Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  ‘Oh, for the Lord’s sake,’ I said, and rose to leave. Outside she was still laughing so provocatively that I drew her towards me.

  The next morning on the train home I heard a transistor far down the carriage promise a prolonged spell of good weather. Meadows were being mowed all along the line, and I saw men testing handfuls of hay in the breeze as they waited for the sun to burn the dew off the fallen swards. It was weather people prayed for at this time.

  I walked the three miles from the station. Meadows were down all along the road, some already saved, in stacked bales. The scent of cut grass was everywhere. As I drew close to the stone house in its trees I could hardly wait to see if the Big Meadow was down beyond the row of beech trees. When I lived here I’d felt this same excitement as the train rattled across the bridges into the city or when I approached the first sight of the ocean. Now that I lived in a city on the sea the excitement had been gradually transferred home.

  Before I reached the gate I could tell by the emptiness beyond the beeches that the Big Meadow had been cut. Rose and my father were in the house. They were waiting in high excitement.

  ‘Everything’s ready for you,’ Rose said as she shook my hand, and through the window I saw my old clothes outside in the sun draped across the back of a chair.

  ‘As soon as you get a bite you can jump into your old duds,’ my father said. ‘I knocked the Big Meadow yesterday. All’s ready for go.’

  Rose had washed my old clothes before hanging them outside to air. When I changed into them they were still warm from the sun, and they had that lovely clean feel that worn clothes have after washing. Within an hour we were working the machines.

  The machines had taken much of the uncertainty and slavery from haymaking, but there was still the anxiety of rain. Each cloud that drifted into the blue above us we watched as apprehensively across the sky as if it were an enemy ship, and we seemed as tired at the end of every day as we were before we had the machines, eating late in silence, waking from listless watching of the television only when the weather forecast showed; and afterwards it was an effort to drag feet to our rooms where the bed lit with moonlight showed like heaven, and sleep was as instant as it was dreamless.

  And it was into the stupor of such an evening that the gold watch fell. We were slumped in front of the television set. Rose had been working outside in the front garden, came in and put the tea kettle on the ring, and started to take folded sheets from the linen closet. Without warning, the gold watch spilled out on to the floor. She’d pulled it from the closet with one of the sheets. The pale face was upwards in the poor light. I bent to pick it up. The glass had not broken. ‘It’s lucky it no longer goes,’ Rose breathed.

  ‘Well, if it did you’d soon take good care of that.’ My father rose angrily from the rocking chair.

  ‘It just pulled out with the sheets,’ Rose said. ‘I was running into it everywhere round the house. I put it in with the sheets so that it’d be out of the way.’

  ‘I’m sure you had it well planned. Give us this day our daily crash. Tell me this: would you sleep at night if you didn’t manage to smash or break something during the day?’ He’d been frightened out of light sleep in the chair. He was intent on avenging his fright.

  ‘Why did the watch stop?’ I asked.

  I turned the cold gold in my hand. Elgin was the one word on the white face. The delicate hands were of blue steel. All through my childhood it had shone.

  ‘Can there be two reasons why it stopped?’ His anger veered towards me now. ‘It stopped because it got broke.’

  ‘Why can’t it be fixed?’ I ignored the anger.

  ‘Poor Taylor in the town doesn’t take in watches any more,’ Rose answered. ‘And the last time it stopped we sent it to Sligo. Sligo even sent it to Dublin but it was sent back. A part that holds the balance wheel is broke. What they told us is that they’ve stopped making parts for those watches. They have to be specially handmade. They said that the quality of the gold wasn’t high enough to justify that expense. That it was only gold plated. I don’t suppose it’ll ever go again. I put it in with the sheets to have it out of the way. I was running into it everywhere.’

  ‘Well, if it wasn’t fixed before, you must certainly have fixed it for good and for ever this time.’ My father would not let go.

  His hand trembled on the arm of the rocking chair, the same hand that drew out the gold watch long ago as the first strokes of the Angelus came to us over the heather and pale wheaten sedge of Gloria Bog: ‘Twenty minutes late, no more than usual … One of these years Jimmy Lynch will startle himself and the whole countryside by ringing the Angelus at exactly twelve … Only in Ireland is there right time and wrong time. In other countries there is just time.’ We’d stand and stretch our backs, aching from scattering the turf, and wait for him to lift his straw hat.

  Waiting with him under the yew, suitcases round our feet, for the bus that took us each year to the sea at Strandhill after the hay was in and the turf home; and to quiet us he’d take the watch out and let it lie in his open palm, where we’d follow the small second hand low down on the face endlessly circling until the bus came into sight at the top of Doherty’s Hill. How clearly everything sang now set free by the distance of the years, with what heaviness the actual scenes and days had weighed.

  ‘If the watch isn’t going to be fixed, then, I might as well have it.’ I was amazed at the calm sound of my own words. The watch had come to him from his father. Through all the long years of childhood I had assumed that one day he would pass it on to me. Then all weakness would be gone. I would possess its power. Once in a generous fit he even promised it to me, but he did not keep that promise. Unfairly, perhaps, I expected him to give it to me when I graduated, when I passed into the civil service, when I won my first promotion, but he did not. I had forgotten about it until it had spilled out of the folded sheets on to the floor.

  I saw a look pass between my father and stepmother before he said, ‘What good would it be to you?’

  ‘No good. Just a keepsake. I’ll get you a good new watch in its place. I often see watches in the duty-free airports.’ My work often took me outside the country.

  ‘I don’t need a watch,’ he said, and pulled himself up from his chair.

  Rose cast me a furtive look, much the same look that had passed a few moments before between her and my father. ‘Maybe your father wants to keep the watch,’ it pleaded, but I ignored it.

  ‘Didn’t the watch once belong to your father?’ I asked as he shuffled towards his room, but the only answer he made was to turn and yawn back before continuing the slow, exaggerated shuffle towards his room.

  When the train pulled into Amiens Street Station, to my delight I saw her outside the ticket barrier, in the same tweed suit she’d worn the Saturday morning we met in Grafton Street. I could tell that she’d been to the hairdresser, but there were specks of white paint on her hands.

  ‘Did you tell them that we’re to be married?’ she asked as we left the station.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It never came up. And you, did you write home?’

  ‘No. In fact, I drove down last weekend and told them.’

  ‘How did they take it?’

  ‘They seemed glad. You seemed to have made a good impression.’ She smiled. ‘As I guessed, Mother is quite annoyed that it’s not going to be a big do.’

  ‘You won’t change our plans because of that.’

  ‘Of course not. She’s not much given to change herself, except to changing other people so that they fit in with her ideas.’

  ‘This fell my way at last,’ I said and showed her the silent watch. ‘I’ve always wanted it. If we believed in signs it would seem life is falling into our hands at last.’

  ‘And not before our time, I think I can risk adding.’

  We were married that October by a Franciscan in their church on the quay, with two vergers as witnesses, and we drank far too much wi
ne at lunch afterwards in a new restaurant that had opened in Lincoln Court. Staggering home in the late afternoon, I saw some people in the street smile at my attempt to lift her across the step. We did not even hear the bells closing the Green.

  It was dark when we woke, and she said, ‘I have something for you,’ taking a small, wrapped package from the bedside table.

  ‘You know we promised not to give presents,’ I said.

  ‘I know but this is different. Open it. Anyhow, you said you didn’t believe in signs.’

  It was the gold watch. I held it to my ear. It was running perfectly. The small second hand was circling endlessly low down on the face. The blue hands pointed to past midnight.

  ‘Did it cost much?’

  ‘No. Very little, but that’s not your business.’

  ‘I thought the parts had to be specially made.’

  ‘That wasn’t true. They probably never even asked.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have bothered.’

  ‘Now I’m hoping to see you wear it,’ she laughed.

  I did not wear it. I left it on the mantel. The gold and white face and delicate blue hands looked very beautiful to me on the white marble. It gave me a curious pleasure mixed with guilt to wind it and watch it run; and the following spring, coming from a conference in Ottawa, I bought an expensive modern watch in the duty-free shop of Montreal Airport. It was guaranteed for five years, and was shockproof, dustproof, waterproof.

  ‘What do you think of it?’ I asked her when I returned to Dublin. ‘I bought it for my father.’

  ‘Well, it’s no beauty, but my mother would certainly approve of it. It’s what she’d describe as serviceable.’

  ‘It was expensive enough.’

  ‘It looks expensive. You’ll bring it when you go down for the hay?’

  ‘It’ll probably be my last summer with them at the hay,’ I said apologetically. ‘Won’t you change your mind and come down with me?’

  She shook her head. ‘He’d probably say I look fifty now.’ She was as strong-willed as the schoolteacher mother she disliked, and I did not press. She was with child and looked calm and lovely.

  ‘What’ll they do about the hay when they no longer have you to help them?’ she said.

  ‘What does anybody do? Do without me. Stop. Get it done by contract. They have plenty of money. It’ll just be the end of something that has gone on for a very long time.’

  ‘That it certainly has.’

  I came by train at the same time in July as I’d come every summer, the excitement tainted with melancholy that it’d probably be the last summer I would come. I had not even a wish to see it to its natural end any more. I had come because it seemed less violent to come than to stay away, and I had the good new modern watch to hand over in place of the old gold. The night before, at dinner, we had talked about buying a house with a garden out near the strand in Sandymount. Any melancholy I was feeling lasted only until I came in sight of the house.

  All the meadows had been cut and saved, the bales stacked in groups of five or six and roofed with green grass. The Big Meadow beyond the beeches was completely clean, the bales having been taken in. Though I had come intending to make it my last summer at the hay, I now felt a keen outrage that it had been ended without me. Rose and my father were nowhere to be seen.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked when I found them at last, weeding the potato ridge one side of the orchard.

  ‘The winter feeding got too much for us,’ my father said.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  My father and Rose exchanged looks, and my father spoke as if he was delivering a prepared statement.

  ‘We didn’t like to. And anyhow we thought you’d want to come, hay or no hay. It’s more normal to come for a rest instead of just to kill yourself at the old hay. And indeed there’s plenty else for you to do if you have a mind to do it. I’ve taken up the garden again myself.’

  ‘Anyhow, I’ve brought these.’ I handed Rose the box of chocolates and bottle of scent, and gave my father the watch.

  ‘What’s this for?’

  ‘It’s the watch I told you I’d get in place of the old watch.’

  ‘I don’t need a watch.’

  ‘I got it anyhow. What do you think of it?’

  ‘It’s ugly,’ he said, turning it over.

  ‘It was expensive enough.’ I named the price. ‘And that was duty free.’

  ‘They must have seen you coming, then.’

  ‘No. It’s guaranteed for five years. It’s dustproof, shockproof, waterproof.’

  ‘The old gold watch – do you still have that?’ He changed after silence.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Did you ever get it working?’

  ‘No,’ I lied. ‘But it’s sort of nice to have.’

  ‘That doesn’t make much sense to me.’

  ‘Well, you’ll find that the new watch is working well anyway.’

  ‘What use have I for time here any more?’ he said, but I saw him start to wind and examine the new watch, and he was wearing it at breakfast the next morning. He seemed to want it to be seen as he buttered toast and reached across for milk and sugar.

  ‘What did you want to get up so early for?’ he said to me. ‘You should have lain in and taken a good rest when you had the chance.’

  ‘What will you be doing today?’ I asked.

  ‘Not much. A bit of fooling around. I might get spray ready for the potatoes.’

  ‘It’d be an ideal day for hay,’ I said, looking out the window on the fields. The morning was as blue and cool as the plums still touched with dew down by the hayshed. There was a white spider webbing over the grass. As the day grew, I found myself stirring uncomfortably in my suit – missing my old loose clothes, the smell of diesel in the meadow, the blades of grass shivering as they fell, the long teeth of the raker kicking the hay into rows, all the jangle and bustle and busyness of the meadows.

  I heard the clear blows of a hammer on stone. My father was sledging stones that had fallen from the archway where once the workmen’s bell had hung. Some of the stones had been part of the arch and were quite beautiful. There seemed no point in breaking them up. I moved closer, taking care to stay hidden in the shade of the beeches.

  As the sledge rose, the watch glittered on my father’s wrist. I followed it down, saw the shudder that ran through his arms as the metal met the stone. A watch was always removed from the wrist before such violent work. I waited. In this heat he could not keep up such work for long. He brought the sledge down again and again, the watch glittering, the shock shuddering through his arms. When he stopped, before he wiped the sweat away, he put the watch to his ear and listened intently. What I’d guessed was certain now. From the irritable way he threw the sledge aside, it was clear that the watch was still running.

  That afternoon I helped him fill the tar barrel with water for spraying the potatoes, though he made it clear he didn’t want help. When he put the bag of blue stone into the barrel to steep, he thrust the watch deep into the water before my eyes.

  ‘I’m going back to Dublin tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘I thought you were coming for two weeks. You always stayed two weeks before.’

  ‘There’s no need for me now.’

  ‘It’s your holiday. You’re as well off here as by the sea. It’s as much of a change and far cheaper.’

  ‘I meant to tell you before, and should have but didn’t. I am married now.’

  ‘Tell me more news,’ he said with an attempt at cool surprise, but I saw by his eyes that he already knew. ‘We heard but we didn’t like to believe it. It’s a bit late in the day for formal engagements, never mind invitations. I suppose we weren’t important enough to be invited.’

  ‘There was no one at the wedding but ourselves. We invited no one, neither her people nor mine.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it was cheaper that way,’ he agreed.

  ‘When will you spray?’

  ‘I’ll s
pray tomorrow,’ he said, and we left the blue stone to steep in the barrel of water.

  With relief, I noticed he was no longer wearing the watch, but the feeling of unease was so great in the house that after dinner I went outside. It was a perfect moonlit night, the empty fields and beech trees and walls in clear yellow outline. The night seemed so full of serenity that it brought the very ache of longing for all of life to reflect its moonlit calm, but I knew too well it neither was nor could be. It was a dream of death.

  I went idly towards the orchard, and as I passed the tar barrel I saw a thin fishing line hanging from a part of the low yew branch down into the barrel. I heard the ticking even before the wrist watch came up tied to the end of the line. What shocked me was that I felt neither surprise nor shock.

  I felt the bag that we’d left to steep earlier in the water. The blue stone had all melted down. It was a barrel of pure poison, ready for spraying.

  I listened to the ticking of the watch on the end of the line in silence before letting it drop back into the barrel. The poison had already eaten into the casing of the watch. The shining rim and back were no longer smooth. It could hardly run much past morning.

  The night was so still that the shadows of the beeches did not waver on the moonlit grass, seemed fixed like a leaf in rock. On the white marble the gold watch must now be lying face upwards in this same light, silent or running. The ticking of the watch down in the barrel was so completely muffled by the spray that only by imagination could it be heard. A bird moved in some high branch, but afterwards the silence was so deep it began to hurt, and the longing grew for the bird or anything to stir again.

  I stood in that moonlit silence as if waiting for some word or truth, but none came, none ever came. Only what was increased or diminished as it changed, became only what is, becoming again what was even faster than the small second hand endlessly circling in the poison.

  Suddenly, the lights in the house went out. Before going into the house, I drew the watch up again out of the barrel by the line and listened to it tick, now purely amused by the expectation it renewed – that if I continued to listen to the ticking some word or truth might come. And when I finally lowered the watch back down into the poison, I did it so carefully that no ripple or splash disturbed the quiet, and time, hardly surprisingly, was still running; time that did not have to run to any conclusion.