Niall Williams - History of the Rain

Within a week he was dead.

Amen to him.

Awomen also, as Denis Fitz said half a second after the congregation at midnight Mass before in Faha we moved midnight to half nine.

Grandfather’s response to the Reverend’s refusal to visit and subsequent death took an original form; he stopped believing in God, and started believing in salmon. Plans in this world were pointless. Pointless to have imagined he could ever have fulfilled his father’s dreams or achieved the Impossible Standard.

Grandfather forsook the world for fishing.

In fairness, perhaps there was a deeper point; perhaps secretly it was to out-Christian the Reverend by going back to basics: to Peter the Fish, to Paul the Church, is that how it goes? I’m not great on the Bible, though we have a nice one (Book 1,001, King James Edition), black and soft with the kind of feather-light pages they only use in bibles, as if paper for bibles can only come from this one place, and the pages are thinned down to a fineness that feels holy somehow so that even turning them is kind of sanctifying. Either way, whatever the reason, the Salmon it was. Grandfather stopped all work on Ashcroft House & Lands, walked out the French doors, went down across the lawn, called the workers together and to the collected jawdrops and head scratches told them stop, stop trimming the hedges boys, no more mowing the hay, pack up, go home.

There’s a photograph of Grandfather when he’s about thirty-five. He’s in a white shirt buttoned to his chin and his face has an expression of wild impatience. His lips are so tight you’d think he was afraid he’d dribble out some awful medicine if he cracked them. He resents the moment of the pose, he wants to escape it, that Elsewhere business again, and already in his chin you can see the Reverend coming. You can see the angle of the nose, the furrow between the dark eyes, and you know the old man is arriving in his skin. There’s going to be no way to escape him.

But Grandfather is going to try. Yes sir. He’s going to apply the What-would-my-father-do to everything, and then choose the opposite. So, instead of settling down into the dull acceptance of midlife, instead of comfortable complacence and respectability, he takes his rods and strides out the gates of Ashcroft accompanied by two bounding wolfhounds. He leaves the house to its own devices, which means weeds, mould, mushrooms in the basement, broken panes in the upstairs bedrooms, flies, snails, mice and a family of trapped rooks.

He begins on the two Black Castle sections of the Boyne River. In the notebooks he kept of his catch there are brackets beneath the salmon he caught and the name Mr R. R. Fitzherbert.

For duties to His Majesty I suppose, maybe for going away and getting Him something nice, the Virgin Islands or something, The King had given Mr Fitzherbert all the fish that passed there — To you the fish, to you the chips, same as the Bible only English-style — and my grandfather was scrupulous enough to record which of Mr Fitzherbert’s salmon he took, and with which flies.

I have his Salmon Journals, which were the workbooks for his book. They are here in my father’s library, pressed flattish between Don Quixote (Book 1,605, Vintage Classics, London), a kind of genius Spanish miracle, and Salar the Salmon (Book 1,606, Henry Williamson, Faber & Faber, London), a book so good that reading it you feel you’re in a river. Each journal is carefully kept, blue marbling inside and blackly leatherbound like a Lesser Bible. The first time I opened one I felt indecent. I love the feel of a book. I love the touch and smell and sound of the pages. I love the handling . A book is a sensual thing. You sit curled in a chair with it or like me you take it to bed and it’s, well, enveloping. Weird I am. I know. What the Hell? as Bobby Bowe says to everything. You either get it or you don’t. When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company , not only the company of the writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds; these were the literal original Facebooks, the books where faces had been, and I just loved it, the whole strange sense of being aboard a readership.

I know, I know. I’m not an e-person or an iPerson. Maybe I would be if we weren’t in the five per cent. The Minister says the whole country is Broadband now, except for maybe five per cent. Hello? We’re not even Narrowband. And what with having a predilection, as Thomas Halvey says, for the nineteenth century, I’m older than old-fashioned, I know. No, whatever way they built Faha down in a hole beside the river, we can’t get Broadband. We still get calls from somebody in the Philippines offering us Best Internet Deals ever. We let them talk to Nan. She can keep them on for an hour. It’s a sort of granny-sitting.

But look, here is one of my grandfather’s Salmon Journals. Feel that. Smell that. The pages have a water warp, a buckled edge like a river wave. The paper is a heavy old stock smooth under your hand. Some pages clump together as if the recording was made in rain. The handwriting is neat and done in blue ink that is now faded lavender.

SALMON

Week of June 12th, 1929

18lbs 6oz (Jock Scot)

19lbs 4oz (Blue Jock)

15lbs 11oz (Collie)

14lbs 8oz (Collie)

21lbs 3oz (Gudgeon )

It goes on, pounds and pounds of fish, page after page of pale ink. I wondered what Mr R. R. Fitzherbert thought of Abraham taking all his salmon. Maybe he didn’t know. He lived in Nottinghamshire. I have wondered if my grandfather ate them all, if the Swain jaw was partly a fish-face, and I’ve pouted at the mirror for half an hour one afternoon when I first became sick just to see if I could see the salmon leaping out in me.

For how long can a man go fishing? I asked Mrs Quinty, but she thought it was some cloaked reference to Tommy and the Hairdresser, that once Tommy had caught Sylvia he’d get tired or bored or not be able to sustain himself as Phyllis Lillis says, you know, in what Hamlet calls Country Matters. But what I was actually asking was: fishing. How long could my grandfather be happy getting up in the morning heading out with his rod to go fishing?

Because, Dear Reader, that’s all he did.

He fished for salmon.

He pretty much let the house and grounds go Rackrent (Book 778, Castle Rackrent , Maria Edgeworth, Penguin Classics, London). From the first salmon of the season to the last weary fish returning upriver in the autumn Abraham Swain was there, standing thigh-deep in the river proper, a little swirl of broken water in his wake and his line laying soft swished question marks in the air overhead.

Even the wolfhounds became bored. When they saw him lift his rods they would trot back across the front hall and flop down, their great hair and bone masses immovable and hearts conflicted in the classic dog dilemma of loyalty to their master and knowing he was do-lally. Grandfather let them be, and the hounds commenced what was to be the business of the remainder of their lifetimes, chewing to straggling ropes the various oriental carpets and, when these proved too fibrous a diet, laying sideways and gnawing jag-toothed the pitch-pine floorboards.

Grandfather didn’t give two flying figaries. He had lost all care for this life which he believed random and meaningless, a constant proof but small comfort he found in those salmon that passed and those that were caught.

In our family history there are few stories told of this time.

Grandfather Fished just about sums it up.

He chose fecklessness as a first response. Let God or the Devil show up if they existed. He was away fishing. Nothing of the struggles then of our emerging nation, nothing of Old Roundrims, Old Gimlet-eyes, our Spanish-American First Irishman who was shaping His Country, nothing of the darkening politics of Europe touches Grandfather’s life. He lives his own solitary unconfinement until April 19th 1939 when there is the last entry midway through Salmon Journal XIX.