Colum McCann - Songdogs

Cici tugs hard on the joint.

‘That’s lovely,’ she says, and suddenly a serpentine sweep of roads rises up in her mind, away from here. Her hands are shaking a little. ‘I’m very happy for you.’ She goes outside and sits on the step. Mam stays in the living room. The baby’s been there for three months. I can imagine her running her hands very lovingly over her stomach, talking to the child that hasn’t even begun to move within her yet, waiting for the faint soothing thump of life against the wall of her womb. When Cici comes inside, her face flushed, she finds Mam in the kitchen, making bread.

‘Come with me.’

‘Michael will be back soon.’

‘He can come, too, man.’

‘I told you, I am going to have a baby.’

‘You want a baby to grow up in this shit?’ Cici’s arms fly towards the window.

‘No.’

‘Then, come on.’

‘Later I will ask to Michael.’

‘Aww, man.’

Mam watches from the window as Cici leaves that afternoon, the photograph tucked in her pocket. Cici carries her belongings in a grey duffle bag. Mam moves from the window, and maybe she turns on the television set to watch a famous game show, or maybe she kneads more dough, or maybe she stares at her hair in the mirror, thinking it could be the last she will see of Cici.

The baby follows Cici’s example — comes far too late, leaves way too early. On an evening of torpor, Mam loses the child. The old man is coming back from the roofs. He carries an apple tart up the stairs of the apartment, the smell wafting around him. He is happy, for once, with his day’s work. When he opens the door she is lying in a pool of blood on the bathroom floor. He drops the apple tart. His feet slide in the blood. She is unconscious with her head slumped against the wall. He lifts her to her feet, whispering, Sweet Jesus, sweet Jesus. On the way down to the street a dark patch of red insinuates itself into the front of his shirt, where he carries her. He brings her to hospital, and the dead child propels them on to a year of misery. She comes home from the hospital, hand held to her belly. They don’t talk much. A lethargy hangs in the air. Some nights my father finds that she has disappeared from the apartment and he pulls on his belted overcoat to go searching, finds my mother down at the maternity ward of the hospital, staring in through the glass window at babies, with nurses trying to gently steer her away. She spends money on baby clothes. She carries a soother in her purse. Sometimes she is torn towards going to find Cici. Mam writes a letter to her friend: ‘Regretting is expensive, sometimes I wish I had gone with you.’

The old man stays on the roofs, but they both know that they will have to move on. And they do move on — towards the west of Ireland. He suggests that it will be a good place for Mam to recover, that there may still be some money left over in the bank, he can get a job easily there, he can take photographs, there is some land that was never sold. They can try again for a family. They will have a child, maybe two, maybe three — whatever she wants. After that, he says, they will make their home in Mexico.

‘Promise?’

‘I promise.’

‘Ireland is far.’

‘I know, love.’

‘We will be all right?’

‘Of course.’

‘And then we come back to Mexico?’

‘Of course.’

When they leave the street, the old man relishes the triumph of it. He sways his way down along the pavement with the suitcases in either hand. He has arranged for the taxi to meet them at the end of the street. There is more drama that way for the old man — walk the full length of the street.

He wears a grey tweed jacket in the airport, a white dog rose in the breast pocket, the hat devoid now of its rabbits’ feet. Mam has bought a brand-new strawberry dress. She is radiant on the airplane, a stewardess marvelling at her accent. They move onwards and backwards — always onwards and, for the first time backwards — to a place where some wisps of grey De Valera mist still hang, although it is the winter of 1966 and all over the country other mists are being dispersed. They have difficulty in Shannon because my mother doesn’t have a visa, but my father bribes the immigration official with a twenty-dollar bill. He is home free. He is walking gigantically again. A great swagger out through the airport, arms swinging, pushing the suitcases on a trolley with his foot. Mam beside him. They take a bus to Mayo. There’s some money left in the account, but no land, and they must take out a mortage to buy an old farmhouse — Guinness bottles among nettles in the garden, windows cracked in the shed, an old bathtub in the courtyard, wisteria growing upwards with the years. Mam settles down in much the same way as their new bathtub — a shiny anachronism. She is the dark-skinned one, the one the drunks in the town square call Senorita, the one who never cuts her hair even when it becomes long and brazenly silver. She wears a scarf over her head as she goes to mass in the red-brick church. Letters to Cici are returned, unopened. In America the war protests are in full flight, and Cici is rampant around the country with a flower on her cheek, elephant flares covering her sandals, hypodermic needles stuck blithely in her arm. But Mam knows nothing of this, and she waits for letters.

Mam lingers in the farmhouse, eyes to the bog, spending years this way, slow as Sundays, longing constantly for a child’s movement in her belly. I am to be born four years later, when she’s forty-two years old, and as a precautionary measure the doctors slice open her belly for a Caesarian section. The old man waits in the hospital corridors, gently tapping his heel on the floor, hat propped on his knee, bobbing.

* * *

An array of equipment neatly lined in front of him — silver tinsel, purple and golden floss, blue chatterer feathers, some yellow seal’s fur, a hot-orange hackle, tiny golden-pheasant feathers, some black thread, very black, riverblack. He pointed each one out to me, hand hovering over them. Most of it had arrived in the package this morning, from an angling shop in Dublin.

He told me that brighter flies work better in dark waters, that the salmon will rise at the sight of colours.

Curious thing, though, he said that salmon don’t eat when they’re in rivers, they’re just conditioned to respond — if you catch them they’ve nothing in their bellies. And when they leap it’s not out of any happiness, it’s just to move up fast water or to get rid of sea lice. But they’re clever bastards, he said — they know the real thing when they see it, and a badly made fly is about as good as a Hail Mary in an air raid.

I pulled up an old crate and sat down, the deep lengthy smell of him around me.

‘Ya don’t overdress it,’ he said, pointing at the hook, ‘otherwise it collects too much water. But a big fly means a big fish, it’s all about balance.’

He was having difficulty with a knot.

‘D’ya need some help there?’

‘Nah, I’m grand, I could do this with my eyes closed.’

He wound two small chatterer feathers back to back. ‘For the tail,’ he explained.

I noticed how much bigger his hands were than mine. They had stopped shaking and worked with precision. He reversed the hook in the vice and leaned down into it, sometimes with his glasses on, sometimes without, a bit frustrated. ‘Fucken hell’s bells,’ he said, ‘here,’ and he handed me a slim pair of scissors, got me to cut off some of the excess thread. ‘Get in here now, closer.’ I was surprised to see that he didn’t smoke at all.

He made the body of the insect, wound on a long slender feather, and then he worked on the throat and the wing, put some golden-pheasant feathers on each side. He stacked the hairs so they looked wing-like. ‘Ya give the fuckers as much life as possible,’ he said. I handed him the hackle pliers, the scissors, and the tweezers. He enumerated each one as we went along. He had a large darning needle stuck into a sherry-bottle cork for the bodkin. And a thimble made from an old lipstick container that must have belonged to Mam. Each time I handed him something he nodded up and down, wheezed, approximating a thanks. But the rest of the time his breathing was still and even, in full and splendid concentration at the making of the fly — it was turning out something like a miniature Indian headress, threads and feathers and tippets. I thought of Kutch and Eliza, maybe bringing one of the flies back to them as a present.