The Barracks (21 page)

There had only been one month of peace with Quirke after the day Reegan had been caught spraying, though he had kept it from Elizabeth till it erupted again into the open that November. Quirke had paid an early morning inspection, and afterwards Reegan came up to her in the kitchen in a state of blind fury.

“The bastard! The bastard! I'll settle that bastard one of these days,” he started to grind and she saw his hands clench and unclench and touch unconsciously the sharp, red stubble on his face.

“What happened?” she asked when he was quieter.

“He did an inspection this mornin' and after the others had gone he said, ‘There's something I want to tell you, Reegan,' and I like a gapin' fool opened me big mouth and said, ‘What?' So he stared me straight in the face and said, ‘Let me tell you one thing, Reegan: never come down to this dayroom again unshaven while you're a policeman!' and he left me standin' with me mouth open.”

She saw he desperately needed to tell some one: to ease the hurt by telling, cheapen and wear out his passion by telling, scatter it out of his mind where it was driving him to the brink of madness. Though she found the tremor of hatred unnerving, his face purple as he shouted, “Never come down to this dayroom unshaven again while you're a
policeman, Reegan! Never come down to this dayroom unshaven again while you're a policeman, Reegan!”

“You didn't do anything at all?” she asked.

“Nothin'. It took me off me feet, that tough is a new line from Quirke. Though I'd probably have done nothin' anyhow,” he was quieter, he began to brood bitterly now. “I'd not be thirty bastardin' years in uniform if I couldn't stand before barkin' mongrels and not say anything. It's either take them by the throat and get sacked or stop with your mouth shut, and they know they've got you in the palm of their hand. Though they couldn't sack me now, I'm just thirty years in this slave's uniform, they'd have to ask me to resign and give me a pension. You can't victimize an old Volunteer these days!” he began to laugh and then swiftly it turned to rage again. “That bastard! That ignoramus! Never come down to this dayroom again unshaven while you're a policeman, Reegan!” he shouted.

“If you want to get out of the police altogether I don't mind. Don't let me stand in your way. I was afraid of it before but I don't think it makes any difference any more,” Elizabeth said.

“You don't mind?” he came close to stare.

“No. You can send in your resignation, whenever you wish.”

“And what'll we do then?”

“Whatever you think best, it's not for me,” she shuddered from the responsibility. “It won't be my decision, it'll be up to you, though I'd give any help. You know that, it must be your decision.”

“I thought after the summer that we'd have enough to buy and stock a fair farm. That's what I was brought up to, Reegans as far as you can go worked a farm, not till 1921 did this bastardin' uniform show itself. With the pension we'd not be worked too much to the bone on a farm, and you'd be your own boss anyhow.”

“Whatever you think, that seems good,” she nodded, one thing was much the same as the next to her, this game of caring was only something she felt she owed him to play.

“But Jesus there's one thing, Elizabeth,” he swore. “There'll be no goin' quiet, that's certain. I'll do for that bastard before I go. Never come down to this dayroom unshaven again while you're a policeman, Reegan! There'll be no goin' quiet, that's the one thing that's sure and certain,” he said between clenched teeth and took his greatcoat and cap to go out on another patrol.

The heavy white frost seemed over everything at this time, the drum of boots on the ground hard as concrete in the early mornings, voices and every sound haunting and carrying far over fields of stiff grass in the evenings. The ice had to be broken on the barrels each morning. It was so beautiful when she let up the blinds first thing that, “Jesus Christ”, softly was all she was able to articulate as she looked out and up the river to the woods across the lake, black with the leaves fallen except the red rust of the beech trees, the withered reeds standing pale and sharp as bamboo rods at the edges of the water, the fields of the hill always white and the radio aerial that went across from the window to the high branches of the sycamore a pure white line through the air.

And then she'd want to go out and lift her hot face and throat to the morning. But it would be only to find her eyes water and every desire shrivel in the cold. She wasn't able to do that any more, that was the worst to have to realize; and it was driven home like nails one evening she was alone and the first heart attack struck while she was lifting flour out of the bin; she managed to drag herself to the big armchair and was just recovered enough to keep them from knowing when they came home.

Mullins's pig was slaughtered. She heard its screams without any emotion, she'd seen too many pigs stuck when she was a child. She could visualize what was taking place by the varying pitches of the screaming. It'd first start when they tangled it in ropes, rise to its highest when it was caught on the snout-hook for the head to be dragged back and the long knife driven in to the heart between the shoulder-blades, the screaming choke into silence as the knife was
pulled out for the blood to beat into the basin that caught it so that they'd be able to make black pudding. Then the carcass would be scalded with boiling water and the white hairs shaved away.

As the screaming died Casey came running up from the dayroom to call, “Did you hear the roars, Elizabeth? It's all over.”

He began to smoke and pace nervously about the kitchen.

“Do you know what?” he said heatedly. “He wanted me to give a hand. Some people have a hard neck and there's no mistake. The very thought of it is enough to make me sick! I told him it was a barbarous custom, but that I'd do b.o. and let Brennan go. And he'd the neck to laugh into me face and say that I'd ate a nice bit of pork steak quick enough. It's simple barbarity for savages, that's what it is, Elizabeth,” he complained.

A sudden vision of pampered dogs being walked between the plane trees in the parks of London came and went in her mind before she answered, all a London evening held there for a moment.

“It'll be the end of a lot of talk,” she said.

“A lot of rubbish,” Casey said, “skim milk and did you ever hear the bate of the notion, windfall apples to sweeten the bacon. God, Elizabeth, that pig got more publicity than a Christian.”

“You'll have to hear about this morning, won't you?”

“Yes. There'll be a runnin' commentary and nothin' left out,” he said with such distaste that she had to laugh in secret.

She felt she was getting weaker; and she grew more afraid that she'd pass out some day and that they'd find her before she had time to recover, and confine her to bed. As they were the days were futile enough, and the whole feeling of them seemed to gather into the late evening in December they came tipsy from the District Court, nothing obviously resolved in the pub or on the bikes home or in the dayroom, and they landed finally in the kitchen, anything that'd prolong the evening so that they'd not have to go home.

“It's a sure prophecy, and with these bombs they have now the end of the world can't be far away. Anything that's ever med grows into use,” Mullins was declaiming before they'd taken their chairs, and it was not popular.

“If it'll come it'll come and talkin' won't stop it,” Reegan said.

“There was a famous Jesuit once and he was asked if he was playin' cards at five minutes to midnight and the end of the world was announced for midnight what would he do?” Brennan took up, and there was an immediate air of interest, the human and priestly elements together were certain to give reassurance.

“And do your know what he answered? You'd never guess!” so pleased was Brennan with his moment in the limelight that he tried to prolong it.

“No. What did he answer?” Casey was prompting, when Mullins let drop heavily, “He said he'd keep playin'. One act is as good as the next before God, it's the spirit of the thing counts, that's all.”

“Where did you hear that?” Brennan asked in chagrin.

“People hear things, in company. They don't spend all their life with ignoramuses,” Mullins insulted, he appeared gloomy and surly and more drunken than the others.

“He was a cool man then,” Casey tried to obscure the brutality and to ridicule the conversation into shallower and easier waters. “I'd be inclined to jump on me knees and say an
Act of Contrition
or pray for more time. Give me five minutes more in your arms above. Isn't that what you'd be inclined to do, Elizabeth?” he appealed.

“The Jesuits believe in prayer, fasting and alms deeds; not in cushions for chairs and that; and they'd be ready to face their end when it'd come,” Mullins was determined to be surly.

“That's not fair, that's hittin' below the belt. I didn't bring personal things in, though I could,” he said, the eyes still bright and shallow and gentle.

“Out with it so, be a man, and say it out. There's nothin' worse than hintin',” Mullins attacked furiously.

“That's enough, it's nothin' to get hot about it,” Reegan said, and in the silence Brennan saw a chance again.

“They're very clever, the Jesuits,” he said. “A Jesuit was the only man ever to get 100 per cent in an exam in Oxford. He was asked to describe the miracle of the Marriage Feast of Cana and do you know how he answered it? All he wrote was,
Christ looked at the water and it blushed
, and he was the first man ever to get 100 per cent. Not a word wasted, exactly perfect.
Christ looked at the water and it
blushed
.”

“Aren't miracles strange?” Casey suddenly pondered. “Plane-loads off to Lourdes every summer and they say the amount of cures there are a terror. And every cure has to be certified, so there can be no hookery.”

“There's no cod and it's recognized by Rome,” Brennan said.

“Fatima's recognized too and isn't it strange that with all its cures they never recognized Knock.”

“A man was cured of paralysis one Sunday I was there,” Brennan said, he and Casey the only two left in the conversation. “We were walkin' round and round the church and sayin' the rosary when a sort of gasp went up: there was a cure. A sandy little man, no more than forty; he just got up out of his wheel-chair and walked as if there was never a tap on him.”

“Mr Maguire, the solicitor, says that the reason Knock's not recognized is because the Papal Nuncio fellows never got on with the clergy here, and it's for the same reason that we've got not first-class saints. It looks be now as if we'll be prayin' till Doomsday to shift Matt Talbot and Oliver Plunkett past the Blessed mark. If they were Italians or Frenchmen they'd be saints quick enough, Mr Maguire said,” Casey droned, the evening sagging into the lifeless ache of a hangover.

“It's a disgrace over about Knock: you never went to Knock yet on an excursion Sunday but they were savin' hay or some other work over in Mayo. A Papal Nuncio'd want to have an ocean of miracles in front of him when he'd land
after seein' all that sin on a Sunday before he'd recognize the place, “it was Brennan again this time.

“The nearer the church the farther from God,” Casey yawned in answer. Reegan followed Elizabeth's slow movements as she washed the delf at the table, his eyes desperate with this vision of futility when she turned to come for hot water to the fire. Is this all? Will they never go away? Will this go on for ever? in his eyes.

Mullins rose, Casey and then Brennan, trying to be before the footlights to the last. “I knew a fella once and he used always say when he was jarred,' I'll do anything within reason, but home I will not go.' He'd do anything within reason but home he would not go,” Brennan laughed.

“Such bullshit,” Reegan said when they had gone. “Nothin' short of a miracle would change that crew, and there's no mistake.”

She was quiet. Nothing short of a miracle would change any of their lives, their lives and his life and her life without purpose, and it seemed as if it might never come now, she changed his words in her own mind but she did not speak.

C
hristmas was coming and, in spite of everything, the feeling of excitement grew as always. Cards were bought and sent; and returned to deck the sideboard with tinsel and colour, sleighs and reindeer and the coaches with red-liveried footmen arriving before great houses deep in snow. The plum pudding was wrapped in gauze in the sweet can that stood out of reach on top of the press above the flour-bin; the turkey hung plucked and white, its stiff wings spread, on the back of the scullery door, and they'd all join in burning the down away with blazing newspapers Christmas Eve; ivy and berried holly were twined about the hanging cords of the pictures on the wall. When dark fell Christmas Eve they stripped the windows of their curtains, and a single candle was put to burn in each window till the morning. The rosary was said, and the children sent to bed.

Reegan was on edge all this Christmas Eve, the worst evening of the year for the policemen with drunkenness and brawling, the lockup had been cleaned out days before in readiness. Reegan was hardly aware of Elizabeth as he struggled into the cumbersome greatcoat and put on his peaked cap to go out on patrol. He didn't wear the baton in its leather sheath but slipped it naked into his greatcoat pocket, the vicious stick of lead-filled hickory shining yellow before it was hid, only the grooved surface of the handle and the leather thong hanging free.

She watched him get ready to go, her sense of his restlessness ctarting to gnaw: she could do nothing, and yet she felt she'd failed him somehow, something at some time that she could have done for him that she had failed to do, though she could never know what it might have been and
all she was left with was sense of her own failure and guilt and inadequacy. There was nothing she could do or say, only watch him go, listen to him tell her that he wouldn't be back till late. His lips touched her face. His boots faded down the hallway and the dayroom slammed to leave silence in the house. She set about doing the few jobs that were left, and managed to shut all thought of their life together out of her mind. At half-eleven the first bell for midnight Mass rang, ten clear strokes. This would be the first Christmas since she'd come to the village to find her away from that Mass, there was always such a crush of people, and she couldn't trust her strength there any more, far safer to wait for the deserted church in the morning. The cars began to go past. She heard a burst of drunken singing in the village, the last bell rang at midnight, then what seemed the drift of a choir came, and the sense of silence and Christmas began to awe and frighten her as she hurried to get through the few jobs that remained.

The thought of the stable and the birth, the announcement of glad tidings, shepherds, kings, reaching out and down to her in this kitchen drifted into her mind, and it was awesome as she worked to feel it run to this through the dead months and years. She was covering the mug, out of which Reegan drank barley water every night of his life, with a saucer, a narrow blue circle above its handle, the earthenware pale brown; she'd leave it there beside the raked fire in the hope that it'd stay warm till he'd come. To see the first Christmas and to follow it down to his moment, joined in her here and ending in her death, and yet the external reality would run on and on and on as the generations. Perhaps it should be the rhetoric of triumph that it ran so but who was she and what was it? Her thought could begin on anything for object and still it travelled always the same road of pain to the nowhere of herself, it was as far as anything seemed to go.

“Get rid of your mind, Elizabeth: distract it; get away. It is late. You've only to leave the presents into the children's rooms and then you can get to sleep at last,” beat at her till
she took the football boots and a pair of identical dolls and went. She left them quietly in the rooms, the doors creaked, but the deep breathing of their sleep did not break. An ironical smile rose to her features as she recollected the bitterness of her own disillusionment as a child, the marvellous world of Santa Claus collapsing in a night into this human artifice, and now she was playing the other part of the game. It seemed as a person grew older that the unknowable reality, God, was the one thing you could believe or disbelieve in with safety, it met you with imponderable silence and could never be reduced to the nothingness of certain knowledge. She tried to shut that away as she closed the doors. No blinds or curtains were on the windows tonight, the candle-flame burned and waved in the black shine of the glass like a small yellow leaf, and there was a blaze of light in the village about the church. Out there in the night Reegan was patrolling or at Mass, she knew.

He was with Mullins. At eleven they had started to clear the pubs, meeting hostility and resentment in every house, and in McDermott's at the church a familiar arm was put round Mullins's neck and he was told, “Never mind the auld duty, John. Have a drink on the house, forget it all, it'll taste just as sweet in the uniform.” The invitation was greeted by a storm of cheering, Mullins was furious and Reegan had to order him to be still. When the cheering died Reegan said, “I'm givin' every man three minutes to get off these premises. I'll summons every man on these premises in three minutes' time.”

He spoke with quiet firmness: a sullen muttering rose but they gulped their drinks and left.

“No respect for anything, just like the bloody animals in the fields,” Mullins was muttering as the pub cleared, and he gave full vent to his rage on a man they found pissing in public against the churchyard wall as they came out.

“Get out of it,” Mullins roared in a fury of assertion.

“Sugar off home outa that with yourself and mind your own business,” the man swayed erect to mutter, certain it was some one trying to joke him out of his position or else
a puritan madman he was determined to put in his place. In a flash Mullins was beside him with drawn baton. “Get out of it. Have you no shame, young girls passin' here to Mass, or are you an animal?”

“You wouldn't mind handlin' those fillies closer than ever my pissin'll get to them, you narrow-minded auld bastard,” the drunk shouted as he buttoned his fly and a cheer went up from the outhouses.

“What did you say to
me
? What did you say? Do you see
this
?” Mullins thrust the baton before the man's face, gripping him by the shoulder, mad with rage. “Do you know what this is? Would you like a taste of this?”

“No,” the man jabbered, the hard wood of the baton against his face, and he saw the silver buttons, the peaked cap: he was dealing with the police. Painfully the drunken brain was made to function in the space of seconds: he'd be up in court; his name would be in the newspapers; he'd be the laughing-stock of the country.

“I'm sorry,” he tried to slide. “I'm sorry. I didn't know. I'm sorry.”

“You're sorry now! It's never too late to be sorry, is it? You weren't that a minute ago and young girls pass this way to Mass, you know! And what kind of language was that you were usin' to officers of the law? Do you see this? Do you see this, do you? Would you like to get the tannin' you deserve with this and find yourself in court later?” Mullins ground threateningly with the baton, but growing placated, he was master now.

The man watched the baton close to his face, the shock had left him cold sober beneath the depression of alcohol, he was past caring what happened now, he shivered, he hoped it was all a passing nightmare. The cheering had died in the outhouses. Reegan moved close for the first time.

“What's your name?” Reegan demanded.

The name was hopelessly given.

“What do you do?”

“A sawyer.”

Reegan knew the man's name, what his work was, but
the demanding of the information was an old bullying trick policemen learn and it had become a habit by this.

“Shouldn't you know better than to be at something like that,” he began in the official moral tone, but grew disgusted, and with an impatient movement told him to be gone. Mullins had subsided into approving growls, but as the man made good his escape woke to shout, “Get home outa that you disgraceful blaguard and never let me catch you at that in public again.” Reegan watched Mullins coldly: the cheeks seemed flushed in the weak light of the candles in the windows.

“Such a disgrace and young girls passin'. Such language. No better than the animals in the fields,” Mullins tried to justify himself to Reegan, who only smiled sardonically at the moral indignation, remembering Mullins's gloating stories of the gunshot nights and through blood and sand and shit MacGregory will ride tonight.

A mad surge of strength rose in Reegan, desire to break the whole mess up into its first chaos: there was no order, only the police force. He sent Mullins to the church gate to help Casey direct the traffic, he said he'd do the last round of the village on his own. He felt the naked baton in his own pocket and began to curse as he walked away.

It was later than two in the Christmas morning when they were finished: the last of the cars directed away from the church, the roads patrolled for drunks, the reports filled into the books in the dayroom. No one slept on the iron bed against the wall of the lockup during Christmas. Reegan put a chair against the door so that he'd be able to hear the phone or anyone knocking from his own bedroom. He drank the barley water that Elizabeth had left covered beside the raked fire, believing that it cleansed his blood, something he'd brought with him from his childhood. Then he climbed the stairs in his stockinged feet, carrying the green glass oil-lamp, and placed a boot quietly against the bedroom door to make sure it stayed open. Elizabeth was awake. “Is it late?” she asked.

“Ten to three,” he took out his watch, and she heard him
winding. “There's rain and showers of hailstones. It'd skin a monkey outside tonight.”

He threw off his clothes and she shivered as his feet touched her getting into bed.

“You didn't sleep?”

“No,” and she was quick to change. “Did anything happen?”

“No, except Mullins, the ass, found some one pissin' against the churchyard wall outside McDermott's and a Reverend Mother wouldn't have made more noise about it.”

“And was he drunk?”

“Not Mullins; the man was. They considered it a bit of a joke in the pub that Mullins should want to put them out and that drove him wild.”

“He had to take it out on something,” she supposed quietly.

“He near landed me and the unfortunate he caught in a nice mess, they'd like nothin' better than to laugh themselves sick at a case like that in the town. Man convicted of indecent exposure Christmas Eve.

“There's no law and order, only the police force,” he repeated. “And if you were as long with the lunatics that make it up as I am you'd wonder how it lasts together for even an hour.”

“It seems to manage to go on, no matter what happens,” she said but he was too hot and restless to hear.

“Only Quirke didn't show his rat's face round the place this time and that's some relief,” his words flinted on his own shifting thoughts.

“What does it matter about him, even if he did! Better keep them out of your mind, care about the things you want, and ignore Quirke and those things,” she spoke out of herself for once.

“But they won't ignore you, that's the trouble,” Reegan argued hotly. “And if you have to mix with them, day-in day-out, and put up with them, whether you like it or not, what can you do?”

“Agree with them. Tell them always that they're right, that they're wonderful people. No one will want to disagree with you about that. If you feel that some one expects you to behave well because of their good opinion of you it's always harder to do otherwise: every one gets seduced by the feeling of responsibility.”

He didn't understand and didn't want, though most of the words seemed simple enough, but he felt blindly and passionately against.

“No. That's not right,” he said. “They're scum and nothin' can change that. They put on a nice face till you turn your back and then it's the knife. They should be all put down and tramped on and the arse-lickers,” he had driven his way into inarticulacy, and then she caught his hand.

“It doesn't matter,” she said.

He felt the warm flesh of her hand and the frustrated direction of his feelings changed to desire for her, he felt the still smooth flesh of the shoulders with his hands, her thighs: her hair brushed the grain of his throat, he'd lie on her and forget. Mouth pressed on mouth, old words of endearment
were panted out of their quick breathing, the loins rose and fell in rhythm, and then died in the fulfilment of the seed beating. The act did not fully end there, the kindness of undesiring hands passing over the flesh remained, stroking, waiting; they'd try to fall apart without noticing much wrench, and lie in the animal warmth and loving kindness of each other against the silence of the room with its door open to the phone or anyone knocking, the wild noises of the midwinter night outside. And they were together here. It didn't have to mean anything more than that, it'd be sufficient for this night. She took his face between her hands, and kissed it softly, in gratitude. She was mindless now of all things, suffused through and through and lost in contentment, and in its gentleness and tiredness they fell into deep sleep together.

Before eight she had to wake to go with the children to first Mass and struggle into the morning. He lay on: he'd
stood at the back of the church in his uniform through midnight Mass, officially on duty there, and getting much satisfaction of the fact that he was fulfilling two obligations at the one time. He rose for breakfast when he heard them return, and asked, “Was there anything strange at the Mass?” He listened to her voice, “No. There was only a handful in the church, nearly every one must have gone to midnight Mass. The priest didn't keep us long because of the cold.”