The All of It: A Novel (11 page)

F
IVE O’CLOCK: ONLY
half an hour left before half-five, half-five being the hour he’d set for himself for quitting the beat and going back to the Castle to account. Folly, to suffer out the full time. No question, though, that he would: go on casting; go on desiring. Nothing to be done about the desiring, whitely chastened now though it was. Every aspect of every minute of the entire day—rain without surcease spilling out of the black and liquid sky; sloughed, fierce sweeps of wind; the swollen, silt-ridden, ever-swiftening river; the torturing midges; the ghosting mists like amorphous shifts of sorrow—all had acted in perfect scheme to chasten desire. Nought, though, can ever fully dry the angler’s heart of it.

Why not then the Hairy Mary? Nothing would come of it, but were Seamus to bring it up as an “if only,” he’d be able honestly to silence him. In the course of the afternoon, given the hopeless conditions, he’d tried a range of lures, selecting them almost solely on the basis of their fluke value: Black Fairy, Abbey, Night Hawk, Silver Wilkinson, Warden’s Worry…. So really, at last, why not the Hairy Mary?

Bending to shelter it from the rain, he opened the fine, fleece-lined fly-case he wryly called the Declan de Loughry Treasury, the title appropriate for its containing the bulk of his worldly wealth, the exotically beautiful, delicate simulations of insecta and hexapoda being expensive—
dear
, to the point of a gasp—especially to a priest whose monetary worth was what you might elegantly describe as being the polar opposite of opulent….

Ah—the Hairy Mary, nested in the fleece, just where it ought to be…. So tie it on, then walk back to the top of the beat and fish again the glide between the banks.

Trekking the lengthy distance back to the glide, he looked up once from the slippery shoreline and saw a kestrel sitting in the drench of the sky and thought of Kevin—of his tame, envying fondness for the wild, unlimited creature. The bird lingered above him, watching, interested: Ariel observing Caliban…. The notion bestowed on him for the
first time that day a sense of relationship to the immutable in nature, and, in the soothe of the perspective, he felt himself growing calm.

At the glide, he decided to use as his casting-stand a ledge known locally as Gorham’s Rock, a Mr. Timothy Gorham having made a kill from there some forty years before of a thirty-three-pound salmon, immortalizing himself and the rock thereby…. Mr. Gorham hadn’t achieved the kill in these conditions, however, legend having it that there’d been just enough of an east wind to ripple the water, not this gale; and the water just high and cool enough, not this boisterous torrent and freezing water; and the water coloured like fine beer, not clouded by silt and ridden with torn, suspended matter. He caught himself at his further maundering: it was, he knew, a way of preparing himself for final defeat. But, not wishing to dishonour the memory of Timothy Gorham, he determined to put his back into his last casts, and
did
, throwing out and stripping in again and again, wholeheartedly, in the way of a foolish, committed abider.

At half-five, though, his stomach muscles aching like he’d been fisted to the ground, and his teeth clapping together like castanets—he was that frozen—he reeled in, enough being enough, and hooked the Hairy Mary into the holding-ring at the base of his rod.

He’d go now, having given it his best.

But just as he turned from the river, the already stinging rain freshened in force to a bulletlike ferocity that sent him at a trot to the questionable cover of a low-branched, exorbitantly-leafed wych elm tree. Wet completely as he already was, he might have just slogged through the spate straight to the snug of the ghillie hut, no tree being able to be more than a leaky umbrella, but the truth was he’d rather be alone and drowning than suffer the time in the hut with Seamus, for sure as could be, Seamus’d not walk from the hut to the car in such a downpour. He could all but hear Seamus’s whine: “Hold a bit, Father! Surely,
now
you can spare yourself a further soaking….” and so on.

Better under the tree, captive to a memory of himself on a fair morning but three years ago, resting, out of the sun, under these very branches, after making the kill of a fine twelve-pound salmon. Frank Seldon had been his ghillie then, a jewel of a man in his mid-eighties, with a soft, companionable, lyrical tongue and a godlike skill with the rod. Frank: dead now…. And the likes of Seamus being let out by Thomas under the guise of being a ghillie….

It was because of that affectionate memory of Frank that he decided to take off the Hairy Mary and to tie on in its place (it was an utterly whimsical choice) a Size 12 Connemara Black, Frank hav
ing told him once that at the end of a fruitless day on the river, he never walked away from the beat with a lure of defeat still on his line. “It’s a superstition with me,” he’d added, “my hold on tomorrow.” Then, with a crooked smile: “At my age, you know, you’re prey to such notions.”

So—and—as he’d chosen to put the time in under the tree, he’d heed Frank’s words.

It was after he’d made the change of the lure and as he lingered, shivering, in a kind of mindless, melancholy trance that the fact (it was
as
a fact that he later came to speak of it)—that the
fact
of the cove which lay hard by to his right intruded itself on his consciousness as being
not
what it usually was—a mere nuisance of trespass to the angler—but a veritable lake, excessively flooded,
deep
, with waves curling its surface and at its neck, the river waters, riled to foam, still roisteringly sluicing into it.

Normally, he’d not have given the cove a second thought except for its being a sad, exaggerated, golly-fault of the spate conditions—no place, surely, where a salmon might shelter—
but
, and here again, fillip-like, another mad whim seized him: Why not, as he’d thrashed, daylong, the river to ribbons—
why not
change the locale of the whipping? And
why not
, with the Size 12 Connemara Black (madness heaped on madness) perform one cast—
only
one
—into the virgin waters of the cove?

He glanced at his watch. Five-forty-three, and the rain letting up a bit….

Not quite believing he was doing it, he walked resolutely from the tree and took a position at a point midway between the cove’s throat and the beginning curve of its ending banks.

An hour later, back at the Castle, hemmed in by an envying press of other, end-of-the-day, fatigued, failed, whiskey-drinking anglers and their ghillies, and under urgent pressure from them as they toasted him (oh, sweet triumph) to recount every single this-and-that living particular of his kill, he’d insistently told them that
truly
, he had no notion, no idea,
really
, whatever in the world had made him go for that one last cast, knowing as he did the hopeless odds of the conditions and the million-to-one chance of a salmon’s electing the cove as its lie and the ludicrous fact of the Size 12 Connemara Black lure—
yes!
a
trout
fly; imagine!—and then, just as he was about to perform the cast, to add to the folly of the exercise, the wind’s devilish turnabout from giving off those even, combing sighs out of the northwest and spitting itself out instead in short, erratic, tigerish eruptions that raked and clawed the surface waters of the cove, turning it into a chaos of tiny, spiky
ricks and cones and making it absolutely impossible to gauge the thrust-value of a cast, so he’d
almost
not made the cast at all, being sopped through as he was and chilled to the very marrow of his bones and paining with exhaustion and feeling he couldn’t cope with a backlashed line, the damnable snarl of it to be undone, and, well, truth to tell, repeating, between the stacked odds against a decent cast and the daft fact of the cove and the Connemara Black, he’d all but decided
not
to make the cast but then was overwhelmed by the thought that he
should
, that he
ought
to, that he
must!
—as if it were a sacred duty—so
had
; though, honestly, he had to confess, he hadn’t really exerted himself, not
tried
, so to speak, just raised his rod near casual-like, hardly intending, and made the fling.

And of course, just as you’d expect, it was a poor thing, falling short for lack of spirit,
yet
—and here again, the mystery of it!—bad as it was, the
presentation was excellent
, the line uncurling beautifully and the Connemara Black touching down on the water in as soft and lifelike a way as ever you could imagine or dream of.

Instantly—yes,
instantly
—the fish showed itself in a head-and-tail rise. And, of course, the spank of its action, so sudden and smarting, and him so lulled, he all but had a heart attack! And the wrist being the villain in a situation like that, he jerked
the rod upwards—reflex of surprise—but, God be praised! there was sufficient slack in the line so that the Connemara Black wasn’t disturbed in its watery rest. So: slowly,
slowly
, near dying, he began the tease of the strip-in.

When the beast did finally take, it wasn’t a clean, enthusiastic, definite strike. Nothing like that. Rather, it took from below, almost stealthily, after, he supposed, nudging the lure with its nose, then deciding. But,
yes
, he knew well enough it was on: in its first alarm it did a complete in-place roll, causing a sign on the water and himself to have the sensation of the rod’s thickening in his hand. Keen to the nuance of that sensation, he nerved himself against doing anything hasty: let the creature have its moment to turn away—worth about eight yards off the reel—before performing that deft, precise, tautening skyward lift of the rod and applying, at the same instant, the reel’s check, the joint action of which, then or never, sets the hook firmly in the tough jaw of the angering salmon. “Of course.
Of course
, man!” he bawled impatiently to the big-jowled Welshman, that action supposes a larger
salmon
fly,
never
, that is to say
not, not
a Connemara Black with its tiny Size 12 barb meant for the more sensitive mouth of a sea-trout! So forget the fact of the Connemara Black and apply to the kill as usual. “There being no alternative,”
withering the Welshman with the obvious.

Understand: the flooded cove—site of the struggle—presented another hazard to the mix of the drama, for while he knew as well as he did the inside of his pocket the underwater terrain of the riverbed, he knew
nought, nought
of the cove’s bottom, the location of stick-clumps, or nested, raw-edged rock-clumps, or how far out into the heavy, muddy waters the reed-beds grow, all such places being the natural refuge a fish would run for, there to tangle the line and break free of it. So the task of
controlling
the beast as he played it had been especially tricky….

“It took how long?” one of the Americans asked.

“Just over thirty-five minutes.” And…until well near the end, the only way he’d been able to handle the beast, in the controlling sense, was by maintaining an exceptionally high, above-the-head hold of his rod—a criminal position for the necessary amount of reeling in of the line and the letting out of it, the creature being a fighter with the strength of Satan (it twice bent the rod to a sure-seeming breaking point)—and him all the while with his fingers going numb for want of blood getting to them and his arms nearly torn from their sockets each and every time he slipped the check on the reel. And: “Raw, is it?” sticking out his tongue for Thomas to inspect, “Bitten to ribbons?”
Thomas knew he was a “mouther” when he played a fish.

Very near the end there’d been a hot, thorough moment when he feared he’d lost it, it so suddenly stopped rampaging….
Stilled
itself, and in a way that caused the line to slacken and the tip of the rod to lift, not straight up—oh God, not
that
much!—but enough to cause him to miss a breath before he felt a verifying tug. A
tug
, mind. Not a feisty yank of renewed strength. Just a tug of the dull, heavy sort….

“Poundage and fatigue,” glint-eyed Thomas cut in. “And I’ll wager you were glad enough then to have Seamus at your side, were you not?” lifting his shoulder importantly and blathering confidentially on to the circle: “When he ’phoned me yesterday, Father said he’d not need a ghillie…. But you can see for yourselves with Father’s kill—the very
size
of it—the
sense
of the Castle’s rule of a ghillie for every beat, and how it falls on me to see to the rule’s being carried out.”

“To your health, Thomas.”

“
Well
, Father?”

“Well, Thomas?”

“Well, were you not glad to have Seamus?”

“Well…yes. Seamus waded out for the netting….”

No point in publicly telling what a mess Seamus had made of the netting; that, far from being at
hand and on the ready, it had taken five celestial bawlings of his name before he’d come at a walk through the rain from the ghillie hut, and without the net, a path he’d retraced at a hare’s pitch once he took in why he’d been called…. The net retrieved, the boy had proved ignorant to the necessity of a weight for it: “A
rock
, Seamus! You call yourself a ghillie? No!—the bigger one.
That
one, for the love of God!
PUT IT IN THE NET
!…To hold it down in the water’s ‘what’s for’!”—this last growled exasperation shattering the concentrate of silence which normally queens the final tenses of a kill….

Nor how, then, as the fish surfaced and was marvellously seen, agleam, there’d been the need to instruct Seamus: “Wade out, boy!
Wade out!
I daren’t bring it closer,” which words, hissed forth, sent Seamus, all glory of purpose, into the water; but, his obeying haste being of the reckless sort, he’d not (of course) considered his footing, so had slipped (of course), and, careening, his head on the wobble, his mouth in the twist of an oath, his arms angled out stick-and-scarecrow-like, though (credit him) his hand maintaining its grip on the net, he was, for one bizarre moment, valued as being the living incarnation of O’Callaghan’s immortal painting of “The Wounded Soldier-Boy A-Dying in the Foss.”…