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

She had not eaten, but even after she had cleared the table and washed and put away the dishes she still had little appetite. She drank a mug of coffee with a slice of fruit cake as she stared out on the empty yard. It was already late in the afternoon when she rose, washed the mug, closed the door, and went heavily down the steps into the dull heat of the yard.

She found him at the corner of the stables waiting with an eagerness he hadn’t shown for weeks, a blue cloth coat he sometimes wore to the fair on his arm. They went silently into the orchard, picking a place in the high grass away from the beaten path that ran from the gate to the pale row of beehives facing south under the far ivy-covered wall. A clump of wild raspberries that had spread right up to the outer branches of the russet trees gave added cover, though no one in the world would find them there this blessed day.

‘You see, it’s washed.’ He offered her the blue coat to feel with about as much tenderness as it was ever possible for him to show before he spread it on the ground.

‘It’s as cool here as on any river,’ he said as he reached for her. ‘As cool as on any river. They can have the fields and anything they want. This is happiness,’ he said in a heavy, hoarsely rhythmic tone as he moved above her. ‘This is the centre, centre of everything, they can have all else they want.’

‘Then I must be part of that centre too,’ she said quietly out of the same dull defeat she had felt alone in the big kitchen, not caring about the words she had said.

He stopped in pure amazement. He could not have looked more taken aback if the deep earth itself had stirred and spoken. For a moment, she thought he was about to strike her, but all he did was quickly straighten his clothes and turn his back to her in the long grass. The oppressive silence was at length broken by the sound of the small orchard gate being opened and closed. Old William came slowly down the worn path between the trees. He was going to the hives, dressed all in white, his white beard tucked beneath the suit, the frame of the veil resting on an old straw hat, the long gloves tied with twine below the elbow. He carried a hive tool and smoker, pausing now and then to fan the smoker as he walked slowly along.

From the shelter of the grass and wild canes they watched him go through the hives. His slow care somehow took away some of the oppression. Each time he lifted a roof, a thin stream of bees would move towards the veil. He paid them no attention, working methodically through the hives, sometimes having to use the tool to prise the frames apart, now and again turning his back to the sun to hold up the frames to the light. When he had gone through all the hives, and the bees were quietly working again, he lifted an old wooden chair out of the grass and sat to one side, staring directly into the flight path, the way people lean on bridges to watch water flow below.

‘What’s he doing?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. Just watching. He could sit that way for hours. Once I asked him what they were doing. “They’re killing off the drones today, Edward,” he said. ‘You’d think he was talking about the weather.’

‘Still, he sells part of the honey to Sloans,’ she said. ‘They buy some of his sections every year.’

‘For what? For pennies. Mostly he has to feed it back to the bloody bees. Or give it away. The only certain thing about anything the Kirkwoods ever turn their hand to is that it is guaranteed to be perfectly useless.’

They watched old William rise from the chair, remove the hat and veil, freeing a few bees caught in the mesh with his fine, long fingers. He turned the chair upside down again in the grass and came slowly up the orchard. The sun had already gone down behind the walls. They too soon rose, smoothed the stains and bits of grasses from their clothes, and left in opposite directions. Annie May had changed much from the night she had come with Eddie Mac from the dance, but she still held on to a dull hope, and she was beginning to fear that she was with child.

Soon she was certain, and yet she put off telling Eddie. They hired four casual yardmen for the harvest. All her time seemed to go in preparing meals. There was a time when Eddie used to flirt with her in front of the workmen, but now he just ate morosely and silently.

One day she was coming through the yard with a hurriedly gathered bag of green cooking apples for the men’s dessert when she heard cheering from the cattle pen. Eddie Mac was in the centre of the pen, his arm round the neck of a young black bull, his free hand gripping its nostrils, the delicate membrane between finger and thumb. The cheering of the men around the pen rose as he slowly forced the struggling animal to its knees, but then suddenly, either through loss of his footing or the terrified animal gathering all its strength into a last surge, he was thrown violently against the steel bars, and the bull broke loose. He wasn’t hurt. He rose at once to race after the bull, to rain kicks at its mouth and throat, the cornered animal bellowing for the rest of the herd as it tried to lift its head away from the blows.

She grew so afraid that she found herself shaking. The fear stayed with her all through the day as she cooked and served and washed. Because she could stand the fear no longer she told him in the evening what she had been putting off for weeks.

He did not look at her as she spoke. He had known from that first night he took her that it would end with his being driven out. He had been expecting it from the very beginning. His only surprise was that it had taken so long.

‘How much time is there?’ he asked.

‘Four months. Maybe a little more.’ It was such relief to her that he had listened so quietly. Then she found herself pressing for a wild, common happiness. ‘We could do up the small house. Families were brought up in it before. It’d need very little change. I could go on working in the big house. They’d probably be only glad of it. It’d mean the two of us were settled.’

‘Don’t worry. Everything will work itself out,’ he said, and she began to cry. ‘We’ll have to think things out. It’ll take time,’ he said.

‘Time?’

‘We have to see the priest if we’re to be settled. Banns will have to be read, certificates got, a lot of things. The harvest business will be all over here in a few days. The yardmen will be let go the end of the week. Then we can start to think.’

‘Everything will be all right, then.’ She could hardly believe her own happiness.

‘You don’t have to worry about a single thing. Once this week is over everything will be taken care of.’

‘I was afraid,’ she said. ‘Now I can’t believe that everything is going to turn out so good.’

He had been through this before. There was only one difference between this time and the other times. All the other times it was the girls that had to stir themselves and make for England. This time he would have to disappear into England.

That night, after she had gone, he lay for a long time fully clothed on the iron bed in the bare three-roomed house, smoking cigarette after cigarette, though he usually smoked little, staring up at the tongued boards of the ceiling. As a boy he had tried to count right across the ceiling, often by the leaping firelight on a winter’s night, but he had never managed to complete a single count, always losing the count among the maze of boards at the centre. Tonight he had no need to count so far. Today had been Monday, the second of the month. Tomorrow: Tuesday. Then Wednesday. The fair of Boyle was held on the first Thursday of every month. That was three days away.

The evening before the fair he picked six of the finest black two-year-olds from the fields, the prize cattle of the farm, and penned them by the road, a rough pen he and his father had put together years before with old railway sleepers. After he closed the pen, he threw hay in a corner so that the cattle would stay quiet through the night. He had been given such a free hand running the land for so long that no one questioned him about the cattle. When he came in it was already dark and rain had started to fall. He found Annie May ahead of him in the house. Though no lamp was lit, she had stirred the fire and a kettle was boiling. The little table that hung on iron trestles from the wall had been lifted down. Cups and plates were set. She had brought food from the big house.