The Collected Stories

by John McGahern

  ‘You only thought that,’ Philly said gently.

  ‘Peter thought it too.’

  ‘Well then, if he did – which I doubt – he thinks it no more.’

  ‘By the way, you were very quick to pocket his wallet,’ Fonsie said quickly as if changing the attack.

  ‘That’s because nobody else seemed ready to take it. But you take it if that’s what you want.’ Philly took the wallet from his pocket and offered it to Fonsie.

  ‘I don’t want it.’ Fonsie refused the wallet roughly.

  ‘We’d better look into it, then. We’ll never get a quieter chance again in the next days.’

  They were on a long straight stretch of road just outside the village. Philly moved the car in on to the grass margin. He left the engine running.

  ‘There are thousands in this wallet,’ Philly said simply after opening the wallet and fingering the notes.

  ‘You’d think the fool would have put it in a bank where it’d be safe and earning interest.’

  ‘Peter wouldn’t put it in a bank. It might earn a tax inspector and a few awkward questions as well as interest,’ Philly said as if he already was in possession of some of his dead uncle’s knowledge and presence.

  With the exception of the huge evergreens that used to shelter the church, the village had not changed at all. They had been cut down. Without the rich trees the church looked huge and plain and ugly in its nakedness.

  ‘There’s nothing more empty than a space you knew once when it was full,’ Fonsie said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Can you not see the trees?’ Fonsie gestured irritably.

  ‘The trees are gone.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. They were there and they’re no longer there. Can you not see?’

  Philly pressed Fonsie to come into the bar-grocery but he could not be persuaded. He said that he preferred to wait in the car. When Fonsie preferred something, with that kind of pointed politeness, Philly knew from old exasperations that it was useless to try to talk, and he left him there in silence.

  ‘You must be one of the Ryans, then. You’re welcome but I’m very sorry about poor Peter. You wouldn’t be John, now? No? John stayed below in the house. You’re Philly, then, and that’s Fonsie out in the car. He won’t come in? Your poor mother didn’t come? I’m very sorry about Peter.’ The old man with a limp behind the counter repeated each scrap of information after Philly as soon as it was given between his own hesitant questions and interjections.

  ‘You must be Luke Henry, then?’ Philly asked.

  ‘The very man and still going strong. I remember you well coming in the summers. It must be at least ten years.’

  ‘No. Twenty years now.’

  ‘Twenty.’ He shook his head. ‘You’d never think. Terror how they go. It may be stiff pedalling for the first years but, I fear, after a bit, it is all freewheeling.’ When Luke smiled his face became strangely boyish. ‘What’ll you have? On the house! A large brandy?’

  ‘No, nothing at all. I just want to get a few things for the wake.’

  ‘You’ll have to have something, seeing what happened.’

  ‘Just a pint, then. A pint of Guinness.’

  ‘What will Fonsie have?’

  ‘He’s all right. He couldn’t be got to come in out of the car. He’s that bit upset,’ Philly said.

  ‘He’ll have to have something,’ Luke said doggedly.

  ‘Well, a pint, then. I’ll take it out to him myself. He’s that bit upset.’

  When Philly opened the door of the car and offered him Luke’s pint, Fonsie said, ‘What’s this fucking thing for?’

  ‘Nothing would do him but to send you out a drink when I said you wouldn’t come in.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do with it?’

  ‘Put it in your pocket. Use it for hair oil. It’s about time you came off your high horse and took things the way they are offered.’ Fonsie’s aggression was suddenly met with equal aggression, and before he had time to counter, Philly closed the car door, leaving him alone with the pint in his hand.

  Back inside the bar Philly raised his glass. ‘Good luck. Thanks, Luke.’

  ‘To the man that’s gone,’ Luke said. ‘There was no sides to poor Peter. He was straight and thick. We could do with more like him.’

  Philly drank quickly and then started his order: several bottles of whiskey, gin, vodka, sherry, brandy, stout, beer, lemonade, orange, and loaves, butter, tea, coffee, ham and breasts of turkey. Luke wrote down each item as it was called. Several times he tried to cut down the order – ‘It’s too much, too much’ he kept muttering – then, slowly, one by one, all the time checking the list, he placed each item on the counter, checking it against the list once more before packing everything into several cardboard boxes.

  Philly pulled out a wad of money.

  ‘No,’ Luke refused the money firmly. ‘We’ll settle it all out here later. You’ll have lots to bring back. Not even the crowd down in the bog will be able to eat and drink that much.’ He managed a smile in which malice almost equalled wistfulness.

  After they’d filled the boot with boxes, they stacked more in the back seat and on one side of the folded wheelchair. Luke shook Fonsie’s hand as he helped to carry out the boxes to the car. ‘I’m sorry for your trouble’; but if Fonsie made any response it was inaudible. When they finished, Philly lifted the empty pint glass from the dashboard and handed it to Luke with a wink. Luke raised the pint glass in a sly gesture to indicate that he was more than well acquainted with the strange ways of the world.

  ‘In all my life I never had to drink a pint sitting on my own in a car outside a public house. There’s no manners round here. The people are savages,’ Fonsie complained as soon as the car moved.

  ‘You wouldn’t come in and Luke meant only the best,’ Philly said gruffly.

  ‘Of course, as usual you had to go and make a five- or six-course meal out of the whole business.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I thought you’d never stop coming out of the pub with the boxes. The boot is full. The back seat is jammed. You must have enough to start a bar-restaurant yourself.’

  ‘They can be returned,’ Philly said defensively. ‘Luke wouldn’t even take money. We wouldn’t want to be disgraced by running out of drink in the middle of the wake. Luke said, everybody said, there was never anything small about Uncle Peter. He wouldn’t want anything to run short at his wake. The McDermotts were always big people.’

  ‘They were in their shite,’ Fonsie said furiously. ‘He made us feel we were stealing bread out of his mouth. But that’s you all over. Big, big, big,’ he taunted. ‘That’s why people in Dublin are fed up with you. You always have to make the big splash. You live in a rathole in the desert for eighteen months, then you come out and do the big fellow. People don’t want that. They want to go about their own normal lives. They don’t want your drinks or big blow.’

  There are no things more cruel than truths about ourselves spoken to us by another that are perceived to be at least half true. Left unsaid and hidden we feel they can be changed or eradicated, in time. Philly gripped Fonsie’s shoulder in a despairing warning that he’d heard enough. They turned into the bog road to the house.

  ‘We live in no rathole in the desert,’ Philly said quietly. ‘There’s no hotel in Dublin to match where we live, except there’s no booze, and sometimes that’s no bad thing either.’

  ‘That still doesn’t take anything away from what I said.’ Fonsie would not relent.

  Without any warning, suddenly, they were out of the screen of small trees into the open bog. A low red sun west of Killeelan was spilling over the sedge and dark heather. Long shadows stretched out from the small birches scattered all over the bog.

  ‘What are you stopping for?’ Fonsie demanded.

  ‘Just looking at the bog. On evenings like this I used to think it was on fire. Other times the sedge looked like gold. I remember it well.’


  ‘You’re talking through your drainpipe,’ Fonsie said as the car moved on. ‘All I remember of these evenings is poor Mother hanging out the washing.’

  ‘Wouldn’t she hang it out in the morning?’

  ‘She had too much to do in the morning. It shows how little you were about the house. She used to wash all of Peter’s trousers. They never were washed from one year to the next. She used to say they were fit to walk around on their own. Often with a red sun there was the frost. She thought it freshened clothes.’

  To their surprise there were already six cars on the street as they drew close to the house.

  ‘News must have gone out already that you’ve bought the world of booze,’ Fonsie said as they drew up in front of the door, and his humour was not improved by having to sit in the car while all the boxes in the boot were carried into the house before the wheelchair could be taken out.

  John was getting on famously with the people in the house who had come while his two brothers had been away. In fact, he got on better with strangers than with either of his brothers. He was a good listener. At school he had been a brilliant student, winning scholarships with ease all the way to university; but as soon as he graduated he disappeared into teaching. He was still teaching the same subjects in the same school where he had started, and appeared to dislike his work intensely though he was considered one of the best teachers in the school. Like most of his students and fellow teachers he seemed to live and work for the moment when the buzzer would end the school day.

  ‘I don’t want to be bothered,’ was a phrase he used whenever new theories or educational practices came up in the classroom. ‘They can go and cause trouble with their new ideas elsewhere. I just want to be left in peace.’

  Their mother complained that his wife ran his whole life – she had been a nurse before they married – but others were less certain. They felt he encouraged her innate bossiness so that he could the better shelter unbothered behind it like a deep hedge. When offered the headship of the school, he had turned it down without consulting his wife. She had been deeply hurt when she heard of the offer from the wife of another teacher. She would have loved to have gone to the supermarket and church as the headmaster’s wife. Her dismay forced her to ask him if it was true. ‘You should at least have told me.’ His admission that he’d refused the promotion increased her hurt. ‘I didn’t want to bother you,’ he said so finally that she was silenced.

  When the two brothers came back to the house, he gradually moved back into a corner, listening with perfect attention to anybody who came to him, while before he had been energetically welcoming visitors, showing them to the corpse room, getting them drinks and putting them at ease. Once Philly and Fonsie came into the house he turned it all over to them. The new callers lined up in front of them to shake their hands in turn.

  ‘I’m sorry about poor Peter. I’m sorry for your trouble. Very sorry.’

  ‘Thank you for coming. I know that. I know that well,’ Philly answered equally ceremoniously, and his ready words covered Fonsie’s stubborn silence.

  Despite the aspersion Fonsie cast on the early mourners, very little was drunk or eaten that night. Maggie Cullen made sandwiches with the ham and turkey and tomatoes and sliced loaves. Her daughter-in-law cut the sandwiches into small squares and handed them around on a large oval plate with blue flowers around the rim. Tea was made in a big kettle. There were not many glasses in the house but few had to drink wine or whiskey from cups. Those that drank beer or stout refused all offers of cup or glass and drank from the bottles. Some who smoked had a curious, studious habit of dropping their cigarette butts carefully down the narrow necks of the bottles. Some held up the bottles like children to listen to the smouldering ash hiss in the beer dregs. By morning, butts could be seen floating in the bottoms of several of the bottles like trapped wasps.

  All through the evening and night people kept coming to the house while others who had come earlier quietly left. First they shook hands with the three brothers, then went to the upper room, knelt by the bed; and when they rose they touched the dead hands or forehead in a gesture of leavetaking or communion, and then sat on one of the chairs by the bed. When new people came in to the room and knelt by the bed they left their chairs and returned to the front room where they were offered food and drink and joined in the free, unceasing talk and laughter. Almost all the talk was of the dead man. Much of it was in the form of stories. All of them showed the dead man winning out in life and the few times he had been forced to concede defeat it had been with stubbornness or wit. No surrender here, were his great words. The only thing he ever regretted was never having learned to drive a car. ‘We always told him we’d drive him anywhere he wanted to go,’ Jim Cullen said. ‘But he’d never ask. He was too proud, and when we’d take him to town on Saturdays we’d have to make it appear that we needed him along for company; then he’d want to buy you the world of drink. When the children were young he’d load them down with money or oranges and chocolates. Then, out of the blue, he said to me once that he might be dead if he’d ever learned to drive: he’d noticed that many who drove cars had died, while a lot of those who had to walk or cycle like himself were still battering around.’

  From the top of the dresser a horse made from matchsticks and mounted on a rough board was taken down. The thin lines of the matchsticks were cunningly spliced and glued together to suggest the shape of a straining horse in the motion of ploughing or mowing. A pig was found among the plates, several sheep that were subtly different from one another, as well as what looked like a tired old collie, all made from the same curved and spliced matchsticks.

  ‘He was always looking for matches. Even in town on Saturdays you’d see him picking them up from the bar floor. He could do anything with them. The children loved the animals he’d give them. Seldom they broke them. Though our crowd are grown we still have several he made in the house. He never liked TV. That’s what you’d find him at on any winter’s night if you wandered in on your ceilidh. He could nearly make those matchsticks talk.’

  It was as if the house had been sundered into two distinct and separate elements, and yet each reflected and measured the other as much as the earth and the sky. In the upper room there was silence, the people there keeping vigil by the body where it lay in the stillness and awe of the last change; while in the lower room that life was being resurrected with more vividness than it could ever have had in the long days and years it had been given. Though all the clocks in the house had now been silenced everybody seemed to know at once when it was midnight and all the mourners knelt except Fonsie and two very old women. The two rooms were joined as the Rosary was recited but as soon as the prayers ended each room took on again its separate entity.

  Fonsie signalled to Philly that he wanted to go outside. Philly knew immediately that his brother wanted to relieve himself. In the city he never allowed any help but here he was afraid of the emptiness and darkness of the night outside the house and the strange ground. It was a clear moonlit night without a murmur of wind, and the acres of pale sedge were all lit up, giving back much of the light it was receiving, so that the places that were covered with heather melted into a soft blackness and the scattered shadows of the small birches were soft and dark on the cold sedge. High up and far off they could hear an aeroplane and soon they picked it out by the pulsing of its white nightlight as it crossed their stretch of sky. The tall evergreens within the pale stone wall on the top of Killeelan were dark and gathered together against the moonlight. As if to give something back to his brother for accompanying him into the night, Fonsie said as he was relieving himself in the shadowed corner of the house, ‘Mother remembers seeing the first car in this place. She says she was ten. All of them from the bog rushed out to the far road to see the car pass. It’s strange to think of people living still who didn’t grow up with cars.’

  ‘Maybe they were as well off,’ Philly said.

  ‘How could they be as well off?’

&nb
sp; ‘Would Peter in there now be better off?’

  ‘I thought it was life we were talking about. If they were that well off why had they all to do their best to get to hell out of the place?’

  ‘I was only thinking that a lot of life never changes. If the rich could get the poor to die for them the rich would never die,’ Philly said belligerently. It didn’t take much or long for an edge to come between them, but before it could grow they went back into the house. Not until close to daylight did the crowd of mourners start to thin.

  During all this time John had been the most careful of the three brothers. He had drunk less than either of the other two, had stayed almost as silent as Fonsie, and now he noticed each person’s departure and accompanied them out to their cars to thank them for coming to Peter’s wake as if he had been doing it all his life. By the time the last car left, the moon was still in the sky but was well whitened by the rising sun. The sedge had lost its brightness and taken on the dull colour of wheat. All that was left in the house with the dead man and his three nephews were the Cullens and a local woman who had helped with tea and sandwiches through the night. By that time they had all acquired the heady, vaguely uplifting spiritual feeling that comes in the early stages of exhaustion and is often strikingly visible in the faces of the old or sick.

  In the same vague, absent, dreamlike way, the day drifted towards evening. Whenever they came to the door they saw a light, freshening wind moving over the sedge as if it were passing over water. Odd callers continued coming to the house throughout the day, and after they spent time with the dead man in the room they were given food and drink and they sat and talked. Most of their talk was empty and tired by now and had none of the vigour of the night before. Mrs Cullen took great care to ensure that the upper room was never left empty, that someone was always there by Peter’s side on this his last day in the house. Shortly after five the hearse arrived and the coffin was taken in. It was clear that Luke had been right and that most of the drink Philly had ordered would have to be returned. Immediately behind the hearse was a late, brief flurry of callers. Shortly before six the body was laid in the coffin and, with a perfunctory little swish of beads, the undertaker began the decade of the Rosary. The coffin was closed and taken out to the hearse. Many cars had taken up position on the narrow road to accompany the hearse to the church.