Driving with Daisy by Tom Nestor

Author:Tom Nestor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: GemmaMedia
Published: 2009-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

I always stopped on the bridge over the Deel. It is one of Limerick’s main rivers. It rises in the mountain foothills to the west and winds its way through fertile lands until it merges with the sea. I had the idea that one day I would search for the source of the Deel. I never found it because when I started to fish, the thought went out of my head. But I would get to know every turn, swirl and eddy between Rath and miles downstream, far below the weir at New Bridge.

A year or two before, I had found a fishhook stuck in the lapel of my father’s jacket. I took the fishhook, cut and peeled a hazel pole and hooked a worm to a length of black thread. That simple action killed my interest in horses and the fox-hunt. We became like friends, the Deel and I, wanting each other’s company. The river spoke to me in song. It read to me from the book of its landscape, telling me the secrets of its journey. I was never much of a fisherman either, because the whispers and the secrets distracted me.

On summer evenings, when the sun went down, a group of us used to make for the Deel. It was said that there was a depth of ten feet in the middle of Dore’s Hole. It was as black, as my father would say, as the hobs of hell. When I rounded the bend, saw the evil looking sheen on the water surface and heard the sucking sound as the flow swirled under the banks, it filled me with fear. None of us could swim. We groped around the black hole, lying on sheaves of rushes, arms and legs pumping like a threshing machine. The noise of our pleasure brought more and more youngsters to swell the group.

Then three young women arrived one evening. They stood gaping at us from the bank. The women were older than us, louder and more sure of themselves. They demanded equal rights to the black pool. When we refused and dared them to do something about it, they went behind the bushes and came out in bathing costumes. It was the closest we had come to young female nudity. It stopped us in our tracks. One moment we were full of innocent bravado. The next we were struck dumb with our mouths open in shock.

The women slid down the bank. Their bathing costumes were pulled out of line. Dark hidden places were revealed. Our eyes had rested on forbidden fruits and the crime of looking, as our priest would later say, was a terrible sin. Then we remembered that we were stark naked beneath the black water. Nothing separated us from the gaze of these young women except a sheaf of rushes. This must have been the way that Adam felt in the Garden of Eden. We pulled our grass skirts around us and went home in silence. A few confessed to the priest and the blame fell on all of us.

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