Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  Creatures of the Earth

  New and Selected Stories

  John McGahern

  Contents

  Preface

  Wheels

  Why We’re Here

  Christmas

  Hearts of Oak and Bellies of Brass

  Strandhill, the Sea

  Korea

  Lavin

  My Love, My Umbrella

  The Recruiting Officer

  A Slip-up

  All Sorts of Impossible Things

  Faith, Hope and Charity

  The Wine Breath

  Swallows

  Gold Watch

  Parachutes

  A Ballad

  Crossing the Line

  High Ground

  Like All Other Men

  Sierra Leone

  The Creamery Manager

  Oldfashioned

  Eddie Mac

  The Conversion of William Kirkwood

  Bank Holiday

  Creatures of the Earth

  Love of the World

  The Country Funeral

  Preface

  These stories grew in the mind and in the many workings of the material, but often began from as little as the sound of a chainsaw working in the evening, an overheard conversation about the price of cattle, thistledown floating by the open doors of bars on Grafton Street on a warm autumn day, an old gold watch spilling out of a sheet where it had been hidden and forgotten about for years. Others began as different stories, only to be replaced by something completely unforeseen at the beginning of the work. The most difficult were drawn directly from life. Unless they were reinvented, re-imagined and somehow dislocated from their origins, they never seemed to work. The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance.

  Over the years there were two particular stories I rewrote several times, but I was never satisfied with them, and yet I would not let them go. I was too attached to the material. I stubbornly refused to obey the primary rule that if the writer finds himself too fond of a rhythm or an image or phrase, or even a long passage, he should get rid of it. When I came to write Memoir, I saw immediately that the central parts of both these stories were essential to the description of the life we lived with my father in the barracks, from which they should never have been lifted. No matter what violences or dislocations were attempted, they continued to remain firmly grounded, obdurately what they were.

  Among its many other obligations, fiction always has to be believable. Life does not have to suffer such constraint, and much of what takes place is believable only because it happens. The god of life is accident. Fiction has to be true to a central idea or vision of life.

  ‘Creatures of the Earth’ and ‘Love of the World’ are new stories.

  John McGahern

  March 2006

  Wheels

  Grey concrete and steel and glass in the slow raindrip of the morning station, three porters pushing an empty trolley up the platform to a stack of grey mail-bags, the loose wheels rattling, and nothing but wait and watch and listen, and I listened to the story they were telling.

  ‘Seven-eighths of his grave he’d dug in that place down the country when they went and transferred him up on promotion.’

  ‘Took to fishing out beyond Islandbridge, bicycle and ham sandwiches and a flask of tea, till he tried to hang himself from a branch out over the river, but the branch went and broke and in he fell roaring for help.’

  ‘No use drowning naturally if you’d meant to hang yourself in the first place.’

  ‘Think there’s any chance they’ll have him up for attempted whateveritis?’

  ‘Not nowadays – they’ll give him a six-month rest-cure in the Gorman on full pay.’

  They’d filled the trolley, the smile dying in the eyes as they went past, the loose wheels rattling less under the load, the story too close to the likeness of my own life for comfort though it’d do to please Lightfoot in the pub when I got back.

  ‘Looked at with the mind, life’s a joke; and felt, it’s a tragedy and we know cursed nothing,’ he’d said last night over pints of Guinness.

  Flush of tiredness in my face after the drinking, the jug of water by the bed had been no use, rough tongue, dry roof of mouth, dull ache and throb of the poison along the forehead and on all the nerves, celebrating this excursion home; and always desire in the hot tiredness, the dull search about the platform for vacancy between well-fleshed thighs: may I in my relax-sirs slacks (Hackney, London) plunge into your roomy ripeness and forget present difficulties?

  The train drew in. I got a table in the restaurant car facing a priest and a man in his fifties, a weathered face under a hat, the blue Sunday suit limp and creased.

  A black woollen scarf inside the priest’s gaberdine almost completely concealed the Roman collar. The waiter brought us tea and toast on trays and the priest broke the silence.

  ‘Have you come far?’ he asked the hatted man at his side.

  ‘From London, on the nightboat.’

  ‘You must work there, then,’ the priest continued in an interested politeness.

  ‘I do and fukken all, for the last twenty-eight years, on the buildings.’

  The man hadn’t seen the collar and was unaware of the shock of the swear-word. The priest looked anxiously about the carriage but asked, ‘Is it tough on the buildings?’ more to prove he could master the unsocial than out of any politeness now.

  ‘Not if you use your fukken loaf like. You soon get wised-up that nobody’ll thank you for making a fukken name for yourself by working. I’m a teaboy.’ The man was relaxed, ready to hold forth.

  ‘And are you going home on holiday?’ the priest changed.

  ‘Not effin’ likely. I’m going home to bury the brother,’ he announced importantly.

  ‘I’m sorry. May he rest in peace,’ the priest said.

  ‘A release to himself and everybody else; been good for nothing for years.’

  The priest rose. He’d risked enough.

  ‘If you’re ever in London,’ the man held out his hand, ‘you’ll find me any Sunday morning in the Archway Tavern, in the door of the Public Bar facing the Gents.’

  The priest thanked him, anxious to be gone, and as he turned to the door the man saw the round collar.

  ‘That was a priest,’ he murmured as if waiting for the certainty to sink in. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I got no chance.’

  ‘Well I’ll be fukken blowed.’ He slumped.

  ‘He didn’t seem to mind too much. I wouldn’t worry.’

  ‘Still, he’s a priest, isn’t he? You have to draw the line fukken somewhere. I’ll go and tell him I’m sorry.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry,’ I said, but he shambled to the door.

  ‘He was all right about it, he said he understood,’ he informed when he returned after minutes, relief of confession on the old face as he pondered, ‘Tidy how a body can put his fukken foot in it.’

  The train had crossed the Shannon. The fields were slowing. I took the suitcase and shook hands with the man.

  The front door was open when I got to the house. She was on her knees in the hall, scrubbing the brown flagstones. She must have heard the iron gate under the yew at the road and the footsteps up the unweeded gravel but she did not stop or look up until I was feet away. All she said was my name, but all the tense emotion of the face, the tears just held back, went into the name, and it was an accusation. ‘Rose,’ I answered with her name.

  I thought she was going to break, and there was the embarrassment of the waiting silence, the still brush in her hand beside her knees on the wet stone.

  ‘Did you get the letter that I was coming?’

  ‘Your fathe
r got a letter.’ Her face hardened, and it was already a hard greying face, the skin stretched tight over the bones, under the grey hair.

  ‘Was it all right to come?’

  She still didn’t rise or make any sign for me to enter, and when she dipped the brush in the water and started to scrub the stone again I put the suitcase down close to the wall of the house and said, ‘I’ll fool around till he comes.’ She didn’t answer and I could hear the rasp of the scrubbing brush on the stone till I’d gone the other side of the house.

  They’d net-wired a corner of the orchard off for her hens, the wild nettles growing coarse and tall out of the bare scratched earth; henshit enriches the clay, I’d heard them say.

  ‘Be quiet, trembling between timidity and the edges of violence as the rest of your race, and wait for him to come: life has many hours, it’ll end.’

  The bell without rope or tongue hung from the stone archway where the pear tree leaned; it used to call the workmen to their meals.

  ‘Why don’t you go to night lectures and try for promotion?’ Lightfoot had asked, pints on the marble of the Stag’s Head.

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better for you to have some say in the world than to have jumped-up jacks ordering you around all the time?’

  ‘Drink your drink. They have piped music in the office now. They talk less.’

  I saw my father come on the tractor, two creamery cans on the trailer, old felt on his head. I wondered if the sweat-band stank as it used to or if it was rotten now. I watched him take the cans off the trailer, then go inside, body that had started my journey to here.

  The suitcase was still against the wall of the house. I left it there, but went in. One place was laid on the table by the window, and she was bent over saucepans.

  ‘Your father has come from the creamery. He’s gone out again but he’ll soon be in for his dinner.’

  ‘Thanks. It’s all right.’

  As I grow older I use hardly anything other than these formal nothings, a conciliating waiter bowing backwards out of the room.

  I took the newspaper, went through the daily calamities that spice the well-being or lighten trouble with news of worse, the turning of the pages loud above the sounds of cooking in the gnawing silence. At last she took the whistle from the nail on the wall and blew three short blasts from the flower garden.

  Clay muffled his boots as he came in, leaving a trail on the washed stone. I stood but he turned past me to the table as if he hadn’t seen me.

  ‘Is the dinner ready, Rose?’

  ‘In a second, Jim.’

  He drummed an idle rhythm with the bone of the knife on the cloth until she put the plate before him, fried eggs and bacon, a yellow well of butter in the middle of the creamed potatoes.

  ‘There, Jim.’

  ‘Thanks, Rose.’

  The knife and fork rang often on the plate to break the aggressive sucking and swallowing of the food, but he said nothing.

  ‘I came on the train,’ I offered, and had to smile at how foolishly it hung in the silence till he lifted his hat with the flourish of a man in a hurry, the sweat-band still apparently intact, and went in the direction of the timber-stack.

  When he’d gone she put my plate on the table. ‘There’s some dinner.’

  ‘Why didn’t he speak? Does he not want me in the house?’ I asked quietly as I ate.

  She was stirring in a bucket with a stick a mixture of meal and skim milk for the calf.

  ‘Do you know, Rose?’ I’d to ask again.

  ‘It’s not my place to interfere. It’ll only drag more trouble into it.’

  ‘Well, I’ll ask him myself.’

  ‘What do you want to go and upset him for?’ Her voice was sharp.

  ‘No. I can’t stay here without knowing whether he wants me or not. The place is his.’

  ‘If you let it go today it’ll calm down and tomorrow it’ll be as if nothing happened,’ she reasoned in her care, but I could feel the hatred. The disappointment and pain had hardened with the years, but she could mask them better now.

  In the confidence of her first days in the house she’d taken down the brown studio photo of the old wedding, Warner Artist Grafton Street, replacing it with the confetti-strewn black and white of her own, the sensible blue costume in place of the long white dress to the silver shoes. She’d been too old for white.

  Against her hopes, too old for children too, the small first communion and the confirmation photos stayed on the sideboard, replaced by no other, only disappearing when the youngest left and they were alone.

  All remembered her near madness in the middle of her months as she felt the last years slip.

  ‘For Chrisake don’t you know there’s children listening? I’m tired. Let me get to sleep.’

  ‘You should have stuck with your children.’

  The noise of the blow came, she escaping to the fields, losing herself between the tree trunks till she’d grown cold and come in to sit numbly in a chair over the raked fire till morning. Perhaps she’d hoped he’d come, but he hadn’t, stiff with anger at the shouted insult to his maleness, more bitter since it echoed his own bitterness at growing old. The next day he’d dug the potatoes where the sheets hung on the line between two trees above the ridge, scattering clay on the sheets she’d scrubbed white for hours on the wooden scrubbing-board.

  The years had gone by and now they were alone and he was her child and everything. I could understand her care and hatred, but it was getting late, and I didn’t want to stay.

  I found him splitting lengths of beech beside the useless pier he’d built to absorb the glass about the house, dangerous with jagged bits. He held the length steady with his boot against the pier while he drove the wedge into the timber. I waited until it split and the wedge fell loose.

  ‘Can I speak to you?’

  As he turned to put another length of beech into position, I said, ‘If you don’t answer I’ll just leave.’

  ‘Well, I’m not in America as you can no doubt see.’ He suddenly turned.

  ‘I can’t understand why you’ve not spoken to me since I came.’

  ‘You’re joking surely. Do you mean to tell me that you don’t know why?’

  ‘I don’t. I’d not ask you if I knew.’

  ‘You mean to say you know nothing about that letter you wrote in the spring?’ he accused, the voice breaking under the whole day’s resentment. ‘I had to wait till near the end of my days for a right kick in the teeth.’

  There was the treacherous drag to enter the emotion, to share and touch, the white lengths of beechwood about his boots and the veins swollen dark on the back of the old hands holding the sledge. With his sleeve he wiped away tears.

  ‘The one important thing I ever asked you couldn’t even be bothered,’ he accused.

  ‘That’s not true. When you wrote you wanted to move to Dublin I went round the auctioneers, sent you lists, looked at places.’

  ‘And you said if I did get a place and moved that you wanted no room in it.’

  ‘I want to live on my own. I didn’t want you to come thinking differently.’

  ‘I didn’t come under illusions. You took good care of that,’ he accused bitterly. ‘And I was foolish enough to think there might be more than pure selfishness.’

  I knew the wheel: fathers become children to their sons who repay the care they got when they were young, and on the edge of dying the fathers become young again; but the luck of a death and a second marriage had released me from the last breaking on this ritual wheel.

  ‘You are married,’ I said. It was a washing of hands.

  ‘Yes, I’m married,’ he said in a bitterness close to regret. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘What did she think of you leaving?’

  ‘She’d be hardly likely to stay here on her own if I went.’ He resented the question.

  ‘It’s your life and her life, for me to enter it would be simple intrusion. I
n the long run it’d cause trouble for everybody.’

  I could hear the measured falseness of my own voice, making respectable with the semblance of reason what I wanted anyhow.

  ‘I’d give anything to get out of this dump,’ he changed.

  ‘It’s quiet and beautiful.’ The same hollowness came, I was escaping, soothing the conscience as the music did the office.

  ‘Quiet as a graveyard,’ he took up. ‘And stare at beauty every day and it’ll turn sicker than stray vomit. The barracks shut now, a squad car in its place. Sometimes children come to the door with raffle tickets, that’s all. But there’s plenty of funerals, so busy Mrs McGreevy’s coffin last month came out roped on the roof of the bread van, and the way they talked about her was certain proof if proof was needed that nobody seriously believes in an after-life. They were sure they’d never hear the edge of her tongue again either in hell or heaven or the duck-arsed in-between. I’d give anything to get out,’ he said with passion.

  There was silence but it was easier after he’d spoken. Then he asked, ‘Are you down for long?’

  ‘I’ll stay till tomorrow if it’s all right.’

  ‘That’s about as long as you can stand us I suppose.’

  ‘It’s not that. I have to be at work.’

  I helped him gather the tools.

  ‘I think Rose is giving you your old room. I want to get the last things done before night.’

  ‘I’ve left your case in your old room, the bed is aired,’ she said when I came in.

  ‘There’s no trouble any more but I have to go tomorrow, it’s to be back at the office,’ I explained.

  ‘The next time you must come for longer.’ It was easy in the lies that give us room.

  ‘I’ll do that and thank you.’

  Quietly the dark came, the last tasks hurried, a shift of hens on the roost of the hen-house before the bolting of the door. Inside, the lamp was lit and he said, ‘That’s another day put down,’ as he took off his boots and socks, reek of feet and sweat as he draped socks over the boots on the floor.

  ‘Rose, the corns were tormenting me no end today. Any chance you’d give them a scrape with the razor?’