Colum McCann - Songdogs

‘I’ll get the hairdryer,’ I said.

‘You won’t catch me using that fucken thing,’ he muttered, ‘no bloody way.’

I closed the door to let him take off his togs and scrub himself down. I sat down on the top of the stairs. ‘The river, Dad?’ I said from outside, but he mustn’t have heard me, the bathwater gurgling down the drain.

* * *

Water is what we are made of. It has its own solitude. A storm blew in and the search was called off for a few hours. The rain filled the ditches with flow, hammered down on the roof, made small lakes in the roads, the lane impassable. The old man stayed outside and watched as it rifled down. Doubt sunk itself into the searchers, and the rumours were again rife. She had gone to Chile, where she had fallen in love with a military dictator. She had been seen in Dublin with nasturtiums behind her ears. She had taken a boat out into the storm. She was in the mental hospital in Castlebar, behind the big yawning gates. But for me she was home where she belonged — and a letter would come for me one morning.

One of the searchers, a young girl, handed me a gold earring, told me it was for luck and I believed her, went home with it shoved into a jacket pocket.

‘She’s just disappeared for a few days,’ my father said. He slept on the floor outside my room that night, and for the next eighteen months, stories coming from him each evening, like hallucinogenic prayers, magnificent dreamscapes, while I — brutally young — waited for a knock on the door, twirling a gold ring in my hand. It was a couple of years later that I came home from school wearing the earring. He had begun his fishing then, every day he would go down to the river. ‘Take that piece of shite from your ear,’ he said to me on the riverbank, ‘or I’ll give ya what-for and no doubt about it.’

‘Ask my bollocks,’ I said. From then on, that was one of the few things I ever said to him.

* * *

After he towel-dried his hair he pulled on two jumpers, the warmed trousers and the overcoat. Even got some clean wool socks. He stretched himself out and gave a sniff at the air. ‘Jaysus, haven’t smelled this good in years.’

He told me that the morning midges and other insects are attracted to sweet fragrances, that if he went outside he’d be besieged after the amount of shampoo I had put in his hair. But we went out anyway into the dawn and I didn’t notice any more insects than usual. They made their normal congregations around the bushes, and a few of them hovered around us, grey smudges. A drizzle broke, stopped, fell again.

‘See, I told ya,’ he said as he attempted to clap his hands on a few of the midges in the air.

We shifted our way around the farmyard and he made a crack about the wheelbarrow and pushing him around in it. Even gave a little kick at its wheel, a swipe that missed. I noticed the flap of one of his wellingtons was coming undone and told him about the old man in Mexico whom I had seen dance, in his collarless shirt and his holey shoes. ‘Nothing better than an old man for dancing,’ he said as he shuffled over the courtyard towards the pathway. We went out beyond the yard. Clouds were out, swifts following them. A breeze blew over our heads. It was too early for the factory smell. He negotiated his way over the stile and through the gap in the bushes down towards the water. The river was as dead as ever.

I tucked my jacket in under me and took a place at the edge of the riverbank. He took to a fit of coughing in the lawn chair, then stood up and started collecting a few cigarette butts that we had missed yesterday. I started helping him, put two butt ends in my jacket pocket. I was standing close to him when his arms flew out.

‘Look at that!’ he shouted, ‘Look!’

I looked around and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a ripple.

But I know what he saw. Caught in mid-twist in the air, the flash of belly shining, contorted and unchoreographed in its spin, reaching out over the surface so the skips were alight in the air around it, fins tucked in, tail in a whisk throwing off droplets, making a massive zigzag of itself, three feet over the surface, mouth open to gulp air, eyes huge and bulbous, a fringe of water around it — place and motion caught together, as in one of the old photos — reaching up, the whole surface of the water in a frenzy beneath it, so that the flow jiggled and freed itself from its home within the reeds, went down towards the sea, the grass itself bending to the movement, until his salmon hit a zenith and it retreated headfirst into the water with a magical sound, a chorus of plops, erupting like weather, and the water knew something about itself and became all at once quiet and there was joy there, I felt it, marvellous, unyielding, and he leaned his shoulder against me and said: ‘Fucken hell, amazing, wasn’t it?’

He slapped me on the back and asked me to go to the house and get his fishing rod and the flies, which I did. I opened the wooden box and brought him the colourful one he had made the other day. As I came back down, he was nodding away on the riverbank, clapping his hands together and laughing and shouting at the magnificence of his fish. I walked up to him with the rod and said to myself, and to the swifts that flew around, and to the midges that they fed on, and to the clouds that were sauntering along, I said: Let this joy last itself into the night.

He tied the fly on. He was whispering, ‘Did ya see it, son?’

I looked over and said to him: ‘Yeah, I saw it.’

He gave a grin, fixed the fly, adjusted the reel, stood away from me, just a few feet, spun out some line, caressed the length of the rod, all the time whistling through his teeth as he whipped the rod back and forth above his head, fluidity to it, the swish and swerve, casting away as if there was no tomorrow, none at all, just casting away with all his might.