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

‘What do you think of all this?’ Mrs Waldron said as she stroked the cat stretched like a lion on the dashboard of the car. The black cat suddenly yawned, rose to her feet and looked gravely down on the surging water of the Sound.

The cottage was by a stream beyond the village, well below the road, which gave some protection against the storms. At high tide the ocean covered the rocks on the other side of the raised road. When the tide was out, there was a long, bright strand between two curving headlands. The cottage was whitewashed in the traditional way, with a blue stone slate roof and a small porch in front. A garage had been added to the side that faced the stream, and a large living room and bathroom were hidden at the back. Mrs Waldron loved the slow, crunching sound the car tyres made as they rolled down to the porch.

Each morning, before Eileen left for work in Castlebar, the two women rose and had breakfast together. ‘I know there’s no need for me to get up so early, but it helps give shape to the day.’ After Eileen left, Mrs Waldron tidied the house, fed the cat in the shelter of the porch, watching her with an amusement that was pure affection as she performed her toilet, with ceremony and great gravity, in the black earth beneath the escallonias. Then Mrs Waldron read. Even during the busiest times of her young life in the town, if she had not managed to set at least an hour aside for reading she felt that the day had lacked concentration, had somehow been dissipated and lost.

Now her only interruptions were rare telephone calls — and when her reading brought her face to face with some affection or sharp memory. ‘She had done more than she wanted to, less than she ought.’ She found herself repeating the sentence long after she had closed the book, seeing elements of her own life and people she knew reflected in it, elements of that life seen and given a moral sweetness that was close to smiling.

‘Smith told me he’s given up reading!’ her husband informed her boisterously one evening years ago after he came home from the hospital.

‘What’s so funny about that?’

‘He told me it’s too passive. He’s going to concentrate on hill and mountain climbing!’

‘Then he’ll be happier climbing.’

‘Oh, love, don’t be so serious.’ He tried to waltz her away from whatever she was preparing for dinner.

‘Are you sure you’ve not been drinking?’

‘Not a drop. But I intend to have a stiff drink before dinner. We have to examine Smith’s momentous decision. Will you join me?’

Without reading, she would feel her whole life now to be spiritually idle. All through their marriage she and her husband had talked to one another about the good things that they’d happened upon, that lightened and deepened life, gave recognition and pleasure.

After a light lunch she rested and then set out on her walk. In all but the worst weather she walked, and never varied it unless the wind forced her in another direction, but these walks were never as enjoyable as the ones she and her husband took together in the last years when they were alone.

She went by the harbour. It was empty now of boats except for four old curraghs resting upside down on concrete blocks, roped down against the storms. There were a few wooden crayfish creels along the short pier wall and these were also weighted down, as was some torn and tangled netting. Passing the harbour she could choose between several sheep paths through the heather, but generally she went by the path closest to the ocean. The only person she met on her walks that February was a little old man in green oilskins with a pair of binoculars. Always he was in the same place, resting in the shelter of a big boulder and looking out to sea. Only after she’d passed him several times did he look at her and nod. Then, sometimes, she was the first to smile and nod. He seemed pleased, but still they did not speak. She thought he might be a relic, like herself, who had taken up bird-watching, or someone just fascinated by the power and beauty of the ocean, ever changing. What did he see there?

A school fife-and-drum band marching past the cottage to early Mass woke both mother and daughter to St Patrick’s Day. The weather was warmer. People suddenly seemed to be in better spirits. Along all the cottages on the road to the harbour, people were digging their kitchen gardens, spreading manure and seaweed, shovelling the rich, black earth. Some waved to her with their spades or shovels as she passed.

‘God bless the work.’

‘And you, too, Missus, when you’re at it.’

At the harbour they were scraping and tarring the boats. A man was lovingly measuring a square of calico over weakened timbers before covering it with a boiling mixture of tar and pitch from a tin jug. She loved the smell of the boiling tar in the sea air. There was a crazy doctor by the name of Doorley she remembered from her childhood who believed in the healing properties of tar, and each summer he tarred his ten children from head to toe. All of them were disturbed in later life. One became a beggar on the roads. Two committed suicide. Though her father, who was also a medical doctor, and others complained about his behaviour, nobody was able or willing to bring it to a stop. Everybody was too afraid. Authority could not be questioned then, especially when vested in a priest or doctor. How rapidly all that had changed. Sometimes she could hardly believe it had all taken place in the brief space of a lifetime.

As soon as the weather turned, the man with binoculars discarded his green oilskins for a thick jersey of unwashed grey wool with a worn black suit and a cloth cap. One day she stopped to talk to him, and the stop became almost mandatory. He had worked all his life in England, near Didcot, on buildings and line maintenance. Tommy McHugh was his name. He had five children, all grown. When they were growing up he saw them at Christmas and a few weeks each summer. During the war he didn’t see his family for four years. A child conceived during one visit was three years old when he next returned. Dog-tired after the boat and train journey, he woke in the morning to see a small boy standing at the foot of the bed, saying to all who’d listen, ‘That’s my Daddy!’ His wife and he had never lived together until he returned for good. She thought it must have been hard for them to come together after such absences, but she noticed he never talked about his wife unless she reflected a part of his own life.

‘Is it the colours you watch or the sea birds or just the ocean itself?’

‘I’d not be stupid enough to be watching anything like that,’ he replied slowly, a sly smile in his eyes. He looked at her with approval, as if she had laid a clever trap and he had danced clear. ‘I’d have no taste for watching anything like that. I’d be watching those sheep over there.’ He gestured towards the Head and handed her the binoculars. What were white specks beforehand grew into clear shapes.

‘Sheep are very stupid animals,’ he confided. ‘Hardly a week goes by but one of them doesn’t fall off.’

‘What do you do then?’

‘Sometimes you can get them back on their feet. More times they’re finished.’

‘Are you not too far off here?’

‘You can see better from here than on the Head, and it’s a cruel climb. The trouble is that it’s a very tasty bit of land.’

From that day on he always handed her the binoculars to look at the sheep. Over and over he told her about his hard life in England, the monies he sent home out of every pay-packet, how difficult it was to pass the time after work, but fortunately there was everlasting overtime.

One day he had with him a beautiful black-and-white collie pup on a long line of binder twine, timid and anxious to please, its coat woolly still, and before long she found herself looking forward to seeing it each day. At first, the man was enamoured: he was going to train it into the best working dog on the island. But during the weeks that followed, as the pup grew into a young, eager dog, and the training proceeded, complaints replaced the early in-loveness and praise. Sometimes the collie was ‘as stupid as the sheep’ he rushed and scattered. She observed how self-absorbed the man was, how impatient. Increasingly, she disliked that the young dog was in his control. She found herself wondering what his wife was like and how had she coped with his return? Thinking of the man and his life, and the dog and sheep, without warning, a buried memory of her father scattered the day. It was summer. She was home from college. Her father was late returning from a round of sick calls. Lunch was already on the table, and she was standing with her mother in the open bay window, when her father’s car came up the laurelled avenue and turned on the big square of gravel. Instead of coming straight into the house, he went around the car and took a whole side of lamb from the boot, placing a towel on his shoulder to carry it proudly in. The lamb was probably some payment in kind.