Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  Suddenly the war was over. Britain had to be rebuilt. The countryside emptied towards London and Luton. The boat trains were full and talk was of never-ending overtime. After weeks in England, once-easy gentle manners, set free from the narrow rule of church and custom, grew loud, uncertain, coarse.

  At home a vaguely worried church joined a dying language to declare that learning Irish would help to keep much foreign corrupting influence out. Red Algier tractors with long steering columns and the sound of low-flying airplanes – they were said to have the original Messerschmitt engine – started to replace the horse and cart. A secondary school was opened by the Brothers in the town. The word Salamanca, having endured for most of a century as a mighty ball booted on the wind out of defence in Charlie’s field, grew sails again on an open sea, became distant spires within a walled city in the sun. Race memories of hedge schools and the poor scholar were stirred, as boys, like uncertain flocks of birds on bicycles, came long distances from the villages and outlying farms to grapple with calculus and George Gordon and the delta of the River Plate.

  Against this tide the Sinclairs came from London to the empty parsonage in Ardcarne, where Colonel Sinclair had grown up, where Mrs Sinclair, as a young army wife and mother, had spent happy summers with her gentle parents-in-law, the old canon and his second wife. After the war, the Colonel had settled uneasily into the life of a commuter between their house in Wimbledon and the ministry. Their son had been killed in the war and their daughter was married to a lecturer in sociology at Durham University, with two children of her own. They both wanted to live in the country, and when they discovered that the church commissioners would be only too glad to give the decaying parsonage for a nominal sum to a son of the manse, they sold the house in Wimbledon, and the Colonel took early retirement.

  They stayed in the Royal Hotel while the parsonage was being restored, and as they employed local tradesmen, it was not resented. Once they moved in, the grounds, the garden and orchard, even the white paddock railings, they brought back with their own hands. They loved the house. Each year just after Christmas they went to England for two months, and every summer their daughter and her children came from Durham. Each Thursday they did a big shopping in the town, and when it was done went to the Royal Hotel for a drink. It was the one time in the week they drank at the Royal, but every evening except on Sunday, at exactly nine o’clock, their black Jaguar would cross the bridge and roll to a stop outside Charlie’s Bar. It was so punctual that people began to check their watches as it passed, the way they did with the mail van and the church bells and the distant rattle of the diesel trains across the Plains. Mrs Sinclair never left the Jaguar, but each night had three gin and tonics sitting in the car, the radio tuned to the BBC World Service, the engine running in the cold weather. It was the Colonel who brought out the drinks, handing them through the car window, but his own three large Black Bushmills he drank at the big oval table in Charlie’s front room or parlour. ‘Wouldn’t Mrs Sinclair be more comfortable in at the fire on a night the like of that?’ Charlie himself had suggested one bad night of rain and a rocking wind not long after they had started to come regularly. ‘No, Charlie. She’d not like that. Women of her generation were brought up never to set foot in bars,’ and the matter ended there; and though it caused a veritable hedgerow of talk for a few weeks, it provoked no laughter.

  ‘They’re strange. They’re different. They’re not brought up the like of us. Those hot climates they get sent to does things to people.’

  At first, the late night drinkers entering Charlie’s used to hurry past the car and woman, but later some could be seen to pause a moment before pushing open the door as if in reflection on the mystery of the woman sitting alone drinking gin in the darkness, the car radio on and the engine running wastefully, the way they might pause coming on the otter’s feeding place along the riverbank, its little private lawn and scattering of blue crayfish shells.

  When they left for England after Christmas, the car was missed like any familiar absence, and when suddenly it reappeared in March, ‘They’re back,’ would be announced with relief as well as genuine gladness.

  ‘How long have we been here now? How long is it since we’ve left Wimbledon?’ the Sinclairs would sometimes ask one another as the years gathered above them. Now they found they had to count; it must be three, no four, five my God, using birthdays and the deaths of friends like tracks across the sky.

  ‘They’re flying now.’

  ‘Still, it must mean we’ve been happy.’

  Company they seemed not to need. Occasionally, they ran into their own class, on Thursday in the Royal, after their shopping was done, the town full of the excitement of the market, bundles of cabbage plants knotted with straw on offer all along the Shambles; but as they never had more than the one drink, and evaded exploratory invitations to tea or bridge, they became in time just a matter of hostile curiosity. ‘How did you get through the winter?’ ‘Dreadful. Up to our hocks in mud, my dear.’ ‘But the Bishop is coming for Easter.’ Mostly, the Colonel was as alone in Charlie’s parlour as Mrs Sinclair was outside in the closed car, though sometimes Charlie joined him with a glass of whiskey if the bar wasn’t busy and Mrs Charlie wasn’t on the prowl. They’d sit at the table and talk of fruit trees and vegetables and whiskey until the bell rang or Mrs Charlie was heard surfacing. Sometimes the Colonel had the doubtful benefit of a local priest or doctor or vet or solicitor out on the razzle, but if they were very drunken he just finished his drink and left politely. ‘I never discuss religion because its base is faith – not reason.’ What brought them most into contact with people was the giving away of fruit and vegetables. They grew more than they could use. To some they gave in return for small favours, more usually by proximity and chance.

  It was because of help the Sergeant had given with the renewal of a gun licence that they came with the large basket of apples to the barracks. The day had been eventful at the barracks, but only in the sense that anything at all had happened. An old donkey found abandoned on the roads had been brought in that morning. Every rib showed, the hooves hadn’t been pared in years, the knees were broken and twisted and cut, clusters of blue-black flies about the sores. He was too weak even to pluck at the clover on the lawn, and just lay between the two circles of flowerbeds while they waited for the Burnhouse lorry, an old shaky green lorry with a heavy metal box like the lorries that draw stones, too wide to get through the barrack gates.

  ‘It’d be better if we could get him alive on the lorry. That way it’d save having to winch him up,’ the driver said.

  They had to lift the donkey from the lawn and push, shove, and carry the unresisting animal over the gravel and up a makeshift ramp on to the lorry.

  ‘Whatever you do keep a good hault of his tail.’

  ‘I have his head. He can’t fall.’

  ‘Christ rode into Jerusalem on an ass.’

  ‘He’d not ride far on this one.’

  They expected the donkey to fall once they let go of him on the lorry, but he stayed on his feet without stirring while the driver got the humane killer out of the cab. When the back of the metal horn was tapped with the small hammer close to the skull, he crumpled more silently after the shot rang than a page thrust into flame. The tailboard was lifted up, the bar dropped in place. A docket had to be signed.

  The Sergeant and two of the policemen signed themselves out on delayed patrol after the lorry had rattled across the bridge with its load. Guard Casey remained behind as barrack orderly and with him the Sergeant’s sixteen-year-old son, Johnny. As soon as the policemen had split out in different directions on their bicycles at the bridge, Casey turned to the boy. ‘What about a game?’

  They were friends, and often played together on the gravel, dribbling the ball around one another, using the open gates as goal. The old policeman was the more skilled of the two. Before he’d joined the Force he’d been given a trial by Glasgow Celtic, but he would leave off the game at once if
any stranger came to the barracks. What annoyed the boy most during the games was that he’d always try to detain people past the call of their business. He had an insatiable hunger for news.

  ‘I don’t feel like playing this evening,’ the boy said.

  ‘What’s biting you?’

  ‘What’d you do if you caught the owner of that donkey?’

  ‘Not to give you a short answer, we’d do nothing.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’ve trouble enough without going looking for it. If we applied the law strictly in every case, we’d have half the people of the country in court, and you know how popular that would make us.’

  ‘It’s lousy. An old donkey who’s spent his whole life pulling and drawing for someone, and then when he’s no use any more is turned out on the road to starve. How can that be justified?’

  ‘That’s life,’ Casey replied cheerfully. He went in and took one of the yellow dayroom chairs and the Independent out on the gravel and started the crossword. Sometimes he lifted his head to ask about the words, and though the boy answered quickly and readily the answers did not lead to further conversation.

  It was getting cold enough for both of them to think about going in when they heard the noise of a car approaching from the other side of the river. As soon as Casey looked at his watch he said, ‘I bet you it’s the Colonel and the wife on their way to Charlie’s. I told you,’ he said as soon as the black Jaguar appeared, but suddenly stiffened. Instead of continuing straight on for Charlie’s, the Jaguar turned down the hill and up the short avenue of sycamores to stop at the barrack gate. Casey left the newspaper on the chair to go forward to the gate. Mrs Sinclair was in the car, but it was the Colonel who got out, taking a large basket of apples from the back seat.

  ‘Good evening, Colonel.’ Casey saluted.

  ‘Good evening, Guard.’ The effortless sharp return of the salute made Casey’s effort seem more florid than it probably was. ‘Is the Sergeant about?’

  ‘He’s out on patrol, but his son is here.’

  ‘That will do just as well. Will you give these few apples to your father with our compliments and tell him the licence arrived?’

  Big yellow apples in a bed of green leaves and twigs ringed the rim of the basket, and in the centre red Honeycombs and Beauty of Bath were arranged in a striking pattern.

  ‘Thank you, sir. They’re very beautiful.’

  ‘What is?’ The Colonel was taken by the remark.

  ‘The way the apples are arranged.’ He coloured.

  ‘Mrs Sinclair did the arranging but I doubt if she ever expected it to be noticed.’

  ‘Do you want your basket back, sir?’

  ‘No. Your father can drop it in some time he’s our way. Or it can be left in Charlie’s. But come. You must meet Mrs Sinclair,’ and the boy suddenly found himself before the open window.

  ‘This young man has been admiring your arrangement of the apples.’ The Colonel was smiling.

  ‘How very kind. Thank you,’ she said.

  In his confusion he hardly knew how the Colonel took leave of them, and he was still standing stock-still with the basket in his hand as the car turned for Charlie’s.

  Guard Casey reached down for an apple. ‘One thing sure is that you seem to have struck on the right note there,’ but he was too kind to tease the boy, and after he’d bitten into the apple said, ‘No matter what way they’re arranged they’ll be all the same by the time they get to your belly. Those people spent a lot of their life in India.’

  The boy showed his father the basket of apples as soon as he came in off patrol. ‘It’s to thank you for getting them the gun licence. There’s no hurry with the basket. They said we could bring it to the house some time or leave it in Charlie’s.’

  ‘Of course I’ll leave it to the house. It’d not be polite to dump it in Charlie’s,’ and he was in great good humour after he’d left the basket back with the Sinclairs the very next day.

  ‘Colonel and Mrs Sinclair have been singing your praises. They said they never expected to come on such manners in this part of the country. Of course it doesn’t say much for the part of the country.’

  ‘I only thanked them.’

  ‘They said you remarked on how the apples were arranged. You certainly seemed to have got above yourself. I kept wondering if we were talking about the same person. They want to know if you’d help them in the garden for a few hours after they come back from England.’

  ‘What kind of help?’

  ‘Light work about the garden. And they’d pay you. All that work they do isn’t work at all. They imagine it is. It’s just fooling about. What do you say?’

  ‘Whatever you think is best.’ He was quite anxious to go to the Sinclairs, drawn to them and, consequently, he was careful not to dampen his father’s enthusiasm by showing any of his own.

  ‘Anyhow, we have plenty of time to think about it. I’d say to go. You never know what might come of it if the Sinclairs started to take an interest in you. More people got their start in life that way than by burning the midnight oil.’ He could not resist a hit at the late hours the boy studied; ‘a woeful waste of fire and light’.

  The Sinclairs left for England three days after Christmas, and the Jaguar was absent from Charlie’s in the evenings until the first week in March. The night they returned, as the bell above Charlie’s door rang out, there was gladness in each, ‘They’re back!’ They had become ‘old regulars’. That Saturday Johnny went to the parsonage for the first time.

  The jobs were light. He dug, cleared ground, made ridges, wheeled or carried. He had never worked in a garden with anybody before but his father, and by comparison it was a dream working for the Sinclairs. They explained each thing they wanted done clearly, would go over it a second or third time with good humour if he hadn’t got it right the first time, always pleased with what had been done well. Though he was uncomfortable at first over the formal lunch, the good hour they spent over a meal, they were so attentive and cheerful that they put him at ease. The hours of the Saturday seemed to fly, were far too short, and often he found himself dreaming of such a life for himself with a woman like Mrs Sinclair in the faraway future when he would grow old.

  The wheel of the summer turned pleasantly. The seeds pushed above ground, were thinned. The roses and the other flowers bloomed. The soft fruit ripened and Mrs Sinclair started to make jams in the big brass pot. Each Saturday the boy went home laden with so much fruit and vegetables that he was able to supply Casey’s house as well as their own.

  Beyond the order and luxury, what he liked best about the house was the silence. There was no idle speech. What words were spoken were direct and towards some definite point. At the barracks, the movement of a fly across the windowpane, Jimmy Farry pushing towards the bridge with his head down, and the cattle cane strapped to the bar of the bicycle, were enough to start an endless flow of conjecture and criticism, especially if Casey was around. ‘If you could get close enough to the “huar” you’d hear him counting, counting his cattle and money, counting, counting, counting …’

  On one of the more idle Saturdays of the autumn, when they were burning leaves and old stakes and broken branches, the boy felt easy enough with the Colonel to ask him about war and the army.

  ‘The best wars are the wars that are never fought, but for that you need a professional army, so sharp that any possible aggressor would think twice before taking it on. Actual war is a sordid business, but once it begins the army has to do the job as efficiently as possible. It means blowing people’s heads off. That’s never a pretty business.’

  ‘Did you fight in the front lines?’

  ‘Yes. An officer has to be prepared to go anywhere he sends his men. It is a bad business no matter what civilian nonsense is talked about heroism.’ It was plain he had no intention of giving lurid detail, and after a silence asked, ‘What do you think you’ll do when you enter the big bad world, Johnny?’

  ‘I don’t know.’
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  ‘You must have some idea of what you’d like to do when you finish school?’

  ‘It depends on what comes up.’

  ‘What do you mean by what comes up?’

  ‘Whatever jobs are on offer.’

  ‘Have you ever thought of becoming a soldier – looking for a commission?’

  ‘I’d have no chance of that.’ The boy laughed lightly.

  ‘Why not? I thought you were rather good at school, especially at maths.’

  ‘It’s not that. I’d have to be a star athlete to stand a chance of a cadetship.’

  ‘For the Irish army?’ the Colonel laughed heartily. ‘The mile in four minutes.’

  ‘Of course, what other …?’

  ‘There are other armies.’ The Colonel was greatly amused. ‘What would you say to the British army?’