Colum McCann: Fishing the Sloe-Black River

I have come to think of our lives as the colors of that place — hers a piece of bog cotton, mine as black as the water found when men slash too deep in the soil with a shovel.

I remember when I was fifteen, cycling across those bogs in the early evenings, on my way to the dancehall in my clean, yellow socks. My sister stayed at home. I tried to avoid puddles, but there would always be a splash or two on the hem of my dress. The boys at the dancehall wore blue anoraks and watched me when I danced. Outside they leaned against my bike and smoked shared cigarettes in the night. I gave myself. One of them once left an Easter lily in the basket. Later it was men in granite-gray suits who would lean into me, heads cocked sideways like hawks, eyes closed. Sometimes I would hold my hands out beyond their shoulders and shape or carve something out of my fingers, something with eyes and a face, someone very little, within my hand, whose job it was to try to understand. Between a statue of Our Lady and a Celtic cross commemorating the dead of Ireland, my hand made out the shape of a question mark as a farm boy furrowed his way inside me.

A man with a walrus mustache gone gray at the tips took me down to the public lavatories in Castlebar. He was a sailor. He smelled of ropes and disuse and seaport harridans. There were bays and coverts, hillsides and heather. My promiscuity was my autograph. I was hourglassy, had turf-colored hair and eyes as green as wine bottles. Someone once bought me an ice-cream in Achill Island, then we chipped some amethyst out of the rock banks and climbed the radio tower. We woke up late at the edge of a cliff, with the waves lashing in from the Atlantic. There was a moon of white reflected in the water. The next day at the dinner table, my father told us that John F. Kennedy had landed a man on the moon. We knew that Kennedy was long dead — he stared at us from a picture frame on the wall — but we said nothing. It was a shame, my father said, looking at me, that the moon turned out to be a heap of ash.

My legs were stronger now, and I strolled to the dancehall, the bogs around me wet and dark. The boy with the Easter lily did it again, this time with nasturtiums stolen from outside the police station. My body continued to go out and around in all the right places. My father waited up for me, smoking Woodbines down to the quick. He told me once that he had overheard a man at his printing shop call me “a wee whore,” and I heard him weeping as I tuned in Radio Luxembourg in my room.

My older sister, Brigid, succeeded with a spectacular anorexia. After classes she would sidle off to the bog, to a large rock where she thought nobody could see her, her Bible in her pocket, her sandwiches in her hand. There she would perch like a raked robin, and bit by bit she would tear up the bread like a sacrament and throw it all around her. The rock had a history — in penal times it had been used as a meeting place for mass. I sometimes watched her from a distance. She was a house of bones, my sister, throwing her bread away. Once, out on the rock, I saw her take my father’s pliers to her fingers and slowly pluck out the nail from the middle finger of her left hand. She did it because she had heard that the Cromwellians had done it to harpists in the seventeenth century, so they could no longer pluck the cat-gut to make music. She wanted to know how it felt. Her finger bled for days. She told our father that she had caught her hand in a school door. He stayed unaware of Brigid’s condition, still caught in the oblivion caused, many years before, by the death of our mother — lifted from a cliff by a light wind while out strolling. Since that day Brigid had lived a strange sort of martyrdom. People loved her frail whiteness but never really knew what was going on under all those sweaters. She never went to the dancehall. Naturally, she wore the brown school socks that the nuns made obligatory. Her legs within them were thin as twigs. We seldom talked. I never tried. I envied her that unused body that needed so little, yet I also loved her with a bitterness that only sisters can have.

Now, two decades later, squashed in the boot of a car, huddled under a blanket, I ask myself why I am smuggling myself across the Canadian border to go back to a country that wouldn’t allow me to stay, to see a sister I never really knew in the first place.

It is dark and cramped and hollow and black in here. My knees are up against my breasts. Exhaust fumes make me cough. A cold wind whistles in. We are probably still in the countryside of Quebec. At every traffic light I hope that this is the border station leading into Maine. Perhaps when we’re finally across we can stop by a frozen lake and skim out there on the ice, Michael and I.

When I asked Michael to help smuggle me across the border he didn’t hesitate. He liked the idea of being what the Mexicans call a “coyote.” He said it goes with his Navajo blood, his forefathers believing that coyotes howled in the beginning of the universe. Knowing the reputation of my youth, he joked that I could never have believed in that legend, that I must go in for the Big Bang. In the boot of the car I shudder in the cold. I wear a blue wool hat pulled down over my ears. My body does not sandwich up the way it used to.

I met Michael on a Greyhound bus in the early seventies, not long after leaving the bogs. I had left Brigid at home with her untouched platefuls of food. At Shannon Airport my father had cradled me like his last cigarette. On the plane I realized that I was gone forever to a new country — I was tired of the knowing way women back home nodded their heads at me. I was on my way to San Francisco, wearing a string of beads. In the bus station at Port Authority I noticed Michael first for his menacing darkness; his skin looked like it had been dipped in hot molasses. And then I saw the necklace of teeth that hung on his chest. I learned later that they were the teeth of a mountain lion. He had found the lion one afternoon in the Idaho wilderness, the victim of a road kill. Michael came over and sat beside me, saying nothing, smelling faintly of woodsmoke. His face was aquiline, acned. His wrists were thick. He wore a leather waistcoat, jeans, boots. On the bus I leaned my head on his shoulder, feigning sleep. Later my hand reached over and played with the necklace of teeth. He laughed when I blew on them. I said they sounded like wind chimes, tinkling together, though they didn’t sound anything like that at all. We rattled across a huge America. I lived with him for many years, in San Francisco on Dolores Street near the Mission, the foghorn of the Golden Gate keening a lament. After the raid, in 1978, when I was gone and home in Ireland, I would never again sleep with another man.

The car shudders to a halt. My head lolls against the lid of the boot. I would rather pick my way through a pillar of stone with a pin than go through this again. There is a huge illegal trade going on with cigarettes and alcohol crossing the border. We could be stopped. Michael wanted to take me across by paddling a canoe down the Kennebec River, but I said I would rather just do it in the car. Now I wish we’d done it his way. “Up a lazy river with a robin song, it’s a lazy, lazy river we can float along, blue skies up above, everyone’s in love.” My father had sung that when Brigid and I were young.

Slowly the car pitches forward. I wonder whether we are finally there or whether this is just another traffic light along the way. We stop again and then we inch up. I ask myself what plays in Michael’s head. I was shocked when I saw him first, just three days ago, because he still looked much the same after thirteen years. I was ashamed of myself. I felt dowdy and gray. When I went to sleep on his sofabed, alone, I remembered the new creases on the backs of my thighs. Now I feel more his equal. He has cut his hair and put on a suit to lessen the risk of being caught — giving him some of the years that I have gained, or lost, I don’t know which.