Colum McCann - Songdogs

When he finished the first one he gave me a thumbs-up. ‘That’ll do,’ he said, ‘we’ll see if the bastard can resist this.’ He walked around the barn for a while, the coat on, strutting around, sniffing at the air, wiping his hands.

He hummed a tune, rubbing the air against his lips. Sometimes he stopped to place the feathers in his mouth, or asked me to wipe bits of glue from the fly, or catch a piece of waxed thread coming through a loop, pick up dropped pieces from the floor, clip and taper, wind some floss around the shank. He pursed his lips into the melody again, the rise and fall of it around us as he showed me a few little tricks, how to tie in the tinsel tags, merge the colours into one another, make the head of the fly with black thread. Time moved with the rhythm of an insect wing — it struck me how a second of an insect’s life might be a decade of ours, the whole world shattered into prisms of vision, the concentrate of living, the vitality of each instant — and the old man could have been creating both the brevity and length of time. The hum became immutable so that I forgot it was there, sunk down into soundlessness.

It was evening when he finally stood up, put the last fly in his hat, donned it, said, ‘I’m fucken starving, young fella, come on, let’s go.’

He put the other flies in the tray and closed the lid. We went up to the house and there were midges out — he used to be able to dress up a midge, he said, but they’re too small and difficult for him nowadays.

I cooked some spaghetti and sauce. ‘Do I look bloody Italian?’ he said, but he ate it with relish, talked about flies, an assembly line of chatter coming from him. Told me that some old guy in Donegal a hundred years ago was the first to make colourful ones, butterflies, made himself a fortune doing it too. He used to put feathers in donkey piss so they wouldn’t lose their dye. Could tie them with one hand behind his back. Someone even brought him over to London to lecture on them. There was genius in making colours for dark water. My father rattled on, intermittently stopping for a cough or to blow his nose, the words flowing from him again. At one stage, over pasta falling from his fork, he pointed at me sternly: ‘Tell ya what though, the only mark of a good fly is when ya catch something. That’s the long and short of it. Ya can make pretty ones until the cows come home, but if ya don’t catch you’re just taking a lash in the wind.’

After the food we had a few cups of tea and his hands started a little bit of the tremens. Went up to the room, said he’d fish the big one tomorrow.

When I followed him up he was trying to tie himself another fly in bed, but he needed the vice, and he just laid the wooden tray down at the edge of the mattress.

The flowery sheets were drawn around him. He started hacking up into an old handkerchief, which he folded very precisely after each spit into it. Turned it over and rubbed along it with his fingers as if he were enclosing a very important letter. Mucus oozed out the side at one stage, and he opened the hanky and re-folded it, twirling up the edges. He seemed fettered in by the room, turning his eyes to both walls, the ceiling, and back to the walls again, which seem to have buckled under the weight of the house. I sat by the bed.

‘Did ya hear that?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘There was a knock on the door.’

‘No there wasn’t.’

‘Go down and see who’s at the bloody door,’ he said. ‘Maybe the postman again.’

‘At this hour?’

I went over to the window and lifted it, stuck my head out.

‘Nobody there.’

‘I could have sworn I heard someone,’ he said.

‘Nobody.’

‘Maybe it’s Mrs McCarthy,’ he said.

‘No, nobody.’

‘Go on down and check, for fucksake.’

A smell filled the room and I knew straight away why he had been trying to send me downstairs. The smell suffocated its way through the air, blocking out everything, the acridness of his breath, the unbathed effluvium of his body. He had some matches by his bed and he rolled over and struck one, coughed on it to blow it out, but I knew what he was doing, and even after the sulphur filtered off, the odour remained, hovered, mocked him with its pungency.

‘Leave me alone,’ he said suddenly.

He lay back in the bed with an almost theatrical gesture of labour, but I told him that I just wanted to sit there for a while. He gave a quick flick of his head as if bothered by a real insect this time, reached across, flipped on his bedside radio. It gave out a steady diet of foreign wars and dying. He cursed and turned it off, leaned into his handkerchief, brought up another ream. His forehead was wrinkled in pain, and he put his hand on mine and said, ‘Conor.’

I said: ‘Yeah, Dad?’

It’s the first time in years I’ve called him Dad, but he didn’t seem to notice.

‘That was a grand time, dressing the flies.’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

He shifted his body in bed and asked me for a smoke.

‘Don’t think you should.’

‘Look, I’m all right, okay? Haven’t had one all day. That’s a record.’

‘They’re killing ya.’

He coughed again: ‘Wonderful. Let them kill me so. They’re over there by the bedside table.’

I reached across but the packet was empty. He told me there were some downstairs, under the sink, he hides a few packets away for emergencies. Said to make sure to get the ones that were fresh, some of them had been down there since time immemorial and might crackle to the touch. I don’t know why, but I went down and got a packet, they were tucked way in at the back of the cupboard. When I came back upstairs he had propped himself up against the pillows — ‘Lovely, oh lovely, now you’re talking’ — and I turned one upside-down in the packet, the way he does for luck, handed him one. He never smokes with the wedding-ring hand, always keeps it in the right one, perched between his fingers.

‘Sure, a puff now and then does nobody any harm.’

I waited until he had finished, in case he fell asleep and brought the house down with him, another fire, another echo. He pushed himself back against the bed and I heard him letting go again, but I pretended nothing had happened.

‘I’ll get Doctor Moloney out tomorrow morning,’ I said.

‘You will not.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s Sunday tomorrow and, besides, I won’t have anyone shoving anything up me rectum.’

I laughed.

‘What’s so funny?’ he asked.

‘Oh, nothing really.’

‘I heard they do that in San Francisco these days,’ he said.

I was a little startled and thought for a moment of Cici in her whitewhite city. ‘Do what?’ I said.

‘Shove strange things up beyond.’

‘What d’ya mean?’

‘Gerbils and the like.’

He chugged on the cigarette. ‘They said it on the TV. I was up at all hours one night, watching.’

‘You watch TV these days?’

He took a moment to reply, held his hand to his temple, scratched the bald spot. ‘Times have changed.’

‘You used to hate it.’

‘Every now and then in the winter.’ He scrunched up his eyebrows.

‘How about a glass of hot whiskey to make you sleep?’

‘Nah,’ he said, ‘I’m content with this,’ dropping the ash into the cup of his hand, then letting it fall out on the floor.

I stubbed the butt end out for him and, just before he lay over to sleep, he sat up and leaned his head against my shoulder. I moved in closer to him, put my hand at the back of his head. When he pulled back from my shoulder there was a little bit of phlegm on my t-shirt. I didn’t want to move, but he saw it and, using the handkerchief, he started to wipe if off.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he said, ‘ah, Jesus.’