Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  ‘Will you be wanting anything to ate before the Function?’ she shouted.

  ‘No, Biddy.’ He shook his head.

  ‘Well, your clothes will be aired for you there and then when you want to change out of your uniform.’

  ‘Thanks, Biddy,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll leave your shoes polished by the table. I’ll not wait up for you as no doubt it’ll be the small hours. I’ll put your hot waterjar in the bed.’

  ‘Thanks, thanks, Biddy.’

  Quietly he rose and replaced the cheap fiddle in the case, fingering the broken string before adding the slack bow. He shut the case and replaced it between the tea-box and the red globe of the Sacred Heart lamp on the mantel.

  The smell of porter and whiskey, blue swirls of cigarette smoke, pounding of boots on the floorboards as they danced, the sudden yahoos as they swung, and the smile of the girl with the cloth fuchsia bells in her hair as he played, petrified for ever in his memory even as his stumblings home over the cold waking fields.

  Tonight in Galway, in a long dress of burgundy velvet, satin in her hair, the delicate white hands of Eileen O’Neill would flicker on the white keyboard as the Surveyor played, while Mrs Kilboy would say to him at the CWA, ‘Something will have to be done about Jackson’s thieving ass, Sergeant, it’ll take the law to bring him to his senses, nothing less, and those thistles of his will be blowing again over the townland this year with him dead drunk in the pub, and is Biddy’s hens laying at all this weather, mine have gone on unholy strike, and I hear you were measuring the road today, you and a young whipper-snapper from Dublin, not even the guards can do anything unknownst in this place, and everybody’s agog as to how the case will go, the poor woman’s nerves I hear are in an awful condition, having to pass that wooden cross twice a day, and what was the use putting it up if it disturbs her so, it won’t bring him back to life, poor Michael, God rest him, going to Carrick for his haircut. The living have remindedness enough of their last ends and testaments without putting up wooden crosses on the highways and byways, and did you ever see such a winter, torrents of rain and expectedness of snow, it’ll be a long haul indeed to the summer.’

  It would be a long haul to summer and the old tarred boat anchored to the Ford radiator in the mouth of the Gut, the line cutting the water as hooked roach after hooked roach made a last surge towards the freedom of the open lake.

  When he had knotted his tie in the mirror his eye fell on the last of the whiskey and he filled the glass to the brim. He shivered as it went down but the melancholy passed from his face. He turned the chair round so that he could sit with his arms on its back, facing Biddy. ‘Do you know what I’ll say to Mrs Kilboy?’ he addressed the unheeding Biddy who was intent on the turning of the heel. ‘It’ll be a long haul indeed until the summer, Mrs Kilboy,’ I’ll say. ‘And now, Mrs Kilboy, let us talk of higher things. Some of the palaces of the royal popes in Avignon are wonderful, wonderful, Mrs Kilboy, in the sun; and wonderful the cafés and wonderful, Mrs Kilboy, the music. Did you ever hear of a gentleman called Paganini, Mrs Kilboy? A man of extraordinary interest is Paganini. Through his genius he climbed out of the filth of his local Genoa to wealth and fame. So that when he came to London, Mrs Kilboy, the crowds there crowded to touch him as they once trampled on one another to get their hands on Christ; but he stuck to his guns to the very end, improvising marvellously, Mrs Kilboy, during his last hours on his Guarnerius. I wonder what Guarnerius myself and yourself, Mrs Kilboy, or Biddy down in the barracks will be improvising on during our last hours before they hearse us across Cootehall bridge to old Ardcarne? Well, at least we’ll be buried in consecrated ground – for I doubt if old Father Glynn will have much doubts as to our orthodoxy – which is more than they did for poor old Paganini, for I was informed today, Mrs Kilboy, that they left him in some field for five years, just like an old dead cow, before they relented and allowed him to be buried in a churchyard on his own land.’

  The Sergeant tired of the mockery and rose from the chair, but he finished the dregs of the glass with a flourish, and placed it solidly down on the table. He put on his hat and overcoat. ‘We better be making a start, Biddy, if we’re ever going to put Mrs Kilboy on the straight and narrow.’

  Biddy did not look up. She had turned the heel and would not have to adjust the needles again till she had to start narrowing the sock close to the toe. Her body swayed happily on the chair as she turned and turned the handle, for she knew it would be all plain sailing till she got close to the toe.

  Gold Watch

  It was in Grafton Street we met, aimlessly strolling in one of the lazy lovely Saturday mornings in spring, the week of work over, the weekend still as fresh as the bunch of anemones that seemed the only purchase in her cane shopping basket.

  ‘What a lovely surprise,’ I said.

  I was about to take her hand when a man with an armload of parcels parted us as she was shifting the basket to her other hand, and we withdrew out of the pushing crowds into the comparative quiet of Harry Street. We had not met since we had graduated in the same law class from University College five years before. I had heard she’d become engaged to the medical student she used to knock around with and had gone into private practice down the country, perhaps waiting for him to graduate.

  ‘Are you up for the weekend or on holiday or what?’ I asked.

  ‘No. I work here now.’ She named a big firm that specialized in tax law. ‘I felt I needed a change.’

  She was wearing a beautiful suit, the colour of oatmeal, the narrow skirt slit from the knee. The long gold hair of her student days was drawn tightly into a neat bun at the back.

  ‘You look different but as beautiful as ever,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d be married by now.’

  ‘And do you still go home every summer?’ she countered, perhaps out of confusion.

  ‘It doesn’t seem as if I’ll ever break that bad habit.’

  We had coffee in Bewley’s – the scent of the roasting beans blowing through the vents out on to Grafton Street for ever mixed with the memory of that morning – and we went on to spend the whole idle day together until she laughingly and firmly returned my first hesitant kiss; and it was she who silenced my even more fumbled offer of marriage several weeks later. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be married. But we can move in together and see how it goes. If it doesn’t turn out well we can split and there’ll be no bitterness.’

  And it was she who found the flat in Hume Street, on the top floor of one of those old Georgian houses in off the Green, within walking distance of both our places of work. There was extraordinary peace and loveliness in those first weeks together that I will always link with those high-ceilinged rooms – the eager rush of excitement I felt as I left the office at the end of the day; the lingering in the streets to buy some offering of flowers or fruit or wine or a bowl and, once, one copper pan; and then rushing up the stairs to call her name, the emptiness of those same rooms when I’d find she hadn’t got home yet.

  ‘Why are we so happy?’ I would ask.

  ‘Don’t worry it,’ she always said, and sealed my lips with a touch.

  That early summer we drove down one weekend to the small town in Kilkenny where she had grown up, and above her father’s bakery we slept in separate rooms. That Sunday a whole stream of relatives – aunts, cousins, two uncles, with trains of children – kept arriving at the house. Word had gone out and they had plainly come to look me over. This brought the tension between herself and her schoolteacher mother into open quarrel late that evening after dinner. Her father sat with me in the front room, cautiously kind, sipping whiskey as we measured each careful cliché, listening to the quarrel slow and rise and crack in the far-off kitchen. I found the sense of comfort and space charming for a while, but by the time we left I too was beginning to find the small town claustrophobic.

  ‘Unfortunately the best part of these visits is always the leaving,’ she said as we drove away. ‘After a while away you�
�re lured into thinking that the next time will somehow be different, but it never is.’

  ‘Wait – wait until you see my place. Then you may well think differently. At least your crowd made an effort. And your father is a nice man.’

  ‘And yet you keep going back to the old place?’

  ‘That’s true. I have to face that now. That way I don’t feel guilty. I don’t feel anything.’

  I knew myself too well. There was more caution than any love or charity in my habitual going home. It was unattractive and it had been learned in the bitter school of my father. I would fall into no guilt, and I was already fast outwearing him. For a time, it seemed, I could outstare the one eye of nature.

  I had even waited for love, if love this was; for it was happiness such as I had never known.

  ‘You see, I waited long enough for you,’ I said as we drove away from her Kilkenny town. ‘I hope I can keep you now.’

  ‘If it wasn’t me it would be some other. My mother will never understand that. I might as well say I waited long enough for you.’

  The visit we made to my father some weeks later quickly turned to a far worse disaster than I could have envisaged. I saw him watch us as I got out of the car to open the iron gate under the yew, but instead of coming out to greet us he withdrew into the shadows of the hallway. It was my stepmother, Rose, who came out to the car when we both got out and were opening the small garden gate. We had to follow her smiles and trills of speech all the way into the kitchen to find my father, who was seated in the car chair, and he did not rise to take our hands.

  After a lunch that was silent, in spite of several shuttlecocks of speech Rose tried to keep in the air, he said as he took his hat from the sill, ‘I want to ask you about these walnuts,’ and I followed him out into the fields. The mock orange was in blossom, and it was where the mock orange stood out from the clump of egg bushes that he turned suddenly and said, ‘What age is your intended? She looks well on her way to forty.’

  ‘She’s the same age as I am,’ I said blankly. I could hardly think, caught between the shock and pure amazement.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t have to, but we were in the same class at university.’ I turned away.

  Walking with her in the same field close to the mock orange tree late that evening, I said, ‘Do you know what my father said to me?’

  ‘No,’ she said happily. ‘But from what I’ve seen I don’t think anything will surprise me.’

  ‘We were walking just here,’ I began, and repeated what he’d said. When I saw her go still and pale I knew I should not have spoken.

  ‘He said I look close to forty,’ she repeated. ‘I have to get out of this place.’

  ‘Stay this one night,’ I begged. ‘It’s late now. We’d have to stay in a hotel. It’d be making it into too big a production. You don’t ever have to come back again if you don’t want to, but stay the night. It’ll be easier.’

  ‘I’ll not want to come back,’ she said as she agreed to see out this one night.

  ‘But why do you think he said it?’ I asked her later when we were both quiet, sitting on a wall at the end of the Big Meadow, watching the shadows of the evening deepen between the beeches, putting off the time when we’d have to go into the house, not unlike two grown children.

  ‘Is there any doubt? Out of simple hatred. There’s no living with that kind of hatred.’

  ‘We’ll leave first thing in the morning,’ I promised.

  ‘And why did you,’ she asked, tickling my throat with a blade of ryegrass, ‘say I was, if anything, too beautiful?’

  ‘Because it’s true. It makes you public and it’s harder to live naturally. You live in too many eyes – in envy or confusion or even simple admiration, it’s all the same. I think it makes it harder to live luckily.’

  ‘But it gives you many advantages.’

  ‘If you make use of those advantages, you’re drawn even deeper in. And of course I’m afraid it’ll attract people who’ll try to steal you from me.’

  ‘That won’t happen.’ She laughed. She’d recovered all her natural good spirits. ‘And now I suppose we better go in and face the ogre. We have to do it sooner or later and it’s getting chilly.’

  My father tried to be charming when we went in, but there was a false heartiness in the voice that made clear that it grew out of no well-meaning. He felt he’d lost ground, and was now trying to recover it far too quickly. Using silence and politeness like a single weapon, we refused to be drawn in; and when pressed to stay the next morning, we said unequivocally that we had to get back. Except for one summer when I went to work in England, the summer my father married Rose, I had always gone home to help at the hay; and after I entered the civil service I was able to arrange holidays so that they fell around haytime. They had come to depend on me and I liked the work. My father had never forgiven me for taking my chance to go to university. He had wanted me to stay at home to work the land. I had always fought his need to turn my refusal into betrayal, and by going home each summer I felt I was affirming that the great betrayal was not mine but nature’s own.

  I had arranged the holidays to fall at haytime that year as I had all the years before I met her, but since he’d turned to me at the mock orange tree I was no longer sure I had to go. I was no longer free, since in everything but name our life together seemed to be growing into marriage. It might even make him happy for a time if he could call it my betrayal.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I confessed to her a week before I was due to take holidays. ‘They’ve come to depend on me for the hay. Everything else they can manage themselves. I know they’ll expect me.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘I suppose I’d prefer to go home – that’s if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Why do you prefer?’

  ‘I like working at the hay. You come back to the city feeling fit and well.’

  ‘Is that the real reason?’

  ‘No. It’s something that might even be called sinister. I’ve gone home for so long that I’d like to see it through. I don’t want to be blamed for finishing it, though it’ll finish soon, with or without me. But this way I don’t have to think about it.’

  ‘Maybe it would be kinder, then, to do just that, and take the blame.’

  ‘It probably would be kinder, but kindness died between us so long ago that it doesn’t enter into it.’

  ‘So there was some kindness?’

  ‘When I was younger.’ I had to smile. ‘He looked on it as weakness. I suspect he couldn’t deal with it. Anyhow it always redoubled his fury. He was kind, too, in fits, when he was feeling good about things. That was even more unacceptable. And that phrase from the Bible is true that after enough suffering a kind of iron enters the soul. It’s very far from commendable, but now I do want to see it through.’

  ‘Well, then go,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand it but I can see you want to go. Being new, the earliest I can get holidays will be September.’

  We had pasta and two bottles of red wine in the flat the evening before I was to leave for the hay, and with all the talking we were almost late for our walk in the Green. We liked to walk there every good evening before turning home for the night.

  The bells were fairly clamouring from all corners, rooting vagrants and lovers from the shrubbery, as we passed through the half-closed gates. Two women at the pond’s edge were hurriedly feeding the ducks bread from a plastic bag. We crossed the bridge where the Japanese cherry leaned, down among the empty benches round the paths and flowerbeds within their low railings. The deck-chairs had been gathered in, the sprinklers turned off. There was about the Green always at this hour some of the melancholy of the beach at the close of holiday. The gate we had entered was already locked. The attendant was rattling an enormous bunch of keys at the one through which we had to leave.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I’d like to be married before long. I hadn’t thought it would
make much difference to me, but, oddly, now I want to be married.’

  ‘I hope it’s to me,’ I said.

  ‘You haven’t asked me.’

  I could feel her laughter as she held my arm close.

  ‘I’m asking now.’

  I made a flourish of removing a non-existent hat. ‘Will you marry me?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Before the year is out.’

  ‘Would you like to go for a drink to celebrate, then?’

  ‘I always like any excuse to celebrate.’ She was biting her lip. ‘Where will you take me?’

  ‘The Shelbourne. Our local. It’ll be quiet.’

  I thought of the aggressive boot thrown after the bridal car, the marbles suddenly rattling in the hubs of the honeymoon car, the metal smeared with oil so that the thrown boxes of confetti would stick, the legs of the comic pyjamas hilariously sewn up. We would avoid all that. We had promised one another the simplest wedding.

  ‘We live in a lucky time,’ she said and raised her glass, her calm, grey, intelligent eyes shining. ‘We wouldn’t have been allowed to do it this way even a decade ago. Will you tell your father that we’re to be married?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably not unless it comes up. And you?’

  ‘I’d better. As it is, Mother will probably be furious that it is not going to be a big splash.’

  ‘I’m so grateful for these months together, that we were able to drift into marriage without the drowning plunge. What will you do while I’m away?’

  ‘I’ll pine,’ she teased. ‘I might even try to decorate the flat out of simple desperation. There’s a play at the Abbey that I want to see. There are some good restaurants in the city if I get too depressed. And in the meantime, have a wonderful time with your father and poor Rose in the nineteenth century at the bloody hay.’