Pat the Boat, a story in an odd shape by Walter Macken (30 12 15)

.

Called by the sound of the chapel bell,

swelling white clouds in the blue sky ---

The priest said: Come to the funeral:

Let you make the three steps of sorrow

For the dear dead.

.

And who is dead that I know, I ask,

the mourners are as sparse as

blossoms after frost in June?

All the more reason, he said,

to follow the few.

.

For Pat the Boat is dead, he sighed,

outliving memory with age,

forging forgetting by men

with ten long years in a crippled bed.

Who will recall him?

.

Walking slowly in the warm spring sun,

I see him advancing from time gone,

coming from the river of the boats

disturbing the stones with a lame foot,

Oh, well I recall him.

.

I do, I said. I see him in Camp Street

wearing a home-made canvas satchel,

false flies in a weather-worn hat,

sunburned face and Ghengis Khan moustache --

And is he dead?

.

He lived too long past useful life,

the priest said ; for ten years gone

and half the world of fishing men

would mourn him ; now so few – with you

a simple baker’s dozen.

.

I could hear him now, saw-rusted voice,

Boat riding the drift of the waves,

fingers tying a colourful fly,

wind whipping the brim of his hat,

the leaping trout on the hook.

.

He never roamed and yet he knew --

the rivers of India, the high lochs of Scotland,

the steamy jungles of South America,

the flies that lured the fish of Europe,

all these he knew,

.

For men came from many lands to fish

the glinting lake of the hundred isles,

and in their wisdom like all the clan

they asked and cried for the better man,

none more than Pat the Boat.

.

Every rock and every shallow

spring summer and heavy autumn,

he knew the ways of the fish

like he knew the lines in his own hand,

who will replace him?

.

He is gone and he is forgotten,

here in a hole on the hill.

Lift up your head and you will see the great lake

lying supine under the sun,

deceptively calm and still.

.

The prayer of the priest is loud in the air;

the coffin booms from the fall of clay;

a destroyed chapel lies under the clutch of ivy,

the yellow soil cascades impatiently on the wood

and my eyes are sad.

.

Forgotten so soon? Buried by a dozen,

a life of knowledge, of the movement of water,

spring floods and west winds

and great fish doomed to the rod --

Was this useless knowledge?

.

To know the ways of the wild geese,

the duck and the cormorant,

the great brown trout and the silver salmon

the pike and the perch and the flat bream --

was this waste then?

.

Not to have killed in war or wounded in anger,

to have loved outside the marriage ring,

to have swayed a nation from a wooden platform,

to have clutched a wounded breast to freedom’s call --

He did none of this.

.

He knew the clouds and the sun and the stars,

the movement of wood over deep waters,

the frozen fingers on the triple hooks,

the ring of the bell on the end of a pole,

the fear of the Maam gale ;

.

The joy and regret at the death of a fighting fish,

the hot tea from a wood-boiled kettle,

the black midge and the dancing Mayfly,

the green grasshopper and the long legged Daddy,

all these he knew.

.

He shared the sight of the sunrise with God

alone in a frail punt on a March morning.

He watched the red sun embracing the mountains

when with tired muscles he rowed home ---

a trace in the evening.

.

He did nothing, they will say, and he left nothing.

But nobody knows the secrets he learned

from the vault of the sky or the cry of a tern --

but now he will know and confirm it all

on the other side of the tapestry.

.

So sleep, Pat the Boat, in the limestone soil,

or watch the great lake you knew with wonder,

you are never alone for it will talk to you

when the wind blows from the northwest

or the east or the south.

.

Who knows the ways of men, the priest said.

Kings have keeners by thousands but who loves them?

Monuments are built for the great and decay,

Some where a fisherman will talk of Pat the Boat,

and he too will die.

.

There are bones of men in the old chapel, I say

They never thought to be forgotten.

Certain fish in the lake will say; we are

because Pat the Boat no longer is --

Let that be his monument.

.

Amen, said the priest, with a smile.

The old gate squealed as it closed ---

it was as old as the yew tree,

but both

have a longer span, than man.