Colum McCann: Fishing the Sloe-Black River

Michael still gropes for the back of his hair as he drives, and every now and then he squeezes my forearm and says it’ll be all right. The expressway is a vomit of cars but gradually, as we move, the traffic thins out and the pace quickens. Occasional flecks of snow get tossed away by the windshield wipers. I curl into a shell and listen to the sound of what might be waves. I am older now. I have no right to be afraid. I think about plucking the petals from the flowers, one by one. We drive toward the ocean. Far off I can see gulls arguing over the waves.

The convent at Bluepoint looks like a school. There seems to be little holy about the place except for the statue of Our Lady on the front lawn, a coat of snow on her shoulders. We park the car and I ask Michael to wait. From under his shirt collar I flick out the necklace of teeth and, for the first time since I’ve seen him, kiss him flush on the lips. “Go on,” he says, “don’t be getting soppy on me now. And don’t stay too long. Those waterfalls in Quebec melt very quickly.”

He turns the radio up full blast and I walk toward the front entrance. Hold. Buckle. Swallow. The words of a poet who should have known: “What I do is me. For that I came.” I rasp my fingers along the wood but it takes a long time for the heavy door to swing open.

“Yes dear?” says the old nun. She is Irish too, her face creased into dun and purple lines.

“I’d like to see Brigid O’Dwyer.”

She looks at me, scans my face. “No visitors, I’m sorry,” she says. “Sister Brigid needs just a wee bit of peace and quiet.” She begins to close the door, smiling gently at me.

“Is mise a dhreifeur,” I stutter. I am her sister.

The door opens again and she looks at me, askance.

“Bhfuil tú cinnte?” Are you sure?

“Sea,” I laugh. “Táim cinnte.” Yes, I’m sure.

“Cad a bhfuil uait?” she asks. What do you want?

“I want to see her. Sé do thoil é. Please.”

She stares at me for a long time. “Tar isteach. Come in, girl.” She takes the daffodils and touches my cheek. “You have her eyes.”

I move into the corridor where some other old nuns gather like moss, asking questions. “She’s very sick,” says one. “She won’t be seeing anyone.” The nun who met me at the door shuffles away. There are flowers by the doorway, paintings on the walls, a smell of potpourri, a quality of whiteness flooding all the colors. I sit in a steel chair with my knees nailed together, my hands in my lap, watching their faces, hearing the somber chatter, not responding. A statue of the Madonna stares at me. I am a teenager now in a brown convent skirt. It is winter. After camogie, in the school showers, one or two of the nuns stand around and watch my classmates and me as we wash the dirt off our legs. They see bruises on my inner thigh and then they tell me about Magdalene. I ride away from the school gates. I flagrantly pedal my bicycle with my skirt up high. I see her there, on the rock, sucking her finger, making a cross of reeds, the emblem of the saint for whom she was named. My father puts some peat on the fire. That’s grand, give me a smoke, so.

“Will you join us for a cup? She’s sleeping now.” It’s the old nun who answered the door.

“Thank you, Sister.”

“You look white, dear.”

“I’ve been traveling a long time.”

Over tea and scones they begin to melt, these women. They surprise me with their cackle and their smiles. They ask of the old place. Brigid, they say. What a character. Was she always like that? The holy spirit up to the ears?

Two nuns there had spent the last few years with her. They tell me that she had been living in El Salvador in a convent outside a coffee plantation. One day recently three other nuns in the convent were shot, one of them almost fatally, so Brigid slipped out to a mountain for a few hours to pray for their health. She was found three days later, sitting on a rock. They look at me curiously when I ask about her fingernails. No, they say, her fingernails were fine. It was the lack of food that did it to her. Five campesinos had carried her down from the mountain. She was a favorite among the locals. She had always taken food to the women in the adobe houses, and the men respected her for the way she had hidden it under her clothes, so they wouldn’t be shamed by charity. She’d spent a couple of weeks in a hospital in San Salvador, on an intravenous drip, then they transported her to Long Island to recover. She had never talked of any brothers or sisters, though she had gotten letters from Ireland. She did some of the strangest things in Central America, however. She carried a pebble in her mouth. It came all the way from the Sargasso Sea. She learned how to dance. She reared four piglets behind the sacristy in the local church. She had shown people how to skin rabbits. The pebble made little chips in her teeth. She had taken to wearing some very strange colored socks.

I start to laugh.

“Everyone,” says one of the nuns with a Spanish accent, “is allowed a little bit of madness, even if you’re a nun. I don’t see what’s wrong with that.”

“No, no, no, there’s nothing wrong with it. I’m just thinking.”

“It does get cold down there, you know,” she replies.

Someone talks about the time she burned the pinto beans. The time the pigs got loose from the pen. The time the rabbit ran away from her. Another says she once dropped a piece of cake from her dress when she knelt at the altar, and one of the priests, from Wales, said that God gave his only begotten bun. But the priest was forgiven for the joke since he was not a blasphemer, just a bit of a clown. The gardener comes in, a man from Sligo, and says: “I’ve seen more fat on a butcher’s knife than I have on your sister.” I leave the scone raisins on the side of the saucer. I am still laughing.

“Can I see her?” I say, turning to the nun who opened the door for me. “I really need to see her. I have a friend waiting for me outside and I must go soon.”

The nun shuffles off to the kitchen. I wait. I think of a piece of turf and the way it holds so much history. I should have brought my sister a sod of soil. Or a rock. Or something.

An old nun, with an African accent, singing a hymn, comes out of the kitchen, carrying a piece of toast and a glass of water. She has put a dollop of jam on the side of a white plate, “for a special occasion.” She winks at me and tells me to follow her. I feel eyes on my back, then a hum of voices as we leave the dining area. She leads me up the stairs, past a statue, eerie and white, down a long clean corridor, toward a room with a picture of Archbishop Romero on the door. We stop. I hold my breath. A piece of turf. A rock. Anything.

“Go in, child.” The nun squeezes my hand. “You’re shaking.”

“Thank you,” I say. I stand at the door and open it slowly. “Brigid?” The bedclothes are crumpled as if they’ve just been tossed. “Brigid. It’s me. Sheona.”

There’s no sound, just a tiny hint of movement in the bedsheets. I walk over. Her eyes are open, but she’s not there inside them. Her hair is netted and gray. The lines on her face cut inward. Age has assaulted her cheekbones. I feel angry. I take down the picture of the Sacred Heart that is spraying red light out into the room and place it face-down on the floor. She murmurs and a little spittle comes out the side of her mouth. So she is there, after all. I look in her eyes again. This is the first time I have seen her since we were still that age. A bitterness in there now, perhaps, borne deep. “I just want some neutral ground,” I say. Then I realize that I don’t know who I’m talking to, and I put the picture back on the wall.

I sit on the bed and touch her ashtrayed hair. “Talk to me,” I say. She turns slightly. The toast is growing cold on a plate on the floor. I have no idea if she knows who I am as I feed her, but I have a feeling she does. I’m afraid to lay my hand on her for fear of snapping bones. She doesn’t want to be fed. She hisses and spits the bread out of dehydrated lips. She closes her mouth on my fingers, but it takes no effort to pry it open. Her teeth are as brittle as chalk. I lay the toast on her tongue again. Each time it gets moister and eventually it dissolves. I wash it down with some water. I try to say something but I can’t, so I sing a Hoagy Carmichael tune, but she doesn’t acknowledge it. If I tried to lift her, I think I would find a heap of dust in my hand, my own hand, which is speaking to me again, carving out a moving shape.