Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  ‘You shouldn’t take it so hard. A boy has come in so that an old man can go out,’ one of those foolish people who have a word for everything said.

  ‘He was not old to me,’ she cried.

  Harkin was in the newspapers again, but not the sports pages. He had been with his friend Guard McCarthy late one night when their patrol car was called to a disturbance at an itinerant encampment on the outskirts of the town. A huge fire of car tyres and burning branches lit up the vans and mobile homes, the cars and mounds of metal scrap. Stones and burning branches were thrown at the Garda car. They radioed for reinforcements before getting out.

  The guards said that as soon as they left the car they were set upon by youths and men wielding sticks and iron bars. All the itinerant witnesses swore that both guards had jumped from the car with drawn batons and provoked the assault. In the bloody fight that followed, the guards stood and fought back to back, the short, leaded batons thonged to their wrists. When the reinforcements arrived, three tinkers lay unconscious on the ground. The rest of the men had escaped into the fields, and McCarthy and Harkin were being attacked by a crowd of hysterical women. McCarthy’s face was covered with blood. He had a serious head wound. An ear hung loose. Harkin’s left arm was broken, and he was cut and bruised.

  When one of the tinkers died in hospital without recovering consciousness, a terrible furore started in the newspapers, on the radio and television. Itinerants’ rights organizations denounced the two guards and Garda treatment of itinerants in general. At the trial the guards were exonerated of criminal wrongdoing. Whether excessive force was used or not remained unanswered. Once the uproar subsided, an internal Garda inquiry was held after a civil action brought by the itinerant families was settled out of court. As a result, McCarthy was transferred to a coastal town under the Cork-Kerry mountains. Harkin was sent to Achill Island. Any lingering hope he held of advancement in the Force was gone.

  On Achill the heart attack came without warning. For several weeks it was touch and go whether he’d live or die. He came through a number of serious operations. Strangely, he was very happy in hospital and an ideal patient. By the time he was released it was known he’d never be fit to resume normal police duties. For the first time in a marriage that had slowly emptied of everything but caution and carefulness and appearances, Kate took a decisive part. If Harkin accepted the desk work he was offered in a station in one of the big towns, he would have to go there alone. With him or without him Kate was going back to what she knew.

  It was one of those rare moves in life which appear to benefit everybody. Maggie made no bones then or later that Kate saw it as a last chance to climb back into some kind of life of her own. The town had not won a county championship since that great summer ten years before, and Harkin was greeted like a returning idol.

  He had been deeply shaken by the way people turned away from him once he ceased to be a star, the same people who had crowded around him on pitches and in hotel lobbies, had stopped him in the street to ask for autographs. This constant attention had been so long a part of his everyday life that he had come to take it as much for granted as air or health. When suddenly it disappeared, he was baffled: he was the same person now as when he had dominated centrefields, and it gnawed at the whole structure of his self-esteem, forcing in on him the feeling that he no longer amounted to anything, he who had meant the world to cheering, milling crowds. Back in this small town where he was well remembered he felt he could breathe again, and the welcome and sympathy he was shown soon brought immediate, practical benefit.

  During the ten years the Harkins had been away, tourism had grown rapidly. There were now many guest houses, and foreigners had built summer houses by the lakes and were buying and converting old disused dwellings. They were mostly Germans and French, with a scattering of Swiss and Dutch, highly paid factory workers from industrial cities, attracted more to the hunting and fishing and cheap property prices than to the deserted beauty of the countryside. A local guard, Guard Tracy, had developed a lucrative sideline looking after their summer houses and soon had more work than he could handle. Some of this he passed on to the disabled ex-guard, with promises to put more business his way if things went well, but when Tracy was transferred suddenly to Waterford, Harkin got control of the entire business. Suspicion grew that he had brought about Tracy’s transfer by reporting his dealings with the foreigners to the Garda authorities, but it could as easily have been any one of several people. While Tracy had managed the properties only, Harkin threw himself into the whole lives of the tourists. Soon he was meeting them at Dublin airport and taking them back. He organized shooting expeditions. He took them on fishing trips all over. These tourists did not return their catch to the water. The sport was in the kill. As well as pheasant, duck, woodcock, pigeon, snipe, they shot songbirds, thrushes, blackbirds, even larks.

  His damaged heart meant Harkin wasn’t able to go with them over the fields. Often he stood on the roads with his new repeater and guarded access to where they were shooting. In the summer they came with freezer vans, and Harkin took them to lakes rich in pike and perch and eel. He helped them net the lakes in broad daylight as well as at night. Heads of gutted pike were scattered round every small shore. Because of his contacts in the guards he was able to obstruct complaints, and most people did not bother to complain. Harkin was well known and admired – the disabled guard was entitled to a living like every other. The lakes had been there for so long and were so little used, except by eel fishermen from the north, that they were taken for granted; but everybody disliked the slaughter of the songbirds. When the day’s shooting and fishing was done, the tourists loved to party and drink. In the same way as he disregarded the plunder of the lakes and the growing hostility to the shooting of songbirds, Harkin drank pint for pint, glass for glass, with his new friends without seeming to care for his health. At parties he would pull off his shirt to display the scars of his operations.

  At weekends and in the winter evenings, Kate’s two daughters often accompanied their father on his rounds of the empty tourist houses, while the boy went with his mother to visit Maggie, sometimes to stay the night. Kate must have felt the changes ten years can bring as she walked the curving path through the fields above the lake and down by the tall trees to the house. It was her son’s hand she now held instead of Harkin’s, his grip more demanding than ever her husband’s had been. All that drowsy love had gone: she feared him now and feared closeness, not distance. The path and the lake and the fields were the same. Her father was gone, his dear presence nowhere but in her mind, and everything continued on as before. The blackbirds and thrushes racketed. A robin sang. Maggie was still there, praise be to everything that moves or sings. A red shorthorn left the small herd and walked with them on the path, frisking its long tail excitedly while trying to nuzzle her hand. ‘Will it bite us?’ the child asked. ‘No. It’s just looking for nuts. Your grandfather was always trying to stop your grandmother turning them into pets.’

  ‘You left the two lassies behind today?’ Maggie met them, her broad face creased with smiles.

  ‘They went with their father on his rounds of the houses.’

  ‘My little man is in his lone glory, then.’ She stretched out and lifted the boy high above her head.

  For days at a time and whole nights of the summer, Kate and the children didn’t see Harkin, but when they did, he was usually in good humour. He had plenty of money. He had always been generous, and Kate now had more money than she needed. His life became so intertwined with the tourists that in the off-season they sent him air tickets to join them in various cities. Kate thought little of the trips. When he was leaving, she wished him a good holiday and had the children wish him the same. He always brought back presents.

  The tourists congratulated him on having an obedient, old-fashioned wife. They raised their glasses and wondered if he could find such a wife for Pierre or Helmut. Harkin took out his notebook and, with the mock solemnity of a policema
n raiding a public house for after-hours drinking, wrote down the names, warning each man that anything said could be used in evidence against them once he found them such a wife.

  They roared with laughter. ‘Harkin can do anything. Harkin is the devil …’

  As Kate was walking back through the town one morning after taking the children to school, Jerome Callaghan’s car pulled up along the curb. He pushed open the door on the passenger side for her to get in. She hesitated. They’d once been in the same class at school. He now owned his uncle’s auctioneering business and had a reputation for going with older women.

  ‘I’ve been looking out for you, Kate,’ he said. ‘How would you like to work again?’

  She was taken aback because it was as if her most secret thought had been taken from her and offered casually back. ‘There aren’t many jobs for women my age.’

  ‘There’s one,’ he said. ‘They are looking for someone to run the office in the market.’

  It was what she had hoped for but had never expected to find in this small place. As they talked, she knew she could do the work. All she doubted were his motives. She refused his offer to drive her home, saying she had things to get for the house. She also said she’d make her own way to the mart for an interview with McNulty, the manager, later the same day.

  At twelve o’clock she went to the big galvanized building outside the town in the middle of a huge, gravelled space for cattle trucks and trailers. In spite of dressing with great care, she felt nervous and vulnerable offering herself for work again after all these years. McNulty could not have been more friendly. He seemed to know a great deal already about her training, and after a short conversation offered her the job there and then. He wanted her to begin work the following morning.

  Confronted suddenly with an offer she had long wanted but only dared to think about in secret, her first instinct was to back away: she didn’t know how her husband would react when he got back; she’d like time to think it over. McNulty couldn’t give her time. If she wouldn’t take the job, he’d be forced to look for someone else. More than a million pounds passed through the mart each week. She was always free to hand in her notice if, after a few weeks, she found the work didn’t suit her.

  She began the following morning. Men were already hosing the cattle pens when she came in, the arc light high in the steel girders shining down on the wet concrete. Annie and Lizzie who worked in the office were friendly and helpful. They’d worked in the mart for years and feared that the new person would be hostile or distant; either of them could have done her work, but they didn’t want the responsibility. A few of the small farmers, who came in about cheques or cattle cards, she’d known since she was a girl, men like her father, rough and ready and anxious; but her father was not rough, and she knew that much of the rough manner was a shield, a working uniform. The dealers were more polished and better dressed and more interesting, and they too wore uniforms. Cattle she had grown up with. She loved their faces. She found their lowing hard at first, lowing for what fields and company they’d been taken from. They’d be driven round the sale rings, loaded on to trucks or trailers and carried through the night to ships or abattoirs. Only a few would reach the lives of new farms. All that passed through her office were their cards, their bills of sale, the cheques, the dockets. She was so busy on mart days that the voices of the auctioneers calling out their rhythmic numbers over the loudspeakers were only a distant sound.

  On mart days and the days that followed, which were even busier, when the accounts had to tally and any irregularities of sale or purchase reported to McNulty, Maggie would come into the town to pick up the children from school. On all other days Kate had time to see to the children herself. As long as the work was done, they didn’t care what hours she kept.

  The days flew. In the quiet morning after leaving the children at school, as she came up the back lane to the mart by gardens and the yards of the bars and engineering works savouring the morning, she began to realize how much she had missed the independence of work. Now it was through this new concentration – and the simple walk from the school to the mart a prelude to the work itself – that each day had been given back to her in its long light and depth, all the actions and interactions of the day, between the setting out and the returning, a reflection of the mystery of the whole blessed gift of life. She had nearly lost that gift. She had given up thinking of her marriage. Though she had searched for hours, she had never been able to isolate any single day, or even month or incident, when it had taken that wrong turning; but it had turned, and they had never talked. How or when or why would never be known. She had no other wish but to live her life and to bring up her children in peace – without her husband, or any man. With her husband in the house, she felt more alone than in his absence. Her nervousness in the face of his return quickened the speed with which the days flew. They seemed to race. Jerome Callaghan was in the mart most days. When they met, he was polite and careful. Once he asked her how she liked the work.

  ‘I’m very happy.’

  ‘Everybody’s delighted with you, anyhow,’ he said.

  ‘You can say that again.’ Annie looked up from her chair far down the counter and echoed his words so vigorously that Kate knew that they were happy with her work and wanted her to stay. Her husband’s visit abroad was prolonged much more than usual. She was relieved at the first postponements, but then her nervousness grew greater in the face of his return. The days no longer raced. They were fixed on his return like a held breath.

  Harkin brought many presents back at the end of seven weeks. The three children were very excited, and he was full of plans for making a video of the area with a German company. If the video took off it could bring the many abandoned houses in the mountains on to the market as well as increase interest in the lakes, and it would make sense for him to set up as an auctioneer as well as to expand his present business. They could all wind up as millionaires. He had been drinking earlier in the day but he was far from drunk. Kate knew he would dislike that she had found work and that it was better that he heard it directly from her, but such was the atmosphere of the house and her own deep horror of confrontation that she kept putting it off. As the children were getting ready for bed, having eked out the day well past their usual bedtime, the boy blurted out proudly, ‘Mammy’s got work. Some days she takes us into her office after school.’

  ‘What sort of work?’

  ‘In the mart – in the office,’ she answered quickly.

  ‘Who gave you this work?’

  ‘They were looking for someone in a hurry. Mr McNulty gave me the work.’

  ‘So Horsey McNulty is a mister now all of a sudden. Did you need the money?’

  ‘No. We’ve never had so much money.’

  ‘Were you short of money before?’

  ‘We were never short.’

  ‘Why did you want the work?’

  ‘The children are growing up. It was a chance to get out of the house.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t need to be consulted.’

  ‘I tried to put off taking the job till you came home, but they couldn’t give me the time. They needed somebody that week.’

  The mood of the house changed. Instead of trying to postpone their bedtime, the three children were anxious to be away and under the blankets. When the doors of their rooms were closed, he took a whiskey bottle from the press and poured a

  large glass. She was always apprehensive when she saw him drink whiskey.

  ‘Those crowd of wide boys knew well what they were doing. As well as McNulty, Jerome Callaghan is stuck to his elbows in the mart and he’s nosing after the one thing.’ He suddenly drained the glass but didn’t reach for the bottle again. ‘You’ll have to throw it up. That’s all. I’m not going to have my wife working up in the cow shit with a pack of wide boys. It’s not as if I don’t make enough money. You’ll give it up tomorrow and get the hell out of the place.’

  She said she couldn’t. She liked the w
ork, and it didn’t interfere with the running of the house or the children. She said that the people were pleasant, especially the two women who worked with her in the office, and she had given them her word.

  With the empty glass in his hand he rose and came towards her. It was as if all the resentments he’d held half in check over years had gathered into a fist. He had married her when he could have had his pick of women. He had given her a house, car, children, clothes – everything a woman could want. What had she given back? Nothing, nothing. She had given him no help at all. Their life had been a dog’s life. He hadn’t even the life of a dog. ‘Have you ever asked yourself if there’s anything wrong with you?’ He didn’t seem to know or care what he said.

  ‘Be careful, you’re saying too much,’ she warned, but he did not hear her.

  ‘I’ll bring you up to date. I’ll soon bring you up to date. Two nights ago I went to a hotel in the Black Forest. The Germans aren’t stuck in the dark ages. We were ten couples. A divorced woman was with me. Helga. Every man had two keys to his room. After drinks, each man threw a key on the table and went to his room. The women stayed behind to pick up a key. The woman who came to my room said when she opened the door, “I won the prize. I got the Irishman.” We did everything man or beast can do and we were the last couple to come down. Everybody clapped as soon as we came into the bar and wanted to buy us drinks. You mightn’t think much of these people, but they know what I am worth.’

  ‘This time you’ve gone too far,’ she said.

  ‘Not half far enough.’ He came towards her. ‘You’ll either do what you’re supposed to do in this house or get out.’ He seized her with both hands and raced her to the door. She tried to stop herself falling as she was flung but before she realized what had happened she found herself reeling to a stop in the middle of the small lawn. She didn’t fall. Behind her she heard the door lock.