Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  In the rain we made love again, she the more fierce, and after the seed spilled she said, ‘Wait,’ and moving on a dying penis, under the unsteady umbrella in her hands, she trembled towards an inarticulate cry of pleasure, and as we walked into the street lamp I asked, we had so fallen into the habit of each other, ‘Would you think we should ever get married?’ ‘Kiss me.’ She leaned across the steel between us. ‘Do you think we should?’ I repeated. ‘What would it mean to you?’ she asked.

  What I had were longings or fears rather than any meanings. To go with her on the train to Thurles on a Friday evening in summer and walk the three miles to her house from the station. To be woken the next morning by the sheepdog barking the postman to the door and have tea and brown bread and butter in a kitchen with the cool of brown flagstones and full of the smell of recent baking.

  Or: fear of a housing estate in Clontarf, escape to the Yacht Sunday mornings to read the papers in peace over pints, come home dazed in the midday light of the sea front to the Sunday roast with a peace offering of sweets. Afterwards in the drowse of food and drink to be woken by, ‘You promised to take us out for the day, Daddy,’ until you backed the hire-purchased Volk-swagen out the gateway and drove to Howth and stared out at the sea through the gathering condensation on the semicircles the wipers made on the windshield, and quelled quarrels and cries of the bored children in the back seat.

  I decided not to tell her either of these pictures as they might seem foolish to her.

  ‘We’d have to save if we were to think about it,’ I heard her voice.

  ‘We don’t save very much, do we?’

  ‘At the rate the money goes in the pubs we might as well throw our hat at it. Why did you ask?’

  ‘Because’, it was not easy to answer then, when I had to think, ‘I like being with you.’

  ‘Why, why’, she asked, ‘did you tell that stupid story about the umbrellas?’

  ‘It happened, didn’t it? And we never make love without an umbrella. It reminded me of you.’

  ‘Such rubbish,’ she said angrily. ‘The sea and sand and a hot beach at night, needing only a single sheet, that’d make some sense, but an umbrella?’

  It was the approach of summer and it was the false confidence it brings that undid me. It rained less. One bright moonlit night I asked her to hold the umbrella.

  ‘For what?’

  She was so fierce that I pretended it’d been a joke.

  ‘I don’t see much of a joke standing like a fool holding an umbrella to the blessed moonlight,’ she said.

  We made love awkwardly, the umbrella lying in the dry leaves, but I was angry that she wouldn’t fall in with my wish, and another night when she asked, ‘Where are you going on your holidays?’ I lied that I didn’t know. ‘I’ll go home if I haven’t enough money. And you?’ I asked. She didn’t answer. I saw she resented that I’d made no effort to include her in the holiday. Sun and sand and sea, I thought maliciously, and decided to break free from her. Summer was coming and the world full of possibilities. I did not lead her under the trees behind the church, but left after kissing her lightly, ‘Goodnight.’ Instead of arranging to meet as usual at the radiators, I said, ‘I’ll ring you during the week.’ Her look of anger and hatred elated me. ‘Ring if you want,’ she said as she angrily closed the door.

  I was so clownishly elated that I threw the umbrella high in the air and laughing loudly caught it coming down, and there was the exhilaration of staying free those first days; but it soon palled. In the empty room trying to read, while the trains went by at the end of the garden with its two apple trees and one pear, I began to realize I’d fallen more into the habit of her than I’d known. Not wanting to have to see the umbrella I put it behind the wardrobe, but it seemed to be more present than ever there; and often the longing for her lips, her body, grew, close to sickness, and eventually dragged me to the telephone.

  ‘I didn’t expect to hear from you after this time,’ she said.

  ‘I was ill.’

  She was ominously silent as if she knew it for the lie that it was.

  ‘I wondered if we could meet?’

  ‘If you want,’ she answered. ‘When?’

  ‘What about tonight?’

  ‘I cannot but tomorrow night is all right.’

  ‘At eight, then, at the radiators?’

  ‘Say, at Wynn’s Hotel instead.’

  The imagination, quickened by distance and uncertainty, found it hard to wait till the eight of the next day, but when the bus drew in, and she was already waiting, the mind slipped back into its old complacency.

  ‘Where’d you like to go?’

  ‘Some place quiet. Where we can talk,’ she said.

  Crossing the bridge, past where the band had played the first day we met, the Liffey was still in the summer evening.

  ‘I missed you a great deal.’ I tried to draw close, her hands were white gloved.

  ‘What was your sickness?’

  ‘Some kind of flu.’

  She was hard and separate as we walked. It was one of the new lounge bars she picked. It had piped music and red cushions. The bar was empty, the barman polishing glasses. He brought the Guinness and sweet sherry to the table.

  ‘What did you want to say?’ I asked when the barman had returned to polishing the glasses.

  ‘That I’ve thought about it and that our going out is a waste of time. It’s a waste of your time and mine.’

  It was as if a bandage had been torn from an open wound.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘It will come to nothing.’

  ‘You’ve got someone else, then?’

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with it.’

  ‘But why, then?’

  ‘I don’t love you.’

  ‘But we’ve had many happy evenings together.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not enough.’

  ‘I thought that after a time we would get married.’ I would grovel on the earth or anything to keep her then. Little by little my life had fallen into her keeping, it was only in the loss I had come to know it, life without her, the pain of the loss of my own life without the oblivion the dead have, all longing changed to die out of my own life on her lips, in her thighs, since it was only through her it lived.

  ‘It wouldn’t work,’ she said, and, sure of her power, ‘All those wasted evenings under that old umbrella. And that moonlit night you tried to get me to hold it up like some eejit. What did you take me for?’

  ‘I meant no harm and couldn’t we try to make a new start?’

  ‘No. There should be something magical about getting married. We know too much about each other. There’s nothing more to discover.’

  ‘You mean … our bodies?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She moved to go and I was desperate.

  ‘Will you have one more drink?’

  ‘No, I don’t really want.’

  ‘Can we not meet just once more?’

  ‘No.’ She rose to go. ‘It’d only uselessly prolong it and come to the same thing in the end.’

  ‘Are you so sure? If there was just one more chance?’

  ‘No. And there’s no need for you to see me to the bus. You can finish your drink.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ and followed her through the swing-door.

  At the stop in front of the Bank of Ireland I tried one last time. ‘Can I not see you home this last night?’

  ‘No, it’s easier this way.’

  ‘You’re meeting someone else, then?’

  ‘No.’

  It was clean as a knife. I watched her climb on the bus, fumble in her handbag, take the fare from a small purse, open her hand to the conductor as the bus turned the corner. I watched to see if she’d look back, if she’d give any sign, but she did not. All my love and life had gone and I had to wait till it was gone to know it.

  I then realized I’d left the umbrella in the pub, and started to return slowly for it. I went through the swing-door, took
the umbrella from where it leaned against the red cushion, raised it and said, ‘Just left this behind,’ to the barman’s silent inquiry, as if the performance of each small act would numb the pain.

  I got to no southern sea or city that summer. The body I’d tried to escape from became my only thought. In the late evening after pub-close, I’d stop in terror at the thought of what hands were fondling her body, and would, if I had power, have made all casual sex a capital offence. On the street I’d see a coat or dress she used to wear, especially a cheap blue dress with white dots, zipped at the back, that was fashionable that summer, and with beating heart would push through the crowds till I was level with the face that wore the dress, but the face was never her face.

  I often rang her, pleading, and one lunch hour she consented to see me when I said I was desperate. We walked aimlessly through streets of the lunch hour, and I’d to hold back tears as I thanked her for kindness, though when she’d given me all her evenings and body I’d hardly noticed. The same night after pub-close I went – driven by the urge that brings people back to the rooms where they once lived and no longer live – and stood out of the street lamps under the trees where so often we had stood, in the hope that some meaning of my life or love would come, but the night only hardened about the growing absurdity of a man standing under an umbrella beneath the drip from the green leaves of the trees.

  Through my love it was the experience of my own future death I was passing through, for the life of the desperate equals the anxiety of death, and before time had replaced all its bandages I found relief in movement, in getting on buses and riding to the terminus; and one day at Killester I heard the conductor say to the driver as they sat downstairs through their ten-minute rest, ‘Jasus, this country is going to the dogs entirely. There’s a gent up there who looks normal enough who must umpteen times this last year have come out here to nowhere and back,’ and as I listened I felt like a patient after a long illness when the doctor says, ‘You can start getting up tomorrow,’ and I gripped the black umbrella with an almost fierce determination to be as I was before, unknowingly happy under the trees, and the umbrella, in the wet evenings that are the normal weather of this city.

  The Recruiting Officer

  Two cars outside the low concrete wall of Arigna School, small and blue-slated between the coal mountains; rust of iron on the rocks of the trout stream that ran past the playground; the chant of children coming through the open windows into the rain-cleaned air: it was this lured me back into the schoolroom of this day – to watch my manager, Canon Reilly, thrash the boy Walshe; to wait for the Recruiting Officer to come – but a deeper reason than the quiet picture of the school between mountains in bringing me back, can only be finally placed on something deep in my own nature, a total paralysis of the will, and a feeling that any one thing in this life is almost as worthwhile doing as any other.

  I had got out of the Christian Brothers, I no longer wore the black clothes and white half-collar, and was no longer surrounded by the rules of the order in its monastery; but then, after the first freedom, I was afraid; it was that I was alone.

  I had come to visit one of my married sisters, when I saw the quiet school. I said I too would live out my life in the obscurity of these small places; if I was lucky I’d find a young girl. To grow old with her among a people seemed ambition enough, there might even be children and fields and garden.

  I got a school immediately, without trouble. The newly trained teachers wanted places in the university towns, not in these backwaters.

  Now I am growing old in the school where I began. I have not married. I lodge in a pub in Carrick-on-Shannon. I travel in and out the seven miles on a bike to escape the pupils and their parents once the school is shut, to escape from always having to play an expected role. It is rumoured that I drink too much.

  With mostly indifference I stand at the window and watch Canon Reilly shake a confession out of the boy Walshe, much as a dog shakes life out of a rat; and having nothing to do but watch I think of the sea. We went to the sea in summer, a black straggle in front of Novicemaster O’Grady, in threes, less risk of buggery in threes than pairs, the boards of the bridge across to the Bull hollow under the tread of our black sandals, and below us the tide washing against the timber posts. Far out on the Wall we stripped, guarding our eyes on the rocks facing south across the bay to the Pidgeon House, and when O’Grady blew the whistle we made signs of the cross on ourselves with the salt water and jumped in. He blew it again when it was time for us to get out. We towelled and dressed on the rocks, guarding our eyes, glad no sand could get between our toes, and in threes trooped home ahead of O’Grady and past the wired-down idiotic palm trees along the front.

  The bell for night prayers went at nine-thirty, the two rows of pews stretching to the altar, a row along each wall and the bare lino-covered space between empty of all furniture, and we knelt in the long rows in order of our rank, the higher the rank the closer to the altar. On Friday nights we knelt in the empty space between the pews and said: My very dear Brothers, I accuse myself of all the faults I have committed since my last accusation, I broke the rule of silence twice, three times I failed to guard my eyes. After a certain rank and age the guarding of the eyes wasn’t mentioned, you were supposed to be past all that by then, but I never reached that stage. I got myself booted out before I became impervious to a low view of passing girls, especially on windy days.

  The sea and the bell, nothing seems ever ended, it is such nonsenses I’d like written on my gravestone in the hope they’d sow confusion.

  ‘You admit it now after you saw you couldn’t brazen your way out of it,’ Reilly shouts at the boy, holding him by the arm in the empty space between the table and the long benches where the classes sit in rows.

  ‘Now. Out with what you spent the money on.’

  ‘Lemonade,’ the low answer comes, the white-faced boy starting to blubber.

  ‘Lemonade, yes, lemonade, that’s how you let the cat out of the bag. The Walshes don’t have shillings to squander in the shops on lemonade every day of the week.’

  Still gripping the boy by the arm he turns to the rows of faces in the benches.

  ‘What sins did Walshe commit – mind I say sins, not one sin – but I don’t know how to call it – this foul act?’

  I watch the hands shoot up with more attention than I’d given to the dreary inquisition of the boy. I was under examination now.

  ‘The sin of stealing, Canon.’

  ‘Good, but mind I said sins. It is most important in an examination of conscience before confession to know all the sins of your soul. One foul act can entail several sins.’

  ‘Lies, Canon.’

  ‘Good, but I’m looking for the most grievous sin of all.’

  He turned from the blank faces to look at me: why do they not know?

  ‘Where was the poorbox when it was broken open?’ I ask, having to force the question out. Even after the years of inspectors I’ve never got used to teaching in another’s presence, the humiliation and the sense of emptiness in turning oneself into a performing robot in a semblance of teaching.

  ‘In the church, sir.’

  ‘An offence against a holy person, place or thing – what is that sin called?’

  ‘Sacrilege.’ The hands at once go up.

  ‘Good, but if you know something properly you shouldn’t need all that spoonfeeding.’ The implied criticism of me he addresses to the children.

  ‘Stealing, lies, and blackest of all – sacrilege.’ He turns again to the boy in his grip.

  ‘If I hand you over to the guards do you know where that will lead, Walshe? To the reformatory. Would you like to go to the reformatory, Walshe?’

  ‘No, Canon.’

  ‘You have two choices. You can either take your medicine from me here in front of the class or you can come to the barracks. Which’ll you take?’

  ‘You, Canon.’ He tries to appease with an appearance of total abjection and miser
y.

  ‘It’s going to be no picnic. You’ll have to be taught once and for all in your life that the church of God is sacred.’ He raises his voice close to declamation, momentarily releases his grip on the arm, takes a length of electric wire from his pocket. The boy whimpers quietly as the priest folds it in two before taking a firm grip on the arm again.

  ‘It’s going to hurt, Walshe. But if you’re ever again tempted to steal from the church you’ll have something to remember!’

  In a half-circle the beating moves, the boy trying to sink to the floor to escape the whistle and thud of the wire wrapping round his bare legs but held up by the arm, the boy’s screaming and the heavy breathing of the priest filling the silence of the faces watching from the long benches in frightened fascination. When he finally lets go of the arm the boy sinks in a heap on the floor, the moaning changing to an hysterical sobbing.

  ‘Get up and go to your place and I hope that’s the last lesson you’ll have to be ever taught.’ He puts the length of wire back in his pocket and takes out a blue cloth to wipe his forehead.

  The boy cowers as he rises, arms automatically protecting his torn legs, moves in a beaten crawl to his place, plunges his face in rage and shame into the folds of his arms and continues sobbing hysterically.

  ‘Open your geographies and get on with your study of the Shannon,’ I say as the heads turn towards Walshe. There’s the flap of the books being opened. They find the page, stealing a quick furtive look towards the boy as they bend their heads. In the sobbing silence the clock ticks.

  ‘An example had to be made to nip that blackguardism in the bud.’ He turns to me at the window.

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘How do you mean suppose?’ The eyes are dangerous.

  ‘I suppose it was necessary to do.’

  ‘It was necessary,’ he emphasizes, and after a pause, ‘What I’d like to see is religious instruction to counteract such influences after Second Mass every Sunday. Mr McMurrough always took it.’

  ‘It’s too far for me to come from the town to take.’

  ‘I can’t see any justification for you living in the town. I can’t see why you can’t live in the parish. The Miss Bambricks at the post office have mentioned to me that they’d be glad to put you up.’