Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  ‘You better soak them first,’ she answered.

  She placed a basin of steaming water by his chair on the floor, the water yellowing when she added Dettol. She moved the lamp closer.

  He sat there, her huge old child, soaking his feet in water, protesting like a child. ‘It’s scalding, Rose,’ and she laughed back, ‘Go on, don’t be afraid.’ And when she knelt on the floor, her grey hair falling low, and dried the feet that dripped above the lighted water, I was able to go out without being noticed as she opened the bright razor.

  Cattle and a brown horse and sheep grazed on the side of the hill across the track. The sun came and went behind white cloud, and as it did the gravel shone white or dulled on the platform.

  ‘The train won’t go without you unless I tell it,’ the one official said to an anxious passenger pressing him to open the ticket office, and he went on stacking boxes on the gravel where the goods van would come in. When he did open the office and sold tickets there was still time left and the scrape of feet changing position on the gravel grew more frequent.

  I had no hangover and no relax-sirs desire and as much reason to go back as come. I’d have hangover and desire in the morning and as much reason then as now. I was meeting Light-foot in the bar beside the station and would answer ‘How did it go?’ with how it went, repetition of a life in the shape of a story that had as much reason to go on as stop.

  I walked through the open carriages. There was nobody I knew. Through the windows the fields of stone walls, blue roofs of Carrick, Shannon river. Sing for them once First Communion Day O River Shannon flowing and a four-leaved shamrock growing, silver medal on the blue suit and white ankle socks in new shoes. The farther flows the river the muddier the water: the light was brighter on its upper reaches. Rustle of the boat through the bulrushes as we went to Moran’s well for spring water in dry summers, cool of watercress and bitterness of the wild cherries shaken out of the whitethorn hedge, black bullrush seed floating in the gallons on the floorboards, all the vivid sections of the wheel we watched so slowly turn, impatient for the rich whole that never came but that all the preparations promised.

  Why We’re Here

  Gillespie tested the secondhand McCullagh chainsaw as soon as he came from the auction, sawing some blown-down branches stacked against the wall of the house into lengths for firewood. The saw ran perfectly.

  ‘Now to get rid of the evidence. For it’ll not be long till he’s up with his nose smelling unless I’m far out,’ he said to the sheepdog when he’d finished. He carried the saw and sawn lengths into the shed, scattering the white sawdust wide into the grass with his boot. Then he farted. ‘A great release that into the evening, thank God,’ he sighed, as he waited for the aroma of the decomposing porter he’d drunk in Henry’s after the auction to lift to his nostrils, his eyes going over the ground beside the stack of blown-down branches again. ‘Not much evidence left that I can see. Nothing to do now but wait for him to arrive up.’

  He was waiting at the gate when Boles came on the road, the slow tapping of the cattle cane keeping time to the drag of the old feet in slippers, sharply calling ‘Heel’ to his dog as a car approached from Carrick, shine of ointment over the eczema on his face as he drew close.

  ‘Taking a bit of a constitutional, Mr Boles?’

  ‘The usual forty steps before the night,’ Boles laughed.

  The two dogs had started to circle, nosing each other, disturbing the brown droppings of the yew. They stood in its shade, where it leaned above the gateway.

  ‘Lepping out of your skin you are, Mr Boles. No holding the young ones in these days.’

  ‘Can’t put the clock back. The old works winding down, you know.’

  ‘No future in that way of thinking. You’re good for ten Beechers yet, if you ask me.’

  They watched the dogs trying to mount each other, circling on the dead droppings of the yew, their flutes erect, the pink flesh unsheathed, and far off a donkey braying filled the evening with a huge contentment.

  ‘At much, this weather?’ Boles asked.

  ‘The usual foolin’ around. Went to the auction.’

  ‘See anything there?’

  ‘No, the usual junk, the Ferguson went for a hundred. Not fit to pull you out of bed.’

  ‘Secondhand stuff is not the thing, a risk, no guarantee,’ Boles said, and then changed to ask: ‘Did I hear an engine running up this way an hour ago?’

  ‘None that I know of.’

  ‘I’d swear I heard an engine between the orchard and the house an hour ago.’

  ‘Country’s full of engines these days, Mr Boles. Can’t believe your ears where they come from.’

  ‘Strange.’ Boles was dissatisfied, but he changed again to ask: ‘Any word of Sinclair this weather?’

  ‘The crowd up for Croke Park saw him outside Amiens Street with an empty shopping bag. They said he looked shook. Booked close enough to the jump.’

  ‘Never looked very healthy.’

  ‘The ignorance and boredom of the people of this part of the country is appalling, simply appalling,’ Boles mimicked an English accent quietly. ‘That’s the speech he’ll make to Peter at the gate. A strange person.’

  ‘Touched, that’s all. I got to know his form well, the summer I bought this place from him and was waiting for him to shunt off. Especially when I was close to the house, mowing with the scythe there between the apple trees, he used to come out and spout to the end of the world. The ignorance and the boredom but nothing about his own bad manners and the rain, speaking as one intelligent man if you don’t mind to another, O Saecula Saeculorum world without end Amen the Lord deliver us. He even tried to show me how to put an edge on the scythe.’

  ‘I knew him fifteen years here.’

  ‘Fifteen too long, I’d say.’

  ‘No, he was a strange person. He suffered from the melancholy.’

  ‘But he had a pension, hadn’t he, from that cable in Valencia?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t money troubled him.’

  ‘No reason why we exist, Mr Boles. Why we were born. What do we know? Nothing, Mr Boles. Simply nothing. Scratching our arses, refining our ignorance. Try to see some make or shape on the nothing we know,’ Boles mimicked again.

  ‘That was his style, no mistaking, nature of the beast. The way he used to treat that wife of his was nobody’s business.’

  ‘In Valencia he met her, a girl in the post office. He used to cut firewood in the plantation, I remember, and he’d blow a whistle he had when he’d enough cut. She’d come running with a rope the minute she’d heard the whistle. It was a fair sight to see her come staggering up the meadow with a backload of timber, and him strolling behind, golfin’ at the daisies with the saw, shouting fore.’

  ‘Poor soft bitch. I knew a few’d give him fore, and the size of him in those plus fours. He should have stayed where he belonged.’

  ‘I am reduced to the final ambition of wanting to go back to look on the green of the billiard table in the Prince of Wales on Edward Road. They may have taken it away though. Sign of a misspent youth, proficiency at billiards,’ Boles mimicked again.

  ‘On the same tack to me in the orchard. A strange coot. Luther’s idea about women. The bed and the sink. As good to engage a pig in serious conversation as a woman. All candles were made to burn before the high altar of their cunts. It was no rush of faith, let me tell you good sir, that led to my conversion. I was dragged into your Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church by my male member. I’ll not forget in a hurry how he came out with that spiff.’

  ‘He had a curious blend of language sometimes,’ Boles said.

  ‘And he ends up after all his guff with an empty shopping bag outside Amiens Street Station.’

  ‘A lesson, but I liked him. Great smell of apples in the evening.’

  ‘Rotting on the ground. Wouldn’t pay you to gather. Except a few hundredweight for Breffni Blossom. They don’t mind the bruises.’

  ‘Better than wasti
n’ in the grass.’

  The passing cars had their headlamps on now. A mile away, over fields of stone walls, the lighted windows of the nine-twenty diesel rattled past.

  ‘Train to Sligo.’

  ‘Empty, I suppose.’

  ‘I suppose … Time to be moving in the general direction of the bed.’

  ‘No hurry, long enough lying down in the finish. How is the eczema?’

  ‘Stays quiet long as I don’t go near timber. I’ve got this stuff on to keep the midges off.’ He brushed his finger lightly along his cheek.

  ‘If everything was right we’d appreciate nothing.’

  ‘Still, I’d have sworn I heard a chainsaw up this way today,’ Boles said as he turned to the road.

  ‘Must have been from elsewhere,’ Gillespie contradicted. ‘What the wind can do with sounds is no joke.’

  ‘There was hardly a puff of wind today.’

  ‘Surprising what even a little can do, as the woman said when she pissed in the ocean.’ Gillespie laughed aggressively.

  ‘I was certain, but time to go,’ Boles said and called his dog.

  ‘No use detaining you if you have, though it’s young, the night, yet.’

  ‘Goodnight, then.’

  ‘ ’Night, Mr Boles.’

  He watched him go, the light tapping of the cattle cane in time to the drag of feet in slippers, calling ‘Heel’ to the dog as headlamps flooded the road from Boyle.

  ‘That’s what’ll give him something to think about,’ Gillespie muttered as he called his own dog back and turned towards the house.

  Christmas

  As well as a railway ticket they gave me a letter before I left the Home to work for Moran. They warned me to give the letter unopened to Moran, which was why I opened it on the train; it informed him that since I was a ward of state if I caused trouble or ran away he was to contact the guards at once. I tore it up, since it occurred to me that I might well cause trouble or run away, resolving to say I lost it if asked, but he did not ask for any letter.

  Moran and his wife treated me well. The food was more solid than at the Home, a roast always on Sundays, and when the weather grew hard they took me to the town and bought me wellingtons and an overcoat and a cap with flaps that came down over the ears. After the day’s work when Moran had gone to the pub, I was free to sit at the fire while Mrs Moran knitted, and listen to the wireless – what I enjoyed most were the plays – and Mrs Moran told me she was knitting a pullover for me for Christmas. Sometimes she asked me about life at the Home and when I’d tell her she’d sigh, ‘You must be very glad to be with us instead,’ and I would tell her, which was true, that I was. I usually went to bed before Moran came back from the pub, as they often quarrelled then, and I considered I had no place in that part of their lives.

  Moran made his living by buying cheap branches or uncommercial timber the sawmills couldn’t use and cutting them up to sell as firewood. I delivered the timber with an old jennet Moran had bought from the tinkers. The jennet squealed, a very human squeal, any time a fire of branches was lit, and ran, about the only time he did run, to stand in rigid contentment with his nostrils in the thick of the wood smoke. When Moran was in good humour it amused him greatly to light a fire to see the jennet’s excitement at the prospect of smoke.

  There was no reason this life shouldn’t have gone on for long but for a stupid wish on my part, which set off an even more stupid wish in Mrs Grey, and what happened has struck me ever since as usual when people look to each other for their happiness or whatever it is called. Mrs Grey was Moran’s best customer. She’d come from America and built the huge house on top of Mounteagle after her son had been killed in aerial combat over Italy.

  The thaw overhead in the bare branches had stopped the evening we filled that load for Mrs Grey. There was no longer the dripping on the dead leaves, the wood clamped in the silence of white frost except for the racket some bird made in the undergrowth. Moran carefully built the last logs above the crates of the cart and I threw him the bag of hay that made the load look bigger than it was. ‘Don’t forget to call at Murphy’s for her paraffin,’ he said. ‘No, I’ll not forget.’ ‘She’s bound to tip you well this Christmas. We could use money for the Christmas.’ He’d use it to pour drink down his gullet. ‘Must be time to be moving,’ I said. ‘It’ll be night before you’re there,’ he answered.

  The cart rocked over the roots between the trees, cold steel of the bridle ring in the hand close to the rough black lips, steam of the breath wasting on the air to either side. We went across the paddocks to the path round the lake, the wheels cutting two tracks on the white stiff grass, crush of the grass yielding to the iron. I had to open the wooden gate to the pass. The small shod hooves wavered between the two ridges of green inside the wheeltracks on the pass, the old body swaying to each drive of the shafts as the wheels fell from rut to rut.

  The lake was frozen over, a mirror fouled by white blotches of the springs, and rose streaks from the sun were impaled on the firs of Oakport across the bay.

  The chainsaw started up in the wood again. He’d saw while there was light. ‘No joke to make a living, a drink or two for some relief, all this ballsing. May be better if we stayed in bed, conserve our energy, eat less,’ but in spite of all he said he went on buying the branches cheap from McAnnish after the boats had taken the trunks down the river to the mill.

  I tied the jennet to the chapel gate and crossed to Murphy’s shop.

  ‘I want Mrs Grey’s paraffin.’

  The shop was full of men. They sat on the counter or on wooden fruit boxes and upturned buckets along the walls. They used to trouble me at first. I supposed it little different from going into a shop in a strange country without its language, but they learned they couldn’t take a rise out of me, that was their phrase. They used to lob tomatoes at the back of my head in the hope of some reaction, but they left me mostly alone when they saw none was forthcoming. If I felt anything for them it was a contempt tempered by fear: I was here, and they were there.

  ‘You want her paraffin, do you? I know the paraffin I’d give her if I got your chance,’ Joe Murphy said from the centre of the counter where he presided, and a loyal guffaw rose from around the walls.

  ‘Her proper paraffin,’ someone shouted, and it drew even more applause, and when it died a voice asked, ‘Before you get off the counter, Joe, throw us an orange.’

  Joe stretched to the shelf and threw the orange to the man who sat on a bag of Spanish onions. As he stretched forward to catch the fruit the red string bag collapsed and he came heavily down on the onions. ‘You want to bruise those onions with your dirty awkward arse. Will you pay for them now, will you?’ Joe shouted as he swung his thick legs down from the counter.

  ‘Everybody’s out for their onions these days.’ The man tried to defend himself with a nervous laugh as he fixed the string bag upright and changed his seat to an orange box.

  ‘You’ve had your onions: now pay for them.’

  ‘Make him pay for his onions,’ they shouted.

  ‘You must give her her paraffin first.’ Joe took the tin, and went to the barrel raised on flat blocks in the corner, and turned the copper tap.

  ‘Now give her the proper paraffin. It’s Christmas time,’ Joe said again as he screwed the cap tight on the tin, the limp black hair falling across the bloated face.

  ‘Her proper paraffin,’ the approving cheer followed me out of the door.

  ‘He never moved a muscle, the little fucker. Those homeboys are a bad piece of work,’ I heard with much satisfaction as I stowed the tin of paraffin securely among the logs of the cart. Ice over the potholes of the road was catching the first stars. Lights of bicycles – it was a confession night – hesitantly approached out of the night. Though exposed in the full glare of their lamps I was unable to recognize the bicyclists as they pedalled past in dark shapes behind their lamps, and this made raw the fear I’d felt but had held down in the shop. I took a stick and beat the r
eluctant jennet into pulling the load uphill as fast as he was able.

  After I’d stacked the logs in the fuel shed I went and knocked on the back door to see where they wanted me to put the paraffin. Mrs Grey opened the door.

  ‘It’s the last load until after Christmas,’ I said as I put the tin down.

  ‘I haven’t forgotten.’ She smiled and held out a pound note.

  ‘I’d rather not take it.’ It was there the first mistake was made, playing for higher stakes.

  ‘You must have something. Besides the firewood you’ve brought us so many messages from the village that we don’t know what we’d have done without you.’

  ‘I don’t want money.’

  ‘Then what would you like me to give you for Christmas?’

  ‘Whatever you’d prefer to give me.’ I thought prefer was well put for a homeboy.

  ‘I’ll have to give it some thought, then,’ she said as I led the jennet out of the yard, delirious with stupid happiness.

  ‘You got the paraffin and logs there without trouble?’ Moran beamed when I came in to the smell of hot food. He’d changed into good clothes and was finishing his meal at the head of the big table in tired contentment.

  ‘There was no trouble,’ I answered.

  ‘You’ve fed and put in the jennet?’

  ‘I gave him crushed oats.’

  ‘I bet you Mrs Grey was pleased.’

  ‘She seemed pleased.’

  He’d practically his hand out. ‘You got something good out of it, then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You mean to say she gave you nothing?’

  ‘Not tonight but maybe she will before Christmas.’

  ‘Maybe she will but she always gave a pound with the last load before,’ he said suspiciously. His early contentment was gone.

  He took his cap and coat to go for a drink or two for some relief.

  ‘If there’s an international crisis in the next few hours you know where I’ll be found,’ he said to Mrs Moran as he left.