Creatures of the Earth (40 page)

‘There's been a shooting. Mrs Harkin …'

‘Is she …?'

‘I'm sorry,' Guard Sullivan said.

Callaghan restrained the urge to rush to her, the futile wish to help and succour what can be helped no longer, and turned slowly back to his car. Numbly he turned the car around and
found himself driving out to the lake, parking at the gate. As he got out, he disturbed wildfowl in the reeds along the shore, and they scattered, shrieking, towards the centre. There was no moon but there were clear reflections on the water. Never did life seem so mysterious and inhospitable. They might as well all be out there in the middle of the lake with the wildfowl.

The lights were on in the house. When he knocked, Maggie came to the door. Later when the guards called at the house with word of the death, it was Callaghan who answered the knock.

After being charged, Harkin was transferred to a mental institution for a psychiatric report as part of the preparations for his trial. He took great interest in his case and consulted regularly with his solicitor. He tried but was unable to prevent the children from going to Maggie. Other than his solicitor, the only person he asked to see was Guard McCarthy, who had fought back to back with him against the tinkers on that terrible night years before.

McCarthy had settled in Cork and married a teacher. When Harkin's letter arrived, he was alarmed and took it straight to his sergeant, who consulted his superiors. To McCarthy's dismay, he was asked to visit his old friend and to write down everything that was said during the visit in case it could be of use in the forthcoming trial. All the expenses of the visit would be paid by the State.

On a summer's day the two men met and were allowed through locked doors into a walled ornamental garden. They sat on a wooden bench by a small fountain. Almost playfully Harkin examined McCarthy's ear for stitchmarks and asked, ‘Do you think Cork has much of a chance in the All-Ireland this year?'

‘Not much,' McCarthy answered. A silence followed that seemed to take a great age. The visit could not end quickly enough for him.

‘What makes you say that?' Harkin eventually asked.

‘The team is uneven. They're short of at least two forwards.'

‘I'd hate to see Dublin winning it again.'

‘They have the population,' McCarthy said. ‘They have the pick.'

There was another long silence until Harkin asked, ‘How do you think my case will go?'

In the heart-stopping pause that followed, McCarthy could hear the water splashing from the fountain, the birds singing. He said he had no earthly clue. The silence returned, but nothing came to break it. ‘Was there anything in particular you wanted to see me about, Michael?' he ventured cautiously.

‘No. Nothing. I just wanted to get a look at you again after all these years,' and he placed his hand on the guard's shoulder as they both rose.

McCarthy wrote down everything that Harkin said, but it was never used as evidence. That same evening Harkin swallowed an array of tablets that he had managed to conceal, and before he slipped into unconsciousness he reached beneath the scar on his chest to tear out the mechanism that regulated his heartbeat.

A silence came down around all that happened. Nobody complained about the normal quiet. Bird cries were sweet. The wing-beat of the swan crossing the house gave strength. The long light of day crossing the lake steeped us in privilege and mystery and infinite reflections that nobody wanted to break or question.

Gradually the sense of quiet weakened. The fact that nothing much was happening ceased to comfort. A craving for change began again. The silence around the murder was broken. All sorts of blame was apportioned as we noticed each year that passed across the face of the lake, quickening and gathering speed before swinging round again, until crowds of years seemed suddenly in the air above the lake, all gathering for flight.

With the years, Maggie and I had drawn closer. Whenever I had to go into the town I nearly always called at her house to see
if she wanted to come and I often took the children to the train or met them when they came for weekends from Dublin.

All three children were at university. They were well mannered and intelligent and anxious to please, but compared to Maggie's rootedness they were like shadows. It was as if none of them could quite believe they had full rights to be alive on earth under the sky like every single other.

Every year I drove Maggie to the Christmas dinner and party for senior citizens in the parish hall. I am now almost old enough to go to the dinner in my own right, but it is one meal I want to put off for as long as I can. When Maggie was made Senior Citizen of the Year, it was natural that I'd drive her to Carrick for the presentation. All of us who knew her were delighted, but there was great difficulty in getting her to accept.

‘Well, all of us here think it's great, Maggie, no matter what you say,' I said to her as we drove to Carrick.

‘It's a lot of bother,' she answered. ‘The old people used always to say it was never lucky to be too noticed. The shady corners are safer.'

‘Even the shady corners may be safe no longer, but isn't it wonderful how well all the children did, and all you were able to do for them.'

‘They were no trouble. They did it all themselves. I think they were making sure they'd never be left behind a second time,' and then she laughed her old, deep laugh. ‘The two lassies will be fine, but I'm not so sure if his lordship will last the course. When he set out to be a doctor I don't think he realized he was in for seven years. Now his head is full of nothing but girls and discos. He thinks I'm made of money.'

As Maggie entered the ballroom of the hotel, everybody stood, and there was spontaneous clapping as she was led to her place. I saw Jerome Callaghan and his young wife at one of the tables. It was said he gave Maggie all the help she would allow over the years in bringing up the children – and I can't imagine her ever taking very much – and that he had played a part in her being chosen. I waited until she was seated behind an
enormous vase of roses. Then I left as we had agreed. I walked about the empty town, had one drink in a quiet bar that also sold shoes and boots, across from the town clock, until it was time to take Maggie home.

‘How did you enjoy it anyhow?' I asked as we drove towards the lake.

‘Enjoy it?' she laughed. ‘I suppose they meant well but I wouldn't like to go through the likes of tonight too often. The whole lot of them would lighten your head. What did I do? I did nothing. What else could I do? I was – in life.'

She was silent then until we turned in round the lake. ‘Even where I am now, it's still all very interesting. Sometimes even far, far too interesting.'

The moon was bright on the lake, turning it into a clear, still sky. The fields above the lake and the dark shapes of the hedges stood out. Maggie sat quietly in the car while I got out to open the gate. Only a few short years before she would have insisted on getting out and walking the whole way in on her own. Wildfowl scattered from the reeds along the shore out towards the centre of the lake as soon as the car door opened. They squawked and shrieked for a while before turning into a dark silent huddle. Close by, a white moon rested on the water. There was no wind. The stars in their places were clear and fixed. Who would want change since change will come without wanting? Who this night would not want to live?

After Fonsie Ryan called his brother he sat in his wheelchair and waited with growing impatience for him to appear on the small stairs, and then, as soon as Philly came down and sat at the table, Fonsie moved his wheelchair to the far wall to wait for him to finish. This silent pressure exasperated Philly as he ate.

‘Did Mother get up yet?' he asked abruptly.

‘She didn't feel like getting up. She went back to sleep after I brought her tea.'

Philly let his level stare rest on his brother but all Fonsie did was to move his wheelchair a few inches out from the wall and then, in the same leaning rocking movement, let it the same few inches back, his huge hands all the time gripping the wheels. With his large head and trunk, he sometimes looked like a circus dwarf. The legless trousers were sewn up below the hips.

Slowly and deliberately Philly buttered the toast, picked at the rashers and egg and sausages, took slow sips from his cup, but his nature was not hard. As quickly as he had grown angry he softened towards his brother.

‘Would you be interested in pushing down to Mulligan's after a while for a pint?'

‘I have the shopping to do.'

‘Don't let me hold you up, then,' Philly responded sharply to the rebuff. ‘I'll be well able to let myself out.'

‘There's no hurry. I'll wait and wash up. It's nice to come back to a clean house.'

‘I can wash these things up. I do it all the time in Saudi Arabia.'

‘You're on your holidays now,' Fonsie said. ‘I'm in no rush but it's too early in the day for me to drink.'

Three weeks before, Philly had come home in a fever of excitement from the oil fields. He always came home in that high state of fever and it lasted for a few days in the distribution of the presents he always brought home, especially to his mother; his delight looking at her sparse filigreed hair bent over the rug he had brought her, the bright tassels resting on her fingers; the meetings with old school friends, the meetings with neighbours, the buying of rounds and rounds of drinks; his own fever for company after the months at the oil wells and delight in the rounds of celebration blinding him to the poor fact that it is not generally light but shadow that we cast; and now all that fever had subsided to leave him alone and companionless in just another morning as he left the house without further word to Fonsie and with nothing better to do than walk to Mulligan's.

Because of the good weather, many of the terrace doors were open and people sat in the doorways, their feet out on the pavement. A young blonde woman was painting her toenails red in the shadow of a pram in a doorway at the end of the terrace, and she did not look up as he passed. Increasingly people had their own lives here and his homecoming broke the monotony for a few days, and then he did not belong.

As soon as the barman in Mulligan's had pulled his pint he offered Philly the newspaper spread out on the counter that he had been reading.

‘Don't you want it yourself?' Philly asked out of a sense of politeness.

‘I must have been through it at least twice. I've the complete arse read out of it since the morning.'

There were three other drinkers scattered about the bar nursing their pints at tables.

‘There's never anything in those newspapers,' one of the drinkers said.

‘Still, you always think you'll come on something,' the barman responded hopefully.

‘That's how they get your money,' the drinker said.

Feet passed the open doorway. When it was empty the concrete gave back its own grey dull light. Philly turned the pages slowly and sipped at the pint. The waiting silence of the bar became too close an echo of the emptiness he felt all around his life. As he sipped and turned the pages he resolved to drink no more. The day would be too hard to get through if he had more. He'd go back to the house and tell his mother he was returning early to the oil fields. There were other places he could kill time in. London and Naples were on the way to Bahrain.

‘He made a great splash when he came home first,' one of the drinkers said to the empty bar as soon as Philly left. ‘He bought rings round him. Now the brother in the wheelchair isn't with him any more.'

‘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.

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.