Colum McCann - Songdogs

* * *

He came back from the river for lunch and didn’t eat a single thing, again. Told him that he’s just going to fade away.

‘Jaysus, now there’s an idea,’ he said.

He walked out to the grey-stone firepit to burn the rubbish, carrying one Spar bag, full to the brim with bread crusts and tea bags and hardly anything else. He says it’s two weeks’ worth of rubbish. He has this curious bend to him as he walks, looks hugely lopsided. The wind was raving and he had his collar pulled up around his neck. I went outside to help him, but he was already at the pit, dumping the bags out, the crusts falling, thick brown shafts into the ash. I came up behind him.

‘Can I give ya a hand?’

He turned to me: ‘What are ya doing out without a coat on, for fucksake? You’ll catch your bloody death.’

I reached down to pick up the red petrol can at the side of the firepit and unscrewed the top, but he took it from me. ‘Right now, I can do it on my own.’ He sprinkled petrol over the rubbish, took out an old army Zippo from his pocket, hunkered down, lit the top of a long piece of straw, held it out. The fire whooshed up momentarily, a sucking updraft, died down.

‘Go on so, I’m grand,’ he said, looking down at the flames as if he might stand there for days, incalculably patient.

No point in pissing him off, so I ambled back to the house, put the kettle on, and watched from the living room, where he had another fire lit. His photos of Mam in Mexico are still around, although they look tired now, a binge of them around the room. The painting job that we once did has faded.

I dragged a chair to the window, propped my elbows on the big high armrests, watching him in the farmyard. When he was done with the burning he turned to come back from the pit, and still the whole of his body was leaning over, walking at an angle, paying some sort of homage to the ground. He shuffled back along the little muddy trail, stopped and scratched at his head, then moved his fingers curiously along his right cheek as if trying to ruddy it, walked over to the wheelbarrow. For a moment he took hold of the handles and lifted it. He shoved the wheelbarrow forward a couple of feet as if it were an empty flying seat at some carnival, but it ground itself down into a hole in the middle of the yard, let out a few sparks, stopped. Scrunched up his lips and let out a glob of spit from the side of his mouth. Took his glasses off, had a look at his watch, wound it, glanced back at the house. I gave him a wave but he didn’t respond, even with the glasses back on. Perhaps the light was glinting on the window, but I was sure he couldn’t see me — most likely his eyes are on their way, too. Bodies fall like rain at that age — drops collide into one another.

His mouth was drawn downwards across the falling. He looks closer to his nineties than he does to his seventies.

He stopped for a moment and lit up — it’s not me who’ll catch my death at all. In the living room, even with the waft of peat, it smelled musty and dank, the tobacco having sunk into the wood. I took all the ashtrays out to the bin and dumped them, cleaned them with a rag. Got them shiny and black. Maybe this way he’ll see how much he smokes — used to be he only took a few drags from each one, put it out, but now they’re all smoked down to the quick, dark around the filters. They’ll whisk him away before he knows it, sucked up on the ember updraft of himself. I’ve heard it’s more difficult than going cold turkey. Not long after leaving Ireland, I met an Algerian in one of the cheap hotels on Bedford Street in London. He was trying to kick cocaine. He had set up a dartboard in his next-door room to occupy himself. But one afternoon he sold the dartboard for a line of coke that he did in the public toilets in Victoria Station. Even paid his tenpence to get in and snort it. Afterwards he had nothing left and he locked himself away in the room, where I could hear him scratching at the walls, shouting for another line of coke and a cigarette.

Those days of mine in London were long and grey. Eighteen years old, having just left home. In a train station, in black drainpipe trousers and a shirt of tentative blue, I pondered my dual heritage, the Irish in me, the Mexican. An explosion of blood made the shape of a flower around my nose, where I had failed to make a place for a small silver stud. I had wanted to announce my manhood with a nose-ring. An old landlady brought me to a bathroom to put Dettol on the side of my face where the blood had strayed, saying: ‘You hacked your bloody face, son, what in the world are ya doing?’ And me thinking it could have been my own mother tentatively dabbing a cotton ball against my nose. I moved through London as if wounded, working on building sites where they changed my name to Paddy. A plethora of paddies in knitted hats and construction belts moving their way around scaffolding. I checked in and out of small rooms all over the city. Walked around with a skin of doubt — dark, but with a field of freckles across the cheekbones. A childish voice inside me asking: ‘Who the hell are you anyway?’ In bookshops on Charing Cross Road I looked at guidebooks to Mexico, wondering if my mother might step out from the pages and appear to me, maybe a sarape around her, maybe standing under a clothesline, fluttering her thinness out towards the Chihuahuan desert. In those bookshops — with the smell of words, the promise of existing in another place, the feet moving by me as I sat lotus-legged on the floor, the clerks staring me down from the register — I decided that I would make my trip to my mother’s country, find her, make her exist for me again.

And now I wonder what the old man remembers about her these days. Maybe nothing. Maybe silence has cured him of memory. Maybe there’s an absolute vacuum in the anathema of age.

The kettle gave out a high whistle from the kitchen. When I went outside to tell him that the tea was ready he had his back to me — ‘tea’s growing cold!’ — but he didn’t hear me at all, his shadow sliding away from the wheelbarrow, lengthening across the yard, folding against the aluminum siding of the barn. He looked fairly content as he shuffled over to the side door and bent down, started feeding something to the cat. The cat was running around and around his feet like something possessed. He reached out every now and then and grabbed it by the tail, lit himself a cigarette which chugged away from his mouth. A drizzle came down upon him from some rat-grey clouds.

I went up behind him and touched him on the shoulder and he whipped around, startled. It was as if he had forgotten I was there. The cigarette dropped from his mouth.

‘Tea’s ready,’ I said.

‘Ya put me heart in me mouth.’

‘I looked for some biscuits but I couldn’t find any.’

‘Haven’t had a biscuit in a while.’

‘I’ll go shopping tomorrow.’

‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘Sounds like a bargain to me.’

He bent down to try to pick the cigarette up from the ground but his fingers couldn’t quite get it. I reached for it, but his boot crunched it first, ploughed it into the ground.

‘I need some smokes too, Conor.’

‘No you don’t.’

‘Come off it, now. Don’t be doing that to me.’

‘What?’

‘I love the odd smoke,’ he said.

We were quiet for a while, then he rubbed his hands together: ‘You’re getting like Mrs McCarthy for crissake.’

I reached my hands down into my pockets, felt the breeze lisp its way into me: ‘Well, come on so, the tea’ll be fit to dance on.’

‘Just a minute,’ he said, catching the cat’s tail. ‘This little bastard’s hungrier than any I’ve seen before.’

* * *

The town was thin. Dogs and cats were bony. Burros exposed brown racks of ribs as they nudged in along ancient paths. On dusty streets clothes were hung from windows, taking siestas in the sun — the clothes were sparse and worn, bits at the elbows rubbed away, knees vanished or threadbare. Even the vultures that rode the thermals above were lean. They made spirals in the air, their wings beating sparsely against the heat, looking down on the gauntness beneath them, comic black kites with red-raw beaks. Boys aimed up at the vultures with slingshots, tried to keep them in the air, exhaust them. But they flew on, generation giving way to generation, leanness to leanness.