Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  High Ground

  I let the boat drift on the river beneath the deep arch of the bridge, the keel scraping the gravel as it crossed the shallows out from Walsh’s, past the boathouse at the mouth, and out into the lake. It was only the slow growing distance from the ring of reeds round the shore that told that the boat moved at all on the lake. More slowly still, the light was going from the August evening.

  I was feeling leaden with tiredness but did not want to sleep. I had gone on the river in order to be alone, the way one goes to a dark room.

  The Brothers’ Building Fund Dance had been held the night before. A big marquee had been set up in the grounds behind the monastery. Most of the people I had gone to school with were there, awkward in their new estate, and nearly all the Brothers who had taught us: Joseph, Francis, Benedictus, Martin. They stood in a black line beneath the low canvas near the entrance and waited for their old pupils to go up to them. When they were alone, watching us dance, rapid comment passed up and down the line, and often Joseph and Martin doubled up, unable or unwilling to conceal laughter; but by midnight they had gone, and a night of a sort was ours, the fine dust from the floor rising into the perfume and sweat and hair oil as we danced in the thresh of the music.

  There was a full moon as I drove Una to her home in Arigna in the borrowed Prefect, the whole wide water of Allen taking in the wonderful mysteriousness of the light. We sat in the car and kissed and talked, and morning was there before we noticed. After the harshness of growing up, a world of love and beauty, of vague gardens and dresses and laughter, one woman in a gleaming distance seemed to be almost within reach. We would enter this world. We would make it true.

  I was home just before the house had risen, and lay on the bed and waited till everybody was up, then changed into old clothes. I was helping my father put up a new roof on the house. Because of the tiredness, I had to concentrate completely on the work, even then nearly losing my footing several times between the stripped beams, sometimes annoying my father by handing him the wrong lath or tool; but when evening came the last thing I wanted was sleep. I wanted to be alone, to go over the night, to try to see clearly, which only meant turning again and again on the wheel of dreaming.

  ‘Hi there! Hi! Do you hear me, young Moran!’ The voice came with startling clarity over the water, was taken up by the fields across the lake, echoed back. ‘Hi there! Hi! Do you hear me, young Moran!’

  I looked all around. The voice came from the road. I couldn’t make out the figure at first, leaning in a broken gap of the wall above the lake, but when he called again I knew it was Eddie Reegan, Senator Reegan.

  ‘Hi there, young Moran. Since the mountain can’t come to Mahomet, Mahomet will have to come to the mountain. Row over here a minute. I want to have a word with you.’

  I rowed slowly, watching each oar-splash slip away from the boat in the mirror of water. I disliked him, having unconsciously, perhaps, picked up my people’s dislike. He had come poor to the place, buying Lynch’s small farm cheap, and soon afterwards the farmhouse burned down. At once, a bigger house was built with the insurance money, closer to the road, though that in its turn was due to burn down too, to be replaced by the present mansion, the avenue of Lawson cypresses now seven years old. Soon he was buying up other small farms, but no one had ever seen him work with shovel or with spade. He always appeared immaculately dressed. It was as if he understood instinctively that it was only the shortest of short steps from appearance to becoming. ‘A man who works never makes any money. He has no time to see how the money is made,’ he was fond of boasting. He set up as an auctioneer. He entered politics. He married Kathleen Relihan, the eldest of old Paddy Relihan’s daughters, the richest man in the area, Chairman of the County Council. ‘Do you see those two girls? I’m going to marry one of those girls,’ he was reported to have remarked to a friend. ‘Which one?’ ‘It doesn’t matter. They’re both Paddy Relihan’s daughters’; and when Paddy retired it was Reegan rather than any of his own sons who succeeded Paddy in the Council. Now that he had surpassed Paddy Relihan and become a Senator and it seemed only a matter of time before he was elected to the Dáil, he no longer joked about ‘the aul effort of a fire’, and was gravely concerned about the reluctance of insurance companies to grant cover for fire to dwelling houses in our part of the country. He had bulldozed the hazel and briar from the hills above the lake, and as I turned to see how close the boat had come to the wall I could see behind him the white and black of his Friesians grazing between the electric fences on the far side of the reseeded hill.

  I let the boat turn so that I could place my hand on the stone, but the evening was so calm that it would have rested beneath the high wall without any hand. The Senator had seated himself on the wall as I was rowing in, and his shoes hung six or eight feet above the boat.

  ‘It’s not the first time I’ve had to congratulate you, though I’m too high up here to shake your hand. And what I’m certain of is that it won’t be the last time either,’ he began.

  ‘Thanks. You’re very kind,’ I answered.

  ‘Have you any idea where you’ll go from here?’

  ‘No. I’ve applied for the grant. It depends on whether I get the grant or not.’

  ‘What’ll you do if you get it?’

  ‘Go on, I suppose. Go a bit farther …’

  ‘What’ll you do then?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sooner or later, I suppose, I’ll have to look for a job.’

  ‘That’s the point I’ve been coming to. You are qualified to teach, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. But I’ve only taught for a few months. Before I got that chance to go to the university.’

  ‘You didn’t like teaching?’ he asked sharply.

  ‘No.’ I was careful. ‘I didn’t dislike it. It was a job.’

  ‘I like that straightness. And what I’m looking to know is – if you were offered a very good job would you be likely to take it?’

  ‘What job?’

  ‘I won’t beat around the bush either. I’m talking of the Principalship of the school here. It’s a very fine position for a young man. You’d be among your own people. You’d be doing good where you belong. I hear you’re interested in a very attractive young lady not a hundred miles from here. If you decided to marry and settle down I’m in a position to put other advantages your way.’

  Master Leddy was the Principal of the school. He had been the Principal as long as I could remember. He had taught me, many before me. I had called to see him just three days before. The very idea of replacing him was shocking. And anyhow, I knew the politicians had nothing to do with the appointment of teachers. It was the priest who ran the school. What he was saying didn’t even begin to make sense, but I had been warned about his cunning and was wary. ‘You must be codding. Isn’t Master Leddy the Principal?’

  ‘He is now but he won’t be for long more – not if I have anything to do with it.’

  ‘How?’ I asked very quietly in the face of the outburst.

  ‘That need be no concern of yours. If you can give me your word that you’ll take the job, I can promise you that the job is as good as yours.’

  ‘I can’t do that. I can’t follow anything right. Isn’t it Canon Gallagher who appoints the teachers?’

  ‘Listen. There are many people who feel the same way as I do. If I go to the Canon in the name of all those people and say that

  you’re willing to take the job, the job is yours. Even if he didn’t want to, he’d have no choice but to appoint you …’

  ‘Why should you want to do that for me? Say, even if it is possible.’ I was more curious now than alarmed.

  ‘It’s more than possible. It’s bloody necessary. I’ll be plain. I have three sons. They go to that school. They have nothing to fall back on but whatever education they get. And with the education they’re getting at that school up there, all they’ll ever be fit for is to dig ditches. Now, I’ve never dug ditches, but even at my age I’d take off my c
oat and go down into a ditch rather than ever have to watch any of my sons dig. The whole school is a shambles. Someone described it lately as one big bear garden.’

  ‘What makes you think I’d be any better?’

  ‘You’re young. You’re qualified. You’re ambitious. It’s a very good job for someone of your age. I’d give you all the backing you’d want. You’d have every reason to make a go of it. With you there, I’d feel my children would still be in with a chance. In another year or two even that’ll be gone.’

  ‘I don’t see why you want my word at this stage,’ I said evasively, hoping to slip away from it all. I saw his face return to its natural look of shrewdness in what was left of the late summer light.

  ‘If I go to the Canon now it’ll be just another complaint in a long line of complaints. If I can go to him and say that things can’t be allowed to go on as they have been going and we have a young man here, from a good family, a local, more than qualified, who’s willing to take the job, who has everyone’s backing, it’s a different proposition entirely. And I can guarantee you here this very evening that you’ll be the Principal of that school when it opens in September.’

  For the first time it was all coming clear to me.

  ‘What’ll happen to the Master? What’ll he do?’

  ‘What I’m more concerned about is what’ll my children do if he stays,’ he burst out again. ‘But you don’t have to concern yourself about it. It’ll be all taken care of.’

  *

  I had called on the Master three evenings before, walking beyond the village to the big ramshackle farmhouse. He was just rising, having taken all his meals of the day in bed, and was shaving and dressing upstairs, one time calling down for a towel, and again for a laundered shirt.

  ‘Is that young Moran?’ He must have recognized my voice or name. ‘Make him a good cup of tea. And he’ll be able to be back up the road with myself.’

  A very old mongrel greyhound was routed from the leather armchair one side of the fire, and I was given tea and slices of buttered bread. The Master’s wife, who was small and frail with pale skin and lovely brown eyes, kept up a cheerful chatter that required no response as she busied herself about the enormous cluttered kitchen which seemed not to possess a square foot of room. There were buckets everywhere, all sorts of chairs, basins, bags of meal and flour, cats, the greyhound, pots and pans. The pattern had faded from the bulging wallpaper, a dark ochre, and some of the several calendars that hung around the walls had faded into the paper. It would have been difficult to find space for an extra cup or saucer on the long wooden table. Plainly there were no set meal times. Two of the Master’s sons, now grown men, came singly in from the fields while I waited. Plates of food were served at once, bacon and liver, a mug of tea. They took from the plate of bread already on the table, the butter, the sugar, the salt, the bottle of sauce. They spent no more than a few minutes over the meal, blessing themselves at its end, leaving as suddenly as they’d entered, smiling and nodding in a friendly way in my direction but making little attempt at conversation, though Gerald did ask, before he reached for his hat – a hat I recognized as having belonged to the Master back in my school days, a brown hat with a blue teal’s feather and a small hole burned in its side – ‘Well, how are things getting along in the big smoke?’ The whole effect was of a garden and orchard gone completely wild, but happily.

  ‘You couldn’t have come at a better time. We’ll be able to be up the road together,’ the Master said as he came heavily down the stairs in his stockinged feet. He’d shaved, was dressed in a grey suit, with a collar and tie, the old watch-chain crossing a heavy paunch. He had failed since last I’d seen him, the face red and puffy, the white hair thinned, and there was a bruise on the cheekbone where he must have fallen. The old hound went towards him, licking at his hand.

  ‘Good boy! Good boy,’ he said as he came towards me, patting the hound. As soon as we shook hands he slipped his feet into shoes which had stood beside the leather chair. He did not bend or sit, and as he talked I saw the small bird-like woman at his feet, tying up the laces.

  ‘It’s a very nice thing to see old pupils coming back. Though not many of them bring me laurels like yourself, it’s still a very nice thing. Loyalty is a fine quality. A very fine quality.’

  ‘Now,’ his wife stood by his side, ‘all you need is your hat and stick,’ and she went and brought them.

  ‘Thank you. Thank you indeed. I don’t know what I’d do but for my dear wife,’ he said.

  ‘Do you hear him now! He was never stuck for the charm. Off with you now before you get the back of me hand,’ she bantered, and called as we went slowly towards the gate, ‘Do you want me to send any of the boys up for you?’

  ‘No. Not unless they have some business of their own to attend to in the village. No,’ he said gravely, turning very slowly.

  He spoke the whole way on the slow walk to the village. All the time he seemed to lag behind my snail’s pace, sometimes standing because he was out of breath, tapping at the road with the cane. Even when the walk slowed to a virtual standstill it seemed to be still far too energetic for him.

  ‘I always refer to you as my star pupil. When the whole enterprise seems to be going more or less askew, I always point to young Moran: that’s one good job I turned out. Let the fools prate.’

  I walked, stooping by his side, restraining myself within the slow walk, embarrassed, ashamed, confused. I had once looked to him in pure infatuation, would rush to his defence against every careless whisper. He had shone like a clear star. I was in love with what I hardly dared to hope I might become. It seemed horrible now that I might come to this.

  ‘None of my own family were clever,’ he confided. ‘It was a great disappointment. And yet they may well be happier for it. Life is an extraordinary thing. A very great mystery. Wonderful … shocking … thing.’

  Each halting speech seemed to lead in some haphazard way into the next.

  ‘Now that you’re coming out into the world you’ll have to be constantly on your guard. You’ll have to be on your guard first of all against intellectual pride. That’s the worst sin, the sin of Satan. And always be kind to women. Help them. Women are weak. They’ll be attracted to you.’ I had to smile ruefully, never having noticed much of a stampede in my direction. ‘There was this girl I left home from a dance once,’ he continued. ‘And as we were getting closer to her house I noticed her growing steadily more amorous until I had to say, “None of that now, girl. It is not the proper time!” Later, when we were both old and married, she thanked me. She said I was a true gentleman.’

  The short walk seemed to take a deep age, but once outside Ryan’s door he took quick leave of me. ‘I won’t invite you inside. Though I set poor enough of an example, I want to bring no one with me. I say to all my pupils: Beware of the high stool. The downward slope from the high stool is longer and steeper than from the top of Everest. God bless and guard you, young Moran. Come and see me again before you head back to the city.’ And with that he left me. I stood facing the opaque glass of the door, the small print of the notice above it: Seven Days Licence to Sell Wine, Beer, Spirits. How can he know what he knows and still do what he does, I say to the sudden silence before turning away.

  ‘Do you mean the Master’ll be out on the road, then?’ I asked Senator Reegan from the boat, disturbed by the turn the conversation had taken.

  ‘You need have no fear of that. There’s a whole union behind him. Well, what do you say?’

  ‘I’ll have to think about it.’

  ‘It’s a very fine position for a young man like yourself starting out in life.’

  ‘I know it is. I’m very grateful.’

  ‘To hell with gratitude. Gratitude doesn’t matter a damn. It’s one of those moves that benefits everybody involved. You’ll come to learn that there aren’t many moves like that in life.’

  ‘I know that but I still have to think about it.’

  ‘Listen. Let’s
not close on anything this evening. Naturally you have to consider everything. Why don’t you drop over to my place tomorrow night? You’ll have a chance to meet my lads. And herself has been saying for a long time now that she’d like to meet you. Come about nine. Everything will be out of the way by then.’

  I rowed very slowly away, just stroking the boat forward in the deadly silence of the half-darkness. I watched Reegan cross the road, climb the hill, pausing now and then among the white blobs of his Friesians. His figure stood for a while at the top of the hill where he seemed to be looking back towards the boat and water before he disappeared.

  When I got back to the house everyone was asleep except a younger sister who had waited up for me. She was reading by the fire, the small black cat on her knee.

  ‘They’ve all gone to bed,’ she explained. ‘Since you were on the river, they let me wait up for you. Only there’s no tea. I’ve just found out that there’s not a drop of spring water in the house.’

  ‘I’ll go to the well, then. Otherwise someone will have to go first thing in the morning. You don’t have to wait up for me.’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait and make the tea when you get back.’

  ‘I’ll be less than ten minutes.’

  I walked quickly, swinging the bucket. The whole village seemed dead under a benign moon, but as I passed along the church wall I heard voices. They came from Ryan’s Bar. It was shut, the blinds down, but then I noticed cracks of yellow light along the edges of the big blue blind. They were drinking after hours. I paused to see if I could recognize any of the voices, but before I had time Charlie Ryan hissed, ‘Will you keep your voices down, will yous? At the rate you’re going you’ll soon have the Sergeant out of his bed,’ and the voices quietened to a whisper. Afraid of being noticed in the silence, I passed on to get the bucket of spring water from the well, but the voices were in full song again by the time I returned. I let the bucket softly down in the dust and stood in the shadow of the church wall to listen. I recognized the Master’s slurred voice at once, and then voices of some of the men who worked the sawmill in the wood.