Colum McCann: Songdogs

He must have been a curious sight in his belted blue coat, my father, eyes very dark, a history of mischief and sadness already written in them.

At the age of eleven, when he was told the story of his mother, he renamed himself Michael Lyons, a name that was common among many of the locals, a name that could have belonged to his own father. He stood on the edge of the cliff in his short trousers and spat out over the ocean to soak Britain with phlegm for the pointlessness of his father’s death. At the time he didn’t realise that his spit was aimed westward — at Mexico, at San Francisco, at Wyoming, at New York — where in later years it would truly land.

The ladies came along the seaboard and each took one of his hands, swinging him home between them — a chairoplane of freckles, kicking small brown shoes up into the air.

In the spring of 1934 the old Protestant ladies decided to take a boat out to bring some food to islanders across the bay. My father wasn’t with them — he was out slingshotting curlews in the bogs, his body awkward now with adolescence. The sun was pouring down turmeric over the perfectly calm water. The ladies stepped off the dock into a currach, white parasols above their heads. They began to row, the oars creating concentric ripples on the sea, the dock receding from them. Nobody knew what happened next — one of the ladies, Loyola, had been a skilled boatwoman by all accounts — but maybe she leaned over to look at a porpoise, or a floating shoe, or a starfish, or a discarded bottle, then tumbled in. Maybe her friend went after her in a fit of pure love, the parasol taking flight, a grey-haired woman in a white lace dress, with her arms outstretched, breaking the surface of the blueness with a dive. In the water they might have suddenly looked at one another and remembered the essential fact that neither of them could swim. The parasol drifted on the water’s surface and I imagine the two ladies going down together to the ocean floor, holding hands, regretting that the boy couldn’t join them in the seaweed.

Their bodies were found washed up on the strand, with seals barking loudly by some nearby rocks.

The Protestant ladies were buried in a quiet graveyard near where the river tumbled into the sea. In their will they left my father everything they owned — the house, the land, the china, the sad toothbrushes staring him down from a porcelain cup. He was sixteen years old and he sat at a giant mahogany table in the living room, contemplating the thud of empty house around him. Gardeners and housekeepers came by to do their work, rapping at the brass knocker on the door. They whisked their caps off and nodded gravely to him when he opened up. He gave them their wages, but asked them not to come back, said he would do the chores himself, that he’d continue to pay them every week from the inheritance. They moved down the gravel driveway, casting suspicious glances backwards. Grass began to grow long over croquet hoops on the lawn. Mallets were lost under leaves. Curtains were left open to shafts of sunlight, discolouring the furniture. My father’s shirts and vests carpeted the corridors. He started sleeping outside, on the verandah, too many spectral voices in the upstairs rooms. The house seemed alien to him, but by day he wandered around it, opening drawers, tapping walls, scrawling ‘Michael’ in the dirt on the windowpanes.

It was a camera that woke him. He found it in a large red box under one of the beds, forgotten. It had belonged to Loyola, but she had never mentioned it to him. Opening the silver snaps, a pandora of dust arose around him, and he lifted the parts out on to the bed. It was an old model with a dickybird hood, glass plates in perfect order, wooden legs sturdy, lens unscratched. A hand-scrawled note left instructions. He spent hours putting it together and carried it downstairs, stepping along the corridor of scattered clothes, out to the front lawn. He hailed the sky with his new discovery, roaming around the grounds, practising, looking at the long grass through a box-view, opening and closing the shutter, wiping every fleck of dust from the body, reinforcing the tripod legs with wedges of wood. He called the camera ‘Loyola’ and at night he carried it to the verandah, stared at it through his insomnia. He didn’t know it then, but the camera would burst him out on to the world, give him something to cling to, fulminate a belief in him in the power of light, the necessity of image, the possibility of freezing time.

He ordered more glass plates and developing equipment from Dublin, built a makeshift darkroom at the end of the lawn, took the camera apart once a week, cleaned it with the flap ends of white shirts, put it back together again meticulously, polished it with a soft rag dipped in diluted vinegar, careful to rub the cloth in one direction, to avoid staining. In the cold winter months he stuffed clothes and old towels in the box to keep the equipment from freezing. During summer he put it in the shadows and draped it with a large white tablecloth.

I can imagine my father back in the thirties, roaming around, darting his head in and out, like a swallow, from the black hood of the camera. He carried it along dark roads built eighty years before, by famished men from the poorhouses. They were narrow roads, bits of sea-blown spray landing on them, winding drunkenly away from the cliffs towards the mountains. And drunken men walked along them, sometimes rows of men, like weeds in motion through the decade of the Great Depression. Rain soaked the soil, battered the land, flung rainbows over the bay. Storms squalled across the water, sometimes so strong that they carried slates and beams and occasionally the whole roofs of houses through the air.

His friend, Manley, had a motorbike that my father used to borrow. Leaning the Triumph around tight corners, along piers and through village greens, a scarf flying out at the back of his neck, my old man became famous locally.

Along the backroads of Mayo he caught black and white images of old women head-bent on the way to mass; flowers reaching up above black puddles; sheep huddled in the ruined shells of old cottages; packets of cornflakes fading in the windows of shops; fishermen down by the docksides warming their hands over oil drums; a middle-aged tinker resting outside an old caravan, spreadeagled, plucking at the crotch of his pants. It was a world that had seldom seen a lens of any sort, and my father moved around it, taller now, his body filling out, sleeves rolled up, drama in the exhibition of himself. The quiff of hair bounced around on his forehead. Veins rose, eskers on the back of his hand, blue and well defined. He could cock his arm and dance an easy muscle. Girls outside the dancehall watched him and wondered.

The owner of the dancehall — a man with a face like a hagfish — wouldn’t allow any cameras inside. Still, my father was quite content to hang around, smoking, waiting for Manley to emerge, looking for opportunities to use Loyola. Eighteen years old, and the world back then was a fabulous place to him. He could have bitten off pieces of the universe and spat them on a big glass photographic plate. Outside the dancehall he sometimes took pictures of young women smoking for the first time, new hats cocked sideways, daring lipstick smudged upwards to thicken their lips. Sometimes the girls would try to get him to come in and dance, but it didn’t interest him, dancing, unless he could take a picture of it.

Once he got caught trying to take photographs of the church housekeeper in the outhouse behind the priest’s place. The door was left open, revealing the housekeeper with her skirt hitched high around her hips and her knees ajar. My father had hidden in a clump of bushes but didn’t have time to take a single picture. The priest, a former hurley player, discovered him and knocked him to the ground with a single roundhouse, opened the back of the camera, held the glass plates to the light as if reading the holy scrolls. He gave a thunderous sermon the next week, passages from the Old Testament about graven images, feverish words flying around the pews. My old man slouched at the back of the church with his hat on. He tipped his hat a little when worshippers went up for the Eucharist. From then on, there was a dark, but almost heroic shadow following him in town. A swagger out the door of the church, a bit of spit aimed at the sky with missionary zeal, a bravura in the sway of his shoulders as he walked.