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

‘Is there anything wrong with me dress today, Captain?’ he shouted out as he came close. His walk was awkward because of the hayfork hidden behind his back.

‘No, Francie. We are not in uniform today,’ William Kirkwood replied mildly, not knowing what to make of the apparition. Then a cheer went up from behind the roadside hedge and the whole company of men swarmed into the field. Another man was opening the gate to let in an extra horse and raker. Haycocks started to spring up the field before the shouting, joking, cursing, jostling tide of men. Lucy was sent racing to the house to tell Annie May to start making sandwiches. William himself went to Charlie’s for a half-barrel of porter. Long before night the whole field was swept clean. After the men had gone William Kirkwood walked the field, saw all the haycocks raked and tied down.

‘That would take you and me most of a week, Lucy, and we’d probably lose half of it,’ he said in his reflective way, almost humbly.

The promised rain arrived by evening. Its rhythmic beating on the slates brought him no anxiety. He heard it fall like heartsease, and slept.

The same help arrived to bring the hay in from the fields, and they came for the compulsory wheat and root crops as well. Not even in the best years, when they could afford to take on plenty of labour, had the whole work of summer and harvest gone so easily. To return the favours, since none of the men would accept money, William Kirkwood had to go in turn to the other farms. Each time that she wasn’t allowed to go with him Lucy was furious and sulked for days. He was no use at heavy labouring work on the farms, and he was never subjected to the cruelty of competition with other men, but he had an understanding of machinery that sometimes made him more useful than stronger men. As well as by his new military rank, he was protected by the position that the Kirkwoods had held for generations and had never appeared to abuse. He was a novelty in the fields, a source of talk and gossip against the relentless monotony of the work and days. His strangeness and gentle manners made him exceedingly popular with the girls and women, and the distance he always kept, like the unavailability of a young priest, only increased his attractiveness. After the years of isolation, he seemed very happy amid all the new bustle and, for the first time in years, he found that the land was actually making money. At Christmas he offered Annie May a substantial sum as a sort of reparation for the meagre pay she had been receiving unchanged for years. This she indignantly refused.

‘It was pay enough for me to be let stay on here all these years without a word. I wouldn’t ever want to insult you, but I’ll throw that sort of money on the floor if you force it on me.’

‘Well then, we’ll take Lucy to the town. She’s no longer a child. She needs a whole new outfit like the other girls.’

‘Isn’t she all right the way she is? All it’ll do is give her notions. What’ll notions do in her place but bring in trouble!’

She would take nothing for herself, but on Lucy she yielded. They went together to Boles. Annie May had never set foot in Boles before and she was awed into silence, starting with fright each time the pulleys sent the brass cups hurtling along the wires to the cashier in her glass case above in the shop, starting again each time the cups came crashing back with receipts and change. With much help from Mrs Boles, and the confused choices of Lucy, it was William himself who decided the outfit, old Boles all the time hovering around at the sight of the last of the Kirkwoods.

‘I was only that height when I used see your dear mother come into the shop. Oh, she was a lady,’ rubbing his hands, the eternal red rose in his buttonhole seemingly never affected by winter or summer.

‘You look beautiful, Lucy, but I hate to see you growing up,’ William complimented the girl simply. Lucy blushed and went to kiss him on the lips, but he found that he was hardly able to lift her into his arms.

The first Sunday she went to Mass and the rails in this outfit she created an even greater sensation than did William when he first stood as just another workman in one of his neighbour’s fields.

The war ground on with little effect. The activities of the local Force were now routine: the three weeks in Finner Camp, rifle competitions, drill on Thursday evenings, rifle practice on Sunday afternoons — firing from the Oakport shore at targets set in the back of McCabe’s Hill. On certain Sunday mornings the Force assembled in full dress at the Hall, marched through the village to the church, where they stood on guard in front of the altar during the sung Mass, presenting arms before and after the consecration. Captain Kirkwood marched his men through the village on these Sundays, but at the church door turned over his command to the schoolteacher, Lieutenant McLoughlin, and remained outside until Mass had ended. Now that he had become such a part of the people it was felt that such a pointed difference was a little sad. This was brought up in bumbling fashion to William’s face by Garda Sergeant Moran in Charlie’s front room or parlour one Sunday after rifle practice. It was usual for the whole company to go to Charlie’s for a drink after these Sunday practices. The men drank standing up behind the wooden partition that separated the bar from the grocery, but the two officers, Captain Kirkwood and Lieutenant McLoughlin, sat with the Garda Sergeant around the big oval table in the front room. The Sergeant attended these rifle practices to make sure that certain safety precautions were observed. He had been drinking after Mass, and had made a nuisance of himself at the practice, wandering around during firing looking for someone to talk to, but as he did not come under his command there was very little Captain Kirkwood could do. As soon as Charlie brought the whiskeys to the front room, the Sergeant began: ‘Before the war, William, you were there on your own in that big house, helping nobody, getting no help. Now you’re in with everybody. Only for your being a Protestant, there’d not be the slightest difference now between you and the rest of us. I fear it takes war to bring people to their senses.’

Lieutenant McLoughlin was searching furiously for some phrase to stifle the embarrassing speech, a verbal continuation of the nuisance they had been subjected to all day when William Kirkwood drily remarked, ‘Actually, Sergeant, I’m seriously considering becoming a Catholic, but not, I’m afraid, in the interests of conformity,’ which brought a stunned silence to the room even more embarrassing than the Sergeant’s speech.

To remark that it was a little sad that such a pointed difference still stood out was polite weak sentiment; for William Kirkwood to turn Catholic was alarming. It broke the law that everybody stayed within the crowd they were born into, like the sparrows or blackbirds. They changed for a few reasons, and for those reasons only, money or position, mostly inseparable anyway, and love , if it can be called love when the instinct fastens on one person and will commit any madness to obtain its desire. Catholics had turned Protestant for money or position, it was an old sore and taunt; but the only reason a Protestant was ever known to turn was in order to marry. They had even a living effigy of it within the parish, the Englishman Sinclair, who had married one of the Conways, his poor wife telling the people in Boyle he had gone to Mass in Cootehall, then fibbing to the Cootehall people that he went to Mass in Boyle, when the whole world knew that he was at home toasting his shins and criticizing everything and everybody within sight: ‘It was no rush of faith that led to my conversion. I was dragged into your Apostolic Roman Catholic Church by my male member,’ he would shout and chuckle.