John McGahern - Creatures of the Earth - New and Selected Stories

There was no more coursing together again after that Sunday. The doctor’s car was parked a long time outside the white gate that led to the Bawn the next day, and when Tom Lennon’s old Ford wasn’t seen around the roads that day or the next or the next the teacher went to visit him, taking a half-bottle of whiskey. Lennon’s young wife, a warm soft country girl of few words, let him in.

‘How is he?’ he asked.

‘The doctor’ll be out again tomorrow,’ she answered timidly and led him up the creaky narrow stairs. ‘He’ll be delighted to see you. He gets depressed not being able to be up and about.’

From the circular room of the tower that they used as a living room he could hear happy gurgles of the baby as they climbed the stairs, and as soon as she showed him into the bedroom she left. In the pile of bedclothes Tom Lennon looked smaller and more frail than he usually did.

‘How is the patient?’

‘Fed up,’ he said. ‘It’s great to see a face after staring all day at the ceiling.’

‘What is it?’

‘The old ticker. As soon as I’d eaten after getting home on Sunday it started playing me up. Maybe I overdid the walking. Still, it could be worse. It’d be a damned sight worse if it had happened in five weeks’ time. Then we’d be properly in the soup.’

‘You have oodles of time to be fit for the exam,’ the teacher said, hiding his dismay by putting the whiskey down on the dressing table. ‘I brought this little something.’ There was, he felt, a bloom of death in the room.

‘You never know,’ the instructor said some hours later as the teacher took his leave. ‘I’m hoping the doctor’ll have me up tomorrow.’ He drank only a little of the whiskey in a punch his wife made, while the hatted man on the chair slowly finished his own half-bottle neat.

The doctor did not allow him up that week or the next, and the teacher began to come every evening to the house, and two Sundays later he asked to take the hounds out on his own. He did not cross the bridge to the Plains as they’d done the Sunday together but went along the river to Doireen. The sedge of the long lowlands rested wheaten and dull between two hills of hazel and briar in the warm day. All winter it had been flooded but the pale dead grass now crackled under his feet like tinder. He beat along the edges of the hills, feeling that the hares might have come out of the scrub to sleep in the sun, and as he beat he began to feel Tom Lennon’s absence like his own lengthening shadow on the pale sedge.

The first hare didn’t get more than halfway from where it was lying to the cover of the scrub before the fawn’s speed caught it, a flash of white belly fur as it rolled over, not being able to turn away from the teeth in the long sedge, and the terror of its crying as both hounds tore it began. He wrested the hare loose and stilled the weird childlike crying with one blow. Soon afterwards a second hare fell in the same way. From several parts of the river lowland he saw hares looping slowly out of the warm sun into the safety of the scrub. He knew they’d all have gone in then, and he turned back for Charlie’s. He gave one of the hares to Charlie; the other he skinned and took with him to Tom Lennon’s.

‘Do you know what I’m thinking?’ he said that night. ‘I’m thinking that I should take the bitch.’

He saw sudden fear in the sick man’s eyes.

‘You know you’re always welcome to borrow her any time you want.’

‘It’s not that,’ he said quickly. ‘I thought just to take her until you’re better. I could feed her. It’d be no trouble. It’d take some of the weight off the wife.’ When he left that evening he took the bitch. She was wildly excited, thinking that she was going hunting again, though it was dark, and she rose to put paws on his shoulders and to lick his face.

She settled in easily with the teacher. He made a house for her in the garden out of a scrapped Ford but he still let her sleep in the house, and there was a lighter spring in his walk each evening he left school, knowing the excitement with which he would be met as soon as he got home. At night he listened to Tom Lennon’s increasingly feverish grumblings as the exam drew closer, and he looked so angry and ill the night after the doctor had told him he could put all thought of the exam out of his mind that the suspicion grew stronger in the teacher’s mind that his friend might not after all be just ill.

‘What are you going to do?’ he asked fearfully.

‘Do the exam, of course.’ There was determination as well as fear in the sunken eyes.

‘But you can’t do it if the doctor said you weren’t fit.’

‘Let’s put it this way,’ the sick man laughed in harsh triumph, ‘I can’t not do it.’

The night before the exam he asked the teacher to bring up the clippers. He wanted a haircut, and that night, as the teacher wrapped the towel round the instructor’s neck and took the bright clippers out of their pale-green cardboard box, adjusting the combs, and started to clip, the black hair dribbling down on the towel, he felt for the first time ever a mad desire to remove his hat and stand bareheaded in the room, as if for the first time in years he felt himself in the presence of something sacred.

‘That’s a great job,’ Tom Lennon said afterwards. ‘You know, while we’re at it, I might as well go the whole hog and shave as well.’

‘Do you want me to get you some hot water?’

‘That wouldn’t be too much trouble?’

‘No trouble at all.’

Downstairs as they waited for the water to boil, the wife in her quiet voice asked him, ‘What do you think?’

‘He seems determined on it. I tried to talk him out of it but it was no use.’

‘No. It doesn’t seem any use,’ she said. A starched white shirt and blue suit and tie were draped across a chair one side of the fire.

The teacher sat on the bed’s edge and held the bowl of water steady while the instructor shaved. When he finished, he examined himself carefully in the little hand-mirror, and joked, ‘It’s as good as for a wedding.’

‘Maybe it’s too risky. Maybe you should send in a certificate. There’ll be another chance.’

‘No. That’s finished. I’m going through with it. It’s my last chance. There’ll be no other. If I manage to get made permanent there’d be a weight off my mind and it’d be better than a hundred doctors and tonics.’

‘Maybe I should give the old car a swing in readiness for the morning, so?’

‘That’d be great.’ The instructor fumbled for his car keys in his trouser pockets on the bed rail.

The engine was cold but started on the sixth or seventh swing. In the cold starlit night he stood and listened to the engine run.

‘Good luck, old Tom,’ he said quietly as he switched it off and took the car keys in.

‘Well, good luck tomorrow. I hope all goes well. I’ll be up as soon as I see the car back to find out how it went,’ he said in a singsong voice he used with the children at school in order not to betray his emotion after telling him that the Ford was running like a bird.

Tom Lennon rose the next morning as he said he would, dressed in his best clothes, had tea, told his wife not to worry and that he’d be back about six, somehow got as far as the car, and fell dead over the starting handle the teacher had left in the engine the previous night.

When word was brought to the school, all the hatted man did was bow his head and murmur, ‘Thanks.’ He knew he had been expecting the death for some days. When he went to the Bawn a last time he felt no terror of the stillness of the brown habit, the folded hands, but only a certain amazement that it was the agricultural instructor who was lying there and not he. Two days later his hat stood calmly among the scarved women and bareheaded men about the open grave, and when it was over he went back to Charlie’s. The bar was filled with mourners from the funeral-making holiday. A silence seemed to fall as the brown hat came through the partition, but only for a moment. They were arguing about a method of sowing winter wheat that the dead man used to advocate. Some thought it made sense. Others said it would turn out to be a disaster.