The Collected Stories by John McGahern Page B

at a threshing or in a wheatfield he’d be found at nightfall gathering carelessly abandoned tools or closing gaps after the others had gone drinking or to dress for the dances. Neither could they understand his sudden heavy drinking in Billy Burns’s. Before that if he had to enter a pub he’d accept nothing but lemonade. Burns was blamed for giving him credit when his money ran out, and after he seized and held in the house the gypsy girl who sold him paper flowers with wire stems, it was the same Burns who gave him the money to buy the gypsies off in return for Willowfield. The gypsies had warned him that if he didn’t pay what they wanted they’d come and cut him with rusted iron. What money he was able to earn afterwards was from his trade, and that steadily dwindled as machinery replaced the horse. All of his roof had fallen in except above the kitchen, where oats and green weeds grew out of the thatch. Whatever work he got he did outside on the long hacked bench, except when it was too cold or wet.
    The first time I stopped to watch him it was because of the attraction of what’s forbidden. He was shaping a section of a cart wheel, but he put down mallet and chisel to say, that strange smile I’ll always remember coming over his face, ‘Those sisters of yours are growing into fine sprigs. Have you looked to see if any of them have started a little thatch?’
    ‘No.’ His smile frightened me.
    ‘It should be soft, light, a shading.’ His voice lingered on the words. I felt his eyes did not see past the smiling.
    ‘I haven’t seen,’ I said and started to watch the roads for anybody coming.
    ‘You should keep your eyes skinned, then. All you have to do is to keep your eyes skinned, man.’ The voice was harder.
    ‘I don’t sleep in their rooms.’
    ‘No need to sleep in the same room, man. Just keep your eyes skinned. Wait till you hear them go to the pot and walk in by mistake. It’ll be cocked enough to see if it has started to thatch.’ The voice had grown rhythmical and hard.
    It was more a desire to see into the strangeness behind his smile than this constant pestering that made me give him the information he sought.
    ‘The two eldest have hair but the others haven’t.’
    ‘The others have just a bald ridge with the slit,’ he pursued fiercely.
    ‘Yes.’ I wanted to escape but he seized me by the lapels.
    ‘The hair is fairer than on their heads?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Fair and soft? A shade?’
    ‘Yes, but let me go.’
    ‘Soft and fair. The young ivy covering the slit.’ He let me go as the voice grew caressing and the smile flooded over the face. ‘So fair you can see the skin through it yet. A shading,’ he gloated, and then, ‘Will you come with me a minute inside?’
    ‘I have to go.’
    He turned as if I was no longer there and limped, the boot tongueless and unlaced, to the door, and as I hurried away I heard the bolt scrape shut.
    I avoided Lavin all that winter. I’d heard his foot was worse and that he was unlikely to see another winter outside the poorhouse. It should have assuaged my fear but it did not, and besides I’d fallen in love with Charley Casey.
    Charley Casey was dull in school, but he was good at games, and popular, with a confident laugh and white teeth and blue-dark hair. He had two dark-haired sisters of seventeen and nineteen, who were both beautiful, and a young widowed mother, and there hungabout him that glamour of a house of ripe women. I helped him at his exercises, and in return he partnered me in handball. We started to skate in the evenings together on the shallow pond and to go to the river when the days grew warmer. I was often sick with anxiety when he was absent, able to concentrate on nothing but the bell that would set me free to race to his house.
    I tried to get him to read
David Copperfield
so that we could share a world, but always he had excuses. When the school closed and I had to go to the sea, he promised that he’d have it read by