The Trout

by Peter Cunningham

  I want to write down all the little details of this last week, including such items as the colour of the farmer’s wife’s hair in Flannery’s, and how that farm has changed from the way it used to be, as well as the humpy, moss-covered hillocks that stand in front of our old house on the Suir where once the beech trees stood. Energy is coursing through me. I feel like someone who has learned to fly.

  A row of emails download, including the minutes of the last meeting of past teachers from Saint Celestine’s, which I missed. I open it and print it. One by one I go down the mails: one from Mr Amos, announcing his retirement, which is a matter of regret; a request from Jerry Fisher for permission to give my address to a magazine in Montreal that wants to contact me. A dozen unwanted mails from companies selling holidays, stationery and medicines, all of which I delete. A mail from Chancellery Saint Patrick’s, with a message saying, ‘FYA’ and an attachment. I open it and press print, then return to my pen and yellow pad.

  How can I write a story that will, in essence, reveal Sulphur as a fake? The broad nib with its lovely dark ink runs across the page, leaving behind the curled words of my life. I sit back, wondering. Something in this doesn’t quite fit, as if not all the truth has come to light, as if a central fact has been omitted. Looking outside, I can tell by the light that it’s noon, which means that I’d better make that picnic. I take up the print-out from Chancellery Saint Patrick’s and read it as I walk towards the kitchen.

  Kay is outside, wearing a straw hat and gardening gloves. She’s taking out dead growth from a border.

  ‘Where’s Tim?’ I ask.

  ‘Keith dropped by and he went with him over to Roger’s.’

  ‘Keith? He went to Roger’s with Keith?’

  ‘Yes—I said we’d pick him up there when we go for our picnic. What is it, Alex?’

  ‘Get in the car.’

  3

  Kay is still wearing her gardening gloves and hat; I’m still gripping the print-out as I wheel out on to the road and point for the lake.

  ‘In nineteen seventy-nine, when Father Thomas Deasy was working in Detroit, he spent five months as relief chaplain in the juvenile correction facility in Chatham, Ontario.’

  The corner of the lake comes into view.

  ‘Chatham is where Keith was in prison,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, God,’ Kay says, ‘does that mean . . .?’

  ‘I don’t know what it means. The man at your window, the man outside the house. Now this connection—I think I know where Terence is.’

  Seen through the pine trees, the lake is a blinding white as we pull up at Roger’s Quay. I’m still holding the page and praying to the God I have so often offended. Mr Amos is walking towards us down the wooden dock.

  ‘Jacob, you seen Keith?’

  Mr Amos closes one eye as he surveys me. ‘Went out ’bout an hour ago. Maybe more.’

  ‘Was our grandson with him? Tim? He’s eight years old. Was Tim in the boat?’

  ‘Couldn’t rightly say. You folks okay?’

  ‘We’re fine,’ I hear myself say as I run along the jetty with Kay behind me. ‘Check the repairs shed!’ I shout as I jump down into the Maid of Kerry.

  Within a minute, I have the engine running and the painter ready to cast off.

  ‘Shed’s locked,’ Kay says, climbing in.

  Foam churns at our stern as we make our way out from Roger’s at well in excess of regulation. At the mouth of the creek, I push the throttle as far forward as it will go and the boat sits back into herself.

  ‘Where is Tim?’ Kay asks.

  ‘He’s gone with Keith. They’ve gone out to Terence.’

  Kay is open-mouthed. ‘Gone out? Where? These lakes are vast.’

  ‘They’ve gone to Hermit’s Island. I’m pretty sure Terence Deasy is there. Keith has been looking after him, feeding him, bringing him medicines.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I just know.’

  ‘Is Tim all right?’

  I feel confidence beyond reason when I say, ‘Tim is absolutely fine.’

  4

  We’ve settled into a rhythmic flight northwards across the smooth water. We’ve both tried to call Tim and Keith, but neither is picking up. To our port side, the shoreline falls away, revealing inlets where the gardens of cottages come down to the lake. The launch thuds water as the outline of islands appears in the distance. I know now that the final part of this story is about to fall into place. That in itself is terrifying, since there is a dark line in my imagination that I do not want to cross. We keep a steady course in mid-channel. Some of the islands are uninhabited rock outcrops, smothered in vegetation; others have a single dwelling set in pine trees and overlooking neatly painted moorings. We swing into another part of the lake, a place I’m not too familiar with. This great body of water runs to over two thousand square miles.

  ‘Look!’

  Kay is pointing to figures on a spit of land. It’s our neighbour, Dimitri Echenoz, with a group of kids. I head in and swing broadside to the shore, about twenty yards out.

  ‘Alex, Kay, come on in and have a drink!’ Dimitri shouts.

  ‘Thanks, maybe later,’ I call back. ‘Dimitri—have you seen Keith or Tim?’

  ‘Sure, Keith went by earlier. Tim was with him.’

  ‘Which way were the headed?’

  ‘Which way was Keith headed?’ Dimitri turns to a child. ‘Pierre?’

  Pierre wears spectacles. ‘They were headed for Hermit’s,’ he says, peering at us. ‘Tim says there’s some old sick guy there.’

  ‘Tim told you that?’ his father says. It’s clear from Dimitri’s reaction that he hasn’t heard this before. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Sure I’m sure,’ Pierre says. ‘Tim’s been out couple of times to see him.’

  I hit the throttle.

  The lake widens and after fifteen minutes the outline of a solitary outcrop grows into view. Hermit’s Island is just a few defiant glacial acres, a place where kids sometimes party and where some years back contraband smugglers were run to ground. The water arc on either side of the spray hood subsides as I kill the engine, take out paddles and hand one to Kay. We glide in to a beach of shale.

  ‘I don’t know what we’re going to find here,’ I say, ‘but it may be tough to take.’

  ‘I can take tough,’ Kay says.

  We wade knee-deep for ten yards. I love Kay in a way that is new, as if today’s capacity to surprise is endless, as if my life will always be nurtured by that vital first moment on the strand in Tramore when our eyes met. The terrain is uneven and the scrub of the island dense as we edge through on ever-rising ground. Light is failing and the blue-black sky is unmarked and flawless. Kay points. Where the sun meets aluminium, it shines white as a spotlight.

  We begin a long, crouching diversion. A hierarchy of dread engulfs me, with an image of my grandson’s dead body at its summit. I know this cannot happen and yet I know it happens every day. After several hundred yards, twenty yards from the lakeshore, the little creek where Keith’s boat has been slid in under the vegetation is in front of us. All at once I can smell something.

  ‘Tobacco,’ Kay whispers.

  Cigarette scent lies on the still air and makes me think of the days when patients smoked in the doctor’s waiting room. A rocky outcrop blocks our way, but when we round it, fifty yards farther on I see three seated figures, their faces to the east. Keith and Tim are smoking cigarettes. Between them, head slumped, is a man. He’s been wedged into a rock under a rough hoop of birch branches. Keith is chanting in a low, mournful voice. Tim, to my amazement, is smoking his cigarette with relish.

  Part Six

  Ontario, Canada

  Present Day

  1

  Through the emerald branches of hemlock, I can glimpse the sunlight on Lake Muskoka. Summer has come early to Ontario, something everyone says is because of climate change. Beavers and racoons can be seen on the islands, and white-tailed deer are grazing the groves of ald
er and birch along the foreshore. Bright sunlight pierces the foliage of the oak tree where the blue jay has taken up position. Down on the water there’s bound to be a good hatch tonight.

  It’s a midweek morning and Jerry Fisher is due from Toronto. My agent’s enthusiasm over these last weeks has made my blood quicken. He has secured a deal for my second novel, and is now hopeful for translation rights in Europe. As Jerry puts it: ‘We need to launch you in the non-English-speaking world’.

  Tim has grown up a lot recently, which reminds me of myself when I was nearly ten years of age. He’s being driven up here by his father to stay with us for a week and go fishing; from where I sit at my desk, with the view of the lake, every time I hear a car I look up to see if it’s them.

  My father’s health began to deteriorate sharply a year ago; one day the nursing home in Waterford called.

  ‘He has asked for you,’ Nurse Mary said.

  When I heard that, I was sad, but sadness is something I have learned to cope with.

  ‘He has a few days left, a week at the most,’ she said.

  ‘I will pray for him,’ I said.

  So I did, by the side of a trout-filled lake that the doctor had never seen. He died on a Wednesday morning when Ireland was in the grip of a great storm, I later learned. By his own request, he was taken to the parish church in south Tipperary where he and I had knelt and prayed so many times, and was then brought to the adjoining cemetery where my mother lies, as do Mr and Mrs Flannery. His funeral Mass was said by the parish priest, Father Seán Phelan, Nurse Mary wrote. There was a good turnout and Father Phelan’s eulogy was uplifting. He told the congregation that Paddy Smyth was a wonderful man who had dedicated his life to the healing of others and, having lived for more than nine decades, had now been taken to his heavenly reward. My father’s few belongings could be forwarded to me, if I wished, Nurse Mary said. They amounted to no more than his clothes and the contents of his bedside locker.

  Her letter enclosed a snapshot, found among my father’s possessions, of him and my mother, around the time of their marriage, taken by a street photographer in Waterford. They turn around at the moment the photographer calls to them. Hope and laughter shine from their young faces. It is terrifying to think of what lay ahead.

  2

  Another letter, sent to my publisher, and then forwarded to Jerry Fisher, arrived a month after my father’s death. The writer, whose each pen stroke was transcribed with an almost artistic flourish, signed himself as Brother Malachy, Wilkins Abbey. He began by explaining how he had been trying to find a way of contacting me. He went on to say that, following my departure that day from the Abbey, he had gone back to his cell and come upon some old notes he had made of his conversations with Father Charlie McVee.

  Brother Malachy did not wish to cause me pain by bringing up the past again, he wrote, but nonetheless, since we had discussed in some detail what had been the deceased priest’s state of mind, he felt he should relay one of their final conversations.

  ‘I asked him if he regretted what he had done, but he just looked at me with what I can only describe as defiance. I reminded him that he had not much longer to live. He shrugged. I then asked him: in the event of his not being fearful for himself, was he not fearful for his soul? He looked at me, as if there were some things I would never understand. Then he said: “The body is just a playground, Malachy. It is nothing. All this… this trouble is nothing! The soul doesn’t bother with any of that. The soul swims through all those nets and into the big lake of God’s mercy.’’’

  With a silent prayer of thanks to the guiding spirit that had brought me to Kay, I glanced once more at the blue stationery with its calligraphy; then I balled up the letter and threw it in the fire.

  3

  I have spoken on the telephone a few times to Seán Phelan over the last two years. He’s a lonely, decent man who, like me, has spent his adult life suffering wounds inflicted in his childhood. He’s looking forward to retiring, he says. He wants to travel. His sister lives in Australia and her husband has died. There’s so much of the world he hasn’t seen, Seán says.

  Keith still works in Roger’s Quay; he continues to service my boat. He had been nursing Father Thomas Deasy for over a week on Hermit’s Island. The priest had refused to go into the emergency department of Charlton Hospital, or to the Catholic priest in that town. He had only a short time to live, he knew, and told Keith that he wanted to spend those days somewhere on the lake. He said that it reminded him of Ireland. Keith said that Father Thomas was one of the few people who had treated him decently in the juvenile correction centre in Chatham, and that Father Thomas was his friend.

  The priest had wanted to meet me, Keith said, but was afraid of how I might react to his request. The drugs he was taking, including painkillers, had unbalanced him and he was prone to periods of hallucination. The night he appeared at Kay’s window in Charlton hospital, he had been attending the emergency department. The priest cried a lot, Keith told me, and when Keith asked him if he was in pain, he said, yes, but not the kind of pain anyone might imagine.

  When he learned about Tim, Terence asked to be allowed see the child and talk to him.

  I never did get to have that chat with Larry White. He left Bayport some weeks after these events without saying goodbye. We never met again, so who he really was remains a mystery to this day. I heard much later from several people who are close to the police in Charlton that Larry was once a narcotics officer in Vancouver, working undercover, and that he’d come to Bayport to find a new life when the drugs gang in which he was embedded discovered his true identity; but maybe that was just a rumour.

  Terence’s body was taken to Charlton. Kay and I arranged a church, and Bishop Hal Werner said the funeral Mass. Keith was the only other person to attend. The bishop took the ashes back to Saint Patrick’s, Detroit, where there is a plot beside the chancellery for deceased priests of the diocese.

  4

  Tim is a fine boy, big-boned like me, good-looking like his father and his grandmother. Sometimes we go fishing along the lakeshore, or from Maid of Kerry. Tim’s got a deft touch with a fly rod that I never had; but I’ve started to fish with him anyway. It relaxes me and I’m getting better at it. My days with Tim on the lake are spent checking out the best spots for trout, and when we go back home, we leaf through the latest magazines and discuss the merits of different types of flies.

  On the evening that Terence died on Hermit’s Island, when we got home, I sat down with Tim. Just the two of us.

  ‘Keith brought me out twice before to see his sick friend,’ he told me. ‘He was real nice. Keith was cooking for him, but he wouldn’t eat. Keith made me promise to tell no one about him.’

  Keith had been buying medicines and bringing them out to Hermit’s Island.

  ‘He said his name was Terence. Said he knew you well—that you had been friends once. Were you once his friend, granddad?’

  ‘Yes, I was.’

  It had become dark outside, the kind of early summer dark that folds you into it and keeps you warm. Tim told me how he had been kicking a ball on the lawn when Keith pulled up.

  ‘He asked me if I’d like to come and help him,’ Tim said. ‘I kind of knew where we were going.’

  They drove to Roger’s where Keith fired up his biggest boat and they went straight out to Hermit’s. Terence was lying beside a fire, wrapped in blankets. He had become extremely weak.

  ‘He says he wants to tell you stuff,’ Keith told Tim.

  Tim had to kneel down to hear.

  ‘He asked me questions.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘Whether I had ever been to Ireland. Whether Great-Granddad Smyth had ever come over here. If I had ever met him.’

  The child turned to me.

  ‘Asked if you and I fished here on Muskoka. I told him you didn’t fish much, but that I water-skied.’

  ‘That was a good answer.’

  ‘He told me about how his mom had died a
nd how his uncle, who was a kind man, had taken him in. They lived on a farm and had their own river—imagine their own river!’

  ‘Quite a river too.’

  ‘Keith was trying to get him to take his medication, but Terence didn’t want to. Sometimes he closed his eyes and I thought he was asleep, but then he’d start whispering again. He told me how he’d learned to fish for trout. How the best fish were always caught at night.’

  I began to discern the outline of a purpose, as if the dead man was using Tim to give me information.

  ‘What else did he tell you?’

  ‘How he often went down to the river at night with the priest and the doctor. Lots of times. He said I should tell you that.’

  ‘He said that?’

  ‘He said it was very important.’

  ‘What did he say then?’

  ‘That the priest took him to a special place to fish, on his own,’ Tim said.

  ‘And the doctor?’

  ‘He went to another place,’ Tim said. ‘But Terence said the doctor knew.’

  I didn’t care if my grandson saw my tears.

  ‘He said that?’

  ‘Yes. He said that when I met you, I should tell you that. What did he mean, Granddad? What did the doctor know?’

  It is often said that the dying can hear much more than is supposed. It is reported by those who have come back from the brink that, despite their seeming deadness, even when their heart has stopped, they are vividly aware of people around them. Some describe it as swimming into the darkness, like a little fish. They can hear the water lapping gently as they move ever farther, as the deeper and deeper currents take them into their care, as they let go and the shore recedes, as the noise and harshness of the land is forgotten and bit by bit they become one with the mystery of the water and the music of the night.