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

Eileen returned to her work in Castlebar. Several times Mrs Waldron set out to walk, but each time found herself without heart to go further than the small harbour. She was ashamed of her own grief, the continual sense of absence instead of presence, glancing down at the stream and seeing only the bare stones by the pools.

Then one morning she woke up determined to walk the whole way out along the cliffs. The previous evening Eileen told her that she wanted to invite John Quinn to lunch the following Sunday. She looked forward with an excitement that was as much apprehension as curiosity, and knew that most of the weekend would go into planning the lunch.

She read all morning, made a light lunch and set out. ‘A mind lively and at ease can look out on nothing, and that nothing will always answer back.’ Was her mind at ease? Love was ever watchful. But was there a final going out of the light, a turning of the face to the earth? The light would belong to others then. They would watch. They would walk in the light.

She climbed away from the harbour, at once meeting the stiff breeze from the ocean, and was so intent on her path that before she noticed him she was beside Tommy McHugh. His face glowed with pleasure, and he came forward with an outstretched hand.

‘You’re welcome back. I was beginning to be afraid something had happened to you. There’s not many of our kind left now.’

‘My daughter came back from France. And we’ve had many visitors,’ she said almost by way of apology.

‘You’re welcome back anyhow.’

‘Where’s Shep today?’ she asked after a pause.

‘It got so bad he’d do nothing I’d tell him. He was driving those sheep mad. So I took him … I took him and threw him — and threw him over the cliff, and I have peace ever since.’

She heard and didn’t hear. She could see the petrified black-and-white shape blur in the air as it was flung out over the water. She had to get away quickly.

‘Well. I’m glad to see you too,’ she said as she started to move away.

There was something about the abruptness of her leaving, her distracted air, that displeased Tommy McHugh. He followed her disappearing figure for a long time, then said in the singsong, confiding voice he had often used with the young collie when the two of them were sitting alone together above the ocean: ‘I don’t believe any of that stuff about the daughter coming from France, or the visitors. I wouldn’t entertain it for even one holy, eternal minute. Let me tell you something for nothing, lad. Let me tell it to you for now and for ever and for world without end, Amen, deliver us, lad, that yon old bird is on her sweet effing way out,’ he declared to the absent collie in a voice that sang out that they alone among all the creatures of the earth would never have to go that way.

It is very quiet here. Nothing much ever happens. We have learned to tell the cries of the birds and the animals, the wing-beats of the swans crossing the house, the noises of the different motors that batter about on the roads. Not many people like this quiet. There’s a constant craving for word of every sound and sighting and any small happening. Then, when something violent and shocking happens, nobody will speak at all after the first shock wave passes into belief. Eyes usually wild for every scrap of news and any idle word will turn away or search the ground.

When the Harkins returned with their three children to live in the town after Guard Harkin’s heart attack on Achill, they were met with goodwill and welcome. The wedding of Kate Ruttledge to Guard Harkin, ten years before, had been the highlight of that summer. A young, vigorous man struck down without warning elicited natural sympathy. Concern circled idly round them — would Kate take up work again, would he find lighter work? — as if they were garden plants hit with blight or an early frost. The young guard, an established county footballer with Mayo when he came to the town, was tipped by many as a possible future all-star. We’d watched Kate grow up across the lake, go away to college in Dublin and come home again to work in Gannon’s, the solicitors, turning into a dark beauty before our eyes. She was running Gannon’s office at the time they met, and was liked by almost everybody. The excitement that ran through the town and near countryside when Harkin declared for the local club was felt everywhere. Excitement grew to fever over the summer as he led the team from victory to victory, until he lifted high the beribboned silver cup in Carrick on the last Sunday in September. Nineteen long years of disappointment and defeat had been suddenly kicked away, and the whole town went wild for the best part of a week.

Kate, who had shown no interest in sport of any kind up till then, spent every Sunday of that rainy summer travelling to football matches all over the country. She’d seen Harkin prostrate on the field at Castlebar when Mayo lost in the Connacht Final, but everywhere else she attended was victory and triumph. She’d witnessed men and boys look long and deep into his face, lost in the circle and dream of his fame. She’d held her breath as she’d seen him ride the shoulders of running mobs bearing him in triumph from the pitches. There were times when he fell injured on the field, and she could hardly breathe until she saw him walk again when he was lifted to his feet.

On an October Sunday at the end of the football season Kate took him out to the farm above the lake to meet Maggie and James for the first time. They parked the car at the lake gate to walk the curving path through the fields above the water and down to the house in its shelter of trees. Girls didn’t take men to their homes at the time unless they had made up their minds to marry. These visits were always tense and delicate because they were at once a statement of intent and a plea for approval. There was little Kate had ever been denied. Now all her desires and dreams were fixed on this one man. In her eyes he stood without blemish. These small fields above the lake were part of her life. Away from here she often walked them in her mind, and, without her noticing, this exercise had gradually replaced the earlier exercise of prayer. She was light, almost tearful with happiness as she closed the lake gate. Now she was leading her beloved through the actual fields to meet the two people who meant most to her in the world, and she felt as close to Harkin and as certain of her choice as she was of her own life. The lake below them was like a mirror. The air was heavy and still. The yellow leaves of the thorns were scattered everywhere with the reds of the briars and the thick browns of the small oaks. Blackbirds and thrushes racketed in the hedges. A robin sang on a thorn.

‘What do you think of the place?’ she asked as they crossed the hill to go down under the tall hedges to the house.

‘It’s a bit backward and quiet,’ he said. ‘The views, though, are great. They’d pay money to have this in the middle of a city.’

In the house the young guard was polite, even deferential, as he enquired about the fields and the lakes and the cattle. Her father, James, was quiet and attentive, asking in his turn about the sheep and cattle they kept on the Mayo farm the guard had grown up on. Maggie was herself as always, quietly there, large and easy, withdrawing only to make the sandwiches and tea. Whiskey was offered, but at that time Harkin did not drink. Already he felt comfortable in the house. It was a house where he felt he wasn’t expected to be anything other than himself. There was a generous side to the guard’s nature; among footballers he was known as an unselfish player. After they’d eaten, and he’d praised the tea and the sandwiches, he felt moved in some clouded way to give something of himself back for the simple courtesy he had been shown. The generous virtues are at times more ruinous than vices.