The Trout

by Peter Cunningham

  As my tears came silently and quickly, the doctor took out a red spotted handkerchief and patted my cheeks.

  ‘Do you know something? You look the living image of your poor mam. She’ll never be dead for me as long as you’re here.’

  He had never before said anything like that and I recognized how his words reflected the desperation of the situation. Then the hall door opened and Father McVee appeared in a regimental black soutane, gleaming black brogues and a broad Roman collar. He came towards me, his arms flapping.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ he said.

  ‘I’m delivering your lodger, father,’ the doctor said, getting back to his feet. ‘It’s his first time.’

  ‘Miss McGinty has made the biggest pot of porridge I’ve ever seen in my life,’ said Father McVee happily.

  20

  Whatever kind of water he inhabits, the trout is an expert at survival: in knowing where the food is, and how to get it, and, when he is not feeding, in conserving his energies and keeping out of trouble. He soon discovers that tiny, vulnerable creatures like flies and nymphs are at the mercy of the currents, so, not unnaturally, he positions himself to take advantage of the flows.

  In the sitting room, I listened to the big, mahogany-encased wireless, and spun the dial between Hilversum and Berlin, Stockholm and Athlone, as I did at home. Father McVee had driven to Clonmel, to visit the industrial school, following which he would return to the village to hear confessions, Miss McGinty told me.

  As each hour passed, I tried to imagine the doctor’s progress: on the train, off the train, in his hotel arranging to be called in time for his conference in the morning. I wandered in and out of the kitchen, where the housekeeper was preparing dinner; but she lacked the spontaneous affection of Mrs Tyrrell and seemed uncomfortable to have a child interrupting her solitary routines.

  Father McVee poured himself a glass of sherry, sat at the head of his dining room table and peered down at me. Outside, over the garden, dusk spread like black dye.

  ‘It’s not often I have a visitor.’

  Miss McGinty carried in a soup tureen, set it down and began to ladle out.

  ‘Our guest,’ the priest indicated when she tried to place a soup plate in front of him. ‘By the look of the creature, he needs it more than I do.’

  Soup of any kind was not to my liking, a fact that influenced Mrs Tyrrell when designing her menus.

  ‘I’d say by the smell that you’ve excelled yourself, Miss McGinty. What is it at all?’

  ‘Legumes, father.’

  ‘Legumes, by golly,’ he remarked, in a voice that reminded me of a hooting owl.

  When Miss McGinty had left, he tipped what was left of his sherry into the soup plate. As I dragged my spoon around, causing unnamed vegetables to break the surface, I could feel the weight of the priest’s gaze. Once, when I glanced up, I saw he wasn’t eating, but staring at me, open-mouthed. At one point, he went to the sideboard and refilled his glass. Nose to my plate, I pretended to be eating, but knew that he was still staring.

  ‘We’ll try Flannery’s for trout later. Would you like that, Master Smyth?’

  ‘Yes, please, Father.’

  He made a low throaty sound. ‘Oh, be the boys, be the boys! Ah, yes! Oh, be the boys.’

  21

  ‘He underwent a number of psychiatric examinations. In hospital they put machines on his head, then showed him the pictures. “You have a psychological disorder”, they told him. He never disagreed. “Why did you decide to become a priest?” they asked him. “It was always decided”, he said. “You mean”, they said, “you did not decide yourself—is that what you mean, Charlie?” “What I mean is”, he said, “that my mother decided.” The doctors looked at their files. “But your mother was dead, Charlie”, they told him, “she died when you were born”,’ Brother Malachy says.

  22

  We climbed from the village and the headlights of the priest’s Morris Minor picked out the white-tipped brush of a fox stepping watchfully along the hedgerow. Across the back seat lay fishing rods in canvas sleeves. The warm evening was intermittently bathed by a moon in its final quarter.

  More than once I had had to look to confirm that the man at the wheel, dressed in an open-necked checked shirt and corduroys, really was Father McVee. At Flannery’s road gates, he sat there expectantly.

  ‘Well come on, young lad, hop out!’

  I hauled back the heavy gates with difficulty, waited until the car came bumping through, then dragged them closed again.

  ‘You’re a weak little eel, aren’t you?’ he said as I got back in.

  Our lights soon picked out the crooked whitethorns with their religious ornaments and the clean outlines of the farm buildings. Darkness enclosed us. As the dog in the shed began to snarl and bark, I expected to see Mr Flannery hurrying out, as he always did, an air of distraction about him. Instead, the priest sounded the horn. His breath whistled and he drummed the steering wheel with his fingers. He sounded the horn again. I could see high shadows moving within the house and realized that Flannery’s still used oil lamps. Dim light cracked the jamb of the door.

  Trout fishing is the most elegant of ballets: the man with only the rod in his hand, his prey a thing of silver beauty in the water, the line of communication between man and fish as delicate as gossamer.

  ‘Push over, Master Smyth, and let him in there beside you.’

  I felt a jolt to my hip as I was pushed in across the seat. The priest turned the car and we headed back for the road.

  ‘Are you all right tonight, laddie?’

  I glanced over and saw the boy looking ahead, his left arm braced against the dashboard. The sadness that I had noticed on the first day still clung to his expression. As we drew near the road, he jumped out and the headlights pinned him as he lifted back the gates.

  ‘You see how lovely and strong Terence is?’ the priest said. ‘We’ll have to make you big and strong like that, Master Smyth.’

  To get at Flannery’s stretch of river, you had to drive downhill on the road and then re-enter the bottom portion of the farm through a series of level fields. The priest hummed happily as the last slice of the moon occasionally flashed through high cloud and sparked off moving water. By a gatepost, we parked.

  ‘Terence has the boots on already. He knows the routine down here, don’t you, Terence?’

  The priest slipped out the component parts of the split-cane rod and fitted them together, his hands sure. He took out a reel, threaded the silk line through the eyelets, and then, using the lights of the car, chose a black-headed fly from a box, tied it fast to catgut, joined it to the silk line, made the knot neat with a pair of scissors, hauled the dressed line through and snagged the hook on to the cork rod handle.

  ‘This lad is called the coachman, Master Smyth. He’s your only man at night.’

  As he shook out a second rod, I looked for Terence. The headlights made a wall of blackness. Hand to my eyes, I walked around the car and waited until the glare ebbed from my vision. He was sitting on the ground by the rear wheel, arms around his knees, head forward so that all I could see was his hair.

  ‘Terence?’

  He didn’t move.

  ‘Terence, have you ever caught a trout?’

  I got down beside him, edging in close until my back was also to the wheel.

  ‘I like being down here,’ I whispered as bands of pale moonlight drifted across us.

  Slowly his face appeared. He looked at me through slits and along his row of upper teeth were black gaps. I thought he was going to tell me something, but he tilted back his head, gathered saliva in his mouth, and spat at me.

  ‘What are you wee lads up to?’

  Father McVee’s head came into view.

  ‘Nothing, Father,’ Terence mumbled.

  ‘Now,’ the priest said, handing a rod to him, ‘Master Smyth will carry the baskets, please.’

  Single file, the priest to the fore, we walked through a narrow gap and int
o ferns that came to my chest. Clouds hurried over the dying moon. I was mystified that Terence didn’t like me, for I had never done anything to him; and yet, when he had spat at me, he had been filled with venom. Nonetheless, I wanted to be near him. He walked ahead of me on ground that fell away to the river. A hunting bird screeched as it rose before us. Fast-flowing water could suddenly be heard.

  ‘This is where we start from and where you stay,’ the priest whispered, taking the baskets from me and placing them on the ground, ten paces from the river. ‘There’s an apple in there, for being a good wee lad.’

  Immediately he began to cast out into the mid-stream where no trees overhung. I could not see the far bank. Terence was twenty yards farther along, casting, the rod light in his hands. A trout slurped. Weak moonbeam showed a midge hatch for an instant, a fuzz above the water. I looked to where Terence, moving along, had all but disappeared. The priest followed him.

  23

  Time that evening is difficult for me to measure. Although thrilled by darkness and the presence of the unknown, I was gripped too by a sense of unspecified danger. I felt insects on my neck and legs. Now and then a fish broke upwards and sipped; and once, at the exact moment when the last of the moon lay in a narrow track on the water, a brown trout made a spectacular leap, and hung for a beautiful shining instant, impaled on the shaft of light, water drawn up from his tail in a moon-silver skirt. I wondered if I should call to the others that fish were rising here, but the imperative of silence had been hammered into me by my father. As I searched for movement in the reeds and the shadows, there was a cry. A man’s long cry that split the night. Ah! They’ve caught one, I thought!

  The young trout that lies in shallow waters leads a dangerous existence, and not always a long one, since he is easily visible to predators. The older trout leads a very different life. He feeds in slower and deeper waters. No darting this way and that for him, no extrovert or suicidal lunges. He has all the time in the world to scrutinize his prey. Seldom will he emerge into the shallows, unless the urge to mate takes its hold.

  ‘My father came back from Dublin the next day, and I went home.’

  ‘Did you understand what had happened?’

  ‘My reflex answer is, no—how could I have? I was a gormless seven-year-old kid. But on another level, which I suppose was my sexual level, something was stirring. Chemistry. I think in my bones I knew what had happened, but my brain could not imagine it.’

  24

  The doctor had purchased a car radio in Dublin and had it tuned most of the day to Athlone. As we met the hills and dips of south Tipperary, he turned down the volume and began to chat about the conference in Dublin, where he had met colleagues and had been invigorated by the papers presented by consultants from overseas.

  I thought endlessly of Terence and of how I wanted to be like him—to know how to cast and be able to so easily lift back a gate. A week passed and then, late one afternoon, when the schools had closed for the summer, we were stopped by a flag in the window of a house beyond Carrick. Mrs Flannery’s chest had relapsed.

  ‘Why do these bloody people leave it till teatime to make the call?’ the doctor cried as he turned east and my blood quickened.

  The trout is like poetry as he throbs on the current, as the water slicks by his glistening form. He hypnotizes the eye with a magic that draws men down into a silent void, into a mysterious liquid womb.

  ‘I’ll be as quick as I can. Stay in the car.’

  As the dog’s barking ceased, the blossom of the countryside folded over the earth. When I rolled down the window, I could smell dung smells, mingled with hen smells and the other dry, brittle scents of midsummer. The need to see Terence again twisted upwards in me. Inside the open door of a nearby shed hung black rubber thigh-waders. Hidden bantams chuckled in rafters. I stepped into the yard, and then ran for the barn, just as Terence walked out.

  We stood there, staring at each other. A head taller than me and twice as broad, beneath his black hair his eyes stood out like seashells.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Daddy…’

  ‘Daddy the doctor! Daddy the doctor!’ he sneered and I thought he was going to spit at me again. He looked at the Humber. ‘Daddy’s car.’

  ‘It’s a Humber Hawk.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘It’s got optional overdrive and a radio,’ I said. ‘We can listen to Athlone.’

  ‘Daddy the doctor!’ he said mockingly and turned back into the barn.

  I was used to being picked on in school, but Terence’s disrespectful attitude to the doctor stunned me, since everyone knew the esteem in which my father was held in three counties. Still caught up in a surge of unexplained longing, I followed Terence inside to where a calf was penned. He must have been feeding the animal, for he swung his leg over the waist-high, horizontal poles and picked up a bottle. The white-snouted calf sucked hungrily on the rubber teat, ears flattened. ‘Why do you have to feed it?’

  He mustn’t have heard me, I thought.

  ‘Terence, why are you feeding it?’

  He looked at me. ‘Daddy the doctor’s little boy!’

  I looked in awe as he spat on the ground.

  ‘His stupid mother died.’

  It took me a moment to work out to what he was referring.

  ‘My mother died,’ I blurted.

  The bottle whistled as the calf sucked it dry.

  ‘She contracted septicaemia.’

  He squinted out at me. ‘What?’

  ‘Blood poisoning. Daddy says it’s a very painful death.’

  ‘Think I care?’

  ‘It took her three weeks to die.’

  ‘I don’t care if she died twenty times over. I don’t care if she’s in hell.’

  ‘She may be in purgatory, Daddy says, but he’s more certain that she’s in heaven.’

  ‘You’re a real daddy’s boy, aren’t you?’

  ‘My mother was a daily communicant. She said the rosary every night and she did the nine first Fridays. Anyone who does the nine first Fridays is guaranteed a place in heaven.’

  Then I thought of Mrs Tyrrell’s remarks.

  ‘And your mother died,’ I said.

  He dropped the bottle and vaulted out. He caught me by the neck and pushed my face down until it was pressed into farm shit.

  ‘Who said you could talk about my mother?’

  The weight on my neck was unforgiving.

  ‘No one.’

  He shook me. ‘Talk about her again and I’ll kill you.’

  As he let me go, I fell to one side and spat muck. He was leaning on the side of the pen, his gaze to the south, over the placid hills. I got up and wiped myself with straw. My legs and shoes were smeared with dung. I felt powerless in his company, weak and subjugated. He was so strong and confident, so abounding in all the qualities I lacked.

  ‘Where do you live?’ he asked me suddenly.

  ‘With my father.’

  ‘With Daddy the doctor. I know. But where?’

  ‘Outside Carrick. On the Waterford road.’

  He turned slowly and looked towards the car.

  ‘I need to get to Waterford before anyone here knows I’m gone,’ he said.

  He went to the house side of the barn and looked at the Humber, then came back again.

  ‘It’s too far to walk without being caught.’ When he spoke, I could see where his teeth were missing. ‘Can you keep your mouth shut?’

  I nodded, terrified.

  ‘I’m going to Waterford.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘When I sail to America.’

  The pages of Robinson Crusoe swam before me.

  ‘First the boats go to England, then to America,’ he said. ‘They’re always looking for deckhands. America is a huge place. No one knows anyone there.’

  I wiped myself with my sleeve. ‘Have you told your uncle?’

  He shook his head. ‘Little fool.’ He looked at me curiously. ‘I’ll go
with you as far as Carrick.’

  My mouth stung and I stank of shit, but a shaft of excitement tingled in me.

  ‘I’ll hide in the boot,’ he said.

  ‘The boot is full of medicines.’

  ‘Then I’ll hide in the back.’

  I gawked at him, at his tanned skin and his long-fingered hands.

  ‘Come here,’ he said.

  He reached into a barrel of water, slopped my face and rubbed the shit off.

  ‘No one will know. Just you and me.’

  Like a gunshot, the noise of the opening cottage door broke through the afternoon.

  ‘Next time!’ he whispered. ‘When he comes back to see the aunt.’

  I dashed through the barn and regained the back seat, just as the doctor appeared with Mr Flannery, the farmer anxious as usual.

  ‘I don’t know, dammit!’ the doctor cried and Flannery rocked back. ‘Just keep her on the balsam. I’ll be back in a week.’

  He slammed the car door and started the engine. His nostrils twitched.

  ‘You were out of the car, weren’t you?’

  ‘No, Daddy. I was here the whole time.’

  ‘Liar! Your shoes stink of manure. Take ’em off!’

  ‘I needed to pee,’ I whined.

  ‘A liar is a bad trait,’ the doctor said grimly as he drove over the field at greater speed than normal. ‘A liar is like a corpse with worms in his belly—rotten inside—so you’d better get those worms out, young fella, or you’ll have me to deal with.’

  In his temper, he flung the car sideways and my head knocked off the walnut trim. As I scrambled to my knees, I saw the doctor’s angry little eyes in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Know what I mean?’

  25

  ‘I asked him several times if he regretted what he had done,’ Brother Malachy says. ‘His answer was always the same. “Regret who I am? My nature? My instinct? Is my instinct wrong, that which God gave me? It may not be appropriate, or desirable in the wider sense, but it is me,” he always said. On one occasion he described it as a flowering. The flower doesn’t become transformed, he said; it just does what flowers do. It opens its lips and becomes filled with the essence necessary for its existence. That’s what he told me.’