The Longest Silence (5 page)

Now, cheerfully ensconced in a medieval trout town, I was ready to do battle with my bamboo rod. I had discovered that I held no advantage over the locals’ cast of three wet flies with my single nymphs and dries. Indeed, on evidence, I was quick to turn to their ways. Years later, Americans would “discover” this soft-hackle revolution. At an ancient monastery outside Dublin accessed by a stone causeway over fast water, pierced by a circular opening for the angling convenience of the friars, I imagined they sought the trout and salmon with the down-winged, bright fly that was born in early times on the spate rivers of the Celtic world, in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and perhaps Cornwall. A thousand years later, it pops up in American fly shops as a novelty. Constant discovery is the eternal joy of the ahistorical.

My new friend Ned informed me that we would advance upon the River Maigue by Morris Minor on the morrow. We had the usual array of grouse-and-anythings as well as his great proof against failure, the rusty spinner. I looked forward to the trip with enthusiasm tempered by the conviction that Ned knew where every drop of water in Ireland was headed. He was beyond being a presentationist, reading not only the thought of the trout but the next thought which the trout had not yet thought. As a result, my frequent cautious dragless drifts were set against the backdrop of Ned’s brief presentations and the hiss of his taut leader at an angle to the current. While I did the customary North American deep-sea wading, he knelt on the bank in his worn-out hip boots. If brush was behind him, he turned to look quickly for a hole in it and then, without looking again, sent the tight bow of his backcast into it without a hitch.

Because of Ned’s membership in a teetotaling society, I led a very quiet life in Kilmallock. When we headed out into the six-hour evening the roisterers were aligned in the pub, and they were there
when we returned home in the dark with fish to clean and supper to get. I like both lives but they really don’t intersect.

Ned’s wife was a sharp-minded realist who made me the occasional meal. She had a tusklike tooth that kept her mouth slightly ajar: a drunken dentist, attempting to cure her toothache by extraction, had had the tooth halfway out when he fell into a stupor on the floor. The tooth recovered, as did Mrs. Noonan, but it compromised her dentition forever. And under no circumstances, she told me, would she ever go to a dentist again.

The blond sports girl left with the hurley team never to be further seen. Across from my room, I became aware of a gloomy figure smoking cigarettes in a second-floor window, an older man in a dark tweed coat, never without a cigarette, watching the street indifferently throughout the daylight hours. I learned that he was a “returned Yank,” that is, a Kilmallock local who had emigrated to America, spent his working life as a policeman, and returned to his hometown with a vast Detroit automobile to impress the locals. The car was undrivable in the local streets and was somehow disposed of. I gathered that on learning his return was not to be a triumph, the old cop sank into the gloom in which I discovered him: cigarettes, the passing scene, and the conviction he made a huge mistake leaving Boston.

One night as I dined downstairs, a modest country couple in middle age came by to present their son to Mrs. D’Arcy, who was tough and efficient, something of an authority figure if not in the town, at least on this street. The son had recently joined the Irish coast guard, and by some bureaucratic gyration he’d been sent, without ever seeing any settlement other than his native borough, straight to New York City. What an astonishment this must have provided, I thought. Butting in, I asked the young man what he thought of New York. His mother answered for him proudly, “Agh, he took no notice of it.”

This, I have since decided, is the war cry of the provincial. The proprietor of a bookshop in Montana, where I live, once said to me, “Piss on Europe. I’d rather be in Livingston.” And an old gentleman who worked for me on the ranch sometimes boasted that he had lived here all his life and had never been to Billings, eighty miles distant. Personally, I like the young African who made his way to the North
Pole after having been enchanted by a photograph of the icebergs. Or the father of Beryl Markham, who at about the age we go on social security decided to leave Africa and homestead again in Argentina. There’s no substitute for courage.

When we fished the Morning Star and the Loobagh, I remarked to my companions on the handsome, ruined, once fine houses we saw from time to time, roofless, with fire-blackened windows. The lack of answers suggested hard days with the Fenians, of whom my great-grandfather was one, a violent rascal who was killed later in Cuba while covertly serving the United States. My grandmother told me it had never been explained why he was buried in an army cemetery in Lexington, Kentucky. He had been a specialist in violence, which even in the early part of our century made all places home. I was increasingly aware during our evening forays in my Morris across a sometimes vacant landscape that its history had been a melancholy one, and that if the small towns seemed weary, they were entitled to.

We were heading for the Maigue. In back were our rods, reels, creels, long bamboo-handled nets which hang crossways from left shoulder to right hip, various arcana like the top part of a Morris turn signal
pace
Oliver Kite, the perfect spoon for inspecting the stomach contents of a trout, waders and waterproofs, a Genoa salami, soda bread, and a knife. We planned to go nearly to Adare, situated at the top of the River Maigue’s tideway, a forest and pasture gallery of intimate trout stream.

Much of the water near Adare was preserved both by the Dunraven Hotel and local fisheries societies. I relied upon Ned to find us an opening. We went up past Croom, a market town once the resort of poets and now a place of ruined abbeys, ring forts, and crumbling round towers. You would have to be born not only among these lanes to find our aperture of unguarded water but also among its rumors, which seeped details of farmsteads and leases into the local collective consciousness.

We wandered down through a pasture and there flowed the Maigue like a woodland spring creek, where the rings of already feeding trout traveled thirty yards on the silken current before disappearing. Ned
went upstream a way, only occasionally revealing himself through the steady motions of his rod.

I got myself in place to fish the spinner fall. Before I caught my first fish, a troupe of black-and-white cows gathered on the bank to watch me. After suspicion at the movements of my rod passed, they begin to cogitate on my activity, shifting their lower jaws and gazing from under long eyelashes, straight through me to some larger knowledge of human antics.

The fish I caught were all around two pounds apiece. I don’t remember ever catching stronger, wilder, more violent or wanton fighters than these fish. They were vividly leopard-marked with short, hard bodies. They wore me out with their valor.

I have thought of that evening for thirty years. Then, in Montana, I ran into a man married to an Irish woman, a fly fisher who knew the Maigue. Don’t go back, he said, they’ve drained the bogs and ruined it. Could this be? I knew how to find out. I wrote Ned Noonan in his tiny ancient town. I got the letter back: “Addressee unknown.”

And yet, and yet. A letter arrived this summer from the other Tom McGuane’s youngest daughter, Antonia. The blooming adolescent I remembered described herself as a divorced mother, a painter in Nova Scotia, and the director of a gallery for Inuit art. Ireland, she said, was prospering at last. And Kilmallock, where my old Morris had been a shining phaeton, was full of cars.

B
ECAUSE THIS WAS
a visit and a return, I might have had the nerve, right at the beginning, to call it “Sakonnet Point Revisited” and take my lumps on the Victorianism and sentimentality counts, though half a page of murder and sex at the end would bail that out. If you are to cultivate a universal irony, as Edmund Wilson told Scott Fitzgerald to do, you must never visit anything in your works, much less revisit, ever.

But when you go back to a place where you spent many hours of childhood, you find that some of it has become important, if not actually numinous, and that universal irony might just have to eat hot lead for the moment, because there is no way of suppressing that importance. Also, there is the fact of its being no secret anyway. A Midwestern childhood is going to show, for instance, even after you have retired from the ad agency and are a simple crab fisherman by the sea, grave with Winslow Homer marineland wisdom. Sooner or later someone looks into your eyes and sees a flash of corn and automobiles, possibly even the chemical plant at Wyandotte, Michigan. You can’t hide it.

Still, there was one thing certainly to be avoided: to wit, the notion when you go back to the summer place everything seems so small. You protest: “But when I got there, everything did seem small.…”

Don’t say it! The smallness of that which is revisited is one of the
touchstones of an underground literature in which the heart is constantly wrung by the artifacts of childhood. Undermining it would be like shooting Barbie.

I had neared Sakonnet Point thinking, This place is loaded with pitfalls, and I had visualized a perfect beach of distant memory now glittering with mercury, oiled ducks, aluminum, and maybe one defunct-but-glowing nuclear submarine. And I met my expectations at my first meal in the area: “the Down East Clam Special.” The cook’s budget had evidently been diverted into the tourist effluvium inspired by the American Revolution that I’d seen in the lobby. The clams in my chowder and fritters and fried clams were mere shadows of their former selves, calling into question whether they had ever been clams at all.

On my plate was universal irony in parable form, come to haunt me. I knew at that moment that I had my imaginative rights. As a result, I actually returned to Sakonnet Point half thinking to see the whalers of the
Pequod
striding up from their dories to welcome me. And, truly, when I saw the old houses on the rocky peninsula, they fitted the spangled Atlantic around them at exactly the equipoise that seems one of the harmonics of childhood.

I had my bass rod in the car and drove straight to Warren’s Point. There was a nice shore-break surf and plenty of boiling whitewater that I could reach with a plug. Nevertheless, I didn’t rush it. I needed a little breakthrough to make the pursuit plausible. When fishing on foot, you have none of the reassurances that the big accoutrements of the sport offer. No one riding a fighting chair on a John Rybovich sportfisherman thinks about not getting one in quite the same terms as the man on foot.

Before I began, I could see on the horizon the spectator boats from the last day of the America’s Cup heading home. The Goodyear blimp seemed as stately in the pale sky as the striped bass I had visualized as my evening’s reward.

I began to cast, dropping the big surface plug, an Atom Popper, into the whitewater around boulders and into the tumbling backwash of waves. I watched the boats heading home and wondered if
Gretel
had
managed a comeback. During the day I had learned that an old friend of the family was in Fall River recovering from a heart attack and that his lobster pots still lay inside the course of the cup race. I wondered about that and cast until I began to have those first insidious notions that I had miscalculated the situation.

But suddenly, right in front of me, bait was in the air and the striped green-and-black backs of bass coursed through it. It is hard to convey this surprise: bait breaking like a small rainstorm and, bolting through the frantic minnows, perhaps a dozen striped bass. They went down at the moment I made my cast and reappeared thirty feet away. I picked up and cast again, and the same thing happened. Then the fish vanished.

I had missed the chance by not contriving an interception. I stood on my rock and rather forlornly hoped the surprise would happen again. To my immediate right, baitfish were splashing out of the water, throwing themselves up against the side of a sea-washed boulder. It occurred to me, slowly, that they were not doing this out of their own personal sense of sport. So I lobbed my plug over, made one turn on the handle, hooked a striper, and was tight to the fish in a magical burst of spray. The bass raced around among the rocks and seaweed, made one dogged run toward open water, then came my way. When he was within twenty feet, I let him hang in the trough until another wave formed, then glided the fish in on it and beached him.

The ocean swells and flattens, stripes itself abstractly with foam and changes color under the clouds. Sometimes a dense flock of gulls hangs overhead and their snowy shadows sink into the green, translucent sea.

Standing on a boulder amid breaking surf that is forming offshore, accelerating and rolling toward you is, after awhile, like looking into a fire. It is mesmeric.

All the time I was here I thought of my uncle Bill, who had died the previous year and in whose Sakonnet house I was staying, as I had in the past. He was a man of local fame as a gentleman and a wit. And he had a confidence and a sense of moral precision that amounted to a mild form of tyranny. But for me his probity was based almost more on
his comic sense than on his morality, though the latter was considerable.