Colum McCann: Fishing the Sloe-Black River

But I didn’t miss the men. I bought saucepans, cooked beautiful food, wrote poems near a single bar electric heater. Once I even went out with a policeman from Donegal, but when he lifted my skirt I knocked his glasses off. At work, in a ribboned blouse, I was so unhappy that I couldn’t even switch jobs. When making calls, I was always breaking my fingernails on the phone slots. I watched a harpist in the Concert Hall playing beautifully on nylon strings. In a moment of daring I tried to find my sister exactly two years to the day that I had seen her, huddled with the homeless in a Foxford blanket. “Sister Brigid,” I was told, “is spreading the word of God in Central America.” I didn’t have the nerve to ask for the address. All I knew of Central America was dogs leaner than her.

We are off the highway now, looking for a New Hampshire petrol station. The sun in the east is bleeding into the darkness. Michael refuses to fill up at the garages that lick the big interstate. He prefers a smaller town. He’s still the same man, now wearing his necklace of mountain lion teeth over an opennecked Oxford. Because I trust him, because he still believes in simpler, more honest things, I tell him about why I think Brigid is sick. I am very simple in my ideas of Central America. My information comes from newspapers. She is sick, I tell him, because she was heartbroken among the maguey plants. She is sick because there are soldiers on the outskirts of town who carry Kalashnikovs or AK-47’s, hammering the barrels through the brick kilns that make the dough rise. She is sick because she saw things that she thought belonged only in Irish history. She is sick because she saw girls bonier than her and because there was no such thing as a miracle to be found. She is sick, she is in an infirmary convent on Long Island for nuns who have or have not done their jobs. Though really, honestly, I think she is sick because she knew I was watching when she flung her bread from a rock and I never said a word.

“You’re too hard on yourself,” says Michael.

“I’ve been picking my way through a pillar of stone with a pin.”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh come on, Michael, it’s not as if we’re twenty-one any more. All those years spat away.”

“It doesn’t help to be bitter,” he says.

“Oh, and you’re not bitter?”

“I’ve learned not to think about it.”

“That’s worse than being bitter, Michael.”

“Come on,” he says, reaching across to take my hand. “You can’t change the past.”

“No we can’t,” I say. My hand is limp. “We can’t, can we?”

Embarrassed at my anger, I tell him once again, for the umpteenth time over the last three days, about how I found out where she was. I decided, only a week ago, to go back and see my father. I brought him a carton of Major because I couldn’t find Woodbines. I have no idea what stirred me to see him, except that one of the other secretaries in Dublin had talked all morning long about her pet collie dog throwing up over her favorite rug. She was actually weeping over it, more for the rug, I imagine, than for the dog. I walked out to the canal and sat watching boys diving in, breaking up the oily slime. Their recklessness astounded me. I went to Heuston station and took a train west.

He was dead, of course. The couple who had bought our old bungalow had three babies now. They said they had been with my father in a hospital in Galway when, in an oxygen tent, he asked for a nip of Bushmill’s and a smoke. The doctors had told him that he would explode and he had said, “That’s grand, give me a smoke, so.” The husband asked who I was even though he knew exactly who I was. I didn’t want him to bring out nasturtiums or Easter lilies. I told him, in front of his wife, that I was a distant cousin. In a whisper, at the gate, he told me he had heard that Brigid was sick and was living now in a convent in the “Big Apple.” He stole a furtive kiss on my cheek. I wiped it off in disgust, went home to Dublin and made phone calls until I found Michael living in Quebec, a foreman at a building site.

“Michael, I need to get back in. I can get a flight from London into Canada, no hassle.”

“I’ll pick you up at the airport in Montreal.”

“Are you married?” I asked.

“Are you kidding? Are you?”

“Are you kidding?” I laughed. “Will you take me there?”

“Yeah.”

It’s one highway, 95, all the way, a torrent of petrol stations, neon signs, motels, fast-food spires. Michael talks of a different world beyond this, where in his boredom he watched the sun fall and rise and fall again. San Quentin had taught him about looking out windows. The day he got out, in a suit two sizes too big, he learned how to cartwheel again and ended up tearing the polyester knees. He took a bus to Yosemite and got a job as a guide. He took a motorbike, a “rice burner” he called it, from California to Gallup, New Mexico, where his mother and father pissed away a monthly government check into a dry creekbed at the back of their house. Michael slept in a shed full of Thunderbird bottles, a hole in the corrugated ceiling where he watched the stars, bitterly charting their roll across the sky. He followed them east. He climbed scaffolds to build New York City high-rises. Navaho and Mohawk climbers were in big demand for that type of job and the money was good.

Then there was a girl. She brought him to Quebec. They climbed frozen waterfalls in a northern forest. The girl was long gone, but the waterfalls weren’t. Maybe, he says, when we get back to Quebec he’ll put me in a harness and spiked boots and we’ll go scaling. I finger my thighs and say perhaps.

Floods of neon rush by.

We stop in a diner and a trucker offers Michael ten dollars for the lion-tooth necklace. Michael tells him that it’s a family heirloom and then, trying to make sure that I don’t hear — me, in my red crocheted cardigan and gray skirt — the trucker offers him a bag full of pills. Michael still has that sort of face. It’s been years since I’ve been wired, and I have a faint urge to drop some pills. But Michael thanks the trucker, says that he hasn’t done speed in years and we drive away.

By late evening the next day, we snarl into the New York City traffic and head down toward the Village. Michael’s eyes are creased and tired. The car is littered with coffee cups and the smell of cigarettes lingers in our clothes. The city is much like any other to me now, a clog of people and cars. It seems appropriate that there is no room for us in the Chelsea Hotel, no more Dylan, no more Behan, no more Cohen remembering us well. Old songs flow through me as we drive away. We stay with a friend of Michael’s on Bleecker Street. I have brought two nightdresses in my suitcase. My greatest daring is that I don’t wear either of them. Michael and his friend curl on the ends of the sofa. I sleep in a bed, scared of the sheets. Four red-beaked hawks in badges grunting down from the thermals by a gentle creek in sequoia sunlight. A bouquet of boys shimmy in from the bogs in brown tweed hats and pants tucked in with silver bicycle clips. My father lights a carton of cigarettes and burns in a plastic tent. A nun runs around with dough rising up in her belly. My wrists pinned to pine needles, no light wind to carry me away. Blood running down the backs of his thighs. The talons of a robin carrying off flowers. I toss and turn in sweat that gathers in folds and it is not until Michael comes over and kisses my eyelids that I find sleep.

On the drive out to Long Island I buy a bunch of daffodils from a street vendor. He tells me that daffodils mean marriage. I tell him that they’re for a nun. He tugs at his hat. “You never know, hon,” he says, “you never know these days.”