Creatures of the Earth (17 page)

‘Do you think it will be late when Cronin tumbles in?' Ryan asked sleepily.

‘It won't be early. He went to a dance with O'Reilly and the two women.'

Pale light from the street lamp just outside the window shone on the varnished ceiling boards of the room. Cronin would have to cross the room to get to his bed by the window.

‘I don't mind if he comes in near morning. What I hate is just to have got to sleep and then get woke up,' Ryan said.

‘You can be sure he'll wake us up. He's bound to have some story to get off his chest.'

Ryan was large and gentle and worked as an inseminator at the AI station in the town, as did Cronin. The three of us shared this small room in the roof of the Bridge Restaurant. O'Reilly was the only other lodger Mrs McKinney kept, but he had a room of his own downstairs. He was the site engineer on the construction of the new bridge.

‘What do you think will happen between O'Reilly and Rachael when the bridge is finished?'

I was startled when Ryan spoke. The intervals of silence before we fell asleep seemed always deeper than sleep. ‘I don't know. They've been going out a good while together. Maybe they'll be married … What do you think?'

‘I don't know. He's had a good few other women here and there in the last few months. I doubt if he wants to get hitched.'

‘She'd have no trouble finding someone else.'

She had been the queen of one beauty competition the summer before and runner-up in another. She was fair-haired and tall.

‘She mightn't want that,' Ryan said. ‘The Bachelors' Ball will be interesting on Friday night. Why don't you change your mind and come? The dress suits are arriving on the bus Friday evening. All we'd have to do is ring in your measurements.'

‘No. I'll not go. You know I'd go but I want to have the money for Christmas.'

An old bicycle went rattling down the hill and across the bridge, a voice shouting out, ‘
Fàg à bealach
.'

‘That's Paddy Mick on his way home. He has no bell. It means the last of the after-hour houses are shut.'

‘It's time to try to get to sleep – Cronin or no Cronin.'

It was very late when Cronin woke us, but daylight hadn't yet started to thin the yellow light from the street lamp. We would have pretended to have gone on sleeping but he repeated, ‘Are yous awake?'

‘We are now.'

‘That O'Reilly should be run out of town,' he said.

‘What's wrong now?' I had suspected for a while that his lean, intense good looks concealed a deep stupidity.

‘What he made that girl do tonight no poor girl should have to do, and in front of people too.'

‘What was it?' Ryan raised himself on an elbow in the bed while Cronin slipped out of his clothes.

‘It was horrible.'

‘You can't just wake us up like this and not tell us.'

‘It was too foul to put in words.'

‘What's so suddenly sacred about words! Why didn't you stop it if you felt so badly about it?'

‘What could you say once it was done? Once he made her do it. My woman was so upset that she didn't talk for the rest of the night.'

Cronin had been going out casually with a hairdresser some years older than he was, who owned her own business in the town. He was taking her to the ball on Friday.

‘Are you going to tell us what happened? Or are you going to let us get back to sleep?'

‘I wouldn't disgrace myself by telling it.' He turned his back to us in the bed.

‘I hope you have nightmares.' Ryan swore before pulling the clothes and pillow violently over his head.

The four of us had breakfast together the next morning. There was no one else in the big dining-room except some night-shift workers from the mill across the road in their white caps and overalls, the pale dusting of flour still on their arms and faces. I'd always envied their high spirits in the morning. Breakfast was for them a celebration. Cronin was gloomily taciturn until near the end of the meal when he said, ‘You're an awful effin' so and so, O'Reilly, to do what you did last night.'

‘I haven't even a notion what you're talking about.' O'Reilly bloomed. He was a small barrel of a man with a fine handsome head. He had played cornerback for Cavan in two All-Irelands.

‘No girl should have to do what you made that girl do last night.'

‘You know nothing about women, Cronin,' O'Reilly said loudly, hoping to get the ear of the mill workers, but they were having too good a time of their own. ‘Women like to do that. Only they have to pretend that they don't. Let me tell you that all women take a poor view of a man who accepts everything at its face value.'

‘It was a disgrace,' Cronin said doggedly.

‘You're a one to talk.' O'Reilly rose from the table in high good humour. ‘Whatever yourself and the hairdresser were up to in the back of the car, I thought it was about to turn over.'

‘It was a pure disgrace,' Cronin said to his plate.

Ryan and myself stayed cautiously neutral. I had clashed with O'Reilly from the beginning when I'd refused to become involved with the town football team, which he ran with a fierce fanaticism, and we were all the more cautious because Cronin usually hero-worshipped O'Reilly. In the long evenings they could be seen kicking a ball round for hours in the park
after training sessions. Lately, they'd taken to throwing shoes and pieces of cutlery at the ceiling if they thought I was upstairs with a book or correcting school exercises. I was looking forward to the opening of the new bridge.

Ryan's unwashed Beetle was waiting outside the gate when I finished school at three that evening.

‘I've calls in the Gaeltacht. Maybe you'll come in case there's need of a bit of translating.'

It was a polite excuse. There was never need of translation. The tied cow could be always pointed out. The breed of the bulls – Shorthorn, Charolais, Friesian – were the same in Gaelic as in English. The different colours of the straws of semen in the stainless steel container on the floor of the Beetle needed no translation. Ryan just didn't like driving on the empty roads between these silent, alien houses on his own.

‘I got the whole business out of Cronin in the office this morning.' A wide grin showed on his face as the VW rocked over the narrow roads between the bare whitethorns.

‘What was it, then? I won't be shocked.'

‘It shocked Cronin.'

‘What was it, for Christ's sake?'

‘O'Reilly got Rachael to take his lad in her mouth,' Ryan said. ‘Then he wouldn't let her spit it out.'

‘Spit what out?'

‘What's in the bucket?' He gestured towards the bright steel container on the floor of the VW where the straws were kept in liquid nitrogen.

‘They say it's fattening,' I said to hide my own shock.

‘Not half as fattening as in the other place.' I was unprepared for the huge roar of laughter my words induced.

‘What do you mean?'

‘O'Reilly's in a white fright. He's got Rachael up the pole.'

‘Then he'll marry her.'

‘Not unless he has to. Cronin told me that he spent all last week applying for engineering jobs in South Africa. It seems they're building lots of bridges in South Africa.'

‘But he has a permanent job to go to in Galway as soon as the bridge finishes. He's been boasting about it long enough.'

‘He could go if he married Rachael, but it mightn't be so easy if he refused to do the decent. News travels.'

We'd come to the first of the plain ugly cottages the government had built on these twenty-acre farms. They were all alike. A woman met us, showed us to the cow, gave Ryan a basin of hot water, soap, a towel to wash and dry his rubbered arm afterwards. She responded to my few questions with deep suspicion, fearful that I was some government official sent out to check on grants or the speaking of Irish.

These people had been transplanted here from the seaboard as part of de Valera's dream; lighthouses put down on the plain from which Gaelic would spread from tongue to tongue throughout the land like pentecostal flame. Used to a little fishing, a potato patch, grass for a cow between the rocks, they were lost in the rich green acres of Meath. A few cattle were kept knee-deep in grass, or the land was put out on conacre to the grain contractors who supplied the mill – and the men went to work in England. It was dark by the time we'd finished. The last call had to be done by the light of a paraffin lantern.

‘What will Rachael do if O'Reilly ditches her?' I asked as we drove back.

‘What does any girl do? She has to nail her man. If she doesn't …' He spread his hands upwards underneath a half-circle of the steering wheel. ‘You might as well come to the Ball. It'll be twice as much fun now that we know what's afoot.'

‘I'll not go. For me it's just another reason to stay away.'

The dress suits came in flat cardboard boxes on the evening bus the Friday of the Ball. Tulips came in similar boxes for the altar. O'Reilly changed into his suit as soon as he came home from work and went to the hotel to have drinks with subcontractors on the bridge. There had plainly been a falling out between him and Cronin. Ryan and Cronin waited till after tea to change. They'd never worn dress suits before and were restless with excitement, twisting themselves in mirrors, laughing
nervously as they paraded in front of the McKinneys. They found time slow to pass while waiting to pick up their girls. Ryan was bringing the girl who took the calls in their office.

I went with them to the Midland Bar, where we had three rounds of hot whiskeys. Still it wasn't late enough to leave when we got back, and they went alone to some other bar, this time taking their cars. O'Reilly had taken his car to the hotel. I'd meant to read, but when left alone I found that I wasn't able to because of the excitement and the whiskey. I was half tempted to go back up to the Midland's with old Paddy McKinney when he went for his nightly jar, and glad when Mrs McKinney came in soon afterwards to join me at the fire.

‘You didn't go to the Ball after all?'

‘No. I didn't go.'

‘You may be as well off. Old Paddy was a great one for dances and balls in his day, would never miss one. And he got me. And I got him. That's all it ever seems to have amounted to,' she said with vigorous incomprehension. Later, I tried to ask her if she'd let me have O'Reilly's room when he left, but she'd give no firm answer, knowing it'd be easier to let the room than to fill the bed in the upstairs room, and, as if to make up for her evasion, she made delicious turkey sandwiches and a big pot of tea instead of the usual glass of milk and biscuits.

The screeching of a car to a violent stop beneath the window woke me some time in the early hours. A door banged but I could hear no voices. A key turned in the front door. I sat up as footsteps started to come up the stairs. O'Reilly opened the door. His oiled hair was dishevelled as was the suit and bow.

‘I want you to convey a message for me when they return.' He had to concentrate fiercely to frame the words.

‘Where are the others?'

‘They're still at the Ball. I abandoned them there.'

‘Is Rachael there, too?' I asked cautiously.

‘The last I saw of her she was dancing with Cronin. Cronin made a speech. He got up on the stage for a special request and took the microphone. It was most embarrassing. One should
never associate with uncultivated people. I decided that the gentlemanly thing to do was to leave at once on my own. So I'm here.' He stood solid as a stone on the floor, but it was obvious from the effort of concentration and small hiccups that he was extraordinarily drunk.

‘Tell them that I'm not to be disturbed. Tell them not to go banging on the door. The door will be locked.'

‘I'll tell them.'

‘I'm most obliged. I'll recompense you in due course.'

I heard him move about for a little while downstairs. Then his door closed.

The others were so long in coming that I was beginning to think they must have met with some accident. They made much noise. I heard them try O'Reilly's door several times, calling out before they came upstairs. Cronin was wild with drink, Ryan just merry and foolish.

‘Bloody O'Reilly got home. He's locked the door.' Cronin staggered violently as he spoke.

‘He was up here,' I said. ‘He asked not to be disturbed when you came home.'

‘Not to be disturbed.' Cronin glared.

‘I'm just giving the message.'

‘That's the notice he has hung on the doorknob,' Ryan giggled.

‘I made a speech,' Cronin said. ‘A most impressive speech.'

‘What sort of speech?' I asked as gently as possible in the hope of diverting the drilling stare.

‘That it was the bounden duty of every single man to get married. Of course I was referring to O'Reilly in particular, but it had universal significance as well. To show that I was serious I proposed that I myself be married immediately. This week if possible.'

Any temptation to laugh was out. It would be far too dangerous.

‘Of course
you
make no effort to get married. You just lie here in bed,' he continued. The stare would not be diverted, and then suddenly he jumped on me in the bed, but his movements were
so slow and drunken that all I had to do was draw my knees upwards and to the side for him to roll across the bed out on the floor the far side. This was repeated three times. ‘Make no effort. Just lie there,' he kept saying, and each time the breathing grew heavier. I was afraid the farce could go on for some time, until, rising, he caught sight of himself in the wardrobe mirror.

‘I've never seen myself in a dress suit before. I am most impressed. Instead of giving it back, I think I'll buy it. I'll wear it in my professional capacity. The farmers will be most impressed.' Dress suits seemed to be having a formalizing effect on speech.