Creatures of the Earth (41 page)

‘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.'

As soon as they entered the room everybody stood up and came towards them and shook hands: ‘I'm sorry for your trouble.' There were three old men besides Jim Cullen, neighbours of the dead man who had known them as children. Mrs Cullen was the older woman. A younger man about their own age was a son of the Cullens, Michael, whom they remembered as a child, but he had so grown and changed that his appearance was stranger to them than the old men.

‘It's hard to think that Peter, God rest him, is gone. It's terrible,' Jim Cullen said as he led them into the bedroom.

The room was empty. A clock somewhere had not been stopped. He looked very old and still in the bed. They would not have known him. His hands were enormous on the white sheet, the beads a thin dark trickle through the locked fingers. A white line crossed the weathered forehead where he had worn a hat or a cap. The three brothers blessed themselves, and after a pause John and Philly touched the huge rough hands clasped together on the sheet. They were very cold. Fonsie did not touch the hands, turning the chair round towards the kitchen before his brothers left the side of the bed.

In the kitchen Fonsie and Philly drank whiskey. Mrs Cullen said it was no trouble at all to make John a cup of tea and there were platefuls of cut sandwiches on the table. Jim Cullen started to take up the story of Peter's death. He had told it many times already and would tell it many times again during the next days.

‘Every evening before dark Peter would come out into that garden at the side. It can be seen plain from our front door. He was proud, proud of that garden though most of what it grew he gave away.'

‘You couldn't have a better neighbour. If he saw you coming looking for help he'd drop whatever he was doing and swear black and blue that he was doing nothing at all,' an old man said.

‘It was lucky,' Jim Cullen resumed. ‘This woman here was thinking of closing up the day and went out to the door before
turning the key, and saw Peter in the garden. She saw him stoop a few times to pull up a weed or straighten something and then he stood for a long time; suddenly he just seemed to keel over into the furrow. She didn't like to call and waited for him to get up and when he didn't she ran for me out the back. I called when I went into the garden. There was no sight or sound. He was hidden under the potato stalks. I had to pull them back before I was able to see anything. It was lucky she saw him fall. We'd have had to look all over the bog for days before we'd have ever thought of searching in the stalks.'

‘Poor Peter was all right,' Philly said emotionally. ‘I'll never forget the day he put me up on the counter of the Rockingham Arms.'

He was the only brother who seemed in any way moved by the death. John looked cautiously from face to face but whatever he found in the faces did not move him to speak. Fonsie had finished the whiskey he'd been given on coming from the room and appeared to sit in his wheelchair in furious resentment. Then, one by one, as if in obedience to some hidden signal or law, everybody in the room rose and shook hands with the three brothers in turn and left them alone with Jim and Maggie Cullen.

As soon as the house had emptied Jim Cullen signalled that he wanted them to come down for a minute to the lower room, which had hardly been used or changed since they had slept there as children: the bed that sank in the centre, the plywood wardrobe, the blue paint of the windowsill half flaked away and the small window that looked out on all of Gloria, straight across to the dark trees of Killeelan. First, Jim showed them a bill for whiskey, beer, stout, bread, ham, tomatoes, butter, cheese, sherry, tea, milk, sugar. He read out the words slowly and with difficulty.

‘I got it all in Henry's. Indeed, you saw it all out on the table. It wasn't much but I wasn't certain if anybody was coming down and of course I'd be glad to pay it myself for poor Peter. You'll probably want to get more. When word gets out that
you're here there could be a flood of visitors before the end of the night.' He took from a coat a large worn bulging wallet. ‘Peter, God rest him, was carrying this when he fell. I didn't count it but there seems to be more than a lock of hundreds in the wallet.'

Philly took the handwritten bill and the wallet.

‘Would Peter not have made a will?' John asked.

‘No. He'd not have made a will,' Jim Cullen replied.

‘How can we be sure?'

‘That was the kind of him. He'd think it unlucky. It's not right but people like Peter think they're going to live for ever. Now that the rest of them has gone, except your mother, everything that Peter has goes to yous,' Jim Cullen continued as if he had already given it considerable thought. ‘I ordered the coffin and hearse from Beirne's in Boyle. I did not order the cheapest – Peter never behaved like a small man when he went out – but he wouldn't like to see too much money going down into the ground either. Now that you're all here you can change all that if you think it's not right.'

‘Not one thing will be changed, Jim,' Philly said emotionally.

‘Then there's this key.' Jim Cullen held up a small key on a string. ‘You'll find it opens the iron box in the press above in the bedroom. I didn't go near the box and I don't want to know what's in it. The key was around his poor neck when he fell. I'd do anything in the world for Peter.'

‘You've done too much already. You've gone to far too much trouble,' Philly said.

‘Far too much,' John echoed. ‘We can't thank you enough.'

‘I couldn't do less,' Jim Cullen replied. ‘Poor Peter was one great neighbour. Anything you ever did for him he made sure you got back double.'

Fonsie alone did not say a word. He glowed in a private, silent resentment that shut out everything around him. His lips moved from time to time but they were speaking to some darkness seething within. It was relief to move out of the small cramped room. Mrs Cullen rose from the table as soon as they
came from the room as if making herself ready to help in any way she could.

‘Would you like to come with us to the village?' Philly asked.

‘No, thanks,' Jim Cullen answered. ‘I have a few hours' shuffling to do at home but then I'll be back.'

When it seemed as if the three brothers were going together to the village the Cullens looked from one to the other and Jim Cullen said, ‘It'd be better if one of you stayed … in case of callers.'

John volunteered to stay. Philly had the car keys in his hand and Fonsie had already moved out to the car.

‘I'll stay as well,' Mrs Cullen said. ‘In case John might not know some of the callers.'

While Fonsie had been silent within the house, as soon as the car moved out of the open bog into that part of the lane enclosed by briars and small trees, an angry outpouring burst out like released water. Everything was gathered into the rushing complaint: the poor key with the string, keeling over in the potato stalks, the bloody wallet, the beads in the huge hands that he always felt wanted to choke him, the bit of cotton sticking out of the corner of the dead man's mouth. The whole thing was barbaric, uncivilized, obscene: they should never have come.

‘Isn't it as good anyhow as having the whole thing swept under the carpet as it is in the city?' Philly argued reasonably.

‘You mean we should bark ourselves because we don't keep a dog?'

‘You make no effort,' Philly said. ‘You never once opened your mouth in the house … In Dublin even when you're going to shop it takes you a half-hour to get from one end of a street to the next.'

‘I never opened my mouth in the house and I never will. Through all those summers I never talked to anybody in the house but Mother and only when the house was empty. We were all made to feel that way – even Mother admitted that – but I was made to feel worse than useless. Every time I caught
Peter looking at me I knew he was thinking that there was nothing wrong with me that a big stone and a rope and a deep bog hole couldn't solve.'

‘You only thought that,' Philly said gently.

‘Peter thought it too.'

‘Well then, if he did – which I doubt – he thinks it no more.'

‘By the way, you were very quick to pocket his wallet,' Fonsie said quickly as if changing the attack.

‘That's because nobody else seemed ready to take it. But you take it if that's what you want.' Philly took the wallet from his pocket and offered it to Fonsie.

‘I don't want it.' Fonsie refused the wallet roughly.

‘We'd better look into it, then. We'll never get a quieter chance again in the next days.'

They were on a long straight stretch of road just outside the village. Philly moved the car in on to the grass margin. He left the engine running.

‘There are thousands in this wallet,' Philly said simply after opening the wallet and fingering the notes.

‘You'd think the fool would have put it in a bank where it'd be safe and earning interest.'

‘Peter wouldn't put it in a bank. It might earn a tax inspector and a few awkward questions as well as interest,' Philly said as if he already was in possession of some of his dead uncle's knowledge and presence.

With the exception of the huge evergreens that used to shelter the church, the village had not changed at all. They had been cut down. Without the rich trees the church looked huge and plain and ugly in its nakedness.

‘There's nothing more empty than a space you knew once when it was full,' Fonsie said.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Can you not see the trees?' Fonsie gestured irritably.

‘The trees are gone.'

‘That's what I mean. They were there and they're no longer there. Can you not see?'

Philly pressed Fonsie to come into the bar-grocery but he could not be persuaded. He said that he preferred to wait in the car. When Fonsie preferred something, with that kind of pointed politeness, Philly knew from old exasperations that it was useless to try to talk, and he left him there in silence.