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

‘Too much. Too much,’ a second drinker added forcefully though it wasn’t clear at all to what he referred.

‘It must be bad when that brother throws in the towel, because he’s a tank for drink. You’d think there was no bottom in that wheelchair.’

The barman stared in silent disapproval at his three customers. There were few things he disliked more than this ‘behind-backs’ criticism of a customer as soon as he left. He opened the newspaper loudly, staring pointedly out at the three drinkers until they were silent, and then bent his head to travel slowly through the pages again.

‘I heard a good one the other day,’ one of the drinkers cackled rebelliously. ‘The only chance of travel that ever comes to the poor is when they get sick. They go from one state to the other state and back again to base if they’re lucky.’

The other two thought this hilarious and one pounded the table with his glass in appreciation. Then they looked towards the barman for approval but he just raised his eyes to stare absently out on the grey strip of concrete until the little insurrection died and he was able to continue travelling through the newspaper again.

Philly came slowly back up the street. The blonde had finished painting her toenails — a loud vermilion — and she leaned the back of her head against a door jamb, her eyes closing as she gave her face and throat completely to the sun. The hooded pram above her outstretched legs was silent. Away, behind the area railings, old men wearing berets were playing bowls, a miniature French flag flying on the railings.

Philly expected to enter an empty room but as soon as he put his key in the door he heard the raised voices. He held the key still. His mother was downstairs. She and Fonsie were arguing. With a welcome little rush of expectancy, he turned the key. The two were so engaged with one another that they did not notice him enter. His mother was in her blue dressing gown. She stood remarkably erect.

‘What’s going on?’ They were so involved with one another that they looked towards him as if he were a burglar.

‘Your Uncle Peter died last night, in Gloria. The Cullens just phoned,’ his mother said, and it was Philly’s turn to look at his mother and brother as if he couldn’t quite grasp why they were in the room.

‘You’ll all have to go,’ his mother said.

‘I don’t see why we should have to go. We haven’t seen the man in twenty years. He never even liked us,’ Fonsie said heatedly, turning the wheelchair to face Philly.

‘Of course we’ll go. We are all he has now. It wouldn’t look right if we didn’t go down.’ Philly would have grasped at any diversion, but the pictures of Gloria Bog that flooded his mind shut out the day and the room with amazing brightness and calm.

‘That doesn’t mean I have to go,’ Fonsie said.

‘Of course you have to go. He was your uncle as well as mine,’ Philly said.

‘If nobody went to poor Peter’s funeral, God rest him, we’d be the talk of the countryside for years,’ their mother said. ‘If I know nothing else in the world I know what they’re like down there.’

‘Anyhow, there’s no way I can go in this.’ Fonsie gestured contemptuously to his wheelchair.

‘That’s no problem. I’ll hire a Mercedes. With a jalopy like that you wouldn’t think of coming yourself, Mother?’ Philly asked suddenly with the humour and malice of deep knowledge, and the silence that met the suggestion was as great as if some gross obscenity had been uttered.

‘I’d look a nice speck in Gloria when I haven’t been out of my own house in years. There wouldn’t be much point in going to poor Peter’s funeral, God rest him, and turning up at my own,’ she said in a voice in which a sudden frailty only served to point up the different shades of its steel.

‘He never even liked us. There were times I felt if he got a chance he’d throw me into a bog hole the way he drowned the black whippet that started eating the eggs,’ Philly said.

‘He’s gone now,’ the mother said. ‘He stood to us when he was needed. It made no difference whether he liked us or not.’

‘How will you manage on your own?’ Fonsie asked as if he had accepted he’d have to go.

‘Won’t Mrs O’Brien next door look in if you ask her and can’t I call her myself on the phone? It’ll be good for you to get out of the city for a change. None of the rest can be trusted to bring me back a word of anything that goes on,’ she flattered.

‘Was John told yet?’ Philly interrupted, asking about their eldest brother.

‘No. There’d be no use ringing him at home now. You’d have to ring him at the school,’ their mother said.

The school’s number was written in a notebook. Philly had to wait a long time on the phone after he explained the urgency of the call while the school secretary got John from the classroom.

‘John won’t take time off school to go to any funeral,’ Fonsie said confidently as they waited.

To Fonsie’s final disgust John agreed to go to the funeral at once. He’d be waiting for them at whatever time they thought they’d be ready to travel.

Philly hired the Mercedes. The wheelchair folded easily into its cavern-like boot. ‘You’ll all be careful,’ their mother counselled as she kissed them goodbye. ‘Everything you do down there will be watched and gone over. I’ll be following poor Peter in my mind until you rest him with Father and Mother in Killeelan.’

John was waiting for them outside his front door, a brown hat in his hand, a gabardine raincoat folded on his arm, when the Mercedes pulled up at the low double gate. Before Philly had time to touch the horn John raised the hat and hurried down the concrete path. On both sides of the path the postage-stamp lawns showed the silver tracks of a mower, and roses were stacked and tied along the earthen borders.

‘The wife doesn’t seem to appear at all these days?’ Philly asked, the vibrations of the engine shaking the car as they waited while John closed the gate.

‘Herself and Mother never pulled,’ Fonsie offered.

There was dull peace between the two brothers now. Fonsie knew he was more or less in Philly’s hands for the next two days. He did not like it but the stupid death had moved the next two days out of his control.

‘What’s she like now?’

‘I suppose she’s much like the rest of us. She was always nippy.’

‘I’m sorry for keeping you,’ John said as he got into the back of the car.

‘You didn’t keep us at all,’ Philly answered.

‘It’s great to get a sudden break like this. You can’t imagine what it is to get out of the school and city for two or three whole days,’ John said before he settled and was silent. The big Mercedes grew silent as it gathered speed through Fairview and the North Strand, crossing the Liffey at the Custom House, and turned into the one-way flow of traffic out along the south bank of the river. Not until they got past Leixlip, and fields and trees and hedges started to be scattered between the new raw estates, did they begin to talk, and all their talk circled about the man they were going to bury, their mother’s brother, their Uncle Peter McDermott.

He had been the only one in the family to stay behind with his parents on Gloria Bog where he’d been born. All the rest had scattered. Their Aunt Mary had died young in Walthamstow, London; Martin died in Milton, Massachusetts; Katie, the eldest, had died only the year before in Oneida, New York. With Peter’s death they were all gone now, except their mother. She had been the last to leave the house. She first served her time in a shop in Carrick-on-Shannon and then moved to a greengrocer’s-cum-confectioner’s on the North Circular Road where she met their unreliable father, a traveller for Lemons Sweets.