Free History of the Rain by Niall Williams

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.
    It reads:
     
    26lbs (worm)
     
    The Salmon in Ireland
    because here the confluence of fact, story and legend make for cloudy waters. Salmon derives from the Latin salire , to leap. It was Cattalus of course who likened the leaping salmon to an erect phallus, a version of which survives in Ireland in a story told to me by an ancient fisherman in the County Westmeath. In this story the mother of Saint Finan Cam is said to have been prompted by a bodiless voice to go swimming in a river after dark. While swimming in mid current, apparently unawares, she became impregnated by a salmon.
    One imagines the surprise.
    How the salmon achieves the leap has down the centuries been variously explained. By holding his tail in his mouth according to the seventeenth-century poem ‘Poly-Olbion’ by Michael Drayton.
     
    . . . his taile takes in his teeth, and bending like a bowe
    That’s to the compasse drawn, aloft himself doth throwe.
     
    That the height of the leap may be linked to a female presence is not perhaps as fanciful as