Colum McCann - Songdogs

When the old man came back that night, I’m sure they climbed the stepladder and lay down to sleep, as usual, arms reaching around one another. An owl maybe hooting in the trees, dropping balls of hairy scat on to the world, like a gift.

Delhart’s baby came the next week.

The ranger and my father had been sitting in the bar, their clothes smothered with the smell of smoke, when Eliza came in. She was in her early twenties, but strands of white already flicked through her hair, falling out of its braids. She had a face that looked like it had been fashioned from some brown bank of soil. Her dress was wet where the water had broken, but she carried herself well. The barman moved from behind the counter to swat her away as if she were a fly, but Delhart rose and moved to Eliza. She clenched her teeth, all wild arms and acrimony: ‘I want you to see what it’s like,’ she said. Eliza folded over and clutched at her stomach. They were the first words that anyone had ever heard from her. Delhart pushed the bartender aside and took her into a backroom, hitched her dress around her waist.

The old man ran out to find the doctor, but he was off on another call — a boy had burnt the palm of his hand in a smouldering field while searching for snakes.

When my father returned, Eliza’s teeth crunched down on a very thick piece of cardboard. Beads of sweat were erupting from her brow. A smudge of blood stained Delhart’s arm, the baby already halfway into the world, guided now by four old women, who fretted and coaxed. ‘You men know nothing!’ My father went outside to wait, where the bartender smiled deliriously — news of the birth had spread and dozens of people had gathered in the bar, watching the grey snow on a television screen. A hum drifted around the bar, speculation about whether Delhart was the father at all. Some women were hoping the baby would look like him — they muttered that there were too many brown-skinned people in the town already.

When the baby boy was born he was dark under the blood, dark as Eliza’s neck, coal-coloured hair scattered on his head. One of the women asked Eliza what she would call him. ‘Kutch,’ she said, almost spitting the word out. It meant ‘dark one’ in her own language. Delhart carried the baby out into the bar, wrapped in towels, as if he were some sort of godsend, but Eliza called the ranger back, said she wanted him to have nothing to do with the baby, she would raise him on her own — if Delhart ever came to her cabin he would end up like the grizzly that had stumbled into town at the beginning of summer. In the background, word filtered from a radio that lightning had hit one of the northern ridges and that there might be new, even more ferocious fires the next day. There weren’t any more fires. Clouds came, and for the next week rain teased intermittently, the clouds sat above the mountains like strange horses. But they were spooked by the need and they shrugged and meandered on north towards Canada. From their lookout, Cici and Mam watched insects flicker around rocks, birds gather on trees, their southern flight imminent. Animals howled from a distance and at times Cici yammered back at them.

She had heard about Delhart’s baby and shrugged as if tossing off a blanket. ‘I still don’t give a shit.’ But her poetry was full of births — seeds bursting from pods, scattering on a Wyoming wind, a black bear in the forest, hysterical for her cubs, two golden eagles spiralling downwards while mating on the air. Rolls of paper gathered on the lookout floor. Mam made her cups of tea and sometimes they went walking, put their arms around one another’s waists, sang to keep the bears away. Cici taught her what she knew of weather patterns in the area, the names of certain clouds in English, the white filmy cirrus, stratus, the flat-based cumulus, the cumulonimbus which would, one day soon, pile precipitation down on them and finish their summer. Mam learned how to gauge the relative humidity. She sometimes chatted on the radio with the other operators.

‘This is gonna be my last summer here,’ said Cici, on one of their walks.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know, maybe go back to San Fran.’

My father came up the mountain, drunk, breathless. He’d decided he would publish a book of that summer’s photos, and said maybe he’d include a poem of Cici’s. Cici said nothing. That night he drank a jug of wine on his own, and in his imagination he was in New York City, where he wore a big black overcoat and a lopsided beret to a publishing party where the only fires were the ones under trays of hors-d’œuvres, keeping them warm. He got drunk late into the night, and read, for the first time, Cici’s poems. The old man never said a word about her poetry again — they were worlds apart, he and Cici. He razored the beard off his cheeks, ran a comb through his hair, looked down the mountain, wondered where he and Mam would go.

Young Miguel’s maps might have flashed through his mind. The smell of clay. All those jagged edges for cities.

They ended up waiting for the rain, all three of them together. In the evening they watched the fires flickering in the east, and in the morning they stood rooted to their shadows and watched the play of dark clouds across the valleys. From the top of the mountain, they could see all the way across to Idaho. My father took pictures of the tower, the radio, the cobweb in the corner, the aggregation of daddy longlegs that throbbed on the eastern side of the building, curious rhythmic pulsations that made them look like a single giant organism, as if they were warding off some predator. There were pictures of the water trough, the trees, their camp, his bicycle leaning against a tree. My mother packed their bags. They had no real idea where they might end up next, but they had to go somewhere, in a few months the whole of their summer would be covered in snow. They gazed at the clouds fattening in the sky, puffed up like so many swollen chests. Outrider billows blew across, promising squalls and cataracts and downpours. When the rain eventually came it was the hardest, purest, greyest, most beautiful rain any of them had ever felt in their lives. It whipped in massive sheets across the world that leaned towards autumn and caused the fires to smoulder and collected in rivulets and slammed against berries and dripped from trees and caused seeds to burst and melted the salt blocks and pocketed the brightness and puddled the dry, dry ground. All three of them stood outside the tower, and they let the rain drive itself refreshingly into their faces. Afterwards the clouds lightened and the air seemed clean enough up there to cause nose bleeds.

* * *

Mrs McCarthy came over with food for him this afternoon. Roast spuds and a big breast of chicken. Don’t know what drives her to bring the odd dinner to the old man — nobody else in town could care less. Some sort of Christian charity, I suppose. She was a bit surprised to see me, but she brightened up soon enough and asked me if I was going to mass on Sunday. Gave her a bit of a wink and told her I’d be there the following week, come rain, hail, or shine.

The old man surprised me when he stood up and took the plate from Mrs McCarthy, announced with a flourish of his hand: ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a farmer’s arse through a hedge!’

He sat in the big chair and the gravy tumbled down his chin. Later, Mrs McCarthy came back grinning and brought a plate for me too.

‘God bless ya,’ she said to me, looking around the kitchen, ‘I see you’ve done a spot of cleaning for him.’

He went fishing until nightfall, six hours of ferocious stupidity, for nothing this time, not a bite. It was cold when he came in and went up to his bedroom, said he didn’t want to fall asleep in the chair, it’s giving him a backache, there’s a draft coming through the window. I made him a hot whiskey, lots of sugar, but no cloves in the cupboard. Brought the whiskey up on the old silver tray, draped a white towel over my arm for a joke, swished my way through the door, shouting ‘Room Service!’ and he was squatted down, by the dressing table, naked, bent over a handheld mirror, examining something on his backside. His legs came down, spindle-like. There was a small chain of blood on the inside of his buttocks, dried there. He was staring at it and he had a washcloth in his hand, about to wipe the blood away.