Colum McCann - Songdogs

He rolled over to the far side of the bed, pretending he was sleeping. I picked up the wooden tray with all the flies in it, worked away at one of my own for an hour or so, trying to wind some thread on the shank, but couldn’t find the knack, kept dropping the damn thing. It seemed impossible, so finely tuned and delicate. I looked at the flies he had made during the day. They lay there in waiting, ready to burst into flight, and I took two small chatterer wings and flipped them together between my fingers as he dozed off.

He woke early this morning, rummaging around before the sun rose. Heard him as he opened up his window, spat down into the grass, went to the bathroom and pissed in the sink. I went downstairs after him and he gave me a nod.

‘How ya feeling?’

‘Like a million dollars,’ he said. ‘Look.’

He had the tray out open on the kitchen table and he was admiring one of the flies in particular. ‘Isn’t that a beauty?’

Jazz bucked from the radio and he moved over to fiddle with the dial, fine-tuning it. He pecked rhythmically at the air with his head. Hair stuck out where he had been sleeping on it. He ate a little cereal, some toast with jam, said he felt great for fishing today. Reached for the fly once more, held it up. ‘You and me both,’ he said. I thought he was asking me if I wanted to go fishing with him, but then I realised he wasn’t talking to me at all, that he wanted to be on his own, him and his fly, so I let him be.

He wore a baggy green crew-neck jumper and a fat red tie knotted up to his neck, mashing up over the top of the sweater. His head looked skeletal above it.

‘All dressed up?’

‘Yeah,’ he said.

He gave me a shrug.

Before he left for the river I asked him — for a bit of a joke really — if he was going to go to mass, that Mrs McCarthy might be expecting him, down there in her rosary beads and headscarf. But he shook his head sharply and all he said was: ‘The Lord’s my shepherd, I shall not want him.’

We stood at the door and I told him that I’ve never been much of a man for mass, either. A bit too much like a spiritual suppository. He cocked his head sideways in agreement, opened the door handle, turned around to face me, looked at the rods, switched them back and forth, touched the inside lining of his jacket where he had placed one or two of the new flies. He reached out to shake my hand, then drew it away quietly before I had a chance to shake. I was going to ask him why he wanted to do that, but he just turned away. He picked up the rods and left, shuffling slowly through the yard.

It was strange the way he walked, stopping every few yards to catch his breath, hitching the back of his grey trousers, shuffling along, contemplating the sky as if he might try to reach up and shake its hand, too. I just went outside and sat on Mam’s wall and celebrated the lack of rain — it was a beautiful bright morning.

* * *

Lord, I remember. Mornings back then, in the mid-seventies, before it all tumbled down around them.

Mam was building the low stone wall along the lane. She wore a yellow rain jacket, her silver hair woven back into a braid that touched the small of her back. She would kneel down at the half-built wall as if in prayer, sometimes singing a bit of a Mexican song. The wall wasn’t very well built, but it broke the land in a splendid way. Holes in it like rheumy eyes staring out at the fields. It threatened with topple — because she was always failing in one way or another, making it too high in places, too low in others, a little lopsided, a touch drunk. But she loved the building of it. She would start work when breakfast was finished, shortly after the morning swim. She stood and watched as my father and I fought the current, but even then you could tell she was itching to get started. Long thin fingers cracked against one another. As soon as we emerged from the water, she’d put her hand on my lower back and hustle me up to the kitchen, jogging alongside me, leaving the old man there. As I ate she pulled on her blue garden gloves and, just before my father breezed his way into the kitchen with his head wrapped in a towel, she’d lean to me and whisper: ‘Now, m’ijo, I will begin.’

The wall ran two hundred yards from the house to the main road. It was anywhere from two to four feet high, serpentine, almost coiling by the time it reached the road, as if she wanted to extend it further and further, but could only make it loop into itself. It looked like an ancient set of grey teeth. Birds sometimes nestled in the gaps between the stones. Mam was forever dismantling sections, putting it back together again, replacing larger stones with smaller ones, juggling, shuffling. Men rode past on bicycles and hailed her with a giant ‘Senorita,’ and she quickly corrected them. ‘ Señora! ’ she’d shout. They’d wink: ‘Whatever you say, Missus Lyons.’ She’d bend down to the wall again, cramming in a flat rock, or chiselling the side of a sharp stone. She covered her eyes with a brown arm so sparks didn’t jump up at her when she worked. At lunchtime the men would stop again, and instruct her on the building of the wall. She’d make them cups of tea in large white mugs, listen closely, nod her head, braids swinging, then wave them off and continue as before, stubbornly, steadfastly. It was her wall. It belonged solely to her. She made it the way she saw fit.

She spat when working — a continuation of the habit she had picked up working with the chickens in Mexico, when dust got in every pore.

The wall made some sort of crease in her boredom — there wasn’t much else for her to do, the washing fluttering out over the bog, dishes piling up in the sink, ham and cheese sandwiches to be made for my school lunchbox. She was in her late forties by then. The world was growing older. The wall helped her whittle away the days until she could return to Mexico. They argued a lot, she and the old man. They stood in the kitchen and waved their arms, pointing fingers at each other. Shouts rang around the house. Sometimes he thumped a fist into the cupboard — a little row of indentations appeared like puckered stabwounds in the wood. He saw no use for the wall — except as a place to crouch down to light a cigarette, or to take a quick clandestine piss. Maybe they were still in love, but it was a different quality of love than I imagine they had in the beginning — a pathic love, a brusque love, no magic there. When he was away on photographic jobs, a great grey silence descended around the house, and Mam sat me down and told me things. If she began in her native tongue, which I didn’t understand, she’d reach up to her grey hair and sweep it back, begin again in English. Bits and pieces of stories that began to mesh and merge for me, stories told to a child in a childish way, and Mexico became a country just down the road.

In the kitchen she scrubbed pots and pans, watched the passing of the world through the window. Cars trundled by, women in headscarfs on their way to coffee mornings, the postman’s van eddying past without stopping, herds of cattle driven along with sticks.

Her only friend was Mrs O’Leary. Mam went to her pub a few afternoons a week — it was a ship-pictured pub, old and creaky at the joints, much like its customers. Sometimes, in the summer months, she took me along. Mrs O’Leary kept chickens out the back, about a dozen of them pecking around. And Mrs O’Leary was not unlike an old chicken herself — with a great red face, a long beak of a chin and a wizened wattle abandoned underneath it. She must have been eighty years to heaven at that stage, a gigantic woman in chalcedony-coloured dresses, huge billows of breasts, a deep voice, always on the verge of a laugh. But her eyes were giving way, so that she could hardly recognise the labels of bottles anymore, sometimes mistaking Jameson’s for Paddy’s, Bushmills for Irish Mist, causing an uproar of universal sorrow among the men who stuck to whiskeys like limpets to sea-rocks. She couldn’t see the clock moving on the wall, walked into doorframes, could only read the headlines of the Irish Press, which served well for moppinig up brown spills on the concrete floor. What devastated Mrs O’Leary most was that she could hardly tell the sex of a newborn chicken anymore — a skill that required the eyes of a hawk, the patience of years, an awareness of the whimsical vicissitudes of nature. She sauntered up to our house one summer afternoon and said to Mam: ‘I hear you have a way with the nether regions,’ and, after a moment’s explanation, they both burst out laughing.