Colum McCann: Fishing the Sloe-Black River

But Osobe stayed silent almost the whole time as he stood in that big old house and spread paste on the walls in long smooth motions, humming gently as the house began to take on color. “Sean,” he would say to me in his comically broken English, with his face cocked into a smile, “someday you will be great wallpaper man. You must think how important this job. We make people happy or sad if we do bad job.”

He would buy big bottles of Club Orange and packets of Goldgrain biscuits and spread them out on the ground during lunchtime. He brought a radio one morning and his old body swayed with movement as he tuned in to a pop station from Dublin. Once, for a joke, he swiped a ladder away from me and left me hanging from a door ledge. He was deft with a knife, slicing the wallpaper in one smooth motion. At the end of the day he would smoke two cigarettes, allowing me a puff at the end of each one. Then he would sit, lotus-legged, in front of a newly decorated wall and nod, smiling gently, rocking back and forth.

“What is Japan like?” I asked him one evening as we were cycling home, my palms sweaty.

“Like everywhere else. Not as beautiful like this,” he said, sweeping his arms around the fields and hills.

“Why did you come here?”

“So long ago.” He pointed at his nose. “Don’t remember. Sorry.”

“Were you in the war?”

“You ask lots of questions.”

“Somebody told me you were in Hiroshima.”

He laughed uproariously, slapping his thighs. “I have no answer.” He rode silently for a while. “Hiroshima was sad place. Japanese don’t talk about.”

“Were you in Hiroshima?” I asked again.

“No, no,” he said. “No, no.”

“Do you hate Americans?”

“Why?”

“Because…”

“You are very young. You shouldn’t think these things. You should think of making good job with wallpaper. That is important.”

We rode out to the house at eight every morning. The lawn was dry and cracked. The third floor windows were black with soot. When the radio played it could be heard all over the house. Osobe worked with tremendous energy. In the hot afternoons he rolled up his sleeves and I could see his sinewy arms. Once, when the radio told us of an earthquake in Japan, he blanched and said that the country was suffering from too much pain.

In the evenings I started going down to the bridge with my friends to drink flagons of cider with the money I held back from my parents. I began to buy my own cigarettes. I read books about World War II and created fabulous lies about how he had been in that southern Japanese city when the bomb had been dropped, how his family had been left as shadows on the town hall walls, dark patches of people on broken concrete. He had been ten miles from the epicenter of the blast, I said, in the shade of a building, wearing billowy orange carpenter pants and a large straw hat. He was flung to the ground, and when he awoke, the city was howling all around him. He had reeled away from the horror of it all, traveling the world, ending up in the west of Ireland. My friends whistled through their teeth. Under the bridge they pushed the bottle toward me.

Occasionally my mother and father asked me about Osobe, muted questions, probings, which they slid in at dinnertime after I had handed over most of my wages.

“He’s a strange one, that one,” said my father.

“Hiding something, I’d guess,” my mother would respond, the fork clanging against her teeth.

“Bit of a mad fellow, isn’t he, Sean?”

“Ah, he’s not too bad,” I said.

“People say he lived in Brazil for a while.”

“God knows, he could have,” said my mother.

“He doesn’t tell me anything,” I said.

For all I really knew, he had just wandered to our town for no good or sufficient reason and decided to stay. I had an uncle in Ghana, an older brother in Nebraska, a distant cousin who worked as a well digger near Melbourne, none of which struck me as peculiar. Osobe was probably just one of their breed, a wanderer, a misfit, although I didn’t want him to be. I wanted him to be more than that.

We worked through that hot summer together, finished the Gorman house and started on a few others. I grew to enjoy clambering along the roads on our bicycles in the morning, slapping paste on the walls, inventing tales about him for my friends down under the bridge. Some of my friends were working in the chipper, others were bringing in the tired hay, and a couple were selling golf balls down at the club. Every evening I continued with Osobe stories for them, their faces lit up by the small fire we kept going. We all slurped at the bottles, fascinated by the terror and brilliance of it all. Fireballs had raged throughout the city as he fled, I told them. People ran with sacks of rice in their melted hands. A Shinto monk said prayers over the dead. Strange weeds grew in clumps where the plum trees once flowered, and Osobe left the city, half-naked, his throat and eyes burning.

* * *

Osobe opened the door to me one morning toward the end of summer. “All the jobs almost done,” he said. “We celebrate with cup of tea.”

He guided me gently by the arm to the chair in the middle of the room. Looking around I noticed that he had been wallpapering again. He had papered over the old pattern. There were no bubbles, no stray ends, no spilled paste around the edges. I imagined him staying up late at night, humming as he watched the colors close in on him. The rest of the cottage was a riot of odds and ends — dishes and teacups, an Oriental fan, wrapped slices of cheese, a futon mattress rolled in the corner. There was a twenty-pound note sitting on the small gas heater near the table. Another ten-pound note lay on the floor, near the table. His brown hat was hung up on the door. There were paintbrushes everywhere.

“You did good job,” he said. “Will you go soon school?”

“In a few weeks.”

“Will you one day paper? Again. If I find you job?” he said.

Before I could answer he had sprung to his heels to open the front door for a marmalade-colored cat, which had been scratching at the door. It was a stray. We often saw it slinking around the back of the chipper, waiting for some scraps. John Brogan once tried to catch it with a giant net but couldn’t. It scurried away from everyone. Osobe leaned down on his hunkers and, swooping his arms as if he were going to maul it, he got the cat to come closer. It was almost a windmill motion, smoothly through the air, his thin arms making arcs. The cat stared. Then, with a violent quickness, Osobe scooped it up, turned it on its back, pinned it down with one hand and roughly stroked his other hand along its belly. The cat leaned its head back and purred. Osobe laughed.

For a moment I felt a vicious hatred for him and his quiet ways, his mundane stroll through the summer, his ordinariness, the banality of everything he had become. He should have been a hero or a seer. He should have told me some incredible story that I could carry with me forever. After all, he had been the one who had run along the beach parallel to a porpoise, who filled his pockets full of pebbles, who could lift the stray orange cat in his fingers.

I looked around the room for a moment while he hunched down with the cat, his back to me. I was hoping to find something, a diary, a picture, a drawing, a badge, anything that would tell me a little more about him. Looking over my shoulder I reached across to the gas heater, picked up the twenty-pound note and stuffed it in my sock, then pulled my trousers down over it. I sat at the wooden table, my hands shaking. After a while Osobe turned and came over toward me with the cat in his arms, stroking it with the same harsh motion as before. With his right hand he reached into his overalls and gave me a hundred pounds in ten new notes. “For you school.” I could feel the other twenty-pound note riding up in my sock, and as I backed out the door a sick feeling rose in my stomach.