Although it is warm in the hotel bedroom, I shiver. I close the curtains, undress, take my blood pressure tablets, and then stand under the hot shower for five minutes before I call Kay.
‘Well?’ she asks.
‘I just got a name from him, that’s all. Otherwise, nothing has changed.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘How are you? That’s the main thing.’
‘I’m fine—we’re fine. Keith is here.’
‘I asked him to look at those loose shingles.’
‘I’m really fine, Alex. I don’t need Keith here to look after me.’
After the call, because I have forgotten to pack my cell charger, I turn off the phone before I get into bed. As I lie, listening to the sounds of traffic on the quay, I realize that even now I’m waiting for a message from the nursing home. He has changed his mind. He is sorry and wants to see you. And I would charge out on the road again, full of childish hope, full of love.
The traffic gradually becomes part of the room. Flannery. Heavy iron farm gates, high grass, a gigantic alabaster group of statues that includes Jesus dying in his mother’s arms. Gnarled thorn trees, like human limbs, stand in proximity to the thatched house, their branches wrapped around with rosary beads, scapulars and the tiny plastic-framed visages of saints.
We are sitting in our new car, a red Humber, and my nostrils are filled with the smell of leather. I look across to my father. He is dressed entirely in black and is wearing on his head a three-peaked biretta surmounted with a woolly tuft.
‘You must finish the book,’ he is saying to me. ‘Then you can come fishing.’
‘It’s very long, Daddy.’
‘Books is all that stands between us and poverty,’ he says with the sudden passion I fear most. ‘Read it!’
I stare down. The print is small and the lines close together.
AlexSmythAuthorBayportLakeMuskokaOntario
7
Father McVee was a hit with the local country folk who had grown weary of their elderly curate. Now they had a younger man who spoke with passion of God’s love, the beauty of the Virgin Mary and the power of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes he berated them from the pulpit, and ordered the men at the back to come forward and fill the front pews, and when they did, scolded the secrets they kept in their hearts. He arrived unannounced through the back doors of cottages. When he came to our house to visit the doctor, or to collect him for fishing, if he saw me he always said things such as, Ah, here’s the boss of the house himself! or, If I gave you a thru’penny bit, young man, would you know what to do with it?
The river bend, glimpsed through trees, jumps alive as mist sighs from the hedgerows. Along the top of post-and-rails a grey squirrel scurries. Pigeon-song thrums in the morning glades. By the time I pull up by the bridge, sunlight is creeping into the sloping farmland, nailing tiny details, such as white stones in drainage gullies and pearls of moisture on the heads of daffodils. The stone-built, eighteenth-century residence seems far too near the road. A car is parked on one side of the porch, a large caravan on the other. As I step back to get a better view, I realize with shock why the proportions are so altered. The beech trees have gone. Hillocks, like graves, mark the stumps. The beech were planted the same year the house was built and what is left holds no meaning.
As I glide through a valley of dense trees, colours bright as coral glint. This is isolated country, far from the main road. In the old days the farmers up here seldom came to town. After the riverbed, a sharp climb leads to lush fields divided by grass-grown stone banks and home to speckled cattle. In a gateway, I get out and, looking back, cup my hands to my ears.
Mooooooaaaaaugh!
8
Jesus was everywhere: in a group of twice-life-size statues, depicting the Passion of Christ in Flannery’s meadow, through which we had to drive, and, in a tiny figurine over every shed door lintel of the grey-painted farm outbuildings, as the Infant of Prague.
Father McVee always referred to him as Our Dear Lord, Jesus Christ. The priest had started dropping by our house on Sundays after Mass, and sat in the front room with the doctor, going through fishing books and magazines where the merits of sherry spinners, ginger quills and grey dusters were discussed. Colour paintings of the flies revealed themselves as the doctor, or the priest, carefully peeled back the protective tissue pages.
The fly-tier’s art involves the hackles of game cocks, the feathers from duck wings and the stripped eye quills of peacocks.
No Flannery is listed in the telephone book for this area and at the shop where I stopped, they shook their heads. Have I really been here before, in this soft but remote landscape, this hidden parish of few homesteads so different from the sprawling expanses of Muskoka? Twice I drive up and down the same stretch of narrow road before realising what has changed: in place of Flannery’s old field gate, a bell-shaped entrance and modern concrete piers have been installed. An avenue divides the front field, and on either side of it stand rows of poplar, forty feet high. My rented car rattles on the cattle grid.
The sense of returning to a place I once knew is minimal. Water troughs and aluminium gates. A modern house with shiny slates and large windows is at odds with the old place, now revealed, hunched in beside the new. Concrete licks down from the house into the yard, like a dirty apron.
‘Looking for someone?’
At my window stands a ginger-haired man who is no more than thirty, wearing a sleeveless singlet and shorts. He holds a pitchfork and his sweating body glistens.
9
‘You stay in the car, mind,’ said the doctor.
He sounded the horn, a few sharp pips, then got out. From a shed across the pockmarked dirt yard, frantic scuffling and barking erupted. The dwelling house, neatly thatched with little braids and twists of straw artfully woven above the eaves, glowed in the sunshine. I climbed into the driver’s seat, its leather warm, clasped the steering wheel and imagined myself driving.
A man hurried towards us. Mr Flannery’s hair was both black and white, like the coat of a badger, and from his chin sprouted a ragged black and white beard. Knitted mats of dark curls covered his thick forearms; damp patches marked the front of his flannel shirt.
‘The fishing is mighty here these nights, Jim. Would you not take it up again?’ the doctor asked as the farmer led the way to the house.
‘I might, doctor, I might,’ Mr Flannery replied, ‘but I never seem to have the time.’
Fly fishing allows man to revert to his state of being a natural hunter and to stalk his quarry as he has done since memory began. Fly fishing allows man to act out an elemental part of the forest glade that lies within us all.
10
The farmer regards me with suspicion as he rests on his pitchfork, both hands on the shaft.
‘Flannery,’ he says and spits to the side. ‘We found a prayer book inside in a box belonging to a Mrs Flannery. But this farm has changed hands three times since.’
The cottage door opens and a young woman comes out, looks at me, then picks up a pail and continues across the yard.
‘They have a bench in the church,’ he says. ‘I think they’re buried up there.’
‘Just them? I mean, only the husband and wife?’
‘The man you should talk to is Father Seán Phelan. Father Phelan knows everything.’
A wind is getting up, warm and laden with summer.
‘No one ever came back here?’ I ask. ‘No one ever came in and said they’d lived here?’
‘My wife is from this parish. Tess!’
Tess puts down the pail. She is pregnant and wears a cotton dress and shit-stained rubber boots to her bare knees.
‘This man is asking about Flannerys that used to be here.’
‘Oh, Flannerys,’ she says and looks at me with curiosity. Her foxy hair is tied back tight from her freckled cheeks. ‘Mr and Mrs Flannery.’
‘I told him Father Phelan was his man.’
‘Flannerys are buried beside the
church,’ she says.
‘I told him that.’
I’m willing her to say more, for there is an instant quality of wisdom to Tess that is bewitching.
‘I’m trying to contact a young boy who used to live here with them,’ I say. ‘His name was Terence.’
She screws up her face. ‘When I was growing up, there used to be stories.’ She glances at her husband. ‘You know, stories.’
‘There was trouble,’ I say.
‘Why the big interest?’ the farmer asks.
‘I live in Canada now. I’m trying to track down people I used to know here.’
‘Flannery died, before her,’ Tess says, ‘and she left the farm to the parish priest. He sold the farm and used the money to rebuild the church.’
‘What did Flannery die of, d’you know?’
She sees me only as an outsider.
‘Don’t ask me,’ she says. ‘It was a long time ago.’
11
Even though it was forbidden, I got out of the Humber. Timeless peace lay on the day, its drowsiness enlarging my senses as I walked across the yard, borne along by the droning of insects and the ripe scents of dung stacks and rich meadows.
By an old hay barn with open sides, I could see to the valley beyond. Pigeons flew out over my head in a tight covey. In the barn, shadows fell like broad planks as I walked through and out the other side to where a crab apple tree of small, stunted buds grew crookedly from a bank of earth. Thirty yards below, a boy was cranking the handle of a water pump. Brown legs, broad shoulders. Older than me, but not much. Black hair curled on his neck. The water bounced into the air like silver coins. He turned and saw me. He was frowning. What is the matter with him? was my first thought. Why does he look so sad?
Trout have spherical lenses that provide a wide field of vision. Their eyes can move independently of each other. They can see colours perfectly well, but since colours are not visible at night, a black fly is best for night fishing since it creates a clear silhouette against the moonlit sky.
12
Kay sits with a coffee, trying to read, listening to the east wind that sings in the roof. It’s just gone eight-thirty and Keith has called from Roger’s Quay, saying he’ll be over in an hour. Tim appears at the door of the kitchen, looking bored.
‘You want something to eat, Tim?’
‘No, thanks, Grandma.’
‘What do you want to do today?’
‘Keith said he’d bring me water-skiing. Can I?’
‘Not till Granddad comes home.’
‘Please.’
‘No. And that’s the end of it. Look, why don’t you go over and see what Pierre is up to?’
She watches fondly as the small figure makes his way out. She sees me as a small boy too, when it comes to my father, a child who must keep trying to be accepted, she will later say. My novel Sulphur, she understands, was another attempt to be accepted. The doctor of the book, a crusty old widower with a heart of gold, was hard on his only son, fearing that to indulge him would be to spoil him; and the son was often bewildered by his father’s seeming rejection, and the beatings, losses of temper, and the bouts of lonely drunkenness. And yet the underlying love between the father in the book and his son was heart-warming, the emotions beautifully etched and delivered, Kay felt.
Sulphur did not tell the whole story, however, since it spoke only of one boy, whereas now it seems there were two. Death can mean so many different things, for the unconscious plays tricks, ever spinning its symbols, trying to make us confront the truth through our dreams. Dreams are seldom literal, Kay knows: her patients dream and then see conspiracies where there are none until their lives become ruined by suspicion.
Moreover, the doctor in the book was depicted as a good and noble man whose human failings were rescued by his honourable instincts. Was this the eulogizing to which I had referred and to which someone called Terence may have taken exception?
Kay puts down the magazine she has been reading, brings her fingertips to her temples and tries to press a little ease in there. Sometimes, as now, she says a quick prayer to make things right. The east wind sings. Soon it will go into the south and a new song will be heard in the roof tiles.
13
For decades I have lain awake in the Canadian vastness imagining the landscape through which I am now forging, seeing the roll of vernal hill fields, hearing stream on stone, smelling sweet gorse. The village, a small collection of buildings with the church as its focal point, lies so hidden that one always comes upon it with surprise. Uncountable Sundays at Mass here with the doctor stand frozen in my mind. He always timed it so that we arrived as the Mass bell was pealing. Generations clung to the forms and pews. In winter, the church was so cold that the doctor unfailingly remarked, ‘No wonder there’s so much chilblains.’
Sunlight pours down the empty main street. The pub is still there, and so is the shop beside it, although that has become a supermarket. Next is the church, with its cemetery gathered tight around it. The church door is closed, something that formerly would never have been seen at noon. As I drive past, bells that are not bells but electronic recordings burst from the bell-tower. I remember Father McVee directing altar boys to the rope of the old bell, a task seen as a reward for diligence on the altar. Now each reverberating beat of the midday Angelus, delivered in a fug of static, follows me out along the road.
The trout has inner ears, which allows him to distinguish sounds, particularly sounds too low for humans to hear. Lateral lines on either side of the trout’s body transmit vibrations in the water to his brain. He uses this information to find food and to escape predators.
14
Pea gravel crunches on my approach to the hall door: dining room to the right, sitting room to the left; upstairs, three windows: the frosted panes of the bathroom and the two windows of the priest’s bedroom. Do priests in Ireland still employ housekeepers, I wonder? Father McVee’s, I suddenly recall, was called Miss McGinty.
A chain is undone and two locks turn.
‘Father Phelan?’
He squints into the brightness. He is wearing a grey cardigan. His Roman collar is unclipped and hanging to one side of his shirt.
‘Yes?’
‘Seán, I’m Alex Smyth.’
Father Phelan runs his tongue back and forth along the inside of his lower lip, as if searching for food particles. In his mid-sixties, he is stooped and bald.
‘Alex Smyth.’
‘Do you remember me, Seán?’
All the decades rush into a single point in his pale blue eyes. ‘You got married and…’ He is confused. ‘Where do you live?’
‘In Canada.’
Trouble hatches in his suddenly anxious look. He makes to step back inside.
‘Alex, I’m sorry, but…’
‘I just want to ask you something, that’s all.’
‘I have to go out shortly.’
‘This will just take a minute.’
The priest sighs. ‘You’d better come in so.’
Defiant fair curls still cluster on the back of his neck. A smell of stale drink. We turn left, to the sitting room, although from its coldness and bareness it is clear he has not been sitting here. A gilt-framed painting of the Sacred Heart hangs over the mantelpiece; beneath it is a dish containing an unlit night-light.
‘Chain on the door these days, Seán. Two bolts.’
The priest offers up the palms of his hands.
‘I have to take home the chalices after every Mass… Different times.’ He goes to the window and drops the blind. ‘It’s hard to keep going.’
We sit on upright chairs.
‘I saw my father yesterday.’
‘When you say you saw him…?’
The priest’s tone carries in it the possibility that what I’ve just referred to is a corpse.
‘He’s in a home outside Waterford, still to the good. Reads the paper. Still cantankerous.’
‘Ah, thank God,’ the priest says reflexivel
y. ‘I never knew him well, as you know, although I do know that he and my, ah, predecessor were acquainted.’
‘He doesn’t want to see me anymore.’
The tongue, like a sensor, moves beneath the lip. ‘Well, there are consequences to everything.’
‘I was in Flannery’s old farm an hour ago.’
He blinks. ‘Flannery’s?’
‘Flannerys that was.’
‘Walshes have it now. That was parish land, you know.’
‘Left to the Church by Flannerys.’
‘Thomas and Agnes Flannery. Buried above. Let me see. He died in nineteen fifty-seven.’ The priest is staring at me as if something unsavoury has just appeared. ‘And his wife followed him in nineteen sixty-three, if I’m not mistaken,’ he continues.
‘And she was the sickly one.’
Father Phelan looks mildly surprised.
‘She was my father’s patient,’ I explain.
‘God be merciful to them both.’
Although caught off-guard by my arrival, now his attitude displays a mounting defiance.
‘So what brought you out to Flannery’s, Alex?’
‘Trying to find out exactly what happened there.’
Father Phelan shakes his head. ‘Before my time.’
‘There was a boy called Terence. Something happened. What became of him?’
Father Phelan’s eyes are empty. ‘Terence?’
‘Flannery’s nephew. Come on, Seán!’
As if the utterance of a blatant lie is a step too far, he suddenly stands up.
‘I think it is unfair to come in here like this, disturbing my morning, asking questions like a policeman.’
‘Hardly.’
‘Stirring it all up again… interfering.’
‘Something is haunting me,’ I say and my voice is unsteady. ‘It has been with me all my life, but now it has come back with a vengeance.’
The Trout Page 5