Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  ‘Would you like more tea, or for me to walk you back to the Clarence? … Or would you like to spend the night here?’

  She paused for what seemed an age, and yet it could not have been more than a couple of moments.

  ‘I’d like to spend the night here.’

  He did not know how tense his waiting had been until he felt the release her words gave. It was as if blank doors had slid back and he was being allowed again into the mystery of a perpetual morning, a morning without blemish. He knew it by now to be an old con trick of nature, and that it never failed, only deepened the irony and the mystery. ‘I’ll be able to show you the city tomorrow. You can check out of your hotel then if you wish. And there are the two rooms,’ he was beginning to say when she came into his arms.

  As he waited for her, the poet’s sudden angry accusation came back. Such accusations usually came to rankle and remain long after praise had failed, but not this evening. He turned it over as he might a problem that there seemed no way round, and let it drop. If it was true, there was very little that could be done about it now. It was in turn replaced by the phrase that had come to him earlier by the sea’s edge; and had he not seen love in the person of his old mother reduced to noticing things about a farmyard?

  ‘I hope you’re not puzzling over something like “life” again,’ a teasing call came from the bedroom.

  ‘No. Not this time.’ He rose to join her.

  In the morning they had coffee and toast in the sunlit kitchen with the expectation of the whole day waiting on them. Then they walked in the empty streets of the city, looked through the Green before going to the hotel to bring her things back to the flat.

  The following days were so easy that the only anxiety could be its total absence. The days were heightened by the luxury and pleasure of private evenings, the meals she cooked that were perfection, the good wine he bought, the flowers; desire that was never turned aside or exasperated by difficulty.

  At the end of the holiday, he had to go back to the office, and she put off the Dundalk visit and began to go to the Trinity Library. Many people were not back in the office, and he was able to work without interruption for the whole of the first morning. What he had to do was to isolate the relevant parts of the section and reduce them to a few simple sentences.

  At the afternoon meeting the Minister was the more nervous. He was tall and muscular, small blue eyes and thick red hair, fifteen years the younger man, with a habit of continually touching anybody close to him that told of the large family he grew up in. They went over and over the few sentences he had prepared until the Minister had them by rote. He was appearing on television that night and was extremely apprehensive.

  ‘Good man.’ He grasped McDonough’s shoulder with relief when they finished. ‘One of these evenings before long you must come out and have a bite with us and meet the hen and chickens.’

  ‘I’ll be glad to. And good luck on the TV. I’ll be watching.’

  ‘I’ll need all the luck I can get. That bitch of an interviewer hates my guts.’

  They watched the television debate together in the flat that evening. The Minister had reason to be apprehensive. He was under attack from the beginning, but bludgeoning his way. As he watched, McDonough wondered if his work had been necessary at all. He could hardly discern his few sentences beneath the weight of the Minister’s phrases. ‘I emphatically state … I categorically deny … I say without any equivocation whatsoever … Having consulted the best available opinions in the matter’ (which were presumably McDonough’s own).

  ‘What did you think?’ he asked when he switched off the set.

  ‘He was almost touching,’ she said carefully. ‘Amateurish maybe. His counterpart in the States might be no better, but he certainly would have to be more polished.’

  ‘He was good at handstands and somersaults once,’ he said, surprised at his own sense of disappointment. ‘I’ve become almost fond of him. Sometimes I wish we had better people. They’ll all tell him he did powerfully. What’ll we do? Would you like to go for a quick walk?’

  ‘Why don’t we?’ She reached for her cardigan.

  Two days later she went to Dundalk, and it wasn’t certain how long she intended to remain there. ‘I guess I’ve come so far that they’ll expect me to stay over the weekend.’

  ‘You must please yourself. You have a key. I’ll not be going anywhere.’

  They had come together so easily that the days together seemed like a marriage without any of the drama of a ceremony.

  When he was young he had desired too much, and so spread his own fear. Now that he was close to losing everything – was in the direct path of the wind – it was little short of amazing that he should come on this extraordinary breathing space.

  Almost in disbelief he went back in reflection to the one love of his life, a love that was pure suffering. In a hotel bedroom in another city, unable to sleep by her side, he had risen and dressed. He had paused before leaving the room to gaze on the even breathing of her sleep. All that breath had to do was frame one word, and a whole world of happiness would be given, but it was for ever withheld. He had walked the morning streets until circling back to the hotel he came on a market that was just opening and bought a large bunch of grapes. The grapes were very small and turning yellow and still damp, and were of incredible sweetness. She was just waking and had not missed him when he came back into the room. They ate the grapes on the coverlid and each time she lifted the small bunches to her mouth he remembered the dark of her armpits. He ached to touch her but everything seemed to be so fragile between them that he was afraid to even stir. It seemed that any small movement now could bring calamity. Then, laughing, she blew grape seeds in his face and, reaching out her arms, drew him down. She had wanted their last day together to be pleasant. She was marrying another man. Later he remembered running between airport gates looking for flights that had all departed.

  It was eerie to set down those days beside the days that had just gone by, call them by the same name. How slowly those days had moved, as if waiting for something to begin: now all the days were speeding, slipping silently by like air.

  Two evenings later, when he let himself into the flat and found Mary Kelleher there, it was as if she had never been away.

  ‘You didn’t expect me back so soon?’

  ‘I thought you’d still be in Dundalk, but I’m glad, I’m delighted.’ He took her in his arms.

  ‘I had as much of Dundalk as I wanted, and I missed you.’

  ‘How did it go?’

  ‘It was all right. The cousins were nice. They had a small house, crammed with things – religious pictures, furniture, photos. There was hardly place to move. Everything they did was so careful, so measured out. After a while I felt I could hardly breathe. They did everything they possibly could to make me welcome. I read the poems at last.’ She put the book with the brown cover on the table. ‘I read them again on the train coming back. I loved them.’

  ‘I’ve long suspected that those very pure love sonnets are all addressed to himself,’ McDonough said. ‘That was how the “ignorant bloody apes and mediocrities” could be all short-circuited.’

  ‘Some are very funny.’

  ‘I’m so glad you liked them. I’ve lived with some of them for years. Would you like to go out to eat? Say, to Bernardo’s?’ he asked.

  ‘I’d much prefer to stay home. I’ve already looked in the fridge. We can rustle something up.’

  That weekend they went together for the long walk in the mountains that he had intended to take the day they met. They stopped for a drink and sandwiches in a pub near Blessington just before two o’clock, and there they decided to press on to Rathdrum and stay the night in the hotel rather than turn back into the city.

  It was over dinner in the near empty hotel dining-room that he asked if she would consider marrying him. ‘There’s much against it. I am fifty. You would have to try to settle here, where you’ll be a stranger,’ and he went
on to say that what he had already was more than he ever expected, that he was content to let it be, but if she wanted more then it was there.

  ‘I thought that you couldn’t be married here.’ Her tone was affectionate.

  ‘I meant it in everything but name, and even that can be arranged if you want it enough.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘With money. An outside divorce. The marriage in some other country. The States, for instance.’

  ‘Can’t you see that I already love you? That it doesn’t matter? I was half teasing. You looked so serious.’

  ‘I am serious. I want to be clear.’

  ‘It is clear and I am glad – and very grateful.’

  They agreed that she would spend one week longer here in Dublin than she had planned. At Christmas he would go to New York for a week. She would have obtained her doctorate by then. James White would be surprised. There were no serious complications in sight. They were so tired and happy that it was as if they were already in possession of endless quantities of time and money.

  Creatures of the Earth

  In wild, wet January weather, two months after Mr Waldron’s death, Mrs Waldron and her daughter, Eileen, closed their big house outside Castlebar and moved to their summer cottage on Achill.

  The whole family – two other daughters, their husbands, two sons, their wives and three grandchildren – had gathered in the big house that Christmas. They would have preferred it to be kept open until at least the summer, but their mother was determined to move, even on her own. The Waldrons were an unusual family, all of them secure in good professions, and they had little interest in their inheritance other than for it to be settled according to their parents’ wishes. Their chief inheritance, a good education, had already been given. Michael Flynn was to be kept on two days a week to look after the gardens and grounds, and Eileen, a solicitor, who worked in Castlebar, might sometimes use the house in bad weather or whenever there were late court sittings. With some reluctance it was agreed that the horses and the few cattle that had been their father’s main diversion would be sold. In a year’s time they could look at the situation again. With relief and some nervous laughter it was settled that nothing more had to be done or said. They could start opening the wines they would have with the Christmas dinner.

  Eileen would have been as happy to stay as to move. There was a man her own age in Castlebar who interested her. It was she who had been the closest to her father. She did not like the idea at first of his horses being sold, but had to admit that keeping them made little sense. Secretly she was glad of the hour-long drive from Achill to Castlebar: it might help shake off the listlessness and sense of emptiness she had begun to feel once her initial anger at the death had passed. And she had come to that unnerving time when youth is rapidly disappearing into early middle age.

  The wind rocked the heavy, white Mercedes as they crossed the Sound to the island the January Saturday they moved, the sea and sky rain-sodden and wild. They had taken very little with them from Castlebar. The only precious thing they took was an old, trusting black cat they were all very attached to. The black cat had four white paws and a white star on her forehead and was called Fats.

  In the evenings the cat used to wait for the surgeon’s car to come from the hospital. Often Mr Waldron carried her indoors on his shoulder, and when he went over the fields to look at the cattle or horses the cat went with him, racing ahead and crying to be lifted on to his shoulder whenever the grass was wet. All through his final illness the cat slept at the foot of his bed. Whenever Mrs Waldron attempted to remove her from the folded quilt, he woke instantly. ‘No. Leave her be. She has not deserted us’ – a humorous reference to the apparent avoidance of them early in the illness, especially by many of the people who had worked for years with him at the hospital. All through their long life together it had been agreed that it was vanity, a waste, to consider how they appeared in the eyes of others.

  In merriment they had often recalled walking behind the professor of philosophy on a clear winter’s morning when they were undergraduates on their way to the Saturday market and hearing him demand after each person passed, ‘Did they snub us or did they not see us?’ Over the years it had become one of the playful catch-phrases of the house: ‘Did they not see us or did they snub us?’

  At first Mrs Waldron did not believe that his colleagues were avoiding him, thought indeed it was all in his imagination: ‘You’ll be as paranoiac as old Professor Ryan soon if you’re not careful.’

  ‘I don’t think so. In fact, I’m glad they’re avoiding us. Most of the time I’m too tired to receive them if they did want to visit.’

  Then, when it was clear he would not recover, she noticed the wives melt away to another part of the supermarket, the husbands disappear down side-streets in the middle of the town.

  ‘We are no longer useful. It is as simple as that.’

  ‘It can’t be that simple.’

  ‘Not complicated, then, either. They work with sick people but they are not ill. They are outside and above all that. They have to be. They loom like gods in the eyes of most of these poor creatures. Now that I am sick I simply am no longer part of the necessary lie that works. I have to be shut out. Gods can never appear ill or wounded.’

  ‘You never behaved that way.’

  ‘I like to think I was a little different, but maybe not all that different either. Anyhow …’

  The day before he died, he woke briefly, recognized her and said, ‘I think we were a good pair,’ and almost at once the heavy, monotonous breathing resumed. They were the last words he spoke, and broke her heart, but they were a deep source of solace in the days ahead. She lifted the cat from the foot of the bed, burying her face in the fur, and left the darkened room to the nurse who came behind her and closed the door softly.

  ‘What do you think of all this?’ Mrs Waldron said as she stroked the cat stretched like a lion on the dashboard of the car. The black cat suddenly yawned, rose to her feet and looked gravely down on the surging water of the Sound.

  The cottage was by a stream beyond the village, well below the road, which gave some protection against the storms. At high tide the ocean covered the rocks on the other side of the raised road. When the tide was out, there was a long, bright strand between two curving headlands. The cottage was whitewashed in the traditional way, with a blue stone slate roof and a small porch in front. A garage had been added to the side that faced the stream, and a large living room and bathroom were hidden at the back. Mrs Waldron loved the slow, crunching sound the car tyres made as they rolled down to the porch.

  Each morning, before Eileen left for work in Castlebar, the two women rose and had breakfast together. ‘I know there’s no need for me to get up so early, but it helps give shape to the day.’ After Eileen left, Mrs Waldron tidied the house, fed the cat in the shelter of the porch, watching her with an amusement that was pure affection as she performed her toilet, with ceremony and great gravity, in the black earth beneath the escallonias. Then Mrs Waldron read. Even during the busiest times of her young life in the town, if she had not managed to set at least an hour aside for reading she felt that the day had lacked concentration, had somehow been dissipated and lost.

  Now her only interruptions were rare telephone calls – and when her reading brought her face to face with some affection or sharp memory. ‘She had done more than she wanted to, less than she ought.’ She found herself repeating the sentence long after she had closed the book, seeing elements of her own life and people she knew reflected in it, elements of that life seen and given a moral sweetness that was close to smiling.

  ‘Smith told me he’s given up reading!’ her husband informed her boisterously one evening years ago after he came home from the hospital.

  ‘What’s so funny about that?’

  ‘He told me it’s too passive. He’s going to concentrate on hill and mountain climbing!’

  ‘Then he’ll be happier climbing.’

  ‘
Oh, love, don’t be so serious.’ He tried to waltz her away from whatever she was preparing for dinner.

  ‘Are you sure you’ve not been drinking?’

  ‘Not a drop. But I intend to have a stiff drink before dinner. We have to examine Smith’s momentous decision. Will you join me?’

  Without reading, she would feel her whole life now to be spiritually idle. All through their marriage she and her husband had talked to one another about the good things that they’d happened upon, that lightened and deepened life, gave recognition and pleasure.

  After a light lunch she rested and then set out on her walk. In all but the worst weather she walked, and never varied it unless the wind forced her in another direction, but these walks were never as enjoyable as the ones she and her husband took together in the last years when they were alone.

  She went by the harbour. It was empty now of boats except for four old curraghs resting upside down on concrete blocks, roped down against the storms. There were a few wooden crayfish creels along the short pier wall and these were also weighted down, as was some torn and tangled netting. Passing the harbour she could choose between several sheep paths through the heather, but generally she went by the path closest to the ocean. The only person she met on her walks that February was a little old man in green oilskins with a pair of binoculars. Always he was in the same place, resting in the shelter of a big boulder and looking out to sea. Only after she’d passed him several times did he look at her and nod. Then, sometimes, she was the first to smile and nod. He seemed pleased, but still they did not speak. She thought he might be a relic, like herself, who had taken up bird-watching, or someone just fascinated by the power and beauty of the ocean, ever changing. What did he see there?

  A school fife-and-drum band marching past the cottage to early Mass woke both mother and daughter to St Patrick’s Day. The weather was warmer. People suddenly seemed to be in better spirits. Along all the cottages on the road to the harbour, people were digging their kitchen gardens, spreading manure and seaweed, shovelling the rich, black earth. Some waved to her with their spades or shovels as she passed.