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

‘Your old friend won’t hunt again,’ Charlie said as he handed him the whiskey. The voice was hushed. The eyes stared inquiringly but respectfully into the gaunt face beneath the hat. The small red curl of the nose was still.

‘No. He’ll not hunt again.’

‘They say herself and the child is going home with her own people this evening. They’ll send a van up later for the furniture.’ His voice was low as a whisper at the corner of the bar.

‘That makes sense,’ the teacher said.

‘You have the bitch still?’ Charlie asked.

‘That’s right. I’ll be glad to keep her, but the wife may want to take her with her.’

‘That’ll be the least of her troubles. She’ll not want.’

‘Will you have something yourself?’ the teacher invited.

‘All right, then, Master.’ He paused suddenly. ‘A quick one, then. We all need a little something in the open today,’ and he smiled an apologetic, rueful smile; but he downed the whiskey, as quickly running a glass of water and drinking it into the coughing as if it hadn’t been in the open at all.

The fawn jumped in her excitement on her new master when he finally came home from the funeral. As he petted her down, gripping her neck, bringing his own face down to hers, thinking how he had come by her, he felt the same rush of feeling as he had felt when he watched the locks of hair fall on to the towel round the neck in the room; but instead of prayer he now felt a wild longing to throw his hat away and walk round the world bareheaded, find some girl, not necessarily Cathleen O’Neill, but any young girl, and go to the sea with her as he used to, leave the car at the harbour wall and take the boat for the island, the engine beating like a good heart under the deck boards as the waves rocked it on turning out of the harbour, hold her in one long embrace all night between the hotel sheets; or train the fawn again, feed her the best steak from town, walk her four miles every day for months, stand in the mud and rain again and see her as Coolcarra Queen race through the field in the Rockingham Stakes, see the judge gallop over to the rope on the old fat horse, and this time lift high the red kerchief to give the Silver Cup to the Queen.

And until he calmed, and went into the house, his mind raced with desire for all sorts of such impossible things.

Cunningham and Murphy had worked as a team ever since they’d met on a flyover site outside Reading. They dug trenches and were paid by the yard. The trenches were in places where machines could not easily go, and the work was dangerous, the earth walls having to be shuttered up as they went along, the shutters held apart by metal bars with adjustable flat squares on both ends. Both men worked under assumed names to avoid paying income tax.

This money that they slaved for all the year in the trenches they flashed and wasted in one royal month each summer in Ireland. As men obsessed with the idea that all knowledge lies within a woman’s body, but having entered it find themselves as ignorant as before, they are driven towards all women again and again, in childish hope that somehow the next time they will find the root of all knowledge, and the equally childish desire for revenge since it cannot be found, the knife in the unfathomable entrails. They became full of hatred. Each year, as Murphy and Cunningham dug trenches towards their next royal summer, their talk grew obsessional and more bitter. ‘It’s a kind of a sort of a country that can’t even afford a national eejit so they all have to take turns.’

What slowed them up the most was not the digging but the putting up of the shuttering behind them. As August drew close they grew careless and their greed for money grew in order to make an even bigger splash this summer than ever before. Little by little the spaces between the metal bars lengthened. They felt invulnerable: no matter how careless they were the bad accident was bound to happen elsewhere.

Murphy was standing on top of the trench watching Cunningham wield the pick below, behind him the fence of split stakes on Hessell Street. The midday sun beat mercilessly down on the trench, and they worked it turn and turn about, coming up every five minutes or so to cool in whatever air stirred from the Thames.

The only warning given was a sudden splintering of timber before the trench caved in. Murphy fell backwards from the edge but Cunningham had no time. The boards and clay caught him. His head and shoulders remained above the earth.

He stayed alive while they dug him out, but as soon as they released the boards he died. The boards had broken his back.

All that got through Murphy’s shock as he rode with the body in the ambulance to the London Hospital was, ‘The police’ll be in on this. The assumed names will come out. I might have to have an earlier holiday than I expected.’

The men stood about the site in small silent groups after the ambulance had gone, the different engines idling over, until Barney, the old gangerman, stormed about in his black suit and tie and dirty white shirt, as if he’d suddenly gone epileptic. ‘What the fuck are yous all doing? Come on. Get a move on. Do yous think you get fukken paid for standin’ about all day?’

As the site reluctantly moved back to life, a sudden gust of wind lifted an empty cement bag and cartwheeled it across the gravel before wrapping it against the fence of split stakes on Hessell Street.

It was a hot day in Ireland too when the phone rang in the village post office to relay the telegram of the death. The hired girl Mary wrote it down on the official form, closed it in the small green envelope with the black harp and then wondered how to get it delivered. Because of the hot weather everybody was in the hayfields two miles away, and she couldn’t leave the place unattended to go that far. She decided to cross the road to see if James Sharkey was still in the school. The schoolhouse door was unlocked, and she found the hatted man alone in the classroom. He had stayed behind correcting exam papers.

‘What is it, Mary?’ He lifted his head from the desk as she tapped on the glass of the classroom door.

‘It’s Joe Cunningham from Derrada.’ She held up the small green envelope. ‘He’s been killed in an accident in England. They’re all at the hay.’

‘Joe Cunningham.’ The child’s face came to him. A dull average boy, the oldest of the Cunninghams, two of them still at school. He’d been home last summer, boasting and flashing his money in the bars. ‘What’ll you have, Master? I’m standin’ today. We mightn’t have been all geniuses but we got on toppin’,’ what looked like bits of tinfoil glittering in his jacket.

‘I’ll take it, Mary. It’s just as well I take it. They know me a long time now. I suppose they took the car to the fields?’

‘No, they went in the van.’

‘I’ll take the car, then.’

All the doors of the house were open when he got to Cunningham’s but there was nobody in. He knew that they must be nearhand, probably at the hay. There is such stillness, stillness of death, he thought, about an empty house with all its doors open on a hot day. A black and white sheepdog left off snapping at flies to rush towards him as he came through the gate into the meadow. It was on the side of the hill above the lake. In the shade, a tin cup floated among some hayseed in a gallon of spring water. Across the lake, just out from a green jet of reeds, a man sat still in a rowboat fishing for perch. They were all in the hayfields, the mother and father and four or five children. The field had been raked clean and they were heading off cocks. All work stopped as the hatted man came over the meadow. The father rose from teasing out hay to a boy winding it into a rope. They showed obvious discomfort as they waited, probably thinking the teacher had come to complain about some of the children, until they saw the pale green envelope.