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

While the powerful car slowed through Enfield they began to recall how their mother had taken them back to Gloria at the beginning of every summer, leaving their father to his own devices in the city. They spent every summer there on the bog from the end of June until early September. Their mother had always believed that only for the clean air of the bog and the plain wholesome food they would never have made it through the makeshifts of the city winter. Without the air and the plain food they’d never, never have got through, she used to proclaim like a thanksgiving.

As long as her own mother lived it was like a holiday to go there every summer — the toothless grandmother who sat all day in her rocking chair, her shoulders shawled, the grey hair drawn severely back into a bun, only rising to gather crumbs and potato skins into her black apron, and holding it like a great cloth bowl, she would shuffle out on to the street. She’d wait until all her brown hens had started to beat and clamour around her and then with a quick laugh she’d scatter everything that the apron held. Often before she came in she’d look across the wide acres of the bog, the stunted birch trees, the faint blue of the heather, the white puffs of bog cotton trembling in every wind to the green slopes of Killeelan and walled evergreens high on the hill and say, ‘I suppose it won’t be long till I’m with the rest of them there.’

‘You shouldn’t talk like that, Mother,’ they remembered their mother’s ritual scold.

‘There’s not much else to think about at my age. The gaps between the bog holes are not getting wider.’

One summer the brown rocking chair was empty. Peter lived alone in the house. Though their mother worked from morning to night in the house, tidying, cleaning, sewing, cooking, he made it clear that he didn’t want her any more, but she ignored him. Her want was greater than his desire to be rid of them and his fear of going against the old pieties prevented him from turning them away.

The old ease of the grandmother’s time had gone. He showed them no welcome when they came, spent as little time in the house as possible, the days working in the fields, visiting other houses at night where, as soon as he had eaten, he complained to everybody about the burden he had to put up with. He never troubled to hide his relief when the day finally came at the end of the summer for them to leave. In the quick way of children, the three boys picked up his resentment and suffered its constraint. He hardly ever looked at Fonsie in his wheelchair, and it was fear that never allowed Fonsie to take his eyes from the back of his uncle’s head and broad shoulders. Whenever Philly or John took him sandwiches and the Powers bottle of tea kept warm in the sock to the bog or meadow, they always instinctively took a step or two back after handing him the oilcloth bag. Out of loneliness there were times when he tried to talk to them but the constraint had so solidified that all they were ever able to give back were childish echoes of his own awkward questions. He never once acknowledged the work their mother had done in the house which was the way she had — the only way she had — of paying for their stay in the house of her own childhood. The one time they saw him happy was whenever her exasperation broke and she scolded him: he would smile as if all the days he had spent alone with his mother had suddenly returned. Once she noticed that he enjoyed these scolds, and even set to actively provoke them at every small turn, she would go more doggedly still than was her usual wont.

‘What really used to get her dander up was the way he used to lift up his trousers by the crotch before he sat down to the table,’ Fonsie said as the car approached Longford, and the brothers all laughed in their different ways.

‘He looked as if he was always afraid he’d sit on his balls,’ Philly said. ‘He’ll not have to worry about that any more.’

‘His worries are over,’ John said.

‘Then, after our father died and she got that job in the laundry, that was the first summer we didn’t go. She was very strange that summer. She’d take your head off if you talked. We never went again.’

‘Strange, going down like this after all that,’ John said vaguely.

‘I was trying to say that in the house. It makes no sense to me but this man and Mother wouldn’t listen,’ Fonsie said. ‘They were down my throat before I could open my mouth.’

‘We’re here now anyhow,’ Philly said as the car crossed the narrow bridge at Carrick and they could look down at the Shannon. They were coming into country that they knew. They had suffered here.

‘God, I don’t know how she came here summer after summer when she wasn’t wanted,’ John said as the speeding car left behind the last curve of sluggish water.

‘Well, she wasn’t exactly leaving the Garden of Eden,’ Philly said.

‘It’s terrible when you’re young to come into a place where you know you’re not wanted,’ John said. ‘I used to feel we were eating poor Peter out of house and home every summer. When you’re a child you feel those sorts of things badly even though nobody notices. I see it still in the faces of the children I teach.’

‘After all that we’re coming down to bury the fucker. That’s what gets me,’ Fonsie said.

‘He’s dead now and belongs with all the dead,’ Philly said. ‘He wasn’t all bad. Once I helped him drive cattle into the fair of Boyle. It was dark when we set out. I had to run alongside them in the fields behind the hedges until they got too worn out to want to leave the road. After we sold the cattle up on the Green he took me to the Rockingham Arms. He bought me lemonade and ginger snaps and lifted me up on the counter and said I was a great gossoon to the whole bar even if I had the misfortune to be from Dublin.’

‘You make me sick,’ Fonsie said angrily. ‘The man wasn’t civilized. I always felt if he got a chance he’d have put me in a bag with a stone and thrown me in a bog hole like that black whippet.’

‘That’s exaggerating now. He never did and we’re almost there,’ John said as the car went past the church and scattered houses of Cootehall, where they had come to Mass on Sundays and bought flour and tea and sugar.

‘Now, fasten your seat-belts,’ Philly said humorously as he turned slowly into the bog road. To their surprise the deep potholes were gone. The road had been tarred, the unruly hedges of sally and hazel and briar cut back. Occasionally a straying briar clawed at the windscreen, the only hint of the old wildness. When the hedges gave way to the field of wild raspberry canes, Philly slowed the car to a crawl, and then stopped. Suddenly the bog looked like an ocean stretched in front of them, its miles of heather and pale sedge broken by the stunted birch trees, and high against the evening sun the dark evergreens stood out on the top of Killeelan Hill.

‘He’ll be buried there the day after tomorrow.’

The house hadn’t changed, whitewashed, asbestos-roofed, the chestnut tree in front standing in the middle of the green fields on the edge of the bog; but the road was now tarred to the door, and all around the house new cattle sheds had sprung up.

Four cars were parked on the street and the door of the small house was open. A man shading his eyes with his hand came to the doorway as soon as the Mercedes came to a stop. It was Jim Cullen, the man who had telephoned the news of the death, smaller now and white-haired. He welcomed the three brothers in turn as he shook their hands. ‘I’m sorry for your trouble. You were great to come all the way. I wouldn’t have known any of you except for Fonsie. Your poor mother didn’t manage to come?’

‘She wasn’t up to it,’ Philly said. ‘She hasn’t left the house in years.’