Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

‘I don’t drink, Father,’ I said as he raised the bottle.

  ‘You’re wise. The heart doesn’t need drink at your age. I didn’t touch it till I was forty, but after forty I think every man should drink a little. The heart needs a jab or two every day to remind it of its business once it crosses forty. What do you think the business of the heart is?’

  ‘I suppose it has many businesses, Father.’

  ‘You’ll never be convicted on that answer, son, but it has only one main business. That’s to keep going. If it doesn’t do that all its other businesses can be forgotten about.’

  He poured himself a very large whiskey, which he drank neat, and then added a smaller measure, filling the glass with water. The Principal had been right. The saucepan was full of steaming porridge when he lifted the lid. He ladled it into the bowls with a wooden spoon, leaving place enough in the bowl for milk and a sprinkling of sugar. It was all I could do to finish what was in the bowl. I noticed how remarkably steady his hand was as he brought the spoon to his lips.

  ‘If a man sticks to the stirabout he’s unlikely to go very far wrong,’ he concluded. ‘I hope you’ll be happy here. Mr Kennedy is a good man. He went on our side in that strike. He kept the school open. It was presumably good for the pupils. I think, though, it brought some trouble on himself. It’s seldom wise in the long run to go against your own crowd.’

  He’d risen, laying his rug aside, but before I could leave he took me by the shoulder up to a large oil painting in a heavy gilt frame above the mantel. ‘Look at it carefully. What do you see?’

  ‘A tropical tree. It looks like an island.’

  ‘Look again. It’s a trick painting,’ he said, and when I could make nothing more of it he traced lines from the tree, which also depicted a melancholy military figure in a cocked hat. ‘Napoleon, on Elba,’ he laughed.

  The Kennedys had invited me to their Sunday lunch the next day. Their kitchen was pleasant and extremely warm, the two girls setting the big table and smells of roasting chicken and apple stew coming from the black-leaded range. There was wine with the meal, a sweet white wine. Afterwards, the girls cleared the table and, asking permission, disappeared into the town. Oliver sat on in the room. Kennedy filled his wife’s glass to the brim with the last of the Sauterne and got himself a whiskey from the press in place of the wine.

  ‘You were just like he was twenty-one years ago. Your first school. Straight from the training college. Starting out,’ Mrs Kennedy said, her face pink with the wine and cooking.

  ‘Teachers’ jobs were hard come by in those days. Temporary assistant teacher for one year in the Marist Brothers in Sligo was my first job. There was pay but you could hardly call it pay. Not enough to keep a wren alive.’

  ‘It was the first of July. I remember it well. We had a bar and grocery by the harbour and sold newspapers. He came in for the Independent. He was tall then, with a thick head of brown hair. I know it was the first of July, but I forget the year.’

  ‘Nineteen thirty-three. It was the year I got out of college. I bought that Independent to see if there were any permanent jobs coming up in October.’

  ‘We were both only twenty. They told us to wait till we had saved some money, that we had plenty of time. But we couldn’t wait. My father gave us two rooms above the grocery part of the shop. Do you ever regret not waiting?’

  ‘We wouldn’t have saved anyhow. There was nothing to save. And we had those years.’

  I felt like an intruder. Their son sat there, shamed and fascinated, unable to cry, stop, or tear himself away.

  ‘Those two rooms were rotten with damp, and when there were storms you should have heard the damned panes. You could have wallpapered the rooms with the number of letters beginning “The Manager regrets” that came through the letter-box that winter. Oliver here was on the way.’

  ‘Those two rooms were happiness,’ she said, lifting the glass of sweet wine to her lips, while her son writhed with unease on the sofa.

  ‘We could get no job, and then I was suddenly offered three at the same time. It’s always the same. You either get more than you want or you get nothing. We came here because the house went with the school. It meant a great deal in those days. It still does us no harm.’

  *

  I walked with Kennedy to the school on the Monday. He introduced me to the classes I was to teach. We walked together on the concrete during the mid-morning break. Eagerly, he started to talk as we walked up and down among the playing children. The regulation ten minutes ran to twenty before he rang the bell.

  ‘They’re as well playing in this weather. The inspectors never try to catch me out. They know the work gets done.’

  It was the same at the longer lunchtime, the talk veering again to the early days of his marriage.

  ‘I used to go back to those two rooms for lunch. We’d just go straight to bed, grabbing a sandwich on the way out. Sometimes we had it off against the edge of the table. It was a great feeling afterwards, walking about with the Brothers, knowing that they’d never have it in the whole of their lives.’

  I walked with him on that concrete in total silence. I must have been close to the perfect listener for this excited, forceful man. No one had ever spoken to me like this before. I didn’t know what to say. The children milled about us in the weak sun. Sometimes I shivered at the premonition that days like this might be a great part of the rest of my life: I had dreamed once that through teaching I would help make the world a better place.

  ‘What made you take up teaching?’ he asked. ‘I know the hours are good enough, and there’s the long holidays, but what the hell good is it without money?’

  ‘I don’t know why,’ I answered. ‘Some notion of service … of doing good.’

  ‘It’s easy to see that you’re young. Teaching is a lousy, tiring old job, and it gets worse as you get older. A new bunch comes at you year after year. They stay the same but you start to go down. You’ll not get thanked for service in this world. There were no jobs when I was young. It was considered a bloody miracle to have any sort of a job with a salary. If I was in your boots now I’d do something like dentistry or engineering, even if I had to scrape for the money.’

  The time had already gone several minutes past the lunchtime. The children were whirling about us on the concrete in loud abandon, for them the minutes of play stolen from the school day were pure sweetness.

  ‘Still, if I had had those chances, I wouldn’t have gone to Sligo and I’d never have met her,’ he mused.

  I was in my room in the digs after tea one evening when a daughter of the house in the blouse and gymfrock of the convent secondary school knocked and said, ‘There’s a visitor for you in the front room downstairs.’

  A frail, grey-haired man rose as soon as I entered. He had an engaging handshake and smile.

  ‘I’m Owen Beirne, branch secretary of the INTO. I just called in to welcome you to the town and to invite you to our meeting on Friday night. I teach in a small school out in the country. Forgive the speech.’ He smiled as he sat down.

  I explained briefly that I had joined the union already and suggested that we move from the stiff front room.

  ‘We’ll cross in a minute to the Bridge Bar. They always have a nice fire, but it’s safer to say what I have to say here. I suppose you don’t know about your Principal and the union.’

  ‘He told me he wasn’t a member.’

  ‘Did he try to stop you joining?’ he asked sharply.

  ‘No. I told him I’d joined already.’

  ‘Well, he was a member before the strike but he refused to come out on strike. For several months he crossed that picket line, while the church and de Valera tried to starve us to our knees.’

  There was nothing for me to say.

  ‘As far as we are concerned, I mean the rest of the teachers around here, Kennedy doesn’t exist. You’re in a different position. He’s your Principal. You have to work with the man. But if we were to meet the two of you together, you
might find yourself blackballed as well.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘It means nothing as far as you are concerned. You just go your own way and notice nothing. But should he try to pull the heavy on you in school – he did with one of your predecessors – let us know and we’ll fall on him like the proverbial load of bricks.’ He had risen. ‘That’s what I wanted to get out of the way.’

  The bar was empty, but there was a bright fire of logs at one end. Owen Beirne ordered a hot whiskey with cloves and lemon. The barman seemed to like and respect him. I had a glass of lemonade.

  ‘Don’t you take a drink?’

  ‘Seldom.’

  ‘I drink too much. It’s expensive and a waste of time. During the times I don’t drink I read far more and feel better in every way. Unfortunately, it’s very pleasant.’

  He told me his father had been a teacher. ‘My poor father had to go to the back door of the presbytery every month for his pay. The priest’s housekeeper gave it to him. It was four pounds in those days. I’ll never forget my mother’s face when he came back from the presbytery one night with three pounds instead of four. The housekeeper had held back a pound because the priest had decided to paint the church that month. One of the great early things the INTO got for the teacher was for the salary to be paid directly into his own hands – to get it through the post instead of from the priest or his housekeeper.

  ‘All that was changed by my time. The inspectors, the dear inspectors, were our hairshirts. A recurring nightmare I have is walking up and down in front of a class with an inspector sitting at the back quietly taking notes. Some were the roaring boys. One rode the bucking mule in Duffy’s Circus in Ballinasloe, got badly thrown, but was still out before nine the next morning to check if the particular teacher he’d been drinking with was on time. They were like lords or judges. Full-grown men trembled in front of them at these annual inspections. Women were often in tears. The best hams and fruit cakes were brought out at lunchtime. For some there had to be the whiskey bottle and stout in the schoolhouse after school.

  ‘Then, during the war, the Emergency, we had an inspector in Limerick called Deasy, a fairly young man. I was teaching in his area at the time. He was a real rat. In Newcastle West there was an old landed family, a racehorse and gambling crowd, down on their luck. An uncle was the Bishop of Cashel. One of the sons was a failed medical student, and God knows what else, and as part of a rehabilitation scheme didn’t the Bishop get him a temporary teaching job. Deasy was his inspector. I’m sure the teaching was choice, and what Deasy didn’t say to his man wasn’t worth saying. This crowd wasn’t used to being talked to like that. He just walked out of the school without saying a word. Deasy sat down to his tea and ham sandwiches and fruit cake with the schoolmistress. They were still having lunch when your man arrived back. He sat down with them, opened his coat nice and quietly, produced the shotgun and gave Deasy both barrels. He wasn’t even offered the Act of Contrition. I was in the cathedral in Limerick the night Deasy’s body was brought in. It was a sad sight, the widow and seven children behind the coffin. Every inspector in the country was at the funeral. Things were noticeably easier afterwards.’

  ‘What happened to your man?’

  ‘He was up for murder. He’d have swung at the time but for the Bishop, who got him certified. They say that after a few years he was spirited away to Australia. He was as sane as I was.’

  ‘It seems to be a more decent time now,’ I said.

  ‘It’s by no means great, but it’s certainly better than it was.’

  A few people had come into the bar by this time. They looked our way but no one joined us at the fire. He’d had four drinks, and his face was flushed and excited. He wanted to know what poets my generation was reading. He seemed unimpressed by the names I mentioned. His own favourite was Horace. ‘Sometimes I translate him for fun, as a kind of discipline. I always feel in good spirits afterwards.’

  Almost absently he spilled out a number of coloured capsules from a small plastic container on to the table, got a glass of water from the bar. ‘It’s the old ticker. I’m afraid it’s wobbly. But I hope not to embarrass my friends,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry. That’s lousy luck to have.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ he answered laughing as we took leave of one another. ‘I’ve had a good innings.’

  Kennedy didn’t call to the digs next morning, and I made my own way to the school. As I came through the gates I saw that he had all the classes lined up on the concrete, and he was looking so demonstratively at his watch that I checked the time on my own watch. I was in time but only just. Before I got any closer he’d marched his own classes in, disappearing behind a closed door. Instead of coming round with the roll books that morning, he sent one of the senior boys, and at the mid-morning break I found myself alone on the concrete for several minutes, but when he did join me his grievance spilled out at once.

  ‘I heard yourself and Mr Beirne had a long session in the Bridge House last night.’

  ‘He called at the digs. It was more comfortable to cross to the Bridge.’

  ‘I suppose plenty of dirt was fired in my direction.’

  ‘None. He said the fact that you’re not in the INTO must be no concern of mine. It was the only time you were mentioned.’

  ‘That was very good of him. There are many people around here who would think him not fit company for a young teacher,’ he said angrily.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Every penny he has goes on booze or books and some of the books are far from edifying, by all accounts. He’s either out every night in the bars, or else he shuts himself off for weeks on end. They say his wife was dead in the house for most of a day before he noticed. The priests certainly think he’s no addition to the place.’

  ‘He seemed an intelligent man.’

  ‘He knows how to put on a good front, all right.’

  ‘He seemed very decent to me.’ I refused to give way.

  ‘He’s no friend of mine. You can take my word for that. All that crowd would have had my guts for garters if they got the chance. They’ll have a long wait, I can tell you. When I came to this town we hadn’t two coins to clink together. Every morsel of food we put in our mouths that first month here was on credit. But I worked. Every hour of private tuition going round the place I took, and that’s the lousiest of all teaching jobs, face to face for a whole hour with a well-heeled dunce. Then I got into surveying work with the solicitors. I must have walked half the fields within miles of this town with the chains. I was just about on my feet when that strike was called. The children were in good schools. Why should I put all that at risk? It wasn’t my strike. Some of the ones that went on strike will be in hock for the rest of their days. And if it had lasted even another month they’d have had to crawl back like beaten dogs. Do you think that it was easy for me to pass those pickets with their placards and cornerboy jeers every school day for the whole of seven months? Do you think that was easy?’

  ‘I know it wasn’t easy.’

  There was a Mass that Friday for the teachers and children of the parish, an official blessing on the new year, and we were given the day off to attend the Mass. Kennedy called for me and we walked up the town together to the church. At the top of Main Street we ran straight into Owen Beirne. Rather than cut us openly, he crossed to a fish stall and pretended to be examining the freshness of a tray of plaice as we went by.

  ‘Your friend Beirne hadn’t much to say to you today. You were in the wrong company.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ I said.

  As we came up to the railings of the church, a red-faced hulk of a man, obviously a teacher, the gold fáinne and metal tricolour in his lapel, stared at Kennedy in open hostility, cleared his throat, and spat out into our path. Kennedy said nothing as we hurried into the church. After Mass little groups of teachers stood about in the church grounds, shaking hands, joking, but as soon as we approached they fell silent or turned away. Not a single p
erson spoke to us or raised a hat or even bowed. We passed out in total silence. I had never run such a gauntlet. I had the feeling as we walked back through the town that Kennedy was desperately searching for something to say but that he was too disturbed to settle on any one phrase.

  ‘You might as well come into my place for a cup of tea or something,’ he said eventually. ‘You have a good hour yet to go till your lunch.’

  His house was empty and he made the tea himself. ‘They can try as hard as they are able but they can’t harm me now,’ he began slowly as he made the tea. ‘In another two years Oliver will be qualified. By that time, the pair of girls will be on their way into the civil service or training college. That summer we’ll buy the car. We could buy it now but we decided to wait till we can do it right. It’ll be no secondhand. That summer we’ll take the first holiday since we were married. We’ll drive all round Ireland, staying in the best hotels. We’ll not spare or stint on anything. We’ll have wine, prawns, smoked salmon, sole or lobster or sirloin or lamb, anything on the menu we feel like, no matter what the price.’

  I was beginning to think that people grow less spiritual the older they become, contrary to what is thought. It was as if some desire to plunge their arms up to the elbow into the steaming entrails of the world grew more fierce the closer they got to leaving. It was a very different dream to the young priest’s, cycling round Ireland with a copy of the Rambles all those years ago.

  ‘Have you noticed Eileen O’Reilly?’ he changed as we sat with the cups of tea.

  ‘She’s very pretty,’ I said.

  Eileen O’Reilly worked in one of the solicitor’s offices. She was small and blonde with a perfect figure. I thought she’d smiled at me as she passed on a bicycle during a lunch hour. She was standing on the pedals to force the bike across the hill.

  ‘If I was in your place, I’d go for her,’ he said wistfully. ‘She has no steady boyfriend. I do surveying for her office and we always have a joke or an old flirt. When I brought up your name a few days back she blushed beetroot. I can tell she’s interested in you. In two years Oliver will be qualified and I’ll have no more need of the surveying. I could hand it over to you. You’d not be rich, but with the fees on top of the teaching you’d be very comfortable for a young man. You could well afford to marry. I’d not leave her hanging around long if I was in your boots. In two years’ time if you stayed on at the school here and married Eileen I’d give you the surveying. There’s nothing to it once you get the knack of the chains.’