The Collected Stories by John McGahern

thousand hooks, but we used more. We were the last to fish this freshwater for a living.
    As the eels came in over the side I cut them loose with a knife into a wire cage, where they slid over each other in their own oil, the twisted eel hook in their mouths. The other fish – pike choked on hooked perch they’d tried to swallow, bream, roach – I slid up the floorboards towards the bow of the boat. We’d sell them in the village or give them away. The hooks that hadn’t been taken I cleaned and stuck in rows round the side of the wooden box. I let the line fall in its centre. After a mile he took my place in the stern and I rowed. People hadn’t woken yet, and the early morning cold and mist were on the river. Outside of the slow ripple of the oars and the threshing of the fish on the line beaded with running drops of water as it came in, the river was dead silent, except for the occasional lowing of cattle on the banks.
    ‘Have you any idea what you’ll do after this summer?’ he asked.
    ‘No. I’ll wait and see what comes up,’ I answered.
    ‘How do you mean
what comes up
?’
    ‘Whatever result I get in the exam. If the result is good, I’ll have choices. If it’s not, there won’t be choices. I’ll have to take what I can get.’
    ‘How good do you think they’ll be?’
    ‘I think they’ll be all right, but there’s no use counting chickens, is there?’
    ‘No,’ he said, but there was something calculating in the face; it made me watchful of him as I rowed the last stretch of the line. The day had come, the distant noises of the farms and the first flies on the river, by the time we’d lifted the large wire cage out of the bulrushes, emptied in the morning’s catch of eels, and sunk it again.
    ‘We’ll have enough for a consignment tomorrow,’ he said.
    Each week we sent the live eels to Billingsgate in London.
    ‘But say, say even if you do well, you wouldn’t think of throwing this country up altogether and going to America?’ he said, the words fumbled for as I pushed the boat out of the bulrushes after sinking the cage of eels, using the oar as a pole, the mud rising a dirty yellow between the stems.
    ‘Why America?’
    ‘Well, it’s the land of opportunity, isn’t it, a big, expanding country? There’s no room for ambition in this poky place. All there’s room for is to make holes in pints of porter.’
    I was wary of the big words. They were not in his own voice.
    ‘Who’d pay the fare?’
    ‘We’d manage that. We’d scrape it together somehow.’
    ‘Why should you scrape for me to go to America if I can get a job here?’
    ‘I feel I’d be giving you a chance I never got. I fought for this country. And now they want to take away even the licence to fish. Will you think about it anyhow?’
    ‘I’ll think about it,’ I answered.
    Through the day he trimmed the brows of ridges in the potato field while I replaced hooks on the line and dug worms, pain of doing things for the last time as well as the boredom the knowledge brings that soon there’ll be no need to do them, that they could be discarded almost now. The guilt of leaving came: I was discarding his life to assume my own, a man to row the boat would eat into the decreasing profits of the fishing, and it was even not certain he’d get renewal of his licence. The tourist board had opposed the last application. They said we impoverished the coarse fishing for tourists – the tourists who came every summer from Liverpool and Birmingham in increasing numbers to sit in aluminium deck-chairson the riverbank and fish with rods. The fields we had would be a bare living without the fishing.
    I saw him stretch across the wall in conversation with the cattle-dealer Farrell as I came round to put the worms where we stored them in clay in the darkness of the lavatory. Farrell leaned on the bar of his bicycle on the road. I passed into the lavatory thinking they were talking about the price of cattle, but as I emptied the