Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  ‘You promised,’ I accused.

  ‘Honest, I’ll read it when it rains. Why can’t we go to the river same as before!’

  ‘I don’t want to go to the river. Why don’t we go to see Lavin?’ I said in thirst for some perversity.

  ‘That’s a great idea.’ I was taken aback by his enthusiasm. ‘Why don’t we see old John?’

  I walked slowly and sullenly to Lavin’s, resentful that he had fallen so easily in with my proposal.

  Tools beginning to rust were outside on the old bench and the door was open. Lavin sat inside, his foot upon a footrest. The foot was wrapped in multicoloured rags that included red flannel and stank in the heat. Casey crossed the shavings-littered floor to the empty fireplace to ask, ‘How’s the old foot, John?’

  ‘Playing me up, Charley Boy, but Himself was never in better order.’

  ‘I’ve no doubt,’ Charley laughed loudly.

  I stood close to the door in smouldering anger.

  ‘How are the two beauties of sisters? The thatch must be good and black and thick, eh? Brimmin’ with juice inside, or have they shaved?’ The smile came instantly, the repetitious fondling voice lingered on each word.

  ‘No. They didn’t shave it, John. It’s as thick as thatch. Not that thatch is going to be all that thick above your head for long,’ Casey laughed.

  ‘Never mind the roof now. How is little John Charles coming along? Sprouting nicely?’ He touched Casey’s fly gently with his fingertips.

  ‘You have to show me yours first. You never saw such a weapon as old John has.’ Casey laughed and winked towards me at the door.

  ‘No sooner said than done.’ Suddenly Lavin opened his trousers.

  ‘A fair weapon and as stiff as a stake.’ Casey gripped it in his fist.

  ‘Know the only place the stiffs get in – the cunt and the grave,’ Lavin joked, his mouth showing black stumps of teeth as he laughed.

  ‘I bet you put it stiff and hard into the gypsy, old Johnny Balls,’ Casey teased.

  ‘Yeah, and what about seeing little John Charles now?’

  ‘Fire ahead,’ Casey laughed. I wanted to shout but couldn’t as Lavin unbuttoned Casey’s fly and gently started to play with it in his fingers.

  ‘Sprouting along royal, fit for milking any day.’

  He fondled the penis until it was erect and then stretched to take a heavy carpenter’s rule from the mantel.

  ‘An increase of a good inch since the last time, upon my soul,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come up from the door to see which little John Charles is farthest advanced?’

  ‘No.’ I fought back tears of rage.

  ‘Come on,’ Casey said challengingly. ‘Let old John compare them.’

  ‘I don’t want.’

  ‘Have it your own way, so,’ he said, and as he took the rule to measure Lavin I left and waited outside. He soon followed.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ I attacked immediately.

  ‘Oh, I like to take a hand at old John every now and then and get him all worked up,’ he said casually.

  ‘Why did you let him fool around with you?’

  ‘What does it matter? It gets him all worked up.’

  ‘It’s disgusting,’ I said, disturbed by feelings that had never touched me so fiercely before.

  ‘Oh, what does it matter? He’ll soon be in the poorhouse. Why don’t we go for a swim?’

  I walked in sullen silence by his side across the bridge. I wanted to swim with him but I wanted to reject him, and in my heart I hated him. I calmed as we walked. At the boathouse I helped him lift someone’s night line. It had no fish though the hooks had been cleaned of bait. We started to talk again as we went to where the high whitethorns shielded the river from the road. We stripped on the bank and swam and afterwards lay on the warm moss watching the bream shoal out beyond the reeds, their black fins moving sluggishly above the calm surface, white gleam of the bellies as they slowly rolled, until harness bells sounded on the road behind the whitethorns.

  At the iron gate, where the whitethorns ended, two gypsy caravans and a spring cart came into our view. The little round curtained window in the back glittered in the sun, and two dogs roped to the axle trotted, heads low, mechanically, between the red wheels. Now and then a whip cracked above the horses’ heads into the jingling of the harness bells.

  ‘Do you think Lavin did what he was supposed to do to the gypsy girl?’ I asked.

  ‘He’d hardly have to pay with the farm if he didn’t,’ Casey answered with quiet logic. The image of the monstrous penis being driven deep into the struggling gypsy girl made me shiver with excitement.

  ‘It’d be good if we had two caravans, you and me, like the caravans gone past. You and me would live in one caravan. We’d keep four women in the other. We’d ride around Ireland. We’d make them do anything we’d want to.’ If Casey had been more forward with Lavin early on, I was leading now.

  ‘It’d be great,’ he answered.

  ‘They’d strip the minute we said strip. If they didn’t we’d whip them. We’d whip them with those whips that have bits of metal on the ends. We’d whip them until the blood came and they’d to put arms round our knees for mercy.’

  ‘Yes, we’d make them get down on their hands and knees, naked, and do them from behind the way the bull does,’ Casey said, and dived sideways to seize a frog in the grass. He took a dried stem of reed and began to insert it in the frog. ‘That’s what’ll tickle him, I’m telling you.’

  ‘Why couldn’t we do it together?’ I tentatively asked, stiff with excitement. He understood at once.

  ‘I’ll do it to you first,’ he said, the dead reed sticking out of the frog in his hand, ‘and then you’ll do it to me.’

  ‘Why don’t you let me do it to you first, and then you can have as long as you like on me?’

  ‘No.’

  The fear was unspoken: whoever took his pleasure first would have the other in his power and then might not surrender his own body. We avoided each other’s eyes. I watched the dead reed being moved in and out of the frog.

  ‘They say it hurts,’ I said. There was relief now of not having to go through with it.

  ‘It’d probably hurt too much.’ Charley Casey was eager to agree. ‘It’d be better to get two women and hurt them. They say a frog can live only so long under water.’

  ‘Why don’t we see?’

  I found a stone along the bank and we tied one of the frog’s legs with fishing line to the stone. We took it some hundred yards up the bank to where a shallow stream joined the river. We dropped the stone and watched the frog claw upwards, but each time it was dragged back by the line, until it weakened, and it drowned.

  We crossed the bridge in silence, already changing. I helped him at school for some time afterwards but in the evenings we avoided each other, as if we were aware of some shameful truth we were afraid to come to know together.

  I never saw Lavin again. They took him to the poorhouse that October when the low hedges were blue with sloes, though by then the authorities referred to it as the Resthome for Senior Citizens.

  Casey is now married, with children, and runs a pub called the Crown and Anchor somewhere in Manchester, but I’ve never had any wish to look him up. In fact he seldom enters my mind. But as I grow older hardly a day passes but a picture of Lavin comes to trouble me: it is of him when he was young, and, they said, handsome, gathering the scattered tools at nightfall in a clean wheatfield after the others had gone drinking or to change for the dances.

  My Love, My Umbrella

  It was the rain, the constant weather of this city, made my love inseparable from the umbrella, a black umbrella, white stitching on the seams of the imitation leather over the handle, the metal point bent where it was caught in Mooney’s grating as we raced for the last bus to the garage out of Abbey Street. The band was playing when we met, the Blanchardstown Fife and Drum. They were playing Some day he’ll come along/The man I love/And he’ll be big and strong/
The man I love at the back of the public lavatory on Burgh Quay, facing a few persons on the pavement in front of the Scotch House. It was the afternoon of a Sunday.

  ‘It is strange, the band,’ I said; her face flinched away, and in the same movement back, turned to see who’d spoken. Her skin under the black hair had the glow of health and youth, and the solidity at the bones of the hips gave promise of a rich seed-bed.

  ‘It’s strange,’ she answered, and I was at once anxious for her body.

  The conductor stood on a wooden box, continually breaking off his conducting to engage in some running argument with a small grey man by his side, but whether he waved his stick jerkily or was bent in argument seemed to make no difference to the players. They turned their pages. The music plodded on, Some day he’ll come along/The man I love/And he’ll be big and strong/The man I love. At every interval they looked towards the clock, Mooney’s clock across the river.

  ‘They’re watching the clock,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’ her face turned again.

  ‘They’ll only play till the opening hour.’

  I too anxiously watched the clock. I was afraid she’d go when the band stopped. Lights came on inside the Scotch House. The music hurried. A white-aproned barman, a jangle of keys into the quickened music, began to unlock the folding shutters and with a resounding clash drew them back. As the tune ended the conductor signalled to the band that they could put away their instruments, got down from his box, and started to tap the small grey man on the shoulder with the baton as he began to argue in earnest. The band came across the road towards the lighted globes inside the Scotch House, where already many of their audience waited impatiently on the slow pulling of the pints. The small grey man carried the conductor’s box as they passed in together.

  ‘It is what we said would happen.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The small family cars were making their careful way home across the bridge after their Sunday outings to their cold ham and tomato and lettuce, the wind blowing from the mouth of the river, gulls screeching above the stink of its low tide, as I forced the inanities towards an invitation.

  ‘Would you come with me for a drink?’

  ‘Why?’ She blushed as she looked me full in the face.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I said I’d be back for tea.’

  ‘We can have sandwiches.’

  ‘But why do you want me to?’

  ‘I’d like very much if you come. Will you come?’

  ‘All right I’ll come but I don’t know why.’

  It was how we began, the wind blowing from the mouth of the river while the Blanchardstown Fife and Drum downed their first thirst-quencher in the Scotch House.

  They’d nothing but beef left in Mooney’s after the weekend. We had stout with our sandwiches. Soon, in the drowsiness of the stout, we did little but watch the others drinking. I pointed out a poet to her. I recognized him from his pictures in the paper. His shirt was open-necked inside a gabardine coat and he wore a hat with a small feather in its band. She asked me if I liked poetry.

  ‘When I was younger,’ I said. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Not very much.’

  She asked me if I could hear what the poet was saying to the four men at his table who continually plied him with whiskey. I hadn’t heard. Now we both listened. He was saying he loved the blossoms of Kerr Pinks more than roses, a man could only love what he knew well, and it was the quality of the love that mattered and not the accident. The whole table said they’d drink to that, but he glared at them as if slighted, and as if to avoid the glare they called for a round of doubles. While the drinks were coming from the bar the poet turned aside and took a canister from his pocket. The inside of the lid was coated with a white powder which he quickly licked clean. She thought it was baking soda. Her father in the country took baking soda for his stomach. We had more stout and we noticed, while each new round was coming, the poet turned away from the table to lick clean the fresh coat of soda on the inside of the canister lid.

  That was the way our first evening went. People who came into the pub were dripping with rain and we stayed until they’d draped the towels over the pump handles and called ‘Time’ in the hope the weather would clear, but it did not.

  The beat of rain was so fierce when we came out that the street was a dance of glass shapes, and they reminded me of blackened spikes on the brass candleshrine which hold the penny candles before the altar.

  ‘Does it remind you of the candlespikes?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, now that you mention it.’

  Perhaps the rain, the rain will wash away the poorness of our attempts at speech, our bodies will draw closer, closer than our speech, I hoped, as she returned on the throat my kiss in the bus; and from the bus, under the beat of rain on the umbrella, we walked beyond Fairview church.

  ‘Will I be able to come in?’ I asked.

  ‘It would cause trouble.’

  ‘You have your own room?’

  ‘The man who owns the house watches. He would make trouble.’

  Behind the church was a dead end overhung with old trees, and the street lights did not reach as far as the wall at its end, a grey orchard wall with some ivy.

  ‘Can we stay here a short time, then?’

  I hung upon the silence, afraid she’d use the rain as excuse, and breathed when she said, ‘Not for long, it is late.’

  We moved under the umbrella out of the street light, fumbling for certain footing between the tree roots.

  ‘Will you hold the umbrella?’

  She took the imitation leather with the white stitching in her hands.

  Our lips moved on the saliva of our mouths as I slowly undid the coat button. I tried to control the trembling so as not to tear the small white buttons of the blouse. Coat, blouse, brassière, as names of places on a road. I globed the warm soft breasts in hands. I leaned across the cold metal above the imitation leather she held in her hands to take the small nipples gently in teeth, the steady beat on the umbrella broken by irregular splashes from the branches.

  Will she let me? I was afraid as I lifted the woollen skirt; and slowly I moved hands up the soft insides of the thighs, and instead of the ‘No’ I feared and waited for, the handle became a hard pressure as she pressed on my lips.

  I could no longer control the trembling as I felt the sheen of the knickers, I drew them down to her knees, and parted the lips to touch the juices. She hung on my lips. She twitched as the fingers went deeper. She was a virgin.

  ‘It hurts.’ The cold metal touched my face, the rain duller on the sodden cloth by now.

  ‘I won’t hurt you,’ I said, and pumped low between her thighs, lifting high the coat and skirt so that the seed fell free into the mud and rain, and after resting on each other’s mouth I replaced the clothes.

  Under the umbrella, one foot asleep, we walked past the small iron railings of the gardens towards her room, and at the gate I left her with, ‘Where will we meet again?’

  We would meet at eight against the radiators inside the Metropole.

  We met against those silver radiators three evenings every week for long. We went to cinemas or sat in pubs, it was the course of our love, and as it always rained we made love under the umbrella beneath the same trees in the same way. They say the continuance of sexuality is due to the penis having no memory, and mine each evening spilt its seed into the mud and decomposing leaves as if it was always for the first time.

  Sometimes we told each other stories. I thought one of the stories she told me very cruel, but I did not tell her.

  She’d grown up on a small farm. The neighbouring farm was owned by a Pat Moran who lived on it alone after the death of his mother. As a child she used to look for nests of hens that were laying wild on his farm and he often brought her chocolates or oranges from the fairs. As she grew, feeling the power of her body, she began to provoke him, until one evening on her way to the well through his fields, where he was pruning a whitethorn hedg
e with a billhook, she lay in the soft grass and showed him so much of her body beneath the clothes that he dropped the billhook and seized her. She struggled loose and shouted as she ran, ‘I’ll tell my Daddy, you pig.’ She was far too afraid to tell her father, but it was as if a wall came down between her and Pat Moran who soon afterwards sold his farm and went to England though he’d never known any other life but that of a small farmer.

  She’d grown excited in the telling and asked me what I thought of the story. I said that I thought life was often that way. She then asked me if I had any stories in my life. I said I did, but there was one story that I read in the evening paper that interested me most, since it had indirectly got to do with us.

  It was a report of a prosecution. In the rush hour at Bank Station in London two city gents had lost tempers in the queue and assaulted each other with umbrellas. They had inflicted severe injuries with the umbrellas. The question before the judge: was it a case of common assault or, much more serious, assault with dangerous weapon with intent to wound? In view of the extent of the injuries inflicted it had not been an easy decision, but eventually he found for common assault, since he didn’t want the thousands of peaceable citizens who used their umbrellas properly to feel that when they travelled to and from work they were carrying dangerous weapons. He fined and bound both gentlemen to the peace, warned them severely as to their future conduct, but he did not impose a prison sentence, as he would have been forced to do if he’d found the umbrella to be a dangerous weapon.

  ‘What do you think of the story?’

  ‘I think it’s pretty silly. Let’s go home,’ she said though it was an hour from the closing hour, raising the umbrella as soon as we reached the street. It was raining as usual.

  ‘Why did you tell that silly story about the umbrellas?’ she asked on the bus.

  ‘Why did you tell the story of the farmer?’

  ‘They were different,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. They were different,’ I agreed. For some reason she resented the story.