THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022 51
H
e hadn’t noticed the voices
at first. In the endless stretch
of the afternoon he entered
the pub through the side door with
a soft hushed aspect as if broaching
a place of burial. It was late March
by now, the clocks about to change,
and the first heat of the year was in-
timated when he raised the blinds a
few inches to allow the sunlight
through. He did so as to show the
place up. The effect of the light was
to insinuate life. The motes of dust
in the sunbeams were life. He opened
the windows a fraction to freshen the
air and looked out—
The bay was filling on a neap tide
and the Stags of Broadhaven thrust at
the clear white skies in raucous appeal.
“Softly, softly, turn the wheel softly,”
Michael Batt said. “Until I’m blue in
the face I’m telling that boy to turn the
wheel soft but will he listen to me? In
my sweet hole he will. Boy took down
eejitry from the mother’s side. He sits
in behind that wheel and it’s like he’s
wrestling a fucken gorilla.”
The boy was long since raised and
driving temperately; long dead was
Michael Batt, the father. But the cor-
ner stool at the bar was still vaguely
Batt’s terrain. At an L to it sat six com-
panion stools to face the optics and
the hung spirits arranged beyond the
row of taps. The Cerberian taps, his
own father had called them; for Cer-
berus, he would curtly explain, he who
had guarded the gates of Hell. At the
other end of the bar was the curtained
hatch to the back kitchen, then the
sorrowful passageway to the jacks. He
smiled at Michael Batt’s words, the air
of long-sufferance that was hard prac-
ticed for effect, the lines that were re-
hearsed as Batt walked the shore road
toward the lights of the pub all those
lost evenings ago.
He stepped behind the bar and
placed his hands upon it lightly and
looked out to the room and moved his
eyes slowly left and then slowly right
across the empty stage of it.
“Now,” he said.
He took up the cloth and damp-
ened it in the sink and ran it along
the bar top. He brought up a quiet
shine. The intention of the polishing
was to approximate soft labor. Daily
the bar top was polished to show its
grain and the nicks and scratches of
its great age. The pub had been his
father’s for the long shift of four de-
cades. His father in turn had taken it
from a bachelor uncle. For three gen-
erations behind this bar much the
same set of thick, knitted eyebrows
had insisted on a semblance, at least,
of decorum. The sunlight crept by
slow inches across the floor. It was the
moment, in more usual times, of the
primary school’s letting out and he
missed the high excited chatter from
the yard across the way. Neither loud-
ness nor drunkenness in this barroom
had ever been tolerated.
“There is such a thing as a thoughtful
pub,” his father had always maintained.
He rinsed out the cloth and left it
by the sink and dipped beneath the
bar and went down the passageway
to the jacks. He stopped halfways
along and put a palm to the wall to
steady himself. A rising feeling in the
lungs was endured, a kind of mari-
time swell—he believed it to be a spe-
cies of panic, but it passed over again
as quickly, as quickly as the clouds off
the North Atlantic passed. His phone
pinged and he squinted to read a
text—he spent half a minute then
tapping a careful reply to a worried
aunt in the family WhatsApp group.
Would she ever leave the house
again?
And would she ever get off the fuck-
ing Internet?
The tread of his dependable step
the family listened for always—this
was increasingly a burden to him.
“It could be one of forty-two things
that’s wrong with me,” Frank Waught
half whispered to a pint of Smithwick’s.
“It could be the stomach acid. It could
be the pollen. It could be worse than
either. And of course it could be just
the fear.”
Waught had lived until he was two
days shy of ninety. He had been some-
and-fifty years dying. Waught had
been a man for the low tables rather
than a barside perch—an antisocial
man who needed people. From the
passageway, he looked back now to-
ward the barroom, toward the lost
voices. The five empty tables were lit
in the afternoon glare. Continuing
on, he entered with an apologetic air
the realm of the Ladies’. He opened
the window above the sink and sprayed
the one toilet with Dettol. Bringing
his broad face close to the mirror, he
breathed slowly on it to make a fog,
and as the cloud slowly dissipated it
showed the weary stare of his aging,
greenish eyes. The little map lines of
bloodshot. The twist of the nose, a
Frenchman’s nose. The foolish pride;
the ageless vanity. The extravagant
eyebrows of a disgraced Christian
Brother. He closed his eyes. A long
sensuous parade of lips had been
painted in this mirror.
“That particular dog comes at me
one more time and it’s getting the
quare end of the stick,” Alice Nealon
said. “Every night, half gone seven,
on the one walk I can feckin’ muster,
the bastard come at me, him with the
long face out of the Sullivan yard.
Eejit dog! Eejit dog come lollopin’!
Next time I’ll open the ignorant face
on him.”
Always she began her evening with
a decorous half pint of stout; it was fol-
lowed by another; then, after a pause
for deliberation, she would announce
in a startled voice that she would nearly
chance a full one. Three more would
follow before the double Jameson at
eleven that would send her to the door
rosy-faced and muttering darkly against
the dogs of the vicinity.
He left the Ladies’ and entered the
Gents’ and never in all his time had
it smelt more passable. He opened
the window anyhow. He ran the taps.
He f lushed the toilet. He took the
rubber gloves from his back pocket
and changed the tablets in the urinal.
He pissed on the fresh ones for good
luck and ritual and laughed to him-
self gently. He laughed to himself
frequently these times. There was a
strange hilarity to the predicament.
He had been closed now for almost
four hundred days.
As he reëntered the barroom, three
slow knocks sounded on the front door,
followed by two rapid ones, as if a code
were being employed. He went to the
window and looked under the blind
and saw a blocky man in late middle
age faced to consider the bay, the Stags,
the equinoctial sky. He did not recog-
nize the man but his mood turned
quickly sombre as he moved to the
front door. An experienced publican
