Faber Lunchtime Shorts | John McGahern's Faith, Hope and Charity

L u n c h t i meS h o r t s J o h nMc Ga h e r n ’ s F a i t h , Ho p e a n dCh a r i t y

Faith, Hope and Charity

Cunningham and Murphy had worked as a team ever since they’d met on a flyover site outside Reading. They dug trenches and were paid by the yard. The trenches were in places where machines could not easily go, and the work was dangerous, the earth walls having to be shuttered up as they went along, the shutters held apart by metal bars with adjustable flat squares on both ends. Both men worked under assumed names to avoid paying income tax.

This money that they slaved for all the year in the trenches they flashed and wasted in one royal month each summer in Ireland.

As men obsessed with the idea that all knowledge lies within a woman’s body, but having entered it find themselves as ignorant as before, they are driven towards all women again and again, in childish hope that somehow the next time they will find the root of all knowledge, and the equally childish desire for revenge since it cannot be found, the knife in the unfathomable entrails. They became full of hatred. Each year, as Murphy and Cunningham dug trenches towards their next royal summer, their talk grew obsessional and more bitter.‘It’s a kind of a sort of a country that can’t even afford a national eejit so they all have to take turns.’

What slowed them up the most was not the digging but the putting up of the shuttering behind them. As August drew close they grew careless and their greed for money grew in order to make an even bigger splash this summer than ever before. Little by little the spaces between the metal bars lengthened. They felt invulnerable: no matter how careless they were the bad accident was bound to happen elsewhere.

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Faith, Hope and Charity Murphy was standing on top of the trench watching Cunningham wield the pick below, behind him the fence of split stakes on Hessell Street. The midday sun beat mercilessly down on the trench, and they worked it turn and turn about, coming up every five minutes or so to cool in whatever air stirred from the Thames.

The only warning given was a sudden splintering of timber before the trench caved in. Murphy fell backwards from the edge but Cunningham had no time. The boards and clay caught him. His head and shoulders remained above the earth.

He stayed alive while they dug him out, but as soon as they released the boards he died. The boards had broken his back.

All that got through Murphy’s shock as he rode with the body in the ambulance to the London Hospital was, ‘The police’ll be in on this. The assumed names will come out. I might have to have an earlier holiday than I expected.’

The men stood about the site in small silent groups after the ambulance had gone, the different engines idling over, until Barney, the old gangerman, stormed about in his black suit and tie and dirty white shirt, as if he’d suddenly gone epileptic.

‘What the fuck are yous all doing? Come on. Get a move on. Do yous think you get fukken paid for standin’ about all day?’

As the site reluctantly moved back to life, a sudden gust of wind lifted an empty cement bag and cartwheeled it across the gravel before wrapping it against the fence of split stakes on Hessell Street.

It was a hot day in Ireland too when the phone rang in the village post office to relay the telegram of the death. The hired girl Mary wrote it down on the official form, closed it in the small green envelope with the black harp and then wondered how to get it delivered. Because of the hot weather everybody was in the hayfields two miles away, and she couldn’t leave the place unattended to go that far. She decided to cross the road to see if James Sharkey was still in the school. The schoolhouse 105

Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories door was unlocked, and she found the hatted man alone in the classroom. He had stayed behind correcting exam papers.

‘What is it, Mary?’ He lifted his head from the desk as she tapped on the glass of the classroom door.

‘It’s Joe Cunningham from Derrada.’ She held up the small green envelope. ‘He’s been killed in an accident in England.

They’re all at the hay.’

‘Joe Cunningham.’ The child’s face came to him. A dull average boy, the oldest of the Cunninghams, two of them still at school. He’d been home last summer, boasting and flashing his money in the bars. ‘What’ll you have, Master? I’m standin’ today. We mightn’t have been all geniuses but we got on toppin’,’ what looked like bits of tinfoil glittering in his jacket.

‘I’ll take it, Mary. It’s just as well I take it. They know me a long time now. I suppose they took the car to the fields?’

‘No, they went in the van.’

‘I’ll take the car, then.’

All the doors of the house were open when he got to Cunningham’s but there was nobody in. He knew that they must be nearhand, probably at the hay. There is such stillness, stillness of death, he thought, about an empty house with all its doors open on a hot day. A black and white sheepdog left off snapping at flies to rush towards him as he came through the gate into the meadow. It was on the side of the hill above the lake. In the shade, a tin cup floated among some hayseed in a gallon of spring water. Across the lake, just out from a green jet of reeds, a man sat still in a rowboat fishing for perch. They were all in the hayfields, the mother and father and four or five children. The field had been raked clean and they were heading off cocks. All work stopped as the hatted man came over the meadow. The father rose from teasing out hay to a boy winding it into a rope. They showed obvious discomfort as they waited, probably thinking the teacher had come to complain about some of the children, until they saw the pale green envelope.

‘I’m sorry,’ the hatted man said as he watched the father read.

‘If there’s anything I can do you have only to tell me.’

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Faith, Hope and Charity ‘Joe’s been killed in England. The Lord have mercy on his soul,’ the father said in dazed quiet, handing the envelope to the mother, all his slow movements heavy with toil.

‘Oh my God. My Joe,’ the mother broke.

The older children began to cry, but two little girls lifted fistfuls of hay and began to look playfully at one another and the whole stunned hayfield through wisps of hay and to laugh wildly.

‘I’ll have to go to London. I’ll have to take him home,’ the father said.

‘If there’s anything I can do,’ the teacher said again.

‘Thanks, Master. Shush now,’ he said to his wife. ‘We’ll all go in now. The hay can be tidied up after. Shush now, Bridget. We have to do the best by him the few days more he’ll be with us,’ the father said as they trooped out of the hayfield.

‘Is there anything – a small drop of something – we can offer you, Master?’ They paused at the open door.

‘Nothing, thanks, Joe. What I’ll do is let you get tidied up and I’ll come round for you in about two hours. I’ll take you into the town so that you can see to things.’

‘Are you sure that won’t be putting you to too much trouble, Master?’

‘No trouble at all. Why don’t you go in now?’

Before he switched on the engine he heard from the open door, ‘Thou, Oh Lord, wilt open my lips,’ in the father’s voice.

The leaves of the row of poplars along the path from the house were beginning to rattle so loudly in the evening silence that he was glad when the starting engine shut out the sound.

The father went to London and flew back with the coffin two days later. A long line of cars met the hearse on the Dublin road to follow it to the church. After High Mass the next day young people with white armbands walked behind the hearse until it crossed the bridge, where it gathered speed, and it did not slow until it came in sight of Ardcarne, where they buried him.

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Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories Some weeks later the Dance Committee met round the big mahogany table in the front room of the presbytery: the priest, the hatted teacher, the Councillor Doherty, Owen Walsh the sharp-faced postman, and Jimmy McGuire who owned the post office.

‘We seem to be nearly all here.’ The priest looked round when it had gone well past the time of the meeting.

‘We are,’ the postman answered quickly. ‘Paddy McDermott said he was sorry he couldn’t come. It’s something to do with sheep.’

‘We might as well begin, then,’ the priest said. ‘As we all know why we’re here I’ll just go over it briefly. Young Cunningham was killed in England. The family insisted on taking the body home. Whether it was wise or foolish it is done now and the only thing we know is that the Cunninghams can’t afford to fly a coffin home from England. The talk is that old Joe himself will have to go to England this winter to pay off the expense of the funeral. We all feel, I think, that there’s no need for that.’

There was a low murmur of approval.

‘So we’ve more or less decided to hold a dance,’ the teacher took up quietly. ‘Unless someone here has a better idea?’

‘Have we thought about a collection?’ the Councillor Doherty asked because he felt he should ask something.

‘The dance more or less covers that as well,’ the priest said, and the Councillor nodded comprehendingly. ‘Anybody not going will be invited to send subscriptions.’

‘I can manage that end of it,’ the postman said. ‘I can put the word out on my rounds so that it can be done without any fuss.’

‘There’s no question of getting a big band or anything like that.“Faith, Hope and Charity” will bring in as much and they’ll play for a few crates of stout. We’ll let people pay whatever they can afford,’ the priest said.

‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ were three old bachelor brothers, the Cryans, who played at local functions. They had been known as ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ for so long that nobody now knew how their name began. Faith played the fiddle. Hope 108

Faith, Hope and Charity beat out the rhythm on the drums. Charity was strapped into an old accordion that was said to have come from America.

‘Well, everything seems settled, then, so, except the date.’ The priest rose when everybody murmured agreement and unlocked the cabinet. He took out five heavy tumblers and a cut-glass decanter of whiskey. There was already a glass jug of water beside the vase of roses in the centre of the big table.

The dance was held on a lovely clear night in September. A big harvest moon hung over the fields. It was almost as clear as day coming to the dance and the hall was full. Most of the older people came just to show their faces and by midnight the dance belonged completely to the young. The Committee left after counting the takings. The postman and the teacher agreed to stay behind to close the hall. They sat on the table near the door watching the young people dance. The teacher had taught nearly all the dancers, and as they paired off to go into the backs of cars they showed their embarrassment in different ways as they passed the table.

‘Now that “Faith, Hope and Charity” are getting into right old playing form,’ the postman nodded humorously towards the empty crates of stout between the three old brothers playing away on the stage, ‘they seem to be losing most of their customers.’

‘Earlier and earlier they seem to start at it these days,’ the teacher said.

‘Still, I suppose they’re happy while they’re at it.’ The postman smiled, and folded his arms on the table at the door, always feeling a bit of an intellectual in these discussions with the hatted teacher, while ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ launched into the opening bars of ‘A Whistling Gypsy’.

‘No, Owen. No. I wouldn’t be prepared to go as far as that with you, now,’ James Sharkey began.

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