Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  Making sure that Gillespie hadn’t noticed him at the gate, he turned back. The bed wouldn’t be ready for another week. The news could wait a day or more. Before leaving he stole a last look at the dull white ground about the saw-horse. The most difficult things always seem to lie closest to us, to lie around our feet.

  Ever since his mother’s death he found himself stumbling into these dead days. Once, crushed mint in the garden had given him back a day he’d spent with her at the sea in such reality that he had been frightened, as if he’d suddenly fallen through time; it was as if the world of the dead was as available to him as the world of the living. It was also humiliating for him to realize that she must have been the mainspring of his days. Now that the mainspring was broken, the hands were weakly falling here and falling there. Today there had been the sudden light on the bits of white beech. He’d not have noticed it if he hadn’t been alone, if Gillespie had not been so absorbed in his sawing. Before, there must have been some such simple trigger that he’d been too ashamed or bewildered to notice.

  Stealthily and quickly he went down the dirt-track by the lake till he got to the main road. To the left was the church in a rookery of old trees, and behind it the house where he lived. Safe on the wide main road he let his mind go back to the beech chips. They rested there around Gillespie’s large bulk, and paler still was the line of mourners following the coffin through the snow, a picture you could believe or disbelieve but not be in. In idle exasperation he began to count the trees in the hedge along the road as he walked: ash, green oak, whitehorn, ash; the last leaves a vivid yellow on the wild cherry, empty October fields in dull wet light behind the hedges. This, then, was the actual day, the only day that mattered, the day from which our salvation had to be won or lost: it stood solidly and impenetrably there, denying the weak life of the person, with nothing of the eternal other than it would dully endure, while the day set alight in his mind by the light of the white beech, though it had been nothing more than a funeral he had attended during a dramatic snowfall when a boy, seemed bathed in the eternal, seemed everything we had been taught and told of the world of God.

  Dissatisfied, and feeling as tired again as he’d been on his way to Gillespie’s, he did not go through the church gate with its circle and cross, nor did he call to the sexton locking up under the bellrope. In order to be certain of being left alone he went by the circular path at the side. A high laurel hedge hid the path from the graveyard and church. There he made coffee without turning on the light. Always when about to give birth or die cattle sought out a clean place in some corner of the field.

  Michael Bruen had been a big kindly agreeable man, what was called a lovely man. His hair was a coarse grey. He wore loose-fitting tweeds with red cattleman’s boots. When young he had been a policeman in Dublin. It was said he had either won or inherited money and had come home to where he’d come from to buy the big Crossna farm, to marry and grow rich.

  He had a large family. Men were employed on the farm. The yard and its big outhouses with the red roofs rang with work: cans, machinery, raillery, the sliding of hooves, someone whistling. Within the house, away from the yard, was the enormous cave of a kitchen, the long table down its centre, the fireplace at its end, the plates and pots and presses along the walls, sides of bacon wrapped in gauze hanging from hooks in the ceiling, the whole room full of the excitement and bustle of women.

  Often as a boy the priest had gone to Michael Bruen’s on some errand for his father. Once the beast was housed or the load emptied Michael would take him into the kitchen. The huge fire of wood blazed all the brighter because of the frost.

  ‘Give this man something.’ Michael had led him. ‘Something solid that’ll warm the life back into him.’

  ‘A cup of tea will do fine,’ he had protested in the custom.

  ‘Nonsense. Don’t pay him the slightest attention. Empty bags can’t stand.’

  Eileen, the prettiest of Michael’s daughters, laughed as she took down the pan. Her arms were white to the elbows with a fine dusting of flour.

  ‘He’ll remember this was a good place to come to when he has to start thinking about a wife.’ Michael’s words gave licence to general hilarity.

  It was hard to concentrate on Michael’s questions about his father, so delicious was the smell of frying. The mug of steaming tea was put by his side. The butter melted on the fresh bread on the plate. There were sausages, liver, bacon, a slice of black-pudding and sweetest grisceens.

  ‘Now set to,’ Michael laughed. ‘We don’t want any empty bags leaving Bruen’s.’

  Michael came with him to the gate when he left. ‘Tell your father it’s ages since we had a drink in the Royal. And that if he doesn’t search me out in the Royal the next Fair Day I’ll have to go over and bate the lugs off him.’ As he shook his hand in the half-light of the yard lamp it was the last time he was to see him alive. Before the last flakes had stopped falling, when old people were searching back to ‘the great snows when Count Plunkett was elected’ to find another such fall, Michael Bruen had died, and his life was already another such watermark of memory.

  The snow lay eight feet deep on the roads, and dead cattle and sheep were found in drifts of fifteen feet in the fields. All of the people who hadn’t lost sheep or cattle were in extraordinary good humour, their own ills buried for a time as deep as their envy of any other’s good fortune in the general difficulty of the snow. It took days to cut a way out to the main road, the snow having to be cut in blocks breast-high out of a face of frozen snow. A wild cheer went up as the men at last cut through to the gang digging in from the main road. Another cheer greeted the first van to come in, Doherty’s bread van, and it had hardly died when the hearse came with the coffin for Michael Bruen. That night they cut the path up the side of Killeelan Hill and found the family headstone beside the big yew just inside the gate and opened the grave. They hadn’t finished digging when the first funeral bell came clearly over the snow the next day to tell them that the coffin had started on its way.

  The priest hadn’t thought of the day for years or of Michael Bruen till he had stumbled into it without warning by way of the sudden light on the beech chips. It did not augur well. There were days, especially of late, when he seemed to be lost in dead days, to see time present as a flimsy accumulating tissue over all the time that was lost. Sometimes he saw himself as an old man children were helping down to the shore, restraining the tension of their need to laugh as they pointed out a rock in the path he seemed about to stumble over, and then they had to lift their eyes and smile apologetically to the passersby while he stood staring out to sea, having forgotten all about the rock in his path. ‘It’s this way we’re going.’ He felt the imaginary tug on his sleeve, and he was drawn again into the tortuous existence of the everyday, away from the eternal of the sea or the lost light on frozen snow across Killeelan Hill.

  Never before though had he noticed anything like the beech chips. There was the joy of holding what had eluded him for so long, in its amazing simplicity: but mastered knowledge was no longer knowledge unless it opened, became part of a greater knowledge, and what did the beech chips do but turn back to his own death?

  Like the sudden snowfall and Michael Bruen’s burial his life had been like any other, except to himself, and then only in odd visions of it, as a lost life. When it had been agreeable and equitable he had no vision of it at all.

  The country childhood. His mother and father. The arrival at the shocking knowledge of birth and death. His attraction to the priesthood as a way of vanquishing death and avoiding birth. O hurry it, he thought. There is not much to a life. Many have it. There is not enough room. His father and mother were old when they married; he was ‘the fruit of old things’, he heard derisively. His mother had been a seamstress. He could still see the needle flashing in her strong hands, that single needle-flash composed of thousands of hours.

  ‘His mother had the vocation for him.’ Perhaps she had, perhaps all the mothers o
f the country had, it had so passed into the speech of the country, in all the forms of both beatification and derision; but it was out of fear of death he became a priest, which became in time the fear of life. Wasn’t it natural to turn back to the mother in this fear? She was older than fear, having given him his life, and who would give a life if they knew its end? There was, then, his father’s death, his acceptance of it, as he had accepted all poor fortune all his life long as his due, refusing to credit the good.

  And afterwards his mother sold the land to ‘Horse’ McLaughlin and came to live with him and was happy. She attended all the Masses and Devotions, took messages, and she sewed, though she had no longer any need, linen for the altar, soutanes and surplices, his shirts and all her own clothes. Sometimes her concern for him irritated him to exasperation but he hardly ever let it show. He was busy with the many duties of a priest. The fences on the past and future were secure. He must have been what is called happy, and there was a whole part of his life that, without his knowing, had come to turn to her for its own expression.

  He discovered it when she began her death. He came home one summer evening to find all the lights on in the house. She was in the living-room, in the usual chair. The table was piled high with dresses. Round the chair was a pile of rags. She did not look up when he entered, her still strong hands tearing apart a herring-bone skirt she had made only the year before.

  ‘What on earth are you doing, Mother?’ He caught her by the hands when she didn’t answer.

  ‘It’s time you were up for Mass,’ she said.

  ‘What are you doing with your dresses?’

  ‘What dresses?’

  ‘All the dresses you’ve just been tearing up.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about dresses,’ and then he saw there was something wrong. She made no resistance when he led her up the stairs.

  For some days she seemed absent and confused but, though he watched her carefully, she was otherwise very little different from her old self, and she did not appear ill. Then he came home one evening to find her standing like a child in the middle of the room, surrounded by an enormous pile of rags. She had taken up from where she’d been interrupted at the herring-bone skirt and torn up every dress or article of clothing she had ever made. After his initial shock he sent for the doctor.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s just the onset of senility,’ the doctor said.

  ‘It’s irreversible?’

  The doctor nodded, ‘It very seldom takes such a violent form, but that’s what it is. She’ll have to be looked after.’ With a sadness that part of his life was over, he took her to the Home and saw her settled there.

  She recognized him when he visited her there the first year, but without excitement, as if he was already far away; and then the day came when he had to admit that she no longer knew who he was, had become like a dog kennelled out too long. He was with her when she died. She’d turned her face towards him. There came a light of recognition in the eyes like a last glow of a match before it goes out, and then she died.

  There was nothing left but his own life. There had been nothing but that all along, but it had been obscured, comfortably obscured.

  He turned on the radio.

  A man had lost both legs in an explosion. There was violence on the night-shift at Ford’s. The pound had steadied towards the close but was still down on the day.

  Letting his fingers linger on the knob he turned it off. The disembodied voice on the air was not unlike the lost day he’d stumbled into through the light on the beech chips, except it had nothing of its radiance – the funeral during the years he carried it around with him lost the sheltered burden of the everyday, had become light as the air in all the clarity of light. It was all timeless, and seemed at least a promise of the eternal.

  He went to draw the curtain. She had made the red curtain too with its pale lining but hadn’t torn it. How often must she have watched the moonlight on the still headstones beyond the laurel as it lay evenly on them this night. She had been afraid of ghosts: old priests who had lived in this house, who through whiskey or some other ill had neglected to say some Mass for the dead and because of the neglect the soul for whom the Mass should have been offered was forced to linger beyond its time in Purgatory, and the priest guilty of the omission could himself not be released until the living priest had said the Mass and was forced to come at midnight to the house in all his bondage until the Mass was said.

  ‘They must have been all good priests, Mother. Good steady old fellows like myself. They never come back,’ he used to assure her. He remembered his own idle words as he drew the curtain, lingering as much over the drawing of the curtain as he had lingered over the turning off of the radio. He would be glad of a ghost tonight, be glad of any visitation from beyond the walls of sense.

  He took up the battered and friendly missal, which had been with him all his adult life, to read the office of the day. On bad days he kept it till late, the familiar words that changed with the changing year, that he had grown to love, and were as well his daily duty. It must be surely the greatest grace of life, the greatest freedom, to have to do what we love because it is also our duty. He wasn’t able to read on this evening among the old familiar words for long. An annoyance came between him and the page, the Mass he had to repeat every day, the Mass in English. He wasn’t sure whether he hated it or the guitar-playing priests more. It was humiliating to think that these had never been such a scourge when his mother had been alive. Was his life the calm vessel it had seemed, dully setting out and returning from the fishing grounds? Or had he been always what he seemed now? ‘Oh yes. There you go again,’ he heard the familiar voice in the empty room. ‘Complaining about the Mass in the vernacular. When you prefer the common names of flowers to their proper names,’ and the sharp, energetic, almost brutal laugh. It was Peter Joyce, he was not dead. Peter Joyce had risen to become a bishop at the other end of the country, an old friend he no longer saw.

  ‘But they are more beautiful. Dog rose, wild woodbine, buttercup, daisy …’

  He heard his own protest. It was in a hotel that they used to go to every summer on the Atlantic, a small hotel where you could read after dinner without fear of a rising roar from the bar beginning to outrival the Atlantic by ten o’clock.

  ‘And, no doubt, the little rose of Scotland, sharp and sweet and breaks the heart,’ he heard his friend quote maliciously. ‘And it’s not the point. The reason that names of flowers must be in Latin is that when flower lovers meet they know what they are talking about, no matter whether they’re French or Greeks or Arabs. They have a universal language.’

  ‘I prefer the humble names, no matter what you say.’

  ‘Of course you do. And it’s parochial sentimentalists like yourself who prefer the smooth sowthistle to Sonchus oleraceus that’s the whole cause of your late lamented Mass in Latin disappearing. I have no sympathy with you. You people tire me.’

  The memory of that truculent argument dispelled his annoyance, as its simple logic had once taken his breath away, but he was curiously tired after the vividness of the recall. It was only by a sheer act of will, sometimes having to count the words, that he was able to finish his office. ‘I know one thing, Peter Joyce. I know that I know nothing,’ he murmured when he finished. But when he looked at the room about him he could hardly believe it was so empty and dead and dry, the empty chair where she should be sewing, the oaken table with the scattered books, the clock on the mantel. Wildly and aridly he wanted to curse, but his desire to curse was as unfair as life. He had not wanted it.

  Then, quietly, he saw that he had a ghost all right, one that he had been walking around with for a long time, a ghost he had not wanted to recognize – his own death. He might as well get to know him well. It would never leave now and had no mortal shape. Absence does not cast a shadow.

  All that was there was the white light of the lamp on the open book, on the white marble; the brief sun of God on beechwood, and the sudden light
of that glistening snow, and the timeless mourners moving towards the yews on Killeelan Hill almost thirty years ago. It was as good a day as any, if there ever was a good day to go.

  Somewhere, outside this room that was an end, he knew that a young man, not unlike he had once been, stood on a granite step and listened to the doorbell ring, smiled as he heard a woman’s footsteps come down the hallway, ran his fingers through his hair, and turned the bottle of white wine he held in his hands completely around as he prepared to enter a pleasant and uncomplicated evening, feeling himself immersed in time without end.

  Swallows

  The wind blew the stinging rain from the Gut, where earlier in the bright weather of the summer the Sergeant had sat in the tarred boat, anchored by a rope to an old Ford radiator that clung to the weeds outside the rushes, and watched taut line after taut line cut like cheesewire through the water as hooked roach after hooked roach made a last surge towards the freedom of the open lake before landing slapping on the floorboards. The wind blew the rain from the Gut against the black limestone of the Quarry, where on the wet tar, its pools ruffling in the wet wind, the Sergeant and the young State Surveyor measured the scene of the road accident, both with their collars up and hatted against the rain, the black plastic chinstrap a shining strip on the Sergeant’s jaw. ‘What age was he?’ the Surveyor asked, as he noted the last measurement in his official notebook and put the tapewheel in his pocket.

  ‘Eighteen. Wheeling his bicycle up the hill on his way to Carrick, apparently for a haircut, when bang – into the next world via the bonnet, without as much as by your leave.’

  ‘Will you be able to get manslaughter? From the measurements she wouldn’t appear to have a leg to stand on.’