The Collected Stories

by John McGahern

  This morning as he walked with Agnes he decided to clear the drinking pool which was dry after the long spell of good weather. First he shovelled the dark earth of rotted leaves and cowshit out on the bank. Then he paved the sides with heavy stones so that the cattle would not plough in as they drank and he cleared the weeds from the small stream that fed it. When he followed the stream to the boundary hedge he found water blocked there. He released it and then leaned on his shovel in the simple pleasure of watching water flow. For all that time he was unaware of the shopping bag, but when all the water flowed down towards the pool he felt it again by his side. He wondered what was keeping Agnes. He’d never finished such a long job before outside Tesco’s. Usually he’d counted himself lucky if he was through with such a job by the time he’d finished his bottle of Bass in the Royal by ten to one.

  The drain was now empty and clean. All the water had flowed down to the pool. He’d go to the field garden. The withered bean and pea stalks needed pulling up and the earth turned. A wren or robin sang in the thorns, faithful still in the bare days. He opened the wooden gate into the garden, enclosed on three sides by its natural thorn hedges, and two strands of barbed wire ran on posts to keep the cattle out on the fourth. Each year he pushed the barbed wire farther out, and soon, one of these years, the whole field would be a garden, completely enclosed by its own whitethorns. He pulled up the withered bean and pea stalks with the thorn branches that had served as stakes and threw them in a heap for burning. Then he began to turn the soil. The black and white bean flower had been his favourite, its fragrance carried on the wind through the thorns into the meadow, drawing the bees from the clover. Agnes could keep all her roses in the front garden … and then he felt himself leaning over the fork with tiredness though he hadn’t half the ridge turned. He was too weak to work. It must be late and why had she not called him to his meal? He stuck the fork in the ground and in exasperation went over to the barbed wire. The strands were loose. A small alder shoot sprouted from one of the posts. He walked up the potato furrows, the dried stalks dead and grey in the ridges. This year he must move the pit to higher ground. Last winter the rats had come up from the lake – but why had she not called him? Had she no care? Was she so utterly selfish?

  He turned and stared in the window, but the avenues of shelves were too long and the lights blinding. It was in this impotent rage that he heard the horn blow. Denis was there and Agnes was in the car. He went towards them with the empty shopping bag. They both got out of the car.

  ‘Why did you leave me there?’ he asked angrily.

  ‘Oh don’t be mad at me, Michael. I must have forgot when I came out.’

  ‘What time is it now?’

  ‘Five after three, Michael.’ Denis was smiling. ‘You’ve missed your bottle of Bass, but hop in and I’ll run you home.’

  It wouldn’t have happened if we’d kept the farm. At least on the farm we’d be away from people, he thought obstinately as he put the food aside that he should have eaten hours before. He flushed like a child with shame as he heard again, ‘Five after three, Michael. You’ve missed your bottle of Bass, but hop in and I’ll run you home,’ and thought that’s how it goes, you go on as usual every day, and then something happens, and you make a mistake, and you’re caught. It was Agnes who at last broke this impossible silence.

  ‘I can see that you’re tired out. Why don’t you lie down for a turn?’ she said, and began to clear the plates.

  ‘Maybe I will lie down, then,’ he yielded.

  He slept lightly and restlessly. Only a fraction of what was happening surfaced in his dream. A herd of panting cattle was driven past him on a dirt road by a man wheeling a bicycle, their mouths slavering in the heat. Agnes passed by holding breadcrumbs in her apron. A white car came round the lake. As it turned at the gate a child got out and came towards him with a telegram. He was fumbling in his pocket for coins to give to the child when he was woken by Agnes.

  ‘We’ll be late getting to the Royal if you don’t get up now,’ she was saying.

  ‘What time is it?’

  When she told him the time, he knew they should be leaving in twenty minutes.

  ‘I don’t know if I want to go out tonight.’

  ‘Of course you’ll go out tonight. There’s nothing wrong with you, is there?’

  When she said that he knew he had to go. He rose and washed, changed into his suit, combed his coarse white hair, and at exactly twenty to nine, as on every evening of their lives, they were closing the 37B door in Ainsworth Road behind them.

  All the saloon regulars looked unusually happy and bright as they greeted the old couple in the Royal, and when Michael proffered the coins for the Guinness and pint of Bass, Denis pushed them away. ‘They’re on the house tonight, Michael. You have to make up for that missed bottle of Bass tonight.’

  Blindly he carried the drinks towards Agnes at the table. When he turned and sat and faced the room with his raised glass the whole saloon rang with, ‘Cheers, Agnes. Cheers, Michael.’

  ‘You see it was all in your mind, Michael. Everybody’s the same as usual. Even happier,’ Agnes said afterwards in the quiet of the click of billiard balls coming from the Public Bar.

  ‘Maybe. Maybe, Agnes.’ Michael drank.

  All the people were elated too on the small farms around the lakes for weeks after Fraser Woods had tried to hang himself from a branch of an apple tree in his garden, the unconcealed excitement in their voices as they said, ‘Isn’t it terrible what happened to poor Fraser?’ and the lust on their faces as they waited for their excitement to be mirrored.

  ‘We’ll go early to Tesco’s in the morning. And then you can come down for your bottle of Bass. And it’ll be the same as if nothing ever happened. What was it anyhow?’ Agnes said, warmed by the Guinness.

  ‘I suppose it was just a slip-up,’ Michael answered as he sipped slowly at his pint, trying to put off the time when he’d have to go up to the counter for their next round.

  All Sorts of Impossible Things

  They were out coursing on Sunday a last time together but they did not know it, the two friends, James Sharkey and Tom Lennon, a teacher and an agricultural instructor. The weak winter sun had thawed the fields soft enough to course the hare on, and though it still hung blood-orange above the hawthorns on the hill the rims of the hoof tracks were already hardening fast against their tread.

  The hounds walked beside them on slip leashes, a purebred fawn bitch that had raced under the name of Coolcarra Queen, reaching the Final of the Rockingham Stakes the season before, and a wire-haired mongrel, no more than half hound, that the schoolmaster, James Sharkey, borrowed from Charlie’s bar for these Sundays. They’d been beating up the bottoms for some hours. An odd snipe, exploding out of the rushes before zigzagging away, was all that had risen.

  ‘If we don’t rise something before long we’ll soon have to throw our hats at it,’ Tom Lennon said, and it was a careless phrase. No one had seen the teacher without his eternal brown hat for the past twenty years. ‘I’ve been noticing the ground harden all right,’ the dry answer came.

  ‘Anyhow, I’m beginning to feel a bit humped.’ Tom Lennon looked small and frail in the tightly belted white raincoat.

  ‘There’s no use rimming it, then. There’ll be other Sundays.’

  Suddenly a large hare rose ahead, bounded to the edge of the rushes, and then looped high to watch and listen. With a ‘Hulla, hulla,’ they slipped the hounds, the hare racing for the side of the hill. The fawn bitch led, moving in one beautiful killing line as she closed with the hare, the head eel-like as it struck; but the hare twisted away from the teeth, and her speed carried the fawn past. The hare had to turn again a second time as the mongrel coming up from behind tried to pick it in the turn. The two men below in the rushes watched in silence as the old dance played itself out on the bare side of the hill: race, turn, race again; the hounds hunting well together, the mongrel making up with cunning what he lacked in grace, pacing h
imself to strike when the hare was most vulnerable – turning back from the fawn. But with every fresh turn the hare gained, the hounds slithering past on the hard ground. They were utterly beaten by the time the hare left them, going away through the hedge of whitethorns.

  ‘They picked a warrior there.’

  ‘That’s for sure,’ Tom Lennon answered as quietly.

  The beaten hounds came disconsolately down, pausing at the foot of the hill to lap water from a wheelmark and to lick their paws. They came on towards the men. The paws were bleeding and some of the bitch’s nails were broken.

  ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have raced her on such hard ground,’ the teacher said by way of apology.

  ‘That’s no difference. She’ll never run in the Stakes again. They say there’s only two kinds to have – a proper dud or a champion. Her kind, the in-between, are the very worst. They’ll always run well enough to tempt you into having another go. Anyhow, there’s not the money for that any more,’ he said with a sad smile of reflection.

  Coolcarra Queen was a relic of his bachelor days that he hadn’t been able to bear parting with on getting married and first coming to the place as temporary agricultural instructor.

  They’d raced her in the Stakes. She’d almost won. They’d trained her together, turn and turn about. And that cold wet evening, the light failing as they ran off the Finals, they’d stood together in the mud beside the net of torn hares and watched this hare escape into the laurels that camouflaged the pen and the judge gallop towards the rope on the old fat horse, and stop, and lift the white kerchief instead of the red. Coolcarra Queen had lost the Rockingham Silver Cup and twenty-five pounds after winning the four races that had taken her to the Final.

  ‘Still, she gave us a run for our money,’ the teacher said as they put the limping hounds on the leashes and turned home.

  ‘Well, it’s over now,’ Tom Lennon said. ‘Especially with the price of steak.’

  ‘Your exams can’t be far off now?’ the teacher said as they walked. The exams he alluded to were to determine whether the instructor should be made permanent or let go.

  ‘In less than five weeks. The week after Easter.’

  ‘Are you anxious about it at all?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said sadly. ‘If they make me permanent I get paid whether I’m sick or well. They can’t get rid of me then. Temporary is only all right while you’re single.’

  ‘Do you foresee any snags?’

  ‘Not in the exams. I know as much as they’ll know. It’s the medical I’m afraid of.’

  ‘Still,’ the teacher began lamely and couldn’t go on. He knew that the instructor had been born with his heart on the wrong side and it was weak.

  ‘Not that they’ll pay much heed to instruction round here. Last week I came on a pair of gentlemen during my rounds. They’d roped a horse-mower to a brand new Ferguson. One was driving the Ferguson, the other sitting up behind on the horse machine, lifting and letting down the blade with a piece of wire. They were cutting thistles.’

  ‘That’s the form all right.’ The teacher smiled.

  They’d left the fields and come to the stone bridge into the village. Only one goalpost stood upright in the football field. Below them the sluggish Shannon flowed between its wheaten reeds.

  ‘Still, we must have walked a good twelve miles today from one field to the next. If we’d to walk that distance along a straight line of road it’d seem a terrible journey.’

  ‘A bit like life itself.’ The teacher laughed sarcastically, adjusting the brown hat firmly on his head. ‘We might never manage it if we had to take it all in the one gasp. We mightn’t even manage to finish it.’

  ‘Well, it’d be finished for us, then,’ the instructor countered weakly.

  ‘Do you feel like coming to Charlie’s for a glass?’ he asked as they stood.

  ‘I told her I’d be back for the dinner. If I’m in time for the dinner she might have something even better for me afterwards,’ Tom Lennon joked defensively.

  ‘She might indeed. Well, I have to take this towser back to Charlie anyhow. Thanks for the day.’

  ‘Thanks yourself,’ Tom Lennon said.

  Above the arms of the stone wall the teacher watched the frail little instructor turn up the avenue towards the Bawn, a straggling rectangular building partly visible through the bare trees where he had rooms in the tower, all that was left of the old Hall.

  Charlie was on his stool behind the bar with the Sunday paper when the teacher came with the mongrel through the partition. Otherwise the bar and shop were empty.

  ‘Did yous catch anything?’ he yawned as he put aside the paper, drawing the back of his hands over his eyes like a child. There was a dark stain of hair oil behind him on the whitewash where sometimes he leaned his head and slept when the bar was empty.

  ‘We roused only one and he slipped them.’

  ‘I’m thinking there’s only the warriors left by this time of year.’ He laughed, and when he laughed the tip of his red nose curled up in a way that caused the teacher to smile with affection.

  ‘I suppose I’ll let the old towser out the back?’

  Charlie nodded. ‘I’ll get one of the children to throw him some food later.’ When the door was closed again he said in a hushed, solicitous voice, ‘I suppose, Master, it’ll be whiskey?’

  ‘A large one, Charlie,’ the teacher said.

  In a delicious glow of tiredness from the walking, and the sensuous burning of the whiskey as it went down, he was almost mindless in the shuttle back and forth of talk until he saw Charlie go utterly still. He was following each move his wife made at the other end of the house. The face was beautiful in its concentration, reflecting each move or noise she made as clearly as water will the drifting clouds. When he was satisfied that there was no sudden danger of her coming up to the bar he turned to the shelves. Though the teacher could not see past the broad back, he had witnessed the little subterfuge so often that he could follow it in exact detail: the silent unscrewing of the bottle cap, the quick tip of the whiskey into the glass, the silent putting back of the cap, and the downing of the whiskey in one gulp, the movements so practised that it took but seconds. Coughing violently, he turned and ran the water and drank the glass of water into the coughing. While he waited for the coughing to die, he rearranged bottles on the shelves. The teacher was so intimate with the subterfuge that he might as well have taken part in the act of love. ‘If I’m home in time for the dinner she might have something even better for me afterwards,’ he remembered with resentment.

  ‘Tom didn’t come with you?’ Charlie asked as soon as he brought the fit of coughing under control.

  ‘No. He was done in with the walking and the wife was expecting him.’

  ‘They say he’s coming up for permanent soon. Do you think he will have any trouble?’

  ‘The most thing he’s afraid of is the medical.’

  Charlie was silent for a while, and then he said, ‘It’s a quare caper that, isn’t it, the heart on the wrong side?’

  ‘There’s many a quare caper, Charlie,’ the teacher replied. ‘Life itself is a quare caper if you ask me.’

  ‘But what’ll he do if he doesn’t get permanent?’

  ‘What’ll we all do, Charlie?’ the teacher said inwardly and, as always when driven in to reflect on his own life, instinctively fixed the brown hat more firmly on his head.

  Once he did not bother to wear a hat or a cap over his thick curly fair hair even when it was raining. And he was in love then with Cathleen O’Neill. They’d thought time would wait for them for ever as they went to the sea in his baby Austin or to dances after spending Sundays on the river. And then, suddenly, his hair began to fall out. Anxiety exasperated desire to a passion, the passion to secure his life as he felt it slip away, to moor it to the woman he loved. Now it was her turn to linger. She would not marry him and she would not let him go.

  ‘Will you marry me or not? I want an answer one way or the othe
r this evening.’ He felt his whole life like a stone on the edge of a boat out on water.

  ‘What if I don’t want to answer?’ They were both proud and iron-willed.

  ‘Then I’ll take it as No.’

  ‘You’ll have to take it whatever way you want, then.’ Her face was flushed with resentment.

  ‘Goodbye, then.’ He steeled himself to turn away.

  Twice he almost paused, but no voice calling him back came. At the open iron gate above the stream he did pause. ‘If I cross it here it is the end. Anything is better than the anguish of uncertainty. If I cross here I cannot turn back even if she should want.’ He counted till ten and looked back, but her back was turned, walking slowly uphill to the house. As she passed through the gate he felt a tearing that broke as an inaudible cry.

  No one ever saw him afterwards without his brown hat, and there was great scandal the first Sunday he wore it in the body of the church. The man kneeling next to him nudged him, gestured with his thumb at the hat, but the teacher did not even move. Whispers and titters and one hysterical whinny of laughter that set off a general sneeze ran through the congregation as he unflinchingly wore it through the service.

  The priest was up to the school just before hometime the very next day. They let the children home early.

  ‘Have you seen Miss O’Neill recently, Jim?’ the priest opened cautiously, for he liked the young teacher, the most intelligent and competent he had.

  ‘No, Father. That business is finished.’

  ‘There’d be no point in me putting in a word?’

  ‘There’d be no point, Father.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. It’s no surprise. Everything gets round these parts in a shape.’

  ‘In a shape, certainly, Father.’ There was dry mockery in the voice.

  ‘When it gets wild it is different, when you hear talk of nothing else – and that’s what has brought me up. What’s going the rounds now is that you wore your hat all through Mass yesterday.’