Free The Collected Stories by John McGahern Page B

came down he’d gone out. We saw him outside examining the potato and turnip pits, the rows of winter cabbage.
    After his breakfast he shaved at the old mirror and carefully combed his receding hair over the bald patches of the scalp, polished his boots, gathered the silver buttons and medallions of the tunic on the brass stick and shone them with Silvo.
    On the stroke of nine he went down to the dayroom. I heard his raised voice within minutes. ‘Nothing done right. I’ve told you time in and time out that these records must never be let fall behind,’ and the unfortunate Bannon’s low excuses.
    For several weeks I kept the key in my pocket, but each time I tried to ask him what to do with it and if he wanted it back, I wasn’t able. Eventually, one warm evening, with some anxiety, I threw it as far away towards the river as I was able, watching its flight curve between the two ash trees to fall into the sedge and wild nettles a few feet from the water.

Korea
    ‘You saw an execution then too, didn’t you?’ I asked my father, and he started to tell as he rowed. He’d been captured in an ambush in late 1919, and they were shooting prisoners in Mountjoy as reprisals at that time. He thought it was he who’d be next, for after a few days they moved him to the cell next to the prison yard. He could see out through the bars. No rap to prepare himself came to the door that night, and at daybreak he saw the two prisoners they’d decided to shoot being marched out: a man in his early thirties, and what was little more than a boy, sixteen or seventeen, and he was weeping. They blindfolded the boy, but the man refused the blindfold. When the officer shouted, the boy clicked to attention, but the man stayed as he was, chewing very slowly. He had his hands in his pockets.
    ‘Take your hands out of your pockets,’ the officer shouted again, irritation in the voice.
    The man slowly shook his head.
    ‘It’s a bit too late now in the day for that,’ he said.
    The officer then ordered them to fire, and as the volley rang, the boy tore at his tunic over the heart, as if to pluck out the bullets, and the buttons of the tunic began to fly into the air before he pitched forward on his face.
    The other heeled quietly over on his back: it must have been because of the hands in the pockets.
    The officer dispatched the boy with one shot from the revolver as he lay face downward, but he pumped five bullets in rapid succession into the man, as if to pay him back for not coming to attention.
    ‘When I was on my honeymoon years after, it was May, and we took the tram up the hill of Howth from Sutton Cross,’ my father said as he rested on the oars. ‘We sat on top in the open on the wooden seats with the rail around that made it like a small ship. The sea was below, and smell of the sea and furze-bloom all about, and then I looked down and saw the furze pods bursting, and theway they burst in all directions seemed shocking like the buttons when he started to tear at his tunic. I couldn’t get it out of my mind all day. It destroyed the day.’
    ‘It’s a wonder their hands weren’t tied?’ I asked him as he rowed between the black navigation pan and the red where the river flowed into Oakport.
    ‘I suppose it was because they were considered soldiers.’
    ‘Do you think the boy stood to attention because he felt that he might still get off if he obeyed the rules?’
    ‘Sounds a bit highfalutin’ to me. Comes from going to school too long,’ he said aggressively, and I was silent. It was new to me to hear him talk about his own life at all. Before, if I asked him about the war, he’d draw fingers across his eyes as if to tear a spider web away, but it was my last summer with him on the river, and it seemed to make him want to talk, to give of himself before it ended.
    Hand over hand I drew in the line that throbbed with fish; there were two miles of line, a hook on a lead line every three yards. The licence allowed us a