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

The Colonel opened the house as soon as they’d gone. But he did not go to Charlie’s that evening. Instead, he went to the Royal, and this he continued to do as regularly as once Mrs Sinclair and he had set out for Charlie’s. The Rockingham woods were sold. Sawmills were set up, and to everybody’s surprise the Colonel became manager of McAinish’s Mill. To begin with, he was unpopular with the workmen, insisting on strict timekeeping, which was in opposition to the casual local sense of coming and going, fining each man an hour’s pay for every fifteen minutes late; but he was fair, and it was said that he came to know as much about the saws and machinery as any mechanic in the woods, and it became the best and happiest of the mills. Though he always remained aloof, there grew an unspoken loyalty between him and his men.

Colonel Sinclair bought a small turkey in Boyle that Christmas Eve. It was all he needed for the holiday. There was fruit in the house, wine, a few heads of lettuce still in the greenhouse. Then he went for a stroll in the streets. Mrs Sinclair had been very fond of this town. It was a bright, clear night, brighter still with the strings of Christmas lights climbing towards the star above the clock on the Crescent. Gerald Dodd, Town Commissioner had gone to join the Rockinghams on the clock’s memorial stone. The Colonel approved but it also made him smile. Surrounded on the stone by the formidable roll call of Staffords and King-Harmons the name Gerald Dodd had the effect of a charming and innocent affrontery. The King-Harmons would certainly not have approved. The Staffords would have been outraged. On the other side of the river the broken roof of the old British military barracks was white with frost. From one chimneypiece an elder grew. Amid it all the shallow river raced beneath the gentle curve of the bridge, rushed past the white walls of the Royal on its way out towards Key. About him people clapped one another on backs and shoulders. The air was thickly warm with Happy Christmases. The Colonel walked very slowly, enjoying the crowd but feeling outside the excitement. He shook hands affably with a few neighbours, touched his cap to the women, wishing them a Merry Christmas. He shook hands with men who worked for him in the mill, but he neither offered drinks nor was he asked.

In the Royal, he caught the page boy in the mirror making faces behind his back as he took off his old Burberry, but he did not mind. He was old and the page boy could do without his tip. He sat alone at one of the river windows and ordered smoked salmon with brown bread and a half-bottle of white wine.

When he did not appear at the mill the first morning after the holiday, the foreman and one of the men went to the parsonage. The key was in the front door, but there was no answer to their knocking. They found him just inside the door, at the foot of the stairs. In the kitchen two places were laid at the head of the big table. There was a pair of napkins in silver rings and two wine glasses beside the usual cutlery. A small turkey lay in an ovenware dish beside the stove, larded and stuffed, ready for roasting. An unwashed wilting head of lettuce stood on the running board of the sink.

As an announcement of a wedding or pregnancy after a lull seems to provoke a sudden increase in such activities, so it happened with the Sergeant’s early retirement from the Force. The first to follow was Guard Casey. He had no interest in land and used his gratuity to pay the deposit on a house in Sligo. There he got a job as the yardman in a small bakery, and years of intense happiness began. His alertness, natural kindness, interest in everything that went on around him, made him instantly loved. What wasn’t noticed at first was his insatiable thirst for news. Some of the bread vans went as far as the barracks, and it seemed natural enough that he should be interested in places and people he had served most of his life. In fact, these van men took his interest as a form of flattery, lifting for a few moments the daily dullness of their round; but then it was noticed that he was almost equally interested in people he had never met, places he had never been to. In a comparatively short time he had acquired a detailed knowledge of all the van routes and the characters of the more colourful shopkeepers, even of some who had little colour.

‘A pure child. No wit. Mad for news,’ was the way the passion was affectionately indulged. ‘He should be fed lots. Tell him plenty of lies.’ But he seemed to have an unerring sense of what was fact and what malicious invention.

‘Sunday is so long. It’s so hard to put in.’

Guard Casey kept the walk and air of a young man well into his seventies and went on working at the bakery. It was a simple fall crossing the yard to open the gates one wet morning that heralded an end, a broken hip that would not heal. He and his family had grown unused to one another over the years. They now found each other’s company burdensome, and it was to his relief as well as theirs when it was agreed that he would get better care in the regional hospital when it was clear that he wasn’t going to get well, as everything but his spirit was sinking. Then his family, through their religious connections, found a bed for him in St Joseph’s Hospice of the Dying in Dublin. It was there he was visited by the Sergeant’s son, who had heard that he missed company.

‘They’re nearly all gone now anyhow, God have mercy on them. Is me Oisín i ndiadh na feinne ,’ he laughed.

‘Wouldn’t you think when they’re so full of religion that they’d have shifted themselves this far to see you?’ It was open criticism of his family.

‘No, not at all. It’s too far.’ He lifted his hand as if to clear the harshness which seemed to take on an unpleasant moral note in the face of this largeness of spirit. ‘No one in their right mind travels so far to follow losing teams. And this is a losing team.’ He started to laugh again but was forced to stop because of coughing. ‘Still, I’ve known the whole world,’ he said when he recovered.

Johnny justified Brother Benedict’s account of his ability to Colonel Sinclair by winning a scholarship to university the following year.

‘You’ll be like the rest of the country — educated away beyond your intelligence,’ was the father’s unenthusiastic response, and they saw very little of one another over the next few years. Johnny spent vacations in England working on building sites and in canning factories around London. A good primary degree allowed him to baffle his father even further by continuing postgraduate study in psychology, and he was given a lectureship in the university when he completed his doctorate. Then he obtained work with the new television station, first in an advisory role, but later he made a series of documentary films about the darker aspects of Irish life. As they were controversial, they won him a sort of fame: some thought they were serious, well made, and compulsive viewing, bringing things to light that were in bad need of light; but others maintained that they were humourless, morbid, and restricted to a narrow view that was more revealing of private obsessions than any truths about life or Irish life in general. During this time he made a few attempts to get on with his father, but it was more useless than ever. ‘There must be rules if there’s to be any fairness or freedom,’ he argued the last time they met.

The tide that emptied the countryside more than any other since the famine has turned. Hardly anybody now goes to England. Some who went came home to claim inheritances, and stayed, old men waiting at the ends of lanes on Sunday evenings for the minibus to take them to church bingo. Most houses have a car and colour television. The bicycles and horses, carts and traps and sidecars, have gone from the roads. A big yellow bus brings the budding scholars to school in the town, and it is no longer uncommon to go on to university. The mail car is orange. Just one policeman with a squad car lives in the barracks.