Colum McCann: Fishing the Sloe-Black River

Osobe walked on the beach with his head slung low to the ground, stooping to collect stones. We would sometimes hide in the dunes, parting the long grass to watch him filling his trouser pockets with stones. He had a long rambling stride, sometimes walking for hours along the coast, while the gulls hurled themselves up from the strand, and small fishing boats bobbed on the sea. When I was twelve years old I saw him leap along the beach while a porpoise surfaced and resurfaced in the water, fifty yards away. Once Paul Ryan wrapped a note around a brick and flung it through the window of his cottage, one of a row of fifteen small houses in the center of our village. Nip go home said the note. The following day we noticed that the window had been covered with wallpaper and Paul Ryan went home from school with blood caked under his nose because we could no longer see through Osobe’s front window.

Osobe had come to Ireland before I was born, sometime in the fifties. He was a curious sight in any Irish town, his black hair sticking out like conifer needles, his eyes shaded by the brim of his brown hat. He had bought the cottage, a dilapidated two-room affair, from an out-of-town landlord who thought that Osobe might just stay for a month or two. But, according to my father, a huge lorry carrying reams and reams of wallpaper pulled up to the cottage during the first summer of his visit. Osobe and two hefty Dubliners lifted all the paper into the house, and later he hung a sign on his front window: WALLPAPER FOR SALE — ASK INSIDE. There were mutterings about how the paper had been stolen, how it had been imported from Japan at a ridiculous price, undercutting the Irish wholesalers. Nobody bought any for a month until my Aunt Moira, who was infamous for having gotten drunk with Brendan Behan in a Republican pub in Dublin, knocked on his door and ordered a floral pattern with a touch of pink for her living room.

Osobe rode his black bicycle along the river out to her house. Rolls of paper, cans of glue, knives, and brushes were piled into the basket. My aunt said he did a wonderful job, although people muttered about her outside mass on Sunday mornings. “He was as quiet then as he is now,” she told me. “No more noise out of him than a dormouse, and we should leave it that way. He’s a good man who never done anyone a whit of harm.” She laughed at the rumors that hung around him.

By the time I was born he was a fixture around town, no stranger than the newspaper editor whose handkerchiefs drooped from his trouser pockets, the shopkeeper who kept the footballs that landed in her back garden, the soldier who had lost his right hand while fighting for Franco. People nodded to him on the streets and, in Gaffney’s pub, he was left alone over his morning pint of Guinness. He had a brisk trade going with the wallpaper, and occasionally, when Kieran O’Malley, the local handyman, was sick, he was called out to unblock a toilet or fix a crooked door. There was talk that he was seeing a young girl from Galway, a madwoman who walked around with a third sleeve sewn on her dresses. But that had about as much truth as all the other rumors — or less, in fact, since he was never seen to leave town, not even on his bicycle.

He spoke English haltingly and in the shops he would whisper for a packet of cigarettes or a jar of jam. He never wore his brown hat on Sundays. Girls giggled when he passed them in the street holding a red Japanese sun umbrella above his head.

I was sixteen years old when he hung a sign on his front door, looking for help with a wallpaper job. It was a hot summer, the ground was bone dry, and there were no seasonal jobs in the fields. My father moaned at the dinner table about the huge toll that emigration was having on his undertaking business. “Everyone’s gone somewhere else to die,” he’d say. “Even that Mrs. Hynes is hanging on for dear life.” One evening my mother came and sat by my bed, mashing her fingers together nervously. She muttered under her breath that I should get some work with the Japanese man, that I was old enough now to put some bread on the table. I had noticed that in the bread that she baked at home, there were no currants anymore.

The following morning, in a blue wool sweater and old working trousers, I sidled down to his house and knocked on his door.

The cottage was filled with rolls of wallpaper. They were stacked on top of one another all around the living room, crowding in toward the small table and two wooden chairs. Most of the rolls were muted in color, but they made a strange collage, flowers and vines and odd shapes all meshed together. The walls themselves had been papered with dozens of different types, and the smell of paste was heavy in the house. On the ground sat rows and rows of small paper dolls, the faces painted almost comically. An old philosopher, a young girl, a wizened woman, a soldier. A row of Japanese books stood against one wall. On top of them, a pan of sliced bread. Cigarette packages littered the floor. There was a collection of beach stones on the mantelpiece. I noticed lots of change and a few pound notes scattered around the cottage, and a twenty-pound note stuffed under a lamp. A kettle whistled on the stove and he filled up two china cups with tea.

“Welcome,” he said. The saucer rattled in my fingers. “There is big job in house. You will help me?”

I nodded and sipped at the tea, which tasted peculiarly bitter. His hands were long and spindly, dotted with liver spots. A gray shirt slouched on his thin shoulders.

“You will go home and get bicycle, in this afternoon we start. Very good?”

We rode out together to the old Gorman house, which had lain empty for three years. Osobe whistled as we pedaled, and people stared at us from their cars and houses. Five rolls of pale green wallpaper were balanced in his front basket, and I carried two cans of paste in my right hand, steering the bicycle with the other. I saw Paul Ryan hanging out by the school, smoking a long cigar. “Ya get slanty eyes from wanking too much, Donnelly,” he shouted, and I tucked my head down toward the handlebars.

The Gorman house had been bought by an American millionaire just three months before. There were schoolboy rumors that the American drove a huge Cadillac and had five blond daughters who would be fond of the local disco and, on excellent authority, were known to romp behind haystacks. But there was nobody there when we arrived on our bicycles. Osobe produced a set of keys from his overalls and walked slowly through the house, pointing at the walls, motes of dust kicking up from behind him. We made five trips on the bikes that day, carrying rolls of wallpaper and paste each time. At the end of the day, after I had brought a ladder over my shoulder from his house, he produced a brand new ten-pound note and offered it to me.

“Tomorrow we start,” he said, and then he bowed slightly. “You are fast on bicycle,” he said.

I went outside. The sun was settling over the town. I heard Osobe humming in the background as I leaped on my bike and rode toward home, the money stuffed down deep in my pocket.

* * *

That summer I read books in my bedroom and I wanted Osobe to tell me a fabulous story about his past. I suppose I wanted to own a piece of him, to make his history belong to me.

It would have something to do with Hiroshima, I had decided, with the children of the pikadon, the flash boom. There would be charred telegraph poles and tree trunks, a wasteland of concrete, a single remaining shell of a building. People with melted faces would run wildly through the streets. Bloated corpses would float down the Ota River. The slates on the roofs of houses would bubble. He would spit on the American and British soldiers as they sat under burnt cherry blossom trees, working the chewing gum over in their mouths. Perhaps, in his story, he would reach out for the festered face of a young girl. Or massage the burnt scalp of a boy. A woman friend of his would see her reflection in a bowl of soup and howl. Maybe he would run off toward the hills and never stop. Or perhaps he would simply just walk away down narrow roads, wearing wooden sandals, a begging bowl in his hands. It would be a peculiar Buddhist hell, that story of his, and a B-29 would drone in constantly from the clouds.