Colum McCann: Fishing the Sloe-Black River

Another clodful and the mound rises higher. The rain blows hard into Cathal’s back. Clouds scuttle across the morning sky. Cigarette smoke rushes from his nose and mouth. He begins to sweat under all the heavy clothing. After a few minutes he stubs the butt end into the soil, takes out a red handkerchief and wipes his forehead, then pummels at the ground again. Go carefully now, or you’ll cut the poor little bastard’s delicate neck.

* * *

With the mound piled high and the hole three feet deep, Cathal sees the top of a white feather. A tremble of wet soil. “Easy now,” he says. “Easy. Don’t be thrashing around down there on me.” He digs again, a deep wide arc around the swan, then lays the shovel on the ground and spread-eagles himself at the side of the hole. Across the hole he winks at Wingnut, who has seen this happen enough times that she has learned not to bark. On the lake, behind his back, he can hear some of the swans braying. He reaches down into the hole and begins to scrabble at the soil with his fingernails. Why all this sweating in the rain, in a clean white shirt, when there’s a million and one other things to be done? The clay builds up deep in his fingernails. The bird is sideways in the soil.

He reaches down and around the body and loosens the dirt some more, but not enough for the wings to start flapping. One strong blow of those things could break a man’s arm. He lays his hands on the stomach and feels the heart flutter. Then he scrabbles some more dirt from around the webbed feet. With great delicacy Cathal makes a tunnel out of which to pull the neck and head. With the soil loose enough he gently eases the long twisted neck out and grabs it with one hand. “Don’t be hissing there now.” He slips his other hand in around the body. Deftly he lifts the swan out of the soil, folding back one of the feet against the wing, keeping the other wing close to his chest. He lifts the swan into the air, then throws it away from him.

“Go on now, you little upstart.”

Cathal sits on the edge of the hole with his Wellington boots dangling down and watches the wondrous way that the swan bursts over the lake, soil sifting off its wings, curious and lovely, looking for a place to land. He watches as the other swans make room by sliding in, crunching against one another’s wings. The newborn settles down on a small patch of water on the eastern side of the lake.

Somewhere in the bowels of a housing complex, a mother is packing away clothes in black plastic bags. Her lip quivers. There’s new graffiti on the stairwell wall down from her flat. Pictures of footballers are coming down off a bedroom wall. A sewing needle is flung into an empty dustbin where it rattles. Outside, newspapermen use shorthand in little spiral books. Cameras run on battery packs. Someone thinks of putting some sugar in the water so that the flowers will last longer. Another man, in a flat cap, digs. A soldier is dialing his girlfriend. Or carving a notch. Swans don’t sing unless they’re shot way up high, up there, in the air. Their windpipes whistle. That’s a known fact.

Cathal lights his last cigarette and thinks about how, in two days, the whole flock will leave and the digging may well have to begin all over again. Well, fuck it all anyway. Every man has his own peculiar curse. Cathal motions to his dog, lifts his shovel, then leans home toward the farmhouse in his green boots. As he walks, splatters of mud leap up on the back of his anorak. The smoke blows away in spirals from his mouth. He notices how the fencepost in the far corner of the field is leaning a little drunkenly. That will have to be fixed, he thinks, as the rain spits down in flurries.