Colum McCann - This Side of Brightness

A small, rude smile appears at the edge of his lips as the beard falls away.

Tiny moments flit back into Walker’s mind. He lingers on the rim of these memories. He has begun to say prayers again, long convoluted rhythms, though he’s not quite sure if he’s talking to himself or not. He recalls the prayer he didn’t quite speak in the tunnel, in 1917, that moment of silence before the boys began to throw candles. He can reach out his tongue and almost taste it.

The razor is high around his gray sideburns.

“Say, son.”

“Yessir?”

“I heard some rumblings on the roof last night,” says Walker. “Sounded like someone jumping around.”

Clarence Nathan feels his cheeks flush, but his grandfather laughs long and hard.

“That’s a nice girl. Whatshername?”

“Dancesca.”

“Yeah, now, she’s a catch.”

Embarrassed, Clarence Nathan’s hands shake and he lets the razor slip and a tiny nick appears near his grandfather’s ear. He wipes the remaining soap off the old man’s face and dabs at the cut with the towel, watches the cotton soak up the blood.

“Hold on to her,” says Walker.

Clarence Nathan tears off a piece of newspaper, licks it, and puts it against the old man’s cut, where it dries and stays. The blood darkens the paper.

“Sorry I cut you.”

“Can’t feel a thing,” says Walker. Looking at his reflection in the window, he says, “Nathan Walker, you are still so goddamn handsome!”

Chuckling, he turns to Clarence Nathan.

“Let’s you and me go enjoy the day. Just a quick walk.”

“Yessir.”

“I’ve got something to tell ya.”

“Yessir.”

The streets seem split open with sunlight, widened by heat. Walker and his grandson cross the avenues westward and up the hill toward Riverside Drive. Walker feels the silver cross flip at his neck, and the cool side lies against his skin.

As he walks, he looks sideways at Clarence Nathan. The young man wears a dashiki. A red-green-yellow hat perched on his head. Flared green trousers. A harmonica — a present from Walker — dents one pants pocket. Clarence Nathan has gone over the lip into late adolescence: muscles rumbling under the shirt, his Adam’s apple big and prominent, a familiar swagger to the shoulders. The boy has been trying to cultivate an Afro, but mostly his hair falls quickly out of it, lying lank and black down to his collarbone.

They sit on a park bench at the rear of Grant’s Tomb and look down through the trees along the bluff to the river flowing below. The teenager perches on the high back of the bench. Walker lifts up the flap of his tobacco pouch, puts his nose down close to the bag, drags the scent down, raises his face to the air.

“Feels clean, don’t it?”

“Sir?”

“The day, it feels clean.”

“Yessir.”

“Whatshername again? That girl?”

“Dancesca.”

“Hang on to her. Did I tell ya that already?”

“Yessir, you did.”

After a long silence, Clarence Nathan says, “They let me go up yesterday to the forty-third floor. With the ironworkers. You can see the rivers for miles: the East, the Hudson. When it’s not hazy.”

“Y’all making money at this job?”

“Yessir. A little.”

“Saving it up?”

“Yeah, yeah, ’course.”

“What ya spending the rest on?”

“Bits ’n’ pieces.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk about.”

“What?”

“There’s two types of freedom, son. The freedom to do what ya want and the freedom to do what ya should.” And then Walker says, “Y’all’re buying your momma’s dope, right?”

“No, sir.”

“Don’t lie to me, son. Y’all’re buying her smack. I know. Ya know how I feel about lying.”

“I never bought any drugs, never.”

“Then y’all’re giving her money.”

Clarence Nathan says nothing.

“Don’t be giving her any more money.”

The teenager lowers his head. “Yessir.”

“I mean it. Promise me that.”

“Yessir,” he says.

“If ya don’t stop, there’ll be no telling what happens to her. It’s the right thing to do.”

“I know it is.”

“Ya know what she did? She took out all the keys from the piano. I lifted the lid the other day, and they were all gone.”

“Sir?”

“I guess she thought they were pure ivory. I guess she thought she could soak ’em. They got ivory tops, but the rest of them is wooden. They ain’t worth diddly squat.”

Clarence Nathan stares at his fingers.

“Listen up, son,” says Walker. He coughs and wipes a dribble of spittle from his chin. “Did I ever tell ya about the first sub-aqua pitch in the history of the world?”

He has heard the story but says, “No, sir, you didn’t.”

“Y’all promise not to give her any more money?”

“I promise.”

“Okay,” says Walker, stretching out his hand. “Pretend this is a Bible.”

Clarence Nathan lays his palm on his grandfather’s hand.

“Now swear on it.”

“I swear.”

“Swear on your life that y’ain’t gonna give her another dime.”

“I swear on it.”

“Well,” says Walker. He coughs again, feels his body snap up in sudden pain, closes his eyes. “It was the first run of the train, and the boys brought down baseballs, see.…”

* * *

In the distance Treefrog hears a loud smack of flesh on flesh and a grunt. The wind blows along the tunnel from the southern end, slamming into the nooks and crannies, ferreting its way upward through his nest. Castor sits on his lap, milk frozen to her whiskers. He breathes on her and wipes off the milk between thumb and forefinger, in case the piece of ice has affected her balance.

* * *

Clarence Nathan has often seen his grandfather rifle through his mother’s clothes, taking out small packages and flushing them down the toilet. Louisa comes home and rummages in the bowl with a bent coat hanger, finds nothing. She moves through the apartment, waving the hanger like a weapon. She threatens to leave, says the heroin comes from a treatment program; she needs to let it fade gently from her body. There is talk of South Dakota, a bus journey, a plane trip, but she only portages her bones between the street and the apartment. Her face is brown as leather, with an array of wrinkles. The only thing of color she’s seen in years is the rise of red up a plastic tube, a mistake when she draws the hypodermic needle back too far.

“I need a loan,” she says, late one night.

“No more loans, I told you.”

“I need it for groceries.”

“We got enough groceries.”

“Don’t you know I have to feed you? You know what it’s like trying to feed a family?”

“You don’t even feed yourself. Excepting that other shit.”

“Don’t say shit.” She closes her eyelids. “I need it, Claren. Please.”

“Where you gonna get medicine three in the morning?”

“It’s just a loan. Please.”

“He’ll kill me,” he says, nodding at the sleeping form of Walker.

“He doesn’t have to know.”

She takes his face in her hands and rubs her shaking fingers tenderly along his cheeks.

“No, Momma. I’m sorry.”

“It’s the last time,” she says. “I swear on the Bible.”

“Momma, don’t do this to me.”

“I’ll get a job tomorrow.”

The whites of her eyes, large and beseeching. A terrible need in the quake of her fingers. She looks at him as if he could crush her, snap her, dissolve her, create her.

“Please,” she says, putting her hands close to the whirling blade of an electric fan, no cover on the fan. “I’m begging you. Please.”

She pulls her hands back from the fan at the last minute and then she hangs her head, closes her lips, purses her mouth.