Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  Suddenly he was startled by the noise of a car coming very fast up the narrow lane and braking to a stop behind the hearse. A priest in a long black soutane and white surplice with a purple stole over his shoulders got out of the car carrying a fat black breviary. Seeing Fonsie, he saluted briskly as he went through the open gate. Then, bent almost double, he started to climb quickly like an enormous black-and-white crab after the coffin. Watching him climb, Fonsie laughed harshly before starting to fiddle with the car radio.

  After a long interval the priest was the first to come down the hill, accompanied by two middle-aged men, the most solid looking and conventional of the mourners. The priest carried his surplice and stole on his arm. The long black soutane looked strangely menacing between the two attentive men in suits as they came down. Fonsie reached over to turn off the rock and roll playing on the radio as they drew close, but, in a sudden reversal, he turned it up louder still. The three men looked towards the loud music as they came through the gate but did not salute or nod. They got into the priest’s car and, as there was no turning place between the hearse and the Mercedes, it proceeded to back out of the narrow lane. Then, in straggles of twos and threes, people started to come down the hill. The two brothers and Jim Cullen were the last to come down. As soon as Philly got into the Mercedes he turned off the radio.

  ‘You’d think you’d show a bit more respect.’

  ‘The radio station didn’t know about the funeral.’

  ‘I’m not talking about the radio station,’ Philly said.

  ‘That Jim Cullen is a nice man,’ John said in order to steer the talk away from what he saw as an imminent clash. ‘He’s intelligent as well as decent. Peter was lucky in his neighbour.’

  ‘The Cullens,’ Philly said as if searching for a phrase. ‘You couldn’t, you couldn’t if you tried get better people than the Cullens.’

  They drove straight from Killeelan to the Royal for lunch. Not many people came, just the Cullens among the close neighbours and a few far-out cousins of the dead man. Philly bought a round for everyone and when he found no takers to his offer of a second round he did not press.

  ‘Our friend seems to be restraining himself for once,’ Fonsie remarked sarcastically to John as they moved from the bar to the restaurant.

  ‘He’s taking his cue from Jim Cullen. Philly is all right,’ John said. ‘It’s those months and months out in the oil fields and then the excitement of coming home with all that money. It has to have an effect. Wouldn’t it be worse if he got fond of the money?’

  ‘It’s still too much. It’s not awanting,’ Fonsie continued doggedly through a blurred recognition of all that Philly had given to their mother and to the small house over the years, and it caused him to stir uncomfortably.

  The set meal was simple and good: hot vegetable soup, lamb chops with turnip and roast potatoes and peas, apple tart and cream, tea or coffee. While they were eating, the three gravediggers came into the dining-room and were given a separate table by one of the river windows. Philly got up as soon as they arrived to ensure that drinks were brought to their table.

  When the meal ended, the three brothers drove back behind the Cullens’ car to Gloria Bog. There they put all that was left of the booze back into the car. The Cullens accepted what food was left over but wouldn’t hear of taking any more of the drink. ‘We’re not planning on holding another wake for a long time yet,’ they said half humorously, half sadly. John helped with the boxes, Fonsie did not leave the car. As soon as Philly gave Jim Cullen the keys to the house John shook his hand and got back into the car with Fonsie and the boxes of booze, but still Philly continued talking to Jim Cullen outside the open house. In the rear mirror they saw Philly thrust a fistful of notes towards Jim Cullen. They noticed how large the old farmer’s hands were as they gripped Philly by the wrist and pushed the hand and notes down into his jacket pocket, refusing stubbornly to accept any money. When John took his eyes from the mirror and the small sharp struggle between the two men, what met his eyes across the waste of pale sedge and heather was the rich dark waiting evergreens inside the back wall of Killeelan where they had buried Peter beside his father and mother only a few hours before. The colour of laughter is black. How dark is the end of all of life. Yet others carried the burden in the bright day on the hill. His shoulders shuddered slightly in revulsion and he wished himself back in the semi-detached suburbs with rosebeds outside in the garden.

  ‘I thought you’d never finish,’ Fonsie accused Philly when the big car began to move slowly out the bog road.

  ‘There was things to be tidied up,’ Philly said absently. ‘Jim is going to take care of the place till I get back,’ and as Fonsie was about to answer he found John’s hands pressing his shoulders from the back seat in a plea not to speak. When they parked beside the door of the bar there was just place enough for another car to pass inside the church wall.

  ‘Not that a car is likely to pass,’ Philly joked as he and John carried the boxes in. When they had placed all of them on the counter they saw Luke reach for a brandy bottle on the high shelf.

  ‘No, Luke,’ Philly said. ‘I’ll have a pint if that’s what you have in mind.’

  ‘John’ll have a pint, then, too.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ John said in alarm. ‘I haven’t drunk as much in my life as the last few days. I feel poisoned.’

  ‘Still, we’re unlikely to have a day like this ever again,’ Philly said as Luke pulled three pints.

  ‘I don’t think I’d survive many more such days,’ John said.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better to bring Fonsie in than to have him drinking out there in the car? It’ll take me a while to make up all this. One thing I will say,’ he said as he started to count the returned bottles. ‘There was no danger of anybody running dry at Peter’s wake.’

  Fonsie protested when Philly went out to the car. It was too much trouble to get the wheelchair out of the boot. He didn’t need drink. ‘I’ll take you in.’ Philly offered his stooped neck and carried Fonsie into the bar like a child as he’d done many times when they were young and later when they were on certain sprees. He set him down in an armchair in front of the empty fireplace and brought his pint from the counter. It took Luke a long time to make up the bill, and when he eventually presented it to Philly, after many extra countings and checkings, he was full of apologies at what it had all come to.

  ‘It’d be twice as much in the city,’ Philly said energetically as he paid.

  ‘I suppose it’d be as much anyhow,’ Luke grumbled happily with relief and then at once started to draw another round of drinks which he insisted they take.

  ‘It’s on the house. It’s not every day or year brings you down.’

  Fonsie and Philly drank the second pint easily. John was already fuddled and unhappy and he drank reluctantly.

  ‘I won’t say goodbye.’ Luke accompanied them out to the car when they left. ‘You’ll have to be down again before long.’

  ‘It’ll not be long till we’re down,’ Philly answered firmly for all of them.

  In Longford and Mullingar and Enfield Philly stopped on their way back to Dublin. John complained each time, but it was Philly who had command of the car. Each time he carried Fonsie into the bars – and in all of them the two drank pints – John refused to have anything in Mullingar or Longford but took a reluctant glass in Enfield.

  ‘What’ll you do if you have an accident and get breathalysed?’

  ‘I’ll not have an accident. And they can send the summons all the way out to the Saudis if I do.’

  He drove fast but steadily into the city. He was silent as he drove. Increasingly, he seemed charged with an energy that was focused elsewhere and had been fuelled by every stop they had made. In the heart of the city, seeing a vacant place in front of Mulligan’s where he had drunk on his own in the deep silence of the bar a few short mornings before, he pulled across the traffic and parked. Cars stopped to blow hard at him but he paid no attention as h
e parked and got out.

  ‘We’ll have a last drink here in the name of God before we face back to the mother,’ Philly said as he carried Fonsie into the bar. There were now a few dozen early evening drinkers in the bar. Some of them seemed to know the brothers, but not well. John offered to move Fonsie from the table to an armchair but Fonsie said he preferred to remain where he was. John complained that he hadn’t asked for the pint when the drinks were brought to the table.

  ‘Is it a short you want, then?’

  ‘No. I have had more drink today than I’ve had in years. I want nothing.’

  ‘Don’t drink it, then, if you don’t want,’ he was told roughly.

  ‘Well, Peter, God rest him, was given a great send-off,’ Philly said with deep satisfaction as he drank. ‘I thank God I was back. I wouldn’t have been away for the world. The church was packed for the removal. Every neighbour around was at Killeelan.’

  ‘What else have they to do down there? It’s the one excuse they have to get out of their houses,’ Fonsie said.

  ‘They honour the dead. That’s what they do. People still mean something down there. They showed the respect they had for Peter.’

  ‘Respect, my arse. Everybody is respected for a few days after they conk it because they don’t have to be lived with any more. Oh, it’s easy to honour the dead. It doesn’t cost anything and gives them the chance to get out of their bloody houses before they start to eat one another within.’

  An old argument started up, an argument they had had many times before without resolving anything, the strength of their difference betraying the hidden closeness.

  Philly and Fonsie drained their glasses as John took the first sip from his pint and he looked uneasily from one to the other.

  ‘You have it all crooked,’ Philly said as he rose to get more drink from the counter. John covered his glass with his palm to indicate that he wanted nothing more. When Philly came back with the two pints he started to speak before he had even put the glasses down on the table: he had all the blind dominating passion of someone in thrall to a single idea.

  ‘I’ll never forget it all the days of my life, the people coming to the house all through the night. The rows and rows of people at the removal passing by us in the front seat of the church grasping our hands. Coming in that small lane behind the hearse; then carrying Peter up that hill.’

  Fonsie tried to speak but Philly raised his glass into his face and refused to be silenced.

  ‘I felt something I never felt when we left the coffin on the edge of the grave. A rabbit hopped out of the briars a few yards off. He sat there and looked at us as if he didn’t know what was going on before he bolted off. You could see the bog and all the shut houses next to Peter’s below us. There wasn’t even a wisp of smoke coming from any of the houses. Everybody gathered around, and the priest started to speak of the dead and the Mystery and the Resurrection.’

  ‘He’s paid to do that and he was nearly late. I saw it all from the car,’ Fonsie asserted. ‘It was no mystery from the car. Several times I thought you were going to drop the coffin. It was more like a crowd of apes staggering up a hill with something they had just looted. The whole lot of you could have come right out of the Dark Ages, without even a dab of make-up. I thought a standard of living had replaced the struggle for survival ages ago.’

  ‘I have to say I found the whole ceremony moving, but once is more than enough to go through that experience,’ John said carefully. ‘I think of Peter making those small animals out of matchsticks in the long nights on the bog. Some people pay money for that kind of work. Peter just did it out of some need.’

  Philly either didn’t hear or ignored what John said.

  ‘It’s a godsend they don’t let you out often,’ Fonsie said. ‘People that exhibit in museums are a different kettle. Peter was just killing the nights on the bloody bog.’

  ‘I’ll never forget the boredom of those summers, watching Peter foot turf, making grabs at the butterflies that tossed about over the sedge. Once you closed your hand they always escaped,’ John said as if something long buried in him was drawn out. ‘I think he was making things out of matchsticks even then but we hardly noticed.’

  ‘Peter never wanted us. Mother just forced us on him. He wasn’t able to turn us away,’ Fonsie said, the talk growing more and more rambling and at odds.

  ‘He didn’t turn us away, whether he wanted to or not,’ Philly asserted truculently. ‘I heard Mother say time and time again that we’d never have got through some of the winters but for those long summers on the bog.’

  ‘She’d have to say that since she took us there.’

  ‘It’s over now. With Peter it’s all finished. One of the things that made the last days bearable for me was that everything we were doing was being done for the last time,’ John said with such uncharacteristic volubility that the two brothers just stared.

  ‘I’ll say amen to that,’ Fonsie said.

  ‘It’s far from over but we better have a last round for the road first.’ Philly drained his glass and rose, and again John covered his three-quarter-full glass with his palm. ‘As far as I can make out nothing is ever over.’

  ‘Those two are tanks for drink, but they don’t seem to have been pulling lately,’ a drinker at the counter remarked to his companion as Philly passed by shakily with the pair of pints. ‘The pale one not drinking looks like a brother as well. There must have been a family do.’

  ‘You’d wonder where that wheelchair brother puts all that drink,’ the other changed.

  ‘He puts it where we all put it. You don’t need legs, for God’s sake, to take drink. Drink only gets down as far as your flute.’

  ‘Gloria is far from over,’ Philly said as he put the two pints down on the table. ‘Nothing is ever over. I’m going to take up in Peter’s place.’

  ‘You can’t be that drunk,’ Fonsie said dismissively.

  ‘I’m not sober but I was never more certain of anything in my born life.’

  ‘Didn’t the lawyer say it’d go to Mother? What’ll she do but sell?’

  ‘I’m not sure she’ll want to sell. She grew up there. It was in her family for generations.’

  ‘I’m sure. I can tell you that now.’

  ‘Well, it’s even simpler, then. I’ll buy the place off Mother,’ Philly announced so decisively that Fonsie found himself looking at John.

  ‘I’m out of this,’ John said. ‘What people do is their own business. All I ask is to be let go about my own life.’

  ‘I’ve enough money to buy the place. You heard what the lawyer said it was worth. I’ll give Mother its price and she can do with it what she likes.’

  ‘We’re sick these several years hearing about all you can buy,’ Fonsie said angrily.

  ‘Well, I’ll go where people will not be sick, where there’ll be no upcasting,’ Philly said equally heatedly.

  ‘What’ll you do there?’ John asked out of a desire to calm the heated talk.

  ‘He’ll grow onions.’ Fonsie shook with laughter.

  ‘I can’t be going out to the oil fields for ever. It’ll be a place to come home to. You saw how the little iron cross in the circle over the grave was eaten with rust. I’m going to have marble put up. Jim Cullen is going to look after Peter’s cattle till I get back in six months and everything will be settled then.’

  ‘You might even get married there,’ Fonsie said sarcastically.

  ‘It’s unlikely but stranger things have happened, and I’ll definitely be buried there. Mother will want to be buried there some day.’

  ‘She’ll be buried with our father out in Glasnevin.’

  ‘I doubt that. Even the fish go back to where they came from. I’d say she’s had more than enough of our poor father in one life to be going on with. John here has a family, but it’s about time you gave where you’re going yourself some thought,’ Philly spoke directly to Fonsie.

  ‘If I were to go I’d want to go where there was people an
d a bit of life about, not on some God-forsaken hill out in the bog with a crow or a sheep or a bloody rabbit.’

  ‘There’s no if in this business, it’s just when. I’m sorry to have to say it, but it betrays a great lack of maturity on your part,’ Philly said with drunken severity.

  ‘You can plant maturity out there in the bog, for all I care, and may it grow into an ornament.’

  ‘We better be going,’ John said.

  Philly rose and took Fonsie into his arms. In spite of his unsteadiness he carried him easily out to the car. Fonsie was close to tears. He had always thought he could never lose Philly. The burly block of exasperation would always come and go from the oil fields. Now he would go out to bloody Gloria Bog instead. As he was put in the car, his tears turned to rage.