Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  The Miss Bambricks were two church-mad old maids who grew flowers for the altar and laundered the linen.

  Old McMurrough, whom I had replaced and who now lay in the Sligo madhouse reciting poetry and church doctrine, had taken catechism in the church each Sunday, while the Canon waited at the gate to bear any truant who tried to escape with the main congregation back in triumph by the ear to the class in the sidechapel.

  ‘I am happy where I am,’ I say.

  ‘And there are many in the parish who think a public house in town is no lodgings for a person who has charge of youth.’

  ‘I conduct myself there.’

  ‘I’d sincerely hope so, but, if I may say so, it’s not very cooperative.’

  ‘I am sorry but I do not want to change,’ I answer doggedly. With bent heads the class follows each word with furtive attention, but he changes in frustration at last, ‘The Christian Brother will come after lunch today.’

  ‘I’ll take the other children outside, then, while he speaks to the boys. Luckily, the day is fine.’

  ‘They’re getting it very tough to get vocations. Even tougher still to keep those they do get. They’re betwixt and between, neither priests nor laymen,’ he volunteers but I don’t want discussion.

  ‘They may be lucky.’

  ‘The backward rural areas are their great standby. Even if they don’t stay the course they’ll get an education which they’d not get otherwise.’

  ‘That’s how I got mine.’

  The hurt from my own mouth was not as great if it had come from his.

  ‘Well, it was some use, then.’

  ‘Yes. It was some use.’

  I watch him on his way. At the door he shouts a last warning to the sniffling Walshe, ‘I hope that’ll be one lesson your life will never forget and you can count yourself lucky that there was no guards on the job.’

  There’d be no repercussions from the beating except Walshe’d probably get beaten again when the news travelled home, and, in a few days, if asked who’d scored his legs, he’d answer that he fell in briars.

  I watch the black suit shiny from car leather climb the last steps to the road gate, pausing once to inspect a crack in the concrete, and I turned to wipe the blackboard, afraid of my own hatred.

  ‘Now, I’ll see what you’ve learned about the Shannon.’

  Papers rustle in the benches, there’s a quick expectant buzz. Outside, the three stone walls of the playground run down to the lake, the centre wall broken by the concrete lavatory, above it the rapid sparkle of pinpoint flashes of sunlight on the wings of the blackdust swarm of flies; and on the windowsill in a jam jar a fistful of primroses some child has gathered from the May banks. In the stream of sunlight across the blackboard the chalkdust floats, millions of white grains, breathed in and out all day, found at night in the turnups of trousers, all the aridity of this empty trade.

  ‘You, Murphy, tell me where the Shannon rises?’

  A blank face answers in a pretence of puzzled concentration, and why should he know, his father’s fields and cattle will see him through.

  ‘Please, sir.’

  The room is full of hands.

  ‘Tell Murphy where the Shannon rises, Handley.’ A policeman’s son who’ll have to put his trust in his average wits.

  ‘Shannon Pot, sir, in the Cuilceach Mountains.’

  ‘Can you tell the class now, Murphy, where it rises?’

  ‘Shannon Pot, sir, in the Cuilceach Mountains.’ A look of triumph shows on his well-fed face as he haltingly repeats it.

  ‘Where does it flow, Mary?’

  ‘Southwards into Lough Allen close to the town of Drumshambo,’ the quick answer comes.

  ‘What factory have they there?’

  ‘Breffni Blossom jams.’

  ‘Anybody’s father send apples there?’

  Three hands.

  ‘Prior? Tell about the sending of the apples.’

  ‘We pick them, sir. Put them in a heap, same as potatoes, but on the ground we cover them with straw.’

  ‘Why do you cover them with straw?’

  ‘Frost, sir.’

  A low knock comes on the door that leads to the infant classroom, and my one assistant, Mrs Maguire, appears. She is near retirement: the slack flesh fills the ample spaces of the loose black dress, but the face in contrast is curiously hard, as if all the years of wrestling with children had hardened it into an intransigent assurance.

  ‘When Mrs Maguire says something Mrs Maguire means what she says.’ The third-person reference punctuates everything she says. Now a look of anxious concern shows in the unblinking eyes.

  ‘What happened with the Canon?’

  ‘He thrashed Walshe for breaking into one of the poorboxes.’

  I didn’t want her to stay, though I too had often used the glow of fabricated concern to hurry or escape the slow minutes of the school day.

  ‘Terrible. Awful.’ She echoes a dull safety, hers and mine.

  ‘We’ll talk about it at lunch, then.’

  ‘The world, the world,’ she ponders as she withdraws to her own room.

  I look at the clock, the crawl of the minutes, never the happiness of imagining it two o’clock and looking up and finding it half past three.

  ‘Will you be an absorbed teacher? Will your work be like a game? Or will you be a clockwatcher?’ Jordan, the Professor of Education, asked, more years ago than I care to remember, after a lecture. It was his custom to select one student to walk with him through the corridor, gleaming with wax and the white marble busts of saints and philosophers on their pedestals along the walls.

  ‘I hope I’ll be absorbed, sir.’

  ‘I hope so too for your sake. I can imagine few worse hells than a teacher who is a clockwatcher, driven to distraction by the children, while the day hangs about him like lead.’

  I could answer him now. I was a clockwatcher. The day hung mostly like lead, each morning a dislocation of your life in order to entice or bend the children’s opposing wills to yours, and the day a concentration on this hollow grapple. It seems to be as good as anything else and easier to stay than move.

  ‘We’ll leave the apples for a time and go on with the Shannon.’

  The class drags on until the iron gate on the road sounds. A woman comes down the concrete steps.

  A mother coming to complain, I think, and instinctively start to marshal the reassuring clichés. ‘The child is sensitive and when it loses that sensitivity will surprise us all. To force the child now can only cause damage. You have nothing to worry about.’

  ‘That was my trouble too at that age. I was too sensitive. I was never understood,’ she’d reply.

  ‘Thank you for coming to see me.’

  ‘I feel less worried now.’

  In the beginning everybody was sensitive and never understood, but hides hardened.

  This time, no mother, a Miss Martin: she lived with her brother across the empty waste of wheat-coloured sedge and stunted birch of the Gloria Bog. Her brother made toys from used matchsticks in the winter nights.

  ‘I wonder if I could take young Horan from his lessons for a few minutes, sir. It’s the ringworm.’

  ‘Luke, see Miss Martin in the porch.’ The boy goes quietly out to the porch, already charmingly stolid in the acceptance of his power, Luke, magical fifth in a line of male children unbroken by girls; and while he wailed under the water of his baptism at the stone font in Cootehall church a worm was placed in his hand – either the priest didn’t see or was content to ignore it – but the Horans rejoiced, their fifth infant boy would grow up with the power of healing ringworm.

  On Tuesdays and on Fridays, days of the sorrowful mysteries, he touched the sores thrice in the name of the Father and Son and Holy Ghost, power of magic and religion killing the slow worm patiently circling.

  ‘Did you wash your hands, Luke?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I used the soap.’

  ‘Show them to me.’

  ‘All r
ight. You can get on with your work.’

  The last to come before lunch was the tinker, with pony and cart, the brass shining on the harness, to clean out the lavatory, and as I give him the key we make polite professional remarks about the flies and heat.

  ‘Ah, but not to worry, sir, I’ll bury it deep.’ He touches his cap.

  Soon, soon, they’ll come and flush him and me into the twentieth century, whatever the good that will do, and I grow ashamed of the violence of the thought, and, as if to atone, over lunch, give Mrs Maguire a quiet account of the beating young Walshe received for rifling the poorbox.

  After lunch he comes, dressed all in black, with a black briefcase, the half-collar of the Christian Brother on the throat instead of the priest’s full collar, a big white-haired man, who seemed more made to follow ploughing horses than to stand in classrooms. The large hand lifts the briefcase on the table.

  ‘My name is Brother Mahon and Canon Reilly kindly gave me permission to speak to the senior boys about a vocation to the Irish Christian Brothers.’ I wonder if he knows that I too had been once as he is now, if he looks at me as a rotten apple in the barrel; but if he does he says nothing, all glory to the power of the Lie or Silence that makes people easy in the void, all on our arses except the helping hand they give us on our way.

  ‘I told Canon Reilly I’d take the other children out to the playground while you spoke.’

  ‘Lucky to have such a fine manager as the Canon, takes a great interest in schools.’

  ‘Couldn’t ask for a better manager,’ I answer. The brick supports the brick above it. I’m a rogue and you’re another. ‘I’ll just take them outside now.’

  ‘All except the boys of the sixth class take your English book and follow me outside,’ and again, because I feel watched, the voice is not my own, a ventriloquist’s dummy that might at any minute fall apart.

  The Brother motions the scattered boys closer to the table, ‘It’ll only be just a man to man chat,’ as I take the others out, to sit against the white wall of the school in the sun, facing the lake, where the tinker is putting the green sods back above the buried shit, the flies thick above the cart and grazing pony.

  Through the open window the low voice drifts out into the silence of the children against the wall in the sun, and I smile as I listen. If one could only wait long enough everything would be repeated. I wonder who’ll rise to the gleaming spoon and find the sharpened hooks as I did once.

  ‘I want you to imagine a very different lake shore to your own little lake below your school.

  ‘Hot sands.’ His words drift out. ‘Palm trees, glittering sea, tired after fishing all the night and washing their nets. A tall dark man comes through the palms down to the water.

  ‘We have laboured all the night and have taken nothing, the fishermen answer. The two boats were so full of fish that they began to sink. They fall on their knees on the sand, and the tall man, for it was Jesus, lifted them up and said to them follow me. From henceforth you will catch men.

  ‘In this schoolroom two thousand years later I bring you the same message. Follow me and catch men. Follow me into the Irish Christian Brothers, where as teachers you will lead the little children He so loved to Christ.

  ‘For death comes as a thief in the night, the longest life is but a day, and when you go before the Judgement Seat can you without trembling say to Jesus I refused the call even the tired fishermen answered, and what if He refuses you as you refused Him?’

  He sends them out into the porch, and brings them back one by one to interview them alone, while the tinker hands me back the key. ‘I’ve buried it deep, sir. There’ll be no flies,’ and the rise and fall of voices comes from Mrs Maguire’s infant prison house, Eena, meena, mina moo, capall, asal agus bo.

  Name, age, your father’s farm? he asks, and more to silence my own memory than the low chatter of the children I force, ‘Come on now, get on with your reading,’ but after they grow silent, to covertly read my real mood, the chatter grows loud again.

  ‘You have listened to all that I’ve said?’ I’d been asked once too.

  ‘Yes, Brother,’ I’d answered.

  ‘Do you think you could spend your life as a Christian Brother?’

  ‘I’m not sure, Brother.’

  ‘Do you think your parents would have any objection?’

  ‘I don’t know, Brother.’

  ‘What do you say we go and have a little talk with them after I’ve seen the rest of the boys?’

  It was finished then, my mother’s face had lighted when he drove me home. ‘It’d be an honour to have a Christian Brother in the family.’ ‘He’ll get a free education too, the best there is’; and that August I was in the train with the single ticket, fear of the unknown rooms and people. My brother inherited the bare acres in my place, and married, and with the same strength as she had driven me away he put her in a back room with the old furniture of her marriage while his new wife reigned amid the new furniture of the best rooms. Now each summer I take her to her usual small hotel at the sea, and I walk by her side on the sand saying, ‘Yes and yes and yes’ to her complaints about my brother and his wife, until she tires herself into relief and changes, ‘Do you think should I go to the baths after lunch?’ ‘Go to the baths, it’ll do your arthritis good.’

  ‘I think I’ll go, then.’

  I want to ask her why she wanted the acres for my brother, why she pushed me away, but I don’t ask. I walk by her side on the sand and echo her life with ‘Yes and yes and yes,’ for it is all a wheel.

  A light tap comes on the classroom window, a gesture of spread hands that he is finished, and I take the children in. Two of the boys have been set apart, with their school-bags.

  ‘I’m driving John and Jim to their houses. We’ll talk over everything with their parents.’

  ‘I hope it’ll be all right.’

  ‘We’ll see that everything is made clear. Thank you for your help.’

  After the shaking of hands I turn to the board but I do not want to teach.

  ‘Open your English books and copy page forty-one in your best handwriting.’

  I stand at the window while the nibs scrape. Certainly nothing I’ve ever done resembles so closely the shape of my life as my leaving of the Holy Brothers. Having neither the resolution to stay on nor the courage to leave, the year before Final Vows I took to bed and refused to get up.

  ‘The doctor says you’re in perfect health. That there’s nothing the matter with you,’ old Cogger, the boss, had tried to reason. ‘So why can’t you get up when we are even shortstaffed in the school?’

  ‘I can’t get up.’

  ‘What’s wrong with you that you can’t get up?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘If you don’t get up I have no option but to report you to General Headquarters.’

  I did not get up, he had no option, and the result was an order for my dismissal, but as quietly as possible so as not to scandalize my brothers in JC or the good people of the town. Old Cogger showed me the letter. I was to get a suit of clothes, underwear, railway ticket and one pound. It revived me immediately. I told him the underwear I had would do and he raised the one pound to five.

  The next hurdle was how to get my fit in clothes in a small town without causing scandal. Old Cogger dithered till the day before I had to leave, but at nightfall brought home two likely fits. I picked one, and packed it, and off we set by bus for Limerick, to all appearances two Christian Brothers going on some ordinary business, but old Cogger would come back alone. We did not speak on the way.

  Behind a locked door and drawn curtains I changed in the guest room of the house in Limerick. I’ve wondered what happened to the black uniform I left behind, whether they gave it to another CB or burned it as they burn the clothes of the dead. Cogger showed me to the door as I left for the train but I can’t remember if he wished me luck or shook hands or just shut the door on my back. I had a hat too. Yes a brown hat and a blue suit, but I didn
’t realize how bloody awful they looked until I met my sisters on O’Connell Bridge. They coloured with shame. Afraid to be seen walking with me they rushed me into a taxi and didn’t speak until they had me safely inside the front door of the flat, when one doubled up on the sofa unable to stop laughing, and the other swore at me, ‘In the name of Jasus what possessed the Christians to sail you out into the world in a getup the like of that or you to appear in it?’ Though what I remember most was the shock of sir when the waiter said ‘Thank you, sir,’ as I paid him for the cup of tea I had on the train.

  Even if the memories are bitter they still quicken the passing of time. It is the sly coughing of the children that tells me the hands have passed three.

  ‘All right. Put your books away and stand up.’

  In a fury the books are put away and they are waiting for me on their feet.

  ‘Bless yourselves.’

  They bless themselves and chant their gratitude for the day.

  ‘Don’t rush the door, it’s just as quick to go quietly.’

  I hear their whoops of joy go down the road, and I linger over the locking up. I am always happy at this hour. It’s as if the chains of the day were worth wearing to feel them drop away. I feel born again as I start to pedal towards the town. How, how, though, can a man be born again when he is old? Can he enter a second time his mother’s bag of tricks? I laugh at last.

  Was it not said by Water and the Holy Spirit?

  Several infusions of whiskey at the Bridge Bar, contemplation of the Shannon through its windows: it rises in the Shannon Pot, it flows to the sea, there are stranger pike along its banks than in its waters, will keep this breath alive until the morning’s dislocation.

  A Slip-up

  There was such a strain on the silence between them after he’d eaten that it had to be broken.

  ‘Maybe we should never have given up the farm and come here. Even though we had no one to pass it on to,’ Michael said, his head of coarse white hair leaning away from his wife as he spoke. What had happened today would never have happened if they’d stayed, he thought, and there’d be no shame; but he did not speak it.