Songdogs (2 page)

I can imagine my father back in the thirties, roaming around, darting his head in and out, like a swallow, from the black hood of the camera. He carried it along dark roads built eighty years before, by famished men from the poorhouses. They were narrow roads, bits of sea-blown spray landing on them, winding drunkenly away from the cliffs towards the mountains. And drunken men walked along them, sometimes rows of men, like weeds in motion through the decade of the Great Depression. Rain soaked the soil, battered the land, flung rainbows over the bay. Storms squalled across the water, sometimes so strong that they carried slates and beams and occasionally the whole roofs of houses through the air.

His friend, Manley, had a motorbike that my father used to borrow. Leaning the Triumph around tight corners, along piers and through village greens, a scarf flying out at the back of his neck, my old man became famous locally.

Along the backroads of Mayo he caught black and white images of old women head-bent on the way to mass; flowers reaching up above black puddles; sheep huddled in the ruined shells of old cottages; packets of cornflakes fading in the windows of shops; fishermen down by the docksides warming their hands over oil drums; a middle-aged tinker resting outside an old caravan, spreadeagled, plucking at the crotch of his pants. It was a world that had seldom seen a lens of any sort, and my father moved around it, taller now, his body filling out, sleeves rolled up, drama in the exhibition of himself. The quiff of hair bounced around on his forehead. Veins rose, eskers on the back of his hand, blue and well defined. He could cock his arm and dance an easy muscle. Girls outside the dancehall watched him and wondered.

The owner of the dancehall – a man with a face like a hagfish – wouldn’t allow any cameras inside. Still, my father was quite content to hang around, smoking, waiting for Manley to emerge, looking for opportunities to use Loyola. Eighteen years old, and the world back then was a fabulous place to him. He could have bitten off pieces of the universe and spat them on a big glass photographic plate. Outside the dancehall he sometimes took pictures of young women smoking for the first time, new hats cocked sideways, daring lipstick smudged upwards to thicken their lips. Sometimes the girls would try to get him to come in and dance, but it didn’t interest him, dancing, unless he could take a picture of it.

Once he got caught trying to take photographs of the church housekeeper in the outhouse behind the priest’s place. The door was left open, revealing the housekeeper with her skirt hitched high around her hips and her knees ajar. My father had hidden in a clump of bushes but didn’t have time to take a single picture. The priest, a former hurley player, discovered him and knocked him to the ground with a single roundhouse, opened the back of the camera, held the glass plates to the light as if reading the holy scrolls. He gave a thunderous sermon the next week, passages from the Old Testament about graven images, feverish words flying around the pews. My old man slouched at the back of the church with his hat on. He tipped his hat a little when worshippers went up for the Eucharist. From then on, there was a dark, but almost heroic shadow following him in town. A swagger out the door of the church, a bit of spit aimed at the sky with missionary zeal, a bravura in the sway of his shoulders as he walked.

With his inheritance he set up a small studio in a disused cow barn at the end of a country lane. An ancient barn, it was strewn with animal shit and pieces of lumber. The carcass of a calf had been left to rot in the corner. He took it outside, burned the bones, slopped the barn out, nailed the boards down, festooned the walls with photographs, and waited for customers, leaning against the doorway, bored, smoking. Sometimes Manley arrived, touting his shotgun, wearing unfashionable ties and suits of outstanding vulgarity – clothes my father had lent him money to buy. Manley hung out at the barn, talking of new books he had read. He was championing anarchy at the time – said it was democracy brought to its fullest form – and pounded his fist in the cause of the late Sacco and Vanzetti, who had been executed in the States over a decade before. Manley dreamed of making his way to Spain, perhaps to join the International Brigade. My father nodded to the tune of Manley’s rants, all the time looking down the road for customers.

News travelled late to Mayo. Papers arrived late. Ideas arrived late. Even flocks of birds sometimes arrived late. There was something about the heaviness of the soil and the weather that inspired torpidity. He knew that the locals would come to his barn if he did something unusual, so he soon announced that the portraits would be free of charge. After that a small trail of people came in and out – guiltily and secretly, down along the high brambled lane, into the building, where he hung a white curtain from a wooden beam. Ripples of light came through the slats of the walls, falling in peculiar shapes on their faces – gaunt farmers uneasy in their old Sunday suits, grandmothers with fingers over rotten teeth, policemen in hats, a boxer in billowy shorts, thumping his glove against his chest, the local butcher with a flower in his lapel, girls with safety pins in the undersides of their dresses. There were even some young women slouching in bony but salacious poses.

My father had rescued an old
chaise
with three legs. When the women reclined on it, their hair swooped towards the floor. Manley, giving politics a rest, let a licentious tongue hang out as he peeped in through the barn slats. They weren’t lurid, the photos. They had a stodginess to them, as if the old man forced his hand too hard – unlike the ones he took of Mam years afterwards, fluid and sensual. Most of the women never saw their photos. But decades later, when he was somewhat notorious, he had them printed at a press in France. The book caused a minor uproar in town, giving one of the local councillors a mild heart attack when he saw a portrait of his aunt with her left nipple visible under a thin linen blouse.

*   *   *

The swifts moved with a disregard for space, some of them darting up for insects on the air, others swerving down towards the sea, or simply moving back and forth, whipping the evening sky. He looked up at them, as if envious, as if he might burst his way upwards himself, join them in a mockery of flight. They were bellyfull with insects as he rose stiffly out of the lawn chair, grabbed his fishing rod, put the flyhook in the lowest eye, and walked away from the river, through the muddy soil up towards our house.

He used the bottom end of the rod as a stick as he lurched, his dark overcoat open and hanging, cigarette smoke churning from his mouth, a blue bucket in his right hand. At the doorstep he leaned his rod against the wisteria, and slowly kicked off one of his boots. A stockinged foot trembled with cold on the concrete. He coughed into his fist and let some spit out into the hole at the bottom end of the drainpipe, bent down, stubbed his cigarette in a puddle, swiped at some midges in the air.

I lifted my backpack, stepped out from behind the hedge, and walked across the yard. Cocking his head sideways like a curious animal, he closed his right eye, fumbled in his coat for his glasses.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he muttered, ‘if it isn’t yourself.’

I held out my hand and he leaned his shoulder against me, smelling of earth and tobacco and bait. He moved to place his foot against the bottom of the door and shoved it open, coughed, threw his coat on the rack.

‘Christ, that’s some fucken monster you’ve got there,’ he said.

I placed the backpack against the kitchen table as he walked towards the fireplace.

‘Well, well, well,’ he said, his back to me, fumbling in the fire pail, ‘would ya look at the cut of ya.’

‘You’re looking well yourself.’

‘Cut your hair.’

‘I did.’

‘Lost the earring as well,’ he said.

‘Ah yeah, got rid of that a long time ago.’

‘You’re home for a while?’

‘I am.’ I picked up a spoon from the table, twirled it in my fingers. ‘For a week. Is that all right?’

‘If ya can tolerate an old man.’

‘If you can tolerate me.’

‘On holidays?’ he asked.

‘Sort of, yeah. Back to pick up the green card. Have to go up to the embassy in Dublin one of these days.’

‘Thought you were in London?’ he said.

‘Well, I was, yeah. I’m in the States now.’

‘I see. What ya doin’ there?’

‘Bits and pieces. Nothing much.’

He scratched at his head and let out a bit of a belch: ‘Nothing much happening here these days, either.’

‘Looks the same, except for the river.’

The fluorescent kitchen light fizzled. ‘I’m fishing every day.’

‘Every day?’

‘On the quest for a giant pink salmon down beyond the bend. I’d swear the fucken thing’s taunting me. Up it rears every now and then and looks like it’s waving.’ He stretched out his arms. ‘This bloody big.’

‘A salmon?’

‘That’s right.’

‘In the river?’

‘Why not?’

‘What happened to it?’

‘What?’

‘The water.’

‘Oh, they put in a few more gates by the meat factory.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t know. For cleaning the carcasses or something.’

‘It looks slow.’

‘But chock-f with that big one.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’m telling ya, this bloody big.’

He stretched out his arms again, a three-foot expanse between liver spots. But I was sure that the only thing more than three feet long in that river was the rod that he threw in, in a fit of anger, one time long ago. I had come home from secondary school wearing a gold hoop in my ear, and he flung the rod by the cork handle all the way to the footbridge and told me that if I didn’t take the piece of shite out of my ear he’d give me what-for and no doubt about it. Which he never did, and never would.

‘No kidding,’ he said to me, ‘ya should see it.’

‘Where?’

‘By the bend, I told ya.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Running around like a fart in a bottle.’

I laughed as he bent down, rubbing his knee.

‘An absolute bloody giant,’ he said.

But giant salmon or not, it looked to me that he shouldn’t be going down to the river too much anymore. Might catch himself a bad cold. Or tumble in. Get blown away in the breeze. With his shirt open to the third button he turned around from the fireplace. His chest was a xylophone of bones sticking out against his skin. His face and arms still held some tan, but the vale at his throat was lost to whiteness and the remaining chest hairs curled, acolytes of grey. His neck was a sack of sag and his trousers were huge on him. Not too healthy for him to be out in the cold, although it would be lovely if I could see him cast in the way he used to – even when I detested him there were times I was astounded just to watch him cast. Back when the river was alive, those flicks of the wrist like so many fireflies on the bank, the hooks glinting in the lapel of his overcoat, that huge sadness of his disappearing as the rod whipped away, him counting under his breath, one-two-three-here-we-go, lassoing it to the wind, brisk upward motion of the tip of the glass rod, sometimes drying off the flies by false casting, finally watching them curl out over the water and plonk, reeling the surface into soft circles, stamping his feet on the bank, spitting out over the water, all sorts of hidden violence in the motion.

He coughed again, fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief, pulled it out, and some coins fell to the floor. I stooped down to get them. I stood there looking at the new tenpenny coins.

‘When did they change the coins?’ I said.

‘Oh, a year or so ago.’

‘I see.’ I looked at the harp. It was finely etched.

‘It’s nice to have ya back, Conor,’ he said finally.

His lip quivered as he moved towards the fireplace with the poker, knelt down, prodded softly. A few large chunks fell out on to the cement slab and he mashed them down with his thumb, licked at it to soothe the burn, spat a few pieces of ash from the end of his tongue. He struggled to get up from his knees and I put my arm under his right shoulder.

‘Right,’ he said with a sudden whiparound. ‘I’m not a bloody invalid, ya know.’

‘I know.’

‘So I can get up on my own.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘Without a lick of help.’

‘Okay, okay.’

He placed his hand on the concrete and raised himself, using the mantelpiece as a fulcrum. One of Mam’s pictures – she is standing by a fencepost in Mexico – was still leaning against the mantel. He didn’t look at it. Just stood up, wheezing, straightened himself in the air and yawned, made a helicopter of his arms as if to expand the universe of himself.

‘Ya see?’ he said. ‘Fit as a bloody fiddle.’

He ambled his way into the kitchen and came out with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses, one of which chipped when his trembling hand cracked the bottle against the rim. Poured himself a big glass, handed me the bottle. ‘Take it from the neck,’ he said to me, ‘all the other glasses are dirty.’ I think it’s the first time in my life that the old man has seen me drinking – although when I was younger and Mam was gone, he would tell me his stories, and afterwards I would steal pound notes from his pockets. I would go downtown to buy flagons of hard cider, then return along the riverbank to clear the names of the two Protestant ladies underneath their explosion of cerise wildflowers.

*   *   *

He was almost twenty-one when he stood in a Fascist camp and watched great white loaves of bread showering down on Madrid, the strangest rain the city had ever seen. The bread zipped through the winter air, over the clifftops of the Manzanares River, parachutes of it moving like snow, bombarding the city. It fell on the streets, a miracle of propaganda, beautifully arced from hidden airplanes by pilots who played at being a 1939 Jesus in the clouds.

Reports came back to the Fascist front that the bread had descended from such a height that windows had been broken in the Royal Palace. Craters had been made in the snow. Birds and starving men were in an uproar upon it. Slates had been knocked off the roofs of houses. Books, used as sandbags, had been shaken from windowsills. Little boys in the city had stopped collecting shrapnel and were being won over by the bread. A Communist had been squashed to death by a flying bale. A priest on the Fascist front was heartened by the news of this angelic death – if only they could shower Madrid with holy wine they could have a mass for all the godless dying. Bread, said the priest, was even better than bombs.