Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  Her mood changed as quickly again as soon as we rose. She wanted to end the day, to separate.

  ‘We could go to one of the cinemas in O’Connell Street or to eat somewhere.’ I would offer anything.

  ‘No. Not this evening. I just want to have an early night. I’ve a kind of headache.’

  It was then she pointed out that she’d lost an earring in the sandhills, one of a pair of silver pendants I’d given her for her birthday.

  As soon as she left me I retracked my way back into the sandhills. Our shapes were still where we had lain in the loose sand. With a pocket comb I came on the pendant where the sand and long white grass met. I was happy, only too anxious to believe that it augured well, that it was a sign that the whole course of the affair had turned towards an impossible happiness. ‘We will be happy. We’ll be happy. It will turn out all right now.’ It was a dream of paradise.

  But all the finding of the pendant did was to hold off this hell for four whole weeks. It was strange to think that but for coming on the simple earring in the sand, this day, this unendurable day, would have fallen four weeks ago. She had said so.

  The Harcourt Street lights brought Mulvey’s enraged stride to a stop. He turned and came back towards us. ‘If I can’t carry it, it’s an even worse form of humiliation to have to watch my wife carry it. Throw it there,’ and when she protested he took it from her and threw it down.

  ‘I’ll carry it,’ I said. It was so light it could be empty, but when I swung it I felt things move within the leather.

  ‘What business is it of yours?’ he demanded.

  ‘None. But I don’t want to leave it behind on the street.’

  ‘You take it too seriously.’ He brightened. ‘It wouldn’t be left behind.’

  ‘I don’t mind carrying it at all,’ I said.

  ‘Do you know what colour of sky that is?’ He pointed above the roofs of Harcourt Street.

  ‘It’s blue,’ I said. ‘A blue sky.’

  ‘It’s not a blue sky, but it goes without saying that blue is what it would be called by everybody in this sloppy country. Agate is the exact word. There are many blues. That is an agate sky.’

  ‘How do you know it’s agate?’

  ‘A painter I used to knock around with taught me the different colours.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful word,’ I said.

  ‘It’s the right word,’ he replied.

  ‘I’ve just noticed what a lovely evening it is,’ Claire Mulvey said wistfully. ‘There’s just the faintest hint of autumn.’

  ‘The last time we met I seem to remember you saying that Halloran was all right,’ I said. ‘You said he was a sensitive person.’

  ‘Oh, I was just making him up,’ Mulvey laughed, breaking as quickly into jocular good humour as he had into anger. ‘You don’t have to take what I say about people so solemnly. People need a great deal of making up. I don’t see how they’d be tolerable otherwise. Everybody does it. You’ll learn that soon enough.’

  The light seemed to glow in a gentle fullness on the bullet-scarred stone of the College of Surgeons. Stephen’s Green looked full of peace within its green railings. There was a smoky blue in the air that warned of autumn. Claire Mulvey had been silent for several minutes. Her face was beautiful in its tiredness, her thoughts plainly elsewhere.

  ‘We have to be thankful for this good weather while it lasts,’ she said when we reached the bar. ‘It’s lovely to see the doors of the bars open so late in the summer.’

  Halloran was not in the bar. We counted out the money and found we’d enough for one round but not for a second. Mulvey bought the drinks and took them to a table near the door. We could see the whole way across the street to the closed shoeshop.

  ‘Where’s that case?’ Mulvey said in an exasperation of waiting. ‘We’ve been lugging it around for so long we might as well see what we’ve been lugging around.’

  ‘What does it matter? He left it with us,’ Claire Mulvey pleaded. ‘And he may come at any minute.’

  The opposition seemed to drive Mulvey on. When the lock held, he lifted the suitcase to his knees and, holding it just below the level of the table, took a nail file from his pocket.

  ‘Don’t open it,’ his wife pleaded. ‘He left it locked. It’s like opening someone’s letters.’

  Suddenly the lock sprung beneath the probing of the small file, and he opened it slowly, keeping one eye on the door. An assortment of women’s underclothes lay in the bottom of the case, all black: a slip, a brassière, panties, long nylon stockings, a pair of red shoes; and beneath, a small Roman missal, its ribbons of white and green and yellow and red hanging from the edges. In Latin and English for every day in the year.

  I thought he’d make a joke of it, call to have a bucket of water in readiness when Halloran appeared with the boy. ‘This is just too much,’ he said, and closed the suitcase, probing again with the nail file till the catch locked.

  ‘It wasn’t right to open it,’ Claire Mulvey said.

  ‘Of course it was right. Now we know what we’re really dealing with. Plain, dull, unimaginative perversity. Imagine the ponce dressing himself up in that gear. It’s too much.’

  ‘It mightn’t be his,’ she protested.

  ‘Of course it’s his. Whose else could it be!’

  Eamonn Kelly came in. He’d met Halloran and the boy in Baggot Street that morning after Mass. He said that he’d be here at six and had given him money to buy us drinks till he came. We all asked for pints. I went to help Eamonn Kelly bring the drinks from the counter.

  ‘Did you get home all right last night?’ I asked as we waited on the pulling of the pints.

  ‘Would I be here if I hadn’t?’ he retorted. I didn’t answer. I brought the drinks back to the table.

  ‘Well, at least this is a move in the right direction,’ Mulvey said as he raised his glass to his lips. I felt leaden with tiredness, the actual bar close to the enamelled memories of the morning. Everything around me looked like that dishevelled lilac bush, those milk bottles, granite steps …

  The state was so close to dreaming that I stared in disbelief when I saw the first thistledown, its thin, pale parachute drifting so slowly across the open doorway that it seemed to move more in water than in air. A second came soon after the first had crossed out of sight, moving in the same unhurried way. A third. A fourth. There were three of the delicate parachutes moving together, at the same dreamlike pace across the doorway.

  ‘Do you see the thistles?’ I said. ‘It’s strange to see them in the middle of Grafton Street.’

  ‘There are backyards and dumps around Grafton Street too. You only see the fronts,’ Mulvey said. ‘Yes. There’s plenty of dumps.’

  Several more arrived and passed on in the same slow dream. There was always one or several in the doorway. When at last there were none it seemed strange, but then one would appear when they seemed quite stopped, move slowly across, but the intervals were lengthening.

  ‘They seem to be coming from the direction of Duke Street,’ Claire Mulvey said. ‘There are no gardens or dumps that I can think of there.’

  ‘You think that because you can’t see any. There are dumps and yards and gardens, and everything bloody people do, but they’re at the back.’

  ‘They may have come from even farther away,’ I said. ‘I wonder how far they can travel.’

  ‘It’d be easy to look it up,’ Mulvey said. ‘That’s what books are for.’

  ‘They can’t come on many easy seed-beds in the environs of Grafton Street.’

  ‘There’s a dump near Mercer’s. And there’s another in Castle Street.’ Mulvey started to laugh at some private joke. ‘And nature will have provided her usual hundredfold overkill. For the hundred that fall on stone or pavement one will find its dump and grow up into a proud thistle and produce thousands of fresh new thistledowns.’

  ‘Hazlitt,’ Eamonn Kelly ventured.

  ‘Hazlitt’s far too refined,’ Mulvey said. ‘Just old bori
ng rural Ireland strikes again. Even its principal city has one foot in a manure heap.’ The discussion had put Mulvey in extraordinary good humour.

  Halloran and the boy appeared. Halloran was larger than I remembered, bald, wearing a dishevelled pinstripe suit, sweating profusely. He started to explain something in a very agitated manner even before he got to our table. The boy followed behind like a small dog, his black hair cropped very close to his skull, quiet and looking around, seemingly unafraid. As he came towards the table, a single thistledown appeared, and seemed to hang for a still moment beyond his shoulder in the doorway. A hand reached out, the small fresh hand of a girl or boy, but before it had time to close, the last pale parachute moved on out of sight as if breathed on by the hand’s own movement.

  Lightly as they, we must have drifted to the dancehall a summer ago. The late daylight had shone through the glass dome above the dancefloor, strong as the light of the ballroom, the red and blue lights that started to sweep the floor as soon as the waltz began.

  She’d been standing with a large blonde girl on the edge of the dancefloor. I could not take my eyes from her black hair, the pale curve of her throat. A man crossed to the pair of girls: it was the blonde girl he asked to dance.

  I followed him across the ballroom and, as soon as I touched her elbow, she turned and came with me on to the floor.

  ‘Do you like waltzes?’ were the first words she spoke as we began to dance.

  She did not speak again. As we kept turning to the music, we moved through the circle where the glass dome was still letting in daylight, and kept on after we’d passed the last of the pillars hung with the wire baskets of flowers, out beyond the draped curtains, until we seemed to be turning in nothing but air beneath the sky, a sky that was neither agate nor blue, just the anonymous sky of any and every day above our lives as we set out.

  A Ballad

  ‘Do you think it will be late when Cronin tumbles in?’ Ryan asked sleepily.

  ‘It won’t be early. He went to a dance with O’Reilly and the two women.’

  Pale light from the street lamp just outside the window shone on the varnished ceiling boards of the room. Cronin would have to cross the room to get to his bed by the window.

  ‘I don’t mind if he comes in near morning. What I hate is just to have got to sleep and then get woke up,’ Ryan said.

  ‘You can be sure he’ll wake us up. He’s bound to have some story to get off his chest.’

  Ryan was large and gentle and worked as an inseminator at the AI station in the town, as did Cronin. The three of us shared this small room in the roof of the Bridge Restaurant. O’Reilly was the only other lodger Mrs McKinney kept, but he had a room of his own downstairs. He was the site engineer on the construction of the new bridge.

  ‘What do you think will happen between O’Reilly and Rachael when the bridge is finished?’

  I was startled when Ryan spoke. The intervals of silence before we fell asleep seemed always deeper than sleep. ‘I don’t know. They’ve been going out a good while together. Maybe they’ll be married … What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s had a good few other women here and there in the last few months. I doubt if he wants to get hitched.’

  ‘She’d have no trouble finding someone else.’

  She had been the queen of one beauty competition the summer before and runner-up in another. She was fair-haired and tall.

  ‘She mightn’t want that,’ Ryan said. ‘The Bachelors’ Ball will be interesting on Friday night. Why don’t you change your mind and come? The dress suits are arriving on the bus Friday evening. All we’d have to do is ring in your measurements.’

  ‘No. I’ll not go. You know I’d go but I want to have the money for Christmas.’

  An old bicycle went rattling down the hill and across the bridge, a voice shouting out, ‘Fàg à bealach.’

  ‘That’s Paddy Mick on his way home. He has no bell. It means the last of the after-hour houses are shut.’

  ‘It’s time to try to get to sleep – Cronin or no Cronin.’

  It was very late when Cronin woke us, but daylight hadn’t yet started to thin the yellow light from the street lamp. We would have pretended to have gone on sleeping but he repeated, ‘Are yous awake?’

  ‘We are now.’

  ‘That O’Reilly should be run out of town,’ he said.

  ‘What’s wrong now?’ I had suspected for a while that his lean, intense good looks concealed a deep stupidity.

  ‘What he made that girl do tonight no poor girl should have to do, and in front of people too.’

  ‘What was it?’ Ryan raised himself on an elbow in the bed while Cronin slipped out of his clothes.

  ‘It was horrible.’

  ‘You can’t just wake us up like this and not tell us.’

  ‘It was too foul to put in words.’

  ‘What’s so suddenly sacred about words! Why didn’t you stop it if you felt so badly about it?’

  ‘What could you say once it was done? Once he made her do it. My woman was so upset that she didn’t talk for the rest of the night.’

  Cronin had been going out casually with a hairdresser some years older than he was, who owned her own business in the town. He was taking her to the ball on Friday.

  ‘Are you going to tell us what happened? Or are you going to let us get back to sleep?’

  ‘I wouldn’t disgrace myself by telling it.’ He turned his back to us in the bed.

  ‘I hope you have nightmares.’ Ryan swore before pulling the clothes and pillow violently over his head.

  The four of us had breakfast together the next morning. There was no one else in the big dining-room except some night-shift workers from the mill across the road in their white caps and overalls, the pale dusting of flour still on their arms and faces. I’d always envied their high spirits in the morning. Breakfast was for them a celebration. Cronin was gloomily taciturn until near the end of the meal when he said, ‘You’re an awful effin’ so and so, O’Reilly, to do what you did last night.’

  ‘I haven’t even a notion what you’re talking about.’ O’Reilly bloomed. He was a small barrel of a man with a fine handsome head. He had played cornerback for Cavan in two All-Irelands.

  ‘No girl should have to do what you made that girl do last night.’

  ‘You know nothing about women, Cronin,’ O’Reilly said loudly, hoping to get the ear of the mill workers, but they were having too good a time of their own. ‘Women like to do that. Only they have to pretend that they don’t. Let me tell you that all women take a poor view of a man who accepts everything at its face value.’

  ‘It was a disgrace,’ Cronin said doggedly.

  ‘You’re a one to talk.’ O’Reilly rose from the table in high good humour. ‘Whatever yourself and the hairdresser were up to in the back of the car, I thought it was about to turn over.’

  ‘It was a pure disgrace,’ Cronin said to his plate.

  Ryan and myself stayed cautiously neutral. I had clashed with O’Reilly from the beginning when I’d refused to become involved with the town football team, which he ran with a fierce fanaticism, and we were all the more cautious because Cronin usually hero-worshipped O’Reilly. In the long evenings they could be seen kicking a ball round for hours in the park after training sessions. Lately, they’d taken to throwing shoes and pieces of cutlery at the ceiling if they thought I was upstairs with a book or correcting school exercises. I was looking forward to the opening of the new bridge.

  Ryan’s unwashed Beetle was waiting outside the gate when I finished school at three that evening.

  ‘I’ve calls in the Gaeltacht. Maybe you’ll come in case there’s need of a bit of translating.’

  It was a polite excuse. There was never need of translation. The tied cow could be always pointed out. The breed of the bulls – Shorthorn, Charolais, Friesian – were the same in Gaelic as in English. The different colours of the straws of semen in the stainless steel container on the flo
or of the Beetle needed no translation. Ryan just didn’t like driving on the empty roads between these silent, alien houses on his own.

  ‘I got the whole business out of Cronin in the office this morning.’ A wide grin showed on his face as the VW rocked over the narrow roads between the bare whitethorns.

  ‘What was it, then? I won’t be shocked.’

  ‘It shocked Cronin.’

  ‘What was it, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘O’Reilly got Rachael to take his lad in her mouth,’ Ryan said. ‘Then he wouldn’t let her spit it out.’

  ‘Spit what out?’

  ‘What’s in the bucket?’ He gestured towards the bright steel container on the floor of the VW where the straws were kept in liquid nitrogen.

  ‘They say it’s fattening,’ I said to hide my own shock.

  ‘Not half as fattening as in the other place.’ I was unprepared for the huge roar of laughter my words induced.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘O’Reilly’s in a white fright. He’s got Rachael up the pole.’

  ‘Then he’ll marry her.’

  ‘Not unless he has to. Cronin told me that he spent all last week applying for engineering jobs in South Africa. It seems they’re building lots of bridges in South Africa.’

  ‘But he has a permanent job to go to in Galway as soon as the bridge finishes. He’s been boasting about it long enough.’

  ‘He could go if he married Rachael, but it mightn’t be so easy if he refused to do the decent. News travels.’

  We’d come to the first of the plain ugly cottages the government had built on these twenty-acre farms. They were all alike. A woman met us, showed us to the cow, gave Ryan a basin of hot water, soap, a towel to wash and dry his rubbered arm afterwards. She responded to my few questions with deep suspicion, fearful that I was some government official sent out to check on grants or the speaking of Irish.

  These people had been transplanted here from the seaboard as part of de Valera’s dream; lighthouses put down on the plain from which Gaelic would spread from tongue to tongue throughout the land like pentecostal flame. Used to a little fishing, a potato patch, grass for a cow between the rocks, they were lost in the rich green acres of Meath. A few cattle were kept knee-deep in grass, or the land was put out on conacre to the grain contractors who supplied the mill – and the men went to work in England. It was dark by the time we’d finished. The last call had to be done by the light of a paraffin lantern.