Niall Williams - History of the Rain

God couldn’t get to Abraham Swain, but He sent a message. He sent it queerways through a nineteen-year-old called Gavrilo Princip who was waiting by the bridge over the innocent River Miljacka in the city of Sarajevo. The message went loudly from Gavrilo’s gun into the passing head of Archduke Ferdinand and from there out through the mouth of Lord Kitchener in England. It was a fairly blunt system actually, download speed slower than Faha dial-up, but one hundred thousand men a month got the message and signed up to fight For King and Country. My grandfather heard it in a crowded room in Oriel College where pale young men with no practical knowledge of the world but the gleaming white foreheads of those who handled beautiful ideals voted en masse to join the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. They poured out into the night afterwards, the starlight, the spires, Mr Alexander Morrow, Mr Sydney Eacrett, Mr Matthew Cheatley, Mr Clive Paul (these and all The Fallen listed in the index of Book 547, The Gleaming Days: History of the Ox & Bucks , Oxford), all of them feeling like jumping, like dancing, as if for each a weight had been replaced by a lightness, as if that’s what it meant, Light Infantry . You signed your name on the line and you felt a little lighter, a little ascension . Life was not so heavy after all. Now you only had to go and tell your parents.

Abraham prepared his speech on the train. He wrote out separate Key Phrases on different pieces of paper and laid them on the table. The problem was The Swain Way allowed for no vanity. He couldn’t say: I have to Save My Country . He couldn’t say: God wants me to do this more than that . It couldn’t be that becoming a soldier was in any way better than becoming a Reverend.

A sticky wicket, Alexander Morrow said.

Abraham decided he’d go with Not Yet. God didn’t want him to go into the Church just yet, first there was this war business, Father, and it would be vain and self-serving if he thought himself better than others.

He’d use The Swain Way against itself.

He got off the train and walked up past the graveyard and the tilting tombstones with that look of Elsewhere. This is the thing about the men in this family; they all look like they are on some Secret Mission. They’re here with you and doing the ordinary everyday but secretly all the time some part of them is away, is thinking of their mission. It’s the thing women fall in love with, the elusive bit that they think they can fish back out of the deep Swain pool. But that’s for later. I’ll get to Women & Swains later.

Abraham told his mother Agnes and she excused herself from the room the way ladies did those days so she could go and Have a Moment while a wolf ate her heart.

The Reverend came in and jutted his jaw.

‘Abraham?’

‘Father.’

Maybe the Reverend knew right then. Maybe that was all it took. The Swain men aren’t great for talk. What I imagine is the darkening of the Reverend’s shave-mask, the cold fish-glitter of his eye, narrow-nosed inhale as he realises this is his punishment for imagining Abraham would be The Next Big Thing in Holy World. He turns away to the long window, clasps one hand in the other, feels the chill of the Presence and begins to pray that his son will leap to a glorious death.

Preface

Let me begin by stating what, although perhaps evident to even the most inexperienced of anglers on their first day in this country, nonetheless deserves repetition here: Ireland is a paradise for the salmon-fisher. The plenitude of her rivers, the particular clarity of her waters and the undiminished beauty of her topography all combine towards the creation of the fisherman’s idyll. Indeed in certain weather it may seem that every part of this country is lake and stream and the angler can hardly journey a few miles without encountering waters teeming with salmon or sea trout. In times of flood from numerous miniature rivers fish freely ascend. Wet weather, which is usually plentiful, suits most rivers best and if the angler is properly attired and of sturdy character there is no reason why salmon-fishing in Ireland should not provide him with an experience as close to angling paradise as can be found anywhere.

It is the intention of the author that herein shall be a complete description, drawn from personal experience, of all of the salmon rivers of Ireland. We shall provide detail of the most noteworthy runs, annual close times, dates when netting may be plied, rods plied, as well as the best Irish salmon flies, tacklemakers, etc etc. While this alone would constitute all that is required of an angler’s guidebook it is the author’s belief that it would be remiss if this were all when writing of salmon in Ireland. For in this country to the salmon is attributed a magical character. Here it is not forgotten that he is in a figure of two worlds, both fresh and salt water, mystical, mythic, and in many eyes no less than an alternate God. It is not only that the salmon strives after the impossible, not only that he seeks to be a creature of air as well as water, but that in moments of startling beauty and transcendence he achieves just this. Nor is such appreciation confined only to salmon-fishers. The Irish admire the heroic and all who endeavour against outrageous odds. To give but a flavour, a small boy in Galway or Limerick or Sligo will tell you the story of Fionn MacCumhaill as if it were yesterday’s news. Fionn speared the Salmon of Knowledge, he will tell you, at the falls at Assaroe on the Erne. The salmon had derived its knowledge from eating the hazelnuts that dropped in the stream and now from the salmon Fionn learned that to make a poet you need: Fire of Song, Light of Knowledge and the Art of Recitation, thereby for ever sealing salmon and poetry in the Irish mind. All of which the author believes can only serve to enrich the salmon-fisher’s experience in Ireland. There shall therefore be occasional anecdotes, fragments of lore, superstition and belief, all of which in this country are inextricably entangled, not least because in Ireland Saints and Salmon have for a long time been on first-name basis.

Now, having followed the advice of Richard Penn, Esq. whose twin-volume Maxims & Hints for an Angler and Miseries of Fishing (John Murray, Albemarle St., London, 1833) have long been indispensable to the present author, namely ‘when you commence your acquaintance with a salmon, allow a brief period for introductions’, it is time to delay no more but take a steady stance, survey the river, breathe, and cast.

People are odd creations, this is my theme. None odder than Swains.

On the fourteenth of August 1914 the 2nd Battalion of the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry landed at Boulogne, France.

What happened next I imagine sometimes when I am brought out of the county by ambulance. When the Minister redrew the map of hospitals in Ireland, calling them Centres for Excellence, she forgot about Clare. It’s often done. We’re neither one thing nor the other, neither South nor West; we’re between the blowsy tramp of Kerry and the barrel-chested Galwegians, both of them dolling up, dyeing their hair and pushing to the front. So, if in Clare you have Something , as I have, you have to be brought out.

Timmy and Packy come for me. Timmy has flaming orange hair and the Hurling bug and if you give him the slightest encouragement he’ll let you enjoy samples of his throat-singing. Packy’s mother has done the impossible and made him think he’s good-looking, but they’re lovely really. We go without the siren but there’s still that smell that is the opposite of sickness but makes you think of it anyway. And there I imagine him, Grandfather Swain in France.