By the Lake by John McGahern

my words,” Jamesie said.
    “He’d be trying anyhow whether he’d succeed or not. He’s a pure disgust,” Mary said.
    “Look how he’s beating around. See how he’s round to Kate looking to get women from England.”
    “He’ll not get very far with Kate,” she said.
    “The poor fella is only doing his best. He’s contributing to the race. Like the rest of them he’s only trying to find his way to the boggy hollow,” Jamesie rubbed his hands together, slyly looking out of hooded eyes.
    “You, you,
you
—are a pure disgust as well!” Mary said, and added, “No wonder Lucy can’t stand this fella!”
    Lucy was his daughter-in-law, and Jamesie went quiet as if struck. She was one of the few people he had never been able to charm; it was a deep sore. “Some of these ones would want you tailor-made. Some of these ones are just too precise,” he said, and they were all too fond of him to say another word until he recovered and a path was found out of the silence.

    The Shah rolled round the lake with the sheepdog in the front seat of the car every Sunday and stayed until he was given his tea at six. Some days during the week he came in the evenings as well. On dry Sundays he loved to walk the fields, and to look at the cattle and sheep and the small wooded island out in the back lake where the herons nested, and to look across the lake to the acres of pale sedge of Gloria Bog, which ran like an inland sea until it met the blue of the lower slopes of the mountains where his life began, the stunted birch trees like small green flowers in the wilderness of bog.
    When it was raining or there was little to be done, he was content to sit in the house. Often he sat in silence. His silences were never oppressive and he never spoke unless to respond to something that had been said or to say something that he wanted to say. Throughout, he was intensely aware of every other presence, exercising his imagination on their behalf as well as on his own, seeing himself as he might be seen and as he saw others. Since he was a boy he had been in business of some kind but had never learned to read or write. He had to rely on pure instinct to know the people he could trust. This silence and listening were more useful than speech and his instinct was radar-sharp. His manners had once been gentle and hidden with everybody but to some extent the gentleness had been discarded as he grew in wealth and independence. With people he disliked he could be rough. People or places that made him ill at ease or uncomfortable he went to great lengths to avoid. When caught in such situations his manners would turn atrocious, like a clear-sighted person going momentarily blind. Where he blossomed was in the familiar and habitual, which he never left willingly. The one aberration of his imaginative shrewdness was a sneaking regard for delinquents, or even old villains like John Quinn, whose activities excited and amused him, as they tested and gave two fingers to the moral world.
    All his family, dominated by the mother, had been hardworking, intelligent, humorous, sociable. Across from the three-roomed cottage, the whitethorns had been trained to make an arch into the small rose garden, and a vine of roses covered the whitewashed wall when few houses on the mountain had more than the bare necessities. They also kept bees, had a small apple garden, ground coffee from dried and roasted dandelion roots; and when they got some money a room would be added to the house rather than building another outhouse to keep more fowl or animals.
    He alone in the family escaped school. A dedicated but ill-tempered schoolmaster, who had been instrumental in his older brother and sister becoming the first to win scholarships out of these mountains, had given him a bad beating during his first year at school. No amount of coaxing or threats could get him to return. At twelve, he made his first shillings by borrowing the family horse to draw stones to make a road to