Free Creatures of the Earth by John McGahern

frog’s legs with fishing line to the stone. We took it some hundred yards up the bank to where a shallow stream joined the river. We dropped the stone and watched the frog claw upwards, but each time it was dragged back by the line, until it weakened, and it drowned.
    We crossed the bridge in silence, already changing. I helped him at school for some time afterwards but in the evenings we avoided each other, as if we were aware of some shameful truth we were afraid to come to know together.
    I never saw Lavin again. They took him to the poorhouse that October when the low hedges were blue with sloes, though by then the authorities referred to it as the Resthome for Senior Citizens.
    Casey is now married, with children, and runs a pub called the Crown and Anchor somewhere in Manchester, but I’ve never had any wish to look him up. In fact he seldom enters my mind. But as I grow older hardly a day passes but a picture of Lavin comes to trouble me: it is of him when he was young, and, they said, handsome, gathering the scattered tools at nightfall in a clean wheatfield after the others had gone drinking or to change for the dances.

My Love, My Umbrella
    It was the rain, the constant weather of this city, made my love inseparable from the umbrella, a black umbrella, white stitching on the seams of the imitation leather over the handle, the metal point bent where it was caught in Mooney’s grating as we raced for the last bus to the garage out of Abbey Street. The band was playing when we met, the Blanchardstown Fife and Drum. They were playing Some day he’ll come along/The man I love/And he’ll be big and strong/The man I love at the back of the public lavatory on Burgh Quay, facing a few persons on the pavement in front of the Scotch House. It was the afternoon of a Sunday.
    â€˜It is strange, the band,’ I said; her face flinched away, and in the same movement back, turned to see who’d spoken. Her skin under the black hair had the glow of health and youth, and the solidity at the bones of the hips gave promise of a rich seed-bed.
    â€˜It’s strange,’ she answered, and I was at once anxious for her body.
    The conductor stood on a wooden box, continually breaking off his conducting to engage in some running argument with a small grey man by his side, but whether he waved his stick jerkily or was bent in argument seemed to make no difference to the players. They turned their pages. The music plodded on, Some day he’ll come
along/The
man I
love/And
he’ll be big and
strong/The
man I love . At every interval they looked towards the clock, Mooney’s clock across the river.
    â€˜They’re watching the clock,’ I said.
    â€˜Why?’ her face turned again.
    â€˜They’ll only play till the opening hour.’
    I too anxiously watched the clock. I was afraid she’d go when the band stopped. Lights came on inside the Scotch House. The music hurried. A white-aproned barman, a jangle of keys into the quickened music, began to unlock the folding shutters and with a resounding clash drew them back. As the tune ended the conductor signalled to the band that they could put away their instruments, got down from his box, and started to tap the small grey man on the shoulder with the baton as he began to argue in earnest. The band came across the road towards the lighted globes inside the Scotch House, where already many of their audience waited impatiently on the slow pulling of the pints. The small grey man carried the conductor’s box as they passed in together.
    â€˜It is what we said would happen.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    The small family cars were making their careful way home across the bridge after their Sunday outings to their cold ham and tomato and lettuce, the wind blowing from the mouth of the river, gulls screeching above the stink of its low tide, as I forced the inanities towards an invitation.
    â€˜Would you come with me for a