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

I was feeling leaden with tiredness but did not want to sleep. I had gone on the river in order to be alone, the way one goes to a dark room.

The Brothers’ Building Fund Dance had been held the night before. A big marquee had been set up in the grounds behind the monastery. Most of the people I had gone to school with were there, awkward in their new estate, and nearly all the Brothers who had taught us: Joseph, Francis, Benedictus, Martin. They stood in a black line beneath the low canvas near the entrance and waited for their old pupils to go up to them. When they were alone, watching us dance, rapid comment passed up and down the line, and often Joseph and Martin doubled up, unable or unwilling to conceal laughter; but by midnight they had gone, and a night of a sort was ours, the fine dust from the floor rising into the perfume and sweat and hair oil as we danced in the thresh of the music.

There was a full moon as I drove Una to her home in Arigna in the borrowed Prefect, the whole wide water of Allen taking in the wonderful mysteriousness of the light. We sat in the car and kissed and talked, and morning was there before we noticed. After the harshness of growing up, a world of love and beauty, of vague gardens and dresses and laughter, one woman in a gleaming distance seemed to be almost within reach. We would enter this world. We would make it true.

I was home just before the house had risen, and lay on the bed and waited till everybody was up, then changed into old clothes. I was helping my father put up a new roof on the house. Because of the tiredness, I had to concentrate completely on the work, even then nearly losing my footing several times between the stripped beams, sometimes annoying my father by handing him the wrong lath or tool; but when evening came the last thing I wanted was sleep. I wanted to be alone, to go over the night, to try to see clearly, which only meant turning again and again on the wheel of dreaming.

‘Hi there! Hi! Do you hear me, young Moran!’ The voice came with startling clarity over the water, was taken up by the fields across the lake, echoed back. ‘Hi there! Hi! Do you hear me, young Moran!’

I looked all around. The voice came from the road. I couldn’t make out the figure at first, leaning in a broken gap of the wall above the lake, but when he called again I knew it was Eddie Reegan, Senator Reegan.

‘Hi there, young Moran. Since the mountain can’t come to Mahomet, Mahomet will have to come to the mountain. Row over here a minute. I want to have a word with you.’

I rowed slowly, watching each oar-splash slip away from the boat in the mirror of water. I disliked him, having unconsciously, perhaps, picked up my people’s dislike. He had come poor to the place, buying Lynch’s small farm cheap, and soon afterwards the farmhouse burned down. At once, a bigger house was built with the insurance money, closer to the road, though that in its turn was due to burn down too, to be replaced by the present mansion, the avenue of Lawson cypresses now seven years old. Soon he was buying up other small farms, but no one had ever seen him work with shovel or with spade. He always appeared immaculately dressed. It was as if he understood instinctively that it was only the shortest of short steps from appearance to becoming. ‘A man who works never makes any money. He has no time to see how the money is made,’ he was fond of boasting. He set up as an auctioneer. He entered politics. He married Kathleen Relihan, the eldest of old Paddy Relihan’s daughters, the richest man in the area, Chairman of the County Council. ‘Do you see those two girls? I’m going to marry one of those girls,’ he was reported to have remarked to a friend. ‘Which one?’ ‘It doesn’t matter. They’re both Paddy Relihan’s daughters’; and when Paddy retired it was Reegan rather than any of his own sons who succeeded Paddy in the Council. Now that he had surpassed Paddy Relihan and become a Senator and it seemed only a matter of time before he was elected to the Dáil, he no longer joked about ‘the aul effort of a fire’, and was gravely concerned about the reluctance of insurance companies to grant cover for fire to dwelling houses in our part of the country. He had bulldozed the hazel and briar from the hills above the lake, and as I turned to see how close the boat had come to the wall I could see behind him the white and black of his Friesians grazing between the electric fences on the far side of the reseeded hill.

I let the boat turn so that I could place my hand on the stone, but the evening was so calm that it would have rested beneath the high wall without any hand. The Senator had seated himself on the wall as I was rowing in, and his shoes hung six or eight feet above the boat.

‘It’s not the first time I’ve had to congratulate you, though I’m too high up here to shake your hand. And what I’m certain of is that it won’t be the last time either,’ he began.

‘Thanks. You’re very kind,’ I answered.

‘Have you any idea where you’ll go from here?’

‘No. I’ve applied for the grant. It depends on whether I get the grant or not.’

‘What’ll you do if you get it?’

‘Go on, I suppose. Go a bit farther …’

‘What’ll you do then?’

‘I don’t know. Sooner or later, I suppose, I’ll have to look for a job.’

‘That’s the point I’ve been coming to. You are qualified to teach, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. But I’ve only taught for a few months. Before I got that chance to go to the university.’

‘You didn’t like teaching?’ he asked sharply.

‘No.’ I was careful. ‘I didn’t dislike it. It was a job.’

‘I like that straightness. And what I’m looking to know is — if you were offered a very good job would you be likely to take it?’

‘What job?’

‘I won’t beat around the bush either. I’m talking of the Principalship of the school here. It’s a very fine position for a young man. You’d be among your own people. You’d be doing good where you belong. I hear you’re interested in a very attractive young lady not a hundred miles from here. If you decided to marry and settle down I’m in a position to put other advantages your way.’

Master Leddy was the Principal of the school. He had been the Principal as long as I could remember. He had taught me, many before me. I had called to see him just three days before. The very idea of replacing him was shocking. And anyhow, I knew the politicians had nothing to do with the appointment of teachers. It was the priest who ran the school. What he was saying didn’t even begin to make sense, but I had been warned about his cunning and was wary. ‘You must be codding. Isn’t Master Leddy the Principal?’

‘He is now but he won’t be for long more — not if I have anything to do with it.’

‘How?’ I asked very quietly in the face of the outburst.

‘That need be no concern of yours. If you can give me your word that you’ll take the job, I can promise you that the job is as good as yours.’

‘I can’t do that. I can’t follow anything right. Isn’t it Canon Gallagher who appoints the teachers?’

‘Listen. There are many people who feel the same way as I do. If I go to the Canon in the name of all those people and say that

you’re willing to take the job, the job is yours. Even if he didn’t want to, he’d have no choice but to appoint you …’

‘Why should you want to do that for me? Say, even if it is possible.’ I was more curious now than alarmed.

‘It’s more than possible. It’s bloody necessary. I’ll be plain. I have three sons. They go to that school. They have nothing to fall back on but whatever education they get. And with the education they’re getting at that school up there, all they’ll ever be fit for is to dig ditches. Now, I’ve never dug ditches, but even at my age I’d take off my coat and go down into a ditch rather than ever have to watch any of my sons dig. The whole school is a shambles. Someone described it lately as one big bear garden.’