The Dark

by John McGahern

  This place was at least green and real, I tried to say; but it wasn’t possible for long. The exam was tomorrow. I couldn’t face the exam. I’d have to go sick. I’d steal away to England.

  No, simply endure, it’s enough, was argued back. I’m afraid in case I’ll fail, and wreck my pride, and what does that matter. It’s useless to run. It’s the same stake as Macbeth’s except for the banality of the whole situation. And it’s fight a way out or go down. Everyone can’t be king but it’s the same. They have to fight their way out or go down. My hands clenched as they touched the bucket handle to cross the stile. I kicked at the harmless grasses.

  It was impossible not to laugh too, it was too comic, the whole affair exaggerated, I was going to no crucifixion on a mountain between thieves but to a desk in a public building to engage in a writing competition. The whole business had grown out of proportion, though in a way why shouldn’t it, I was at the heart of the absurdity and what proportion was there to my life, what did I know about it. I knew nothing.

  It was as good to climb to the hay-shed across the meadow in the shelter and lie on the old hay. No one would come there. Lying on the bank of hay you could look over the miles of stone walls across the Plains towards Elphin. The smoke of Carrick clouded the sky far off on the left, changed in the light, and soft yellow.

  The hay could stir promptings, the wenches that beat it out on their backs in hay-sheds under the waggoners of Jeffrey Farnol. The sharp ends pricked through clothes. I might as well, might as well finish the way I’d begun, what did it matter, why not, no one would come here. A girl in the hay, breasts and lips and thighs, a heart-shaped locket swinging in the valley of her breasts, I’d catch it with the teeth, the gold hard but warm from her flesh. The hay comes sharp against my skin once I get my trousers free. The miraged girl is in the hay, shaking hay in my eyes and hair, and she struggles and laughs as I catch her, and she yields, “My love,” and folds my lips in a kiss. I lay her bare under my hands, I slide into her, the pain of the pricking hay delicious pleasure.

  “My love. My love. My love,” I mutter, the lips roving on the hay, the seed pumping free, and it was over. The blue sky over the Plains came to my raised eyes, the stone walls, the grazing sheep, small white birds in the distance between stones, the trunks of three green oaks at the top of the meadow, and the light between. Nothing was changed. Half stripped I lay on the hay, a dry depression settling, and I had to get up, the fixing of shirt and trousers on the height of hay absurd embarrassment. The seed was lost in the hay. It’d dry. A grim smile as I wondered a minute what it’d taste like to the cattle. Strange how human seed would only grow in humans, no good pumping it into either a mare or a mouse, they had their own seed.

  I’d to hang round till I was calmer, brush my clothes clean. The exam was tomorrow. It was far away as tomorrow now, I didn’t care. It was strange how there never was any urge towards abuse when I was at peace.

  23

  THE CLASS MET AT THE MONASTERY GATE, THOSE WHO HAD bicycles parked them in the big room inside. Benedict came with us up Gallows Hill to the Convent. No one spoke much.

  “Remember to read down through the paper. Don’t plunge at the first question you know. Pick out the questions you intend to answer. Allot a time to each. Spend ten minutes picking the questions, it’ll be well spent. And don’t spend too much time at any one question,” Benedict gave last advice outside the Convent, white railings round the lawns and flowerbeds by the wall, and we were checking for the tenth time if we had pen and ink and ruler, the card with the number. If we could get a glance at what was on the paper we’d give money or if there was any chance of escape.

  The desks were arranged inside in the assembly hall, under the stage the Superintendent stood, a green curtain with two gold bands across. I found the desk with my number and sat. The official black box was unlocked. The rules were read. Someone in the front desks witnessed the breaking of the seal on the envelope that held the papers. The papers were given out face downwards, red for honours, a blue paper for pass. I watched the clock. At ten I’d lift the red paper and read.

  The hands that took it at ten were clumsy. The eyes read down the page, only half taking in what was there, but enough to tell that all the nights and concentration hadn’t been for nothing. The desire to rush at the questions had to be beaten back. I picked the questions, marked what I’d picked, a quick glance at the other faces, and I became a writing machine, putting down what I’d learned the way they told me to, glancing up at the clock, once asking for more foolscap.

  Unbelievably quick the three hours were at an end. I handed up the envelope and left. Benedict was outside on the gravel, a huddle about him going feverishly over the paper, the mistakes and the triumphs, how much better every one would do if it was possible to have one more go at it, what they’d avoid.

  We went back to the monastery during the lunch hour, the interest changing to the next paper at two, what’d be on, and it was over at five. I was cycling home same as usual except more spent after the excitement. It hadn’t been very terrible. Tomorrow would be another day, History, some things I wanted to go over to make fresh. That night was less restless, before the end of the fortnight it had grown much the same as ordinary schooldays, only for the challenge of each new paper.

  Tea was given to the class in the community parlour the last day. Benedict made a short speech. Five years at the school were over for us, he said. There’d been differences, no one wanted to shut his eyes to the fact, but differences were a fact of life, and they had, if you could put it that way, agreed to differ, and carried on. The important thing was that they had carried on. Now it was over. They were going out from the shade of the school into life … it went, and one by one when he had finished we came and thanked him and Brother Patrick.

  There was certain pain leaving for the last time, getting the bicycle out of the big room, wheeling over that sanded yard of so much soccer, the lawn and concrete path and lilac tree for the last time, the teachers walking on that concrete in the breaks all the years, up and down, a mystery what they talked about.

  Through the green gate with the cross above it facing the Leitrim Road for the last time. Down the town: the shops, Flynn’s and Low’s, the town clock, past the barracks, and over the stone bridge across the Shannon, Willie Winter’s garage and the galvanized paling about the football pitch of the Streets’ League.

  They were gone, the places in their days, probably able to see them again but never this way, coming from the day of the school. Part of my life had passed in them, it was over, to name them again was to name the dead life as much as them, frozen in the mystery of love.

  Yet the surface of it was that I had cycled past them hundreds of evenings without paying the slightest attention. I knew them only now when they were lost, I’d loved them without knowing, and only learned of the love in the losing, and I cycled past the trees and houses of the road, the quarry, afraid to think: and Mahoney read the last paper greedy as he’d read all the others when I got home.

  “So it’s over,” he said. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t have made much of a fist of any of it.”

  “You would if you’d been taught, if you’d studied for it. It wasn’t so hard.”

  “Nothing’s hard if you have the know-how, it’s only hard if you don’t. And you think you managed it alright?”

  “I think I did.”

  “Time’ll soon tell that. And whether the others did better.”

  “That’s the question,” I was able to laugh. I didn’t care, the dice was thrown, I’d have to wait to read its fall, that was all.

  “That’s the question,” Mahoney repeated. “The one certain thing is that there’s not places for everyone.”

  “Dog eat dog,” Mahoney muttered in an abstraction over the red paper, the conversation fading.

  “Dog eat dog, who’ll eat and who’ll be eaten, and what’ll the eaters and the eaten do,” there was at least grim laughter.

  “Go on
aten, and being et,” Mahoney said.

  “I suppose.”

  “May you be lucky anyhow. That’s all there’s for me to say. And may you be lucky with your luck,” he said, an old prayer. He took his hat off the sill. I watched him go.

  “There’s still work to be done, exams or no exams.”

  I gathered and put away the books that night. The nights of slavery, cramming the mind for the exam, most of it useless rubbish, and already being forgotten. The most that was left was some of the Latin lyrics, their strange grace; Macbeth; some poems; and the delight of solving the maths problems, putting order on their enclosed world, proving that numbers real and imaginary had relationships with each other. That was all. The quicker the rest went out of the head the better. One by one I put the books away, a kind of reverence, my life same as by the shops of the town had passed over these pages, it was over, but there were too many kinds of deaths, and no one’s life was very important except to himself or someone else in love with it.

  Outside the windows of the room the fields I’d been brought up on stretched to their stone walls, yellow moss and streaks of marvellous white lichen on the grey limestone, some trees green in summer and grazing cattle breaking the green monotony.

  24

  THE NEXT DAY WAS NEW AND FREE, NO BURDEN OF SCHOOL. HE found old work-clothes and went back with Mahoney to the fields, malleting stakes into the ground to hang barbed wire to split the pastures, and he was painfully soft, arms leaden by the afternoon, barely able to drag feet by night, pissing on the hands and letting the piss dry in an attempt to get the blistering skin hardened. Not able to stay awake after tea, and the night one unconscious sleep till he was woken by clattering buckets late in the yard in the morning, groaning with the ache of the muscles as he put on clothes, out for another day.

  Haytime came, the blades of grass shivering on the tractor arm, the turning and the shaking, its dry crackle against the teeth of the raker, the constant rattle of the teeth down again on the hard meadow after lifting free. The fragrance of new hay drenched the evening once the dew started and they were building high the cocks. Joy of a clean field at nightfall as they roofed the last cocks with green grass and tied them down against the wind.

  The smell of frying bacon blew from the house as they finished, hay and hayseed tangled in their hair and over their clothes as they walked towards the house, a gentle ache of tiredness. They shared something real at last. They’d striven through the day together, the day was over. No thought or worry anywhere, too tired and at peace to think. The dew was coming down, a white ground mist rising after the heat, a moon pale and quiet above the mushroom shapes of the beeches.

  “Twenty cocks in the Big Meadow. Sixteen in the Rock. It’ll more than fill the shed. We’ll have to throw up a small rick besides. It’ll take an Atom Bomb to starve the cattle this winter. No snow will do it,” Mahoney laughed his satisfaction into the evening.

  “We did a good day,” he was content, brown with sun, touched by the extraordinary peace and richness, even the huge docks under the apple trees, of the evening.

  There was the delight of power and ease in every muscle now, he’d grown fit and hard, he’d worked into the unawareness of a man’s day.

  “There’s not many would keep pace with the two of us. You’ve come into your own since the exam.”

  A hare looped out of the mist and stood. It raised itself, forepaws in the air, one paw crooked, the ears erect. The vague swirl of mist about it seemed to freeze into the intensity of the listening as they stood dead to watch.

  It seemed as if it must shudder in the air with the intensity before it fell quietly down again, uncertain, not knowing what way to flee.

  “Hulla, hulla, hulla,” Mahoney suddenly shouted and it bounded away, disappearing between the green oaks vague at the head of the meadow.

  The sleepy cries of the pigeons sounded from Oakport.

  “The wood’s full of them pigeons. They’ll not leave a pick of cabbage on the stumps if they get a chance. They give me the creeps. Cuckoos with hoarse throats.”

  The tracks of boots left vivid wet splashes on the grass. The frying bacon came stronger, the saliva already too eagerly filling the mouth. Pleasure of drenching the face and arms, the back of the neck, with cold water outside, sitting fresh to the meal on the kitchen table; as later sleep would come before the heaven of a mattress and cool sheets could be enjoyed.

  Never was so much work done, fences fixed and egg bushes rooted up, usually left to the winter to do. There was a savage delight in this power and animal strength, the total unconsciousness of the night afterwards. Sundays were spent at football in Charlie’s field, the same dogtiredness after, not a shadow of thought. He was a man. He was among men. He was able to take a man’s place.

  What was strange to notice was that Mahoney was growing old. He’d stop and lean on the pick, panting, “Take it easy. No need to burst yourself. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

  The cattle got ringworm. They were driven into the cobbled yard, and the wooden gate reinforced with iron bars. Their hooves slid on the cobbles, their eyes great with fear, milling around. For the first time he was their match, he was no longer afraid of a crushing, he had strength enough. He’d coax near, then get an arm around the throats, keep his feet in the first rush till he’d wear them into a corner and grip the sensitive ridge of the nostril between finger and thumb to draw the head up and back, the whites of the eyes rolling, the mouth dripping. He’d hold the heaving flanks of the beast that way against the wall while Mahoney daubed green paint into the sores with a brush.

  Mahoney was far the more cautious, a long remove from the days he used shout and bluster on these same cobbles, while the son stood terrified of the charging cattle with the box of green paint and the brush in his hand.

  “Watch now. Better men than you got hurt. He’d crack your ribs like a shot against that wall. Maybe we better leave him, and take a chance he’ll get alright without the paint, he’s too strong,” he counselled now.

  “No. I think we’ll get him. You can put the paint down, and push him into the wall once I catch him. I’ll be able to hold him once we get him against the wall.”

  “But watch, watch, he’s as strong as a bull.”

  The animal was caught and held. Mahoney daubed in the paint. The gate was opened. They all pushed out with the green paint on the sores.

  “There’s nothing the two of us mightn’t do together,” Mahoney said as they went, blobs of sweat on his forehead, a weariness in the set of the body, the eyes hunted. He was growing old. Hard to imagine this was the same man who’d made the winters a nightmare over the squalid boots, the beatings and the continual complaining.

  They threw away the old raincoats that had protected their clothes, and washed hands and arms in the same basin of hot water with Dettol to kill infection. He watched him there old, and remembered. The looking moved from the cruelty of detachment out into the incomprehension, no one finally knew anything about himself or anybody, even moods of hatred or contempt were passing, were of no necessary consequence.

  25

  THE EXAM RESULT ARRIVED THE FIRST WEEK IN AUGUST. DAYS of pestering the postman out on the road ended.

  “Anything today?”

  The voice shook but tried laughably not to betray its obvious care, it was an unconcerned question.

  “No. Nothing today,” he cycled past the gate, amusement in his voice, mixture of contempt and the superiority of understanding, the green braid on his tunic.

  The day he produced the letter he was forgotten, neither “Good-bye” nor “Thank you” nor anything. There was no need to open it to know what it was, the postmark was plain, Benedict’s hand. He just stared at it, the world reduced to its few square inches. He didn’t notice the postman noisily mount his bike again and cycle off. The problem was how to open it, it shook violently in his hands. He tore it clumsily at last and he had to rest it against the gate, his hands were shaking so much, in order to
read. His eyes clutched up and down at the words and marks as if to gulp it with the one look into the brain.

  It was only slowly it grew clear, the whole body trembling, he’d got the Scholarship, everything. The blue crest of the school crowned the notepaper, Presentation of the Child in the Temple. He started to tremble laughing, tears in the eyes, and then he rested against the gate, it couldn’t be true. He read it again.

  “I got it. I got it,” he burst into the kitchen to Mahoney, hysterically laughing.

  “What?”

  “The Scholarship, all honours, everything.”

  Mahoney seized it and read.

  “Bejesus, you did it, you did it, strike me pink.”

  The excitement was changing, he was crying, joy and generosity flowing towards the whole world. He wanted to catch hands and kiss everyone, and dance. He’d buy them presents, bring them places, they were all beautiful. They’d share joy, the world was a beautiful place, all its people beautiful.

  “You did it. There’s marks for you. That’s what’ll show them who has the brains round here,” Mahoney shouted as he read.

  “Congratulations,” he shook his hand in the manner of a drama. “Come and congratulate your brother.”

  They came and shook his hand and smiled up at him with round eyes, and that was the first cooling. They looked at him as different, and he knew he was the same person as before, he’d been given a lucky grace, he wanted it to be theirs as much as his, but he was changed in their eyes, they’d not accept he was the same.

  “We’ll go to town, the pair of us,’ Mahoney was shouting. “This is no day for work. A day like this won’t arrive many times in our lives.”

  They dressed and went to town. Mahoney talked nonstop on the way, there was nothing to do but be silent and listen. The flood of generosity was choked. He was playing a part in Mahoney’s joy, he was celebrating Mahoney’s joy and not his own. He grew bored and restless but that was the way the day was going to go.