Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  ‘Racing across hedges and ditches after cattle, is it, at our age. Cows, hens, pigs, calves, racing from light to dark on those watery fields between two lakes, up to the tips of our wellingtons in mud and water, having to run with the deeds to the bank manager after a bad year. I thought we’d gone into all this before.’

  ‘Well, we’d never have had to retire if we’d stayed.’ What he said already sounded lame.

  ‘We’d be retired all right. We’d be retired all right, into the graveyard long years ago if we’d stayed. You don’t know what a day this has been for me as well.’ Agnes began to cry and Michael sat still in the chair as she cried.

  ‘After I came home from Tesco’s I sorted the parcels,’ she said. ‘And at ten to one I put the kippers under the grill. Michael will have just about finished his bottle of Bass and be coming out the door of the Royal, I said when I looked at the clock. Michael must have run into someone on his way back, I thought, as it went past one. And when it got to ten past I said you must have fell in with company, but I was beginning to get worried.’

  ‘You know I never fall in with company,’ he protested irritably.

  ‘I always leave the Royal at ten to, never a minute more nor less.’

  ‘I didn’t know what way to turn when it got to half past, I was that paralysed with worry, and then I said I’ll wait five minutes to see, and five minutes, and another five minutes, and I wasn’t able to move with worry, and then it was nearly a quarter past two. I couldn’t stand it. And then I said I’ll go down to the Royal. And I’ll never know why I didn’t think of it before.

  ‘Denis and Joan were just beginning to lock up when I got to the Royal. “What is it, Agnes?” Denis said. “Have you seen Michael?” I asked. “No.” Denis shook his head. “He hasn’t been in at all today. We were wondering if he was all right. It’s the first time he’s not showed up for his bottle of Bass since he had that flu last winter.” “He’s not showed up for his lunch either and he’s always on the dot. What can have happened to him?” I started to cry.

  ‘Joan made me sit down. Dennis put a brandy with a drop of port in it into my hand. After I’d taken a sip he said, “When did you last see Michael?” I told him how we went to Tesco’s, and how I thought you’d gone for your bottle of Bass, and how I put on the kippers, and how you never showed up. Joan took out a glass of beer and sat with me while Denis got on the phone. “Don’t worry, Agnes,” Joan said, “Denis is finding out about Michael.” And when Denis got off the phone he said, “He’s not in any of the hospitals and the police haven’t got him so he must be all right. Don’t rush the brandy. As soon as you finish we’ll hop in the car. He must be nearhand.”

  ‘We drove all round the park but you weren’t on any of the benches. “What’ll we do now?” I said. “Before we do anything we’ll take a quick scout round the streets,” Denis said, and as soon as we went through the lights before Tesco’s he said, “Isn’t that Michael over there with the shopping bag?”

  ‘And there you were, with the empty shopping bag in front

  of Tesco’s window. “Oh my God,” I said, “Michael will kill me. I must have forgot to collect him when I came out of Tesco’s,” and then Denis blew the horn, and you saw us, and came over.’

  *

  Every morning since he retired, except when he was down with that winter flu, Michael walked with Agnes to Tesco’s, and it brought him the feeling of long ago when he walked round the lake with his mother, potholes and stones of the lane, the boat shapes at intervals in the long lake wall to allow the carts to pass one another when they met, the oilcloth shopping bag he carried for her in a glow of chattering as he walked in the shelter of her shadow. Now it was Agnes who chattered as they walked to Tesco’s, and he’d no longer to listen, any response to her bead of talk had long become nothing but an irritation to her; and so he walked safely in the shelter of those dead days, drawing closer to the farm between the lakes that they had lost.

  When they reached Tesco’s he did not go in. The brands and bright lights troubled him, and as she made all the purchases he had no function within anyhow. So on dry days he stayed outside with the empty shopping bag if it wasn’t too cold. When the weather was miserable he waited for her just inside the door beside the off-licence counter. When he first began to come with her after retiring, the off-licence assistants used to bother him by asking if they could help. As he said, ‘No thanks,’ he wanted to tell them that he never drank in the house. Only at Christmas did they have drink in the house and that was for other people, if they came. The last bottles were now three Christmases old, for people no longer visited them at Christmas, which was far more convenient. They went round to the Royal as usual Christmas Day. Denis still kept Sunday hours on Christmas Day. Though it was only the new assistants in the off-licence who ever noticed him on bad days now, he still preferred to wait for her outside with the shopping bag against the Special Offers pasted in the glass. By that time he would have already reached the farm between the lakes while walking with her, and was ready for work.

  The farm that they lost when they came to London he’d won back almost completely since he retired. He’d been dismayed when he retired as caretaker of the Sir John Cass School to find how much the farm had run down in the years he’d been a school caretaker. Drains were choked. The fields were full of rushes. The garden had gone wild, and the hedges were invading the fields. But he was too old a hand to rush at things. Each day he set himself a single task. The stone wall was his pride, perhaps because it was the beginning. There were no limits before the wall was built. Everything looked impossible. A hundred hands seemed needed. But after the wall was built he cleared the weeds and bushes that had overgrown the front garden, cut away the egg bushes from the choked whitethorns, pruned the whitethorns so that they thickened. Now between wall and whitethorn hedge the front garden ran, and he’d gone out from there, task by single task.

  This morning as he walked with Agnes he decided to clear the drinking pool which was dry after the long spell of good weather. First he shovelled the dark earth of rotted leaves and cowshit out on the bank. Then he paved the sides with heavy stones so that the cattle would not plough in as they drank and he cleared the weeds from the small stream that fed it. When he followed the stream to the boundary hedge he found water blocked there. He released it and then leaned on his shovel in the simple pleasure of watching water flow. For all that time he was unaware of the shopping bag, but when all the water flowed down towards the pool he felt it again by his side. He wondered what was keeping Agnes. He’d never finished such a long job before outside Tesco’s. Usually he’d counted himself lucky if he was through with such a job by the time he’d finished his bottle of Bass in the Royal by ten to one.

  The drain was now empty and clean. All the water had flowed down to the pool. He’d go to the field garden. The withered bean and pea stalks needed pulling up and the earth turned. A wren or robin sang in the thorns, faithful still in the bare days. He opened the wooden gate into the garden, enclosed on three sides by its natural thorn hedges, and two strands of barbed wire ran on posts to keep the cattle out on the fourth. Each year he pushed the barbed wire farther out, and soon, one of these years, the whole field would be a garden, completely enclosed by its own whitethorns. He pulled up the withered bean and pea stalks with the thorn branches that had served as stakes and threw them in a heap for burning. Then he began to turn the soil. The black and white bean flower had been his favourite, its fragrance carried on the wind through the thorns into the meadow, drawing the bees from the clover. Agnes could keep all her roses in the front garden … and then he felt himself leaning over the fork with tiredness though he hadn’t half the ridge turned. He was too weak to work. It must be late and why had she not called him to his meal? He stuck the fork in the ground and in exasperation went over to the barbed wire. The strands were loose. A small alder shoot sprouted from one of the posts. He walked up the potato furrows, the dried stalks dead and grey in the ri
dges. This year he must move the pit to higher ground. Last winter the rats had come up from the lake – but why had she not called him? Had she no care? Was she so utterly selfish?

  He turned and stared in the window, but the avenues of shelves were too long and the lights blinding. It was in this impotent rage that he heard the horn blow. Denis was there and Agnes was in the car. He went towards them with the empty shopping bag. They both got out of the car.

  ‘Why did you leave me?’ he asked angrily.

  ‘Oh don’t be mad at me, Michael. I must have forgot when I came out.’

  ‘What time is it now?’

  ‘Five after three, Michael.’ Denis was smiling. ‘You’ve missed your bottle of Bass, but hop in and I’ll run you home.’

  It wouldn’t have happened if we’d kept the farm. At least on the farm we’d be away from people, he thought obstinately as he put the food aside that he should have eaten hours before. He flushed like a child with shame as he heard again, ‘Five after three, Michael. You’ve missed your bottle of Bass, but hop in and I’ll run you home,’ and thought that’s how it goes, you go on as usual every day, and then something happens, and you make a mistake, and you’re caught. It was Agnes who at last broke this impossible silence.

  ‘I can see that you’re tired out. Why don’t you lie down for a turn?’ she said, and began to clear the plates.

  ‘Maybe I will lie down, then,’ he yielded.

  He slept lightly and restlessly. Only a fraction of what was happening surfaced in his dream. A herd of panting cattle was driven past him on a dirt road by a man wheeling a bicycle, their mouths slavering in the heat. Agnes passed by holding breadcrumbs in her apron. A white car came round the lake. As it turned at the gate a child got out and came towards him with a telegram. He was fumbling in his pocket for coins to give to the child when he was woken by Agnes.

  ‘We’ll be late getting to the Royal if you don’t get up now,’ she was saying.

  ‘What time is it?’

  When she told him the time, he knew they should be leaving in twenty minutes.

  ‘I don’t know if I want to go out tonight.’

  ‘Of course you’ll go out tonight. There’s nothing wrong with you, is there?’

  When she said that he knew he had to go. He rose and washed, changed into his suit, combed his coarse white hair, and at exactly twenty to nine, as on every evening of their lives, they were closing the 37B door in Ainsworth Road behind them.

  All the saloon regulars looked unusually happy and bright as they greeted the old couple in the Royal, and when Michael proffered the coins for the Guinness and pint of Bass, Denis pushed them away. ‘They’re on the house tonight, Michael. You have to make up for that missed bottle of Bass tonight.’

  Blindly he carried the drinks towards Agnes at the table. When he turned and sat and faced the room with his raised glass the whole saloon rang with, ‘Cheers, Agnes. Cheers, Michael.’

  ‘You see it was all in your mind, Michael. Everybody’s the same as usual. Even happier,’ Agnes said afterwards in the quiet of the click of billiard balls coming from the Public Bar.

  ‘Maybe. Maybe, Agnes.’ Michael drank.

  All the people were elated too on the small farms around the lakes for weeks after Fraser Woods had tried to hang himself from a branch of an apple tree in his garden, the unconcealed excitement in their voices as they said, ‘Isn’t it terrible what happened to poor Fraser?’ and the lust on their faces as they waited for their excitement to be mirrored.

  ‘We’ll go early to Tesco’s in the morning. And then you can come down for your bottle of Bass. And it’ll be the same as if nothing ever happened. What was it anyhow?’ Agnes said, warmed by the Guinness.

  ‘I suppose it was just a slip-up,’ Michael answered as he sipped slowly at his pint, trying to put off the time when he’d have to go up to the counter for their next round.

  All Sorts of Impossible Things

  They were out coursing on Sunday a last time together but they did not know it, the two friends, James Sharkey and Tom Lennon, a teacher and an agricultural instructor. The weak winter sun had thawed the fields soft enough to course the hare on, and though it still hung blood-orange above the hawthorns on the hill the rims of the hoof tracks were already hardening fast against their tread.

  The hounds walked beside them on slip leashes, a purebred fawn bitch that had raced under the name of Coolcarra Queen, reaching the Final of the Rockingham Stakes the season before, and a wire-haired mongrel, no more than half hound, that the schoolmaster, James Sharkey, borrowed from Charlie’s bar for these Sundays. They’d been beating up the bottoms for some hours. An odd snipe, exploding out of the rushes before zigzagging away, was all that had risen.

  ‘If we don’t rise something before long we’ll soon have to throw our hats at it,’ Tom Lennon said, and it was a careless phrase. No one had seen the teacher without his eternal brown hat for the past twenty years. ‘I’ve been noticing the ground harden all right,’ the dry answer came.

  ‘Anyhow, I’m beginning to feel a bit humped.’ Tom Lennon looked small and frail in the tightly belted white raincoat.

  ‘There’s no use rimming it, then. There’ll be other Sundays.’

  Suddenly a large hare rose ahead, bounded to the edge of the rushes, and then looped high to watch and listen. With a ‘Hulla, hulla,’ they slipped the hounds, the hare racing for the side of the hill. The fawn bitch led, moving in one beautiful killing line as she closed with the hare, the head eel-like as it struck; but the hare twisted away from the teeth, and her speed carried the fawn past. The hare had to turn again a second time as the mongrel coming up from behind tried to pick it in the turn. The two men below in the rushes watched in silence as the old dance played itself out on the bare side of the hill: race, turn, race again; the hounds hunting well together, the mongrel making up with cunning what he lacked in grace, pacing himself to strike when the hare was most vulnerable – turning back from the fawn. But with every fresh turn the hare gained, the hounds slithering past on the hard ground. They were utterly beaten by the time the hare left them, going away through the hedge of whitethorns.

  ‘They picked a warrior there.’

  ‘That’s for sure,’ Tom Lennon answered as quietly.

  The beaten hounds came disconsolately down, pausing at the foot of the hill to lap water from a wheelmark and to lick their paws. They came on towards the men. The paws were bleeding and some of the bitch’s nails were broken.

  ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have raced her on such hard ground,’ the teacher said by way of apology.

  ‘That’s no difference. She’ll never run in the Stakes again. They say there’s only two kinds to have – a proper dud or a champion. Her kind, the in-between, are the very worst. They’ll always run well enough to tempt you into having another go. Anyhow, there’s not the money for that any more,’ he said with a sad smile of reflection.

  Coolcarra Queen was a relic of his bachelor days that he hadn’t been able to bear parting with on getting married and first coming to the place as temporary agricultural instructor.

  They’d raced her in the Stakes. She’d almost won. They’d trained her together, turn and turn about. And that cold wet evening, the light failing as they ran off the Finals, they’d stood together in the mud beside the net of torn hares and watched this hare escape into the laurels that camouflaged the pen and the judge gallop towards the rope on the old fat horse, and stop, and lift the white kerchief instead of the red. Coolcarra Queen had lost the Rockingham Silver Cup and twenty-five pounds after winning the four races that had taken her to the Final.

  ‘Still, she gave us a run for our money,’ the teacher said as they put the limping hounds on the leashes and turned home.

  ‘Well, it’s over now,’ Tom Lennon said. ‘Especially with the price of steak.’

  ‘Your exams can’t be far off now?’ the teacher said as they walked. The exams he alluded to were to determine whether the instructor should be
made permanent or let go.

  ‘In less than five weeks. The week after Easter.’

  ‘Are you anxious about it at all?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said sadly. ‘If they make me permanent I get paid whether I’m sick or well. They can’t get rid of me then. Temporary is only all right while you’re single.’

  ‘Do you foresee any snags?’

  ‘Not in the exams. I know as much as they’ll know. It’s the medical I’m afraid of.’

  ‘Still,’ the teacher began lamely and couldn’t go on. He knew that the instructor had been born with his heart on the wrong side and that it was weak.

  ‘Not that they’ll pay much heed to instruction round here. Last week I came on a pair of gentlemen during my rounds. They’d roped a horse-mower to a brand new Ferguson. One was driving the Ferguson, the other sitting up behind on the horse machine, lifting and letting down the blade with a piece of wire. They were cutting thistles.’

  ‘That’s the form all right.’ The teacher smiled.

  They’d left the fields and come to the stone bridge into the village. Only one goalpost stood upright in the football field. Below them the sluggish Shannon flowed between its wheaten reeds.

  ‘Still, we must have walked a good twelve miles today from one field to the next. If we’d to walk that distance along a straight line of road it’d seem a terrible journey.’

  ‘A bit like life itself.’ The teacher laughed sarcastically, adjusting the brown hat firmly on his head. ‘We might never manage it if we had to take it all in the one gasp. We mightn’t even manage to finish it.’

  ‘Well, it’d be finished for us, then,’ the instructor countered weakly.

  ‘Do you feel like coming to Charlie’s for a glass?’ he asked as they stood.

  ‘I told her I’d be back for the dinner. If I’m in time for the dinner she might have something even better for me afterwards,’ Tom Lennon joked defensively.