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

‘I’m sorry,’ the hatted man said as he watched the father read. ‘If there’s anything I can do you have only to tell me.’

‘Joe’s been killed in England. The Lord have mercy on his soul,’ the father said in dazed quiet, handing the envelope to the mother, all his slow movements heavy with toil.

‘Oh my God. My Joe,’ the mother broke.

The older children began to cry, but two little girls lifted fistfuls of hay and began to look playfully at one another and the whole stunned hayfield through wisps of hay and to laugh wildly.

‘I’ll have to go to London. I’ll have to take him home,’ the father said.

‘If there’s anything I can do,’ the teacher said again.

‘Thanks, Master. Shush now,’ he said to his wife. ‘We’ll all go in now. The hay can be tidied up after. Shush now, Bridget. We have to do the best by him the few days more he’ll be with us,’ the father said as they trooped out of the hayfield.

‘Is there anything — a small drop of something — we can offer you, Master?’ They paused at the open door.

‘Nothing, thanks, Joe. What I’ll do is let you get tidied up and I’ll come round for you in about two hours. I’ll take you into the town so that you can see to things.’

‘Are you sure that won’t be putting you to too much trouble, Master?’

‘No trouble at all. Why don’t you go in now?’

Before he switched on the engine he heard from the open door, ‘Thou, Oh Lord, wilt open my lips,’ in the father’s voice. The leaves of the row of poplars along the path from the house were beginning to rattle so loudly in the evening silence that he was glad when the starting engine shut out the sound.

The father went to London and flew back with the coffin two days later. A long line of cars met the hearse on the Dublin road to follow it to the church. After High Mass the next day young people with white armbands walked behind the hearse until it crossed the bridge, where it gathered speed, and it did not slow until it came in sight of Ardcarne, where they buried him.

Some weeks later the Dance Committee met round the big mahogany table in the front room of the presbytery: the priest, the hatted teacher, the Councillor Doherty, Owen Walsh the sharp-faced postman, and Jimmy McGuire who owned the post office.

‘We seem to be nearly all here.’ The priest looked round when it had gone well past the time of the meeting.

‘We are,’ the postman answered quickly. ‘Paddy McDermott said he was sorry he couldn’t come. It’s something to do with sheep.’

‘We might as well begin, then,’ the priest said. ‘As we all know why we’re here I’ll just go over it briefly. Young Cunningham was killed in England. The family insisted on taking the body home. Whether it was wise or foolish it is done now and the only thing we know is that the Cunninghams can’t afford to fly a coffin home from England. The talk is that old Joe himself will have to go to England this winter to pay off the expense of the funeral. We all feel, I think, that there’s no need for that.’ There was a low murmur of approval.

‘So we’ve more or less decided to hold a dance,’ the teacher took up quietly. ‘Unless someone here has a better idea?’

‘Have we thought about a collection?’ the Councillor Doherty asked because he felt he should ask something.

‘The dance more or less covers that as well,’ the priest said, and the Councillor nodded comprehendingly. ‘Anybody not going will be invited to send subscriptions.’

‘I can manage that end of it,’ the postman said. ‘I can put the word out on my rounds so that it can be done without any fuss.’

‘There’s no question of getting a big band or anything like that. “Faith, Hope and Charity” will bring in as much and they’ll play for a few crates of stout. We’ll let people pay whatever they can afford,’ the priest said.

‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ were three old bachelor brothers, the Cryans, who played at local functions. They had been known as ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ for so long that nobody now knew how their name began. Faith played the fiddle. Hope beat out the rhythm on the drums. Charity was strapped into an old accordion that was said to have come from America.

‘Well, everything seems settled, then, so, except the date.’ The priest rose when everybody murmured agreement and unlocked the cabinet. He took out five heavy tumblers and a cut-glass decanter of whiskey. There was already a glass jug of water beside the vase of roses in the centre of the big table.

The dance was held on a lovely clear night in September. A big harvest moon hung over the fields. It was almost as clear as day coming to the dance and the hall was full. Most of the older people came just to show their faces and by midnight the dance belonged completely to the young. The Committee left after counting the takings. The postman and the teacher agreed to stay behind to close the hall. They sat on the table near the door watching the young people dance. The teacher had taught nearly all the dancers, and as they paired off to go into the backs of cars they showed their embarrassment in different ways as they passed the table.

‘Now that “Faith, Hope and Charity” are getting into right old playing form,’ the postman nodded humorously towards the empty crates of stout between the three old brothers playing away on the stage, ‘they seem to be losing most of their customers.’

‘Earlier and earlier they seem to start at it these days,’ the teacher said.

‘Still, I suppose they’re happy while they’re at it.’ The postman smiled, and folded his arms on the table at the door, always feeling a bit of an intellectual in these discussions with the hatted teacher, while ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ launched into the opening bars of ‘A Whistling Gypsy’.

‘No, Owen. No. I wouldn’t be prepared to go as far as that with you, now,’ James Sharkey began.

If I were to die, I’d miss most the mornings and the evenings, he thought as he walked the narrow dirt-track by the lake in the late evening, and then wondered if his mind was failing, for how could anybody think anything so stupid: being a man he had no choice, he was doomed to die; and being dead he’d miss nothing, being nothing. It went against everything in his life as a priest.

The solid world, though, was everywhere around him. There was the lake, the road, the evening, and he was going to call on Gillespie. Gillespie was sawing. Gillespie was always sawing. The roaring rise-and-fall of the two-stroke stayed like a rent in the evening. When he got to the black gate there was Gillespie, his overalled bulk framed in the short avenue of alders, and he was sawing not alders but beech, four or five tractor-loads dumped in the front of the house. The priest put a hand to the black gate, bolted to the first of the alders, and was at once arrested by showery sunlight falling down the avenue. It lit up one boot holding the length of beech in place, it lit the arms moving the blade slowly up and down as it tore through the beech, white chips milling out on the chain.

Suddenly, as he was about to rattle the gate loudly to see if this would penetrate the sawing, he felt himself (bathed as in a dream) in an incredible sweetness of light. It was the evening light on snow. The gate on which he had his hand vanished, the alders, Gillespie’s formidable bulk, the roaring of the saw. He was in another day, the lost day of Michael Bruen’s funeral nearly thirty years before. All was silent and still there. Slow feet crunched on the snow. Ahead, at the foot of the hill, the coffin rode slowly forward on shoulders, its brown varnish and metal trappings dull in the glittering snow, riding just below the long waste of snow eight or ten feet deep over the whole countryside. The long dark line of mourners following the coffin stretched away towards Oakport Wood in the pathway cut through the snow. High on Killeelan Hill the graveyard evergreens rose out of the snow. The graveyard wall was covered, the narrow path cut up the side of the hill stopping at the little gate deep in the snow. The coffin climbed with painful slowness, as if it might never reach the gate, often pausing for the bearers to be changed; and someone started to pray, the prayer travelling down the whole mile-long line of the mourners as they shuffled behind the coffin in the narrow tunnel cut in the snow.