The Collected Stories

by John McGahern

  XI

  I went straight from the bus station to the Blue Anchor. I got letters that had come for me from Jimmy, saw some of the Pint Drinkers. They were planning to take two barrels of stout out to Strandhill in a van one of these evenings, dig for clams and have a party on the shore. Already it was a world I could no longer join. As we made our excuses for leaving, I to get the next bus back to Strandhill, Jimmy to meet his girl outside the cinema, Jack clapped us affectionately on the shoulders and said, ‘Soon the pint days will be over. They’ll have the leg-irons on yous in no time now.’

  ‘Some other time we must make an evening of it,’ Jimmy and his girl said as I left them at the cinema.

  ‘Some other time,’ I echoed but already my anxiety was returning. The rain was heavier now and the drops fell like small yellow stones into the headlights of the bus. I hurried across the wet sand outside the hotel, and when I did not find her downstairs climbed to her room. I saw Costello’s eyes follow me with open suspicion. When I knocked on her door there was no answer.

  ‘Are you in, Kate?’ I called softly. Then I heard her low sobbing.

  ‘I’ve just come back on the bus. I wondered if you’d like to come out for a drink?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘I came back in the hope you’d come out. Are you sure you won’t come?’

  ‘No, thanks. I want to be alone.’

  Slowly I retraced my steps down the narrow creaking corridor. There was nothing I could do but wait for morning.

  XII

  With a reluctance to face what the morning might bring in the light of the evening before, I was late in coming down. The first thing that met my eyes was her luggage in the hallway. She was leaving.

  ‘I see Miss O’Mara decided to leave today after all,’ I tried to say as casually as possible to Costello, who seemed to be as much on guard over the bags as in his usual place in the office.

  ‘She told me to tell you that she’s settled her account and is leaving,’ he said in a tone which seemed to convey that I must have given her some good reason to leave with such suddenness.

  She had had breakfast, and as I ate mine it grew clear that even outside the discomfort of remaining in Costello’s hostility I had no longer any reason to stay, not indeed that there seemed any reason ever to have come. A kind of anger against her for giving me no warning hardened my decision to leave at once. There was only one way she could leave, on the eleven o’clock bus, and I would leave with her on the same bus.

  ‘I’d like to have the bill. I’m leaving,’ I said to Costello, and as I was now meeting his aggression with aggression he did not trouble to answer. After pretending to consult some records, he presented me with the bill for the whole week. Hostile as I felt, I was forced to smile. ‘But I’ve been here only four days.’

  ‘You booked for a week.’

  ‘Well, in that case, keep the room open for me.’ I counted out what he had demanded. ‘I’ll probably come back tomorrow,’ at which he exploded: ‘No. Your type is not wanted again here,’ and he slid the difference towards me.

  The tide must be far out I thought as I sat and listened to the pounding of the sea while waiting for the bus to turn at the cannon. It was a clear, fresh morning after the rain, only a few tattered shreds of white cloud in the blue sky. She did not come out until the bus was almost due. She was tense and looked as if she hadn’t slept and was afraid when she saw me. Costello carried her bags, and as they prepared to wait together at a separate distance I decided to join them.

  ‘I decided to leave too,’ I said, and she then turned to Costello: ‘You needn’t wait any longer, Mr Costello. I’ll be fine now. And are you sure you won’t take something?’ And when he refused for what was obviously the second time he shook her hand warmly and went in. Even then she might not have spoken if I had not said, ‘You should have let me know. It gave me no chance at all.’

  ‘Does it matter so much?’

  ‘No, not that much. But why make it more difficult than it has to be?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I had to do it this way. I couldn’t do it any other way. I didn’t mean for you to leave at all.’

  The bus was coming. As it was empty the conductor told us to take our bags on the bus, and we dumped them on the front seat. The waves seemed to pound louder than ever behind us above the creaky running of the bus.

  ‘Did he charge you for the whole week?’ I asked.

  ‘I offered but he wouldn’t take it.’

  ‘The brute.’ I smiled. ‘He tried to charge me.’

  I wanted to ask her about the evening before, about all that had gone before since we had first met at Nora Moran’s, but I knew it was all hopeless, and I was blinded by no passion; I had not even that grace: at most it had been a seed, thrown on poor ground, half wishing it might come to something, in the wrong time of year. As if my silence was itself a question, she said as the bus came into Sligo, ‘I can’t explain anything that happened. I’ll tell you some day but I can’t now.’

  ‘It’s all right. Don’t worry about it.’ We were back in the safety of the phrases that mean nothing. ‘Anything worth explaining generally can’t be explained anyhow.’

  ‘We’ll say goodbye here,’ she said when we got off the bus. ‘I’m sorry but I want to be alone.’

  ‘Where’ll you go?’

  ‘To the hotel.’ She motioned with her head. ‘I’ll get the two o’clock train. I hope you’ll ring me when you get to Dublin. I won’t be this way then.’

  I turned away but saw her climb the steps, the glass door open and the doorman take her bags, a flash of light as the door closed. She would have a salad and a glass of wine and coffee, feel the expensive linen and smile at the waiter’s smiles. She would be almost back in her own world before her train left, as I was almost back in mine.

  How empty the doorways were, empty coffins stood on end.

  Already Barnaby and Bartleby would be in their doorway in Abbey Street firmly fitting them till night, when they would silently leave.

  All the people I had met at Nora Moran’s, bowing and scraping and smiling in their doorways. Nora rushing from doorway to doorway, trying to bring all the doorways with her. ‘I never feel easy without saying goodnight to Mother’; Michael Henry climbing on the bus, ‘I don’t believe in shelling out good money to a hotel when you can be just as badly off at home. America teaches you those things,’ the vivid green of the teal’s feather in his hat as he disappeared into the years.

  Kate O’Mara sitting in the big dining-room of the hotel. The Pint Drinkers’ Association, Jimmy McDermott, the last weeks in Sligo, the Kincora, the sea … everything seemed to be without shape. I understood nothing. Perhaps we had come to expect too much. Neither Barnaby nor Bartleby would tell. They didn’t know. They just lived it.

  I opened both my hands. They were quite empty. A clear morning came to me. It was on the edge of a town, close to the asylum, and a crowd of presumably harmless patients were hedging whitethorns along the main road, watched over by their male nurses. One patient seemed to be having a wonderful time. He lifted every branch he cut, and after a careful examination of each sprig he began to laugh uproariously. I felt my empty hands were worthy of such uproarious mirth. Wasn’t my present calm an equal, more courteous madness?

  I was free in the Sligo morning. I could do as I pleased. There were all sorts of wonderful impossibilities in sight. The real difficulty was that the day was fast falling into its own night.

  The Wine Breath

  If I were to die, I’d miss most the mornings and the evenings, he thought as he walked the narrow dirt-track by the lake in the late evening, and then wondered if his mind was failing, for how could anybody think anything so stupid: being a man he had no choice, he was doomed to die; and being dead he’d miss nothing, being nothing. It went against everything in his life as a priest.

  The solid world, though, was everywhere around him. There was the lake, the road, the evening, and he was goin
g to call on Gillespie. Gillespie was sawing. Gillespie was always sawing. The roaring rise-and-fall of the two-stroke stayed like a rent in the evening. When he got to the black gate there was Gillespie, his overalled bulk framed in the short avenue of alders, and he was sawing not alders but beech, four or five tractor-loads dumped in the front of the house. The priest put a hand to the black gate, bolted to the first of the alders, and was at once arrested by showery sunlight falling down the avenue. It lit up one boot holding the length of beech in place, it lit the arms moving the blade slowly up and down as it tore through the beech, white chips milling out on the chain.

  Suddenly, as he was about to rattle the gate loudly to see if this would penetrate the sawing, he felt himself (bathed as in a dream) in an incredible sweetness of light. It was the evening light on snow. The gate on which he had his hand vanished, the alders, Gillespie’s formidable bulk, the roaring of the saw. He was in another day, the lost day of Michael Bruen’s funeral nearly thirty years before. All was silent and still there. Slow feet crunched on the snow. Ahead, at the foot of the hill, the coffin rode slowly forward on shoulders, its brown varnish and metal trappings dull in the glittering snow, riding just below the long waste of snow eight or ten feet deep over the whole countryside. The long dark line of mourners following the coffin stretched away towards Oakport Wood in the pathway cut through the snow. High on Killeelan Hill the graveyard evergreens rose out of the snow. The graveyard wall was covered, the narrow path cut up the side of the hill stopping at the little gate deep in the snow. The coffin climbed with painful slowness, as if it might never reach the gate, often pausing for the bearers to be changed; and someone started to pray, the prayer travelling down the whole mile-long line of the mourners as they shuffled behind the coffin in the narrow tunnel cut in the snow.

  It was the day in February 1947 that they buried Michael Bruen. Never before or since had he experienced the Mystery in such awesomeness. Now, as he stood at the gate, there was no awe or terror, only the coffin moving slowly towards the dark trees on the hill, the long line of the mourners, and everywhere the blinding white light, among the half-buried thorn bushes and beyond Killeelan, on the covered waste of Gloria Bog, on the sides of Slieve an Iarainn.

  He did not know how long he had stood in that lost day, in that white light, probably for no more than a moment. He could not have stood the intensity for any longer. When he woke out of it the grey light of the alders had reasserted itself. His hand was still on the bar of the gate. Gillespie was still sawing, bent over the saw-horse, his boot on the length of beechwood, completely enclosed in the roaring rise-and-fall of the saw. The priest felt as vulnerable as if he had suddenly woken out of sleep, shaken and somewhat ashamed to have been caught asleep in the actual day and life, without any protection of walls.

  He was about to rattle the gate again, feeling a washed-out parody of a child or old man on what was after all nothing more than a poor errand: to tell the Gillespies that a bed had at long last been made available in the Regional Hospital for the operation on Mrs Gillespie’s piles, when his eyes were caught again by the quality of the light. It was one of those late October days, small white clouds drifting about the sun, and the watery light was shining down the alder rows to fall on the white chips of the beechwood strewn all about Gillespie, some inches deep. It was the same white light as the light on snow. As he watched, the light went out on the beech chips, and it was the grey day again around Gillespie’s sawing. It had been as simple as that. The suggestion of snow had been enough to plunge him into the lost day of Michael Bruen’s funeral. Everything in that remembered day was so pure and perfect that he felt purged of all tiredness, was, for a moment, eager to begin life again.

  Making sure that Gillespie hadn’t noticed him at the gate, he turned back. The bed wouldn’t be ready for another week. The news could wait a day or more. Before leaving he stole a last look at the dull white ground about the saw-horse. The most difficult things always seem to lie closest to us, to lie around our feet.

  Ever since his mother’s death he found himself stumbling into these dead days. Once, crushed mint in the garden had given him back a day he’d spent with her at the sea in such reality that he had been frightened, as if he’d suddenly fallen through time; it was as if the world of the dead was as available to him as the world of the living. It was also humiliating for him to realize that she must have been the mainspring of his days. Now that the mainspring was broken, the hands were weakly falling here and falling there. Today there had been the sudden light on the bits of white beech. He’d not have noticed it if he hadn’t been alone, if Gillespie had not been so absorbed in his sawing. Before, there must have been some such simple trigger that he’d been too ashamed or bewildered to notice.

  Stealthily and quickly he went down the dirt-track by the lake till he got to the main road. To the left was the church in a rookery of old trees, and behind it the house where he lived. Safe on the wide main road he let his mind go back to the beech chips. They rested there around Gillespie’s large bulk, and paler still was the line of mourners following the coffin through the snow, a picture you could believe or disbelieve but not be in. In idle exasperation he began to count the trees in the hedge along the road as he walked: ash, green oak, whitehorn, ash; the last leaves a vivid yellow on the wild cherry, empty October fields in dull wet light behind the hedges. This, then, was the actual day, the only day that mattered, the day from which our salvation had to be won or lost: it stood solidly and impenetrably there, denying the weak life of the person, with nothing of the eternal other than it would dully endure, while the day set alight in his mind by the light of the white beech, though it had been nothing more than a funeral he had attended during a dramatic snowfall when a boy, seemed bathed in the eternal, seemed everything we had been taught and told of the world of God.

  Dissatisfied, and feeling as tired again as he’d been on his way to Gillespie’s, he did not go through the church gate with its circle and cross, nor did he call to the sexton locking up under the bellrope. In order to be certain of being left alone he went by the circular path at the side. A high laurel hedge hid the path from the graveyard and church. There he made coffee without turning on the light. Always when about to give birth or die cattle sought out a clean place in some corner of the field.

  Michael Bruen had been a big kindly agreeable man, what was called a lovely man. His hair was a coarse grey. He wore loose-fitting tweeds with red cattleman’s boots. When young he had been a policeman in Dublin. It was said he had either won or inherited money, and had come home to where he’d come from to buy the big Crossna farm, to marry and grow rich.

  He had a large family. Men were employed on the farm. The yard and its big outhouses with the red roofs rang with work: cans, machinery, raillery, the sliding of hooves, someone whistling. Within the house, away from the yard, was the enormous cave of a kitchen, the long table down its centre, the fireplace at its end, the plates and pots and presses along the walls, sides of bacon wrapped in gauze hanging from hooks in the ceiling, the whole room full of the excitement and bustle of women.

  Often as a boy the priest had gone to Michael Bruen’s on some errand for his father. Once the beast was housed or the load emptied Michael would take him into the kitchen. The huge fire of wood blazed all the brighter because of the frost.

  ‘Give this man something.’ Michael had led him. ‘Something solid that’ll warm the life back into him.’

  ‘A cup of tea will do fine,’ he had protested in the custom.

  ‘Nonsense. Don’t pay him the slightest attention. Empty bags can’t stand.’

  Eileen, the prettiest of Michael’s daughters, laughed as she took down the pan. Her arms were white to the elbows with a fine dusting of flour.

  ‘He’ll remember this was a good place to come to when he has to start thinking about a wife.’ Michael’s words gave licence to general hilarity.

  It was hard to concentrate on Michael’s questions about his fathe
r, so delicious was the smell of frying. The mug of steaming tea was put by his side. The butter melted on the fresh bread on the plate. There were sausages, liver, bacon, a slice of black-pudding and sweetest grisceens.

  ‘Now set to,’ Michael laughed. ‘We don’t want any empty bags leaving Bruen’s.’

  Michael came with him to the gate when he left. ‘Tell your father it’s ages since we had a drink in the Royal. And that if he doesn’t search me out in the Royal the next Fair Day I’ll have to go over and bate the lugs off him.’ As he shook his hand in the half-light of the yard lamp it was the last time he was to see him alive. Before the last flakes had stopped falling, when old people were searching back to ‘the great snows when Count Plunkett was elected’ to find another such fall, Michael Bruen had died, and his life was already another such watermark of memory.

  The snow lay eight feet deep on the roads, and dead cattle and sheep were found in drifts of fifteen feet in the fields. All of the people who hadn’t lost sheep or cattle were in extraordinary good humour, their own ills buried for a time as deep as their envy of any other’s good fortune in the general difficulty of the snow. It took days to cut a way out to the main road, the snow having to be cut in blocks breast-high out of a face of frozen snow. A wild cheer went up as the men at last cut through to the gang digging in from the main road. Another cheer greeted the first van to come in, Doherty’s bread van, and it had hardly died when the hearse came with the coffin for Michael Bruen. That night they cut the path up the side of Killeelan Hill and found the family headstone beside the big yew just inside the gate and opened the grave. They hadn’t finished digging when the first funeral bell came clearly over the snow the next day to tell them that the coffin had started on its way.