‘But this confirms it beyond question, as far as I’m concerned,’ he mumbled.
‘Ach, you did the right thing, doctor, rest assured,’ responded the priest, as if freed from his immobility. ‘The boy’s far better off in Clonmel, out of harm’s way.’
The doctor shook his head grimly.
‘It’s a very sad case indeed,’ he said.
Adult female mayflies, in their dun stage, leave the surface of the water in which they have spent their lives, and fly to dry land. There, after several days, they moult again. Males swarm thickly above the trees and bushes where the females are hiding. When the females fly up, a spectacular mating dance occurs. The males immediately die. The females follow the current upstream and lay their eggs on a suitable stretch of water. They too die and then drift downstream on the surface of the water.
The eggs that escape being consumed by trout fall to the riverbed, where they become nymphs—and the cycle begins again.
29
‘Terence went into the industrial school in Clonmel,’ Brother Malachy says. ‘Charlie McVee taught him Christian doctrine and prepared him for his Intermediate Certificate.’
‘Did McVee… did he continue…?’
‘I don’t think so, or at least he didn’t admit it to me. Although he was defiant to the end about his relationship with children, he felt genuine remorse about Flannery. He said that over and over.’
‘What happened to Terence?’
‘His aunt left the farm to the parish and Terence went on to become a priest.’
‘A priest!’
‘He had to go to America to be ordained, of course. It would have been difficult here—with his background.’
‘You say America. Do you know what diocese he was in?’
‘He ended up in Detroit, I think… Yes, Detroit, Michigan, the place all the cars are made. I remember hearing it from a priest who was here on retreat. The diocese was Saint Patrick’s, he said, and Terence went by the name of Father Thomas Deasy.’
As autumn gave way to winter, I sometimes thought about Terence, but when I did my mind veered almost immediately to Mr Flannery. He was wide and guileless, open, tender and full of bewildered love and compassion. Death was a strange, neutral thing, with no bearing on me or my world. Sometimes I dreamed that dead Mr Flannery’s hairy arm was resting on Terence’s neck and Terence was snuggling into his uncle’s chest. They seemed to love each other, even though one of them was dead. Sometimes, dead Mr Flannery was shutting the dog back in the shed. More often, though, he was hanging, his heels kicking, just like his thigh-waders had done when I had imagined them to be a man.
The sun is slipping behind the peak that looms over Wilkins Abbey. Rooks thrash in high trees as wind scours the mountain.
‘Did he have any visitors here?’ I ask as Brother Malachy locks the door to his canteen and we walk back up the path towards the arch.
‘Other than the guards?’ Brother Malachy sighs. ‘There was one old man, a priest from Waterford, came up to see him a couple of times. He was in a wheelchair because he had a bad heart condition. Other than him, no one.’
‘How did he die?’
‘Peacefully. We anointed him, of course, and it looked like he might rally, as he had before, but no. He just went off in a matter of hours.’ Brother Malachy chuckles. ‘And you know something, Alex? I grieved.’
My face must show my surprise.
‘Yes, I grieved when Charlie McVee died. The day we buried him, I burnt everything. His clothes, bedding, shoes, books—everything. I spent the whole next day cleaning out his cell. I could not believe that he was gone. He was the scum of God’s earth, but it is still God’s earth.’
As I drive away, he stands in the arch, hands tucked into the sleeves of his robe. He came up here to this lonely place as a young man and fell in love. When he dies, his possessions will be sent to his next of kin in a shoebox.
Dusk is gathering, as I slip towards the coast, as if sinking to the seabed. I once made this journey before. Foam rides over the sea wall in Dungarvan and the thick black cliff of the Waterford coast is like a line drawn on a canvas.
The trout, like all fish, is cold-blooded, which means that his metabolism and, consequently, his level of activity depend directly on the temperature of the water. When the temperature is average, he is at his best, hunting eagerly and growing rapidly to manhood. But if his surroundings become too hot or too cold, if the environment turns against him, he simply dies.
Part Three
Waterford, Ireland
1970
1
I took the stairs up to the landing, two at a time. The January sky, seen through the big window, hung low over the town. Saturday classes had ended and we had been given permission to go for lunch with my father on my eighteenth birthday.
Seán Phelan was at the boot rack, working a duster over his toecaps.
‘We’d better not be late,’ I said, ‘he’s always on time.’
‘God forbid we’d keep the doctor waiting,’ Seán said. A spear of sunlight cut into his blond curls. He looked no more than sixteen. He picked up his biretta and we clattered down to the front door.
‘What did Nugent say?’ Seán asked.
‘That we have to be back at five for Adoration,’ I said.
‘Fair play to you,’ Seán said.
We had been in the same class in Carrick, and done the Leaving Cert together the previous summer, but had not been friends. My father had discouraged me from mixing with the children of his patients. He considered dairy farmers like the Phelans, who could as equally as him afford the fees to send their son to a Catholic seminary, unsuitable company. And yet, on my first day in Waterford, when the doctor had left me off at the college, and shook my hand, and stood, his chin thrust out, watching me climb the steps with my suitcase as if I were ascending to heaven, when the doors opened and I saw Seán Phelan my heart had lifted.
A red Humber, our new car, was parked below the front door. The bodywork was buffed and polished, even though the journey south from Carrick in that morning’s rain must have been mucky. The doctor had driven down early, I realized, and had had the car washed. As he stepped from it, wearing the green and yellow tweed suit I knew he kept for good wear, his eyes narrowed when he saw who I was with.
‘Congratulations,’ he said stiffly and shook my hand. ‘Happy birthday.’
‘Dad, this is Seán Phelan—we’re in the same class. Is it all right if he joins us?’
‘Ah,’ he said, taking in Seán’s black cassock and biretta. ‘How do you do… Brother Phelan?’
‘Delighted to meet you again, Doctor Smyth,’ said Seán and they shook hands. ‘Thanks for inviting me.’
My father’s expression, which I could read like a page, contained multiple reservations, beginning with who Seán was and ending with the fact that the doctor had not invited him; sandwiched in between was my father’s indissoluble respect for the clergy.
‘I’ve only booked for two,’ he said and looked at me sharply.
‘Sure, there’s only two of us,’ said Seán cheerfully and clambered into the back of the car.
As we drove out by the gardens with their neatly aligned paths, and began the short drive to the Tower Hotel, I played to my father’s need to be vicariously associated with my new life, describing for him the progress of our pastoral formation, and the lectures we had been given by senior clerical figures, some of them from Rome. At the hotel, a porter held open the door and the doctor stood back to allow us in before him. In the lounge, he ordered cordials for us and a whiskey for himself as he amended the luncheon booking.
‘They’re the two great vocations, you know,’ he said to Seán as the first sip of whiskey flushed his cheeks. ‘Medicine and the Church—but of the two, yours is by far the greater.’
I sat back as he laid out for Seán his theories on poverty and injustice, arguments I had heard from my childhood. The doctor had already remade Seán as a priest, which instantly
forgave my friend all the other shortcomings that had up to so recently defined him.
A tall, wheezing head-waiter, with smooth black hair and dressed in a dinner jacket, approached.
‘Whenever you’re ready, doctor.’
We followed him into the busy dining room.
‘Do you fish at all, Brother?’ I heard my father asking.
‘With all the milking, I never had the time, doctor,’ Seán replied.
‘Ah, the beauty of it,’ my father said and shook his head with pleasure. ‘Some of the best moments of my life have been spent on that river. Father McVee is a passionate fisherman—did you know that?’
‘I’ve heard he is, all right,’ Seán said.
At a window table overlooking Reginald’s Tower, the head-waiter handed me a menu and said, ‘Soup of the day is mushroom, Father.’
I stole a glance across the table. Seán was biting his lip to prevent himself from laughing, but the doctor’s face shone with pride.
2
I thought a lot about the doctor during those first months in Waterford, trying to see if by dissecting him more I could understand him better. An only child, like me, my father had been brought up in a household where social standing in the local community was of the utmost importance. I gathered from the way he spoke in admiring terms of her eccentricities that my grandmother had been a formidable snob. Her family had owned a drapery shop in Waterford; her marriage to my grandfather, a farmer with a small holding, albeit a fine, handsome man, had been deemed highly unsuitable. Why then had she married him? It seemed likely, although this was a question I could never ask, that she had been forced to do so. If this was the case, the only explanation for it in the Ireland of the 1920s was that my grandmother had been pregnant.
The doctor often spoke of his own father in terms of disparagement, saying that all the brains came from his mother’s side. She had insisted the servants and farmhands address her as ‘madam’ and her son, my father, as ‘Master Patrick’. She had never taken a meal in the kitchen, or allowed her son to do so. Her husband, who had been brought up eating in the kitchen, seemed to have been treated by his wife like a common labourer.
My father was educated at home by a private tutor until the age of twelve when he was sent off to Rockwell College in County Tipperary. His mother told him that the only two professions worthy of him were the church or medicine. His prejudices had been engraved from a very early age. His mother died when he was in medical school, and a few years later, his father was diagnosed with dementia. The young doctor, as he was by then, booked his ailing father into the county home, sold the house and farm where he had grown up and acquired a fine residence on five acres, overlooking the River Suir on the outskirts of Carrick.
3
Seán Phelan and I did everything together, except sleep. We met each morning at Lauds, knelt side by side at Mass, were served at the same table for breakfast and sat at two adjoining desks in the classroom. We played hurling, ran, adored the Blessed Sacrament, went to Benediction, said the rosary and had evening cocoa together. The other seminarians called us the Carrick lads. In our private time, we discussed prayer, meditation and contemplation, the Scriptures, Jeremiah’s call and response, and the lives and idiosyncrasies of the other priests, deacons and seminarians with whom we lived. I came to rely on the comfort of prayer, the penetrating sense of security found in an empty church and the great mystery of faith to which I had been admitted.
In that winter’s first fall of snow, as we turned left at the estate wall and Seán quickened the pace, we suddenly came within sight of Woodstown Beach. Seán, who was stringy of build and ran with his head swinging doggedly from side to side, had won inter-county athletics medals in school and had now persuaded Father Nugent, the Vice-Rector and Dean of Students, to let us do road training. We stopped on a crescent of sand below the dunes, hands on our knees, gulping air, as gulls swooped over the low-tide cockleshells.
‘I’d nearly go for a swim,’ he said.
‘Swim on your own,’ I said, brushing snow from my hair.
The rotting poles of net fishermen marched to the distant tide as I huddled into the side of a sand dune and Seán scooped snow from the pampas grass and tried to drink it. In a brief clearance, the gable end of a building appeared fifty yards away. Its painted sign said, ‘The Saratoga’.
‘We need a drink,’ Seán said.
‘I brought no money.’
‘I have money. Come on.’
Only when his professional services were required did the doctor ever enter a public house. Occasionally, if his visit there had been arduous, he would accept a whiskey from the owner. At such times, I would be brought in from the car and given lemonade.
A strong gust flung the Saratoga’s door inwards. Linoleum covered the floor and the deserted wooden counter gleamed like bone from the glow of a night-light placed on the mantelpiece beneath a picture of the Sacred Heart and a large photograph of Mrs Jacqueline Onassis.
‘Let’s go,’ I said, seeing the place was empty, but Seán rapped on the counter.
A door slammed and a woman wearing a heavy brown overcoat appeared behind the bar.
‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘how did you two get here?’
‘We got caught in the snow, ma’am,’ Seán said, and then, ‘two large bottles please. And ten Carrolls.’
She looked at us closely and pointed at me. ‘He’s okay,’ she said to Seán, ‘but how old are you?’
‘I’m older than him,’ Seán said. ‘I swear.’
‘Christ,’ she said and shivered, ‘would you ever pull the other one?’
Seán had a cigarette in his mouth as he poured his drink sideways into his glass.
‘Sláinte,’ he nodded and drank thirstily.
The drink was so bitter I gagged; I had never tasted alcohol before. The woman was plugging in a one-bar fire beside the chimney breast.
‘You two brats are going to get pneumonia,’ she said, pulling her coat tightly around her as she shuffled off.
Seán raised his glass towards the mantelpiece. ‘To Jackie,’ he said, ‘the world’s most beautiful woman.’
Jackie O seemed to be looking down at us.
‘I saw her three years ago, walking down the beach outside,’ Seán said, smacking his lips. He offered me a cigarette. ‘She walked this near to me and when I said hello, she turned and smiled at me.’
‘Get away! Jackie O?’
‘I’m telling you. She wasn’t Jackie O then, though, she was still Jackie Kennedy. My father drove us down on a Sunday morning after Mass, and there she was, boy. Of course, there were Secret Service fellas behind her, and lots of other people like us, gawking, but she’d come down to the beach from the big house for a walk, on her own, and there she was, right here, boy, on Woodstown beach, JFK’s widow, as near to me as the counter.’
I looked up at the photograph. ‘She’s so beautiful.’
‘I couldn’t breathe, boy. And the way she walked, striding out, like a beautiful cat. For a year after, every night I went to sleep with Jackie in my arms.’
A door slammed again and the woman reappeared carrying a tray with two steaming glasses.
‘Now, lads,’ she said, ‘get these into ye. I can’t have ye going home to your mothers frozen.’
After the bitter stout, the whiskey slipped down sweet and easy. I leaned back, inhaling smoke, as my blood began to quicken and the image of the beautiful raven-haired woman in the photograph swamped my senses. Seán’s glass was cupped between his hands as he stared at the red bar of the fire.
‘It’s the one thing they keep going on about, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘That God’s grace can accomplish all things. That with Jesus’ cross we can overcome sex and live our lives without torture.’
Condensation had begun to rise from our wet running clothes.
‘Do you believe them?’ I asked.
‘Celibacy is a declaration that the greatest joys are to be found not in earthly goods but in union
with God in this life and in the next.’
‘I didn’t ask you to quote from one of Nugent’s classes,’ I said. ‘I asked, do you believe them?’
Seán had finished his whiskey and had taken up the stout bottle again.
‘My relationship with Jesus is the most important thing in my life,’ he said, ‘and so, whatever it takes, I’ll hang in there.’
As the first wave ever of being tipsy washed through me, I felt the sudden need to talk.
‘Sometimes…’
Seán looked at me. ‘What?’
‘This sounds crazy.’
‘Go on.’
‘I sometimes… I sometimes think there’s someone else inside me.’
‘Inside you?’
‘Yes, someone I’ve never met.’
Seán blew smoke from the side of his mouth. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes. He’s someone bad, someone who’s done a really bad thing.’
Seán was looking at me sceptically. ‘Such as?’
I struggled to see. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Yes, you do! Go on!’
With my eyes closed, I said, ‘Killed a person.’
Seán burst out laughing.
‘It’s not funny,’ I said as the desperate need to confide overwhelmed me. ‘I have these bad dreams. I’m often scared to sleep, because they’re really terrifying. Dogs are tearing me apart. It’s because I’m guilty…’
‘Look, I have bad dreams too. Dreams that my parents are dead. Dreams that my legs are being cut off in a combine harvester.’
‘I have dreams about Father McVee,’ I heard myself say.
The Trout Page 9