Fishing the Sloe-Black River

by Colum McCann

  Osobe walked on the beach with his head slung low to the ground, stooping to collect stones. We would sometimes hide in the dunes, parting the long grass to watch him filling his trouser pockets with stones. He had a long rambling stride, sometimes walking for hours along the coast, while the gulls hurled themselves up from the strand, and small fishing boats bobbed on the sea. When I was twelve years old I saw him leap along the beach while a porpoise surfaced and resurfaced in the water, fifty yards away. Once Paul Ryan wrapped a note around a brick and flung it through the window of his cottage, one of a row of fifteen small houses in the center of our village. Nip go home said the note. The following day we noticed that the window had been covered with wallpaper and Paul Ryan went home from school with blood caked under his nose because we could no longer see through Osobe’s front window.

  Osobe had come to Ireland before I was born, sometime in the fifties. He was a curious sight in any Irish town, his black hair sticking out like conifer needles, his eyes shaded by the brim of his brown hat. He had bought the cottage, a dilapidated two-room affair, from an out-of-town landlord who thought that Osobe might just stay for a month or two. But, according to my father, a huge lorry carrying reams and reams of wallpaper pulled up to the cottage during the first summer of his visit. Osobe and two hefty Dubliners lifted all the paper into the house, and later he hung a sign on his front window: WALLPAPER FOR SALE—ASK INSIDE. There were mutterings about how the paper had been stolen, how it had been imported from Japan at a ridiculous price, undercutting the Irish wholesalers. Nobody bought any for a month until my Aunt Moira, who was infamous for having gotten drunk with Brendan Behan in a Republican pub in Dublin, knocked on his door and ordered a floral pattern with a touch of pink for her living room.

  Osobe rode his black bicycle along the river out to her house. Rolls of paper, cans of glue, knives, and brushes were piled into the basket. My aunt said he did a wonderful job, although people muttered about her outside mass on Sunday mornings. “He was as quiet then as he is now,” she told me. “No more noise out of him than a dormouse, and we should leave it that way. He’s a good man who never done anyone a whit of harm.” She laughed at the rumors that hung around him.

  By the time I was born he was a fixture around town, no stranger than the newspaper editor whose handkerchiefs drooped from his trouser pockets, the shopkeeper who kept the footballs that landed in her back garden, the soldier who had lost his right hand while fighting for Franco. People nodded to him on the streets and, in Gaffney’s pub, he was left alone over his morning pint of Guinness. He had a brisk trade going with the wallpaper, and occasionally, when Kieran O’Malley, the local handyman, was sick, he was called out to unblock a toilet or fix a crooked door. There was talk that he was seeing a young girl from Galway, a madwoman who walked around with a third sleeve sewn on her dresses. But that had about as much truth as all the other rumors—or less, in fact, since he was never seen to leave town, not even on his bicycle.

  He spoke English haltingly and in the shops he would whisper for a packet of cigarettes or a jar of jam. He never wore his brown hat on Sundays. Girls giggled when he passed them in the street holding a red Japanese sun umbrella above his head.

  I was sixteen years old when he hung a sign on his front door, looking for help with a wallpaper job. It was a hot summer, the ground was bone dry, and there were no seasonal jobs in the fields. My father moaned at the dinner table about the huge toll that emigration was having on his undertaking business. “Everyone’s gone somewhere else to die,” he’d say. “Even that Mrs. Hynes is hanging on for dear life.” One evening my mother came and sat by my bed, mashing her fingers together nervously. She muttered under her breath that I should get some work with the Japanese man, that I was old enough now to put some bread on the table. I had noticed that in the bread that she baked at home, there were no currants anymore.

  The following morning, in a blue wool sweater and old working trousers, I sidled down to his house and knocked on his door.

  The cottage was filled with rolls of wallpaper. They were stacked on top of one another all around the living room, crowding in toward the small table and two wooden chairs. Most of the rolls were muted in color, but they made a strange collage, flowers and vines and odd shapes all meshed together. The walls themselves had been papered with dozens of different types, and the smell of paste was heavy in the house. On the ground sat rows and rows of small paper dolls, the faces painted almost comically. An old philosopher, a young girl, a wizened woman, a soldier. A row of Japanese books stood against one wall. On top of them, a pan of sliced bread. Cigarette packages littered the floor. There was a collection of beach stones on the mantelpiece. I noticed lots of change and a few pound notes scattered around the cottage, and a twenty-pound note stuffed under a lamp. A kettle whistled on the stove and he filled up two china cups with tea.

  “Welcome,” he said. The saucer rattled in my fingers. “There is big job in house. You will help me?”

  I nodded and sipped at the tea, which tasted peculiarly bitter. His hands were long and spindly, dotted with liver spots. A gray shirt slouched on his thin shoulders.

  “You will go home and get bicycle, in this afternoon we start. Very good?”

  We rode out together to the old Gorman house, which had lain empty for three years. Osobe whistled as we pedaled, and people stared at us from their cars and houses. Five rolls of pale green wallpaper were balanced in his front basket, and I carried two cans of paste in my right hand, steering the bicycle with the other. I saw Paul Ryan hanging out by the school, smoking a long cigar. “Ya get slanty eyes from wanking too much, Donnelly,” he shouted, and I tucked my head down toward the handlebars.

  The Gorman house had been bought by an American millionaire just three months before. There were schoolboy rumors that the American drove a huge Cadillac and had five blond daughters who would be fond of the local disco and, on excellent authority, were known to romp behind haystacks. But there was nobody there when we arrived on our bicycles. Osobe produced a set of keys from his overalls and walked slowly through the house, pointing at the walls, motes of dust kicking up from behind him. We made five trips on the bikes that day, carrying rolls of wallpaper and paste each time. At the end of the day, after I had brought a ladder over my shoulder from his house, he produced a brand new ten-pound note and offered it to me.

  “Tomorrow we start,” he said, and then he bowed slightly. “You are fast on bicycle,” he said.

  I went outside. The sun was settling over the town. I heard Osobe humming in the background as I leaped on my bike and rode toward home, the money stuffed down deep in my pocket.

  * * *

  That summer I read books in my bedroom and I wanted Osobe to tell me a fabulous story about his past. I suppose I wanted to own a piece of him, to make his history belong to me.

  It would have something to do with Hiroshima, I had decided, with the children of the pikadon, the flash boom. There would be charred telegraph poles and tree trunks, a wasteland of concrete, a single remaining shell of a building. People with melted faces would run wildly through the streets. Bloated corpses would float down the Ota River. The slates on the roofs of houses would bubble. He would spit on the American and British soldiers as they sat under burnt cherry blossom trees, working the chewing gum over in their mouths. Perhaps, in his story, he would reach out for the festered face of a young girl. Or massage the burnt scalp of a boy. A woman friend of his would see her reflection in a bowl of soup and howl. Maybe he would run off toward the hills and never stop. Or perhaps he would simply just walk away down narrow roads, wearing wooden sandals, a begging bowl in his hands. It would be a peculiar Buddhist hell, that story of his, and a B-29 would drone in constantly from the clouds.

  But Osobe stayed silent almost the whole time as he stood in that big old house and spread paste on the walls in long smooth motions, humming gently as the house began to take on color. “Sean,” he would say to me in his comically broken Engli
sh, with his face cocked into a smile, “someday you will be great wallpaper man. You must think how important this job. We make people happy or sad if we do bad job.”

  He would buy big bottles of Club Orange and packets of Goldgrain biscuits and spread them out on the ground during lunchtime. He brought a radio one morning and his old body swayed with movement as he tuned in to a pop station from Dublin. Once, for a joke, he swiped a ladder away from me and left me hanging from a door ledge. He was deft with a knife, slicing the wallpaper in one smooth motion. At the end of the day he would smoke two cigarettes, allowing me a puff at the end of each one. Then he would sit, lotus-legged, in front of a newly decorated wall and nod, smiling gently, rocking back and forth.

  “What is Japan like?” I asked him one evening as we were cycling home, my palms sweaty.

  “Like everywhere else. Not as beautiful like this,” he said, sweeping his arms around the fields and hills.

  “Why did you come here?”

  “So long ago.” He pointed at his nose. “Don’t remember. Sorry.”

  “Were you in the war?”

  “You ask lots of questions.”

  “Somebody told me you were in Hiroshima.”

  He laughed uproariously, slapping his thighs. “I have no answer.” He rode silently for a while. “Hiroshima was sad place. Japanese don’t talk about.”

  “Were you in Hiroshima?” I asked again.

  “No, no,” he said. “No, no.”

  “Do you hate Americans?”

  “Why?”

  “Because…”

  “You are very young. You shouldn’t think these things. You should think of making good job with wallpaper. That is important.”

  We rode out to the house at eight every morning. The lawn was dry and cracked. The third floor windows were black with soot. When the radio played it could be heard all over the house. Osobe worked with tremendous energy. In the hot afternoons he rolled up his sleeves and I could see his sinewy arms. Once, when the radio told us of an earthquake in Japan, he blanched and said that the country was suffering from too much pain.

  In the evenings I started going down to the bridge with my friends to drink flagons of cider with the money I held back from my parents. I began to buy my own cigarettes. I read books about World War II and created fabulous lies about how he had been in that southern Japanese city when the bomb had been dropped, how his family had been left as shadows on the town hall walls, dark patches of people on broken concrete. He had been ten miles from the epicenter of the blast, I said, in the shade of a building, wearing billowy orange carpenter pants and a large straw hat. He was flung to the ground, and when he awoke, the city was howling all around him. He had reeled away from the horror of it all, traveling the world, ending up in the west of Ireland. My friends whistled through their teeth. Under the bridge they pushed the bottle toward me.

  Occasionally my mother and father asked me about Osobe, muted questions, probings, which they slid in at dinnertime after I had handed over most of my wages.

  “He’s a strange one, that one,” said my father.

  “Hiding something, I’d guess,” my mother would respond, the fork clanging against her teeth.

  “Bit of a mad fellow, isn’t he, Sean?”

  “Ah, he’s not too bad,” I said.

  “People say he lived in Brazil for a while.”

  “God knows, he could have,” said my mother.

  “He doesn’t tell me anything,” I said.

  For all I really knew, he had just wandered to our town for no good or sufficient reason and decided to stay. I had an uncle in Ghana, an older brother in Nebraska, a distant cousin who worked as a well digger near Melbourne, none of which struck me as peculiar. Osobe was probably just one of their breed, a wanderer, a misfit, although I didn’t want him to be. I wanted him to be more than that.

  We worked through that hot summer together, finished the Gorman house and started on a few others. I grew to enjoy clambering along the roads on our bicycles in the morning, slapping paste on the walls, inventing tales about him for my friends down under the bridge. Some of my friends were working in the chipper, others were bringing in the tired hay, and a couple were selling golf balls down at the club. Every evening I continued with Osobe stories for them, their faces lit up by the small fire we kept going. We all slurped at the bottles, fascinated by the terror and brilliance of it all. Fireballs had raged throughout the city as he fled, I told them. People ran with sacks of rice in their melted hands. A Shinto monk said prayers over the dead. Strange weeds grew in clumps where the plum trees once flowered, and Osobe left the city, half-naked, his throat and eyes burning.

  * * *

  Osobe opened the door to me one morning toward the end of summer. “All the jobs almost done,” he said. “We celebrate with cup of tea.”

  He guided me gently by the arm to the chair in the middle of the room. Looking around I noticed that he had been wallpapering again. He had papered over the old pattern. There were no bubbles, no stray ends, no spilled paste around the edges. I imagined him staying up late at night, humming as he watched the colors close in on him. The rest of the cottage was a riot of odds and ends—dishes and teacups, an Oriental fan, wrapped slices of cheese, a futon mattress rolled in the corner. There was a twenty-pound note sitting on the small gas heater near the table. Another ten-pound note lay on the floor, near the table. His brown hat was hung up on the door. There were paintbrushes everywhere.

  “You did good job,” he said. “Will you go soon school?”

  “In a few weeks.”

  “Will you one day paper? Again. If I find you job?” he said.

  Before I could answer he had sprung to his heels to open the front door for a marmalade-colored cat, which had been scratching at the door. It was a stray. We often saw it slinking around the back of the chipper, waiting for some scraps. John Brogan once tried to catch it with a giant net but couldn’t. It scurried away from everyone. Osobe leaned down on his hunkers and, swooping his arms as if he were going to maul it, he got the cat to come closer. It was almost a windmill motion, smoothly through the air, his thin arms making arcs. The cat stared. Then, with a violent quickness, Osobe scooped it up, turned it on its back, pinned it down with one hand and roughly stroked his other hand along its belly. The cat leaned its head back and purred. Osobe laughed.

  For a moment I felt a vicious hatred for him and his quiet ways, his mundane stroll through the summer, his ordinariness, the banality of everything he had become. He should have been a hero or a seer. He should have told me some incredible story that I could carry with me forever. After all, he had been the one who had run along the beach parallel to a porpoise, who filled his pockets full of pebbles, who could lift the stray orange cat in his fingers.

  I looked around the room for a moment while he hunched down with the cat, his back to me. I was hoping to find something, a diary, a picture, a drawing, a badge, anything that would tell me a little more about him. Looking over my shoulder I reached across to the gas heater, picked up the twenty-pound note and stuffed it in my sock, then pulled my trousers down over it. I sat at the wooden table, my hands shaking. After a while Osobe turned and came over toward me with the cat in his arms, stroking it with the same harsh motion as before. With his right hand he reached into his overalls and gave me a hundred pounds in ten new notes. “For you school.” I could feel the other twenty-pound note riding up in my sock, and as I backed out the door a sick feeling rose in my stomach.

  “You did very good job,” he said. “Come back for visit.”

  It was only afterward that I realized I never got the cup of tea he offered.

  That night, full of cider, I stumbled away from the bridge and walked down along the row of houses where Osobe lived. I climbed around the back of the house, through the hedge, along by some flowerpots, rattling an old wheelbarrow as I moved up to the window. He was there, slapping paste on the wall in gentle arcs. I counted five separate sheets, and the wall mu
st have come a good quarter of an inch closer to him. I wanted him to be sloppy this time, not to smooth the sheets out, to wield the knife in a slipshod way, but he did the job as always, precise and fluid. The whole time he was humming and I stood, drunk, rattling the change from the twenty-pound note in my pocket.

  * * *

  Years later, when I was acquiring an English accent in the East End of London, I got a letter from my father. Business was still slow and a new wave of emigration had left its famous scars. Old Mrs. Hynes still hadn’t kicked the bucket. Five of the council houses were empty now, and even the Gorman house had been sold once more. The American in his Cadillac had never arrived with his five blond daughters. The hurling team had lost all its matches again this year. There was a bumper crop of hay.

  On the last page of the letter he told me that Osobe had died. The body was not discovered for three days, until my Aunt Moira called around with a basket of fruit for him. My father said that when he went into the house, the stench was so bad that he almost vomited. Children gathered at the front door with their hands held to their noses. But there was a whipround made in Gaffney’s pub that extended out to the streets. People threw generous amounts of money in a big brown hat that the owner of the chipper carried from door to door. My aunt chose him a fine coffin, although someone said that he might have been offended by it, that he should have been sent back to Japan to be cremated. She scoffed at the suggestion and made a bouquet of flowers for him.

  There was a party held the night of the funeral, and rumors were flung around according to the depths of the whiskey bottle—but more or less everyone was sure now that he had been a victim of Hiroshima. All the young boys who had worked for him in the summer months had heard vivid details of that frightening August morning. He had run from the city in a pair of wooden sandals. All his family had been killed. They had been vaporized. He was a man in flight. By the early, sober hours of the morning, my father added, the talk was that Osobe was a decent sort, no matter what his history was. Over the years he had employed many young men to work with him, treated them fairly, paid them handsomely, and confided in them about his life. They laughed at how strange his accent had become at the end of it all—when he went to the shop to buy cigarettes he would lean over the counter and whisper for pack of fags, prease. The sight of him carrying that big ladder on his bicycle would be sorely missed around town.