An Irish Christmas Feast (5 page)

The village of Ballybradawn sits comfortably and compactly atop a twenty-foot-high plateau overlooking the Bradawn River. The Bradawn rises in the hills of North Cork but enters the Atlantic in North Kerry. The village with its one thousand souls lies half-way between sea and source.

In the early spring the salmon run upwards from the sea to the spawning beds, silent and silvery, shimmering and shapely. It is a most hazardous journey. Survivors are few. Man is the major enemy.

Our tale begins in the year of our Lord 1953, a climacteric span which saw the demise of Stalin, the flight of the Shah, the inauguration of Eisenhower and the conquest of Everest.

Not to be outdone, Ballybradawn was to witness its own breathtaking phenomenon shortly before Christmas of the year in question.

The spring and summer of the said year had been extremely disappointing seasons for local and visiting anglers. For some reason best known to themselves the dense schools of celebrated
salmo salar,
princes of the Atlantic, had failed to appear as had been their wont for generations. They had arrived all right but in pitifully small numbers. There was intense speculation as to what calamity might have befallen the missing fish and there was widespread belief that full compensation might be expected early during the following spring because that was the way with nature. She was known to be bountiful in the wake of insufficiency.

Indeed there were whispers from the middle of December onwards that spring fish had been sighted in the estuary. Experienced drift-net fishermen, not given to fishy tales, would bear witness to the fact that the fulsome visitors were present in considerable strength in the wide expanse where the Bradawn joined the sea.

Doubting Thomases might insist that these were spent fish on their way downwards from the spawning beds but proof to the contrary had been incontrovertible. When a spring fish plopped back into the water after a jump from its natural domain it did so with a resounding smack followed by a noisy splash which could be heard for long distances. The spent fish, on the other hand, subsided in a minor eddy on his return from a despairing leap. The resultant sound was nearly always indistinguishable from the natural noises of the river.

There were other signs to indicate the presence of spring fish. The seal population had quadrupled in the estuary and its salty precincts and, emboldened by the prospect of a fresh salmon diet, had made unprecedented incursions beyond the tidal reaches of the Bradawn where the terrified salmon sought refuge in the shallows beneath gravel banks and overhanging foliage. Here, alas, were otters who would have no misgivings about sinking sharp teeth into the living, succulent flesh of the unwary refugees from the estuary.

Further on would be poachers armed with gaffs, illegal nets, clowns' caps, cages, triple-hooked stroke-hauls, poisons, explosives and many other deadly devices and ruses, all aimed at terminating prematurely the brief life of
salmo salar.

For most fish it was a one-way journey fraught with peril from beginning to end. Conservators would say that it was nothing short of a miracle that any salmon at all managed to spawn and that the species itself had survived for so long.

When word went abroad in the village of Ballybradawn that a number of spring salmon were showing in the river before their time there was great excitement among the poaching fraternity. From morn till night they would discuss ways and means of supplementing their Christmas fare with the delicious flesh of an illicitly taken salmon. Mouths watered all through their conversations as the many methods of cooking this prize product of the Bradawn River were recounted. Plans were made but none saw fruition because of the vigilance of the local water-keepers who patrolled the river day and night. All known poachers were trailed as they indulged in seemingly innocuous walks along the riverside. Towards the afternoon of Christmas Eve a man by the name of Ned Muddle chanced to be standing at one of the village's more prominent corners when he was approached by a friend who informed him about the premature arrivals. Ned expressed doubts about the veracity of his friend's information.

‘It's true!' that worthy assured him.

‘But how come?' Ned Muddle asked.

‘Some say seals,' said his informant, ‘while others maintain that it's merely an error of judgment on the part of the salmon.'

A lengthy silence ensued while Ned digested the theories put forward by his friend. Ned was greatly addicted to salmon and if presented with a plate of it would not question its origins or the way it was cooked or the manner in which it was served.

Salmon, alas, were expensive and when Ned fancied fish his longings, of necessity, would generally be catered for by either herring or mackerel. Ned Muddle moved to the other side of the corner. His friend followed suit. They rested their backs against the wall while the friend held forth about the numbers and quality of the salmon which had presented themselves before their time and pointed out too how early fish fetched phenomenal prices in the country's fish markets and even a solitary kill was an assurance of drinking money for days on end.

‘Yes. Yes,' Ned announced with some impatience, ‘but what's all this to me?'

‘What's it to you?' his friend expostulated incredulously.

‘Why man dear,' he went on in a more mollifying tone, ‘I would have thought it applied more to you than to any man.'

‘Why is that?' asked an increasingly puzzled Ned.

‘Don't you see?' said his friend, now facing him directly as he drove home his point, ‘you are a handyman, probably the best handyman in Ballybradawn and maybe, just maybe, the greatest handyman in the country.'

Ned frowned and then smiled as he wondered if he might indeed be such a handyman, might just about be the greatest handyman in the country, the world!

‘All right!' he conceded gruffly, only barely managing to conceal his pleasure, ‘so I'm a handyman but what's a handyman got to do with there being salmon in the river?'

‘Only a skilled handyman could make a wire cage to trap these salmon. Any ordinary handyman just couldn't do it. He would have to be the best. He would have made wire cages before this. He would have trapped salmon before this!'

‘Before he went to jail you mean,' Ned Muddle suggested with a wry laugh.

The villagers of Ballybradawn would remember, but not if they were asked, when Ned Muddle went to jail and for how long and why. It had happened ten years before. He had received a three-month sentence. He had been convicted of poaching or, to be more specific, of being found in possession of explosive substances on the river bank for the express purpose of blowing the souls, if any, of the river's inhabitants to Kingdom Come and their filleted bodies to the empty larders of Ned Muddle and his wanton fellow poachers.

There had been a fine-related option but neither Ned nor his henchmen were in a position to avail of it since they were not possessed of the requisite funds. Neither were their friends, neighbours or relations so that they had nowhere to turn except to their long-suffering in-laws who would be seen as the ultimate natural redress in such contingencies except, of course, by the in-laws themselves. The in-laws, alas for the convicted poachers, insisted that they had already pledged and paid far in excess of what might be reasonably expected of them. Ned and his accomplices served the full term.

The two friends moved away from the corner. They found themselves heading towards the cliffs which afforded a commanding view of the widest and deepest pool along the entire river. They stood with hands in pockets, their experienced eyes searching the still surface for tell-tale signs.

Minutes passed, then a quarter-hour but still they stood their ground. Then it happened! A gleaming salmon, unmistakably fresh, powered itself out of the pool's centre and disappeared, almost instantly, with a mighty splash which shattered the surface of the deep pool, dispensing wavelets and ripples to both banks.

The friends withdrew their hands from their pockets and exchanged knowing glances. Words would have been superfluous and since seasoned poachers are men of few words to begin with, they hastened back to their favourite corner without the exchange of as much as a solitary syllable on the way.

‘I have the makings of a cage in my back shed. 'Tis there, ready and waiting for a man of genius like yourself!'

Ned Muddle was flattered. He was not a well-loved person in the community. He was nasty to his wife and children. He was mean and he was dishonest so that words of praise rarely came his way.

In addition to being shifty, cowardly and unreliable, he had not been inside the door of the parish church, or any other church for fifteen years, since his wedding in fact, a sacrament in which he reluctantly participated and in which he might not have collaborated at all had it not been for the insistence of his in-laws-to-be who simply intimated that they would blow his brains out with a double-barrelled gun if he did not present himself at the church at the appointed time.

Despite entreaties from the parish priest and numerous curates as well as visiting missioners and pious lay people Ned Muddle steadfastly refused to conform. His neighbours would cheerfully forgive him all his other transgressions but they balked at the irreligious.

‘I'll do it,' Ned announced more to himself than to his friend whose name happened to be Fred. In less than two hours they assembled the cage. Fred stood back to survey the handiwork in which he had played no more than a token part.

‘'Tis a work of art,' he announced, ‘the village of Ballybradawn can be proud of you. Sure there's no self-respecting salmon would ignore it.'

Ned Muddle permitted himself a rare smile. Cage-making was his true metier. Even his arch-enemies the waterkeepers would concede without begrudgery that he was the best. Fred lifted the cage and bore it indoors to the bedroom which he shared with his wife. There he lovingly laid it on the large double bed which dominated the room. All that was now required was to wait until nightfall before setting out for the river where they would obstruct its flow and the passage of its denizens by constructing a low stone-built rampart from one bank to the other, leaving a gap in the middle where a strong but narrow current would attract the upgoing salmon. In this gap they would place the illegal cage which was designed to admit foolhardy fish but not to allow them egress. Large flat stones would be laid along its bottom to add weight to the structure. Otherwise, because of its lightweight composition, it would shift easily with the force of the concentrated flow.

Ned was a taciturn fellow of few words at the best of times unless, of course, he was berating his wife and family. His friend Fred, fortunately for their enterprise, eschewed conversation too except when it was absolutely necessary. Fred's wife, alas, was the opposite, a most congenial creature who, if afforded the opportunity, would spend hours at a time conversing with friends and neighbours and, when neither was available, with total strangers willing to pass the time of day. She was a woman without malice and even Fred, who rarely paid heed to her harmless narratives, would be the first to concede that his wife was incapable of misrepresentation or character assassination.

As was her wont every evening after supper, she made her way to the parish church where others like her and a small number of elderly males attended evening devotions. On the way home the good woman could not resist the waylaying of a neighbour to whom she secretly conveyed all the details of her husband's forthcoming expedition with his friend Ned Muddle.

‘I know,' Fred's wife entreated her companion, ‘that you won't breathe a word to a living soul.'

‘Did I ever!' came the sincere response while she hurried off as quickly as her legs would take her in order to disclose the news of the planned undertaking to every Tom, Dick and Harry who would listen. Most took little notice for the good reason that previous disclosures by this particular informant had always turned out to be fabrications. Others, however, notably the wives and sweethearts of the village's established poachers, listened well and informed their menfolk. The menfolk bided their time.

No man bides his time as well as a poacher. This is because poachers, due to the secrecy imposed by their calling, are professional time-biders but how exactly do they bide it, one might well ask! The answer is by not seeming to bide it but by committing themselves wholeheartedly to a diversion far removed from poaching such as card-playing or dart-throwing or, in the case of younger, unmarried members of this close-knit fraternity, to the unremitting pursuit of unattached females.

As the evening dragged itself out Ned and Fred passed the time spying on the village resident water-keepers. There were but two. Others from outlying villages would be summoned whenever the district inspector felt it was necessary to do so. The water-keepers lived close together. The friends maintained their vigil and expressed no surprise when one keeper visited the house of the other with his wife a half-hour before midnight. Ten minutes later the four emerged together and made their way towards the parish church where the celebration of midnight mass would begin on the stroke of midnight and where, God willing, the hearts of men and women would expand with the goodness, the charity and the forgiveness that only Christmas can generate.

As soon as they had seen the water-keepers and their wives safely into the brightly lit bosom of the church Fred and Ned made haste to the bedroom of the latter's house where they collected the cage. Fred led the way. Ned followed with the cage. They avoided the village's main street and its attendant laneways. Occasionally as they passed isolated homes a dog would bark and as they neared the river a homebound drunkard shouted a minor obscenity as a prelude to extending the season's greetings. These they returned and continued cautiously along their way. After a mere five minutes they found themselves on the bank of the river less than two hundred yards from the village. They were somewhat apprehensive after the setting of the trap since they observed from the river bank that the light from the nearest street lamps brightened the area where they had placed it. Then, unexpectedly, from the south-west there arrived upon the scene overhead a sizable cloud which obscured the moon and brought welcome darkness to the immediate scene. It would be followed by other clouds for the remainder of their stay so that, all in all, it would be a night of intermittent light, the kind of light beloved by poachers and others whose business runs contrary to the laws of the land.