By the Lake

by John McGahern

  “Enter lightly, Kate, and leave on tiptoe. Put the hand across but never press. Ask why not but never why. Always lie so that you speak the truth and God save all poor sinners,” he said, and greeted his own sally with a sharp guffaw.

  A loud sudden rapping with a stick on the porch door did not allow for any response. “God bless all here!” was shouted out as a slow laborious shuffle approached through the front room.

  “Bill Evans.”

  “It could be no one else,” Jamesie rubbed his hands together in anticipation.

  Bill Evans did not pause in the doorway but advanced boldly into the room to sit in the white rocking chair. The huge wellingtons, the blue serge trousers and torn jacket, a shirt of mattress ticking, the faded straw hat were all several sizes too large. The heavy blackthorn he carried he leaned against an arm of the chair. His eyes darted eagerly from face to face to face. “Jamesie,” he grinned with condescension. “You are welcome to this side of the lake.”

  “I’m delighted, honoured to be here,” Jamesie laughed.

  Tea was made. Milk and several spoons of sugar were added to the tea and stirred. The tea and biscuits were placed on a low stool beside the rocking chair. He ate and drank greedily.

  “How are you all up there?”

  “Topping. We are all topping.”

  “You are managing all right without Jackie?”

  “Getting along topping. Managing fine.”

  He had been schooled never to part with any information about what happened. There was much to conceal about Bill Evans’s whole life. Because he knew no other life, his instinct to protect his keepers and his place was primal.

  “Do you think will Herself get married again?” Jamesie asked jocularly, provocatively.

  “Everybody says that you are far too nosy.”

  “News is better than no news,” Jamesie answered, taken aback.

  There are no truths more hurtful than those we see as partly true. That such a humble hand delivered it made it more unsettling. Though he pretended not to care, Jamesie knew that his curiosity was secretly feared and openly mocked. He became unusually silent.

  Bill Evans finished the tea and biscuits. “Have you any fags?” he demanded when he put the plate and cup away and rose out of the rocking chair.

  Ruttledge gave him five loose cigarettes that had been placed in a corner of the dresser. “A light?” Bill asked. Some matches from a box were emptied into his palm. Cigarettes and matches were all put together into the breast pocket of the large serge jacket. “Not faulting the company but I’ll be beating away now,” he said.

  “Good luck, Bill,” Jamesie called out amiably, but Bill Evans made no answer.

  Ruttledge accompanied him to the gate where he had left the two buckets in the hedge of fuchsia bushes.

  “See if there’s anybody watching in the lane,” he demanded.

  Ruttledge walked out into the lane and looked casually up and down. Between its high banks the narrow lane was like a lighted tunnel under the tangled roof of green branches. “There’s not a soul in sight.”

  “There’s no one watching above at the gate?”

  “Nobody. You were very hard on poor Jamesie,” Ruttledge said.

  “That’s the only way to give it to him,” he grinned in triumph. “He’s too newsy.” He lifted the two buckets out of the fuchsias and, gripping the blackthorn against one of the handles, headed towards the lake.

  His kind was now almost as extinct as the corncrake. He had fled to his present house from the farm he first worked on. When he was fourteen years old he had been sent out from the religious institutions to that first farm. Nobody knew now, least of all Bill Evans, how long ago that was.

  One cold day, several years earlier, they had gone away, locking him outside, warning him to watch the place and not to wander. They were an unusually long time away. Towards evening he could stand the hunger no longer and came to Ruttledge. “Get me something to eat. I’m starving.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “They went away,” he admitted reluctantly.

  There was little food in the house. Kate had gone to London and Ruttledge was housekeeping alone. “You’re welcome to anything in the house but there isn’t even bread. I was waiting till tonight to go to the village.”

  “Haven’t you spuds?”

  “Plenty.” He hadn’t thought of them as an offering.

  “Quick, Joe. Put them on.”

  A pot of water was set to boil. The potatoes were washed. “How many?”

  “More. More.”

  His eyes glittered on the pot as he waited, willing them to a boil. Fourteen potatoes were put into the pot. He ate all of them, even the skins, with salt and butter, and emptied the large jug of milk. “God, I feel all roly-poly now,” he said with deep contentment as he moved back to the ease of the white rocking chair. “Do you have any fags?”

  The small ration was taken from the shelf. A cigarette was lit. He smoked, inhaling deeply, holding the smoke until the lungs could no longer bear the strain, and then released the breath with such slow reluctance that the smoke issued first from the nostrils before gushing out on a weak, spent breath. So deep was his pleasure that watching was also a dismaying pleasure. For once he was in no anxiety or rush to leave, and Ruttledge began to ask him about his life, though he knew any enquiry was unlikely to be welcomed. Already he knew the outlines of such a life.

  He would have known neither father nor mother. As a baby he would have been given into the care of nuns. When these boys reached seven, the age of reason, they were transferred to places run by priests or Brothers. When he reached fourteen, Bill Evans was sent out, like many others, to his first farmer.

  They were also sent as skivvies to the colleges; they scrubbed and polished floors, emptied garbage and waited at tables in the college Ruttledge attended. He recalled how small the boys were in their white jackets, the grey stripes of their trousers, their crew-cut heads, the pale faces tense and blank. No words were allowed to pass between them and the students. They brought huge trays of fish or meat, bowls of soup and vegetables, baskets of bread, and on Sundays glass siphons of red lemonade with silver tops. The place was so bleak that the glass siphons were like flowers on the table for the one festive day of the week. What went on in the kitchens behind the heavy oak partition was a hubbub of distant sound from which the occasional crash or cry or shout emerged. In his long black soutane and red burning eyes under a grey crew-cut, the dean of students was a sinister figure, never more so than when he smiled weakly. He walked up and down between the rows of tables or stood under the big crucifix between the high windows. He read out notices and issued warnings and with bowed head intoned the prayers of grace before and after meals. As he walked slowly up and down between the tables he read his Breviary, pausing now and then to cast an unblinking eye on any table where there was a hint of boisterousness or irregularity. Such was his reputation that cutlery was often knocked to the floor or scattered in the nervous rush towards correction. Then, with a chilling smile, he would pass on, returning to his Breviary, resuming the metronomical walk, until pausing to rest his gaze on an upturned salt cruet. Around him the boys in their short white coats hurried between the kitchens and the tables.

  One morning a boy turned quickly away from a table and found the Dean unexpectedly in his path and went straight into him with a tray. Plates and bowls went flying. The soutane was splashed. Only the students who were seated close to the accident saw what happened next, and even they weren’t certain. In the face of his fury it was thought that the boy broke the rule of silence to try to excuse the accident. The beating was sudden and savage. Nobody ate a morsel at any of the tables while it was taking place. Not a word was uttered. In the sobbing aftermath the silence was deep and accusing until the scrape of knife and fork on plate and the low hum of conversation resumed. Many who had sat mutely at the tables during the beating were to feel all their lives that they had taken part in the beating through
their self-protective silence. This ageing man, who could easily have been one of those boys waiting at tables or cleaning the kitchens if he hadn’t been dispatched to that first farm, sat at ease and in full comfort in the white rocking chair, smoking, after having eaten the enormous bowl of potatoes.

  “You were sent out to that first farm when you were fourteen?”

  “Begod, I was.”

  “You worked for them for a good few years before you ran away to here?”

  “Begod, I did.”

  “They didn’t treat you very well?”

  For what seemed an age he made no attempt to answer, looking obstinately out from the white chair that no longer moved. “Why are you asking me this, Joe?”

  “Everybody comes from somewhere or other. None of us comes out of the blue air.”

  “You’ll be as bad as Jamesie soon,” he answered irritably.

  “Weren’t you in a place run by Brothers and priests before they sent you to the first farm?” Ruttledge ignored the rebuke. A troubled look passed across Bill Evans’s face as swiftly as a shadow of a bird passing across window light and was replaced by a black truculence. “Before the priests and Brothers weren’t you with nuns in a convent with other small boys? Weren’t you treated better when you were small and with the nuns?”

  This time there was no long pause. A look of rage and pain crossed his face. “Stop torturing me,” he cried out.

  Taken aback by the violence and ashamed now of his own idle probing, Ruttledge answered quickly, “I’d never want to do that. I’m sorry there’s so little food in the house.”

  “The spuds were topping, Joe. They have me packed,” he said rising stiffly from the chair, leaning on the rough handle of the blackthorn. “They left me in charge and could be home any minute now. I’d want to be above when they get back.”

  Now, several years later, Ruttledge watched him toil slowly down to the lake with the two buckets. Every day since he and Kate had come to the house, Bill Evans had drawn water from the lake with the buckets. In the house, Kate and Jamesie were talking about him still.

  “I told you, Kate, you are too soft,” Jamesie argued. “The decenter you treat the likes of him the more they’ll walk all over you.”

  “What else has he ever known?”

  “You’ll be the one to suffer but you could be right in the long run,” Jamesie yielded in his agreeable way. “What was done to him was wrong and they could never have luck. When Jackie was drawing to the creamery Bill had to ride on the trailer behind the tractor in rain and wet, get down at gates and throw those heavy cans up on to the trailer. When the cans were full he was barely able. They’d put a stronger man to the pin of his collar. As soon as the can touched the trailer, Jackie would lift his foot off the clutch and turn up the throttle. Bill had to run and scramble up on the trailer after the cans. There were times when he fell. Jackie would kick him if he had to stop the tractor and climb down. Christ hadn’t much worse of a time on the road to Calvary except Bill always came home alive with the cans of skim. It got so bad that Guard Murray had to warn Jackie.”

  “It’s hard to understand. Couldn’t he have waited a few seconds for him to climb back on the trailer?”

  “Ignorance. Pure ignorance. There’s no other way to describe it. One day I was watching them turning sods. There were two other men in the field with Jackie that I won’t name. I was watching through the hedge. Bill’s job was to trample the sods into place with the big wellingtons. Every time they’d pass close with the plough to where he was stepping the sods they’d knock him with a kick or a shove into the furrow and kill themselves laughing. It was their idea of sport.”

  “Couldn’t you do something?”

  “What could you do? If I went into the field they’d turn on me unless I went and knocked him into the furrow as well. That was the year he ran away. He never did a better act. Nobody knew how he got away. He must have walked and got lifts. He was gone two years. He’d be gone still but a crowd up for the All-Ireland stopped at a pub outside Mullingar for a drink on the way home. They didn’t even recognise Bill. He had got fat and was in boots and ordinary clothes. They couldn’t believe when he gave them this great welcome. He had his hand out of course for cigarettes. The place was a farm as well as a pub. He was a kind of a potboy and got to drink all the leftovers. They should have kept their big mouths shut. Jackie and two other men got into the Ford Prefect one Sunday and drove up to Mullingar and brought him back.”

  “Did they force him?”

  “Nobody knows. He could even have been delighted to see them. He could have given them the same welcome as he gave to the All-Ireland crowd. The next Sunday he was back at Mass with his hand out for cigarettes as if he had never been away.” Jamesie had risen to leave.

  On the way out through the porch, Jamesie’s whole attention became fixed on the four iron posts standing upright in their concrete base in the small garden between the house and the orchard.

  “Lord bless us, but Patrick Ryan is a living sight. He starts everything and finishes nothing.”

  “One of these years he’ll be back,” Ruttledge said.

  “We have all been scourged,” Jamesie said sympathetically.

  “When we came first it was hard waiting for him and never knowing whether he’d turn up or not. Watching that empty road around the lake all day until you knew for sure by evening that he wasn’t coming. Now it doesn’t matter.”

  “Still, you’d like it finished,” Jamesie said. “Those four posts standing there on their own are a living sight. All they need is a crossbeam and a rope and a crowd and a cart and a man to hang.”

  “Where is Patrick these days?”

  “The last I heard he was around Dromod putting up a garage for diggers and dozers. He could be gone from there by now. His poor cattle are about the hill.”

  “I’ve often wondered why he keeps cattle at all.”

  “For the name. The name of cattle and land. Without the cattle and the land he’d be just another wandering tradesman. I know Patrick all my life. His poor brother, who’s as gentle as a lamb, has been bad for several weeks in Carrick and Patrick hasn’t once called to see him. They say poor Mrs. Logan and the dog are lost for him ever since he went into hospital.”

  They walked together between the steep banks of the lane. The banks were in the full glory of the summer, covered with foxgloves and small wild strawberries and green vetches. The air was scented with wild woodbine. Before they saw Bill Evans they saw the slow puffs of cigarette smoke behind a screen of young alders. He was seated on an upturned bucket at the water’s edge, the other bucket by his side, drawing in the cigarette smoke as if it were the breath of life, releasing it to the still air in miserly ecstasy. Around him was the sharp scent of the burnished mint. Close by, two swans fished in the shallows, three dark cygnets by their side. Farther out, a whole stretch of water was alive and rippling with a moving shoal of perch. Elsewhere, except when it was ruffled by sudden summer gusts, the water was like glass. Across the lake, at Jamesie’s gate, a man had backed his tractor out into the lake and was fishing from the raised transport box, the engine running.

  “Cecil Pierce, as sound a Protestant as ever walked, can drink pints as good as any Catholic,” Jamesie identified the man fishing from the transport box. “At your ease, Bill,” he whispered as they passed Bill Evans.

  “Not doing too badly at all, Jamesie,” he answered.

  “Give our love to Mary,” Kate said when Jamesie lifted his bicycle out of the ditch.

  He paused and turned to bow low, “I never liked yous anyhow,” and cycled away.

  The heron rose out of the reeds and flapped ahead as if leading him round the shore, but then swung high out over the lake to make its own way to that part of the shore where two round piers stood close to the water’s edge. Hidden in a wilderness of trees and crawling briars behind the piers were the ruins of the house where Mary had grown up and from where she crossed the lake to marry Jamesie.
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  When the Ruttledges turned the corner away from the lake they came on Bill Evans standing between his two buckets of water. He was not smoking. He had been waiting for them. They each lifted a bucket. Usually his slow, arthritic walk uphill from the lake entailed a stop every ten or twelve paces. Now, freed from weight, he easily kept pace, using the blackthorn vigorously to propel himself in a crab-like, sideways climb. They continued past their gate until he hissed, “Ye are far enough.”

  “You’ll be ready for the dinner now?”

  “I’ll be ready,” he grinned wolfishly.

  “Will there be anything left?”

  “Begod there will. There’ll be lots,” he said, but the sudden look of anxiety in the eyes belied the assertiveness.

  Across the lake Jamesie was resting after climbing the steep hill away from the lake, he and his bicycle silhouetted against the sky. Cecil Pierce sat slumped in the raised transport box out over the water as if he had fallen asleep while holding the fishing rod, the engine of the tractor throbbing peacefully away.

  “Bill Evans was the one person we met the first time we came in round the shore,” Ruttledge said.

  “I remember the storm,” Kate said. “We were in the Shah’s car, following Jimmy Joe McKiernan’s battered little red Ford. The waves were washing across the lake wall, pouring down the windscreen, blinding the windows. The wildness could only be heard. The road was spattered with foam, the Shah shaking with laughter behind the wheel as the car rolled from rut to rut. ‘If it’s away from it all yous are trying to get, this royal avenue is as good as any moat.’ When he laughs like that you hardly hear a sound. He just sits and shakes like a huge ball of jelly. He believed it was all a wild goose chase.”

  “We had spent the whole day looking at places. Empty houses, falling-down houses, one house on the mountain, its floor covered with rat traps, new bungalows full of children. Dreams in tatters with the ‘For Sale’ sign at the gate.”

  “And the small children peering up at us from the floors. Where were they all to go?”