Fishing the Sloe-Black River

by Colum McCann

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Sisters

  Breakfast for Enrique

  A Basket Full of Wallpaper

  Through the Field

  Stolen Child

  Step We Gaily, On We Go

  A Word in Edgewise

  From Many, One

  Fishing the Sloe-Black River

  Around the Bend and Back Again

  Along the Riverwall

  Cathal’s Lake

  Also by Colum McCann

  Copyright

  For my father and mother.

  And for Roger and Rose Marie

  SISTERS

  I have come to think of our lives as the colors of that place—hers a piece of bog cotton, mine as black as the water found when men slash too deep in the soil with a shovel.

  I remember when I was fifteen, cycling across those bogs in the early evenings, on my way to the dancehall in my clean, yellow socks. My sister stayed at home. I tried to avoid puddles, but there would always be a splash or two on the hem of my dress. The boys at the dancehall wore blue anoraks and watched me when I danced. Outside they leaned against my bike and smoked shared cigarettes in the night. I gave myself. One of them once left an Easter lily in the basket. Later it was men in granite-gray suits who would lean into me, heads cocked sideways like hawks, eyes closed. Sometimes I would hold my hands out beyond their shoulders and shape or carve something out of my fingers, something with eyes and a face, someone very little, within my hand, whose job it was to try to understand. Between a statue of Our Lady and a Celtic cross commemorating the dead of Ireland, my hand made out the shape of a question mark as a farm boy furrowed his way inside me.

  A man with a walrus mustache gone gray at the tips took me down to the public lavatories in Castlebar. He was a sailor. He smelled of ropes and disuse and seaport harridans. There were bays and coverts, hillsides and heather. My promiscuity was my autograph. I was hourglassy, had turf-colored hair and eyes as green as wine bottles. Someone once bought me an ice-cream in Achill Island, then we chipped some amethyst out of the rock banks and climbed the radio tower. We woke up late at the edge of a cliff, with the waves lashing in from the Atlantic. There was a moon of white reflected in the water. The next day at the dinner table, my father told us that John F. Kennedy had landed a man on the moon. We knew that Kennedy was long dead—he stared at us from a picture frame on the wall—but we said nothing. It was a shame, my father said, looking at me, that the moon turned out to be a heap of ash.

  My legs were stronger now, and I strolled to the dancehall, the bogs around me wet and dark. The boy with the Easter lily did it again, this time with nasturtiums stolen from outside the police station. My body continued to go out and around in all the right places. My father waited up for me, smoking Woodbines down to the quick. He told me once that he had overheard a man at his printing shop call me “a wee whore,” and I heard him weeping as I tuned in Radio Luxembourg in my room.

  My older sister, Brigid, succeeded with a spectacular anorexia. After classes she would sidle off to the bog, to a large rock where she thought nobody could see her, her Bible in her pocket, her sandwiches in her hand. There she would perch like a raked robin, and bit by bit she would tear up the bread like a sacrament and throw it all around her. The rock had a history—in penal times it had been used as a meeting place for mass. I sometimes watched her from a distance. She was a house of bones, my sister, throwing her bread away. Once, out on the rock, I saw her take my father’s pliers to her fingers and slowly pluck out the nail from the middle finger of her left hand. She did it because she had heard that the Cromwellians had done it to harpists in the seventeenth century, so they could no longer pluck the cat-gut to make music. She wanted to know how it felt. Her finger bled for days. She told our father that she had caught her hand in a school door. He stayed unaware of Brigid’s condition, still caught in the oblivion caused, many years before, by the death of our mother—lifted from a cliff by a light wind while out strolling. Since that day Brigid had lived a strange sort of martyrdom. People loved her frail whiteness but never really knew what was going on under all those sweaters. She never went to the dancehall. Naturally, she wore the brown school socks that the nuns made obligatory. Her legs within them were thin as twigs. We seldom talked. I never tried. I envied her that unused body that needed so little, yet I also loved her with a bitterness that only sisters can have.

  Now, two decades later, squashed in the boot of a car, huddled under a blanket, I ask myself why I am smuggling myself across the Canadian border to go back to a country that wouldn’t allow me to stay, to see a sister I never really knew in the first place.

  It is dark and cramped and hollow and black in here. My knees are up against my breasts. Exhaust fumes make me cough. A cold wind whistles in. We are probably still in the countryside of Quebec. At every traffic light I hope that this is the border station leading into Maine. Perhaps when we’re finally across we can stop by a frozen lake and skim out there on the ice, Michael and I.

  When I asked Michael to help smuggle me across the border he didn’t hesitate. He liked the idea of being what the Mexicans call a “coyote.” He said it goes with his Navajo blood, his forefathers believing that coyotes howled in the beginning of the universe. Knowing the reputation of my youth, he joked that I could never have believed in that legend, that I must go in for the Big Bang. In the boot of the car I shudder in the cold. I wear a blue wool hat pulled down over my ears. My body does not sandwich up the way it used to.

  I met Michael on a Greyhound bus in the early seventies, not long after leaving the bogs. I had left Brigid at home with her untouched platefuls of food. At Shannon Airport my father had cradled me like his last cigarette. On the plane I realized that I was gone forever to a new country—I was tired of the knowing way women back home nodded their heads at me. I was on my way to San Francisco, wearing a string of beads. In the bus station at Port Authority I noticed Michael first for his menacing darkness; his skin looked like it had been dipped in hot molasses. And then I saw the necklace of teeth that hung on his chest. I learned later that they were the teeth of a mountain lion. He had found the lion one afternoon in the Idaho wilderness, the victim of a road kill. Michael came over and sat beside me, saying nothing, smelling faintly of woodsmoke. His face was aquiline, acned. His wrists were thick. He wore a leather waistcoat, jeans, boots. On the bus I leaned my head on his shoulder, feigning sleep. Later my hand reached over and played with the necklace of teeth. He laughed when I blew on them. I said they sounded like wind chimes, tinkling together, though they didn’t sound anything like that at all. We rattled across a huge America. I lived with him for many years, in San Francisco on Dolores Street near the Mission, the foghorn of the Golden Gate keening a lament. After the raid, in 1978, when I was gone and home in Ireland, I would never again sleep with another man.

  The car shudders to a halt. My head lolls against the lid of the boot. I would rather pick my way through a pillar of stone with a pin than go through this again. There is a huge illegal trade going on with cigarettes and alcohol crossing the border. We could be stopped. Michael wanted to take me across by paddling a canoe down the Kennebec River, but I said I would rather just do it in the car. Now I wish we’d done it his way. “Up a lazy river with a robin song, it’s a lazy, lazy river we c
an float along, blue skies up above, everyone’s in love.” My father had sung that when Brigid and I were young.

  Slowly the car pitches forward. I wonder whether we are finally there or whether this is just another traffic light along the way. We stop again and then we inch up. I ask myself what plays in Michael’s head. I was shocked when I saw him first, just three days ago, because he still looked much the same after thirteen years. I was ashamed of myself. I felt dowdy and gray. When I went to sleep on his sofabed, alone, I remembered the new creases on the backs of my thighs. Now I feel more his equal. He has cut his hair and put on a suit to lessen the risk of being caught—giving him some of the years that I have gained, or lost, I don’t know which.

  A muffle of voices. I curl myself even deeper into a ball and press my face against the cold metal. If the border patrol asks to examine his luggage, I am gone again, history come full circle. But I hear the sound of a hand slapping twice on the roof of the car, a grind of gears, a jolt forward, and within moments we are in America, the country, as someone once said, that God gave to Cain. A few minutes down the road I hear Michael whoop and roar and laugh.

  “Greetings,” he shouts, “from the sebaceous glands. I’m sweating like a bear. I’ll have you out of there in no time, Sheona.”

  His voice sounds smothered and my toes are frozen.

  On an August night in 1978 I clocked off my job as a singing waitress in a bar down on Geary Street. Wearing an old wedding dress I had bought in a pawn shop, hair let loose, yellow socks on—they were always my trademark—I got into our old Ford pickup with the purple hubcaps and drove up the coast. Michael was spending the weekend in a cabin somewhere north of Mendocino, helping bring in a crop of California’s best. Across the bridge where the hell-divers swooped, into Sausalito, around by Mount Tamalpais, where I flung a few cigarette butts to the wind for the ghosts of Jack Kerouac and John Muir, and up along the coast, the sun rose like a dirty red aspirin over the sea. I kept steady to the white lines, those on the dashboard and those on the road. The morning had cracked well when I turned up the Russian River and followed the directions Michael had written on the back of a dollar bill.

  The cabin was up a drunken mountain road. Cats leaped among parts of old motorbikes, straggles of orange crates, pieces of a windmill. Tatters of wild berries hung on bushes, and sunlight streamed in shafts between the sequoias. Michael and his friends met me with guns slung down at their waists. There had been no guns in Mayo, just schoolgirl rumors of an IRA man who lived in a boghole about a mile from Brigid’s rock. They scared me, the guns. I asked Michael to tuck his away. Late that evening, when all the others had gone with a truckload of dope, I asked him if we could spend a moment together. I wanted to get away from the guns. I didn’t get away from them for long, though. Four hours later, naked on the side of a creek, I was quoting Kavanagh for some reason, my own love banks green and rampant with leaves, when I looked up beyond Michael’s shoulder at four cops, guns cocked, laughing. They forced Michael to bend over and shoved a tree branch up his anus. They tried to take me, these new hawks, and eventually they did. Four in a row. This time with my eyes closed, hands to the ground and nothing to watch me from my fingerhouse.

  Five days later, taking the simple way out—a lean, young lawyer in a white fedora had begun to take an interest in my case—they deported me for not having a green card. Past the Beniano Bufano Peace statue—the mosaic face of all races—at San Francisco International, handcuffed, they escorted me to JFK on to an Aer Lingus Boeing 747. I flung my beads down the toilet.

  Michael lifts me from the boot. He swirls me around in his arms, in the middle of a Maine dirt road. It is pitch black but I can almost smell the lakes and the fir trees, the clean snow that nestles upon branches. A winter Orion thrusts his sword after Taurus in the sky. “That could be a ghost,” I whisper to Michael, and he stops his dance. “I mean, the light hitting our eyes from those stars left millions of years ago. It just might be that the thing is a ghost, already imploded. A supernova.”

  “The only thing I know about the stars is that they come out at night,” he says. “My grandfather sometimes sat in a chair outside our house and compared them to my grandmother’s teeth.”

  I laugh and lean into him. He looks up at the sky.

  “Teach me some more scientific wonders,” he says.

  I babble about the notion that if we could travel faster than the speed of light we would get to a place we never really wanted to go before we even left. He looks at me quizzically, puts his fingers on my lips, walks me to the car and sits me down gently on the front seat, saying, “Your sister.”

  He takes off his tie, wraps it around his head like a bandanna, feels for a moment for his gone ponytail, turns up the stereo, and we drive toward New York.

  I had seen my sister one day in Dublin, outside the Dawson Lounge. I suppose her new convent clothes suited her well. Black to hide the thinness. Muttering prayers as she walked. The hair had grown thick on her hands, and her cheekbones were sculleried away in her head. I followed behind her, up around St. Stephen’s Green and on down toward the Dail. She shuffled her feet slowly, never lifting them very high off the ground. She stopped at the gate of the Dail, where a group of homeless families sat protesting their destitution, flapping their arms like hummingbirds to keep themselves warm. It was Christmas Eve. She talked with a few of them for a moment, then took out a blanket and sat down among them. I looked from the other side of the street. It shocked me to see her laugh and to watch a small girl leap into her lap. I walked away, bought a loaf of bread, and threw it to the ducks in the Green. A boy in Doc Martens glared at me and I thought of the dancehall.

  “None of these coins have our birthdates on them anymore,” I say as I search in my handbag for some money for a toll booth.

  “I enjoyed that back there,” he says. “Hell of a lot better than being on a scaffold. Hey, you should have seen the face of the border patrol guy. Waved me through without batting an eyelid.”

  “You think we just get older and then we fade away?”

  “Look, Sheona, you know the saying.”

  “What saying?”

  “A woman is as old as she feels.” Then he chuckles. “And a man is as old as the woman he feels.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I’m only kidding,” he says.

  “I’m sorry, Mike. I’m just nervous.”

  I lean back in the seat and watch him. In the six years of notes he sent from prison there is one I remember the most. “I wouldn’t mind dying in the desert with you, Sheona,” he had written. “We could both lick the dew off the rocks, then watch the sun and let it blind us. Dig a hole and piss in the soil. Put a tin can in the bottom of the hole. Cover it with a piece of plastic and weigh down the center with a rock. The sun’ll evaporate the piss, purify it, let it gather in droplets on the plastic, where it’ll run toward the center, then drop in the tin can, making water. After a day we can drink from each other’s bodies. And then die well. Let the buzzards come down from the thermals. I hate being away from you. I am dead already.”

  The day I received that letter, I thought of quitting my secretarial job in a glass tower down by Kavanagh’s canals. I thought of going back to Mayo and striking a shovel into a boghole, seeping down into the water, breathing out the rest of my life through a hollow piece of reed grass. But I never quit my job and I never wrote back to him. The thought of that sort of death was way too beautiful.

  My days in Dublin were derelict and ordinary. A flat on Appian Way near enough to Raglan Road, where my own dark hair weaved a snare. Thirteen years somehow slipped away, like they do, not even autumn foliage now, but mulched delicately into my skin. I watched unseen as a road sweeper in Temple Bar whistled like he had a bird in his throat. I began to notice cranes swinging across the skyline. Dublin had become cosmopolitan. A drug addict in a doorway on Leeson Street ferreted in his bowels for a small bag of cocaine. Young boys wore baseball hats. The canals carried fabulo
usly colored litter. The postman asked me if I was lonely. I went to Torremolinos in 1985 and watched girls my age get knocked up in alleyways.

  But I didn’t miss the men. I bought saucepans, cooked beautiful food, wrote poems near a single bar electric heater. Once I even went out with a policeman from Donegal, but when he lifted my skirt I knocked his glasses off. At work, in a ribboned blouse, I was so unhappy that I couldn’t even switch jobs. When making calls, I was always breaking my fingernails on the phone slots. I watched a harpist in the Concert Hall playing beautifully on nylon strings. In a moment of daring I tried to find my sister exactly two years to the day that I had seen her, huddled with the homeless in a Foxford blanket. “Sister Brigid,” I was told, “is spreading the word of God in Central America.” I didn’t have the nerve to ask for the address. All I knew of Central America was dogs leaner than her.

  We are off the highway now, looking for a New Hampshire petrol station. The sun in the east is bleeding into the darkness. Michael refuses to fill up at the garages that lick the big interstate. He prefers a smaller town. He’s still the same man, now wearing his necklace of mountain lion teeth over an opennecked Oxford. Because I trust him, because he still believes in simpler, more honest things, I tell him about why I think Brigid is sick. I am very simple in my ideas of Central America. My information comes from newspapers. She is sick, I tell him, because she was heartbroken among the maguey plants. She is sick because there are soldiers on the outskirts of town who carry Kalashnikovs or AK-47’s, hammering the barrels through the brick kilns that make the dough rise. She is sick because she saw things that she thought belonged only in Irish history. She is sick because she saw girls bonier than her and because there was no such thing as a miracle to be found. She is sick, she is in an infirmary convent on Long Island for nuns who have or have not done their jobs. Though really, honestly, I think she is sick because she knew I was watching when she flung her bread from a rock and I never said a word.