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

A week later, the big silver cup arrived in Kirkwood’s yard on its round of the parish, the red and green ribbons streaming from the handles. Again Eddie Mac was hoisted on shoulders and carried aloft with the cup to his own door. Inside the small house the cup was filled to the brim with whiskey. Cheers rang out as each person drank from the cup. A large bonfire was set ablaze in the middle of the yard. A melodeon started to play.

‘It’s so childish,’ Mrs Kirkwood complained in the big house. ‘We can abandon any hope of sleep tonight.’

‘They’re entitled to the night,’ her husband argued. ‘It’s a pity Eddie’s father isn’t around. He would have greatly enjoyed the night. They’ve had a famous victory.’

‘And they use it to get drunk! Is that a way to celebrate decently? Listen to that din down in the yard.’

‘I think you are too hard on them, Elisabeth,’ William Kirkwood countered gently.

At that time Annie May was too young to go to the dances and Eddie Mac had not yet the reputation of a womanizer. He went with the one girl, Kathleen Duignan. She was tall and dark and they looked like brother and sister. As the Duignans owned land, they were a class above the Macs, and when Kathleen Duignan went to England at Christmas it was thought she had thrown Eddie over. He was never to go with another girl for so long.

A few months later, a torn knee in spring training was to end his football glory. Without him the team struggled through the early rounds of the championship, and when he returned for the semi-final he played poorly. The injury did not affect his walk but showed as soon as he tried to sprint or leap. His whole game was based on speed and anticipation. He had neither taste nor appetite for the rough and tumble. Now that his deadly grace was gone, his style of hanging back till the last moment looked like cowardice. As soon as it was plain that the cup was about to be lost, Eddie was taunted and jeered every time he went near the ball by the same people that had chaired him shoulder high from the field the year before. On the surface he showed no feeling, and walked stone-faced from the field; but on the following Wednesday, the evening every week he walked to the village to collect his copy of the Herald and to buy in a few groceries, he put his studded boots, football socks, togs, bandages in his green and red jersey, and by drawing the sleeves round and knotting them tightly made it a secure bundle, which he dropped in the deepest arch as he crossed the bridge into the village, only waiting long enough after the splash to be certain it had sunk.

A gentle and even more final end came that September to Mrs Kirkwood. She had gone with her book to sit in the rocking chair in front of the library window ‘in the one hour of the day selfishly my own’. When she did not come down to the kitchen at her usual time, Annie May waited for half an hour before going up to the front room. The chair was still imperceptibly rocking before the window, but the book had fallen, and when she called there was no answer. An intense stillness was in the room. Even the spaces between the beech trees down the rich avenue seemed to gaze back in their emptiness, and she ran shouting for help to the yard.

The formal heart of the house, perhaps the heart of the house itself, stopped with Mrs Kirkwood. William Kirkwood and his son seemed only too glad not to have to go out to dinner any more, and they no longer received people at the house. They took all their meals in the big kitchen and did not dress up even on Sunday. Old William’s sole interest for years had been his bees. Now he was able to devote himself to them exclusively; and his son, who had lost money introducing a new strain of Cheviots to the farm and running it according to the tenets of his agricultural college, let it fall back into the hands of Eddie Mac, who ran it on the traditional lines of his father before him, not making money but losing none. All Master William’s time now turned back to a boyhood fascination with astronomy, and he pursued the stars with much the same gentle, singular dedication as his father accorded the bees, ordering books and instruments, entering into correspondence with other amateur astronomers. He spent most clear nights out in the fields examining the stars through a long telescope fixed on a tripod.

Freed from Mrs Kirkwood’s disapproval of all that went on in the village, Annie May was now able to go to the dances. She was large and plain but had her admirers, young men off farms — and some young no longer but without any sense of their ageing, who judged cattle from the rear and preferred a good armful to any lustre of eye or line of cheekbone or throat. Her eyes were still only for Eddie Mac, but he did not even smile or nod to her in the hall. She would see him standing among the other men at the back of the hall, smoking lazily as his eyes went over the girls that danced past. Sometimes he just stood there for the whole night, not taking any girl out to dance, but when he did almost always that girl went with him. If the girl turned him down, unlike the other men, he never went in pursuit of another but quietly retraced his steps to the back of the hall, and soon afterwards he would leave alone. In those years, ‘Who will Eddie Mac try tonight?’ was one of the excitements of the dancehall. He seldom went with the same girl twice.

There was a later time, after it was clear that Annie May was likely to be running the big Georgian house for a very long time, when he would ask her to dance because it was politic. ‘As an oul neighbour with another oul neighbour,’ he would joke; but she was cooking him his midday meal now, which he took with the Kirkwoods in the kitchen. He knew that he could have her whenever he wanted, but her ample, wholesome looks were too plain and they lived and worked too close to one another.

Then came another time when the nights Eddie Mac could dance with one girl and expect her to go with him disappeared. Nights came that saw him take girl after girl out, and none would have him. It was not so much that his dark good looks had coarsened but that he had become too well known over the years in this small place. And a night eventually found him dancing with Annie May, no longer ‘as an oul neighbour with another oul neighbour’ but as man and woman. The air was thick with dust that had been carried in on shoes and beaten into a fine powder; the yellow light gentle from the tin reflectors behind the row of paraffin lamps around the walls. The coins had been already counted into a neat stack of blue paper bags on the card table at the door.

‘I suppose I can hardly ask to leave you home since we are going to the same old place anyhow,’ he proposed almost ruefully, and she found herself blushing all over. It was what she had never dared to hope in all the years.

They passed together through the village, the music from the dancehall still following them; but then the national anthem beat stridently in the night air, and suddenly all was silent. Here and there cautious whispers of lovers drifted from the shelter of walls. The village was mostly sleeping. One thin line of yellow along the blind told that there was after-hour drinking in Charlie’s. A man keeping a lookout for the law cast an exploratory cough in their direction at Shivnan’s forge, but they went by in silence. As they crossed the stone bridge from the dancehall, they saw the lights of bicycles slowly scattering. Below them, the quiet river slid out in silence towards the level sedgelands and the wilder Shannon.

‘Now that they’ve stood up like fools for the Soldier’s Song they can all go home in peace,’ Eddie Mac remarked.

After a mile, they left the road and took the path through the fields to the house. It was a dark, windless night, without moon or star, but they could both walk this path in their sleep.