Patron Saint of Eels

by Gregory Day

  Praise for The Patron Saint of Eels

  ‘. . . a new and highly original voice in Australian contemporary fiction’

  WEST AUSTRALIAN

  ‘Day . . . understands the power of story and the way local mythology and folklore invest a place with its own magic . . . His first novel is essentially an enchanting regional fable that transcends its own regionalism to pose serious questions not only about environmental responsibility but also about spiritual connection with the world in which we live’

  CANBERRA TIMES

  ‘The Patron Saint of Eels is gentle in spirit, reverent and celebratory’

  AGE

  ‘Day has produced a pocket book of great charm and whimsy’

  SUNDAY TIMES

  ‘Gregory Day loves the Australian bush and, with his fable, has given us a gentle story, written as only a “poet and musician” could do’

  NEWCASTLE HERALD

  ‘In Gregory Day’s wonderful first novel, the enigma of the eel becomes the central metaphor for a charming contemporary fable about migration and belonging, and mortality and belief’

  THE AUSTRALIAN

  First published 2005 in Picador by

  Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  St Martins Tower, 31 Market Street, Sydney

  Copyright © Gregory Day 2005

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be

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  This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have

  been in the print edition.

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available

  from the National Library of Australia

  http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  EPUB format: 9781743540015

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  for paddybanjo

  G

  If the sun and moon should doubt, they’d immediately go out.

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  I

  MY BARN IS MY SAVIOUR. These days when I climb up into the manna-gum loft, where once upon a time we stored the sheets of bark we used to build the old huts with around here, and where I now sleep, all my everyday cares and worries just seem to slip away. I can smell the timber all around me, I can feel the sea air as it passes through the many gaps and holes of the unsealed building. I can drift and dream, I can draw and think.

  That’s where I was lying when it all started one September night last year. The rain that had been sheeting down for the whole of the previous two days had finally stopped. I’d turned the radio off and was listening to the waves of wind roll in across the tops of the trees and along the chute of the river valley. I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular, maybe about whether the vegetables I’d planted out in the yard below would make it through the weather, when from over near the road, and in between the crescendos of the wind, I began to hear the strangest slushing sound, a sound I’d never heard before, so that I changed my angle lying there in bed, tilting my head on the pillow to hear it better.

  Yes, it was a slushy sound, the sound of moving water that you might expect to hear after such a deluge as we’d had, but there was something else about it, an urgency to it, a rhythm of panic about it, and as I lay there the night seemed quickly to become all eerie and weird, as nights can do, especially when you encounter an unfamiliar thing in a place that has long been familiar to you. After a little while I was too spooked to contemplate getting up and investigating as I normally would’ve done. I closed the timber shutter of the old open-air window near my bed. I couldn’t for the life of me work out what the hell the sound could be. It was definitely more than just the sluicing sound of the extra flow of water after the rain; I was used to that. No, it was too frenetic. It seemed to be coming from the ditches that ran alongside the roads, particularly from the one at the front of my house, which is connected to the swamp that’s officially known as the ‘Dick Lake Memorial Bird Sanctuary’. I conceded to myself as I lay there that the swamp could have overflown and run into the surrounding ditches and outlets, but I knew the sound I was hearing was not just that. There was another element to it, something insistent, a creepy gluttish beat to it. Almost a malevolence. So I pulled up my blankets to cover my ears and tried to ignore it, to get some sleep and solve the mystery in the easy light of morning.

  Our town is an ocean and bush town where, once upon a time, people used the blue horizon as a spirit level when building a house. The world is useful in more ways than you can imagine, once you really get to know it, and in times past, even in my lifetime, people here in Mangowak were so resourceful they used to make garters out of fishskin, which they’d wear to soothe the gout. Some of the old families around here, like the Owens and the Trahernes, used to rely on the ocean and bush to such an extent that they really did take on marsupial, bird-like and fish-like characteristics. My grandfather, who was a great one for the moonlight, had the sensitive bug eyes of a little sugar glider. And Sid Traherne, before he died, used to spend the hottest days of summer in a kind of burrow he’d dug into the steep slope overlooking the riverflat at the front of his house. Just like a wombat or an echidna.

  A lot of those people are gone now. Jolly Owen’s the last one of the Owens around, and she’s only just hanging on, surrounded as she is by wheelchair ramps and little red lights and beeping alarms, as well as her persistent nightmares about the decade she spent cooking for wheat cockies at Yarpeet up in the Mallee. But us Leas are still here, along with a few other stragglers who’ve survived the gentrification, and the Trahernes, of course, are still around, living as they’ve always done in that private world of theirs, that world of amateur naturalism and cross-country golf, still with their original land, and still with that vast and intimate family knowledge born out of the gifts of improvisation and bushcraft, of getting by.

  It was Darren Traherne that I first saw when I went out that next morning after I’d heard the strange slushing sound. He was standing at the roadside ditch in his Rainbird coat, with his big fishing net full of a wriggling mass. Darren’s stout from work, and tanned, with a long brown plait down his back. He’s a couple of years younger than me and very shy, which kind of makes him serious as a rule, but his voice betrays him. It’s clear and young, just the same as it was when we used to traipse around the riverflat with our bug-catchers and stock whips and packets of Wizz Fizz as ten and twelve year olds in the 1970s.

  He looked up from his work when he heard my footsteps and let out what was almost a little squeal. ‘Fuckin’ hell, come and have a look at this would ya, Noel. The gutter’s teeming with bloody eels!’

  I went over and sure enough he was right, his net was chock-a-block, squirming with eels. As I looked down into the ditch where it runs alongside the pumping station and the boobiallas, it too was a wriggling, gyrating mass. Full to overflowing with the local black eel.

  Of course it immediately explained what had kept me awake the night before and I told Darren all about it. ‘I thought I was going mad,’ I said.

  Darren kept shaking his head, and then called out, as if to someone on the other side of the road, holding his net of eels in front of him. ‘The Dick Lake’s overflowed
with the rain! I never knew there were so many eels in that bloody swamp!’

  He looked back down into his net and fell silent, and then turned all solemn. He said, deadpan, ‘They’re bloody nice smoked, you know.’ Not being able to take his eyes off his catch.

  Darren went off in his ute to get a couple of the big industrial fishing buckets he keeps in his shed. He figured he’d fill them with the eels and pass some on to his sister, his mum and dad, and some mates. It was funny because we’d always joked that he was dreaming if he thought he was ever going to catch enough fish to fill those buckets he’d found washed up on the beach at Heatherbrae. Now he’d found a use for them after all. He knew it was cheating but I reckoned there were going to be a few cameras clicked that day anyway.

  He drove off up the Dray Road to his house on the pub hill just half a mile behind my place, and as I stood dumbfounded by the squirming ditch, Hovva from the fish and chip shop rolled up. He pulled over and stuck his head out the window.

  ‘Come and have a squiz,’ I said. ‘You don’t see this too often.’

  He got out of his car with a curious look on his face, which quickly turned sour when he took a peek in the ditch. ‘Jesus,’ he said, appalled, ‘that’s disgusting.’

  It was a fair enough call. Hundreds of slimy and angry black eels in a ditch at your feet isn’t the prettiest sight in town. But I was more fascinated than anything else. I didn’t find them ugly like Hovva did.

  ‘How the hell did they get there?’ he asked, taking a big step back.

  ‘The Dick Lake overflowed with all the rain and it looks like they’ve come through the old pipes under the road. I could hear them thrashing away during the night. It kept me awake for a while, trying to work out what the sound was.’

  We stood staring down at the eels.

  ‘You should grab a few for the shop,’ I told him. ‘They’re bloody good smoked.’

  Hovva just raised his eyebrows. We hadn’t had a fish and chip shop in Mangowak till he and his brotherin-law blew in and opened one up on the flat in front of the inlet where the old timber and fibro shop we called the ‘bottom’ shop used to be. His brother-in-law was the one into fish. Hovva was just in it for a job, but after only one summer the brother-in-law shot through to Western Australia, taking all his industry connections with him and leaving Hovva to sell frozen Footscray Market flake and trevally with the help of a few schoolkids in the peak times. I doubt whether he’d eaten eel before in his life. And by the look on his face he wasn’t about to.

  ‘Nah, I’ll be right,’ he said. ‘Bloody weird, though, eh?’

  ‘Yair, well, I’ve never seen anything like it, that’s for sure.’

  Not surprisingly Hovva didn’t hang around too long. He said he had to go to Kuarka Dorla to have new tyres put on his car, but I reckon he just couldn’t stand the sight of it. Anyway, he left me alone there with the eels and before long Darren got back with his buckets. We filled three of them from right in front of where we stood and I got four or five eels in my old yellow laundry bucket while we were at it. You can never say no to a free feed, after all.

  II

  ALL THAT DAY THE CREATURES thrashed away in those ditches, and various people cottoned on or were told and stopped to take some or just to have a look. I could see them from behind my tea-tree hedge, which was all in flower, and I could hear their amazement at what the rain had turned up. Some kids came down the hill after school and started poking and eventually slashing at the ditches with sticks. I thought that was a bit much and went out to tell them so. They each took a couple away in hessian bags I gave them for the purpose and left the rest of the eels to their own miry torment.

  At one point I could hear a hammering coming from the house at the back of the block behind my barn, and when I went out to have a peek I could see that my neighbour, Bruce, was down from the city and was fixing up a nail on his back verandah rail to skin some of the eels. I was surprised he knew how. He’s always struck me as the kind of bloke who keeps his hands clean. He works in statistics or something, he told me once, something to do with company reports. I wouldn’t have thought he’d go anywhere near an eel, but there you go, you just never know, do you? As my old man used to say, there’s life under every log, no matter how dead it looks.

  I stood near my barn watching Bruce as he went about it. He seemed to have two or three in an old tartan Esky that he’d placed under his lemon tree not far from where he was fixing the nail. Every now and then I could hear the eels flopping about in the water he’d given them. I couldn’t figure out why on earth he was hammering the nail into the rail without the eel on it. Usually that’s what you’d do – hammer the eel onto a wall or a post and then strip the skin off it. But Bruce had simply hammered in his nail while the eels were still in the Esky under the lemon tree. Wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt, I said nothing and settled in to see how he went about it.

  After hammering in the nail he stood back and looked at it for a bit. Then he went over to the Esky and looked into it. He picked up a paint-stained stick lying in the lemon shade next to the Esky and poked amongst the eels. Then he got up off his haunches and, passing the nail, disappeared into his house. He was gone a little while, during which time I could hear some other people squealing near the ditch back out at the front of my house.

  After a couple of minutes I heard Bruce’s toilet flush and then a few ticks later he reappeared at the back of the house with a banana in his hand. Something seemed to be troubling him. He sat on a chair between the nail and the lemon tree and peeled the banana very methodically, looking up at the nail occasionally as he did, obviously thinking about it. Then he’d not so much look but rather lean sideways towards the flopping in the Esky, obviously thinking about it as well. Maybe he’d been told a way to do it and he couldn’t quite remember it, I thought. But I knew him as a very fastidious type of person – I’d watched the way he’d built his front fence, very neat and picturesque, and he took his time about it – so I wasn’t going to come to any conclusions too quickly.

  As he ate, and I waited to see what would happen next, I got a potential drawing in my head of an eel nailed up to Bruce’s verandah rail. It’d be good. The sun would be on it so it cast a shadow in a slant. Then I thought of the old nail-clock Jack Toucan used to have on his shack wall and I thought I could draw that. Except the eel would be hanging down from the nail, pointing permanently to six o’clock. I thought I could draw it from memory. Jack Toucan died back when I was about eighteen, just after I went away to Melbourne to study, and his shack burnt down in the fires, but I reckoned I could picture it. I’d been up there so much as a kid with my old man and my mum. Before he retired, Jack had been a travelling salesman for Slazenger and I always loved the old racquets that were hanging on his shack walls, along with old newspaper clippings of people like Lew Hoad and Ken Rosewall winning the Davis Cup. His shack was a couple of miles east of our place, back up the hill out of the river valley and in amongst the bearded heath and tea-tree overlooking the gully beach. It was small and totally rudimentary. Stout bottles were stacked high against two of the outside walls, another wall housed the windows and the door, and the fourth wall his nail-clock. It was like a sundial. He’d hammered a nail into the fibro sticking straight out and facing north so that the shadow it cast on the wall would tell the time. Jack Toucan’s nailclock used to be famous around here. People reckoned it told its own time and that’s why Jack was always late. Jack himself reckoned he’d always wanted to live by his own clock and that fixing that nail to the wall was the first thing he did when he retired. One nail. And his life got sweet.

  Anyway, I could picture the drawing now. It’d have to have a bit of colour. But the nail’d be coppery, the eel’d be black and the shadow of the nail’d be brown on the pale green wall. I could see the angle of the shadow at about two o’clock, sticking out from the head of the eel. Which would just be hanging there like a dead bushranger. And in the shed Jack and Ron McCoy and my fathe
r, and old Sweet William, would be having a few ‘snorts’, as they used to call them, and maybe a game of cards to the sound of the surf and the black cockatoos. At two o’clock. Yep, I could picture it now.

  Finally Bruce finished his banana and made a move. He got up, disappeared into the house and returned with a pair of long kitchen tongs. He went over to the Esky and tried to pick up an eel with the tongs. With no success, of course. At this point I realised that he didn’t quite know what he was doing. He might as well have tried to pick them up with a soup spoon! He messed about with the tongs for a little while, then he cast them aside and went over to his van, which was parked at the side of his house nearest my barn. I ducked back a bit so he wouldn’t see me. I didn’t want to embarrass him. And I was a little curious, in a perverse sort of way, about this nail-first method he had going.

  When I heard his footsteps again, I resumed my position at the corner of the barn and saw he’d now donned a pair of gardening gloves, the type with rubber fingers, and was attempting to pick out one of the eels with his hands. That’s better, I thought. He was wincing as he groped about in the Esky, avoiding the difficult branches of the lemon tree as he did so, and finally he got a hold of one.

  He had it by the neck in his left hand and then after it began to curl itself around his wrist he grabbed its bottom half with his right hand. The gloves were perfect for eel-handling. I must remember that, I thought, because the rubber of the fingers is very rough and textured, so you can get a good grip. I had a pair lying around I’d been given the Christmas before but had only ever used once, when I was trying to fix my TV antenna on the roof in the rain.

  He walked the eel over until they stood together in front of the nail, Bruce perfectly motionless, the eel writhing like all get-out. ‘Now what?’ I asked him under my breath.

  As he stood there I sifted through the possibilities and decided there weren’t any. Short of squashing the living eel onto the nail with his bare – or gloved – hands. Bruce knew something wasn’t quite right and his air of distaste for the task was growing. I took off, back into my yard, across in front of my barn, out my side gate, around the road beside the thrashing ditch still fighting with stuck creatures, and wandered in a saunter into Bruce’s driveway and past his van. Making as if I was headed to knock on the door I caught him out of the corner of my eye and said g’day.