The Trout

by Peter Cunningham

  Father Phelan’s forehead is a mosaic of bright pearls. He shakes his head, as if he’s had enough, but then he sits down again and says: ‘Terence.’

  ‘What was his second name?’

  The priest frowns. ‘Deasy. He was Mrs Flannery’s nephew.’

  ‘Terence Deasy.’

  ‘All right? Now you have it.’

  ‘I have another question—sorry, just hear me out—where is Terence now?’

  ‘How the hell would I know? For Jesus’ sake, I’m not the custodian of you and your family’s friends!’ he cries.

  ‘Could he be in Canada? It’s important, Seán.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘So he could be?’

  ‘I don’t fucking know — all right?’ The priest is trembling, whether from rage or fear. ‘I’m sorry, Alex. You really need to direct your questions elsewhere. Now…’ he looks at his watch.

  ‘Tell me where to ask.’

  He places his chin on the tips of his joined, upright fingers, as if composing himself. ‘Charlie McVee went into Wilkins Abbey.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When… everything came out. You know.’

  ‘I went to Canada over forty years ago.’

  ‘Wilkins were the only people who’d take him in.’

  ‘Did you ever visit him?’

  ‘Me? Jesus, no! I had nothing to do with him, ever. No one went near him. No one even went to the funeral.’ Father Phelan once more checks his watch. ‘I told you, I have to be somewhere.’

  ‘I’m going.’

  He opens his front door and sunlight streams in. On the road below, two boys spin by on bicycles.

  He says, ‘He was befriended by one or two of the monks up there. Maybe they’ll know what you want.’

  ‘I’m sorry to have intruded.’

  He lets out a long sigh and I smell the stale alcohol again.

  ‘Do you know what it’s like for us nowadays? Those of us who stayed the course?’ he asks.

  ‘You don’t have to justify yourself to me.’

  ‘We’re marked men. I can see it in their eyes at Mass. Oh, sure, they defer to my office when it suits them, but deep down they despise me and what I represent. We’re finished here. Finished.’

  ‘I’m very sorry.’

  He lowers his gaze. Eyelashes still fair, as I remember them.

  ‘We’ve known each other for a long time,’ he says. ‘Since we went to school together. And after.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘We had some good times,’ he says and all at once smiles.

  A bubbling ten-year-old with a shock of fair curly hair. A crucifix in his hands, dressed in a snowy white alb, preceding Father McVee from the altar to the sacristy.

  His smile becomes sad. ‘You and me, we once… You see, I only ever tried to do what I thought was best.’

  Life is so strange, I think, and so cruel.

  ‘Seán, if you’re ever in Canada…’ I say, handing him the card we had printed when we moved to Muskoka.

  ‘I’ll pray for you,’ Father Phelan says and closes his door.

  15

  The trout has a powerful ability to smell, which is difficult for humans to understand, since smelling underwater is a faculty we lack. When a sea trout becomes sexually mature, perhaps after one or more summers in the ocean, he turns homewards to his childhood river to breed, directed unerringly and entirely by his sense of smell.

  Kay is baking. The electric mixer is churning, a baking tray lined with buttered, grease-proof paper lies awaiting its contents and the oven. With the big kitchen scissors she shreds tiny pieces of lemon zest into the mixture. From overhead comes gentle tapping as Keith re-beds the shingles and re-fixes them to the cross-beams with the brads he brought over from Roger’s Quay. Out of the window, she can see where Tim is dragging a plastic goalmouth across the grass. The goal contraption is three times as large as he is.

  Despite what she said on the phone about being fine, Kay finds Keith’s presence comforting, she will say later; with Keith’s pick-up parked out front, Larry is less likely to drop by. She has decided not to think about Larry, or of who he may really be, or if he is in fact stalking her. She has also decided to stay at home until I get back, because if she goes into Bayport she may bump into Larry. Nor is she going over to the hospital until next week: she’s called in and cancelled her appointments.

  She’s safe here in our home, in the midst of domestic activity. And maybe all this commotion—which is probably no more than coincidence—is for the best. The rift with my father was never resolved, and sometimes Kay thinks that this was because of her. Had I been alone, without having to consider her feelings, I might have laid the groundwork for reconciliation, however difficult. Now my trip to Ireland may somehow bring everyone together.

  The image at her office window that night in Charlton suddenly pops up and she shudders. Yesterday, she called the hospital and spoke to a person she knows in admissions. Larry said he was visiting a friend on the night in question, but now Kay has learned that there were no in-patients in the hospital that night whose name she recognizes. It doesn’t mean that Larry can’t have friends she doesn’t know… but still.

  She knocks off the mixer, dislodges the bowl, takes a wooden spoon and begins to scoop out the mixture into the baking tray. Kay pauses and listens. The metronomic tapping from the roof has ceased.

  ‘Keith?’

  She knows he can hear her because she called him down earlier for coffee. Outside, through the window, the empty lawn lies in sudden shadow. Still grasping the wooden spoon and mixing bowl, she steps out to the porch.

  ‘Keith! Tim!’

  She puts down the bowl and begins to walk quickly. The emptiness is all at once overpowering. Kay forces herself not to run across the path that leads to the front gate, then without warning, she is transfixed by sunlight. In the bright space that separates our house from the Echenozs’, Keith is in goal, Tim is about to kick.

  16

  The panorama plunges into valleys of purple-flowering rhododendron intersected by silver streams. In one direction the distant sea is at once infinite and comforting, and in the other, on the crest of a ridge to the north-west, a row of jagged crenellations appears. As a child, I came up here twice a year with the doctor: at Easter and at Christmas, when he made his confession. What sins lay deep in the doctor’s heart? What whispered words could be spoken only to a monk in this cloistered fortress?

  For the final mile, the road climbs at a steep angle. Lone trees, cleft by lightning, clutch to rock. The sense of desolation I once felt returns as I drive under the stone arch. When a man dies in here, the doctor used to say, all his possessions fit into a shoebox.

  A door, tucked beneath an old masonry buttress, opens into a small office where a white-robed monk sits at a computer.

  ‘The lawnmower,’ he says to me.

  His skin glows, his head is shaven.

  ‘The lawnmower,’ he says again. ‘Am I right?’

  No eyebrows, prominent cheekbones and discoloured teeth. I have no idea how old he is.

  ‘Afraid not, Father.’

  ‘Brother. Brother Malachy. But as Saint Augustine said, a thing is not necessarily false because badly uttered, nor true because spoken magnificently. How can I help you?’

  ‘Alex Smyth. I live in Canada.’

  ‘Ah! How I often dream of it, although I’ve never been there. And yet I detect a slight Irish accent.’

  ‘My father used to come here to have his confession heard.’

  ‘In the days no doubt when that holy sacrament was more widely availed of. And did you not confess yourself, Alex?’

  ‘I was a child.’

  ‘I still remember my first confession,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘Tongue-tied I was. The poor man on the other side of the grille had to come around and see if there was someone in there at all.’

  An elfin quality attaches to this monk of indeterminate age whose robes rustle as he le
ans back in the chair, hands behind his head.

  ‘And is it confession you’re after today, Alex? If I can find you a priest, that is. I’d be off down the fields myself if I wasn’t on duty.’

  ‘I need some information, about a resident of the abbey, now deceased.’

  ‘Oh, well, in that case the abbot is your man, but he’s in Rome, I’m afraid.’

  ‘The priest I’m referring to is Father Charles McVee.’

  The monk’s slow nod. ‘I see. I see.’

  ‘I understand he died here.’

  ‘Indeed he did.’

  ‘Did you know him, Brother Malachy?’

  Brother Malachy’s expression is a mixture of wariness and provisional affirmation. ‘Long time ago.’

  ‘That’s what everyone says.’

  ‘And yet it is incontestably true.’

  I have to smile. ‘When did he die?’

  ‘When did Charlie die? Let me see. How old am I?’ He goes through some form of personal calculation. ‘Twelve years ago? Maybe fourteen.’

  ‘So you remember him.’

  ‘I may do – but why?’ Brother Malachy cocks his head like a bird listening for a worm.

  ‘I find this very hard to talk about, because I am ashamed and afraid, and because it is caught somewhere inside me and I don’t know what it is or how to get it out.’

  The monk exhales in a slow whistle of air.

  ‘What was your father’s name?’

  ‘Paddy Smyth. Doctor Paddy Smyth. He’s still alive.’

  Brother Malachy gets to his feet, his garments cumbersome in the small space, and locks his desk, using keys from a bunch on his leather belt.

  ‘If you’d like to follow me, please, Alex.’

  17

  The trout is a beautiful creature. His colouring is the most delicate brushwork on a glistening sheen, exquisitely streamlined: now gold and olive, now blue and silver, now mottled with spots red and black.

  As Brother Malachy walks between squarely built stone fortifications, the soles of his sandals slap evenly against his heels. Near the door to the church, where a boarded-up souvenir shop makes up one half of a prefabricated wooden building, he again fingers out a key, unlocks the door beside the shop, turns on the light and plugs in an electric kettle.

  ‘My canteen.’

  He sets out two cups, milk and sugar, then goes about making tea. At a plain table, he stirs the pot, but resists the urge to pour, as if all impulses have to be restrained.

  ‘I never met your father, but I know who he is.’

  ‘May I ask how?’

  He looks to the window, the church, the slopes of the mountain, the other world.

  ‘I was twenty-one years of age when I came in here. I had a degree in history and originally thought I was going to be a teacher. But then my vocation swept me up and carried me away. I fell in love.’

  He dwells for a sweet moment, like a bride who has come across her wedding photographs.

  ‘The then abbot did his best to talk me out of it, but I wouldn’t budge. Everything will have to be left behind, including your transistor radio, he told me. Neither could I have visitors, nor ever leave. Fine, I told him, that is what I want. So he put me in charge of Charlie McVee.’

  ‘In charge?’

  ‘A way of testing me, I suppose. Charlie was prematurely old, sick, mostly incontinent. His chest was very bad and we had not yet got the heating in. Although it was quite obvious he hadn’t long to live, he’d already died many times. I’m talking about a wreck of a human being. His priestly faculties had been removed by Rome. He was an outcast. If he hadn’t been taken in here, he would have perished on the side of the road.’

  Brother Malachy pours out two cups of tea. He takes two sugar cubes in his.

  ‘I remember him as a big, brazen man,’ I say.

  ‘Interesting, because although he was never big when I knew him, he was still brazen.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘His attitude.’

  ‘Did he talk to you?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Every day. I can still hear Charlie talking.’

  18

  A trout that has come home to breed becomes increasingly aggressive as his sexual nature takes over. Even if driven from his lie by predators, he will return as quickly as he can when the danger has passed.

  One morning I heard the doctor remark to Mrs Tyrrell, ‘Father McVee is keeping an eye on that situation in Flannery’s.’

  ‘God bless Father McVee,’ replied Mrs Tyrrell, ever ready to display her devotion to the curate.

  ‘That boy has come through hell,’ the doctor said. ‘He may need professional care.’

  I had not heard the doctor refer to the boy in Flannery’s before and this mention of him seemed like an intrusion into what I had come to consider as my secret. The boy had looked like Man Friday in my Robinson Crusoe, a wild figure with bare, exotic skin. As I lay in bed, I imagined myself sleeping on an island beach with him, the dark sea lapping, the moon licking our legs.

  When the doctor was called upon by a patient in Waterford the following evening, a visit that would take more than two hours, Mrs Tyrrell bathed me, a practice that had evolved over the years in the doctor’s absence.

  ‘How are we going to get a bit of fat on you at all, Alex? Seven years of age and you’re still like a lat’.’

  As Mrs Tyrrell’s motherly hands guided soapy water over my limbs, I was seized without warning by a feeling of intense longing. Images jumped at me. I felt myself swell and grow deliciously outside my control as she soaped my thighs. Mrs Tyrrell, suddenly seeing what was happening, stood up abruptly and went over to the far side of the bathroom to dry her hands.

  ‘Mrs Tyrrell?’

  ‘Yes, child?’

  ‘What is that situation in Flannery’s?’

  ‘Oh ho! Ears on bushes!’

  ‘It’s that boy, isn’t it?’

  ‘You say your prayers that you are where you are and not where that poor boy is,’ she said, carrying over a large bath towel which she kept held out between us. ‘A drunkard for a father, the farm gone and the mother in an early grave, God help her. Say your prayers, Alex Smyth.’

  19

  The larger caddis flies, also called sedges or flags, have a tendency to start hatching at dusk, and on calm, warm evenings this can go on long into the night. They begin life under water as larvae, a phase that lasts for around ten months. Inside a sac spun from its own intestines, the larva metamorphoses into a pupa, before biting its way out into the world. The black-headed insect that emerges into the air has two pairs of wings and its long antennae can be twice its body length.

  The all-purpose fly designed to mimic this insect, and often used on moonlit nights, is called the coachman.

  For weeks the doctor had been talking about the medical conference in Dublin. Colleagues from his old university days, and from England, even a professor from the United States of America would gather in the Gresham Hotel. I came to know all the details: how he would drive to Kilkenny and catch the Dublin train; then in Dublin hail a taxi-cab to take him from the station to the hotel, where a room had been reserved; and how, before retiring, if you put your shoes outside your bedroom door, you would find them shining clean next morning. Mrs Tyrrell would stay the night in our house, something so unheard of that it made me sick with excitement. But with twenty-four hours to go, Mrs Tyrrell went down with flu and so it was hastily arranged that I stay with Father McVee.

  ‘His housekeeper, Miss McGinty, is a very fine woman, just like Mrs Tyrrell,’ the doctor said.

  I must have shown my disappointment.

  ‘And,’ the doctor allowed a little smile to tug at his moustache, ‘he says he might even take you fishing.’

  We got up at seven and the doctor fried trout with tomatoes. We ate together for the first time ever in the kitchen. The doctor then brought out a small leather suitcase that had once belonged to my mother.

  ‘The last time I saw this was a
fter the honeymoon,’ he said as I took it from him and went upstairs to pack my things.

  I loved my father more than ever then, for I knew this suitcase represented his lost life. I could imagine my mother unpacking the clothes she had worn in the west of Ireland, where they had spent ten days after their marriage: removing her formal dresses and shoes, gloves and blouses, all of which still hung or lay in her wardrobe, where I sometimes went to plunge my face in the faintly lingering scents that still attached to the fabrics: then her calling down ‘Paddy, can you take this case?’ And the doctor, not realising that within thirty-six months he would never again be called Paddy in that house, would have come up the stairs. Did they kiss at that moment, I wondered? They both smiled, I was sure, the way they were smiling in photographs. When Paddy closed the empty case and lifted it from their bed, did he ever imagine in a thousand dreams that his wife would never see that suitcase again? It would probably have been better, I reasoned, if both of them had died then.

  We loaded up the car just after eight and set out through the rolling hills where a stranger could never suspect a village might exist. All at once, in the tributary valley that made the surrounding farmland so rich, there it was, its church spire proudly fixing the community to its place.

  The parish priest’s house, separated from the road by a garden of sweet pea and roses, had been built, as the doctor had once explained, following the granting of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. Holding my hand, he carried my suitcase in over the crunchy gravel. Suddenly I remembered Father McVee at Sunday Mass, his booming voice ordering men up from the back of the church.

  I pulled back. ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘Alex…’

  ‘I don’t want to stay here. I want to go home!’

  My sudden aversion momentarily outweighed my fear of the doctor’s disapproval. Something extraordinary then took place. My father squatted down to be level with me, and in a soft, conciliatory voice said, ‘Be a good little boy, now, please. The doctor doesn’t get away very often, does he? And think of how disappointed Father McVee will be. He’s looking forward to bringing you fishing.’