Creatures of the Earth Read online

  ‘She might indeed. Well, I have to take this towser back to Charlie anyhow. Thanks for the day.’

  ‘Thanks yourself,’ Tom Lennon said.

  Above the arms of the stone wall the teacher watched the frail instructor turn up the avenue towards the Bawn, a straggling rectangular building partly visible through the bare trees where he had rooms in the tower, all that was left of the old Hall.

  Charlie was on his stool behind the bar with the Sunday paper when the teacher came with the mongrel through the partition. Otherwise the bar and shop were empty.

  ‘Did yous catch anything?’ he yawned as he put aside the paper, drawing the back of his hands over his eyes like a child. There was a dark stain of hair oil behind him on the whitewash where sometimes he leaned his head and slept when the bar was empty.

  ‘We roused only one and he slipped them.’

  ‘I’m thinking there’s only the warriors left by this time of year.’ He laughed, and when he laughed the tip of his red nose curled up in a way that caused the teacher to smile with affection.

  ‘I suppose I’ll let the old towser out the back?’

  Charlie nodded. ‘I’ll get one of the children to throw him some food later.’ When the door was closed again he said in a hushed, solicitous voice, ‘I suppose, Master, it’ll be whiskey?’

  ‘A large one, Charlie,’ the teacher said.

  In a delicious glow of tiredness from the walking and the sensuous burning of the whiskey as it went down, he was almost mindless in the shuttle back and forth of talk until he saw Charlie go utterly still. He was following each move his wife made at the other end of the house. The face was beautiful in its concentration, reflecting each move or noise she made as clearly as water will the drifting clouds. When he was satisfied that there was no sudden danger of her coming up to the bar he turned to the shelves. Though the teacher could not see past the broad back, he had witnessed the little subterfuge so often that he could follow it in exact detail: the silent unscrewing of the bottle cap, the quick tip of the whiskey into the glass, the silent putting back of the cap, and the downing of the whiskey in one gulp, the movements so practised that it took but seconds. Coughing violently, he turned and ran the water and drank the glass of water into the coughing. While he waited for the coughing to die, he rearranged bottles on the shelves. The teacher was so intimate with the subterfuge that he might as well have taken part in the act of love. ‘If I’m home in time for the dinner she might have something even better for me afterwards,’ he remembered with resentment.

  ‘Tom didn’t come with you?’ Charlie asked as soon as he brought the fit of coughing under control.

  ‘No. He was done in with the walking and the wife was expecting him.’

  ‘They say he’s coming up for permanent soon. Do you think he will have any trouble?’

  ‘The most thing he’s afraid of is the medical.’

  Charlie was silent for a while, and then he said, ‘It’s a quare caper that, isn’t it, the heart on the wrong side?’

  ‘There’s many a quare caper, Charlie,’ the teacher replied. ‘Life itself is a quare caper if you ask me.’

  ‘But what’ll he do if he doesn’t get permanent?’

  ‘What’ll we all do, Charlie?’ the teacher said inwardly and, as always when driven in to reflect on his own life, instinctively fixed the brown hat more firmly on his head.

  Once he did not bother to wear a hat or a cap over his thick curly fair hair even when it was raining. And he was in love then with Cathleen O’Neill. They’d thought time would wait for them for ever as they went to the sea in his baby Austin or to dances after spending Sundays on the river. And then, suddenly, his hair began to fall out. Anxiety exasperated desire to a passion, the passion to secure his life as he felt it slip away, to moor it to the woman he loved. Now it was her turn to linger. She would not marry him and she would not let him go.

  ‘Will you marry me or not? I want an answer one way or the other this evening.’ He felt his whole life like a stone on the edge of a boat out on water.

  ‘What if I don’t want to answer?’ They were both proud and iron-willed.

  ‘Then I’ll take it as No.’

  ‘You’ll have to take it whatever way you want, then.’ Her face was flushed with resentment.

  ‘Goodbye, then.’ He steeled himself to turn away.

  Twice he almost paused, but no voice calling him back came. At the open iron gate above the stream he did pause. ‘If I cross it here it is the end. Anything is better than the anguish of uncertainty. If I cross here I cannot turn back even if she should want.’ He counted till ten and looked back, but her back was turned, walking slowly uphill to the house. As she passed through the gate he felt a tearing that broke as an inaudible cry.

  No one ever saw him afterwards without his brown hat, and there was great scandal the first Sunday he wore it in the body of the church. The man kneeling next to him nudged him, gestured with his thumb at the hat, but the teacher did not even move. Whispers and titters and one hysterical whinny of laughter that set off a general sneeze ran through the congregation as he unflinchingly wore it through the service.

  The priest was up to the school just before hometime the very next day. They let the children home early.

  ‘Have you seen Miss O’Neill recently, Jim?’ the priest opened cautiously, for he liked the young teacher, the most intelligent and competent he had.

  ‘No, Father. That business is finished.’

  ‘There’d be no point in me putting in a word?’

  ‘There’d be no point, Father.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. It’s no surprise. Everything gets round these parts in a shape.’

  ‘In a shape, certainly, Father.’ There was dry mockery in the voice.

  ‘When it gets wild it is different, when you hear talk of nothing else – and that’s what has brought me up. What’s going the rounds now is that you wore your hat all through Mass yesterday.’

  ‘They were right for once, Father.’

  ‘I’m amazed.’

  ‘Why, Father?’

  ‘You’re an intelligent man. You know you can’t do that, Jim.’

  ‘Why not, Father?’

  ‘You don’t need me to tell you that it’d appear as an extreme form of disrespect.’

  ‘If the church can’t include my own old brown hat, it can’t include very much, can it, Father?’

  ‘You know that and I know that, but we both know that the outward shows may least belie themselves. It’d not be tolerated.’

  ‘It’ll have to be tolerated, Father or …’

  ‘You can’t be that mad. I know you’re the most intelligent man round here.’

  ‘Thanks, Father. All votes in that direction count round here. “They said I was mad and I said they were mad, and confound them they outvoted me,”’ he quoted. ‘That’s about it, isn’t it, Father?’

  ‘Ah, stop it, Jim. Tell me why. Seriously, tell me why.’

  ‘You may have noticed recently, Father,’ he began slowly, in rueful mockery, ‘a certain manifestation that my youth is ended. Namely, that I’m almost bald. It had the effect of timor mortis. So I decided to cover it up.’

  ‘Many lose their hair. Bald or grey, what does it matter? We all go that way.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘When I look down from the altar on Sunday half the heads on the men’s side are bald.’

  ‘The women must cover their crowning glory and the men must expose their lack of a crown. So that’s the old church in her wisdom bringing us all to heel?’

  ‘I can’t understand all this fooling, Jim.’

  ‘I’m deadly serious. I’ll wear my hat in the same way as you wear your collar, Father.’

  ‘But that’s nonsense. It’s completely different.’

  ‘Your collar is the sublimation of timor mortis. What else is it, in Jesus Christ? All I’m asking is to cover it up.’

  ‘But you can’t wear it all the time?’
<
br />   ‘Maybe not in bed but that’s different.’

  ‘Listen. This joking has gone far enough. I don’t care where you wear your hat. That’s your problem. But if you wear it in church you make it my problem.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to do something about it then, Father.’

  The priest went very silent but when he spoke all he said was, ‘Why don’t we lock up the school? We can walk down the road together.’

  What faced the priest was alarmingly simple: he couldn’t have James Sharkey at Mass with his hat on and he couldn’t have one of his teachers not at Sunday Mass. Only late that night did a glimmer of what might be done come to him. Every second Sunday the teacher collected coins from the people entering the church at a table just inside the door. If the collection table was moved out to the porch and Sharkey agreed to collect the coins every Sunday, perhaps he could still make his observances while keeping his infernal hat on. The next morning he went to the administrator.

  ‘By luck we seem to have hit on a solution,’ he was able to explain to the teacher that evening.

  ‘That’s fine with me. I never wanted to be awkward,’ the teacher said.

  ‘You never wanted to be awkward,’ the priest exploded. ‘You should have heard me trying to convince the administrator this morning that it was better to move the table out into the porch than to move you out of the school. I’ve never seen a man so angry in my life. You’d have got short shrift, I’m telling you, if you were in his end of the parish. Tell me, tell me what would you have done if the administrator had got his way and fired you?’

  ‘I’d have got by somehow. Others do,’ he answered.

  And soon people had got so used to the gaunt face under the brown hat behind the collection table every Sunday that they’d be as shocked now to see him without it after all the years as they had been on the first Sunday he wore it.

  ‘That’s right, Charlie. What’ll we all do?’ he repeated as he finished the whiskey beside the oil heater. ‘Here. Give us another drop before the crowd start to come in and I get caught.’

  My brown hat and his heart on the wrong side and you tippling away secretly when the whole parish including your wife knows it. It’s a quare caper indeed, Charlie, he thought as he quickly finished his whiskey to avoid getting caught by the crowd due to come in.

  There was no more coursing together again after that Sunday. The doctor’s car was parked a long time outside the white gate that led to the Bawn the next day, and when Tom Lennon’s old Ford wasn’t seen around the roads that day or the next or the next the teacher went to visit him, taking a half-bottle of whiskey. Lennon’s young wife, a warm soft country girl of few words, let him in.

  ‘How is he?’ he asked.

  ‘The doctor’ll be out again tomorrow,’ she answered timidly and led him up the creaky narrow stairs. ‘He’ll be delighted to see you. He gets depressed not being able to be up and about.’

  From the circular room of the tower that they used as a living room he could hear happy gurgles of the baby as they climbed the stairs, and as soon as she showed him into the bedroom she left. In the pile of bedclothes Tom Lennon looked smaller and more frail than he usually did.

  ‘How is the patient?’

  ‘Fed up,’ he said. ‘It’s great to see a face after staring all day at the ceiling.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The old ticker. As soon as I’d eaten after getting home on Sunday it started playing me up. Maybe I overdid the walking. Still, it could be worse. It’d be a damned sight worse if it had happened in five weeks’ time. Then we’d be properly in the soup.’

  ‘You have oodles of time to be fit for the exam,’ the teacher said, hiding his dismay by putting the whiskey down on the dressing table. ‘I brought this little something.’ There was, he felt, a bloom of death in the room.

  ‘You never know,’ the instructor said some hours later as the teacher took his leave. ‘I’m hoping the doctor’ll have me up tomorrow.’ He drank only a little of the whiskey in a punch his wife made, while the hatted man on the chair slowly finished his own half-bottle neat.

  The doctor did not allow him up that week or the next, and the teacher began to come every evening to the house, and two Sundays later he asked to take the hounds out on his own. He did not cross the bridge to the Plains as they’d done the Sunday together but went along the river to Doireen. The sedge of the long lowlands rested wheaten and dull between two hills of hazel and briar in the warm day. All winter it had been flooded but the pale dead grass now crackled under his feet like tinder. He beat along the edges of the hills, feeling that the hares might have come out of the scrub to sleep in the sun, and as he beat he began to feel Tom Lennon’s absence like his own lengthening shadow on the pale sedge.

  The first hare didn’t get more than halfway from where it was lying to the cover of the scrub before the fawn’s speed caught it, a flash of white belly fur as it rolled over, not being able to turn away from the teeth in the long sedge, and the terror of its crying as both hounds tore it began. He wrested the hare loose and stilled the weird childlike crying with one blow. Soon afterwards a second hare fell in the same way. From several parts of the river lowland he saw hares looping slowly out of the warm sun into the safety of the scrub. He knew they’d all have gone in then, and he turned back for Charlie’s. He gave one of the hares to Charlie; the other he skinned and took with him to Tom Lennon’s.

  ‘Do you know what I’m thinking?’ he said that night. ‘I’m thinking that I should take the bitch.’

  He saw sudden fear in the sick man’s eyes.

  ‘You know you’re always welcome to borrow her any time you want.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ he said quickly. ‘I thought just to take her until you’re better. I could feed her. It’d be no trouble. It’d take some of the weight off the wife.’ When he left that evening he took the bitch. She was wildly excited, thinking that she was going hunting again, though it was dark, and she rose to put paws on his shoulders and to lick his face.

  She settled in easily with the teacher. He made a house for her in the garden out of a scrapped Ford but he still let her sleep in the house, and there was a lighter spring in his walk each evening he left school, knowing the excitement with which he would be met as soon as he got home. At night he listened to Tom Lennon’s increasingly feverish grumblings as the exam drew closer, and he looked so angry and ill the night after the doctor had told him he could put all thought of the exam out of his mind that the suspicion grew stronger in the teacher’s mind that his friend might not after all be just ill.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked fearfully.

  ‘Do the exam, of course.’ There was determination as well as fear in the sunken eyes.

  ‘But you can’t do it if the doctor said you weren’t fit.’

  ‘Let’s put it this way,’ the sick man laughed in harsh triumph, ‘I can’t not do it.’

  The night before the exam he asked the teacher to bring up the clippers. He wanted a haircut, and that night, as the teacher wrapped the towel round the instructor’s neck and took the bright clippers out of their pale-green cardboard box, adjusting the combs, and started to clip, the black hair dribbling down on the towel, he felt for the first time ever a mad desire to remove his hat and stand bareheaded in the room, as if for the first time in years he felt himself in the presence of something sacred.

  ‘That’s a great job,’ Tom Lennon said afterwards. ‘You know, while we’re at it, I might as well go the whole hog and shave as well.’

  ‘Do you want me to get you some hot water?’

  ‘That wouldn’t be too much trouble?’

  ‘No trouble at all.’

  Downstairs as they waited for the water to boil, the wife in her quiet voice asked him, ‘What do you think?’

  ‘He seems determined on it. I tried to talk him out of it but it was no use.’

  ‘No. It doesn’t seem any use,’ she said. A starched white shirt and blue sui
t and tie were draped across a chair one side of the fire.

  The teacher sat on the bed’s edge and held the bowl of water steady while the instructor shaved. When he finished, he examined himself carefully in the little hand-mirror, and joked, ‘It’s as good as for a wedding.’

  ‘Maybe it’s too risky. Maybe you should send in a certificate. There’ll be another chance.’

  ‘No. That’s finished. I’m going through with it. It’s my last chance. There’ll be no other. If I manage to get made permanent there’d be a weight off my mind and it’d be better than a hundred doctors and tonics.’

  ‘Maybe I should give the old car a swing in readiness for the morning, so?’

  ‘That’d be great.’ The instructor fumbled for his car keys in his trouser pockets on the bed rail.

  The engine was cold but started on the sixth or seventh swing. In the cold starlit night he stood and listened to the engine run.

  ‘Good luck, old Tom,’ he said quietly as he switched it off and took the car keys in.

  ‘Well, good luck tomorrow. I hope all goes well. I’ll be up as soon as I see the car back to find out how it went,’ he said in a singsong voice he used with the children at school in order not to betray his emotion after telling him that the Ford was running like a bird.

  Tom Lennon rose the next morning as he said he would, dressed in his best clothes, had tea, told his wife not to worry and that he’d be back about six, somehow got as far as the car, and fell dead over the starting handle the teacher had left in the engine the previous night.

  When word was brought to the school, all the hatted man did was bow his head and murmur, ‘Thanks.’ He knew he had been expecting the death for some days. When he went to the Bawn a last time he felt no terror of the stillness of the brown habit, the folded hands, but only a certain amazement that it was the agricultural instructor who was lying there and not he. Two days later his hat stood calmly among the scarved women and bareheaded men about the open grave, and when it was over he went back to Charlie’s. The bar was filled with mourners from the funeral-making holiday. A silence seemed to fall as the brown hat came through the partition, but only for a moment. They were arguing about a method of sowing winter wheat that the dead man used to advocate. Some thought it made sense. Others said it would turn out to be a disaster.