Patron Saint of Eels

by Gregory Day

  Every now and then as we sat there a gust of wind would come through and give the fire tower a shake. I’d get a bit windy myself, but looking over at Nan she wouldn’t have flinched.

  ‘I told you they wanted to dredge the Dick Lake, didn’t I?’ I said.

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Ah, they reckon they wanna clean up the damage the septics caused to it. Probably just more tourism.’

  She shook her head at the mention of the word. The dreaded T word. ‘The shire’s down to only two graders now. My road’s bloody awful. You need to be a fuckin’ horse to get over it. But they’ll throw money at the tourists, won’t they? I tell you, Noel, you can have town. It’s better out here. Bullshit free!’

  ‘Yair, fair enough,’ I said, a bit annoyed, ‘but what I’m thinking is how weird it is that all those eels got out of there before they dredged it.’

  ‘Well, I never even knew there were eels in that swamp.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone much did. I don’t think even Ron ever set a net in there.’

  ‘Yair, but he’s never liked eel. He reckons it’s too oily.’

  ‘No, he likes it smoked with a nice sweet sawdust. I remember him serving it up at Rhyll’s place once. Plus, if he knew they were there he’d just wanna catch some of them for the hell of it. He’d give ’em away. Or hang ’em over his fence to watch the reactions.’

  She snorted in amused agreement.

  ‘I was thinking as I was driving up here,’ I said, ‘those eels would’ve been taken out of there in the bucket of a front-end loader if it hadn’t been for that rain. It would’ve been a bloody massacre.’

  ‘Yair, maybe, but what’s worse, Noely? That or dying in those ditches? Poor things.’

  ‘Well, at least this way they can maybe find their way out.’

  ‘They’re lucky for that rain then, eh?’ she said, nodding towards the landscape on the other side of the windows.

  I looked out as well. There was a patch of powder blue in the western sky above Silk Hill.

  ‘I’d like to think they knew what they were doing,’ I said after a pause. ‘I’d love it if they could get their bearings and find the river.’

  Nan stubbed out her second cigarette, as it was obvious to both of us from the light that it was time to go. She scoffed. ‘I’d love it if I knew what I was doing,’ she said, smiling at me with that beautiful freckled clarity she has when she smiles. And on that note we descended the tower.

  As I watched her walk ahead of me on that singlefile track back to the house, I had a sense of her increasing isolation. She was at home on the track, in tune with the scratches and critches and other sounds in the ironbarks around her, but in human terms she was getting increasingly feral. In that way that concerns you. As if she might be forgetting something. A similar kind of thing happened to her brother, Phantom, and he was dead at twenty-eight. Shot himself through the head after six months alone on Yern, the property out near Moriac. He just switched off. From the community and eventually, and tragically, from life. I don’t have any heavy judgements to make about suicide on moral grounds but in Phantom’s case it was terrible because it seemed to be a case of just letting things slip. We all stopped visiting him because he wanted to be left alone. But really, it was the worst thing for him. We should’ve taken him out of himself. Nanette would’ve normally, but she had three young kids under five, she had her hands full. And their other brother, Keith, was studying medicine in South Africa, so he wasn’t there either. And his mates got the ‘stay away’ message. Phantom was like Nan, very strong character, and sparky. People are a bit wary of them but in the end they can be their own worst enemies.

  I decided as we arrived back at the house that I’d ask her to come to the pub with me. She wouldn’t have set foot in there for ages and maybe she needed to have a few drinks and a laugh. Lighten up a bit. But she wouldn’t go. She said she was too tired and had things to do. I persisted but there was no changing her mind. By the time I relented and went to leave she was sending out the vibes for me to nick off. To ‘stay away’. I’d crossed the line. She’s got a shell around her as hard as a terrapin’s.

  IV

  I HAD A GLASS OF CASCADE at home on the verandah before going up to the pub. The weather had finally cleared and you could feel that perhaps the season was on the turn. I watched the late light show up the spiderwebs on a bridle I’d left near the tank stand a couple of weeks before. The chill was thinning out and the birds were loving it, flirting all over the place. It was a serene evening, but for the swish and hissing water, the sound of the eels in the ditches all around me.

  Up at the pub, the eels were naturally enough the big talking point. Things are a damn sight busier around here than they used to be but there isn’t that much going on that people wouldn’t take an interest in something like that. I have a theory that people like it when the bush comes back into their lives a bit. Even though they’ve got carpets on the floors and dishwashing machines and are always complaining the roads aren’t sealed, I reckon it makes them happy when something happens in the paddocks, or on the beaches, or in this case in the ditches, that they can’t avoid. Speaking for myself, though, I definitely like it. It brings the magic back a bit when something unexpected happens in nature. And that night in the pub the buzz in the air was proof enough.

  Stories of eels got told in every corner, over every beer and counter meal. Stories of giant ones in Papua New Guinea and albino ones in the Coorong. Some people said they were good eating but a lot disagreed. Some said they were best prepared by the Chinese, who gut them by sticking chopsticks down their gullet and twisting the guts out. That way you can cook what looks like the complete animal. Others reckoned they spontaneously generate without breeding. Kind of like plants. Someone said they’re nice stewed in brandy.

  I told them that round here the blackfellas used to call them boonea, and old Ron McCoy reckoned that during the war people’d put dead ones in the front yards of Germans or Italians who lived nearby. ‘Of course, that was until the Italians changed their minds,’ said Ron, sitting on his usual stool at the bar.

  It was Wednesday night, pool night, and the bar was fuller than usual. All the younger crew were there as Wednesday was their big midweek night and they loved their pool. They were all spruced up and happy and saying g’day and settling in for a big one.

  I had a chat with Micky Been, Raymond’s son, who worked for us for a little while as he was waiting to go on the pro surfing tour. The Beens are a legendary family of watersportsmen, mainly thanks to Raymond. But now Micky and his two younger brothers, Paul and Oscar, are going great guns as young surfers. All three are pretty talented but they reckon Micky’s the best though he doesn’t like being away from home. He said as much to me one day a couple of years back when we were working, digging post-holes in pink clay up near the lighthouse. He said he’d just like to stay put and surf his local wave rather than head off to Durban or Hawaii or Europe, chasing the kudos of the tour.

  That’s unusual in a young bloke. Most of them are keen to go but Micky’s a pretty simple young guy. And it’s good. It’s no crime to prefer the coast you were born into. The tip is that he’ll stay back here and take over the running of Raymond’s shop and boardshaping business. And be pretty happy. Listening to K-Rock, he’ll marry his girlfriend and become a local legend like his dad. Saving people from sharks and breaking endurance records in the water. Savouring the local barrels, which can be few and far between.

  Although they only live just over the western ridge of our valley, about a mile away across the river in Boat Creek, the Beens and the other ‘clubbies’, as we call them, because they have a lifesaving club there, are a different breed to us in Mangowak. They’re totally focused on the ocean, whereas we divide our map between the shore and the bush out back. We were always more like a country town while they’re more like a suburb of Sydney. Ocean focused and sport mad. I wouldn’t even bother mentioning the eels to Micky because he just wouldn’t
be interested. His dad used to be the same. Although he’s a lot older than me, I remember as a kid that Raymond Been was only ever on the beach. He knew the water in so far as you can race in it, surfski on it, malibu it, but I reckon he barely fished it until the kids were grown up a bit. Now, of course, Raymond’s right into the country as well as sport and he fishes the rocks on the straight beach between our rivermouth and theirs, and heads out back into the bush a lot. I reckon Micky’ll probably develop the same way, but for the moment he’s more concerned about whether his hair gel’s doing the job than what the eels in the Dick Lake are up to. And I don’t say that judgementally; no, it’s probably more natural for a goodlooking twenty-three year old to be concerned with matters of the mirror rather than the swamp. It’s just how it is. Just the way of things.

  Darren Traherne turned up with his sister, Barbara, and a Polaroid of his fishing buckets full of eels. They joined the shout that was running with me and Ron McCoy and my older brother Jim. Of course, we go back a long way with Darren and Barb and, as a case in point, they are the opposite of Micky and the other Beens. These days Darren’s bent on carving things out of ironbark. Barb’s still as freckly as she was when she was a kid, but whereas back then she was chubby and a bit sooky, nowadays she’s slender and a little up-market looking. That is, of course, until she opens her mouth. Then she sounds just like her grandmother, Rhyll. I doubt whether Darren or Barb have ever been on a surfboard in their life. But if you want to talk about yabbies or ragwort, or what’s in the rock-pools, or rainfall, they’re the ones. It’s as I said. In Mangowak things are more country. We’re bushies by the ocean. In Boat Creek it’s the other way around. They’re sportsmen and sunbakers who happen to have a sea of trees sitting out there behind them.

  Straightaway Barb started asking me about the eels, and after a half-hearted chat about a building site with Darren, Micky drifted back off to the pool table where his action was. So, me and Darren, old Ron McCoy, Jim and Barb ranged over the aspects of what had happened in the swamp.

  ‘I told them years ago,’ Ron said in his deep, slow, reclusive voice. ‘They should never have bothered putting the water on. It only brings more people . . . and more nonsense. Damming the bloody river. What were they thinking? There’s enough rain around here to keep the tanks full. And to bust the rivermouth through in autumn and spring. They should leave it alone, bloody bureaucrats. They should never have had those septics in the first place. It does you good to have a shit outside. They wouldn’t have had a problem with the eels then.’

  ‘But the problem isn’t with the eels, Ron,’ Barb said. ‘They didn’t even know the eels were in there. The problem was the birds not being able to land because of the silt and the reeds.’

  ‘That’s tripe,’ said Ron emphatically, his fleshy lips pouting like a bream as he turned to grasp his pony of stout. ‘There’s not that much more reed in there than there was before. The birds don’t land there because they bloody well prefer the riverflat.’

  He’d lived on the sea cliff above the swamp since he was born and his little pork-pie racing hat and clean blue jumper could not disguise what hundreds of early dawns and a constant reconnaissance of nature had done to the shape of his face and his complexion. It was only recently that Ron had bothered ‘dressing’ for the pub. He used to get about in blue Yakka workpants and a three-quarter length gaberdine coat at all times, but it seems things can change in a man as he approaches his eighties, and perhaps Ron had decided that sartorial elegance in the form of a hound’s-tooth hat was one way he could improve his chances of a reasonable verdict when his judgement day came.

  ‘Ron’s right,’ said my brother Jim, who like me had spent hours as a child popping rabbits with a slug gun from Ron’s sunroom window. ‘There’s no contest for a bird, between the riverflat and the Dick Lake. The water’s flowing in the river and the flats are full of food. And there’s the big redgums to roost in. There’s none of that in the Dick Lake.’

  Ron nodded in agreement. ‘They knew there were those eels in there,’ he said, the foam of his stout thick on that fishy upper lip of his. ‘The bloody shire aren’t always that smart, but if I’ve been having the occasional feed of eel out of there for the last fifteen years, then they knew they were there. I’ve seen the shire bloke’s nets sitting on the hut side of the swamp. They take pH or E. coli or bloody IQ tests or whatever, and put nets in every now and then to see what’s there.’ He stopped and clicked his tongue. ‘That’s, of course, when they’re not puttin’ up another bloody sign!’

  We all sniggered. ‘Spot on, Ron,’ said Jim. No-one hates the local council like my brother Jim. As far as he is concerned, they do nothing other than promote tourism at the expense of us who live here. It was one of his favourite subjects. He stood there against the bar in his khaki work clothes, his strong jaw twitching with relish as he got stuck in. ‘Have you seen the one on this side of Kuarka Dorla?’ he said. ‘It says TRAVEL TIMES ADVICE 50 M. If it’s not enough to have a bloody sign telling you how many minutes it’s gonna take to get to here and Lorne and the rest, they have to have a sign fifty metres before it telling you that the sign is there!’

  We chuckled and shook our heads and dipped our fingers into the bowl of nuts, but Ron was his usual deadpan self on his perch, his old sage-green eyes only just masking his mischief. ‘And who’s bloody well paying for that sign?’ he said. ‘We are. That’s who.’

  Darren looked at me and winked. Although we were all pissed off about our rates being spent on such things, Ron was notorious for being a bit tight with his money. He’d barely spend forty dollars a week, he catches or grows everything he eats, and he lives with his ninety-seven-year-old mother on the clifftop block of land they reckon’s worth about three million dollars these days. But it’s just home to Ron. Always has been. And really, when I think about it, it’s not that he’s tight with money, it’s just that it’s not his go. All his pleasures, apart from alcohol, are free.

  ‘So you do catch eels in the swamp, Ron,’ I said, getting the subject back to the eels. He nodded, silently at first, not wanting to talk for fear of being heard to be poaching. We all took a sip.

  ‘Been doing it for years,’ he said eventually. ‘They call it a bloody bird sanctuary! The only birds in there are a gang of old moorhens. Occasionally something else’ll stop there, maybe a nankeen heron or a spoonbill or something, but not often. Yair. I’ve put a square hook in there now and again.’

  There was a pause then and I considered how secretive Ron’s hunter-gatherer life was. Most of his food was caught between four am and dawn, and I only know that because me and my brothers, and Darren, are the only people he’s ever taken with him. And that’s only been very occasionally. Every now and again I’ll hear a tap on my barn door in what seems like the middle of the night and it’ll be Ron asking if I want to go fishing at the mouth or shooting in the hills. It’s usually when he wants a bit of companionship or when he can’t be bothered driving. So I do the driving. And the talking, the little of it there is. Most times he has his trannie on the talkback, anyway. But he’d never told me about getting eels from the Dick Lake. What other hidden resources was he tapping, I wondered, sipping my stout.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ Darren said lightly, ‘that’s one fishing ground that well and truly everyone knows about now, Ron.’

  The old fella smiled cheekily, then pursed his big lips disapprovingly, touched his hat, and shook his head at yet another change in his local habitat.

  How sensitive or not old fellas like Ron McCoy are to the landscape is a constant question these days. A lot of people say they’re rednecks destroying the place but Ron McCoy’s no cocky, no cranky wheat farmer wrecking the river systems or salting the ground. He’s just a small-fry independent. And he knows the place. He watches and listens. He hears what no-one else hears. ‘The thrush in the underbrush,’ my mum used to say. I said to Ron once that if a ghost of an old Wathaurong tribe member turned up back here one day, Ron’d be the only
one he could have a proper yarn with. About the place. I said it to tease him but he took me seriously and said it was probably true.

  ‘I’ve got nothing against the blackfellas,’ he said to me on another occasion, ‘but just because they’re dead round here doesn’t mean they were perfect. One thing’s for sure, though, they would’ve known a lot more about this neck of the woods than we do.’ And another time he said to me, ‘People are romantics. I’ve heard people in Winchelsea romanticise sandscrapes now they’ve got grass greens. Never forget it, Noel. People are romantics.’

  I knew by the way he said it that I was included in that. And that he wasn’t.

  The night kicked on. I had couta and salad at the bar, though that’s not exactly what the menu said it was. Speaking of romanticism. According to the board and the new chef from Daylesford I was ordering:

  Local Flashing Couta skillet-seared in a caramelised Provençal jus, served w/fennel & rocket salad in a drizzle of Moroccan orange & fresh Kelly Country honey.

  What a con! I must admit, though, it was nice, but I would’ve preferred the couta without the caramel and with just a little lemon and garlic and the fennel tops. But yair, it was nice, despite the price, and the bread they serve up these days is always good.

  Darren recounted how he’d put three eels aside in his laundry that afternoon and when he went back to get them to take them around to Barb’s place before heading up to the pub, they were gone. He’d stood them in a bucket in the trough and they’d tipped that over and somehow slithered up the sides of the trough and disappeared. So now he had three eels in his house and he didn’t know where. He looked and looked before he had to leave, with no luck.

  ‘You’d wanna be a bit careful getting into bed tonight,’ joked Jim, and Barb said she reckoned Darren’d end up sleeping in her bungalow for exactly that reason.