Fishing the Sloe-Black River

The women fished for their sons in the sloe-black river that ran through the small Westmeath town, while the fathers played football without their sons, in a field half a mile away. Low shouts drifted like lazy swallows over the river, interrupting the silence of the women. They were casting with ferocious hope, twenty-six of them in unison, in a straight line along the muddy side of the low-slung river wall, whipping the rods back over their shoulders. They had pieces of fresh bread mashed onto hooks so that when they cast their lines, the bread volleyed out over the river and hung for a moment, making curious contours in the air — cartwheels and tumbles and plunges. The bread landed with a soft splash on the water, and the ripples met each other gently.

The aurora borealis was beginning to finger the sky with light the color of skin, wine bottles, and the amber of the town’s football jerseys. Drowsy clouds drifted, catching the colors from the north. A collie dog slept in the doorway of the only pub. The main street tumbled with litter.

The women along the wall stood yards apart, giving each other room so their lines wouldn’t tangle. Mrs. Conheeny wore a headscarf patterned with Corgi dogs, the little animals yelping at the side of her ashy hair. She had tiny dollops of dough still stuck under her fingernails. There were splashes of mud on her Wellingtons. She bent her back into the familiar work of reeling in the empty line. Each time she cast, she curled her upper lip, scrunching up the crevices around her cheeks. She was wondering how Father Marsh, the old priest for whom she did housekeeping, was doing as goalkeeper. The joke around town was that he was only good for saving souls. As she spun a little line out from the reel she worried that her husband, at right-halfback, might be feeling the ache in his knee from ligaments torn long ago.

Leaning up against the river wall, tall and bosom-burdened, she sighed and whisked her fishing rod through the air.

Beside her Mrs. Harrington, the artist’s wife, was a salmon leap of energy, thrashing the line back and forth as deftly as a fly-fisherwoman, ripping crusts from her own loaves, impaling them on the big gray hook and spinning them out over the water’s blackness, frantically tapping her feet up and down on the muddy bank. Mrs. Harrington’s husband had been shoved in at left full-forward in the hope that he might poke a stray shot away in a goalmouth frenzy. But by all accounts — or so Mr. Conheeny said — the watercolor man wasn’t worth a barman’s fart on the football field. Then again, they all laughed, at least he was a warm body. He could fill a position against the other teams in the county, all of whom still managed to gallop, here and there, with young bones.

Mrs. Conheeny scratched at her forehead. Not a bite, not a bit, not a brat around, she thought as she reeled in her line and watched a blue chocolate wrapper get caught in a gust of wind, then float down onto the water.

The collie left the door of the pub, ambling down along the main street, past the row of townhouses, nosing in the litter outside the newsagents. Heavy roars keened through the air as the evening stole shapes. Each time the women heard the whistle blow, they raised their heads in the hope that the match was finished so they could unsnap the rods and bend toward home with their picnic baskets.

Mrs. Conheeny watched Mrs. Hynes across the river, her face plastered with makeup, tentatively clawing at a reel. Mrs. King was there with her graphite rod. Mrs. McDaid had come up with the idea of putting currants in her bread. Mrs. O’Shaughnessy was whipping away with a long slender piece of bamboo — did she think she was fishing in the Mississippi? Mrs. Bergen, her face scrunched in pain from the arthritis, was hoping her fingers might move a little better, like they used to on the antique accordion. Mrs. Kelly was sipping from her little silver flask of the finest Jameson’s. Mrs. Hogan was casting with firefly flicks of the wrist. Mrs. Docherty was hauling in her line, as if gathering folds in her dress. And Mrs. Hennessy was gently peeling the crust from a slice of Brennan’s.

Farther down along the pebbledashed wall, Mrs. McCarton was gently humming a bit of a song. Flow on lovely river flow gently along, by your waters so clear sounds the lark’s merry song. Her husband captained the team, a barrel of a man who, when he was young, consistently scored a hat trick. But the team hadn’t won a game in two years, ever since the children had begun their drift.

They waited, the women, and they cast, all of them together.

When the long whistle finally cut through the air and the colors took on forms that flung themselves against the northern sky, the women slowly unsnapped their rods and placed the hooks in the lowest eyes. They looked at each other and nodded sadly. Another useless day fishing. Opening picnic baskets and lunch boxes, they put the bread away and waited for the line of Ford Cortinas and Vauxhalls and Opel Kaddets and Mr. Hogan’s blue tractor to trundle down and pick them up.

Their husbands arrived with their amber jerseys splattered with mud, their faces long in another defeat, cursing under taggles of pipes, their old bones creaking at the joints.

Mrs. Conheeny readjusted her scarf and watched for her husband’s car. She saw him lean over and ritually open the door even before he stopped. She ducked her head to get in, put the rod and basket in the backseat. She waved to the women who were still waiting, then took off her headscarf.

“Any luck, love?” he asked.

She shook her head: “I didn’t even get a bite.”

She looked out to the sloe-black river as they drove off, then sighed. One day she would tell him how useless it all was, this fishing for sons, when the river looked not a bit like the Thames or the Darling or the Hudson or the Loire or even the Rhine itself, where their own three sons were working in a car factory. He slapped his hands on the steering wheel and said with a sad laugh: “Well, fuck it anyway, we really need some new blood in midfield,” although she knew that he too would go fishing that night, silently slipping out, down to the river, to cast in vain.