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

‘I hope it’s to me,’ I said.

‘You haven’t asked me.’

I could feel her laughter as she held my arm close.

‘I’m asking now.’

I made a flourish of removing a non-existent hat. ‘Will you marry me?’

‘I will.’

‘When?’

‘Before the year is out.’

‘Would you like to go for a drink to celebrate, then?’

‘I always like any excuse to celebrate.’ She was biting her lip. ‘Where will you take me?’

‘The Shelbourne. Our local. It’ll be quiet.’

I thought of the aggressive boot thrown after the bridal car, the marbles suddenly rattling in the hubs of the honeymoon car, the metal smeared with oil so that the thrown boxes of confetti would stick, the legs of the comic pyjamas hilariously sewn up. We would avoid all that. We had promised one another the simplest wedding.

‘We live in a lucky time,’ she said and raised her glass, her calm, grey, intelligent eyes shining. ‘We wouldn’t have been allowed to do it this way even a decade ago. Will you tell your father that we’re to be married?’

‘I don’t know. Probably not unless it comes up. And you?’

‘I’d better. As it is, Mother will probably be furious that it is not going to be a big splash.’

‘I’m so grateful for these months together, that we were able to drift into marriage without the drowning plunge. What will you do while I’m away?’

‘I’ll pine,’ she teased. ‘I might even try to decorate the flat out of simple desperation. There’s a play at the Abbey that I want to see. There are some good restaurants in the city if I get too depressed. And in the meantime, have a wonderful time with your father and poor Rose in the nineteenth century at the bloody hay.’

‘Oh, for the Lord’s sake,’ I said, and rose to leave. Outside she was still laughing so provocatively that I drew her towards me.

The next morning on the train home I heard a transistor far down the carriage promise a prolonged spell of good weather. Meadows were being mowed all along the line, and I saw men testing handfuls of hay in the breeze as they waited for the sun to burn the dew off the fallen swards. It was weather people prayed for at this time.

I walked the three miles from the station. Meadows were down all along the road, some already saved, in stacked bales. The scent of cut grass was everywhere. As I drew close to the stone house in its trees I could hardly wait to see if the Big Meadow was down beyond the row of beech trees. When I lived here I’d felt this same excitement as the train rattled across the bridges into the city or when I approached the first sight of the ocean. Now that I lived in a city on the sea the excitement had been gradually transferred home.

Before I reached the gate I could tell by the emptiness beyond the beeches that the Big Meadow had been cut. Rose and my father were in the house. They were waiting in high excitement.

‘Everything’s ready for you,’ Rose said as she shook my hand, and through the window I saw my old clothes outside in the sun draped across the back of a chair.

‘As soon as you get a bite you can jump into your old duds,’ my father said. ‘I knocked the Big Meadow yesterday. All’s ready for go.’

Rose had washed my old clothes before hanging them outside to air. When I changed into them they were still warm from the sun, and they had that lovely clean feel that worn clothes have after washing. Within an hour we were working the machines.

The machines had taken much of the uncertainty and slavery from haymaking, but there was still the anxiety of rain. Each cloud that drifted into the blue above us we watched as apprehensively across the sky as if it were an enemy ship, and we seemed as tired at the end of every day as we were before we had the machines, eating late in silence, waking from listless watching of the television only when the weather forecast showed; and afterwards it was an effort to drag feet to our rooms where the bed lit with moonlight showed like heaven, and sleep was as instant as it was dreamless.

And it was into the stupor of such an evening that the gold watch fell. We were slumped in front of the television set. Rose had been working outside in the front garden, came in and put the tea kettle on the ring, and started to take folded sheets from the linen closet. Without warning, the gold watch spilled out on to the floor. She’d pulled it from the closet with one of the sheets. The pale face was upwards in the poor light. I bent to pick it up. The glass had not broken. ‘It’s lucky it no longer goes,’ Rose breathed.

‘Well, if it did you’d soon take good care of that.’ My father rose angrily from the rocking chair.

‘It just pulled out with the sheets,’ Rose said. ‘I was running into it everywhere round the house. I put it in with the sheets so that it’d be out of the way.’

‘I’m sure you had it well planned. Give us this day our daily crash. Tell me this: would you sleep at night if you didn’t manage to smash or break something during the day?’ He’d been frightened out of light sleep in the chair. He was intent on avenging his fright.

‘Why did the watch stop?’ I asked.

I turned the cold gold in my hand. Elgin was the one word on the white face. The delicate hands were of blue steel. All through my childhood it had shone.

‘Can there be two reasons why it stopped?’ His anger veered towards me now. ‘It stopped because it got broke.’

‘Why can’t it be fixed?’ I ignored the anger.

‘Poor Taylor in the town doesn’t take in watches any more,’ Rose answered. ‘And the last time it stopped we sent it to Sligo. Sligo even sent it to Dublin but it was sent back. A part that holds the balance wheel is broke. What they told us is that they’ve stopped making parts for those watches. They have to be specially handmade. They said that the quality of the gold wasn’t high enough to justify that expense. That it was only gold plated. I don’t suppose it’ll ever go again. I put it in with the sheets to have it out of the way. I was running into it everywhere.’

‘Well, if it wasn’t fixed before, you must certainly have fixed it for good and for ever this time.’ My father would not let go.

His hand trembled on the arm of the rocking chair, the same hand that drew out the gold watch long ago as the first strokes of the Angelus came to us over the heather and pale wheaten sedge of Gloria Bog: ‘Twenty minutes late, no more than usual … One of these years Jimmy Lynch will startle himself and the whole countryside by ringing the Angelus at exactly twelve … Only in Ireland is there right time and wrong time. In other countries there is just time.’ We’d stand and stretch our backs, aching from scattering the turf, and wait for him to lift his straw hat.

Waiting with him under the yew, suitcases round our feet, for the bus that took us each year to the sea at Strandhill after the hay was in and the turf home; and to quiet us he’d take the watch out and let it lie in his open palm, where we’d follow the small second hand low down on the face endlessly circling until the bus came into sight at the top of Doherty’s Hill. How clearly everything sang now set free by the distance of the years, with what heaviness the actual scenes and days had weighed.

‘If the watch isn’t going to be fixed, then, I might as well have it.’ I was amazed at the calm sound of my own words. The watch had come to him from his father. Through all the long years of childhood I had assumed that one day he would pass it on to me. Then all weakness would be gone. I would possess its power. Once in a generous fit he even promised it to me, but he did not keep that promise. Unfairly, perhaps, I expected him to give it to me when I graduated, when I passed into the civil service, when I won my first promotion, but he did not. I had forgotten about it until it had spilled out of the folded sheets on to the floor.