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

‘Poor soft bitch. I knew a few’d give him fore, and the size of him in those plus fours. He should have stayed where he belonged.’

‘ I am reduced to the final ambition of wanting to go back to look on the green of the billiard table in the Prince of Wales on Edward Road. They may have taken it away though. Sign of a misspent youth, proficiency at billiards ,’ Boles mimicked again.

‘On the same tack to me in the orchard. A strange coot. Luther’s idea about women. The bed and the sink. As good to engage a pig in serious conversation as a woman. All candles were made to burn before the high altar of their cunts. It was no rush of faith, let me tell you good sir, that led to my conversion. I was dragged into your Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church by my male member . I’ll not forget in a hurry how he came out with that spiff.’

‘He had a curious blend of language sometimes,’ Boles said.

‘And he ends up after all his guff with an empty shopping bag outside Amiens Street Station.’

‘A lesson, but I liked him. Great smell of apples in the evening.’

‘Rotting on the ground. Wouldn’t pay you to gather. Except a few hundredweight for Breffni Blossom. They don’t mind the bruises.’

‘Better than wastin’ in the grass.’

The passing cars had their headlamps on now. A mile away, over fields of stone walls, the lighted windows of the nine-twenty diesel rattled past.

‘Train to Sligo.’

‘Empty, I suppose.’

‘I suppose … Time to be moving in the general direction of the bed.’

‘No hurry, long enough lying down in the finish. How is the eczema?’

‘Stays quiet long as I don’t go near timber. I’ve got this stuff on to keep the midges off.’ He brushed his finger lightly along his cheek.

‘If everything was right we’d appreciate nothing.’

‘Still, I’d have sworn I heard a chainsaw up this way today,’ Boles said as he turned to the road.

‘Must have been from elsewhere,’ Gillespie contradicted. ‘What the wind can do with sounds is no joke.’

‘There was hardly a puff of wind today.’

‘Surprising what even a little can do, as the woman said when she pissed in the ocean.’ Gillespie laughed aggressively.

‘I was certain, but time to go,’ Boles said and called his dog.

‘No use detaining you if you have, though it’s young, the night, yet.’

‘Goodnight, then.’

‘ ’Night, Mr Boles.’

He watched him go, the light tapping of the cattle cane in time to the drag of feet in slippers, calling ‘Heel’ to the dog as headlamps flooded the road from Boyle.

‘That’s what’ll give him something to think about,’ Gillespie muttered as he called his own dog back and turned towards the house.

As well as a railway ticket they gave me a letter before I left the Home to work for Moran. They warned me to give the letter unopened to Moran, which was why I opened it on the train; it informed him that since I was a ward of state if I caused trouble or ran away he was to contact the guards at once. I tore it up, since it occurred to me that I might well cause trouble or run away, resolving to say I lost it if asked, but he did not ask for any letter.

Moran and his wife treated me well. The food was more solid than at the Home, a roast always on Sundays, and when the weather grew hard they took me to the town and bought me wellingtons and an overcoat and a cap with flaps that came down over the ears. After the day’s work when Moran had gone to the pub, I was free to sit at the fire while Mrs Moran knitted, and listen to the wireless — what I enjoyed most were the plays — and Mrs Moran told me she was knitting a pullover for me for Christmas. Sometimes she asked me about life at the Home and when I’d tell her she’d sigh, ‘You must be very glad to be with us instead,’ and I would tell her, which was true, that I was. I usually went to bed before Moran came back from the pub, as they often quarrelled then, and I considered I had no place in that part of their lives.

Moran made his living by buying cheap branches or uncommercial timber the sawmills couldn’t use and cutting them up to sell as firewood. I delivered the timber with an old jennet Moran had bought from the tinkers. The jennet squealed, a very human squeal, any time a fire of branches was lit, and ran, about the only time he did run, to stand in rigid contentment with his nostrils in the thick of the wood smoke. When Moran was in good humour it amused him greatly to light a fire to see the jennet’s excitement at the prospect of smoke.

There was no reason this life shouldn’t have gone on for long but for a stupid wish on my part, which set off an even more stupid wish in Mrs Grey, and what happened has struck me ever since as usual when people look to each other for their happiness or whatever it is called. Mrs Grey was Moran’s best customer. She’d come from America and built the huge house on top of Mounteagle after her son had been killed in aerial combat over Italy.

The thaw overhead in the bare branches had stopped the evening we filled that load for Mrs Grey. There was no longer the dripping on the dead leaves, the wood clamped in the silence of white frost except for the racket some bird made in the undergrowth. Moran carefully built the last logs above the crates of the cart and I threw him the bag of hay that made the load look bigger than it was. ‘Don’t forget to call at Murphy’s for her paraffin,’ he said. ‘No, I’ll not forget.’ ‘She’s bound to tip you well this Christmas. We could use money for the Christmas.’ He’d use it to pour drink down his gullet. ‘Must be time to be moving,’ I said. ‘It’ll be night before you’re there,’ he answered.

The cart rocked over the roots between the trees, cold steel of the bridle ring in the hand close to the rough black lips, steam of the breath wasting on the air to either side. We went across the paddocks to the path round the lake, the wheels cutting two tracks on the white stiff grass, crush of the grass yielding to the iron. I had to open the wooden gate to the pass. The small shod hooves wavered between the two ridges of green inside the wheeltracks on the pass, the old body swaying to each drive of the shafts as the wheels fell from rut to rut.

The lake was frozen over, a mirror fouled by white blotches of the springs, and rose streaks from the sun were impaled on the firs of Oakport across the bay.

The chainsaw started up in the wood again. He’d saw while there was light. ‘No joke to make a living, a drink or two for some relief, all this ballsing. May be better if we stayed in bed, conserve our energy, eat less,’ but in spite of all he said he went on buying the branches cheap from McAnnish after the boats had taken the trunks down the river to the mill.

I tied the jennet to the chapel gate and crossed to Murphy’s shop.

‘I want Mrs Grey’s paraffin.’

The shop was full of men. They sat on the counter or on wooden fruit boxes and upturned buckets along the walls. They used to trouble me at first. I supposed it little different from going into a shop in a strange country without its language, but they learned they couldn’t take a rise out of me, that was their phrase. They used to lob tomatoes at the back of my head in the hope of some reaction, but they left me mostly alone when they saw none was forthcoming. If I felt anything for them it was a contempt tempered by fear: I was here, and they were there.

‘You want her paraffin, do you? I know the paraffin I’d give her if I got your chance,’ Joe Murphy said from the centre of the counter where he presided, and a loyal guffaw rose from around the walls.

‘Her proper paraffin,’ someone shouted, and it drew even more applause, and when it died a voice asked, ‘Before you get off the counter, Joe, throw us an orange.’