Frank McGahern

Frank McGahern, a sergeant and father of Sean McGahern, is presented through a tension that never resolves into a simple portrait of either affection or cruelty. He can share a hunt, make an offer of a home, and carefully arrange for his children’s future; he can also make them feel like burdens and threaten to send them away. As the family’s authority figure, he shapes both their material circumstances and the stories they tell themselves about what they owe him.

Identity and the limits of a promise

When Sean arrives at the barracks, Guard Cannon announces, “The prisoner is here,” turning the reunion into a joke before father and son kiss. Frank says he had been heading to the Cross and that Sean beat him to it. Sean, however, remembers that Frank made little effort to meet him. The mismatch matters: the affectionate greeting does not erase the child’s sense that a promise has been neglected. Sean reflects that children need promises to be kept because they seek certainty in an uncertain world. Frank’s relationship with him is thus introduced through intimacy and disappointment at once.

The evening before Sean is due to return to Aughawillan, Frank takes him to Oakport to hunt rabbits. Frank has only three shells left, gives them to Sean to carry, and waits beside a broken wall until rabbits emerge into the fields. After the shot, he sends Sean to retrieve the wounded animal and kills it with a single stroke of his hand. As they walk back carrying the rabbit, Frank asks whether Sean would consider living with him in the barracks. Sean’s immediate concern is for the others; Frank answers that they would remain in Aughawillan and that everything there would stay as it was. The hunt gives this offer a quiet, shared setting, but the proposal also divides the family’s possible futures: Frank imagines Sean joining him while the others remain behind.

The barracks and the children’s mother

The family later moves into the barracks, whose large, long-empty rooms return the girls’ calls as echoes. Their play becomes noisy enough that Frank roars at them to stop; they begin to cry. The lorry has only just carried the furniture away, and the children are still adjusting to the change of home when Sean sleeps beside his father in a large iron bed with broken brass bells. The room’s single window looks toward the river and Oakport. Sean feels numb and heartsick, a response that marks the move not as a settled homecoming but as an upheaval.

On the third day, the telephone rings in the dayroom. Guard Cannon brings word of a personal call, and Frank goes downstairs alone. Katie asks whether the call is from Corramahon; when Guard Cannon nods, she bursts into tears, and Sean begins to weep with her. Frank returns and tells the household, “The children’s mother died at a quarter to three. May the Lord have mercy on her soul.” His announcement is restrained and formal, while the children’s grief breaks out before he comes back into the room. The scene makes him the bearer of news that alters the household, but gives little account of his private response to Susan McGahern’s death.

Authority, resentment, and the burden of gratitude

In the years that follow, Sean hears Frank’s resentment in repeated complaints. Frank invokes the children as a “pack,” imagines putting them in a bag with Toby and sending them beneath the arches at Cootehall Bridge, and threatens to pack them off to an orphanage. The threat of institutional discipline sits alongside his insistence that the children should be grateful: he presents himself as an “old fool” who receives no thanks for keeping them, and contrasts his household with the harsher fate he says another man might impose.

The accounting of food gives that sense of burden a daily, concrete form. The family buys its groceries at Henry’s, and Frank keeps a small notebook covered in blue police cloth, copying into it the purchases recorded in the shop ledger. At month’s end he lines the children up as if they were in class and reads aloud what they have eaten. When the total is high, he questions them about costly items such as butter and may order cuts, warning that once four pounds is passed they can eat dry bread. The procedure makes household consumption an occasion for public scrutiny and shame.

Sean later recognizes how thoroughly he had accepted Frank’s account of fatherhood. Speaking sincerely to a priest who knew the family, he says that the children owe their father a great debt for his sacrifices in raising them. The priest reverses that moral claim: Frank chose to bring them into the world and therefore took on responsibility for them. Sean does not report this correction to his father, but says it changes how he sees both Frank and the children. The episode distinguishes the father’s repeated demand for gratitude from the narrator’s later understanding of parental responsibility.

Illness and the attempt to provide for the future

When Frank becomes seriously ill, the barracks changes from a place of command into the setting for preparations for his possible death. He spends more days in bed, moves slowly, and needs Sean’s help on the stairs. Dr Vesey visits daily; the guards look worried, and the family prays for Frank’s recovery at the end of the Rosary. Before being sent to the Depot Hospital in Dublin, he dresses in uniform and calls Sean into the dayroom, where a grass-and-mud-coloured army-surplus metal box stands open among the ledgers and inkstands.

Frank tells Sean that he may not return alive, but says he has made the necessary provisions. A wad of money is set aside for immediate funeral expenses; a large envelope holds instructions, financial and insurance papers, and directions to consult the solicitor in Boyle after the funeral. Frank says he is to be buried with Susan in Aughawillan. A separate package contains mementoes for the children, including their mother’s rings and jewellery, medals, certificates, photographs, and old letters; another envelope holds a copy of his will. These arrangements reveal a more deliberate form of care than the daily household accounting: Frank inventories what the children may need and makes their access to it dependent on following his instructions.

He also tells Sean that the family cannot remain in the barracks after a new sergeant takes his place. If they stay, he warns, they may be taken to an orphanage. There is enough money to buy a house and small farm, and Frank instructs Sean to bring up the others there in his place. He singles out Paddy Mullaney’s farm, which he considers inexpensive and preferable to further searching. Sean knows the stone-walled fields and the house from earlier visits, but the proposed responsibility becomes real only as Frank describes it. Sean breaks down and begs his father not to die. The episode closes not with a reported outcome of the illness, but with the son confronting the prospect of life without the father whose control and care have remained inseparable.