In those hazy days of late summer, when the morning mists lifted from the valleys of south Tipperary to reveal diamond-bright kingfishers hunting the banks of the Suir, and when, in the full heat of midday, hawks quivered in the white-blue sky, it seemed to me that my life was suspended. I had come to love and loathe the doctor, a contradiction that would endure into my adulthood. He could easily have specialized in a single branch of medicine and become a consultant in one of the large hospitals in Dublin or Cork, but that would have meant a different kind of life and the doctor was a countryman. And yet his self-imposed isolation and disappointment with life was becoming ever more apparent: the despondent stares at night; the intense feeling, articulated after whiskey, that his life could have amounted to more than this; and the sense conveyed, however obliquely, that I was largely to blame for his predicament.
I decided to run away with Terence. The thought tantalized me to the point of madness. I would bargain his place in our car for his agreement to take me with him. Images of a world without the doctor thrilled me. What lay ahead sucked me in and created a new need, which, although I scarcely knew it at the time, was the need to love someone other than the doctor.
26
When the trout takes a fly, he knows with the wisdom of generations that he is fighting for his life. His instinct, which just a moment before was contemplating the taste of a juicy spinner, has now switched to survival. Bursting through the crust of the water, like splintering glass, he shows himself in all his elemental and outraged beauty. His endgame has begun.
The good weather had lasted. As we nosed in across Flannery’s pastures, a warm peace caressed the land. I was sick with apprehension and had lain awake for most of the nights before, fretting about what would happen if we were caught. My father’s anger petrified me, the thought that he might find out what I had planned. I clung to the image of Terence’s superior strength and knowledge that would spring us both from the worlds we hated. Inchoate images of America, picked up from cowboy comics, spun in my head.
As if the gaze of each Infant of Prague contained the knowledge of my secret, I prayed that the doctor would not look at the statues and realise the truth. The shed door in Flannery’s yard was open and the thigh-waders visible, suspended as if a man were strung up in the void above them. The doctor pocketed his pipe, got out and tapped on the rear door window.
‘Are you feeling out of sorts, lad?’
For want of a reply, I nodded. His attitude took on a professional slant.
‘I might have known. It’s this damn flu that’s going. You need a hot drink and bed. Poor lad.’
‘Doctor Smyth, thanks be to God!’ cried Flannery from his front door. ‘She’s fit to burst!’
‘I won’t be long,’ the doctor told me. ‘Stay in the car.’
What was about to take place had filled my mind so completely that no room existed to work around it. I was too terrified to get out, terrified that Terence would appear, terrified that he wouldn’t. The locked-up dog, tormented as ever by unseen intruders, scratched and snarled. Inside the barn, young cattle were gathered. Then I saw him.
A hundred times I had thought of this moment, but had not expected it to unfold so quickly. He came crouching from the barn, opened the back door of the Humber and slid in behind the driver’s seat like a fox sliding into an earth.
‘Shut the door!’
I could neither breathe nor hear. He was clutching a bulging jute sack, his travel belongings, a detail I had overlooked.
‘The blanket,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘The blanket. Cover me with the blanket!’
I instantly forgot the bargain I had planned to strike and threw the travelling rug over him. All became quiet and deathly still. Then a strong odour of stale milk and cow byre began to fill the car. Overcome by my memory of the last time, and the doctor’s reaction, all my plans disappeared in a moment governed only by fear. I snatched away the rug.
‘You have to get out. Quick!’
He bared his uneven teeth.
‘Get out!’
If he had got out then, the future might have unfolded differently, but he grabbed back the rug with both hands. I wanted to vomit for fear.
‘Get out!’
His mouth opened in a silent howl as he held the rug around him like a shawl. Suddenly he was no longer Man Friday, or strong and confident, but a frightened child with missing teeth.
‘Get out!’ I cried.
He looked up at me, his expression pitiable. Miserably trapped between my obligations to unnamed forces, I began to bawl.
‘Get out. Get out! Get out!’
‘I don’t want to go fishing with him anymore.’
I may have fainted in that tiny moment of revelation; I may have sat back, as my head swam, I cannot say, for I was along by the river again in that fathomless black place that had once stood between my innocence and the rest of my life. Suddenly I understood more than I ever wanted to. The voice of the farmer’s wife could now be heard, saying loudly, ‘I promise I’ll take it easy, doctor. You have my word.’
All I could think of was the doctor’s reaction if he ever found out what this boy might reveal about his friend the priest. The rug in the foot well rose and fell gently. As the doctor and Mr Flannery walked across the yard, the doctor was saying, ‘Fishing’s good at the moment, Jim.’
‘The very best, doctor.’
‘Father McVee told me he killed a two-and-a-half pounder the other night.’
‘Father McVee knows where they’re hiding; no doubt at all about that.’
I heard their voices as if from under water.
‘And this is the little lad,’ smiled Mr Flannery and he knocked on the back window.
‘Roll down the window, Alex.’
I did as I was told.
‘What do you say to Mr Flannery, Alex?’
‘How… how do you do, Mr Flannery,’ I stammered as my ears roared.
‘He’s definitely coming down with something,’ the doctor said grimly. ‘Look at him, pale as a ghost. Come on, Alex, we’ll get you home, boy.’
He got in and started the engine. Outside, Mr Flannery stood, concerned and grateful. As the doctor slipped the handbrake and we began to leave the yard, I experienced an instant of time suspended, in which I grasped, if only dimly, how the years ahead would be touched by this moment and how I lacked the strength to alter what was about to happen. We had entered the field where Christ’s Passion stood graphically in the corner.
‘Daddy?’
The doctor looked quizzically in his rear-view mirror.
‘You know that boy who lives here?’
‘The boy? What about him?’
‘He’s hiding in our car.’
The car bumped along for a few yards more, prolonging the suspension of time, as the doctor tried to make sense of what he had heard. He pulled up.
‘What?’
‘He’s here, Daddy. Look.’
I pulled off the rug as the doctor squirmed around and stared down into the foot well.
‘He made me let him hide,’ I cried. ‘He made me!’
‘Lord God Almighty, help us and save us,’ the doctor exclaimed. ‘So he did, the little wretch!’
Terence began to weep and shiver. The doctor, unable for once to speak, shook his head. I withdrew into the far corner of the back seat, as if to escape contagion.
‘What on earth’s he doing in here?’
‘Running away,’ I sobbed.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know… he wouldn’t tell me,’ I said and began to cry in earnest.
‘Dear Lord,’ the doctor said as he wrenched around the wheel. ‘Dear Lord.’
As we re-approached the farmyard, I resumed my long-time position on the back seat, looking out the window. If I tried hard, I could imagine that everything was as it had been: horses in the nearby field, their long wide backs gleaming with healthy condition; cattle munching in hock-high meadows; stat
ues. Our arrival in the yard coincided with Mr Flannery’s releasing of the imprisoned dog, a sly-looking, yellow-eyed creature that ran up to the car and began to bite frantically at the wheels. It took the farmer more than a minute to catch the animal and lock it away. The doctor climbed out and took Mr Flannery to one side. I couldn’t turn around. The car’s back door was opened.
‘Terence?’ Mr Flannery said.
My mother would save me, I knew, as I began to pray to her.
‘God, doctor, I don’t know what to say,’ Mr Flannery said.
‘This is a serious matter.’
‘I know, but he’s a good boy normally. He’s had a hard time. His mammy died and you know the history there. Maybe we’re too old for him here; maybe…’
As we pulled away again, as Terence stood beside Mr Flannery, clutching his jute sack, I felt immeasurable relief. My gaze through the back window of the car was fastened on the shed with the open door, where the black thigh-waders hung, heels kicking gently in the breeze.
27
Studying the stomach contents of trout between April and September will generally reveal a preference for sedge flies, midges and shrimps. In season, mayfly predominates, while other key foods are beetles, fish fry, snails and newts. In the winter, frogs become more important, as does the water louse.
In turn, trout are preyed upon by pike, herons, cormorants, gulls, otters, mink, foxes and seals, to name just some. But of course, the trout’s greatest enemy is man.
The evening was still lengthening as swallows soared and children played with hurling sticks at crossroads. When we reached home, the Angelus was beating out from the car radio and the doctor went wordlessly inside. We had not spoken on the journey, which, even accounting for the radio, was unusual. He was tired, I reasoned, as I tried to reroute the cause of his ominous mood away from the dangerous territory of earlier events.
The telephone rang. Only the hospital in Clonmel called at this time, or a patient who owned a telephone. Or Father McVee. I listened at the door to the hall.
‘No doubt, no doubt. And I hope you kill the one I lost the other evening, but count me out tonight, Father. There’s something here I really must attend to.’
My stomach sank and I began to shiver. I had hoped that after supper he would go fishing, for even though that meant he would be with Father McVee, when he was with the priest the danger to me seemed somehow neutralized. Deciding to play to the earlier perception that I was coming down with flu, I went to my bedroom. Thirty minutes later, as I lay beneath the covers, I heard the doctor’s step on the stairs. I began to shiver in earnest, as if the diverting illness could be summoned at will. My teeth were chattering.
‘So this is where you are, Alex. Let’s have a look at you.’
He drew down the bedclothes, opened my pyjamas and placed the stethoscope on my chest. He made me sit up, then listened through my back, took my pulse, examined my tongue, my throat, my ears; even my hands. Sitting on the bed, he looked curiously at me.
‘Mmmm.’
I felt powerless beneath his unbending scrutiny.
‘You don’t have the flu.’
My skin retracted and I tried to cough.
‘We need to have a little chat.’
Lost in an all-engulfing tide of misery, I tried to retch, as if a good show of vomit might make him back off.
‘It’s all right, Alex, I think I understand.’
That my father could never begin to understand only deepened the crisis. I began to weep.
‘It was that boy, wasn’t it?’
I nodded. I had no idea what he was going to say next.
‘I believe his name is Terence. Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about this afternoon, about Terence trying to run away—but of course I can only guess at why. Did he talk to you? Did Terence tell you things? Did he say why he was running away?’
I found myself pitched into a terrifying void.
‘What did Terence tell you, Alex?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I’m a doctor as well as your father. Nothing you will say can surprise me or make me cross. Do you understand that? Nothing.’
How wrong he was, how wrong.
In a voice as tender as the one he had used on the morning he had gone to Dublin, he said: ‘You’re an innocent little lad. You’ve spent all your life here with me. The world is a nasty place. Bad things happen. Bad people do dirty things.’
I clutched myself and cried inconsolably, for my secret was unfolding and soon I would be less than filth before him.
‘Did Terence tell you about dirty things going on? Did he, Alex?’
Tears splashed on my cheeks.
‘No.’
But the doctor caught my chin and turned my face to his.
‘Is that the truth, Alex? I don’t think so. Tell me what Terence told you. Something bad’s going on there, isn’t it? With his uncle? I want the truth.’
As his questions fell on me, as the vacuum through which I tumbled resounded with ugly noises, I suddenly looked into the doctor’s penetrating glare and saw my escape.
‘I have come across this before. A defenceless boy in the care of an old, childless man whose wife is sick, or in some cases, deceased. What happens is a vile sin. I’ve read about it. In this case, I’ve seen the way he looks at the boy, the way he touches him… This is to help Terence, Alex. You must help him. You must tell me.’
As I began to grasp that the most appalling solution to my dilemma had been presented, appalling but complete, I nodded dumbly.
‘I need to be clear about this, because there will be consequences.’ The doctor looked at me and smiled reassuringly. ‘But you don’t have to worry—it’s not your fault, any more than it’s Terence’s. This will have to be stopped, you understand? Now, tell me: did Terence try to run away because his uncle is doing dirty things to him?’
All I could think of was what the doctor would do if he found out from me about Father McVee. I sank my head and mumbled, ‘Yes.’
‘Lord have mercy on us!’ He stood up and I thought it was over, but he was fishing in the pocket of his jacket for his rosary beads. ‘We’re going to say a decade of the rosary, Alex. We’re going to offer it up for Terence.’
With that, he knelt down beside the bed and led off with the ‘Our Father’.
The shared prayers worked their calmness. Gradually I realized that the dire threat to me had been transformed and that my problem was at an end. It was just another case in the doctor’s busy day. The next day would be no different, nor the weeks and years ahead. I had grasped the outline of how life proceeds, and how some survive the dangers that emerge along the way, and how some do not.
28
Leaves scurried like tadpoles along the laneways as autumn wind hissed in the ditches. At four on a late October afternoon I was walking home from school, schoolbag on my back. I had grown that summer, filled out, shot up by more than an inch and passed the point of being a very young boy. Sometimes I thought of Flannery’s and of what had taken place there, but never for long. The doctor had not mentioned the matter again and I occasionally relished the thought of how easily in the end I had slipped the knot that had once bound me. Terence’s anguished face had faded too, like the fallen leaves.
As rain spat, a car came up behind. I stuck out my arm for a lift. Father McVee was hunched forward in concentration, hands high on the steering wheel. If he saw me, he made no sign of it. The wind strengthened.
His visits had become less frequent; the fishing season was nearly over. When I reached home, wind in my ears, his car was outside the hall door. I made my way around the gable and in by the back door. Some evenings, when the doctor was out and Mrs Tyrrell had gone home, I thumbed through the doctor’s diary to see if he had attended Mrs Flannery. I was not sure why I needed to confirm this fact: it was as if the absence of the name brought further confirmation that nothing had changed. I put down my schoolbag and listened. The house was silent: Thursday was Mrs Tyrrell’s h
alf-day. From the long, hall mirror that faced the back door my reflection looked at me: tall, all at once, bare knees that stood out awkwardly, fair hair in need of a cut. Then the doctor’s voice came from the sitting room.
‘You must have got an awful shock.’
Moving closer to the hall, I heard the sound of a bottle being unstoppered. The priest said, ‘It was a dreadful sight entirely. God be merciful to him.’
‘Where did he do it?’
‘In an outhouse. From the beam where he used to hang his waders.’
‘God have mercy on his soul. And on his poor wife.’
‘She found him. She’s staying with neighbours. I doubt she’ll ever go back there.’
I slid down to the floor, knees to my chin. From where I sat, I could see out through the window in the back door to where the autumn sun was slanting across the upper boughs of an old apple tree, illuminating the fruit that still clung there. I heard the men going out by the hall. Ghost-like, I made my way to the window in the hallway.
‘There’s a little pool up from Mahon Bridge that needs our attention next season,’ Father McVee said.
The doctor chuckled and I could hear the pipe stem rattle on his teeth. ‘Is there no fish in the county safe from you, Father?’
The priest’s reply was lost in the sound of his feet on the gravel. He had reached his car when the doctor said, ‘This incident does remove any doubt, doesn’t it?’
The priest turned.
‘I have to say, when I first made the complaint back in the summer, I had some doubts,’ the doctor said. ‘You know, he always seemed a decent sort.’
From my position, I could see both the doctor and the priest. At that moment, for just the merest instant, a look of naked guilt seized Father McVee and he stood by his car, transfixed. I looked at my father. He too, for that short moment, appeared to have seen the same thing, for he abruptly turned his gaze to the ground and coughed, removing the pipe from his mouth.
The Trout Page 8