Billy Elliott drops his line into the lough and waits. It is quiet this October afternoon and the light is quickly fading. Twenty feet farther along the shore, his cousin George is paying in his line. Both keep their swords and pistols close at hand.
Last month brought storms that no one living can remember. The fair was cancelled and whatever crops had not been taken in were lost. But it rained. The thick soil about Lough Erne soaked up the moisture and there was hope for the Terny-begs, like the Elliotts, who still have seed and silver left to last into next year.
This year they have lived in and through a wilderness as did the Saviour – though he only endured it for only forty days and forty nights. The old folk say that seasons have been clement since the victories of King William almost half a century ago. Billy’s grandfather fought in those battles so he should remember. But no one remembers such harsh seasons as those endured for the last two years.
It began with a great frost which seemed, at first, an amusing novelty. The Erne froze: first the loughs and then the river. Hail and snow dinged down.
But the freeze persisted longer than the sense of novelty. The cold sank deep into the soil, shrivelling the planted seed. A dry Easterly blasted the fields after the frost lifted. Their crops were stunted. Tatties rotted in the ground. The oats bore no grains. The stalks were short. The pike and carp in the lough sank deep beneath the ice and waited. There was no fodder for the horses and cattle through the next cold winter which, though less brutal than the last, was still more hungry and grinding.
The Irish suffered most.
By Autumn, many had stumbled onto the roads to beg, famished and shivering in scant rags. They had no coin for meal, fodder or rent as prices doubled and almost doubled again. What little remained in the Elliott’s barns was theirs to keep, his father said.. Kin helped kin and neighbours helped neighbours and what surplus silver there was was reserved to keep good Protestant families fed while the Irish starved, circling like wolves through the bleak Spring and Summer.
The Elliotts and their kin kept their pistols close and their muskets loaded. His great-grandfather and his kin brought their steel-bonnets, pikes and swords, their jacks and pistols across from Liddesdale; it was part of the deal. They rented ground on land confiscated from the Maguires. They were not freeholders – simply poor tenants valued for their arms. Most of the Irish were driven west into Connaught. At that time there was not a Papist in the townlands. The Hamiltons, Coles, Archdalls and Balfours intended to keep it that way.
A trout rises and turns on the still surface of the lough.
The precaution of those early Undertakers was not without cause. One hundred years ago, on 23rd of this month, treacherous Papists under Captain Rory Maguire rose up and turned upon their Scots and English neighbours. These were Irish who had crept back into the county, tame Irish by all accounts. The Irish Confederates butchered women and children in their hundreds at Monea and Tully, Irvinestown and Lisnaskea. Those left alive they stripped naked and turned out onto the ferns to perish in their privation. Castles were razed and pillaged. Houses burned to the ground with the Scots and English folk locked inside.
The Elliotts eventually sought refuge in Inniskillen where, with the support of less ‘experienced’ English settlers, they withstood the rebel’s siege. No one forgets here. It does not do to forget. His grandfather, father and uncles have always made this clear.
Billy’s line trembles. Something there?
A century on, it is the Irish who shiver naked and starving among the ferns. Is this the Lord’s justice deferred? A minding of the righteousness of good, reformed Protestants?
Around the lough, most of the Papist small holdings stand bereft, their occupants starved to death or taken by disease. The more nimble or less obstinate have taken to the roads seeking passage elsewhere.
So where will his father find sub-tenants and labourers? The old man doesn’t seem perplexed. Whatever loyalty he might have felt to well-kent Irish tenants seems erased by their demise. Parcels of land can be consolidated and rented to the highest bidder, ideally new comers from the mainland. There are willing Protestants hungry for new opportunities. Not all of them are Presbyterian. Though the Elliotts cleave to the Established Church, his father has no problem with Dissenters so long as they are willing and can pay.
Something down there is nibbling at the bait. Billy feels the line tremble against his finger tip. It is a matter of timing. The clouds are piling up over Slabby Mountain. He strikes.
The line jerks and then that tell-tale twitch. Not a big fish but hooked. Billy waits a moment to be sure before beginning to draw in his line.
“Good man!” George shouts.
And then the line goes slack.
Then taut again but tighter than expected, the tow cinching tight about Billy’s hand. His hand is paralysed by the loop of tightening fibres. The rod pulls him towards the bank.
“Geordie!”
The rod end twists and bucks. Something huge is out there. Huge and powerful and sleekit.
Geordie is beside him on the bank.
“Good Lord!”
“I’ll lose these fingers if ye dinna cut the line, man.”
“Tae hell wi that!” Instead, Geordie gets between Billy and the bank and, seizing hold, relaxes the tension on the line around Billy’s hand. As Billy frees himself, his fingers burning, they begin to haul. The creature hauls back. The two men haul again. The creature hauls back.
“An eel?”
“Nae this big.”
They haul and are hauled and, in time, the heavy-set young men, working in unison, seem to prevail. The surface stirs then explodes in a furious splashing. The green and brindle tiger stripes of a huge pike roil on the surface.
“Thought so,” Geordie says.
“Did ye now?” They haul the fish a little closer to the bank.
“Damn this,” Billy says. “Can ye haud him?”
As Geordie nods, Billy unsheathes his broadsword and wades thigh deep into the lough. He approaches the struggling fish aslant. Both of Geordie’s hands grip the line. The fish’s rippled flank twists above the surface and Billy strikes. The point pierces the fish through but still it twists and wraxes on the blade. Billy slips backwards. The pike’s wide grimace of sharp teeth drip with water. Billy’s wrist is sprained. He struggles to hold onto the wet hilt of his sword. Geordie is wading in now, pistol in hand.
“Geordie. What if ye miss?”
But Geordie takes the flint-lock by the muzzle and brings the butt end down on the pike’s broad skull, once, twice. Gingerly, he takes the back edge of Billy’s blade in hand and together they drag the beast onto the bank, the pike still twisting and flailing though weakening with every movement.
They are soaked through. Wet as the fish which they leave to expire as they lie back and laugh and laugh at the truth of it all.
“Lord, grant that I may always be right, for thou knowest I am hard to turn,” his father would say.
Billy smiles to himself. There is truth in the old prayer. And just as well.