Colum McCann - Fishing the Sloe-Black River

Once I woke up and caught her sitting beside the bed, drawing my face on one of these quarters. She was hunched over the bed with these tiny paintbrushes and a palette, her hair tied back, a real serious look on her face. Boy, did I ever want to see that one. But I looked and looked in the greenhouse, and I never found it. I knew it was around somewhere, because she told me she never spent them. I searched for hours, under the table, in all the plant pots, down under the wrought-iron stand, on the ledges, but it never showed up. I expect maybe she painted me with big black eyes, my hair receding, big jowls and all that sort of thing, even though that’s not true.

But I did find some other coins. They were self-portraits, her face painted on top of Washington’s, big long mane of red hair running down her back, that one eye all painted with mascara, her lips flaring out. She was pretty, all right. I could see why she did it. She’d always been pretty, right from the day I met her. So, I took one of those quarters and put it in my wallet. I kind of liked to look at it when I was at work. Most of my job was extracting the blood samples.

I came home from work one night and she wasn’t there, so I went on down to the bar. We live in a fairly good neighborhood and the nearest bar is down by the highway. It’s a dark bar, lots of people hanging out in the corners. You see some strange ones there. But the thing about it is, it’s amazing the things you don’t know about people. I was sitting there at the bar, talking with the bartender, Paul, and it turns out this guy does computers on the side. There’s nobody there hardly, so we talk for a long time, about computer sequencing, research, and things about sparrows and stuff, when all of a sudden he points down at my hand and laughs, then sort of grabs my cheek.

“Doing a little on the side?” he says to me. I look down and realize that I’ve been fingering this quarter in my hands for the last half hour. It’s the portrait of Laura. That face is full of yellows and reds.

I ask him what he’s talking about, and he reaches in under the counter and pulls out about twenty of these quarters. They spill through his goddamn fingers. Jefferson with a peace sign on his forehead, another with the LIBERTY shortened to BERT, the eagle wearing a bra, all sorts of colors everywhere. Says he likes to collect them himself when customers come from the Rose down the street. Says to me that the guys at the Rose, and sometimes the girls, bring the quarters in. One of the afternoon strippers there makes them.

“They put them in the jukebox,” he says, “so at the end of the night they know which quarters are theirs. You see red ones and green ones and blue ones and all sorts. But these are great. This chick is an artist. I’d like to see this chick dance.”

I don’t know much about things, but I do know that it’s amazing, the things we don’t know. I went home that evening and wanted to drive that Karmen Ghia right through the greenhouse, plow it right on through, shatter it into pieces. Laura got home, late, and just went straight on out to the greenhouse. She looked awful young and pretty. She swept past me and said: “You look tired, honey.” She actually said that. She said “honey.” I sat there, in the kitchen, wondering what sort of face she was drawing this time.

The women fished for their sons in the sloe-black river that ran through the small Westmeath town, while the fathers played football without their sons, in a field half a mile away. Low shouts drifted like lazy swallows over the river, interrupting the silence of the women. They were casting with ferocious hope, twenty-six of them in unison, in a straight line along the muddy side of the low-slung river wall, whipping the rods back over their shoulders. They had pieces of fresh bread mashed onto hooks so that when they cast their lines, the bread volleyed out over the river and hung for a moment, making curious contours in the air — cartwheels and tumbles and plunges. The bread landed with a soft splash on the water, and the ripples met each other gently.

The aurora borealis was beginning to finger the sky with light the color of skin, wine bottles, and the amber of the town’s football jerseys. Drowsy clouds drifted, catching the colors from the north. A collie dog slept in the doorway of the only pub. The main street tumbled with litter.

The women along the wall stood yards apart, giving each other room so their lines wouldn’t tangle. Mrs. Conheeny wore a headscarf patterned with Corgi dogs, the little animals yelping at the side of her ashy hair. She had tiny dollops of dough still stuck under her fingernails. There were splashes of mud on her Wellingtons. She bent her back into the familiar work of reeling in the empty line. Each time she cast, she curled her upper lip, scrunching up the crevices around her cheeks. She was wondering how Father Marsh, the old priest for whom she did housekeeping, was doing as goalkeeper. The joke around town was that he was only good for saving souls. As she spun a little line out from the reel she worried that her husband, at right-halfback, might be feeling the ache in his knee from ligaments torn long ago.

Leaning up against the river wall, tall and bosom-burdened, she sighed and whisked her fishing rod through the air.

Beside her Mrs. Harrington, the artist’s wife, was a salmon leap of energy, thrashing the line back and forth as deftly as a fly-fisherwoman, ripping crusts from her own loaves, impaling them on the big gray hook and spinning them out over the water’s blackness, frantically tapping her feet up and down on the muddy bank. Mrs. Harrington’s husband had been shoved in at left full-forward in the hope that he might poke a stray shot away in a goalmouth frenzy. But by all accounts — or so Mr. Conheeny said — the watercolor man wasn’t worth a barman’s fart on the football field. Then again, they all laughed, at least he was a warm body. He could fill a position against the other teams in the county, all of whom still managed to gallop, here and there, with young bones.

Mrs. Conheeny scratched at her forehead. Not a bite, not a bit, not a brat around, she thought as she reeled in her line and watched a blue chocolate wrapper get caught in a gust of wind, then float down onto the water.

The collie left the door of the pub, ambling down along the main street, past the row of townhouses, nosing in the litter outside the newsagents. Heavy roars keened through the air as the evening stole shapes. Each time the women heard the whistle blow, they raised their heads in the hope that the match was finished so they could unsnap the rods and bend toward home with their picnic baskets.

Mrs. Conheeny watched Mrs. Hynes across the river, her face plastered with makeup, tentatively clawing at a reel. Mrs. King was there with her graphite rod. Mrs. McDaid had come up with the idea of putting currants in her bread. Mrs. O’Shaughnessy was whipping away with a long slender piece of bamboo — did she think she was fishing in the Mississippi? Mrs. Bergen, her face scrunched in pain from the arthritis, was hoping her fingers might move a little better, like they used to on the antique accordion. Mrs. Kelly was sipping from her little silver flask of the finest Jameson’s. Mrs. Hogan was casting with firefly flicks of the wrist. Mrs. Docherty was hauling in her line, as if gathering folds in her dress. And Mrs. Hennessy was gently peeling the crust from a slice of Brennan’s.

Farther down along the pebbledashed wall, Mrs. McCarton was gently humming a bit of a song. Flow on lovely river flow gently along, by your waters so clear sounds the lark’s merry song. Her husband captained the team, a barrel of a man who, when he was young, consistently scored a hat trick. But the team hadn’t won a game in two years, ever since the children had begun their drift.