Creatures of the Earth Read online

  ‘It’s a cardinal law of nature that every man should have his head firmly screwed on to know how to change with the times and survive,’ O’Connor agreed.

  The people in the room had broken up into their separate groups, and when Miss Evans raised her arms in a yawn out of the chair Haydon leaned forward to say, ‘There must have been right old sport last night.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, Mr Haydon,’ she laughed, pleased.

  ‘The way all women are, all on their dignity till the business gets down to brass tacks and then an almighty turn of events. And who’d object to an old roll between the sandhills after the dancing anyhow?’ he raised his voice, as if to irritate Ingolsby, who was pressing a reluctant Ryan on Wordsworth.

  She laughed softly, a hint of defiance against the unconcealed hostility of the married women with their children in the laugh, smiling a little as she looked towards the windows streaming with rain.

  ‘The sandhills won’t be much of a temptation tonight, Mr Haydon.’

  ‘No,’ he said, laughing gently with her, ‘but where there’s an old will there’s always an old way.’ In a voice gentle with what sounded like regret he inquired, ‘It was at the Silver Slipper you were last night, wasn’t it, a bird told me?’

  ‘The bird was right,’ she said. ‘The Blue Aces were playing there.’

  ‘The rain, the rain at the sea, is deadly.’ He turned absently in tiredness or memory and reached and took a white shell from the mantelpiece and held it to his ear to listen to it roar.

  ‘It makes everything miserable,’ McVittie said, tired of his complete possession of O’Connor, but all Haydon did was nod heavily as he replaced the shell and turned again to the girl.

  The wash of rain on the windows, the light through their mist going dull on the blue sea of the wallpaper, the red and yellow hollyhocks like tall flowering masts of sailing ships; and when a child wiped a clearing on the glass, cabbages showed between the apple trees in the garden, and the green cooking apples were bright and shining in the leaves with rain.

  ‘Education comes from the Latin educo, to lead forth. People seem to have forgotten that in the modern interpretation of education,’ Ingolsby laboured.

  It was some consolation to Ryan that he’d abandoned the poets, but his eyes still apologized to the room. He’d make his position even clearer yet, in his own time.

  The turning of the pages without reading, pleasure of delaying pleasure to come. Heroes filled those pages week after week. Rockfist Rogan and Alf Tupper and Wilson the Iron Man. The room, the conversations, the cries of the seagulls, the sea faded: it was the world of imagination, among the performing gods, what I ashamedly desired to become.

  Alf Tupper put aside welder and goggles, changed into his country’s singlet to leave the whole field standing in that fantastic last lap, and Wilson, Wilson, the Iron Man, simply came alone into Tibet and climbed to the top of Everest.

  Korea

  ‘You saw an execution then too, didn’t you?’ I asked my father, and he started to tell as he rowed. He’d been captured in an ambush in late 1919, and they were shooting prisoners in Mountjoy as reprisals at that time. He thought it was he who’d be next, for after a few days they moved him to the cell next to the prison yard. He could see out through the bars. No rap to prepare himself came to the door that night, and at daybreak he saw the two prisoners they’d decided to shoot being marched out: a man in his early thirties, and what was little more than a boy, sixteen or seventeen, and he was weeping. They blindfolded the boy, but the man refused the blindfold. When the officer shouted, the boy clicked to attention, but the man stayed as he was, chewing very slowly. He had his hands in his pockets.

  ‘Take your hands out of your pockets,’ the officer shouted again.

  The man slowly shook his head.

  ‘It’s a bit too late now in the day for that,’ he said.

  The officer then ordered them to fire, and as the volley rang, the boy tore at his tunic over the heart, as if to pluck out the bullets, and the buttons of the tunic began to fly into the air before he pitched forward on his face.

  The other heeled quietly over on his back: it must have been because of the hands in the pockets.

  The officer dispatched the boy with one shot from the revolver as he lay face downward, but he pumped five bullets in rapid succession into the man, as if to pay him back for not coming to attention.

  ‘When I was on my honeymoon years after, it was May, and we took the tram up the hill of Howth from Sutton Cross,’ my father said as he rested on the oars. ‘We sat on top in the open on the wooden seats with the rail around that made it like a small ship. The sea was below, and smell of the sea and furze-bloom all about, and then I looked down and saw the furze pods bursting, and the way they burst in all directions seemed shocking like the buttons when he started to tear at his tunic. I couldn’t get it out of my mind all day. It destroyed the day.’

  ‘It’s a wonder their hands weren’t tied?’ I asked him as he rowed between the black navigation pan and the red where the river flowed into Oakport.

  ‘I suppose it was because they were considered soldiers.’

  ‘Do you think the boy stood to attention because he felt that he might still get off if he obeyed the rules?’

  ‘Sounds a bit highfalutin’ to me. Comes from going to school too long,’ he said aggressively, and I was silent. It was new to me to hear him talk about his own life at all. Before, if I asked him about the war, he’d draw fingers across his eyes as if to tear a spider web away, but it was my last summer with him on the river, and it seemed to make him want to talk, to give of himself before it ended.

  Hand over hand I drew in the line that throbbed with fish; there were two miles of line, a hook on a lead line every three yards. The licence allowed us a thousand hooks, but we used more. We were the last to fish this freshwater for a living.

  As the eels came in over the side I cut them loose with a knife into a wire cage, where they slid over each other in their own oil, the twisted eel hook in their mouths. The other fish – pike choked on hooked perch they’d tried to swallow, bream, roach – I slid up the floorboards towards the bow of the boat. We’d sell them in the village or give them away. The hooks that hadn’t been taken I cleaned and stuck in rows round the side of the wooden box. I let the line fall in its centre. After a mile he took my place in the stern and I rowed. People hadn’t woken yet, and the early morning cold and mist were on the river. Outside of the slow ripple of the oars and the threshing of the fish on the line beaded with running drops of water as it came in, the river was dead silent, except for the occasional lowing of cattle on the banks.

  ‘Have you any idea what you’ll do after this summer?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I’ll wait and see what comes up,’ I answered.

  ‘How do you mean what comes up?’

  ‘Whatever result I get in the exam. If the result is good, I’ll have choices. If it’s not, there won’t be choices. I’ll have to take what I can get.’

  ‘How good do you think they’ll be?’

  ‘I think they’ll be all right, but there’s no use counting chickens, is there?’

  ‘No,’ he said, but there was something calculating in the face; it made me watchful of him as I rowed the last stretch of line.

  The day had come, the distant noises of the farms and the first flies on the river, by the time we’d lifted the large wire cage out of the bulrushes, emptied in the morning’s catch of eels, and sunk it again.

  ‘We’ll have enough for a consignment tomorrow,’ he said.

  Each week we sent the live eels to Billingsgate in London.

  ‘But say, say even if you do well, you wouldn’t think of throwing this country up altogether and going to America?’ he said, the words fumbled for as I pushed the boat out of the bulrushes after sinking the cage of eels, using the oar as a pole, the mud rising a dirty yellow between the stems.

  ‘Why America?’

  ‘Well, it’s
the land of opportunity, isn’t it, a big, expanding country? There’s no room for ambition in this poky place. All there’s room for is to make holes in pints of porter.’

  I was wary of the big words. They were not in his own voice.

  ‘Who’d pay the fare?’

  ‘We’d manage that. We’d scrape it together somehow.’

  ‘Why should you scrape for me to go to America if I can get a job here?’

  ‘I feel I’d be giving you a chance I never got. I fought for this country. And now they want to take away even the licence to fish. Will you think about it anyhow?’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I answered.

  Through the day he trimmed the brows of ridges in the potato field while I replaced hooks on the line and dug worms, pain of doing things for the last time as well as the boredom the knowledge brings that soon there’ll be no need to do them, that they could be discarded almost now. The guilt of leaving came: I was discarding his life to assume my own, a man to row the boat would eat into the decreasing profits of the fishing, and it was even not certain he’d get renewal of his licence. The tourist board had opposed the last application. They said we impoverished the coarse fishing for tourists – the tourists who came every summer from Liverpool and Birmingham in increasing numbers to sit in aluminium deck-chairs on the riverbank and fish with rods. The fields we had would be a bare living without the fishing.

  I saw him stretch across the wall in conversation with the cattle-dealer Farrell as I came round to put the worms where we stored them in clay in the darkness of the lavatory. Farrell leaned on the bar of his bicycle on the road. I passed into the lavatory thinking they were talking about the price of cattle, but as I emptied the worms into the box, the word Moran came, and I carefully opened the door to listen. It was my father’s voice. He was excited.

  ‘I know. I heard the exact sum. They got ten thousand dollars when Luke was killed. Every American soldier’s life is insured to the tune of ten thousand dollars.’

  ‘I heard they get two hundred and fifty dollars a month each for Michael and Sam while they’re serving,’ he went on.

  ‘They’re buying cattle left and right,’ Farrell’s voice came as I closed the door and stood in the darkness, in the smell of shit and piss and the warm fleshy smell of worms crawling in too little clay.

  The shock I felt was the shock I was to feel later when I made some social blunder, the splintering of a self-esteem and the need to crawl into a lavatory to think.

  Luke Moran’s body had come from Korea in a leaden casket, had crossed the stone bridge to the slow funeral bell with the big cars from the embassy behind, the coffin draped in the Stars and Stripes. Shots had been fired above the grave before they threw in the clay. There were photos of his decorations being presented to his family by a military attaché.

  He’d scrape the fare, I’d be conscripted there, each month he’d get so many dollars while I served, and he’d get ten thousand if I was killed.

  In the darkness of the lavatory between the boxes of crawling worms before we set the night line for the eels I knew my youth had ended.

  I rowed as he let out the night line, his fingers baiting each twisted hook so beautifully that it seemed a single movement. The dark was closing from the shadow of Oakport to Nutley’s boathouse, bats made ugly whirls overhead, the wings of ducks shirred as they curved down into the bay.

  ‘Have you thought about what I said about going to America?’ he asked, without lifting his eyes from the hooks and the box of worms.

  ‘I have.’

  The oars dipped in the water without splash, the hole whorling wider in the calm as it slipped past him.

  ‘Have you decided to take the chance, then?’

  ‘No. I’m not going.’

  ‘You won’t be able to say I didn’t give you the chance when you come to nothing in this fool of a country. It’ll be your own funeral.’

  ‘It’ll be my own funeral,’ I answered, and asked after a long silence, ‘As you grow older, do you find your own days in the war and jails coming much back to you?’

  ‘I do. And I don’t want to talk about them. Talking about the execution disturbed me no end, those cursed buttons bursting into the air. And the most I think is that if I’d conducted my own wars, and let the fool of a country fend for itself, I’d be much better off today. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  I knew this silence was fixed for ever as I rowed in silence till he asked, ‘Do you think, will it be much good tonight?’

  ‘It’s too calm,’ I answered.

  ‘Unless the night wind gets up,’ he said anxiously.

  ‘Unless a night wind,’ I repeated.

  As the boat moved through the calm water and the line slipped through his fingers over the side I’d never felt so close to him before, not even when he’d carried me on his shoulders above the laughing crowd to the Final. Each move he made I watched as closely as if I too had to prepare myself to murder.

  Lavin

  When I knew Lavin he was close to the poorhouse but he’d still down mallet and cold chisel to limp after the young girls, crooked finger beckoning, calling, ‘Come, give us a peep, there must be a few little hairs beginning,’ and that strange inlooking smile came over the white stubbled face while the girls, shrieking with laughter, kept backing just fast enough to stay outside his reach.

  When I heard people speak of Lavin it was in puzzlement that when young and handsome he had worked such cruel hours at his trade, though he had no need because his uncle had left him Willowfield, the richest farm around; and he had taken no interest in girls though he could have had his pick; and at a threshing or in a wheatfield he’d be found at nightfall gathering carelessly abandoned tools or closing gaps after the others had gone drinking or to dress for the dances. Neither could they understand his sudden heavy drinking in Billy Burns’s. Before that if he had to enter a pub he’d accept nothing but lemonade. Burns was blamed for giving him credit when his money ran out, and after he seized and held in the house the gypsy girl who sold him paper flowers with wire stems, it was the same Burns who gave him the money to buy the gypsies off in return for Willowfield. The gypsies had warned him that if he didn’t pay what they wanted they’d come and cut him with rusted iron. What money he was able to earn afterwards was from his trade, and that steadily dwindled as machinery replaced the horse. All of his roof had fallen in except above the kitchen, where oats and green weeds grew out of the thatch. Whatever work he got he did outside on the long hacked bench, except when it was too cold or wet.

  The first time I stopped to watch him it was because of the attraction of what’s forbidden. He was shaping a section of a cart wheel, but he put down mallet and chisel to say, that strange smile I’ll always remember coming over his face, ‘Those sisters of yours are growing into fine sprigs. Have you looked to see if any of them have started a little thatch?’

  ‘No.’ His smile frightened me.

  ‘It should be soft, light, a shading.’ His voice lingered on the words. I felt his eyes did not see past the smiling.

  ‘I haven’t seen,’ I said and started to watch the roads for anybody coming.

  ‘You should keep your eyes skinned, then. All you have to do is to keep your eyes skinned, man.’ The voice was harder.

  ‘I don’t sleep in their rooms.’

  ‘No need to sleep in the same room, man. Just keep your eyes skinned. Wait till you hear them go to the pot and walk in by mistake. It’ll be cocked enough to see if it has started to thatch.’ The voice had grown rhythmical and hard.

  It was more a desire to see into the strangeness behind his smile than this constant pestering that made me give him the information he sought.

  ‘The two eldest have hair but the others haven’t.’

  ‘The others have just a bald ridge with the slit,’ he pursued fiercely.

  ‘Yes.’ I wanted to escape but he seized me by the lapels.

  ‘The hair is fairer than on their heads?’<
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  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fair and soft? A shade?’

  ‘Yes, but let me go.’

  ‘Soft and fair. The young ivy covering the slit.’ He let me go as the voice grew caressing and the smile flooded over the face. ‘So fair you can see the skin through it yet. A shading,’ he gloated, and then, ‘Will you come with me a minute inside?’

  ‘I have to go.’

  He turned as if I was no longer there and limped, the boot tongueless and unlaced, to the door, and as I hurried away I heard the bolt scrape shut.

  I avoided Lavin all that winter. I’d heard his foot was worse and that he was unlikely to see another winter outside the poorhouse. It should have assuaged my fear but it did not, and besides I’d fallen in love with Charley Casey.

  Charley Casey was dull in school, but he was good at games, and popular, with a confident laugh and white teeth and blue-dark hair. He had two dark-haired sisters of seventeen and nineteen, who were both beautiful, and a young widowed mother, and there hung about him that glamour of a house of ripe women. I helped him at his exercises, and in return he partnered me in handball. We started to skate in the evenings together on the shallow pond and to go to the river when the days grew warmer. I was often sick with anxiety when he was absent, able to concentrate on nothing but the bell that would set me free to race to his house.

  I tried to get him to read David Copperfield so that we could share a world, but always he had excuses. When the school closed and I had to go to the sea, he promised that he’d have it read by the time I got back. At the sea I spent most of my time alone among the sandhills imagining the conversations we’d have about David Copperfield on the riverbank when the slow week by the sea would be over.

  The morning we got back I rushed to his house without waiting to eat. As I pursued him with questions it grew depressingly clear that he’d not read a word and he admitted, ‘I did my best to read it but I fell asleep. It’s too hot. I’ll read it when it rains.’