Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  Slane was a lovely old village in the English style close to Dublin. One Sunday we had lunch at the one hotel, more like a village inn than a hotel, plain wooden tables and chairs, the walls and fireplaces simple black and white, iron scrapers on the steps outside the entrance. She had suggested that we go there the weekend Jerry was on interview in London. The country weekend, the walks along the wooded banks of the river, coming back to the hotel with sharp appetites to have one drink in the bar and then to linger over lunch, in the knowledge that we had the whole long curtained afternoon spread before us, was dream enough. But was it to be that simple? Did we know one another outside the carnal pleasures we shared, and were we prepared to spend our lives together in the good or nightmare they might bring? It was growing clearer that she wasn’t sure of me and that I wasn’t sure. So when the telegram came from the country I was almost glad of the usual drama and mysteriousness.

  ‘Then that’s goodbye to our poor weekend.’ She handed me back the telegram in Gaffneys.

  ‘It’s only one weekend,’ I protested. ‘We’ll have as many as we want once Jerry goes.’

  ‘You remember when I wanted to tell Jerry that we were in love and you wouldn’t have it? You said we didn’t know one another well enough, and then when we can have two whole days together you get this telegram. How are we ever going to get to know one another except by being together?’

  ‘Maybe we can still go?’

  ‘No. Not if you are doubtful. I think you should go home.’

  ‘Will you come back with me this evening?’

  ‘I have to have dinner with Jerry.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘At eight.’

  ‘We’ll have time. We can take a taxi.’

  ‘No, love.’ She was quite definite.

  ‘Will you meet me when I come back, then?’ I asked uncertainly.

  ‘Jerry comes back from London on Sunday.’

  ‘On Monday, then?’

  ‘All right, on Monday.’ There was no need to say where or when. She even said, ‘See you Monday,’ to the barman’s silent inquiry as we left, and he waved ‘Have a nice weekend,’ as he gathered in our glasses.

  *

  I was returning home: a last look at the telegram before throwing it away – an overnight bag, the ticket, the train – the old wheel turned and turned anew, wearing my life away; but if it wasn’t this wheel it would be another.

  Rose, my stepmother, seemed glad to see me, smiling hard, speaking rapidly. ‘We even thought you might come on the late train last night. We said he might be very well on that train when we heard it pass. We kept the kettle on till after the news, and then we said you’ll hardly come now, but even then we didn’t go to bed till we were certain you’d not come.’

  ‘Is there something wrong?’

  ‘No. There’s nothing wrong.’

  ‘What does he want me for?’

  ‘I suppose he wants to see you. I didn’t know there was anything special, but he’s been worrying or brooding lately. I’m sure he’ll tell you himself. And now you’ll be wanting something to eat. He’s not been himself lately,’ she added conspiratorially. ‘If you can, go with him, do your best to humour him.’

  We shook hands when he came, but did not speak, and Rose and myself carried the burden of the conversation during the meal. Suddenly, as we rose at the end of the meal, he said, ‘I want you to walk over with me and look at the walnuts.’

  ‘Why the walnuts?’

  ‘He’s thinking of selling the walnut trees,’ Rose said. ‘They’ve offered a great price. It’s for the veneer, but I said you wouldn’t want us to sell.’

  ‘A lot you’d know about that,’ he said to her in a half-snarl, but she covertly winked at me, and we left it that way.

  ‘Was the telegram about the selling of the walnut trees, then?’ I asked as we walked together towards the plantation. ‘Sell anything you want as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘No. I have no intention of selling the walnuts. I threaten to sell them from time to time, just to stir things up. She’s fond of those damned walnuts. I just mentioned it as an excuse to get out. We can talk in peace here,’ he said, and I waited.

  ‘You know about this Act they’re bringing in?’ he began ponderously.

  ‘No.’

  ‘They’re giving it a first reading, but it’s not the law yet.’

  ‘What is this Act?’

  ‘It’s an Act that makes sure that the widow gets so much of a man’s property as makes no difference after he’s dead – whether he likes it or not.’

  ‘What’s this got to do with us?’

  ‘You can’t be that thick. I’ll not live for ever. After this Act who’ll get this place? Now do you get my drift? Rose will. And who’ll Rose give it to? Those damned relatives will be swarming all over this place before I’m even cold.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ I was asking questions now simply to gain time to think.

  ‘How do I know?’ he said with manic grievance. ‘Already the place is disappearing fast beneath our feet. Only a few weeks back the tractor was missing. Her damned nephew had it. Without as much as by my leave. They forgot to inform me. And she never goes near them that there’s not something missing from the house.’

  ‘That’s hardly fair. It’s usual to share things round in the country. She always brought more back than she took.’

  I remembered the baskets of raspberries and plums she used to bring back from their mountain farm.

  ‘That’s right. Don’t take my word for it,’ he shouted. ‘Soon you’ll know.’

  ‘But what’s this got to do with the telegram?’ I asked, and he quietened.

  ‘I was in to see Callan the solicitor. That’s why I sent the telegram. If I transfer the place to you before that Act becomes law, then the Act can’t touch us. Do you get me now?’

  I did – too well. He would disinherit Rose by signing the place over to me. I would inherit both Rose and the place if he died.

  ‘You won’t have it signed over to you, then?’

  ‘No, I won’t. Have you said any of this to Rose?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t. Do you take me for a fool or something? Are you saying to me for the last time that you won’t take it?’ And when I wouldn’t answer he said with great bitterness, ‘I should have known. You don’t even have respect for your own blood,’ and muttering, walked away towards the cattle gathered between the stone wall and the first of the walnut trees. Once or twice he moved as if he might turn back, but he did not. We did not speak any common language.

  We avoided each other that evening, the tension making us prisoners of every small movement, and the next day I tried to slip quietly away.

  ‘Is it going you are?’ Rose said sharply when she saw me about to leave.

  ‘That’s right, Rose.’

  ‘You shouldn’t pass any heed on your father. You should let it go with him. He won’t change his ways now. You’re worse than he is, not to let it go with him.’

  For a moment I wanted to ask her, ‘Do you know that he wanted to leave you at my sweet mercy after his death?’ but I knew she would answer, ‘What does that matter? You know he gets these ideas. You should let it go with him’; and when I said, ‘Goodbye, Rose,’ she did not answer.

  As the train trundled across the bridges into Dublin and by the grey back of Croke Park, all I could do was stare. The weekend was over like a life. If it had happened differently it would still be over. Differently, we would have had our walks and drinks, made love in the curtained rooms, experimented in the ways of love, pretending we were taming instinct, imagining we were getting more out of it than had been intended, and afterwards … Where were we to go from there, our pleasure now its grinning head? And it would be over and not over. I had gone home instead, a grotesquerie of other homegoings, and it too was over now.

  She would have met him at the airport, they would have had dinner, and if their evenings remained the same as when I used to meet the
m together they would now be having drinks in some bar. As the train came slowly into Amiens Street, I suddenly wanted to find them, to see us all together. They were not in any of the Grafton Street bars, and I was on the point of giving up the impulse – with gratitude that I hadn’t been able to satisfy it – when I found them in a hotel lounge by the river. They were sitting at the counter, picking at a bowl of salted peanuts between their drinks. He seemed glad to see me, getting off his stool, ‘I was just saying here how long it is since we last saw you,’ in his remorseless slow voice, as if my coming might lighten an already heavy-hanging evening. He was so friendly that I could easily have asked him how his interview had gone, amid the profusion of my lies, forgetting that I wasn’t supposed to know.

  ‘I’ve just come from London. We’ve had dinner at the airport.’ He began to tell me all that I already knew.

  ‘And will you take this job?’ I asked after he had told me at length about the weekend, without any attempt to select between details, other than to put the whole lot in.

  ‘It’s all arranged. It’ll be in the papers tomorrow. I leave in three weeks’ time,’ he said.

  ‘Congratulations,’ I proffered uneasily. ‘But do you have any regrets about leaving?’

  ‘No. None whatever. I’ve done my marching stint and speeching stint. Let the young do that now. It’s my time to sit back. There comes a time of life when your grapefruit in the morning is important.’

  ‘And will her ladyship go with you?’

  ‘I’ll see how the land lies first, and then she’ll follow. And by the way,’ he began to shake with laughter and gripped my arm so that it hurt, ‘don’t you think to get up to anything with her while I’m gone.’

  ‘Now that you’ve put it into my head I might try my hand.’ I looked for danger but he was only enjoying his own joke, shaking with laughter as he rose from the bar stool. ‘I better spend a penny on the strength of that.’

  ‘That – was – mean,’ she said without looking up.

  ‘I suppose it was. I couldn’t help it.’

  ‘You knew we’d be around.’

  ‘Will you see me tomorrow?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Anyhow, I’ll be there.’

  ‘How did your weekend in the country go?’ she asked sarcastically.

  ‘It went as usual, nothing but the usual,’ I echoed her own sarcasm.

  McCredy was still laughing when he came back. ‘I’ve just been thinking that you two should be the young couple and me the uncle, and if you do decide to get up to something you must ask Uncle’s dispensation first,’ and he clapped me on the back.

  ‘Well, I better start by asking now,’ I said quickly in case my dismay would show, and he let out a bellow of helpless laughter. He must have been drinking, for he put his arms round both of us, ‘I just love you two young people,’ and tears of laughter slipped from his eyes. ‘Hi, barman, give us another round before I die.’

  I sat inside the partition in Gaffneys the next evening as on all other evenings, the barman as usual polishing glasses, nobody but the two of us in the bar.

  ‘Your friend seems a bit later than usual this evening,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think she’ll come this evening,’ I said, and he looked at me inquiringly. ‘She went down the country for the weekend. She was doubtful if she’d get back.’

  ‘I hope there’s nothing wrong …’

  ‘No. Her mother is old. You know the way.’ I was making for the safety of the roomy clichés.

  ‘That’s the sadness. You don’t know whether to look after them or your own life.’

  Before any pain of her absence could begin to hang about the opening and closing doors as the early evening drinkers bustled in, I got up and left; and yet her absence was certainly less painful than the responsibility of a life together. But what then of love? Love flies out the window, I had heard them say.

  ‘She’ll not come now,’ I said.

  ‘No. It doesn’t seem,’ he said as he took my glass with a glance in which suspicion equalled exasperation.

  We did not meet till several weeks later. We met in Grafton Street, close to where we had met the first night. A little nervously she agreed to come for a drink with me. She looked quite beautiful, a collar of dark fur pinned to her raincoat.

  ‘Jerry’s in Sierra Leone now,’ she said when I brought the drinks.

  ‘I know. I read it in the papers.’

  ‘He rang me last night,’ she said. ‘He was in the house of a friend – a judge. I could hear music in the background. I think they were a bit tight. The judge insisted he speak to me too. He had an Oxford accent. Very posh but apparently he’s as black as the ace of spades,’ she laughed. I could see that she treasured the wasteful call more than if it had been a gift of brilliant stones.

  She began to tell me about Sierra Leone, its swamps and markets, the avocado and pineapple and cacao and banana trees, its crocodile-infested rivers. Jerry lived in a white-columned house with pillars on a hillside above the sea, and he had been given a chauffeur-driven Mercedes. She laughed when she told me that a native bride had to spend the first nine months of her marriage indoors so that she grew light-skinned.

  ‘Will you be joining Jerry soon?’ I asked.

  ‘Soon. He knows enough people high up now to arrange it. They’re getting the papers in order.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ll come home with me tonight, then?’

  ‘No.’ There wasn’t a hint of hesitation in the answer; difficulty and distance were obviously great restorers of the moral order.

  ‘You must let me take you to dinner, then, before you leave. As old friends. No strings attached,’ I smoothed.

  ‘That’ll be nice,’ she said.

  Out in Grafton Street we parted as easily as two leaves sent spinning apart by any sudden gust. All things begin in dreams, and it must be wonderful to have your mind full of a whole country like Sierra Leone before you go there and risk discovering that it might be your life.

  Nothing seems ever to end except ourselves. On the eve of her departure for Sierra Leone, another telegram came from the country. There was nothing mysterious about it this time. Rose had died.

  The overnight bag, the ticket, the train …

  The iron gate under the yew was open and the blinds of the stone house at the end of the gravel were drawn. Her flower garden, inside the wooden gate in the low whitethorn hedge just before the house, had been freshly weeded and the coarse grass had been cut with shears. Who would tend the flowers now? I shook hands with everybody in the still house, including my father, who did not rise from the converted car chair.

  I heard them go over and over what happened, as if by going over and over it they would return it to the everyday. ‘Rose got up, put on the fire, left the breakfast ready, and went to let out the chickens. She had her hand on the latch coming in, when he heard this thump, and there she was lying, the door half-open.’ And they were succeeding. They had to.

  I went into the room to look on her face. The face was over too. If she had been happy or unhappy it did not show now. Would she have been happier with another? Who knows the person another will find their happiness or unhappiness with? Enough to say that weighed in this scale it makes little difference or every difference.

  ‘Why don’t you let it go with him?’ I heard her voice. ‘You know what he’s like.’ She had lived rooted in this one place and life, with this one man, like the black sally in the one hedge, as pliant as it is knobbed and gnarled, keeping close to the ground as it invades the darker corners of the meadows.

  The coffin was taken in. The house was closed. I saw some of the mourners trample on the flowers as they waited in the front garden for her to be taken out. She was light on our shoulders.

  Her people did not return to the house after the funeral. They had relinquished any hopes they had to the land.

  ‘We seem to have it all to ourselves,’ I said to my father in the empty house. He ga
ve me a venomous look but did not reply for long.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. We seem to have it all to ourselves. But where do we go from here?’

  Not, anyhow, to Sierra Leone. For a moment I saw the tall colonial building on a hill above the sea, its white pillars, the cool of the veranda in the evening … Maybe they were facing one another across a dinner table at this very moment, a servant removing the dishes.

  Where now is Rose?

  I see her come on a bicycle, a cane basket on the handlebars. The brakes mustn’t be working for she has to jump off and run alongside the bicycle. Her face glows with happiness as she pulls away the newspaper that covers the basket. It is full of dark plums, and eggs wrapped in pieces of newspaper are packed here and there among the plums. Behind her there shivers an enormous breath of pure sky.

  ‘Yes,’ my father shouted. ‘Where do we go from here?’

  ‘I suppose we might as well try and stay put for a time,’ I answered, and when he looked at me sharply I added, for the sake of my own peace, ‘that is, until things settle a bit, and we can find our feet again, and think.’

  The Creamery Manager

  The books and files had been taken out but no one yet had stopped him from entering his office. Tired of sitting alone listening to the rain beat on the iron, he came out on the platform where he could look down on the long queue of tractors towing in the steel tanks, the wipers making furious, relentless arcs across the windscreens as they waited. He knew all the men sitting behind the glass of the cabs by name; that he had made his first business when he came to manage the creamery years before. Often on a wet summer’s day, when there could be no rush at hay, many of them would pull in below the platform to sit and talk. The rough, childish faces would look up in a glow of pleasure at the recognition when he shouted out their names. Some would flash their lights.

  Today no one looked up, but he could see them observing him in their mirrors after they had passed. They probably already knew more precisely than he what awaited him. Even with that knowledge he would have preferred it if they looked up. All his life he had the weakness of wanting to please and give pleasure.