Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  ‘He made a great splash when he came home first,’ one of the drinkers said to the empty bar as soon as Philly left. ‘He bought rings round him. Now the brother in the wheelchair isn’t with him any more.’

  ‘Too much. Too much,’ a second drinker added forcefully though it wasn’t clear at all to what he referred.

  ‘It must be bad when that brother throws in the towel, because he’s a tank for drink. You’d think there was no bottom in that wheelchair.’

  The barman stared in silent disapproval at his three customers. There were few things he disliked more than this ‘behind-backs’ criticism of a customer as soon as he left. He opened the newspaper loudly, staring pointedly out at the three drinkers until they were silent, and then bent his head to travel slowly through the pages again.

  ‘I heard a good one the other day,’ one of the drinkers cackled rebelliously. ‘The only chance of travel that ever comes to the poor is when they get sick. They go from one state to the other state and back again to base if they’re lucky.’

  The other two thought this hilarious and one pounded the table with his glass in appreciation. Then they looked towards the barman for approval but he just raised his eyes to stare absently out on the grey strip of concrete until the little insurrection died and he was able to continue travelling through the newspaper again.

  Philly came slowly back up the street. The blonde had finished painting her toenails – a loud vermilion – and she leaned the back of her head against a door jamb, her eyes closing as she gave her face and throat completely to the sun. The hooded pram above her outstretched legs was silent. Away, behind the area railings, old men wearing berets were playing bowls, a miniature French flag flying on the railings.

  Philly expected to enter an empty room but as soon as he put his key in the door he heard the raised voices. He held the key still. His mother was downstairs. She and Fonsie were arguing. With a welcome little rush of expectancy, he turned the key. The two were so engaged with one another that they did not notice him enter. His mother was in her blue dressing gown. She stood remarkably erect.

  ‘What’s going on?’ They were so involved with one another that they looked towards him as if he were a burglar.

  ‘Your Uncle Peter died last night, in Gloria. The Cullens just phoned,’ his mother said, and it was Philly’s turn to look at his mother and brother as if he couldn’t quite grasp why they were in the room.

  ‘You’ll all have to go,’ his mother said.

  ‘I don’t see why we should have to go. We haven’t seen the man in twenty years. He never even liked us,’ Fonsie said heatedly, turning the wheelchair to face Philly.

  ‘Of course we’ll go. We are all he has now. It wouldn’t look right if we didn’t go down.’ Philly would have grasped at any diversion, but the pictures of Gloria Bog that flooded his mind shut out the day and the room with amazing brightness and calm.

  ‘That doesn’t mean I have to go,’ Fonsie said.

  ‘Of course you have to go. He was your uncle as well as mine,’ Philly said.

  ‘If nobody went to poor Peter’s funeral, God rest him, we’d be the talk of the countryside for years,’ their mother said. ‘If I know nothing else in the world I know what they’re like down there.’

  ‘Anyhow, there’s no way I can go in this.’ Fonsie gestured contemptuously to his wheelchair.

  ‘That’s no problem. I’ll hire a Mercedes. With a jalopy like that you wouldn’t think of coming yourself, Mother?’ Philly asked suddenly with the humour and malice of deep knowledge, and the silence that met the suggestion was as great as if some gross obscenity had been uttered.

  ‘I’d look a nice speck in Gloria when I haven’t been out of my own house in years. There wouldn’t be much point in going to poor Peter’s funeral, God rest him, and turning up at my own,’ she said in a voice in which a sudden frailty only served to point up the different shades of its steel.

  ‘He never even liked us. There were times I felt if he got a chance he’d throw me into a bog hole the way he drowned the black whippet that started eating the eggs,’ Philly said.

  ‘He’s gone now,’ the mother said. ‘He stood to us when he was needed. It made no difference whether he liked us or not.’

  ‘How will you manage on your own?’ Fonsie asked as if he had accepted he’d have to go.

  ‘Won’t Mrs O’Brien next door look in if you ask her and can’t I call her myself on the phone? It’ll be good for you to get out of the city for a change. None of the rest can be trusted to bring me back a word of anything that goes on,’ she flattered.

  ‘Was John told yet?’ Philly interrupted, asking about their eldest brother.

  ‘No. There’d be no use ringing him at home now. You’d have to ring him at the school,’ their mother said.

  The school’s number was written in a notebook. Philly had to wait a long time on the phone after he explained the urgency of the call while the school secretary got John from the classroom.

  ‘John won’t take time off school to go to any funeral,’ Fonsie said confidently as they waited.

  To Fonsie’s final disgust John agreed to go to the funeral at once. He’d be waiting for them at whatever time they thought they’d be ready to travel.

  Philly hired the Mercedes. The wheelchair folded easily into its cavern-like boot. ‘You’ll all be careful,’ their mother counselled as she kissed them goodbye. ‘Everything you do down there will be watched and gone over. I’ll be following poor Peter in my mind until you rest him with Father and Mother in Killeelan.’

  John was waiting for them outside his front door, a brown hat in his hand, a gabardine raincoat folded on his arm, when the Mercedes pulled up at the low double gate. Before Philly had time to touch the horn John raised the hat and hurried down the concrete path. On both sides of the path the postage-stamp lawns showed the silver tracks of a mower, and roses were stacked and tied along the earthen borders.

  ‘The wife doesn’t seem to appear at all these days?’ Philly asked, the vibrations of the engine shaking the car as they waited while John closed the gate.

  ‘Herself and Mother never pulled,’ Fonsie offered.

  There was dull peace between the two brothers now. Fonsie knew he was more or less in Philly’s hands for the next two days. He did not like it but the stupid death had moved the next two days out of his control.

  ‘What’s she like now?’

  ‘I suppose she’s much like the rest of us. She was always nippy.’

  ‘I’m sorry for keeping you,’ John said as he got into the back of the car.

  ‘You didn’t keep us at all,’ Philly answered.

  ‘It’s great to get a sudden break like this. You can’t imagine what it is to get out of the school and city for two or three whole days,’ John said before he settled and was silent. The big Mercedes grew silent as it gathered speed through Fairview and the North Strand, crossing the Liffey at the Custom House, and turned into the one-way flow of traffic out along the south bank of the river. Not until they got past Leixlip, and fields and trees and hedges started to be scattered between the new raw estates, did they begin to talk, and all their talk circled about the man they were going to bury, their mother’s brother, their Uncle Peter McDermott.

  He had been the only one in the family to stay behind with his parents on Gloria Bog where he’d been born. All the rest had scattered. Their Aunt Mary had died young in Walthamstow, London; Martin died in Milton, Massachusetts; Katie, the eldest, had died only the year before in Oneida, New York. With Peter’s death they were all gone now, except their mother. She had been the last to leave the house. She first served her time in a shop in Carrick-on-Shannon and then moved to a greengrocer’s-cum-confectioner’s on the North Circular Road where she met their unreliable father, a traveller for Lemons Sweets.

  While the powerful car slowed through Enfield they began to recall how their mother had taken them back to Gloria at the beginning of every summer, leaving their father to his
own devices in the city. They spent every summer there on the bog from the end of June until early September. Their mother had always believed that only for the clean air of the bog and the plain wholesome food they would never have made it through the makeshifts of the city winter. Without the air and the plain food they’d never, never have got through, she used to proclaim like a thanksgiving.

  As long as her own mother lived it was like a holiday to go there every summer – the toothless grandmother who sat all day in her rocking chair, her shoulders shawled, the grey hair drawn severely back into a bun, only rising to gather crumbs and potato skins into her black apron, and holding it like a great cloth bowl, she would shuffle out on to the street. She’d wait until all her brown hens had started to beat and clamour around her and then with a quick laugh she’d scatter everything that the apron held. Often before she came in she’d look across the wide acres of the bog, the stunted birch trees, the faint blue of the heather, the white puffs of bog cotton trembling in every wind to the green slopes of Killeelan and walled evergreens high on the hill and say, ‘I suppose it won’t be long till I’m with the rest of them there.’

  ‘You shouldn’t talk like that, Mother,’ they remembered their mother’s ritual scold.

  ‘There’s not much else to think about at my age. The gaps between the bog holes are not getting wider.’

  One summer the brown rocking chair was empty. Peter lived alone in the house. Though their mother worked from morning to night in the house, tidying, cleaning, sewing, cooking, he made it clear that he didn’t want her any more, but she ignored him. Her want was greater than his desire to be rid of them and his fear of going against the old pieties prevented him from turning them away.

  The old ease of the grandmother’s time had gone. He showed them no welcome when they came, spent as little time in the house as possible, the days working in the fields, visiting other houses at night where, as soon as he had eaten, he complained to everybody about the burden he had to put up with. He never troubled to hide his relief when the day finally came at the end of the summer for them to leave. In the quick way of children, the three boys picked up his resentment and suffered its constraint. He hardly ever looked at Fonsie in his wheelchair, and it was fear that never allowed Fonsie to take his eyes from the back of his uncle’s head and broad shoulders. Whenever Philly or John took him sandwiches and the Powers bottle of tea kept warm in the sock to the bog or meadow, they always instinctively took a step or two back after handing him the oilcloth bag. Out of loneliness there were times when he tried to talk to them but the constraint had so solidified that all they were ever able to give back were childish echoes of his own awkward questions. He never once acknowledged the work their mother had done in the house which was the way she had – the only way she had – of paying for their stay in the house of her own childhood. The one time they saw him happy was whenever her exasperation broke and she scolded him: he would smile as if all the days he had spent alone with his mother had suddenly returned. Once she noticed that he enjoyed these scolds, and even set to actively provoke them at every small turn, she would go more doggedly still than was her usual wont.

  ‘What really used to get her dander up was the way he used to lift up his trousers by the crotch before he sat down to the table,’ Fonsie said as the car approached Longford, and the brothers all laughed in their different ways.

  ‘He looked as if he was always afraid he’d sit on his balls,’ Philly said. ‘He’ll not have to worry about that any more.’

  ‘His worries are over,’ John said.

  ‘Then, after our father died and she got that job in the laundry, that was the first summer we didn’t go. She was very strange that summer. She’d take your head off if you talked. We never went again.’

  ‘Strange, going down like this after all that,’ John said vaguely.

  ‘I was trying to say that in the house. It makes no sense to me but this man and Mother wouldn’t listen,’ Fonsie said. ‘They were down my throat before I could open my mouth.’

  ‘We’re here now anyhow,’ Philly said as the car crossed the narrow bridge at Carrick and they could look down at the Shannon. They were coming into country that they knew. They had suffered here.

  ‘God, I don’t know how she came here summer after summer when she wasn’t wanted,’ John said as the speeding car left behind the last curve of sluggish water.

  ‘Well, she wasn’t exactly leaving the Garden of Eden,’ Philly said.

  ‘It’s terrible when you’re young to come into a place where you know you’re not wanted,’ John said. ‘I used to feel we were eating poor Peter out of house and home every summer. When you’re a child you feel those sorts of things badly even though nobody notices. I see it still in the faces of the children I teach.’

  ‘After all that we’re coming down to bury the fucker. That’s what gets me,’ Fonsie said.

  ‘He’s dead now and belongs with all the dead,’ Philly said. ‘He wasn’t all bad. Once I helped him drive cattle into the fair of Boyle. It was dark when we set out. I had to run alongside them in the fields behind the hedges until they got too worn out to want to leave the road. After we sold the cattle up on the Green he took me to the Rockingham Arms. He bought me lemonade and ginger snaps and lifted me up on the counter and said I was a great gossoon to the whole bar even if I had the misfortune to be from Dublin.’

  ‘You make me sick,’ Fonsie said angrily. ‘The man wasn’t civilized. I always felt if he got a chance he’d have put me in a bag with a stone and thrown me in a bog hole like that black whippet.’

  ‘That’s exaggerating now. He never did and we’re almost there,’ John said as the car went past the church and scattered houses of Cootehall, where they had come to Mass on Sundays and bought flour and tea and sugar.

  ‘Now, fasten your seat-belts,’ Philly said humorously as he turned slowly into the bog road. To their surprise the deep potholes were gone. The road had been tarred, the unruly hedges of sally and hazel and briar cut back. Occasionally a straying briar clawed at the windscreen, the only hint of the old wildness. When the hedges gave way to the field of wild raspberry canes, Philly slowed the car to a crawl, and then stopped. Suddenly the bog looked like an ocean stretched in front of them, its miles of heather and pale sedge broken by the stunted birch trees, and high against the evening sun the dark evergreens stood out on the top of Killeelan Hill.

  ‘He’ll be buried there the day after tomorrow.’

  The house hadn’t changed, whitewashed, asbestos-roofed, the chestnut tree in front standing in the middle of the green fields on the edge of the bog; but the road was now tarred to the door, and all around the house new cattle sheds had sprung up.

  Four cars were parked on the street and the door of the small house was open. A man shading his eyes with his hand came to the doorway as soon as the Mercedes came to a stop. It was Jim Cullen, the man who had telephoned the news of the death, smaller now and white-haired. He welcomed the three brothers in turn as he shook their hands. ‘I’m sorry for your trouble. You were great to come all the way. I wouldn’t have known any of you except for Fonsie. Your poor mother didn’t manage to come?’

  ‘She wasn’t up to it,’ Philly said. ‘She hasn’t left the house in years.’

  As soon as they entered the room everybody stood up and came towards them and shook hands: ‘I’m sorry for your trouble.’ There were three old men besides Jim Cullen, neighbours of the dead man who had known them as children. Mrs Cullen was the older woman. A younger man about their own age was a son of the Cullens, Michael, whom they remembered as a child, but he had so grown and changed that his appearance was stranger to them than the old men.

  ‘It’s hard to think that Peter, God rest him, is gone. It’s terrible,’ Jim Cullen said as he led them into the bedroom.

  The room was empty. A clock somewhere had not been stopped. He looked very old and still in the bed. They would not have known him. His hands were enormous on the white sheet, t
he beads a thin dark trickle through the locked fingers. A white line crossed the weathered forehead where he had worn a hat or a cap. The three brothers blessed themselves, and after a pause John and Philly touched the huge rough hands clasped together on the sheet. They were very cold. Fonsie did not touch the hands, turning the chair round towards the kitchen before his brothers left the side of the bed.

  In the kitchen Fonsie and Philly drank whiskey. Mrs Cullen said it was no trouble at all to make John a cup of tea and there were platefuls of cut sandwiches on the table. Jim Cullen started to take up the story of Peter’s death. He had told it many times already and would tell it many times again during the next days.

  ‘Every evening before dark Peter would come out into that garden at the side. It can be seen plain from our front door. He was proud, proud of that garden though most of what it grew he gave away.’

  ‘You couldn’t have a better neighbour. If he saw you coming looking for help he’d drop whatever he was doing and swear black and blue that he was doing nothing at all,’ an old man said.

  ‘It was lucky,’ Jim Cullen resumed. ‘This woman here was thinking of closing up the day and went out to the door before turning the key, and saw Peter in the garden. She saw him stoop a few times to pull up a weed or straighten something and then he stood for a long time; suddenly he just seemed to keel over into the furrow. She didn’t like to call and waited for him to get up and when he didn’t she ran for me out the back. I called when I went into the garden. There was no sight or sound. He was hidden under the potato stalks. I had to pull them back before I was able to see anything. It was lucky she saw him fall. We’d have had to look all over the bog for days before we’d have ever thought of searching in the stalks.’

  ‘Poor Peter was all right,’ Philly said emotionally. ‘I’ll never forget the day he put me up on the counter of the Rockingham Arms.’

  He was the only brother who seemed in any way moved by the death. John looked cautiously from face to face but whatever he found in the faces did not move him to speak. Fonsie had finished the whiskey he’d been given on coming from the room and appeared to sit in his wheelchair in furious resentment. Then, one by one, as if in obedience to some hidden signal or law, everybody in the room rose and shook hands with the three brothers in turn and left them alone with Jim and Maggie Cullen.