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

‘You left the two lassies behind today?’ Maggie met them, her broad face creased with smiles.

‘They went with their father on his rounds of the houses.’

‘My little man is in his lone glory, then.’ She stretched out and lifted the boy high above her head.

For days at a time and whole nights of the summer, Kate and the children didn’t see Harkin, but when they did, he was usually in good humour. He had plenty of money. He had always been generous, and Kate now had more money than she needed. His life became so intertwined with the tourists that in the off-season they sent him air tickets to join them in various cities. Kate thought little of the trips. When he was leaving, she wished him a good holiday and had the children wish him the same. He always brought back presents.

The tourists congratulated him on having an obedient, old-fashioned wife. They raised their glasses and wondered if he could find such a wife for Pierre or Helmut. Harkin took out his notebook and, with the mock solemnity of a policeman raiding a public house for after-hours drinking, wrote down the names, warning each man that anything said could be used in evidence against them once he found them such a wife.

They roared with laughter. ‘Harkin can do anything. Harkin is the devil …’

As Kate was walking back through the town one morning after taking the children to school, Jerome Callaghan’s car pulled up along the curb. He pushed open the door on the passenger side for her to get in. She hesitated. They’d once been in the same class at school. He now owned his uncle’s auctioneering business and had a reputation for going with older women.

‘I’ve been looking out for you, Kate,’ he said. ‘How would you like to work again?’

She was taken aback because it was as if her most secret thought had been taken from her and offered casually back. ‘There aren’t many jobs for women my age.’

‘There’s one,’ he said. ‘They are looking for someone to run the office in the market.’

It was what she had hoped for but had never expected to find in this small place. As they talked, she knew she could do the work. All she doubted were his motives. She refused his offer to drive her home, saying she had things to get for the house. She also said she’d make her own way to the mart for an interview with McNulty, the manager, later the same day.

At twelve o’clock she went to the big galvanized building outside the town in the middle of a huge, gravelled space for cattle trucks and trailers. In spite of dressing with great care, she felt nervous and vulnerable offering herself for work again after all these years. McNulty could not have been more friendly. He seemed to know a great deal already about her training, and after a short conversation offered her the job there and then. He wanted her to begin work the following morning.

Confronted suddenly with an offer she had long wanted but only dared to think about in secret, her first instinct was to back away: she didn’t know how her husband would react when he got back; she’d like time to think it over. McNulty couldn’t give her time. If she wouldn’t take the job, he’d be forced to look for someone else. More than a million pounds passed through the mart each week. She was always free to hand in her notice if, after a few weeks, she found the work didn’t suit her.

She began the following morning. Men were already hosing the cattle pens when she came in, the arc light high in the steel girders shining down on the wet concrete. Annie and Lizzie who worked in the office were friendly and helpful. They’d worked in the mart for years and feared that the new person would be hostile or distant; either of them could have done her work, but they didn’t want the responsibility. A few of the small farmers, who came in about cheques or cattle cards, she’d known since she was a girl, men like her father, rough and ready and anxious; but her father was not rough, and she knew that much of the rough manner was a shield, a working uniform. The dealers were more polished and better dressed and more interesting, and they too wore uniforms. Cattle she had grown up with. She loved their faces. She found their lowing hard at first, lowing for what fields and company they’d been taken from. They’d be driven round the sale rings, loaded on to trucks or trailers and carried through the night to ships or abattoirs. Only a few would reach the lives of new farms. All that passed through her office were their cards, their bills of sale, the cheques, the dockets. She was so busy on mart days that the voices of the auctioneers calling out their rhythmic numbers over the loudspeakers were only a distant sound.

On mart days and the days that followed, which were even busier, when the accounts had to tally and any irregularities of sale or purchase reported to McNulty, Maggie would come into the town to pick up the children from school. On all other days Kate had time to see to the children herself. As long as the work was done, they didn’t care what hours she kept.

The days flew. In the quiet morning after leaving the children at school, as she came up the back lane to the mart by gardens and the yards of the bars and engineering works savouring the morning, she began to realize how much she had missed the independence of work. Now it was through this new concentration — and the simple walk from the school to the mart a prelude to the work itself — that each day had been given back to her in its long light and depth, all the actions and interactions of the day, between the setting out and the returning, a reflection of the mystery of the whole blessed gift of life. She had nearly lost that gift. She had given up thinking of her marriage. Though she had searched for hours, she had never been able to isolate any single day, or even month or incident, when it had taken that wrong turning; but it had turned, and they had never talked. How or when or why would never be known. She had no other wish but to live her life and to bring up her children in peace — without her husband, or any man. With her husband in the house, she felt more alone than in his absence. Her nervousness in the face of his return quickened the speed with which the days flew. They seemed to race. Jerome Callaghan was in the mart most days. When they met, he was polite and careful. Once he asked her how she liked the work.

‘I’m very happy.’

‘Everybody’s delighted with you, anyhow,’ he said.

‘You can say that again.’ Annie looked up from her chair far down the counter and echoed his words so vigorously that Kate knew that they were happy with her work and wanted her to stay. Her husband’s visit abroad was prolonged much more than usual. She was relieved at the first postponements, but then her nervousness grew greater in the face of his return. The days no longer raced. They were fixed on his return like a held breath.

Harkin brought many presents back at the end of seven weeks. The three children were very excited, and he was full of plans for making a video of the area with a German company. If the video took off it could bring the many abandoned houses in the mountains on to the market as well as increase interest in the lakes, and it would make sense for him to set up as an auctioneer as well as to expand his present business. They could all wind up as millionaires. He had been drinking earlier in the day but he was far from drunk. Kate knew he would dislike that she had found work and that it was better that he heard it directly from her, but such was the atmosphere of the house and her own deep horror of confrontation that she kept putting it off. As the children were getting ready for bed, having eked out the day well past their usual bedtime, the boy blurted out proudly, ‘Mammy’s got work. Some days she takes us into her office after school.’