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

‘How did she get this far?’

‘With Johnny from the mill and his girl. She wouldn’t come with us. They had to leave Johnny’s girl home first. We’d better go down. They have no key.’

‘It is our duty to go down,’ Cronin said.

I sat for a long time on the bed’s edge before following them down.

A piece of cardboard hung from the doorknob of O’Reilly’s room. I lifted it and read please do not disturb.

Rachael was sitting at the corner of the small table in the kitchen, and with her was Johnny Byrne, the foreman of the mill. She was smoking, plainly upset, but it made her the more beautiful. She’d pulled a jacket over her bare shoulders, and silver shoes showed beneath the long yellow dress. Ryan and Cronin had taken Mrs McKinney’s cooked turkey from the fridge and placed it on the high wooden table. Cronin was waving a turkey leg about as he inspected himself in Paddy McKinney’s shaving mirror.

‘It’s no trouble now for me to run you the rest of the way home,’ Johnny was saying to Rachael.

‘No thanks, Johnny.’

‘We’ll get him up now. It is our duty,’ Cronin suddenly said.

We heard him rattling the doorknob in the hallway. ‘Get up, O’Reilly. Rachael’s here. You have to run her home.’

After a lot of rattling and a threat to break down the door, a hollow voice sounded within the room as if spoken through a sheet by a man whose life was fast ebbing. ‘Please inspect notice and go away,’ at which point Rachael went out and ushered Cronin back into the kitchen. He was amazingly docile in her hands. Ryan was peeling the turkey breastbone clean with his fingers.

‘You must leave him alone. It’s between us.’ Rachael moved him gently back towards the turkey on the table.

‘Even if you got him up now he’d hardly be fit to drive you home,’ Johnny Byrne said.

‘We could give him coffee,’ and after a time she added, ‘I’ll try just once more.’ She called him, asking him to let her into the room. All that came in the silence were loud, simulated snores.

‘It’d only take a minute to run you home,’ Johnny said when she came back into the kitchen.

‘No, Johnny. I’ll wait. You should go home now. You won’t find till you have to go to work,’ and reluctantly, pausing a number of times, he rose and left. Having stripped the turkey clean, Cronin and Ryan fell asleep in chairs. In the garishly lit kitchen, I sat in Byrne’s place at the table. A foolish, sentimental, idle longing grew: to leave her home, to marry her, to bring up O’Reilly’s child with her in some vague, long vista of happiness; and after an hour I said, ‘I could get one of their car keys,’ indicating the sleeping inseminators, ‘and drive you home.’

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I’ll wait now till morning.’

She was there when Mrs McKinney came down to get the breakfasts in the morning, there to face her bustling annoyance at the disturbances of the rowdy night turn to outrage at the sight of the pillaged turkey on the table.

‘I’m sorry to be here. I’m waiting for Peter to get up. He was drunk and locked the door. He took me to the dance and he has to take me home,’ she explained with a quiet firmness.

‘Was it him did for the turkey too?’ The old woman made no effort to conceal her anger.

‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘It must be those other bowsies, then.’

In her long yellow dress and silver shoes Rachael helped tidy the kitchen and prepare for the breakfasts until the old woman was completely pacified, and the two sat down like ancient allies to scalding tea and thickly buttered toast. Through the thin wall they heard O’Reilly’s alarm clock go off.

‘They’re not worth half the trouble they put us to,’ the old woman grumbled.

They heard him rise, unlock the door, go upstairs to the bathroom, and as he came down Rachael went out to meet him in the hallway. It was several minutes before she returned to the kitchen, and then it was to borrow a kettle of boiling water. Outside on the street it was a white world. The windscreen of O’Reilly’s car was frosted over, the doorhandles stuck.

‘You were right to make him leave you home. They should be all learned a bit of manners,’ Mrs McKinney said approvingly as she took the empty kettle back, the noise of the car warming up coming from outside.

O’Reilly was a long time leaving Rachael home, and when he came back he checked that no one had been looking for him on the site, reported sick, and went to bed. He did not get up till the following morning.

When Mrs McKinney saw the state of Cronin and Ryan later that morning, she decided to postpone the business of the turkey for a day or two. They tried to drink a glass of Bols eggnog in the Midland’s as a cure before work, but it made them violently ill, and they had to go back to bed.

The town had not had such a piece of scandal since some members of the Pioneer excursion to Knock had to be taken from the bus in Longford for disorderly conduct three years before. Circling the Virgin’s Shrine in a solid downpour while responding with Hail Marys to the electronic Our Fathers had proved too severe a trial for three recent recruits.

I was stopped on my way to school, was stopped again on my way back, to see if I could add anything to the news of the night, but everything, down to the devastated turkey, seemed to be already known.

Rachael and O’Reilly were married in early January. Only Cronin was invited to the wedding from the Bridge Restaurant, he and O’Reilly having become great pals again. He told us that it was quiet and very pleasant, just a few people, the way weddings should be. We made a collection in the restaurant, and with the money Mrs McKinney bought a mantel clock in a mahogany frame and had all our names inscribed on a bright metal scroll. After a honeymoon in London, the new couple went to Galway, where he took up his position with the County Council.

It was some years before Rachael and O’Reilly were seen again. A crowd up for the Christmas shopping saw them in Henry Street a Saturday morning before Christmas. They were both wearing sheepskin coats. Rachael’s coat fell to her ankles and a beautiful fair-haired child held her hand as they walked. She had lost her lean beauty but was still a handsome woman. A small boy rode on O’Reilly’s shoulders. The boy was pointing excitedly at the jumping monkeys on the pavement and the toy trumpets the sellers blew. Sometimes when they paused at the shops the mother would turn away from the glitter of the silver snow to smile on them both. They disappeared into Arnott’s before anybody had gathered enough courage to greet them.

Within a decade O’Reilly had risen to be a county engineer, and a few years afterwards became the county manager. Everywhere local officials gather it is heard whispered along the grapevine, as if to ease the rebuke of his rise over older and less forceful, less lucky men, that O’Reilly would not be half the man he is if he had not married Rachael.

A few of the last leaves from the almond saplings that stood at intervals along the pavement were being scattered about under the lamps as he met me off the late bus from the city. He was a big man, prematurely bald, and I could feel his powerful tread by my side as we crossed the street to a Victorian cottage, an old vine above its doorway as whimsical there in the very middle of the town as a patch of thyme or lavender.

‘The house is tied to the school,’ he explained. ‘That’s why it’s not been bulldozed. We don’t have any rent to pay.’

His wife looked younger than he, the faded blonde hair and bird face contrasting with her full body. There was something about her of materials faded in the sun. They had two pubescent daughters in convent skirts and blouse, and a son, a few years older than the girls, with the mother’s bird-like face and blonde hair, a frail presence beside his father.