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

The tide that had gone out to America and every part of Britain now reaches only as far as a bursting Dublin, and every Friday night crammed buses take the aliens home. For a few free days in country light they feel important until the same buses take them back on Sunday night to shared flats and bed-sits.

Storage heaters were installed in the church in the village because of the dampness but the damp did not leave the limestone. The dark evergreens shutting out the light were blamed and cut down, revealing the church in all its huge, astonishing ugliness amid the headstones of former priests of the parish inside the low wall that marked off a corner of Henry’s field. The damp still did not leave the limestone, but in spite of it the church is full to overflowing every Sunday.

As in other churches, the priest now faces the people, acknowledging that they are the mystery. He is a young priest and tells them that God is on their side and wants them to want children, bungalow bliss, a car, and colour television. Heaven is all about us, hell is in ourselves and in one moment can be exorcized. Many of the congregation chat with one another and read newspapers all through the Sacrifice. The words are in English and understandable. The congregation gives out the responses. The altar boys kneeling in scarlet and white at the foot of the altar steps ring the bell and attend the priest, but they no longer have to learn Latin.

No one beats a path to the presbytery. The young priest is seldom there and has no housekeeper. Nights, when he’s not supervising church bingo, he plays the guitar and sings at local hotels where he is a hit with tourists. He seldom wears black or the Roman collar. To show how little it means to him, one convivial evening in a hotel at Lough Arrow he pulled the collar from his neck and dropped it into the soup. When the piece of white plastic was fished out amid the laughter, it was found to have been made in Japan.

A politician lives outside the village, and the crowd that once flocked to the presbytery now go to him instead. Certain nights he holds ‘clinics’. They are advertised. On clinic nights a line of cars can be seen standing for several hundred yards along the road past his house, the car radios playing. On cold nights the engines run. No one thinks it wasteful any more. They come to look for grants, to try to get drunken driving convictions squashed, to get free medical cards, sickness benefit, to have planning application decisions that have gone against them reversed, to get children into jobs. As they all have votes they are never ‘run’.

The Protestants have all gone, but the church in Ardcarne is still opened once a year. No one attends it now. There was a move to have the famous Purser windows taken out and installed in a new church being built in the North of Ireland. This was prevented by the conditions of the endowment. They have not been vandalized.

Sir Cecil and Lady King-Harmon bought a stud farm outside Dublin. The Land Commission took over the estate and split it into farms, preserving the gardens and woods and walks immediately around the house as a forest park. The roofless shell of the Chapel-of-Ease stands by the boathouse. Within, lovers scratch their names on the stone. Pleasure craft ply the lake and its islands with day trippers all through the summer. The tall Nash shell stood for a few years above the lake until it was condemned as dangerous, and dynamited. A grey concrete lookout tower, looking cold and wet even in the sun, was built in its place.

In every house across the countryside there glows at night the strange living light of television sets, more widespread than the little red lamps before the pictures of the Sacred Heart years before.

The Sergeant’s son came with a television crew to make a film for a series called My Own Place . He was older than when his father first came to the barracks. The crew put up in the Royal, and the priest was invited to dinner the first night to counter any hostility they might run into while filming. It showed how out of touch the producer was with the place. He should have invited the politician.

The light was good the next morning, and they decided to begin filming at the old Georgian parsonage in Ardcarne. They hoped to go from there to the Protestant church and the burial place of the King-Harmons, and then to the village if the light held. They would be doing well if they got through all that in one day. They set up the cameras and microphones under the beech trees on the avenue where once he had happily burned leaves for the Sinclairs. It would be a dull film. There would be no people in it. The people that interested him were all dead.

‘Take two, cut one.’ The clapboard was brought down and the continuity girl lifted her stopwatch. The Sergeant’s son started walking slowly down the grass-grown avenue into the camera.

‘After the war, Colonel Sinclair and his wife came home from London to this parsonage. His father had been the parson here. It must have looked much as it looks now when they first came. They restored it, house and garden and orchard and paddocks and lawn. I think they were very happy here, but now all is wilderness again.’

The camera panned slowly away from the narrator to the house, and continued along the railings that had long lost their second whiteness, whirring steadily in the silence as it took in only what was in front of it, despite the cunning hand of the cameraman: lingering on the bright rain of cherries on the tramped grass beneath the trees, the flaked white paint of the paddock railing, the Iron Mountains smoky and blue as they stretched into the North against the rim of the sky.

The summer Annie May Moran came to work for Mrs Kirkwood was the great year of St Michael’s football. The team had reached the Final of the Senior Cup for the second year running. Eddie Mac was their star, their finest forward. He worked for the Kirkwoods and lived in the three-roomed herdsman’s cottage at the end of the yard, its galvanized roof sprayed the same shade of green as the stables. The two Kirkwoods, father and son, old William and young Master William, went to Roscommon to watch the Final. They barely understood the game and were not touched by the wild fever that emptied the countryside on that late August Sunday: ‘We went because Eddie was playing. His father would have enjoyed this day, had he stayed.’

Annie May helped Mrs Kirkwood set the dinner table in the front room that afternoon while the game was being played. Mrs Kirkwood went to particular care with the linen and silver, and the best set of bone china was on display. The Nutleys of Oakport, the oldest and last of her local friends, were coming to dinner that evening. When she was satisfied with the arrangement of the room and had checked the food, she took her book and sat in the rocking chair in the library, where, looking out on the lawn and white paling and the winding avenue of copper and green beech, she rocked herself to sleep as she did every day at this hour.

Exploding cans of carbide, random shouts and cheers and whistles as fires were lit on the hills and on every cross on the roadways woke her early. St Michael’s had won the Senior Cup for the first time since its founding. She rose and came down to Annie May in the kitchen. ‘It’s an unmitigated disaster,’ she confided to the servant girl. ‘It was bad enough last year, and they lost. What’ll it be like now that they have won?’

‘Eddie was the hero,’ William Kirkwood announced when they returned from Roscommon. ‘The two goals he scored in the second half won the game — it broke the other team’s heart. They carried him on their shoulders all around the field with the cup at the end.’ Annie May coloured as he spoke. She was already in love with the young herdsman who had yet to acknowledge her presence in the house.