Colum McCann: Songdogs

Just before I came home to Ireland I saw my first coyotes. They were strung on a fencepost near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. An eruption of brown fur against a field of melting snow, their bodies hanging upside-down, tied to the post with orange twine. Two neat bullet-holes had pierced their flanks where brown merged white. They were foot-dry and rotten with stench. Muzzles and paws hung down in the grass and their mouths were open, as if about to howl.

The hanging was a rancher’s warning to other coyotes to stay away from the field. If they trotted nearby, a paw raised to the chest, an ear cocked to a sound, a tail held in motion, the rancher would bullet them back to where they came from. But coyotes aren’t as foolish as us — they don’t trespass where the dead have been. They move on and sing elsewhere.

I sat on my backpack, behind the hedge, where the old man couldn’t see me, and watched the slowness of the river and him.

Not even the river itself knew it was a river anymore. Wide and brown, with a few plastic bags sitting in the reeds, it no longer made a noise at its curves. A piece of Styrofoam was wrapped around one of the footbridge poles. Some oil boated lazily on the surface, throwing colours in the afternoon sun.

Yet still the old man was fishing away. The line rolled out, catching the light, and the fly landed softly. He flicked it around with his wrist for a minute, slumped his head when he finished each cast, reeled in the slack and rubbed at his forearm. After a while he went and sat in a red and white striped lawn chair under the branches of the old poplar tree. He turned his head in the direction of the hedge, didn’t see me. Leaning backwards in the chair, he started fiddling with the fly on the end of the line, put the hook and feathers in his mouth, blew on them, trying to fluff out the dressing. His overcoat hung in an anarchy around him, and his trousers rode up past the ankles of his green wellingtons. When he stood up to take the coat off I was shocked to see the lineament of his body — as thin as the reeds I used to make holy crosses with during February winters.

The afternoon wore on and he left the cork handle propped in lazily at his crotch, leaned down and spat on the ground, wiped some dribble off the bottom of his chin. Every now and then he tipped his hat upwards to the swifts that scissored in the sky, then stared at the line lying in the water, amongst the rubbish.

A long time ago, back in the seventies — before the meat factory came — he would bring me down in the morning and make me swim in the fast water, against the flow. He was a good swimmer, a strong body on him, powerful shoulders, the neck of a bull. Even in winter he’d climb into the water in his red togs, plough away, his arms making windmill motions. Wisps of wet hair stuck to his balding scalp. The current was strong enough to keep him stationary. Sometimes he could stay in one spot for an hour or two, just swimming. He’d let out big shouts while my mother stood on the riverbank and watched. She was dark-skinned, almost bog-coloured, like the land. Blue work gloves that migrated to her elbows. Bags under her eyes. She would stand and watch, sometimes waving, every now and then fumbling with the colourful flag of elastics that kept her silver hair together.

I stayed in the river by hanging on to the roots of the poplars. Seven years old, I could feel the tug in my armpits, the water skimming over my face, my body sweeping away. The old man kept moving his arms against the current. When he’d had enough he let himself be swept a little stretch downstream, to the riverbank curve. I’d let go of the root and be carried along after him. He’d reach down, catch me, drag me out by the waistband of my togs. We’d dress, shiver together on the muddy bank, my mother calling us up for breakfast. The old man would give a nod to the river. It was the law of water, he told me. It was bound to move things on.

But, watching him this afternoon, I thought that if he tried swimming nowadays he’d just float around like all that shit and rubbish in the reeds.

When evening fell the eastern sky was the colour of nicotine, merging into red in the west. A few thin clouds slashed along through it. He took out his cigarettes, tapping the bottom end of the box with his palm, opening the lid, flipping it upwards with his thumb, a studied patience in the movement. Reaching into his overcoat pocket he got some long kitchen matches. Even from a distance I could see that his hands were trembling, and he lit two matches before the cigarette took.

He blew the smoke up to the swifts, lifted the rod again. Ran his hands lovingly along the glass pole, flicked it back for one last cast. A pile-up of line hit the water noisily. The river skipped. It was an instant of concurrency. The sunlight caught the droplets and coloured them as they rose, and it struck me then that the old man and the water are together in all of this — they have lived out their lives disguised as one another, the river and him, once wild with movement, churning new ways, violently ripping along, now moving slowly down towards some final, unalterable sea.

* * *

A russet-haired woman who only wore one sleeve on her dress gave birth to my father on a clifftop overlooking the Atlantic, in the summer of 1918. She was known in town as a madwoman — she kept one arm inside the dress, tucked down by her waist — and nobody was surprised by the circumstances of the birth. Spindrift blew up on to the cliff, and purple wildflowers were exploding in shapes that might have made her think of bombs erupting in far-off Flanders. She had just received a letter saying that her lover had been fed to the guns of the Great War — he was a local man who had furrowed inside her seven months beforehand, then stepped his way out from Mayo into a British army uniform. Perhaps she flapped a crazy dance of grief after slicing the umbilical cord, unsurprised by the shock of black hair on her baby’s head, the rude red lips, the very white skin, the squash of his ears.

He was found by two Protestant ladies who lived together in a giant house near the edge of the sea. The ladies were out on a Sunday stroll when they saw the bundle of skin amongst some trampled flowers. One of them took off her petticoat and carried him home, wrapped in it. The madwoman, my grandmother, was nowhere to be seen, although a trail of her clothes, including the one-sleeved dress, led inland towards the mountains.

The Protestant ladies raised him in a house of fine china teacups, radio broadcasts, scones privileged with spoonfuls of clotted cream. They sat him by a grand piano, licked their fingers and combed his hair back, an unruly cowlick growing long at his forehead. His clothes were ordered all the way from Dublin, beautiful white shirts that he destroyed running through the bogs, tweed trousers that were ripped on sea rocks, gorgeous blue cravats in which he wrapped stones to fling upwards at curlews. They baptised him in the Protestant church with the name Gordon Peters, and years later — beaten up in school for the name — he repaid them by urinating on their toothbrushes.

Still he loved them in a strange way, these old ladies with scintillating bottle-green eyes. He came back from his long walks with bundles of flowers that he’d plucked from the sides of dark pools, purple flowers that nodded to one another in expensive vases on the dining-room table. He called each of them ‘Mammy,’ bounding home with stones from the beach, telling stories of dolphins that had leaped alongside him, the length of the strand. A friend of his, Manley, emitted a high-pitched squeal that he claimed attracted dolphins, and they spent days together on the beach, shouting, eyes seaward. The ladies brought packed lunches down to them, spreading their long dresses on the rocks, watching their adopted son.