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

Joe stretched to the shelf and threw the orange to the man who sat on a bag of Spanish onions. As he stretched forward to catch the fruit the red string bag collapsed and he came heavily down on the onions. ‘You want to bruise those onions with your dirty awkward arse. Will you pay for them now, will you?’ Joe shouted as he swung his thick legs down from the counter.

‘Everybody’s out for their onions these days.’ The man tried to defend himself with a nervous laugh as he fixed the string bag upright and changed his seat to an orange box.

‘You’ve had your onions: now pay for them.’

‘Make him pay for his onions,’ they shouted.

‘You must give her her paraffin first.’ Joe took the tin, and went to the barrel raised on flat blocks in the corner, and turned the copper tap.

‘Now give her the proper paraffin. It’s Christmas time,’ Joe said again as he screwed the cap tight on the tin, the limp black hair falling across the bloated face.

‘Her proper paraffin,’ the approving cheer followed me out of the door.

‘He never moved a muscle, the little fucker. Those homeboys are a bad piece of work,’ I heard with much satisfaction as I stowed the tin of paraffin securely among the logs of the cart. Ice over the potholes of the road was catching the first stars. Lights of bicycles — it was a confession night — hesitantly approached out of the night. Though exposed in the full glare of their lamps I was unable to recognize the bicyclists as they pedalled past in dark shapes behind their lamps, and this made raw the fear I’d felt but had held down in the shop. I took a stick and beat the reluctant jennet into pulling the load uphill as fast as he was able.

After I’d stacked the logs in the fuel shed I went and knocked on the back door to see where they wanted me to put the paraffin. Mrs Grey opened the door.

‘It’s the last load until after Christmas,’ I said as I put the tin down.

‘I haven’t forgotten.’ She smiled and held out a pound note.

‘I’d rather not take it.’ It was there the first mistake was made, playing for higher stakes.

‘You must have something. Besides the firewood you’ve brought us so many messages from the village that we don’t know what we’d have done without you.’

‘I don’t want money.’

‘Then what would you like me to give you for Christmas?’

‘Whatever you’d prefer to give me.’ I thought prefer was well put for a homeboy.

‘I’ll have to give it some thought, then,’ she said as I led the jennet out of the yard, delirious with stupid happiness.

‘You got the paraffin and logs there without trouble?’ Moran beamed when I came in to the smell of hot food. He’d changed into good clothes and was finishing his meal at the head of the big table in tired contentment.

‘There was no trouble,’ I answered.

‘You’ve fed and put in the jennet?’

‘I gave him crushed oats.’

‘I bet you Mrs Grey was pleased.’

‘She seemed pleased.’

He’d practically his hand out. ‘You got something good out of it, then?’

‘No.’

‘You mean to say she gave you nothing?’

‘Not tonight but maybe she will before Christmas.’

‘Maybe she will but she always gave a pound with the last load before,’ he said suspiciously. His early contentment was gone.

He took his cap and coat to go for a drink or two for some relief.

‘If there’s an international crisis in the next few hours you know where I’ll be found,’ he said to Mrs Moran as he left.

Mrs Grey came Christmas Eve with a large box. She smelled of scent and gin and wore a fur coat. She refused a chair saying she’d to rush, and asked me to untie the red twine and paper.

A toy airplane stood inside the box. It was painted white and blue. The tyres smelled of new rubber.

‘Why don’t you wind it up?’

I looked up at the idiotically smiling face, the tear-brimmed eyes.

‘Wind it up for Mrs Grey,’ I heard Moran’s voice.

I was able to do nothing. Moran took the toy from my hand and wound it up. A light flashed on and off on the tail and the propellors turned as it raced across the cement.

‘It was too much for you to bring,’ Moran said in his politic voice.

‘I thought it was rather nice when he refused the money. My own poor boy loved nothing better than model airplanes for Christmas.’ She was again on the verge of tears.

‘We all still feel for that tragedy,’ Moran said. ‘Thank Mrs Grey for such a lovely present. It’s far too good.’

I could no longer hold back rage: ‘I think it’s useless,’ and began to cry.

I have only a vague memory afterwards of the voice of Moran accompanying her to the door with excuses and apologies.

‘I should have known better than to trust a homeboy,’ Moran said when he came back. ‘Not only did you do me out of the pound but you go and insult the woman and her dead son. You’re going to make quick time back to where you came from, my tulip.’ Moran stirred the airplane with his boot as if he wished to kick it but dared not out of respect for the money it had cost.

‘Well, you’ll have a good flight in it this Christmas.’

The two-hour bell went for Midnight Mass, and as Moran hurried for the pub to get drinks before Mass, Mrs Moran started to strip the windows of curtains and to set a single candle to burn in each window. Later, as we made our way to the church, candles burned in the windows of all the houses and the church was ablaze with light. I was ashamed of the small old woman, afraid they’d identify me with her as we walked up between the crowded benches to where a steward directed us to a seat in the women’s side-altar. In the smell of burning wax and flowers and damp stone, I got out the brown beads and the black prayerbook with the gold cross on the cover they’d given me in the Home and began to prepare for the hours of boredom Midnight Mass meant. It did not turn out that way.

A drunken policeman, Guard Mullins, had slipped past the stewards on guard at the door and into the women’s sidechapel. As Mass began he started to tell the schoolteacher’s wife how available her arse had been for handling while she’d worked in the bar before assuming the fur coat of respectability, ‘And now, O Lordy me, a prize rose garden wouldn’t get a luk in edgeways with its grandeur.’ The stewards had a hurried consultation whether to eject him or not and decided it’d probably cause less scandal to leave him as he was. He quietened into a drunken stupor until the Monsignor climbed into the pulpit to begin his annual hour of the season of peace and glad tidings. As soon as he began, ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. This Christmas, my dearly beloved children in Christ, I wish …’ Mullins woke to applaud with a hearty, ‘Hear, hear. I couldn’t approve more. You’re a man after my own heart. Down with the hypocrites!’ The Monsignor looked towards the policeman and then at the stewards, but as he was greeted by another, ‘Hear, hear!’ he closed his notes and in a voice of acid wished everybody a holy and happy Christmas and climbed angrily from the pulpit to conclude the shortest Midnight Mass the church had ever known. It was not, though, the end of the entertainment. As the communicants came from the rails Mullins singled out the tax collector, who walked down the aisle with closed, bowed head, and hands rigidly joined, to shout, ‘There’s the biggest hypocrite in the parish,’ which delighted almost everybody.

As I went past the lighted candles in the window, I thought of Mullins as my friend and for the first time felt proud to be a ward of state. I avoided Moran and his wife, and from the attic I listened with glee to them criticizing Mullins. When the voices died I came quietly down to take a box of matches and the airplane and go to the jennet’s stable. I gathered dry straw in a heap, and as I lit it and the smoke rose the jennet gave his human squeal until I untied him and he was able to put his nostrils in the thick of the smoke. By the light of the burning straw I put the blue and white toy against the wall and started to kick. With each kick I gave a new sweetness was injected into my blood. For such a pretty toy it took few kicks to reduce it to shapelessness, and then, in the last flames of the straw, I flattened it on the stable floor, the jennet already nosing me to put more straw on the dying fire.