As the eels came in over the side I cut them loose with a knife into a wire cage, where they slid over each other in their own oil, the twisted eel hook in their mouths. The other fish — pike choked on hooked perch they’d tried to swallow, bream, roach — I slid up the floorboards towards the bow of the boat. We’d sell them in the village or give them away. The hooks that hadn’t been taken I cleaned and stuck in rows round the side of the wooden box. I let the line fall in its centre. After a mile he took my place in the stern and I rowed. People hadn’t woken yet, and the early morning cold and mist were on the river. Outside of the slow ripple of the oars and the threshing of the fish on the line beaded with running drops of water as it came in, the river was dead silent, except for the occasional lowing of cattle on the banks.
‘Have you any idea what you’ll do after this summer?’ he asked.
‘No. I’ll wait and see what comes up,’ I answered.
‘How do you mean what comes up?’
‘Whatever result I get in the exam. If the result is good, I’ll have choices. If it’s not, there won’t be choices. I’ll have to take what I can get.’
‘How good do you think they’ll be?’
‘I think they’ll be all right, but there’s no use counting chickens, is there?’
‘No,’ he said, but there was something calculating in the face; it made me watchful of him as I rowed the last stretch of line.
The day had come, the distant noises of the farms and the first flies on the river, by the time we’d lifted the large wire cage out of the bulrushes, emptied in the morning’s catch of eels, and sunk it again.
‘We’ll have enough for a consignment tomorrow,’ he said.
Each week we sent the live eels to Billingsgate in London.
‘But say, say even if you do well, you wouldn’t think of throwing this country up altogether and going to America?’ he said, the words fumbled for as I pushed the boat out of the bulrushes after sinking the cage of eels, using the oar as a pole, the mud rising a dirty yellow between the stems.
‘Why America?’
‘Well, it’s the land of opportunity, isn’t it, a big, expanding country? There’s no room for ambition in this poky place. All there’s room for is to make holes in pints of porter.’
I was wary of the big words. They were not in his own voice.
‘Who’d pay the fare?’
‘We’d manage that. We’d scrape it together somehow.’
‘Why should you scrape for me to go to America if I can get a job here?’
‘I feel I’d be giving you a chance I never got. I fought for this country. And now they want to take away even the licence to fish. Will you think about it anyhow?’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I answered.
Through the day he trimmed the brows of ridges in the potato field while I replaced hooks on the line and dug worms, pain of doing things for the last time as well as the boredom the knowledge brings that soon there’ll be no need to do them, that they could be discarded almost now. The guilt of leaving came: I was discarding his life to assume my own, a man to row the boat would eat into the decreasing profits of the fishing, and it was even not certain he’d get renewal of his licence. The tourist board had opposed the last application. They said we impoverished the coarse fishing for tourists — the tourists who came every summer from Liverpool and Birmingham in increasing numbers to sit in aluminium deck-chairs on the riverbank and fish with rods. The fields we had would be a bare living without the fishing.
I saw him stretch across the wall in conversation with the cattle-dealer Farrell as I came round to put the worms where we stored them in clay in the darkness of the lavatory. Farrell leaned on the bar of his bicycle on the road. I passed into the lavatory thinking they were talking about the price of cattle, but as I emptied the worms into the box, the word Moran came, and I carefully opened the door to listen. It was my father’s voice. He was excited.
‘I know. I heard the exact sum. They got ten thousand dollars when Luke was killed. Every American soldier’s life is insured to the tune of ten thousand dollars.’
‘I heard they get two hundred and fifty dollars a month each for Michael and Sam while they’re serving,’ he went on.
‘They’re buying cattle left and right,’ Farrell’s voice came as I closed the door and stood in the darkness, in the smell of shit and piss and the warm fleshy smell of worms crawling in too little clay.
The shock I felt was the shock I was to feel later when I made some social blunder, the splintering of a self-esteem and the need to crawl into a lavatory to think.
Luke Moran’s body had come from Korea in a leaden casket, had crossed the stone bridge to the slow funeral bell with the big cars from the embassy behind, the coffin draped in the Stars and Stripes. Shots had been fired above the grave before they threw in the clay. There were photos of his decorations being presented to his family by a military attaché.
He’d scrape the fare, I’d be conscripted there, each month he’d get so many dollars while I served, and he’d get ten thousand if I was killed.
In the darkness of the lavatory between the boxes of crawling worms before we set the night line for the eels I knew my youth had ended.
I rowed as he let out the night line, his fingers baiting each twisted hook so beautifully that it seemed a single movement. The dark was closing from the shadow of Oakport to Nutley’s boathouse, bats made ugly whirls overhead, the wings of ducks shirred as they curved down into the bay.
‘Have you thought about what I said about going to America?’ he asked, without lifting his eyes from the hooks and the box of worms.
‘I have.’
The oars dipped in the water without splash, the hole whorling wider in the calm as it slipped past him.
‘Have you decided to take the chance, then?’
‘No. I’m not going.’
‘You won’t be able to say I didn’t give you the chance when you come to nothing in this fool of a country. It’ll be your own funeral.’
‘It’ll be my own funeral,’ I answered, and asked after a long silence, ‘As you grow older, do you find your own days in the war and jails coming much back to you?’
‘I do. And I don’t want to talk about them. Talking about the execution disturbed me no end, those cursed buttons bursting into the air. And the most I think is that if I’d conducted my own wars, and let the fool of a country fend for itself, I’d be much better off today. I don’t want to talk about it.’
I knew this silence was fixed for ever as I rowed in silence till he asked, ‘Do you think, will it be much good tonight?’
‘It’s too calm,’ I answered.
‘Unless the night wind gets up,’ he said anxiously.
‘Unless a night wind,’ I repeated.
As the boat moved through the calm water and the line slipped through his fingers over the side I’d never felt so close to him before, not even when he’d carried me on his shoulders above the laughing crowd to the Final. Each move he made I watched as closely as if I too had to prepare myself to murder.
Lavin
When I knew Lavin he was close to the poorhouse but he’d still down mallet and cold chisel to limp after the young girls, crooked finger beckoning, calling, ‘Come, give us a peep, there must be a few little hairs beginning,’ and that strange inlooking smile came over the white stubbled face while the girls, shrieking with laughter, kept backing just fast enough to stay outside his reach.
When I heard people speak of Lavin it was in puzzlement that when young and handsome he had worked such cruel hours at his trade, though he had no need because his uncle had left him Willowfield, the richest farm around; and he had taken no interest in girls though he could have had his pick; and at a threshing or in a wheatfield he’d be found at nightfall gathering carelessly abandoned tools or closing gaps after the others had gone drinking or to dress for the dances. Neither could they understand his sudden heavy drinking in Billy Burns’s. Before that if he had to enter a pub he’d accept nothing but lemonade. Burns was blamed for giving him credit when his money ran out, and after he seized and held in the house the gypsy girl who sold him paper flowers with wire stems, it was the same Burns who gave him the money to buy the gypsies off in return for Willowfield. The gypsies had warned him that if he didn’t pay what they wanted they’d come and cut him with rusted iron. What money he was able to earn afterwards was from his trade, and that steadily dwindled as machinery replaced the horse. All of his roof had fallen in except above the kitchen, where oats and green weeds grew out of the thatch. Whatever work he got he did outside on the long hacked bench, except when it was too cold or wet.