Laid out in his sick bed, while the Atlantic winds howled from the northwest, Jonathan Adams read of the beginning of the great rivers of Ireland from a schoolbook propped on his chest. Knocking sounds came from all sides. The house shook underwater. He got so bad that a doctor was sent for. None from the locality could be found. Then Nurse Noone appeared with a Doctor Ferris who was visiting relations on the peninsula. When he sat down by the bed the stench of whiskey overwhelmed Jonathan Adams.

“Dear God,” he said.

The doctor lifted the old policeman’s hand and checked his pulse. “Dreadful weather,” he said. He dropped the thin wrist and opened his bag. “We better increase the dose,” he said. He handed the small bottles of morphine to the nurse. He leaned over the dying man and looked into his eyes.

“I wish you luck,” he said.

“Maisie,” called Jonathan Adams. “Is he gone?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t move so fast around the room,” he told the girls.

Up till the last he attended to his own toilet, even after the nurse tried getting him to pee into a steel bedpan. He’d slide out of bed, feel his way along the iron railing, the armchair, the bannisters. “Yes, yes,” he’d say through the closed door of the new bathroom to Nurse Noone. Then he’d stand a moment on the stairs like a sleepwalker. Enter the room and bow his head while the nurse, chatting the whole time, tidied his bed. With great distress he heard the bag, that had been attached to his stomach after the operation in Enniskillen, make loud farting noises. He closed his eyes in embarrassment. As he grew sicker, his skin took on a deep tan as if he had been abroad on holiday, and the whites of his eyes grew remarkably white. Red weals, like a whiskey drinker’s, appeared on his cheeks. He lifted the schoolbook again, but since the doctor increased the morphine, he found he was unable to read. So Nurse Eitne Noone read to him, and after her, Sara, Catherine, and then Maisie.

There were many variants of the Salmon of Knowledge, Jonathan Adams found, as he began to search for the definitive version among the prose poems.

Some told of the beginning of great rivers. Of waters breaking down from the side of a mountain to make a sea. Others, of the reaching of enlightenment. Just as the halibut has the thumb mark of Christ upon it, so the salmon, he heard, bears the print of some long forgotten pagan who invested there under its fin a knowledge that concerns itself with the duality of things, the eternal going away and the eternal return.

The salmon carries this knowledge to and fro through the great seas of the world, and it can be released by the merest touch.

All knowledge, says the salmon, is a journey.