Creatures of the Earth by John McGahern Page A

pony and cart, the brass shining on the harness, to clean out the lavatory, and as I give him the key we make polite professional remarks about the flies and heat.
    â€˜Ah, but not to worry, sir, I’ll bury it deep.’ He touches his cap.
    Soon, soon, they’ll come and flush him and me into the twentieth century, whatever the good that will do, and I grow ashamed of the violence of the thought, and, as if to atone, over lunch, give Mrs Maguire a quiet account of the beating young Walshe received for rifling the poorbox.
    After lunch he comes, dressed all in black, with a black briefcase, the half-collar of the Christian Brother on the throat instead of the priest’s full collar, a big white-haired man, whoseemed more made to follow ploughing horses than to stand in classrooms. The large hand lifts the briefcase on the table.
    â€˜My name is Brother Mahon and Canon Reilly kindly gave me permission to speak to the senior boys about a vocation to the Irish Christian Brothers.’ I wonder if he knows that I too had been once as he is now, if he looks at me as a rotten apple in the barrel; but if he does he says nothing, all glory to the power of the Lie or Silence that makes people easy in the void, all on our arses except the helping hand they give us on our way.
    â€˜I told Canon Reilly I’d take the other children out to the playground while you spoke.’
    â€˜Lucky to have such a fine manager as the Canon, takes a great interest in schools.’
    â€˜Couldn’t ask for a better manager,’ I answer. The brick supports the brick above it. I’m a rogue and you’re another. ‘I’ll just take them outside now.’
    â€˜All except the boys of the sixth class take your English book and follow me outside,’ and again, because I feel watched, the voice is not my own, a ventriloquist’s dummy that might at any minute fall apart.
    The Brother motions the scattered boys closer to the table, ‘It’ll only be just a man to man chat,’ as I take the others out, to sit against the white wall of the school in the sun, facing the lake, where the tinker is putting the green sods back above the buried shit, the flies thick above the cart and grazing pony.
    Through the open window the low voice drifts out into the silence of the children against the wall in the sun, and I smile as I listen. If one could only wait long enough everything would be repeated. I wonder who’ll rise to the gleaming spoon and find the sharpened hooks as I did once.
    â€˜I want you to imagine a very different lake shore to your own little lake below your school.
    â€˜Hot sands.’ His words drift out. ‘Palm trees, glittering sea, tired after fishing all the night and washing their nets. A tall dark man comes through the palms down to the water.
    â€˜We have laboured all the night and have taken nothing, the fishermen answer. The two boats were so full of fish that they began to sink. They fall on their knees on the sand, and the tall man, for it was Jesus, lifted them up and said to them follow me. From henceforth you will catch men.
    â€˜In this schoolroom two thousand years later I bring you the same message. Follow me and catch men. Follow me into the Irish Christian Brothers, where as teachers you will lead the little children He so loved to Christ.
    â€˜For death comes as a thief in the night, the longest life is but a day, and when you go before the Judgement Seat can you without trembling say to Jesus I refused the call even the tired fishermen answered, and what if He refuses you as you refused Him?’
    He sends them out into the porch, and brings them back one by one to interview them alone, while the tinker hands me back the key. ‘I’ve buried it deep, sir. There’ll be no flies,’ and the rise and fall of voices comes from Mrs Maguire’s infant prison house, Eena, meena, mina moo, capall, asal agus bo .
    Name, age, your father’s