Creatures of the Earth (23 page)

‘Will you be joining Jerry soon?' I asked.

‘Soon. He knows enough people high up now to arrange it. They're getting the papers in order.'

‘I don't suppose you'll come home with me tonight, then?'

‘No.' There wasn't a hint of hesitation in the answer; difficulty and distance were obviously great restorers of the moral order.

‘You must let me take you to dinner, then, before you leave. As old friends. No strings attached,' I smoothed.

‘That'll be nice,' she said.

Out in Grafton Street we parted as easily as two leaves sent spinning apart by any sudden gust. All things begin in dreams, and it must be wonderful to have your mind full of a whole country like Sierra Leone before you go there and risk discovering that it might be your life.

Nothing seems ever to end except ourselves. On the eve of her departure for Sierra Leone, another telegram came from the country. There was nothing mysterious about it this time. Rose had died.

The overnight bag, the ticket, the train …

The iron gate under the yew was open and the blinds of the stone house at the end of the gravel were drawn. Her flower garden, inside the wooden gate in the low whitethorn hedge just before the house, had been freshly weeded and the coarse grass had been cut with shears. Who would tend the flowers now? I shook hands with everybody in the still house, including my father, who did not rise from the converted car chair.

I heard them go over and over what happened, as if by going over and over it they would return it to the everyday. ‘Rose got up, put on the fire, left the breakfast ready, and went to let out the chickens. She had her hand on the latch coming in, when he heard this thump, and there she was lying, the door half-open.' And they were succeeding. They had to.

I went into the room to look on her face. The face was over too. If she had been happy or unhappy it did not show now. Would she have been happier with another? Who knows the person another will find their happiness or unhappiness with? Enough to say that weighed in this scale it makes little difference or every difference.

‘Why don't you let it go with him?' I heard her voice. ‘You know what he's like.' She had lived rooted in this one place and life, with this one man, like the black sally in the one hedge, as pliant as it is knobbed and gnarled, keeping close to the ground as it invades the darker corners of the meadows.

The coffin was taken in. The house was closed. I saw some of the mourners trample on the flowers as they waited in the front garden for her to be taken out. She was light on our shoulders.

Her people did not return to the house after the funeral. They had relinquished any hopes they had to the land.

‘We seem to have it all to ourselves,' I said to my father in the empty house. He gave me a venomous look but did not reply for long.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Yes. We seem to have it all to ourselves. But where do we go from here?'

Not, anyhow, to Sierra Leone. For a moment I saw the tall colonial building on a hill above the sea, its white pillars, the cool of the veranda in the evening … Maybe they were facing one another across a dinner table at this very moment, a servant removing the dishes.

Where now is Rose?

I see her come on a bicycle, a cane basket on the handlebars. The brakes mustn't be working for she has to jump off and run alongside the bicycle. Her face glows with happiness as she pulls away the newspaper that covers the basket. It is full of dark plums, and eggs wrapped in pieces of newspaper are packed here and there among the plums. Behind her there shivers an enormous breath of pure sky.

‘Yes,' my father shouted. ‘Where do we go from here?'

‘I suppose we might as well try and stay put for a time,' I answered, and when he looked at me sharply I added, for the sake of my own peace, ‘that is, until things settle a bit, and we can find our feet again, and think.'

The books and files had been taken out but no one yet had stopped him from entering his office. Tired of sitting alone listening to the rain beat on the iron, he came out on the platform where he could look down on the long queue of tractors towing in the steel tanks, the wipers making furious, relentless arcs across the windscreens as they waited. He knew all the men sitting behind the glass of the cabs by name; that he had made his first business when he came to manage the creamery years before. Often on a wet summer's day, when there could be no rush at hay, many of them would pull in below the platform to sit and talk. The rough, childish faces would look up in a glow of pleasure at the recognition when he shouted out their names. Some would flash their lights.

Today no one looked up, but he could see them observing him in their mirrors after they had passed. They probably already knew more precisely than he what awaited him. Even with that knowledge he would have preferred it if they looked up. All his life he had the weakness of wanting to please and give pleasure.

When the Angelus bell rang from Cootehall, he began to think that they might have put off coming for him for another day, but soon after the last stroke he heard heavy boots crossing the cement. A low knock came on the door. Guard Casey was in the doorway but there was no sign of the Sergeant. Guard Guider was the other guard.

‘You know why we're here, Jim,' Guard Casey said.

‘I know, Ned.' Quickly the Guard read out the statement of arrest.

‘You'll come with us, then?'

‘Sure I'll come.'

‘I'm sorry to have to do this but they're the rules.' He brought out a pair of bright handcuffs with a small green ribbon on the linking bar. Guider quickly handcuffed him to Casey and withdrew the key. The bar with the green ribbon kept the wrists apart but the hands and elbows touched. This caused them to walk stiffly and hesitantly and in step. The cement had been hosed clean but the people who worked for him were out of sight. The electric hum of the separators drowned their footsteps as they crossed to the squad car.

In the barracks the Sergeant was waiting for him with a peace commissioner, a teacher from the other end of the parish, and they began committal proceedings at once. The Sergeant was grim-faced and inscrutable.

‘I'm sorry for that Sunday in Clones,' the creamery manager blurted out in nervousness. ‘I only meant it as a day out together.'

The grimness of the Sergeant's face did not relent; it was as if he had never spoken. He was asked if he had a solicitor. He had none. Did he want to be represented? Did he need to be? he responded. It was not necessary at this stage, he was told. In that case, they could begin. Anything he said, he was warned, could be used against him. He would say nothing. Though it directly concerned him, it seemed to be hardly about him at all, and it did not take long. Tonight he'd spend in the barracks. The cell was already prepared for him. Tomorrow he'd be transferred to Mountjoy to await his trial. The proceedings for the present were at an end. There was a mild air of relief. He felt like a railway carriage that had been pushed by handdown rails into some siding. It suited him well enough. He had never been assertive and he had no hope of being acquitted.

Less than a month before, he had bought stand tickets for the Ulster Final and had taken the Sergeant and Guard Casey to Clones. He already knew then that the end couldn't be far off. It must have been cowardice and an old need to ingratiate. Now it was the only part of the whole business that made him cringe.

They had set off in the Sergeant's small Ford, Guard Casey sitting with the Sergeant in the front. They were both big men, Casey running to flesh, but the Sergeant retained some of an athlete's spareness of feature. He had played three or four times for Cavan and had been on the fringe of the team for a few seasons several years before.

‘You were a terrible man to go and buy those stand tickets, Jim,' Casey had said for the fifth time as the car travelled over the dusty white roads.

‘What's terrible about it? Aren't we all Ulster men even if we are stranded in the west? It's a day out, a day out of all our lives. And the Sergeant here even played for Cavan.'

‘Once or twice. Once or twice. Trial runs. You could hardly call it
played
. I just wasn't good enough.'

‘You were more than good enough by all accounts. There was a clique.'

‘You're blaming the selectors now. The selectors had a job to do. They couldn't pick everybody.'

‘More than me has said they were a clique. They had their favourites. You weren't called “the boiler” for nothing.'

A car parked round the corner forced the Sergeant to swerve out into the road. Nothing was coming.

‘You'd think the car was specially parked there to deliver an accident.'

‘They're all driving around in cars,' Casey said, ‘but the mentality is still of the jennet and cart.'

It had been a sort of suffering to keep the talk going, but silence was even worse. There were many small flowers in the grass margins of the roadside.

They took their seats in the stand halfway through the minor game. There was one grace: though he came from close to Clones, there wasn't a single person he knew sitting in any of the nearby seats. The minor game ended. Once the seniors came on the field he started at the sudden power and speed with which the ball was driven about. The game was never close. Cavan drew gradually ahead to win easily. Such was the
air of unreality he felt, of three men watching themselves watch a game, that he was glad to buy oranges from a seller moving between seats, to hand the fruit around, to peel the skin away, to taste the bitter juice. Only once did he start and stir uncomfortably, when Guard Casey remarked about the powerful Cavan full-back who was roughing up the Tyrone forwards: ‘The Gunner is taking no prisoners today.'

He was not so lucky on leaving the game. In the packed streets of the town a voice called out, ‘Is it not Jimmy McCarron?' And at once the whole street seemed to know him. They stood in his path, put arms around him, drew him to the bars. ‘An Ulster Final, look at the evening we'll have, and it's only starting.'

‘Another time, Mick. Another time, Joe. Great to see you but we have to get back.' He had pushed desperately on, not introducing his two companions.

‘You seem to be the most popular man in town,' the Sergeant said sarcastically once they were clear.

‘I'm from round here.'

‘It's better to be popular anyhow than buried away out of sight,' Casey came to his defence.

‘Up to a point. Up to a point,' the Sergeant said. ‘Everything has its point.'

They stopped for tea at the Lawn Hotel in Belturbet. By slipping out to the reception desk while they were eating he managed to pay for the meal. Except for the Sergeant's petrol he had paid for the entire day. This was brought up as they parted outside the barracks in the early evening.

‘It was a great day. We'll have to make an annual day of the Ulster Final. But next year will be our day. Next year you'll not be allowed spend a penny,' the Sergeant said, but still he could see their satisfaction that the whole outing had cost them nothing.

Now that the committal proceedings were at an end an air of uncertainty crept into the dayroom. Did they feel compromised by the day? He did not look at their faces. The door on the river had to be unlocked in order to allow the peace commissioner to
leave and was again locked after he left. He caught the Sergeant and Guard Casey looking at one another.

‘You better show him his place,' the Sergeant said.

To the right of the door on the river was a big, heavy red door. It was not locked. Casey opened it slowly to show him his cell for the night.

‘It's not great, Jimmy, but it's as good as we could get it.'

The cement floor was still damp from being washed. Above the cement was a mattress on a low platform of boards. There was a pillow and several heavy grey blankets on the mattress. High in the wall a narrow window was cut, a single steel bar in its centre.

‘It's fine. It couldn't be better.'

‘If you want anything at all, just bang or shout, Jim,' and the heavy door was closed and locked. He heard bolts being drawn.

Casually he felt the pillow, the coarse blankets, moved the mattress, and with his palm tested the solidity of the wooden platform; its boards were of white deal and they too had been freshly scrubbed. There was an old oil can beside a steel bucket in the corner. Carefully he moved it under the window, and by climbing on the can and gripping the iron bar he could see out on either side: a sort of lawn, a circular flowerbed, netting-wire, a bole of the sycamore tree, sallies, a strip of river. He tried to get down as silently as possible, but as soon as he took his weight off the oil can it rattled.

‘Are you all right there, Jimmy?' Casey was at once asking anxiously from the other side of the door.

‘I'm fine. I was just surveying the surroundings. Soon I'll lie down for a while.'

He heard Casey hesitate for a moment, but then his feet sounded on the hollow boards of the dayroom, going towards the table and chairs. As much as to reassure Casey as from any need, he covered the mattress with one of the grey blankets and lay down, loosening his collar and tie. The bed was hard but not uncomfortable. He lay there, sometimes thinking, most of the
time his mind as blank as the white ceiling, and occasionally he drifted in and out of sleep.

There were things he was grateful for … that his parents were dead … that he did not have to face his mother's uncomprehending distress. He felt little guilt. The shareholders would write him off as a loss against other profits. The old creamery would not cry out with the hurt. People he had always been afraid of hurting, and even when he disliked them he felt that he partly understood them, could put himself in their place, and that was almost the end of dislike. Sure, he had seen evil and around it a stupid, heartless laughing that echoed darkness; and yet, he had wanted love. He felt that more than ever now, even looking at where he was, to what he had come.

That other darkness, all that surrounded life, used to trouble him once, but he had long given up making anything out of it, like a poor talent, and he no longer cared. Coming into the world was, he was sure now, not unlike getting into this poor cell. There was constant daylight above his head, split by the single bar, and beyond the sycamore leaves a radio aerial disappeared into a high branch. He could make jokes about it, but to make jokes alone was madness. He'd need a crowd for that, a blazing fire, rounds of drinks, and the whole long night awaiting.

There was another fact that struck him now like coldness. In the long juggling act he'd engaged in for years that eventually got him to this cell – four years before only the sudden windfall of a legacy had lifted him clear – whenever he was known to be flush all the monies he had loaned out to others would flow back as soon as he called, but whenever he was seen to be in desperate need, nothing worthwhile was ever given back. It was not a pretty picture, but in this cell he was too far out to care much about it now.

He'd had escapes too, enough of them to want no more. The first had been the Roman collar, to hand the pain and the joy of his own life into the keeping of an idea, and to will the idea true. It had been a near thing, especially because his mother had the vocation for him as well; but the pull of sex had been too
strong, a dream of one girl in a silken dress among gardens disguising healthy animality. All his life he had moved among disguises, was moving among them still. He had even escaped marriage. The girl he'd loved, with the black head of hair thrown back and the sideways laugh, had been too wise to marry him: no framework could have withstood that second passion for immolation. There was the woman he didn't love that he was resigned to marry when she told him she was pregnant. The weekend she discovered she wasn't they'd gone to the Metropole and danced and drank the whole night away, he celebrating his escape out to where there were lungfuls of air, she celebrating that they were now free to choose to marry and have many children: ‘It will be no Protestant family.' ‘It will be no family at all.' Among so many disguises there was no lack of ironies.

The monies he had given out, the sums that were given back, the larger sums that would never be returned, the rounds of drinks he'd paid for, the names he'd called out, the glow of recognition, his own name shouted to the sky, the day Moon Dancer had won at Phoenix Park, other days and horses that had lost – all dwindling down to the small, ingratiating act of taking the Sergeant and Guard Casey to the Ulster Final.

The bolts were being drawn. Casey was standing in the doorway. ‘There's something for you to eat, Jimmy.' He hadn't realized how dark the cell had been until he came out into the dayroom, and he had to shade his eyes against the light. He thought he'd be eating at the dayroom table, but he was brought up a long hallway to the Sergeant's living quarters. In the big sideboard mirror he could see most of the room and Casey standing directly behind him with his arms folded.

‘Thanks,' he said after he'd signed a docket at the end of the meal which stated that he had been provided with food. With Casey he went back down the long hallway to the dayroom. He was moving across the hollow boards to the cell door when Casey stopped him.

‘There's no need to go in there yet, Jimmy. You can sit here for a while in front of the fire.'

They sat on the yellow chairs in front of the fire. Casey spent a long time arranging turf around the blazing centre of the fire with tongs. There were heavy ledgers on the table at their back. A row of baton cases and the gleaming handcuffs with the green ribbons hung from hooks on the wall. A stripped, narrow bed stood along the wall of the cell, its head beneath the phone on the wall. Only the cell wall stood between Casey's bed and his own plain boards.