the black harp and then wondered how to get it delivered. Because of the hot weather everybody was in the hayfields two miles away, and she couldn’t leave the place unattended to go that far. She decided to cross the road to see if James Sharkey was still in the school. The schoolhouse door was unlocked, and she found the hatted man alone in the classroom. He had stayed behind correcting exam papers.