THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022 53
sity of anger in youth. He had not
wanted this place but had allowed him-
self to be shaped to it. There was a re-
sentment he had never quite named
before. He shook his head against this
feeling and came out from behind the
bar and went to the window and raised
the blind another fraction and saw the
expanse of the bay and the Stags of
Broadhaven looming and the cormo-
rant arranged gothically on the black
glister of its rock. Time could not be
measured in the usual ways. The mark-
ers of day and evening had fallen into
disuse. Subtracted from his routines he
was no longer the full equation of him-
self. These afternoon visits to the pub
were to simulate routine but now they
were failing. They were filling increas-
ingly with the old lost voices. He went
to the door and opened it and leaned
down to take the whiskey glass from
the stoop where O’Casey had left it
but there was no glass there. He closed
the door and locked it again. He sat at
a low table. The sun was moving with-
out regard and rounded the building
and suddenly its light filled the kitchen
out back.
He felt drawn to the light. He re-
mained at the table. Voices swam
around him, one entered the other’s,
Fred Coakley’s, Andrew Mac’s, Tess
Hennebry’s—
“I’ve only two speeds of mood. Easy-
going, ten mile an hour, or a hundred
and fifty, I lose the rag altogether. I
goes from nought to Hiroshima. What
do be fucken wrong with me?”
“Would I eat? I don’t know would
I eat. Would you throw on a sandwich
for me anyhow? I’m not sayin’ I’d eat
it. Though it might steady the ship a
small while.”
“Your father should have been a
priest. But didn’t he have a brother one
already? Two in the family would be
kinda going to town on it.”
He was alone with the voices. He
wanted to be away from them. He wanted
to travel past himself and across the fields
of the bay and beyond the horizon and
into the equinox, into the light.
R
ising and gauntly now he crossed
the barroom floor. He went under
the bar and into the kitchen. The
kitchen always had been the sanctu-
ary of the house. Draw the curtain and
it was removed from the public view.
Once in this room he had seen his fa-
ther weeping. Time unspooled, un-
reeled. Angered by a customer, thrown
perhaps by an intrusive comment, riled
by some perceived slight, his father
had withdrawn to this room and si-
lently wept. To be a publican was a
lifelong performance.
“People need steadiness,” his fa-
ther said. “They want to look into the
same expression on your face always.
You’ve to arrange your misfortunate
face for them.”
The look his father arranged for
the barroom was tactful, indeed al-
most priestly—he had offered a place
of calm and reprieve, or at least such
was his intention. The sunlight that
came through the kitchen threw its
shabbiness now into awful relief. He
closed his eyes against the sight of it.
He tried to imagine another life but
could not. From the bar, a voice made
imitation of the stuttering caller at
the Ballina mart offering some dubi-
ous Charolais—
“F-four forty, f-four forty, all the
w-way home.... Have ye n-nothin’
about ye at all? F-four forty once....
Have it.... F-four fifty?”
As the men laughed in response
to the soft mockery, he was again a
small boy. He sat on the bar counter
with his legs dangling and a glass of
Coke at his elbow, a packet of Taytos
ripped open beside it. Perhaps he was
five or six years old. The men were
back from the mart. His father poured
pints of stout until they were a third
shy of the brim and lined them on
the counter to settle for a little more
than a minute before finishing them
with a wristy flourish. The voices in
the room were in easy conspiracy and
had great warmth. The mart must
have gone well. He was spoilt and
fussed over as the son of the place.
An old man told him he was to be
fattened for the mart himself, to see
what he would fetch. He knew al-
ready how to slap away and mock
the comment—
“Get up the road, Gertie,” he said.
The peat fumes and the stout
opened the men’s mouths for them.
The Mayo team was a disgrace. There
were fellas togging out who had drank
the winter. The waft of Carrolls cig-
arettes and Majors. Pint bottles were
taken down from the shelf for those
who objected to the gassiness of the
draught. Newspapers were folded over
and the Deaths column squinted at
with sour interest. He knew that his
father spoke to God in the night.
Once he had heard his father whis-
per so in the night. His father told
God that he was very proud of him
and of all his godly works. A high
tide sounded beyond, roughly and
unseen, in heavy booms and deep an-
swering echoes, and as the wind roared
to his boy’s mind the Stags were bay-
ing at the sky. Such was his world
then. He was the prince of the room
and invulnerable.
He could not himself speak to God.
He stepped from the kitchen and into
the barroom and wrung out the cloth
in the sink. The voices in the bar of
more recent times had been an af-
front to him. They offered themselves
baldly as affront; their bodies were
arranged barward in aspects of af-
front. The voices of recent times, he
felt, were colored by avarice and vul-
garity. He had come to that unfortu-
nate age when he believed the young
to be savages. He closed the windows
and drew down the blinds against
what light the March evening had
mustered. Age wore down on him.
The voices faded out and left noth-
ing at all behind. He might sell the
fucking place yet.
He left through the side door to
walk by the water for a while. He could
never sell to the price you’d get for it.
There was barely a ripple on the bay.
There were no people anywhere to be
seen. There was across the slate-gray
water a sensation of great silence and
now somehow of peace. The year again
turned on its slow wheel.
NEWYORKER.COM
Kevin Barry on ghost stories and Irish pubs.
