Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  From the top of the dresser a horse made from matchsticks and mounted on a rough board was taken down. The thin lines of the matchsticks were cunningly spliced and glued together to suggest the shape of a straining horse in the motion of ploughing or mowing. A pig was found among the plates, several sheep that were subtly different from one another, as well as what looked like a tired old collie, all made from the same curved and spliced matchsticks.

  ‘He was always looking for matches. Even in town on Saturdays you’d see him picking them up from the bar floor. He could do anything with them. The children loved the animals he’d give them. Seldom they broke them. Though our crowd are grown we still have several he made in the house. He never liked TV. That’s what you’d find him at on any winter’s night if you wandered in on your ceilidh. He could nearly make those matchsticks talk.’

  It was as if the house had been sundered into two distinct and separate elements, and yet each reflected and measured the other as much as the earth and the sky. In the upper room there was silence, the people there keeping vigil by the body where it lay in the stillness and awe of the last change; while in the lower room that life was being resurrected with more vividness than it could ever have had in the long days and years it had been given. Though all the clocks in the house had now been silenced everybody seemed to know at once when it was midnight and all the mourners knelt except Fonsie and two very old women. The two rooms were joined as the Rosary was recited but as soon as the prayers ended each room took on again its separate entity.

  Fonsie signalled to Philly that he wanted to go outside. Philly knew immediately that his brother wanted to relieve himself. In the city he never allowed any help but here he was afraid of the emptiness and darkness of the night outside the house and the strange ground. It was a clear moonlit night without a murmur of wind, and the acres of pale sedge were all lit up, giving back much of the light it was receiving, so that the places that were covered with heather melted into a soft blackness and the scattered shadows of the small birches were soft and dark on the cold sedge. High up and far off they could hear an aeroplane and soon they picked it out by the pulsing of its white night-light as it crossed their stretch of sky. The tall evergreens within the pale stone wall on the top of Killeelan were dark and gathered together against the moonlight. As if to give something back to his brother for accompanying him into the night, Fonsie said as he was relieving himself in the shadowed corner of the house, ‘Mother remembers seeing the first car in this place. She says she was ten. All of them from the bog rushed out to the far road to see the car pass. It’s strange to think of people living still who didn’t grow up with cars.’

  ‘Maybe they were as well off,’ Philly said.

  ‘How could they be as well off?’

  ‘Would Peter in there now be better off?’

  ‘I thought it was life we were talking about. If they were that well off why had they all to do their best to get to hell out of the place?’

  ‘I was only thinking that a lot of life never changes. If the rich could get the poor to die for them the rich would never die,’ Philly said belligerently. It didn’t take much or long for an edge to come between them, but before it could grow they went back into the house. Not until close to daylight did the crowd of mourners start to thin.

  During all this time John had been the most careful of the three brothers. He had drunk less than either of the other two, had stayed almost as silent as Fonsie, and now he noticed each person’s departure and accompanied them out to their cars to thank them for coming to Peter’s wake as if he had been doing it all his life. By the time the last car left, the moon was still in the sky but was well whitened by the rising sun. The sedge had lost its brightness and taken on the dull colour of wheat. All that was left in the house with the dead man and his three nephews were the Cullens and a local woman who had helped with tea and sandwiches through the night. By that time they had all acquired the heady, vaguely uplifting spiritual feeling that comes in the early stages of exhaustion and is often strikingly visible in the faces of the old or sick.

  In the same vague, absent, dreamlike way, the day drifted towards evening. Whenever they came to the door they saw a light, freshening wind moving over the sedge as if it were passing over water. Odd callers continued coming to the house throughout the day, and after they spent time with the dead man in the room they were given food and drink and they sat and talked. Most of their talk was empty and tired by now and had none of the vigour of the night before. Mrs Cullen took great care to ensure that the upper room was never left empty, that someone was always there by Peter’s side on this his last day in the house. Shortly after five the hearse arrived and the coffin was taken in. It was clear that Luke had been right and that most of the drink Philly had ordered would have to be returned. Immediately behind the hearse was a late, brief flurry of callers. Shortly before six the body was laid in the coffin and, with a perfunctory little swish of beads, the undertaker began the decade of the Rosary. The coffin was closed and taken out to the hearse. Many cars had taken up position on the narrow road to accompany the hearse to the church.

  After they left the coffin before the high altar in the church, some of the mourners crossed the road to Luke’s Bar. There, Philly bought everybody a round of drinks but when he attempted to buy a second round both Luke and Jim Cullen stopped him. Custom allowed one round but no more. Instead he ordered a pint of stout for himself and Fonsie, and John shook his head to the offer of a second drink. Then when Philly went to pay for the two drinks Luke pushed the money back to him and said that Jim Cullen had just paid.

  People offered to put the brothers up for the night but Fonsie especially would not hear of staying in a strange house. He insisted on going to the hotel in town. As soon as they had drunk the second pint and said their goodbyes Philly drove John and Fonsie to the Royal Hotel. He waited until they were given rooms and then prepared to leave.

  ‘Aren’t you staying here?’ Fonsie asked sharply when he saw that Philly was about to leave him alone with John.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where are you putting your carcass?’

  ‘Let that be no worry of yours,’ Philly said coolly.

  ‘I don’t think a more awkward man ever was born. Even Mother agrees on that count.’

  ‘I’ll see you around nine in the morning,’ Philly said to John as they made an appointment to see Reynolds, the solicitor, before the funeral Mass at eleven.

  Philly noticed that both the young Cullens and the older couple had returned from the removal by the two cars parked outside their house. Peter’s house was unlocked and eerily empty, everything in it exactly as it was when the coffin was taken out. On impulse he took three bottles of whiskey from one of the boxes stacked beneath the table and walked with the bottles over to Cullen’s house. They’d seen him coming from the road and Jim Cullen went out to meet him before he reached the door.

  ‘I’m afraid you caught us in the act,’ Mrs Cullen laughed. The four of them had been sitting at the table, the two men drinking what looked like glasses of whiskey, the women cups of tea and biscuits.

  ‘Another half-hour and you’d have found us in the nest,’ Jim Cullen said. ‘We didn’t realize how tired we were until after we came in from looking at our own cattle and Peter’s. We decided to have this last drink and then hit off. We’ll miss Peter.’

  Without asking him, Mrs Cullen poured him a glass of whiskey and a chair was pulled out for him at the table. Water was added to the whiskey from a glass jug. He placed the three bottles on the table. ‘I just brought over these before everything goes back to the shop.’

  ‘It’s far too much,’ they responded. ‘We didn’t want anything.’

  ‘I know that but it’s still too little.’ He seemed to reach far back to his mother or uncle for the right thing to say. ‘It’s just a show of something for all that you’ve done.’

  ‘Thanks but it’s still far too much.’ They all seemed to be pleased at onc
e and took and put the three bottles away. They then offered him a bed but he said he’d manage well enough in their old room. ‘I’m used to roughing it out there in the oil fields,’ he lied; and not many minutes after that, seeing Mrs Cullen stifle a yawn, he drank down his whiskey and left. Jim Cullen accompanied him as far as the road and stood there until Philly had gone some distance towards his uncle’s house before turning slowly back.

  In the house Philly went from room to room to let in fresh air but found that all the windows were stuck. He left the doors to the rooms open and the front door open on the bog. In the lower room he placed an eiderdown on the old hollowed bed and in the upper room he drew the top sheet up over where the corpse had lain until it covered both the whole of the bed and pillow. He then took the iron box from the cupboard and unlocked it on the table in the front room. Before starting to go through the box he got a glass and half filled it with whiskey. He found very old deeds tied with legal ribbon as he drank, cattle cards, a large wad of notes in a rubber band, a number of scattered US dollar notes, a one-hundred-dollar bill, some shop receipts ready to fall apart, and a gold wedding ring. He put the parchment to one side to take to the solicitor the next morning. The notes he placed in a brown envelope before locking the box and placing it back in the cupboard. He poured another large whiskey. On a whim he went and took down some of the matchstick figures that they had looked at the night before – a few of the sheep, a little pig, the dray-horse and cart, a delicate greyhound on a board with its neck straining out from the bent knees like a snake’s as if about to pick a turning rabbit or hare from the ground. He moved them here and there on the table with his finger as he drank when, putting his glass down, his arm leaned on the slender suggestion of a horse, which crumpled and fell apart. Almost covertly he gathered the remains of the figure, the cart and scattered matches, and put them in his pocket to dispose of later. Quickly and uneasily he restored the sheep and pig and hound to the safety of the shelf. Then he moved his chair out into the doorway and poured more whiskey.

  He thought of Peter sitting alone here at night making the shapes of animals out of matchsticks, of those same hands now in a coffin before the high altar of Cootehall church. Tomorrow he’d lie in the earth on the top of Killeelan Hill. A man is born. He dies. Where he himself stood now on the path between those two points could not be known. He felt as much like the child that came each summer years ago to this bog from the city as the rough unfinished man he knew himself to be in the eyes of others, but feelings had nothing to do with it. He must be already well out past halfway.

  The moon of the night before lit the pale sedge. He could see the dark shapes of the heather, the light on the larger lakes of sedge, but he had no desire to walk out into the night. Blurred with tiredness and whiskey, all shapes and lives seemed to merge comfortably into one another as the pale, ghostly sedge and the dark heather merged under the moon. Except for the stirrings of animals about the house and a kittiwake calling sharply high up over the bog and the barking of distant dogs, the night was completely silent. There was not even a passing motor. But before he lay down like a dog under the eiderdown in the lower room he remembered to set the alarm of his travelling clock for seven the next morning.

  In spite of a throbbing forehead he was the first person in the dining-room of the Royal Hotel for breakfast the next morning. After managing to get through most of a big fry – sausages, black pudding, bacon, scrambled eggs and three pots of black coffee – he was beginning to feel much better when Fonsie and John came in for their breakfast.

  ‘I wouldn’t advise the coffee though I’m awash with the stuff,’ Philly said as the two brothers looked through the menu.

  ‘We never have coffee in the house except when you’re back,’ Fonsie said.

  ‘I got used to it out there. The Americans drink nothing else throughout the day.’

  ‘They’re welcome to it,’ Fonsie said.

  John looked from one brother to the other but kept his silence. Both brothers ordered tea and scrambled eggs on toast.

  ‘What did you two do last night?’

  ‘I’m afraid we had pints, too many pints,’ John answered.

  ‘You had no pints, only glasses,’ Fonsie said.

  ‘It all totted up to pints and there were too many. This wild life doesn’t suit me. How you are able to move around this morning I don’t know.’

  ‘That’s nothing,’ Fonsie said. ‘And you should see yer man here when he gets going; then you’d have a chance to talk. It’s all or nothing. There’s never any turning back.’

  As Philly was visibly discomforted, John asked, ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I thanked the Cullens.’

  ‘More whiskey,’ Fonsie crowed.

  ‘Then I opened the iron box,’ Philly ignored the gibe. ‘I found the deeds. We’ll need them for the lawyer in a few minutes. And there was another wad of money. There was sterling and dollars and a few Australian notes as well.’

  ‘The sterling and dollars came from the brother and sister. They were probably sent to the mother and never cashed. God knows where the Australian came from,’ John said.

  ‘It all comes to thousands,’ Philly said.

  ‘When we used to go there you’d think we were starving him out of the place.’

  ‘They probably didn’t have it then.’

  ‘Even if they did it would still have been the same. It’s a way of thinking.’

  ‘The poor fucker, it’d make you laugh,’ Fonsie said. ‘Making pigs and horses out of matchsticks in the night, slaving on the bog or running after cattle in the day, when he could have gone out and had himself a good time.’

  ‘Maybe that was his way of having a good time,’ John said carefully.

  ‘It’ll get some good scattering now,’ Fonsie laughed at Philly.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Philly said sternly back. ‘It all goes to Mother anyhow. She’s the next of kin. Maybe you’ll give it the scattering? I have lots for myself.’

  ‘Mr Big again,’ Fonsie jeered.

  ‘It’s time to go to see this lawyer. Do you want to come?’

  ‘I have more sense,’ Fonsie answered angrily.

  The brown photos around the walls of the solicitor’s waiting room as well as the heavy mahogany table and leather chairs told that the practice was old, that it had been passed from grandfather Reynolds to father to son. The son was about fifty, dressed in a beautifully cut dark pinstripe suit, his grey hair parted in the centre. His manner was soft and urbane and quietly watchful.

  Philly had asked John to state their business, which he did with simple clarity. As he spoke Philly marvelled at his brother. Even if it meant saving his own life he’d never have been able to put the business so neatly without sidetracking or leaving something out.

  ‘My advice would be to lose that money,’ the solicitor said when he had finished. ‘Strictly, I shouldn’t be giving that advice but as far as I’m concerned I never heard anything about it.’

  Both brothers nodded their understanding and gratitude.

  ‘Almost certainly there’s no will. I’d have it if there was. I acted for Peter in a few matters. There was a case of trespass and harassment by a neighbouring family called Whelan a few years back. None of it was Peter’s fault. They were a bad lot and solved our little problem by emigrating en masse to the States. Peter’s friend, Jim Cullen, bought their land.’

  Philly remembered wild black-haired Marie Whelan who had challenged him to fight on the bog road during one of those last summers. John just nodded that he remembered the family.

  ‘So everything should go to your mother as the only surviving next of kin. As she is a certain age it should be acted on quickly and I’ll be glad to act as soon as I learn what it is your mother wants.’ As he spoke he opened the deeds Philly gave John to hand over. ‘Peter never even bothered to have the deeds changed into his name. The place is in your grandfather’s name and this document was drawn up by my grandfather.’

 
‘Would the place itself be worth much?’ Philly’s sudden blunt question surprised John. Out of his quietness Mr Reynolds looked up at him sharply.

  ‘I fear not a great deal. Ten or eleven thousand. A little more if there was local competition. I’d say fourteen at the very most.’

  ‘You can’t buy a room for that in the city and there’s almost thirty acres with the small house.’

  ‘Well, it’s not the city and I do not think Gloria Bog is ever likely to become the Costa Brava.’

  Philly noticed that both the solicitor and his brother were looking at him with withdrawn suspicion if not distaste. They were plainly thinking that greed had propelled him to stumble into the inquiry he had made when it was the last thing in the world he had in mind. Before anything further could be said, the solicitor was shaking both their hands at the door and nodding over their shoulders to the receptionist behind her desk across the hallway to take their particulars before showing them out.

  In contrast to the removal of the previous evening, when the church had been full to overflowing, there were only a few dozen people at the funeral Mass. Eight cars followed the hearse to Killeelan, and only the Mercedes turned into the narrow laneway behind the hearse. The other mourners abandoned their cars at the road and entered the lane on foot. Blackthorn and briar scraped against the windscreen and sides of the Mercedes as they moved behind the hearse’s slow pace. At the end of the lane there was a small clearing in front of the limestone wall that ringed the foot of Killeelan Hill. There was just enough space in the clearing for the hearse and the Mercedes to park on either side of the small iron gate in the wall. The coffin was taken from the hearse and placed on the shoulders of John and Philly and the two Cullens. The gate was just wide enough for them to go through. Fonsie alone stayed behind in the front seat of the Mercedes and watched the coffin as it slowly climbed the hill on the four shoulders. The coffin went up and up the steep hill, sometimes swaying dangerously, and then anxious hands of the immediate followers would go up against the back of the coffin. The shadows of the clouds swept continually over the green hill and brown varnish of the coffin. Away on the bog they were a darker, deeper shadow as the clouds travelled swiftly over the pale sedge. Three times the small snail-like cortège stopped completely for the bearers to be changed. As far as Fonsie could see – he would have needed binoculars to be certain – they were the original bearers, his brothers and the two Cullens, who took up the coffin the third and last time and carried it through the small gate in the wall around the graveyard on the hilltop. Then it was only the coffin itself and the heads of the mourners that could be seen until they were lost in the graveyard evergreens. In spite of his irritation at this useless ceremony, that seemed only to show some deep love of hardship or enslavement – they’d be hard put to situate the graveyard in a more difficult or inaccessible place except on the very top of a mountain – he found the coffin and the small band of toiling mourners unbearably moving as it made its low stumbling climb up the hill, and this deepened further his irritation and the sense of complete uselessness.