Songdogs

by Colum McCann

  My father had rescued an old chaise with three legs. When the women reclined on it, their hair swooped towards the floor. Manley, giving politics a rest, let a licentious tongue hang out as he peeped in through the barn slats. They weren’t lurid, the photos. They had a stodginess to them, as if the old man forced his hand too hard – unlike the ones he took of Mam years afterwards, fluid and sensual. Most of the women never saw their photos. But decades later, when he was somewhat notorious, he had them printed at a press in France. The book caused a minor uproar in town, giving one of the local councillors a mild heart attack when he saw a portrait of his aunt with her left nipple visible under a thin linen blouse.

  * * *

  The swifts moved with a disregard for space, some of them darting up for insects on the air, others swerving down towards the sea, or simply moving back and forth, whipping the evening sky. He looked up at them, as if envious, as if he might burst his way upwards himself, join them in a mockery of flight. They were bellyfull with insects as he rose stiffly out of the lawn chair, grabbed his fishing rod, put the flyhook in the lowest eye, and walked away from the river, through the muddy soil up towards our house.

  He used the bottom end of the rod as a stick as he lurched, his dark overcoat open and hanging, cigarette smoke churning from his mouth, a blue bucket in his right hand. At the doorstep he leaned his rod against the wisteria, and slowly kicked off one of his boots. A stockinged foot trembled with cold on the concrete. He coughed into his fist and let some spit out into the hole at the bottom end of the drainpipe, bent down, stubbed his cigarette in a puddle, swiped at some midges in the air.

  I lifted my backpack, stepped out from behind the hedge, and walked across the yard. Cocking his head sideways like a curious animal, he closed his right eye, fumbled in his coat for his glasses.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he muttered, ‘if it isn’t yourself.’

  I held out my hand and he leaned his shoulder against me, smelling of earth and tobacco and bait. He moved to place his foot against the bottom of the door and shoved it open, coughed, threw his coat on the rack.

  ‘Christ, that’s some fucken monster you’ve got there,’ he said.

  I placed the backpack against the kitchen table as he walked towards the fireplace.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ he said, his back to me, fumbling in the fire pail, ‘would ya look at the cut of ya.’

  ‘You’re looking well yourself.’

  ‘Cut your hair.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Lost the earring as well,’ he said.

  ‘Ah yeah, got rid of that a long time ago.’

  ‘You’re home for a while?’

  ‘I am.’ I picked up a spoon from the table, twirled it in my fingers. ‘For a week. Is that all right?’

  ‘If ya can tolerate an old man.’

  ‘If you can tolerate me.’

  ‘On holidays?’ he asked.

  ‘Sort of, yeah. Back to pick up the green card. Have to go up to the embassy in Dublin one of these days.’

  ‘Thought you were in London?’ he said.

  ‘Well, I was, yeah. I’m in the States now.’

  ‘I see. What ya doin’ there?’

  ‘Bits and pieces. Nothing much.’

  He scratched at his head and let out a bit of a belch: ‘Nothing much happening here these days, either.’

  ‘Looks the same, except for the river.’

  The fluorescent kitchen light fizzled. ‘I’m fishing every day.’

  ‘Every day?’

  ‘On the quest for a giant pink salmon down beyond the bend. I’d swear the fucken thing’s taunting me. Up it rears every now and then and looks like it’s waving.’ He stretched out his arms. ‘This bloody big.’

  ‘A salmon?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘In the river?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The water.’

  ‘Oh, they put in a few more gates by the meat factory.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t know. For cleaning the carcasses or something.’

  ‘It looks slow.’

  ‘But chock-full with that big one.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’m telling ya, this bloody big.’

  He stretched out his arms again, a three-foot expanse between liver spots. But I was sure that the only thing more than three feet long in that river was the rod that he threw in, in a fit of anger, one time long ago. I had come home from secondary school wearing a gold hoop in my ear, and he flung the rod by the cork handle all the way to the footbridge and told me that if I didn’t take the piece of shite out of my ear he’d give me what-for and no doubt about it. Which he never did, and never would.

  ‘No kidding,’ he said to me, ‘ya should see it.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘By the bend, I told ya.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. Running around like a fart in a bottle.’

  I laughed as he bent down, rubbing his knee.

  ‘An absolute bloody giant,’ he said.

  But giant salmon or not, it looked to me that he shouldn’t be going down to the river too much anymore. Might catch himself a bad cold. Or tumble in. Get blown away in the breeze. With his shirt open to the third button he turned around from the fireplace. His chest was a xylophone of bones sticking out against his skin. His face and arms still held some tan, but the vale at his throat was lost to whiteness and the remaining chest hairs curled, acolytes of grey. His neck was a sack of sag and his trousers were huge on him. Not too healthy for him to be out in the cold, although it would be lovely if I could see him cast in the way he used to – even when I detested him there were times I was astounded just to watch him cast. Back when the river was alive, those flicks of the wrist like so many fireflies on the bank, the hooks glinting in the lapel of his overcoat, that huge sadness of his disappearing as the rod whipped away, him counting under his breath, one-two-three-here-we-go, lassoing it to the wind, brisk upward motion of the tip of the glass rod, sometimes drying off the flies by false casting, finally watching them curl out over the water and plonk, reeling the surface into soft circles, stamping his feet on the bank, spitting out over the water, all sorts of hidden violence in the motion.

  He coughed again, fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief, pulled it out, and some coins fell to the floor. I stooped down to get them. I stood there looking at the new tenpenny coins.

  ‘When did they change the coins?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, a year or so ago.’

  ‘I see.’ I looked at the harp. It was finely etched.

  ‘It’s nice to have ya back, Conor,’ he said finally.

  His lip quivered as he moved towards the fireplace with the poker, knelt down, prodded softly. A few large chunks fell out on to the cement slab and he mashed them down with his thumb, licked at it to soothe the burn, spat a few pieces of ash from the end of his tongue. He struggled to get up from his knees and I put my arm under his right shoulder.

  ‘Right,’ he said with a sudden whiparound. ‘I’m not a bloody invalid, ya know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So I can get up on my own.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘Without a lick of help.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’

  He placed his hand on the concrete and raised himself, using the mantelpiece as a fulcrum. One of Mam’s pictures – she is standing by a fencepost in Mexico – was still leaning against the mantel. He didn’t look at it. Just stood up, wheezing, straightened himself in the air and yawned, made a helicopter of his arms as if to expand the universe of himself.

  ‘Ya see?’ he said. ‘Fit as a bloody fiddle.’

  He ambled his way into the kitchen and came out with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses, one of which chipped when his trembling hand cracked the bottle against the rim. Poured himself a big glass, handed me the bottle. ‘Take it from the neck,’ he said to me
, ‘all the other glasses are dirty.’ I think it’s the first time in my life that the old man has seen me drinking – although when I was younger and Mam was gone, he would tell me his stories, and afterwards I would steal pound notes from his pockets. I would go downtown to buy flagons of hard cider, then return along the riverbank to clear the names of the two Protestant ladies underneath their explosion of cerise wildflowers.

  * * *

  He was almost twenty-one when he stood in a Fascist camp and watched great white loaves of bread showering down on Madrid, the strangest rain the city had ever seen. The bread zipped through the winter air, over the clifftops of the Manzanares River, parachutes of it moving like snow, bombarding the city. It fell on the streets, a miracle of propaganda, beautifully arced from hidden airplanes by pilots who played at being a 1939 Jesus in the clouds.

  Reports came back to the Fascist front that the bread had descended from such a height that windows had been broken in the Royal Palace. Craters had been made in the snow. Birds and starving men were in an uproar upon it. Slates had been knocked off the roofs of houses. Books, used as sandbags, had been shaken from windowsills. Little boys in the city had stopped collecting shrapnel and were being won over by the bread. A Communist had been squashed to death by a flying bale. A priest on the Fascist front was heartened by the news of this angelic death – if only they could shower Madrid with holy wine they could have a mass for all the godless dying. Bread, said the priest, was even better than bombs.

  But within a few days the bombs started again. Fires raged in Madrid. The joke was that the Communists could make toast.

  My father stood in the camp, a holy medal at his throat, and watched as the bread and bombs zipped in towards his friend Manley, who was in the city somewhere. He envisioned Manley tracing the pattern of the strange parcels with a Lewis gun held at his shoulder, blowing a bale of loaves to bits, crumbs of it floating down around him. Maybe Manley would hallucinate and think it was a flock of birds, with the trajectory of doves. Or maybe he would be given a loaf by a novia who loved him. Or maybe Manley was dead – it was the end of the war and there weren’t many Communists left.

  The siege of Madrid wore its way through winter, and my father watched it through the eye of a camera, knocking frost off the soles of his boots, flecks of snow melting into the uniform of Franco.

  Manley had left Ireland long before my old man. The vulgar suits were left hanging in a cupboard and, drunk on Marx, he had sauntered away, leaving my father alone in the town. There was a narcosis to Manley’s going, but it was two years before my father followed. He left on his twentieth birthday, no politics in the leaving, simply bored. He sold the house, paid the grave of the Protestant ladies a final visit, gave Loyola to a young boy in town. He pinned most of his inheritance into the rear waistband of his trousers. A few strange stares followed his going – the dickybird camera had become something of a fixture around the town, and perhaps people would miss it. He packed a rucksack and moved out, brutal with innocence. Two new Leica cameras strung across his breast. A huge skip in his stride. He didn’t stop to get blessed by the priest who hailed the virtues of Francisco Franco and General O’Duffy.

  The old man hitch-hiked and walked his way through storms along the seaboard towards Cork. A wiry unshaven man in a brown hat, wandering through fields, splashes of blood-red poppies like a premonition in the ground, his last look at Ireland for almost three decades.

  The only ship going out was full of Irish Fascists in blue shirts. Songs were summoned up about good ways to die in vineyards. Beards grew thick as the waves knocked the boat around off the coast of France. They landed in a blue and delicate Spanish bay, where a melancholy guitar was drowned out by the shouts of the men. They punched the air and grabbed at their crotches as girls at windowsills blew them kisses. But the songs were muted when one of the soldiers was kissed by a teenager, a Communist sympathiser, who bit his tongue out and spat it in his face. The girl was shot to death, running away through a field of hay, a silence descending on the regiment as they stared. By the roadside a priest incanted prayers and doled out holy water to the soldiers. They moved on, the stub of a tongue flickering uselessly in one man’s mouth. Suddenly there were olive trees, bloated bodies, lemon groves, butifarra sausage, stretchers, mangled faces. My father sent photos of severed limbs and discarded bullet shells to newspaper editors. They chucked most of them in the bin, but every now and then one was found tucked in the bottom corners of an English newspaper, beside the colourful reports of some daring young journalists. The photos were dark and brooding – a chaplain in a field, stepping over the dead, a woman picking shrapnel from her thigh as if bored by the enormity of her wound, an obese surgeon smoking over a stretcher, the sucked-in bones of a village after an aerial bombardment.

  The old man bribed ambulance drivers to let him take his shots, bellowed in cafés, slept in the open under stunted trees, made his way towards Madrid where Manley and other Republicans were being besieged. He had no politics, my father, he was only a photographer, shooting visions, but he placed the holy medal at his neck for safety. On one of the Leicas he pasted a portrait of Franco. He didn’t care about the man – it was just a convenient blur to him, a safe passport, a foxhole. Nor did he care for Manley’s hero, Stalin. He might have looked vaguely comic out there, riding along on the backs of vans, handkerchief tied on his head, four-knot style, under the hat, men with guns in a circle around him. His rucksack, with two Foxford blankets tied on the bottom, was his only link to home.

  He wore a pair of big black boots that he had taken off the feet of a dead Welsh Republican. The body was found, fragrant with death, in a clump of bushes. There was a letter in the inside pocket of the man’s uniform, telling his mother, back on the banks of the Teifi River, how much he missed her cooking. ‘Mum, that stuff would…’ and the letter finished there. The old man undid the laces, pulled the boots off – he needed new ones, his own had begun to flap. Some newspaper was stuffed into the toes, and he wrote a note to the family, saying that one day he’d return them. On the bottom of one sole was a carving of a sickle, so that every time his right foot landed it left an impression of the sickle in wet ground. He left sickles behind him for miles, until a soldier in the regiment, walking directly behind him, levelled a rifle and forced him to remove the boots – ‘Communist boots make a Communist man.’ He left them on the ground where the soldier riddled them with bullets. Bits of leather splayed around and the laces lay in some sort of mourning. Maybe there was a family on the banks of the Teifi who waited for years for a large brown package to arrive, waited for some totem of a dead son, waited for a story of some heroic death, waited and waited, among mounds of food and mouldy leftovers.

  The dead soldier’s name was Wilfred Owen, an echo of the World War One poet. Years later my father’s life might invoke a line of the poet’s for me: ‘Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.’

  He bartered his way into another pair of shoes – rope-soled alpargatas, and as the weather got colder, snow in countryside drifts, he bought new boots. The holy medal still shone at his throat and, by the time he reached Madrid, he was well able to sing the praises of nationalism.

  He waited outside the city among the gum trees and watched the bread being loaded onto airplanes to swell the nostrils of a pilot. Thousands of loaves. Some of the dough still rising. He stood in the camps as the planes flew off and wondered what it was that had brought him here, took shots of the nationalists as they waited for the planes to return, drilling their way through time and howitzers and dark-haired whores. There were as many pictures of prostitutes as there were of bread. The prostitutes held a peculiar fascination for him, girls who rolled their skirts up on the rubble of their thighs. It was fashionable to be a little plump, so the girls sometimes wore four or five skirts over one another to give breadth to their hips. The men around them were articulate with their penises, a natural extension from the barrel of a rifle to the absurd freckle sitting on any m
an’s undershaft. One of the shots shows a line of men in a tent, Germans, Spaniards and Moroccans, impatient with sweat, waiting in queue for a thin pockmarked whore in baggy underwear, panties around one ankle. She is kneeling down in front of an equally thin soldier with her mouth at his crotch. At the back of the queue another soldier raises an air-punch in anticipation of the soldier’s climax. His fly is already open and his scrotum leaks out like an underwater polyp.

  In makeshift hospital tents there was as much syphilis as shrapnel. Years later, when I went through boxes in our attic, there were shots of women naked in lamplight, women parading in front of his camera, women with sheets pulled coyly around them, women with their heads tilted sideways and an eye in half a wink. I was a teenager when I discovered them. I’d sit, perched on a slat of wood in the attic, thumping away at my body, in the beginning of its own articulation. I became the camera, became the cameraman, and all the time hated my father for being privy to these visions. I walked into the photos, parted the canvas doors of the tents, stood, bemused at first, talked to the women. The women smiled at my curious appearance, beckoned me backwards to the 1930s, asked me sly questions. I hung in behind the camera as outside the planes droned in the clouds with their bounty. The women would move around in the photographs for me, come behind the camera, take me by the hand and lead me somewhere no lens could watch, let me touch them, open my shirt buttons with a flick of their fingers, let me wander, sleep beside them. Sometimes I swore that I could hear the bread falling outside.

  When Madrid surrendered, the graveyards of Spain were full of men the world could not do without – other wars would need them.

  Manley was found in the charnel of the city, minus one leg in a bombed-out house, babbling, a row of stale loaves around him. The doors and windowframes had been torn off and used for firewood. Manley was strewn out on a mattress that smelled of urine. Unshaven. Huge boils on his neck. He spat in my father’s face when he saw the holy medal, but the old man wandered around the city that day and bought some forged papers for his friend. They were in the name of Gordon Peters. Manley became a man who crawled around on crutches and invented a new past for himself. He and a few other stray Republicans hid in the city with their new identities. My father still had his inheritance, pinned away in plastic at the back of his trousers. He and Manley made arrangements to leave the city together, but Manley disappeared one morning while out buying provisions. My father sat in the shell of the house and waited, days giving way to weeks, cameras gathering dust, the mattress beginning to fester. He searched for his friend, walked around in a stupefied ache, couldn’t find him.