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

James had married into the place and he cared for the fields more than if they were his own. Not only were he and Maggie man and wife but they were each other’s best friend. ‘I should never have been away. I should have been at home minding my own business,’ Maggie complained bitterly for months and could not be consoled.

‘You shouldn’t take it so hard. A boy has come in so that an old man can go out,’ one of those foolish people who have a word for everything said.

‘He was not old to me,’ she cried.

Harkin was in the newspapers again, but not the sports pages. He had been with his friend Guard McCarthy late one night when their patrol car was called to a disturbance at an itinerant encampment on the outskirts of the town. A huge fire of car tyres and burning branches lit up the vans and mobile homes, the cars and mounds of metal scrap. Stones and burning branches were thrown at the Garda car. They radioed for reinforcements before getting out.

The guards said that as soon as they left the car they were set upon by youths and men wielding sticks and iron bars. All the itinerant witnesses swore that both guards had jumped from the car with drawn batons and provoked the assault. In the bloody fight that followed, the guards stood and fought back to back, the short, leaded batons thonged to their wrists. When the reinforcements arrived, three tinkers lay unconscious on the ground. The rest of the men had escaped into the fields, and McCarthy and Harkin were being attacked by a crowd of hysterical women. McCarthy’s face was covered with blood. He had a serious head wound. An ear hung loose. Harkin’s left arm was broken, and he was cut and bruised.

When one of the tinkers died in hospital without recovering consciousness, a terrible furore started in the newspapers, on the radio and television. Itinerants’ rights organizations denounced the two guards and Garda treatment of itinerants in general. At the trial the guards were exonerated of criminal wrongdoing. Whether excessive force was used or not remained unanswered. Once the uproar subsided, an internal Garda inquiry was held after a civil action brought by the itinerant families was settled out of court. As a result, McCarthy was transferred to a coastal town under the Cork-Kerry mountains. Harkin was sent to Achill Island. Any lingering hope he held of advancement in the Force was gone.

On Achill the heart attack came without warning. For several weeks it was touch and go whether he’d live or die. He came through a number of serious operations. Strangely, he was very happy in hospital and an ideal patient. By the time he was released it was known he’d never be fit to resume normal police duties. For the first time in a marriage that had slowly emptied of everything but caution and carefulness and appearances, Kate took a decisive part. If Harkin accepted the desk work he was offered in a station in one of the big towns, he would have to go there alone. With him or without him Kate was going back to what she knew.

It was one of those rare moves in life which appear to benefit everybody. Maggie made no bones then or later that Kate saw it as a last chance to climb back into some kind of life of her own. The town had not won a county championship since that great summer ten years before, and Harkin was greeted like a returning idol.

He had been deeply shaken by the way people turned away from him once he ceased to be a star, the same people who had crowded around him on pitches and in hotel lobbies, had stopped him in the street to ask for autographs. This constant attention had been so long a part of his everyday life that he had come to take it as much for granted as air or health. When suddenly it disappeared, he was baffled: he was the same person now as when he had dominated centrefields, and it gnawed at the whole structure of his self-esteem, forcing in on him the feeling that he no longer amounted to anything, he who had meant the world to cheering, milling crowds. Back in this small town where he was well remembered he felt he could breathe again, and the welcome and sympathy he was shown soon brought immediate, practical benefit.

During the ten years the Harkins had been away, tourism had grown rapidly. There were now many guest houses, and foreigners had built summer houses by the lakes and were buying and converting old disused dwellings. They were mostly Germans and French, with a scattering of Swiss and Dutch, highly paid factory workers from industrial cities, attracted more to the hunting and fishing and cheap property prices than to the deserted beauty of the countryside. A local guard, Guard Tracy, had developed a lucrative sideline looking after their summer houses and soon had more work than he could handle. Some of this he passed on to the disabled ex-guard, with promises to put more business his way if things went well, but when Tracy was transferred suddenly to Waterford, Harkin got control of the entire business. Suspicion grew that he had brought about Tracy’s transfer by reporting his dealings with the foreigners to the Garda authorities, but it could as easily have been any one of several people. While Tracy had managed the properties only, Harkin threw himself into the whole lives of the tourists. Soon he was meeting them at Dublin airport and taking them back. He organized shooting expeditions. He took them on fishing trips all over. These tourists did not return their catch to the water. The sport was in the kill. As well as pheasant, duck, woodcock, pigeon, snipe, they shot songbirds, thrushes, blackbirds, even larks.

His damaged heart meant Harkin wasn’t able to go with them over the fields. Often he stood on the roads with his new repeater and guarded access to where they were shooting. In the summer they came with freezer vans, and Harkin took them to lakes rich in pike and perch and eel. He helped them net the lakes in broad daylight as well as at night. Heads of gutted pike were scattered round every small shore. Because of his contacts in the guards he was able to obstruct complaints, and most people did not bother to complain. Harkin was well known and admired — the disabled guard was entitled to a living like every other. The lakes had been there for so long and were so little used, except by eel fishermen from the north, that they were taken for granted; but everybody disliked the slaughter of the songbirds. When the day’s shooting and fishing was done, the tourists loved to party and drink. In the same way as he disregarded the plunder of the lakes and the growing hostility to the shooting of songbirds, Harkin drank pint for pint, glass for glass, with his new friends without seeming to care for his health. At parties he would pull off his shirt to display the scars of his operations.

At weekends and in the winter evenings, Kate’s two daughters often accompanied their father on his rounds of the empty tourist houses, while the boy went with his mother to visit Maggie, sometimes to stay the night. Kate must have felt the changes ten years can bring as she walked the curving path through the fields above the lake and down by the tall trees to the house. It was her son’s hand she now held instead of Harkin’s, his grip more demanding than ever her husband’s had been. All that drowsy love had gone: she feared him now and feared closeness, not distance. The path and the lake and the fields were the same. Her father was gone, his dear presence nowhere but in her mind, and everything continued on as before. The blackbirds and thrushes racketed. A robin sang. Maggie was still there, praise be to everything that moves or sings. A red shorthorn left the small herd and walked with them on the path, frisking its long tail excitedly while trying to nuzzle her hand. ‘Will it bite us?’ the child asked. ‘No. It’s just looking for nuts. Your grandfather was always trying to stop your grandmother turning them into pets.’