Colum McCann - This Side of Brightness

She moves to the kitchen and leaves him in silence, but then she turns around and stares at him and says, “I saw twenty-seven of them once.”

Walker doesn’t reply.

“Near the trailer house where my family lives in South Dakota.”

He rocks gently on the couch.

“It was on the edge of a lake,” she says. “One by one. And then the whole flock of them. On the edge of the mud. It was soft and they left their footprints. Then the sun came and baked them. The footprints were there for a whole season. I used to ride a bicycle in and out of them. I cried when the rain washed them away. My father slapped me because I wouldn’t stop crying.”

Louisa removes the spittoon, sits on the edge of the couch.

“They came back again the next season,” she says, “but I thought I was too old for bicycles. Besides, my brother was using the tires for slingshots. There was no way I could ride it anymore even if I wanted to.”

“Y’all never married, did ya?”

“We never got the chance.”

“It means the baby’s a bastard.”

“Never say that again. You hear me? Don’t call my son that.”

“They beat Clarence to death,” says Walker.

“I don’t want to think about it. There’s certain things you don’t have to remember.”

“And certain things ya do,” says Walker. “They murdered my son. They put their-all’s gun barrels right down into his eye. They made a grave of his head.”

“Shut up!” she says. “Shut the hell up and listen! Twenty-seven cranes. It was the most beautiful thing in the world. Back and forth. Going up in the air, wings fully spread. Around and around and around.”

Neither of them stir, but after a moment Walker shifts on the couch and says to her, “Do it then.”

“What?”

“Show me.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Please. Show me.”

“Don’t go crazy on me, Nathan.”

“Go ahead,” he says. “If y’all remember it so well, go ahead and do it yourself.”

“Nathan.”

“Do it!” he shouts.

Louisa lowers her head and pours herself a large glass of tequila. She doesn’t even wince as the alcohol hits the back of her throat. Looking at Walker, she hesitates for a moment. She closes her eyes momentarily. Then she smiles, almost derisively. She wipes her lips and puts one arm out and she chuckles and stops.

“Go on,” says Walker.

She starts to move: the high cheekbones, the threaded hair, the white white teeth, a gray dress, no shoes, her brown toes lyrical on the worn carpet. Walker, embarrassed, turns his head slightly, but then returns the gaze as Louisa dances, hands outstretched, arms in a whirl, feet back and forth, the most primitive of movements, dissolving the boundaries of her body. Walker feels a throbbing at his temples, a stirring of something primeval within him, a slow spread of joy rising, fanning out, warming him, supplying his flesh with goose bumps. From the couch, he continues to stare. He knows that there is alcohol coursing through Louisa, but he allows himself to forget that; he lets the movement surround him, breathe him, become him, ancestral and gorgeous. And when Louisa starts to lose her breath, Walker rises awkwardly from the couch, reaches to take her hand, and she stops dancing. He touches the side of her face. She drops her chin to her chest. They are silent for a long time, and then he whispers to her with a smile, “Ya know, ya looked ridiculous dancing like that.”

She puts her head on his shoulder, and together they break into a long laughter, goose bumps still rising on Walker’s skin.

“There’s something we gotta do,” he says, later in the afternoon.

“What’s that?” she asks.

“A family ritual.”

“A ritual?”

He is surprised at himself, his movement, a strange suppleness appearing in his knees. He beckons Louisa across the room with a crooked finger. Side by side, they bend over the crib, holding the dream catcher away, and they rehearse the words first, and say to the baby, “Clarence Nathan Walker, you are so goddamn handsome!”

* * *

Years later, during a time of riots and flowers and dark fists painted on walls, Walker and his grandson will sit together in the basement church in Saint Nicholas Park where Eleanor was once baptized. A new young preacher will be telling the story of an ancient Hebrew king, Hezekiah. The church will be quiet. Walker and the boy will sit with their thighs touching, unembarrassed by their closeness. It will be hot. They will pass a handkerchief back and forth. The preacher will rattle on about tolerance, the necessity of belief, the permanence of struggle.

Grandson and grandfather will not really be listening to the sermon until the preacher mentions an old tunnel.

Walker will nudge his grandson with his elbow and say, “Hey.”

“What?”

“Listen up.”

Hezekiah, the preacher will say, wanted to create a tunnel between two pools of water, Siloam and the Pool of Virgins. A team of men started on the edge of each lake and vowed to meet somewhere near the middle. Underground, the diggers worked the tunnel along, further and further. They expected to meet. But they miscalculated and the tunnels missed each other. The men shouted in anger and disappointment and then they were amazed — in their anger — to hear one another’s faint voices through the rock. Underground, the men changed direction. And so the tunnels moved again. Axes and shovels swung. The corridors of dirt bent and curved. The men followed the sound of the voices, still dull through the rock. And the voices grew louder and they moved closer until their pickaxes smashed against one another, creating sparks, and their voices met. The men swept back the rest of the rock and looked closely at one another’s tired faces. Then they reached forward and touched one another to make sure they were real. The tunnel made a giant misshapen S but, after a while — although the men had failed at first — water began to flow between the two ancient pools.

The winter sun berths itself in the sky for a day and begins to melt the snow, so that he can hear cars topside making their way sloppily through the slush. But in the tunnel the wind lashes along, carrying its insistent chill. Thirty-two days of snow and ice. The most brutal winter he has known. Treefrog pulls the hood of the sleeping bag around his head and lays a shirt over his face, the buttons icy at his nose.

Best to stay in bed the rest of the day, he thinks, but Castor comes up beside him and nuzzles her way under the shirt and he feels her rib cage hard against his face.

Still in his sleeping bag, Treefrog manages to get on a few extra shirts and his gloves, then hops out and takes some milk from the Gulag, the liquid frozen solid. He stabs open the box with his knife, and a cube of milk falls into the pan. Quickly, he heats it over a small fire. Castor laps at the feast and afterward jumps onto the mattress and curls up on the blankets, white fur almost phosphorescent in the dark. Treefrog takes an old thermometer from a box of hubcaps. He rises and gauges all over: by the stalactite, at the ice wall, on the train tracks, in his back cave, by Faraday’s broken traffic light, in the Gulag, at the fire pit, and on the bedside table, where it reads only sixteen degrees Fahrenheit — cold, so goddamn cold.

Warming the thermometer with his breath until it hits an even eighteen, he stands and urinates painfully in a piss bottle.

Time to dump the bottles up above.

With Castor inside his shirt, Treefrog goes outside through the tunnel gate, where the bright light stings his eyes. He puts on his sunglasses and pours his name in the whiteness near the crab-apple trees, but there is not enough to finish off the words. He breaks an icy twig off a tree and carves the remaining letters.