Authors: Colum McCann
He’s the same crotchety old bastard that he was when I left five years ago. Bit stupid for me to come home and think that it might be any different, I suppose. But a week is a week and we can probably tolerate each other that long – besides, I’ll have to make arrangements to get up to Dublin for a few days, get everything sorted out for my visa. But I wonder what he’d say if I told him that these days I’m living in a cabin in Wyoming, working jobs that hardly pay the rent, just drifting along. Probably wouldn’t give a damn, though, wouldn’t faze him one bit. Living his days now with those slow castings.
I sat up in the bedroom tonight and looked out the window to the bible-dark of the Mayo night, the stars rioting away. In a strange way it’s nice to be back – it’s always nice to be back anywhere, anywhere at all, safe in the knowledge that you’re getting away again. The law of the river, like he used to say. Bound to move things on. When I left home I promised myself I’d never return – at the train station he shoved a ten-pound note in my hand and I threw it right back at him as the train pulled away. But enough of this. Enough whining. I am home now, and a million possibilities may still lie outside my window, curlews resurrected to the night if I want them to be.
WEDNESDAY
grand morning for the dogs
Cooked breakfast for him this morning, but he didn’t want any. He said that ‘sunnyside up’ is an American notion and that I’ve developed a bit of an accent to go along with my cooking.
He just sat with that lazy inertia in his eyes and peddled the eggs around on the plate with his fork, leaving a trail of grease. Every now and then he touched the fork against his teeth. His lips moved as if chewing something, the lower one reaching out over the top. They made a dry sort of smacking sound, settled down to nothing again. He steered his finger through the grease and wiped it on the sleeve of his blue workshirt, stared at me for no particular reason. Told me that half the town have their green cards or their English dole numbers by now. Nothing but old men left. All the sons and daughters coming home for Christmas, elongating their words and dropping haitches all over the place. He said he was surprised there wasn’t a row of haitches and ‘gee-whizzes’ between here and Shannon Airport.
We were silent for a long time until two stray dogs came barking through the outside yard. A black and white collie and a golden labrador with a red collar. They wheeled around down by the barn, chasing each other in tight circles, tails wagging. The old man rose up and shuffled over to the window, clacked his lips again, leaned against the frame, rolled the curtain between his thumb and forefinger, watched them. The collie cornered the labrador over by where the darkroom used to be – a burnt-out shell now – and danced ritually around her for a while, climbed up.
The old man chuckled, rubbed his hands along the curtains, and turned away from the window while they continued their bout.
‘Grand morning for the dogs anyway,’ he said.
We laughed, but his was a strange laugh that didn’t last very long. He sort of threw the chuckle out into the air and immediately swallowed it back down his saggy throat. He ambled into the pantry and got all his equipment together while the yelping rose up from outside, chopping through the dawn. Asked him did he want some company for the day but he shook his head, no. He said it’s much better fishing when things are quiet, it doesn’t disturb the big fish, they have acute hearing, they can sense a person for miles, it all has to do with wave vibrations and the motion of sound, salmon are particularly sensitive. I knew he was bullshitting, but I decided to leave him be. Down he went to the river, shouting at the dogs to clear off as he walked.
He gave a slow push to the green gate with his foot, climbed over the stile with difficulty. He has worn a path through the fuchsia bushes to the bank. The path was muddy in the middle from last night’s drizzle, and he had to straddle it at first, one foot at either side of the puddle. Then he just gave up and slopped his way drowsily through the muck, wiped his boots on the long grass. He set up his equipment and started casting away, settled himself down into the grey caisson of his loneliness. The dogs went off down the lane, stopping for another yelp of lust down by the bend, where the big potholes are.
* * *
The old man hung around Madrid in confusion until, in the summer of 1939, a soldier from Mexico – a Communist with only two fingers left on his right hand – beckoned him to another continent. Other wars had erupted all over Europe and the soldier said he knew of a place in the Chihuahuan desert where a man could get away from it all, sit and get drunk and lay a hat over his face and dream and run a full set of fingers over a bottle or a guitar or a horse or a beautiful woman.
My father wasn’t interested in horses or guitars, but the soldier carried a picture of his sister on the inside of his uniform. He held it delicately between his two fingers like a cherished cigarette, a photo of a young woman, no more than seventeen years old, in a billowy white linen skirt, flour on her hands. The photo was a good and sufficient reason for my father to latch on an impulse and go. And there’d been enough dying. He wanted to forget about Manley. Leave Europe to its bags of butchery and bones, to its internecine slaughter. He filled his rucksack with film, swapped his cameras for another Leica, a newer model, and offered the soldier a large amount of money for the shot of his sister. The photo had already grown yellow around the edges, but the soldier wouldn’t part with it. Instead, my father took a picture of the Mexican holding the picture. They were in a market area on the southern Spanish coast, vegetables arrayed about them, the soldier standing, small and wiry, with a wrinkled face that was not unlike an old vegetable patch itself. When he smiled, he showed very bad gums and the darkest of teeth.
The Mexican and my father took a ship that was returning to the green neck of the world with a cargo of rotten bananas. The shipment had been refused at the Spanish port, owing to a vendetta. The captain dumped the bananas not far out to sea – my father said that they fell like absurd black fish into the clear water. On deck, he and the soldier played poker and dreamed bilious dreams, fought with other passengers, threw cigarette butts into the wake behind them, watched them fizzle out in the air, charged the sailors for portraits taken down in the engine room, making a little bit of money together. The Mexican walked around on deck, staring at the photo of his sister, promising my father great things: a house on the edge of the Rio Grande, a grove of tamarisk trees, twelve very healthy chickens, a motorbike that wouldn’t sputter.
He lost the soldier in a dockside crowd in Veracruz when the boat pulled into the Gulf of Mexico.
A Friday afternoon, the day of some festival, and people shoved gigantic bottles into my father’s hands as he roared out for his friend over the heads of the crowd. Fish were being cooked over fires, women in shawls guided donkeys, a fashionable car beeped its way through the market, where parrots and snakes were on sale. Fights and songs were full of mescal. He searched for two days but there was no sign of the soldier. So he walked through the town and out along the coastline paths. Walking was holy – it cleared the mind. He wandered northwards, through small towns full of fishing boats and people bent over nets. They took him into their homes, bedded him down for the night, fed him frijole beans, woke him with coffee, ground corn on
metate
stones for the going. At other times men spat at his feet – to some of them he was nothing more than a gringo fool, a
fuereño
in a derisory hat. But I can imagine him sauntering through the sun-yellow streets, wiry and broad-stepped, stains on the underside of his shirt, his money still pinned into his waistband, the brim of the hat casting a multitude of shadows on his face, thin red streaks of tiredness in the whites of his eyes, chatting to women in his broken Spanish, gesturing to men, drinking, cavorting, constantly struck by the rivers of moments that were carrying him along, slamming him from one bank to the other, ferrying his way ferociously to no particular place.
He took photos as he moved his way up and down the country, along the eastern coast – a prostitute in a blond wig, leaning out of a window; a boy playing soccer alone in a laneway; a man on a boat dumping a dead child, covered in lime, into the sea; men in cotton trousers; boys in the rain flinging stones up at birds; political slogans on the walls; a pig slaughtered at the rear of a church; a woman in an adelita dress moving very precisely under a parasol. Colour seemed to exist in his black and white shots, as if it had somehow seeped itself into the shade and the shadows of his work, so that years later – when I sat in the attic – I could almost tell that the parasol was yellow, it had that feel about it to me. His photos spoke to me that way. Many other things were yellow in my ideas of Mexico at the time – the leaves of plants, the leftovers of malaria, the sun pouring down jonquil over the land.
He spent a couple of seasons with fishermen close to Tampico, living in a palm-fronted hut down near the water. One of the men, Gabriel, inhabited his photographs. On the far side of his sixties, with a patch of hair on the front of his forehead, Gabriel tucked bait in his mouth to keep it warm. Worms, or sometimes even maggots, were held between his gum and lip, causing the lower lip to bulge out. It was as if he carried an extra tongue with him, jutting out over a cleft in his chin. Even when he was fishing with nets or lobster pots Gabriel kept the bait in his mouth. It was a trick he had learned as a child – warm bait, he claimed, made for a better catch. He would lean over the side of his boat and let some foul-looking spit volley out over the water.
He taught my father about nets and reels, hooks and flies, carried a note in his pocket that read, in Spanish: ‘If you want to be happy for an hour, get drunk; if you want to be happy for a day, kill a pig; if you want to be happy for a week, get married; if you want to be happy for a lifetime, go fishing.’
Gabriel had developed an aversion to land. His legs wobbled when he walked on dry soil, so he stayed in his boat most of the time, feet propped over the edge of the deck, taking his worms from an old tobacco can, shoving them down in the pouch of his mouth. He visited his wife in town occasionally, preferring to sleep with her in a hammock because of its rocking motion. Gabriel and his wife had eight children together. Gabriel had called his youngest son ‘Jesus’ with the idea that he would one day walk on water. But Jesus had walked elsewhere, along with other sons and daughters, leaving Gabriel with nobody to take to sea – his wife got seasick in the bath.
Every Sunday, Gabriel brought my father out on the boat instead of going to mass. While church bells rang, my father left his hut and went down to the dock and out to sea. The old Mexican would kneel in between two small shrines he had erected on either side of the rowlocks. Wooden saints were nailed into the boards. They hovered above the blue, pellucid sea. Gabriel said prayers while the boat bobbed out on the ocean, maintaining that on Sundays his shrimp nets were fuller than ever. My father saw him every day, but there weren’t as many photos of Gabriel as he would have liked – film was becoming scarce. Gabriel was almost like a father to him. They filled a void in one another. Gabriel wanted to teach my father ballads, but he soon found out that he had a voice not unlike the ravens that came down to feed on discarded fish heads. So the old Mexican insisted that he just listen, not sing. Raucous tunes rolled from Gabriel, songs that he made up as he went along, eyes cast to the sea. He sang of other days when he was able to dive to great depths and take up precious things from the ocean floor, of traditions, of curious motions that arose from waves. The two of them rowed together through bays and inlets, season piling into season, my father’s face reddening at first, then darkening in the reflected sunlight, his accent improving as he learned Spanish from Gabriel, who rolled his vowels around the parasites in his mouth.
Gabriel’s wife came down to dockside with plates of food, the plates covered with an old cloth to keep them warm. She brought only enough for her husband to eat and seldom even gave a nod to the gringo with the cameras. Sometimes she hung around to listen to the mournful sound of her husband’s four-stringed guitar.
My father knew then that it was time to head on but before he did, a strange thing happened. A group of landcrabs made their way up from the shore to invade the shacks of the seafront. They scuttled in unison, a barrage of them, almost in formation, clambering over stones, a wash of movable eyes. Gabriel was on land at the time, the bait between his gum and lip. The sea had threatened storms, and he was out mending nets on a pier and securing his boat when the invasion happened. He ran home, towards his wife, but found himself surrounded by the creatures. In the photograph Gabriel is perched on a fencepost, much like a bird, scared, looking down, staring at the crabs as they go past, his lip jutting out, letting gobs of maggoty brown spit down upon them. His shabby jacket hangs around him. An old black glazed sombrero with a large brim and steeple crown sits precariously on his head. A perplexed look on his face. The crabs look bizarre and out of place, a bit like my old man, moving crabways through people’s lives, bound to incongruity.
When he got back to his hut, my father found that the place had been ransacked. He suspected Gabriel’s wife, but couldn’t prove a thing. The rucksack, a few clothes, and the Foxford blankets were all missing. He felt it lucky that he always kept his cameras and money with him – but there was a portent in the robbery. Gabriel walked out of town with him, and a few miles beyond – a big sacrifice for a man with an epileptic tenor in his legs – offering my father the shell of a landcrab as a memento. The crab had slithered up and died on Gabriel’s porch. My father hung the shell from his new rucksack and continued north, along the seaboard, towns thinning out, the Sierra Madres looming.
At night the old man slept with his equipment in much the same way that he might have slept with a woman, coveting his cameras, everything curled in around him, the film in a special bag, even the tripod ensconced at his feet, a little piece of string tied around it and hooked to a big toe. He still had enough money left to go where he wanted, but he kept it tucked in his waistband in case of emergency. He moved inland, took a job painting fences for a rich rancher in the grasslands, sleeping in a horse barn with ten vaqueros. The other men played poker at night. Eight long months, keeping to himself, sulking around the corral, making enough to move along once more. Working on the fences, hammering a tamping bar into the ground, he often thought of the Mexican soldier’s sister. The photo had burned itself like magnesium into his mind. Every now and then he woke up and saw two dreamlike fingers beckoning him. He would go and find the girl. He wandered all the way north, towards the Texas border, hitching occasional lifts across the mountains from small grey trucks. Sometimes men told him about a massive war that had erupted on the other side of the world, rumours of skinny women walking barefoot into gas chambers, rows and rows of them pale as Easter lilies, small mines bobbing on the Pacific, an eruption of barbed wire in a halo around Europe – but all of that was an eternity away, he couldn’t fathom how men could continue their lust for dying after the agonies of Spain. He was treading the middle line between drifter and coward, I suppose. He could have gone to Europe to photograph or fight, but instead he continued his peregrinations, heading westward, away from the smell of the sea, wind in the vast emptiness, all the way through the mountains, across Coahuila, to the eastern side of the Chihuahuan desert.