Stories of Ourselves: "The Stoat" by John McGahern

A long-legged student in a turtleneck was following a two-iron he had struck just short of the green when he heard the crying high in the rough grass above the fairway.

All night the rabbit must have raced from warren to warren, he thought, the stoat on its trail.

Plumper rabbits had crossed the stoat’s path but it would not be deflected; it had marked down this one rabbit to kill.

‘It’s common. You often hear the squealing in scrubs or bushes. No doubt it’ll be another specimen for yourself and your uncle to mull over.’

‘I’d feel like a pint if I went down. If you take a drink too early in this weather it makes the day very cumbersome to get through.’

Miss McCabe’s dream was still in the womb of time, he reflected with mock ruefulness, when his father had asked him up to the study the Christmas before.

It was not a study in any strict sense, but a small room where he corrected exam papers and kept textbooks and books of his college days, and where he liked to impart decisions in an aura of some solemnity that ‘not only affects me, but affects my family as well’.

It was not a study in any strict sense, but a small room where he corrected exam papers and kept textbooks and books of his college days, and where he liked to impart decisions in an aura of some solemnity that ‘not only affects me, but affects my family as well’.

It was not a study in any strict sense, but a small room where he corrected exam papers and kept textbooks and books of his college days, and where he liked to impart decisions in an aura of some solemnity that ‘not only affects me, but affects my family as well’.

Those occasions that used to arouse fear and foreboding in the growing boy had by this time dwindled to embarrassing and faintly comic charades.

‘I was afraid you might be affronted by the idea of another woman holding the position your dear mother held,’ the voice floated brittlely along on emotion that it could not control.

Neither had any idea that so much unfulfilled longing for the woe that is marriage wandered around in the world till the replies began to pour in.

‘I’m not. I’m in deadly earnest.’

‘An ad,’ suddenly the uncle became convulsed with laughter, and was hardly able to get the next words out, ‘And did he get...replies?’

‘A government grant...stop it. This is high farce. The man must finally have gone off his rocker.’

‘The trouble with being a bigwig in a small town is that there’s either the Grand Central or nowhere,’ and though he nodded to some people sitting in armchairs as they passed through the lounge, he headed straight for a corner of the bar.

This freedom was gaiety, even though it seemed that it caused him to seem mostly lonely.

Miss McCabe wore pale tweeds and serviceable brown shoes.

Sometimes the son would see them arm in arm on the promenade from the tees close to the shore.

She had rheumatism. ‘And you? What do you intend? Are you studying?’

‘No, I’ll get in a round, and come back early to cook that rabbit. But ask Miss McCabe. It’s just a folly on my part to want to cook it, and I don’t mind at all if you’d both prefer to eat as usual at the Kincora.’

As he went round the course he climbed in that instinct that draws people to places that have witnessed murder or violence to where he had heard the crying that morning, but the blood had dried from the sand, and the place was uncannily still, the coarse tussocks rustling in the sea wind, the strand covered with the full tide, and a white sailing boat tacking up the inlet from Ballisadare to the mouth of the ocean.

He skinned and dressed the rabbit that evening, clinically teasing out the dried blood where the vein had been cut, and Miss McCabe came at eight.

Irrationally, he felt soiled by meal and rabbit and whole evening, as if he had taken part in some buffoonery against the day, against any sense of dignity, and he was determining how to avoid the trout dinner and anything more got to do with them.

Already he could hear his uncle’s mordant voice.