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

‘As there was no answer, I let myself in,’ she apologized.

‘You were as well,’ he responded.

When she said to him that night, ‘You might get finer women, but you’ll never find another who’ll love you as much as I’ll love you,’ he knew it to be true in some far-off sense of goodness; but it was not his truth. He saw the child at her breast, the faltering years ahead with the Kirkwoods. He shut it out of his mind.

It was still dark and raining heavily when he put the cattle on the road in the morning. All he had with him was a stick and small bundle. The first miles were the worst. Several times he had to cross into the fields and run alongside the cattle where the walls were broken, their hooves sliding on the road as they raced and checked. It was much easier once they tired and it started to get light. The tanglers looking to buy the cattle cheap before they reached the fair tried to halt him on the outskirts of the town, but with a curse he brushed past them towards the Green. People had put tables and ladders out all along the street to the Green to protect doors and windows. He found a corner along the wall at the very top of the Green. All he had to do now was wait, his clothes stuck to his back with perspiration and rain. As the cattle quietened after their long, hard run, their hooves sore and bleeding, they started to reach up and pluck at the ivy on the wall.

He had to hang around till noon to get the true price. Though the attempts at bargaining attracted onlookers and attention, to sell the cattle quickly and cheaply would have been even more dangerous still, and it was not his way.

‘Do you have any more where those came from?’ the big Northern dealer in red cattle boots asked finally as he counted out the notes in a bar off the Green.

‘No. Those don’t come often,’ Eddie Mac replied as he peeled a single note from the wad and handed the luck penny back. The whiskey that sealed the bargain he knocked quickly back. The train was due at three.

Afterwards no one remembered seeing him at the station. He had waited outside among the cars until the train pulled in, and then walked straight on. Each time the tickets were being checked he went to the WC, but he would have paid quietly if challenged. He had more money in his inside pocket than he had ever had in his whole life before.

From Westland Row he walked to the B&I terminal on the river and bought a single ticket to Liverpool a few minutes before the boat was due to sail. When the boat was about an hour out to sea, he began to feel cold with the day’s tiredness and went to the bar and ordered whiskey. Warmed by the whiskey, he could see as simply back as forward.

The whole place would be ablaze with talk once it got out about the cattle. The Kirkwoods alone would remain quiet. ‘His poor father worked here. He was a boy here, grew up here, how could he go and do what he has done?’ old William would say. He had nothing against the Kirkwoods, but they were fools. The old lady was the only one with a bit of iron. When Annie May had to tell them the business, they’d no more think of putting her out on the road than they’d be able to put a dog or a cat out. He could even see them start to get fond of the child by the time it started to wander round the big stone house, old William taking it down by the hand to look at the bees.

‘Nursing the hard stuff?’ a man next to him at the bar inquired.

‘That’s right.’ He didn’t want to be drawn into any talk. ‘Nursing it well.’

The boat would get into Liverpool in the morning. Though it would take them days yet to figure out what had happened, he would travel on to Manchester before getting a haircut and change of clothes. From Manchester the teeming cities of the North stretched out: Leeds, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Glasgow. He would get work. He had no need to work for a long time, but he would still get work. Those not in need always got work before the people who needed it most. It was a fool’s world.

The Sergeant and Guard Deasy would call to the big stone house. They would write down dates and information in a notebook and they would search through the herdsman’s house. They would find nothing. A notice would be circulated for him, with a photo. All the photos they would find would be old, taken in his footballing days. They would never find him. Who was ever found out of England! That circular they would put out would be about as useful as hope in hell.

Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Glasgow — they were like cards spread out on a green table. His only regret was that he hadn’t hit out for one of them years before. He would miss nothing. If he missed anything, it would probably be the tongued boards of the ceiling he had never managed to count. In those cities a man could stay lost for ever and victory could still be found.

There might well have been no other room in the big stone house but the kitchen, as the rain beat on the slates and windows, swirled about the yard outside. Dampened coats were laid against the foot of the back door, and the panelled oak door that led to the rest of the house was locked because of the faulty handle, the heavy key in the lock. A wood fire flickered in the open door of the huge old range which was freshly black-leaded, its brass fittings gleaming; and beside it Annie May Moran, servant to the Kirkwoods since she was fourteen, sat knitting a brown jersey for her daughter, occasionally bending down to feed logs to the range from a cane basket by her side. At the corner of the long deal table closest to the fire, William Kirkwood sat with her daughter Lucy, helping the child with school exercises. They were struggling more with one another than with algebra, the girl resisting every enticement to understand the use of symbols, but the man was endlessly patient. He spread coins out on the table, then an array of fresh walnuts, and finally took green cooking apples from a bucket. Each time he moved the coins, the nuts, the apples into separate piles she watched him with the utmost suspicion, but each time was forced into giving the correct answer to the simple subtraction by being made to count; but once he substituted x and y for the coins and fruit no number of demonstrations could elicit an answer, and when pressed she avoided understanding with wild guesses.

‘You are just being stubborn, Lucy. Sticking your heels in, as usual,’ he was forced at length to concede to her.

‘It’s all right for you, but I’m no good at maths,’ she responded angrily.

‘It’s not that you’re no good. It’s that you don’t want to understand. I don’t know what’s wrong with you. It seems almost a perversity.’

‘I can’t understand.’

‘Now Lucy. You can’t talk to Master William like that,’ Annie May said. She still called him Master William though he was now forty-five and last of the Kirkwoods.

‘It’s all right, Annie May. It’d be worth it all if we could get her to understand. She refuses to understand.’

‘It’s all right for you to say that, Master William.’ Lucy laughed.

‘Now, what’s next?’ he hurried her. ‘English and church history?’

‘English and catechism notes for tomorrow,’ she corrected.

English she loved, and they raced through the exercises. She was tall and strong for her thirteen years and had boyish good looks. When they came to the doctrinal notes, it was plain that he was taking more interest in the exercises than the pupil. Through helping Lucy with these exercises in the evenings, he had first become interested in the Catholic Church. In a way, it had been the first step to his impending conversion. He smiled with pure affection on the girl as she tidied all her books into her leather satchel, and after the three had tea and buttered bread together she came into his arms to kiss him goodnight with the same naturalness as on every night since she had been a small child and he had read her stories. When Annie May unlocked the panelled door, a rush of cold met them from the rest of the house, and she hurried to take the hot water jar and the lighted candle in its blue tin holder to show the child to her upstairs room.