by Colum McCann
‘I need some smokes too, Conor.’
‘No you don’t.’
‘Come off it, now. Don’t be doing that to me.’
‘What?’
‘I love the odd smoke,’ he said.
We were quiet for a while, then he rubbed his hands together: ‘You’re getting like Mrs McCarthy for crissake.’
I reached my hands down into my pockets, felt the breeze lisp its way into me: ‘Well, come on so, the tea’ll be fit to dance on.’
‘Just a minute,’ he said, catching the cat’s tail. ‘This little bastard’s hungrier than any I’ve seen before.’
* * *
The town was thin. Dogs and cats were bony. Burros exposed brown racks of ribs as they nudged in along ancient paths. On dusty streets clothes were hung from windows, taking siestas in the sun – the clothes were sparse and worn, bits at the elbows rubbed away, knees vanished or threadbare. Even the vultures that rode the thermals above were lean. They made spirals in the air, their wings beating sparsely against the heat, looking down on the gauntness beneath them, comic black kites with red-raw beaks. Boys aimed up at the vultures with slingshots, tried to keep them in the air, exhaust them. But they flew on, generation giving way to generation, leanness to leanness.
A priest, a mestizo with a face like a poppyseed roll, came once a week, late on Sundays, to celebrate mass. He moved his way through the town on a bicycle, from one church to the other, all sorts of confessions ringing in his ears. Hungover men in shirtsleeves pulled back as the bicycle moved along. Music spilling out from old jukeboxes in the bars died down in reverence. My father took a photo of the priest once, his black cassock raised high in the air as he negotiated an open sewer behind one of the bars, exposing some very dark legs and thin ankles, moving delicately over the river of urine, lips pursed, nose scrunched. Something about the clergy always moved him to expose the pathetic. He delighted in the shot of altar boys getting drunk on mass wine, hair upshooting on their heads, red dribbles down the front of their vestments. But he got in a fierce amount of trouble one morning, just after dawn, when he snapped my grandmother as she prepared to go to church. She was wearing only her undergarments, a corset that could have come from another century, lace zigzagging across it, breasts stuffed into it like a sausage roll, a patina of age upon it. She was stealing out on to the porch to get her Sunday dress, which was drying in the sun. ‘Pig!’ she shouted at him, ‘Go back to your pigpen!’ She was a tiny woman, four feet tall, with a voice that could raise generations of the dead. It boomed from deep inside her bosom-burdened body. ‘Go back and eat slop!’ She threw a bottle at him, narrowly missing his camera. Later, as she moved her way down the road to mass, he tried to apologise, pulling off his hat as he ran beside her, but she spat on the ground in front of him and tilted her own hat on her head. ‘Pig!’
Four weeks later she agreed to talk to him again – but only after he swore that he would go to mass for the rest of his life, every Sunday, without a shadow of a doubt. She lived a life sustained by faith and rosary beads. My mother stood in the corner of the kitchen and giggled when she heard the promise. She was nineteen years old at the time and still given to giggles. She called him ‘Obispo Michael’ – Bishop Michael – after that and gave him a scapular to remind him of his words. He wore it irreverently, walking around with his shirt off in the house, the scapular moving back and forth over turrets of dark chest hair. But he was forced to go to mass every Sunday, up along the street, past the poolhall, and over the small aqueduct that conveyed water from the river. He couldn’t slouch at the back of the church, he was dragged to the front pew with my grandmother, who was so delighted by the outcome that she gave him her favourite set of rosary beads, a black pair that he was embarrassed by when he fished in pockets to look for change. They were made of obsidian and caught the light in a peculiar way.
My grandmother lived with them in the adobe house on the outskirts of town. Her own husband had died ten years before, left dumped in an old oil barrel, his throat cut after a vicious fight. She took up his pastime of skinning rabbits – using the knife as if avenging the death. Every time a baby was born in town she presented the parents with a rabbit’s foot preserved in a jar. The charm was supposed to be especially good in staving off cholera. Only one boy hadn’t been given a rabbit’s foot – his father was suspected of the murder, though nothing could be proved – and my grandmother was looked upon with a mixture of awe and suspicion when the boy died of diarrhoea and muscle cramps in the middle of his second summer. After that, when a woman in town got pregnant, they hurried over to see her, bearing gifts and making oblique references to good-luck charms.
When no rabbits were available for butchering, my grandmother sat on the front porch and simply swiped a knife through the air, back and forth, endlessly, her body swaying with her. The buzzards moved above in their scavenging circles.
One morning, when she was out walking, she flung a stone at a passing cottontail, near a mesquite tree, caught it in the head, stunned it temporarily, hobbled over on a walking stick to finish it off, but tripped in a pothole and broke her leg. ‘I wish I’d gotten that creature,’ she told the doctor, ‘I’d have died happy then.’ What disturbed her the most was that the cottontail had been left to the black birds, the carcass swooped down upon quickly – there wasn’t even a skin to be found. The doctor laid her up in bed for months but others brought her rabbits to skin. Propped up by pillows, she laid old grain sacks around her to contain the blood and hides. The Virgin of Guadalupe stared from the bedside table. When my grandmother was finished she laid her head back on the pillow and muttered a melody of strange prayers to the small white statue. She insisted on wearing a big straw hat, even in bed.
My grandmother tried to get Mam to learn how to skin rabbits, learn the skill, preserve the tradition, but my mother wasn’t interested.
Geraniums grew up from old paint pots that were hung from the porch of the house. A cow skull, decorated merrily with colours, was hung near the front door in front of the rusty fly screen. On top of the roof was a weather-vane that never moved anymore, simply pointed east, even in the strongest of winds. My father climbed on the roof and tried to get it to move – Mam had asked him to fix it so she could watch the direction of her winds – but it wouldn’t budge. During the wedding a drunk had climbed up on the roof and played the guitar for them, but he fell and landed sideways on the vertical spindle, cutting himself and leaving a nasty scar on his ribcage. His wife said that the cut never healed, that he still felt the breeze roll through the wound and that my father – by virtue of being a gringo – should pay him some compensation. Seeing the man outside the town bar, my mother pointed to his ribcage: ‘Which way’s the wind blowing today, Benito?’ The man reared up his leg and let out a giant fart, to the delight of some men squatting on the ground. ‘I think it’s heading south,’ she simply said, as she turned and walked away. That night she left a plate of beans outside the man’s house – it was fair compensation, she said, and the only compensation he would get.
When she walked around the town the local boys still flung big glances at her. Maybe they thought that the man in the big brown hat was some sort of wicked apparition, that one morning they’d all wake up and he’d be gone as easily and as mysteriously as he had come.
But they saw her settling into her new life, bit by bit. Her hair grew out. She began growing vegetables near the porch – tying herself to the soil. It was rough and bitter work, kneeling down in patterned dresses, mangy dogs scrabbling around the fence, dirt so hard that it ripped out the underneath of her fingernails. She gave the job a tolerable accent with a little tequila, sipped from large bottles as she worked on her hands and knees. When dust was kicked up in her face she spat it out on the ground. Still, she was raven-haired and beautiful. Men still found profligacy rising up in their groins. They sat on porches opposite the house, waiting for her to stand up from her work so the sunlight could filter through the thin dress, give an outl
ine of a round breast, a long leg, a back arched with her hands on the lower buttocks to loosen and stretch herself. Somebody took to dropping off chocolate on the doorstep late at night, wrapped in big cubes of ice to keep it from melting. Dishes of pollo en mole and flowers appeared with oblique handwritten notes. She ate the chocolate and the chicken dish and shoved the flowers in vases, didn’t search the admirer out, she wasn’t bothered, she was happy. Secretly she wondered if it was my father who was leaving the presents on the doorstep.
Another sign to the local men that she was no longer available came when she bought the chickens. They arrived one day in wooden crates, eight hens and a rooster. A chicken pen was put together from scrap wood. She named the chickens after people in town. The mayor was the fattest, with a huge fleshy chin wattle. It laid very few eggs. Many of the birds were named after men who went across the border to work on vast oil derricks and ranches in Texas, coming home with fistfuls of money. The part-time barber was a strange chicken, without a head comb, bald as could be. And the barber’s wife was a wild one who flew up in the air at the slightest of sounds.
There was also an odd rooster that never crowed in the morning. She called him José after a local character whose lips had been sewn together when he lost a bet in a bar. Even after the stitches were taken out José never said a word. He walked around silently with his ebony hair slicked back with cooking grease, his mouth in a sneer, the bottom lip peppered with scarholes. When he passed my parents’ house José stared at his namesake rooster with a great brown bitterness. One morning they found the bird strangled on the front doorstep with a note in Spanish that read: ‘Now we speak.’
My mother grew to adore the chickens in the same way that my grandmother adored rabbits. Two groups of them – one raised for eggs, the others for sale – and every now and then some were butchered and cooked. My grandmother did the butchering, deftly pressing her fingers on the point of a neck, cracking it. Mam watched the weather and tied the best times for egg-laying in with its vicissitudes. The colours of the wind had a lot to do with it. Her lazy black wind was a fitful time. The brown one, riverwise, carried nothing but problems, the river coming from somewhere foreign and unfathomable.
My grandmother laughed at her daughter’s curious superstition, wondered why she didn’t attribute the brown wind to Benito and his beans. ‘Are you my daughter at all?’ They sat out on the porch and talked to the chickens as they pecked at the ground, some strange sort of soap opera developing amongst them, particularly when breeding was going on. The new rooster was named ‘Obispo Michael’ after my father, who sometimes came out from his darkroom to watch the spectacle of breeding, tucking his hands into his waistcoat and rocking back and forth in pleasure. ‘That’s a fine method I have there, I must say,’ he said. My grandmother eyed him suspiciously and said something about Riley and the dry bullets of new revolutionaries – she was expecting a grandchild any day, but the only grandchild would be years coming, in another country, almost another universe.
While my mother tended to the animals the old man worked on his photographs. He borrowed a truck, used most of the remaining money on another week-long journey to buy supplies in San Antonio. At the back of the house he built a darkroom – he always claimed it was the finest of its kind in the northern hemisphere. In a place of great light – light that swept its way in a hard yellowness over the land – not a chink got through. He put double doors in. The second door bolted from the inside so that when he was developing the photos wouldn’t get ruined. He saturated himself in red light. Only my mother was allowed in. For a joke he hung above the door a chastity belt he had found in a rubbish dump. A sign in Spanish read: ‘No Entry Beyond This Point.’
Sometimes drunks came hammering at his door. They were fond of reaching up and tucking their empty bottles into the belt. The bottles clanged together like an odd doorbell, but he seldom answered. The coterie of drunks would hang around outside, mouths flapping away under thick black moustaches. They were often looking for money – any man who could afford to take photographs had to be rich. He didn’t have much to give, but he set up a row of hammocks for them outside the door of the darkroom. The men lounged there and shared precious cigarettes, speculated on the nature of his photos. They listened to the floating voices of my mother and grandmother as the chicken opera developed in the yard, Obispo Michael going hell for leather whenever he got the chance, a couple of delighted screams rising up when he went after the barber’s wife who, in real life, had a cleft palate and a tendency towards body odour.
One of the drunks, Rolando, used to stand by the front fence in his huarache sandals and roar them on, leaning over to clandestinely spit on the one named after the mayor. But when my father came out to watch the episodes, Rolando moved away, sneaked up behind him and either flicked my father’s ear or tweaked his nose, particularly if Obispo Michael was having a hectic day. After the first flicking, Rolando would stare into my father’s face, reach up and pull or flick again. But the tweaking stopped one afternoon when Rolando got drunker than ever before and touched a lit cigarette against a mole on my father’s forearm. My father recoiled, and with his elbow – he said it was accidental – caught Rolando in the mouth. The blow could have been harmless; only, Rolando had rotten gums. Teeth were spat out on the ground. Guilty, my father picked Rolando up from the ground while my grandmother went crazy on the front porch: ‘Animal!’ ‘Pig!’ ‘Leave Rolando alone!’ Rolando settled down in the dust, fingering his mouth. My father shooed my grandmother away, went walking to clear his head, bought a bottle of tequila for Rolando. They searched together on the ground for the teeth, one of which was never found. While they were searching, Rolando burnt my father’s mole with another three cigarettes and let gulps of laughter roll down into the neck of the bottle.
Still, slow times lay in that dry soil for the old man – dust billowed in the air when the rare car or pick-up truck went past on the potholed road on its way down to the petrol station, where gas was pumped by hand from an ancient American pump. When he was finished work he sometimes sat with Mam on the front steps, slurping bottles with the men, swatting mosquitoes, and staring at the vehicles, wondered where they were off to, dust settling back down around them. They put their arms around one another, and he told her of other places. They watched the sun sink its way southward on the horizon, month giving way to month, season giving way to season. It was strange for my father to stay so long in one place, and he wondered where the two of them should go next. Once or twice planes were seen in the sky over the Chihuahuan desert and the whole town stood, mesmerised. But still the dust settled on the ordinary. Night rose up on the banal. The days often merged into lethargy as they sat with one another, holding hands. Even the sight of a burro or a cart gave him the want for movement. It thumped within him, haunted him, as it always haunted him – and maybe still does.
* * *
Down beyond the barn a bored raven landed on the telegraph wire, and the old man watched it for the longest time as he stroked the cat. I thought about that wire and how a billion unknown voices might be running under the raven’s feet, moving through the long black body, through the shaggy throat feathers, scuttling along through hollow bones and stringy ligaments, all the way to the wedge-shaped tail sheening with black and purple, voices all the way to the core, to the heart. Those townspeople in Mexico could be voiced here in seconds, talking of its new cafés with their giant wine racks, Miguel’s chandeliers, its tarmacadamed streets, the screeching grackles, the lottery-ticket sellers, the abandoned cinema, the low adobe bars, the malicious heat. I can still feel it. All that heat. As I walked along those roads. In that colonial hotel room with the dancing ceiling fan other voices talked to me. When I went looking for their house there wasn’t a weather vane in sight. And Mam wasn’t there, not her, not her ghost, nor her image, hardly even her memory. And he was summoned up from only a couple of throats. The streets at dawn had a retinue of red, a typhoid rash over the morning. I walked alon
g, under a grove of trees, under the sun, under a universe of curiosity and doubt, a telephone wire within myself, gurgling.
* * *
A boy in the town, Miguel, Rolando’s son, was fond of drawing maps, and the old man bought them from him, hung them on the walls of the house. They were copied from a school atlas, but his versions were full of fabulous and unusual colours. Miguel drew magenta oceans, white mountains, green rivers, purple roads, a red tongue of river, and sometimes he rubbed a little soil on the maps to give the countryside a brown tint. If you put your nose to the maps, you could smell the soil. The cities were shown with little pieces of metal that could rip the tips of your fingers if you ran your hands along them. My father moved the maps from wall to wall, switching them from the kitchen to the living room and back again so that he felt as if he were going somewhere. The year was 1949, and he was over the cusp of his thirties – if he couldn’t go in reality he would go in his imagination. At times he took my mother’s hand and led her all the way around the world within that small house, teaching her English as they went, so that she quickly acquired an Irish accent, the sound of it merging with her own native euphony. She would write new words down in a spiral-edged book, wondering when she might get a chance to use them. In truth she was a little frightened by it all, this possibility of going. Still in her twenties – the difference of nine years sometimes a ravine between them – she had never set foot outside her town. Even if she wanted to, there would be no moving anywhere for a while – my grandmother made sure of that.
‘You can leave when the sun comes up in the west,’ she said, heaving around under her chest. ‘And maybe even a few days after that.’
Miguel’s maps were a sign that my father’s feet were itching again. He even invited the young genius over to draw a few maps on the wall of his darkroom, but Rolando refused to let his son go. A chicken had been named after Rolando – he had been delighted at first, came over to the house every day, leaned over the fence, a grey crooked eyebrow dipping down, talked about how much uglier the mayor was. But then the rooster had seemed to take an overwhelming fondness for mounting and treading Rolando’s namesake, and Rolando was the butt of feral jokes, especially among the other drunks. ‘You’re walking funny today, Rolando.’ ‘Watch those feathers fly!’ ‘Have you room for another egg?’ He never came over to the house anymore, even after the hen was renamed. Young Miguel sneaked over to the darkroom after school, sat in and talked with my father, but he never managed to get the maps finished. He was trying to figure out a way to get a particular mound of soil to suspend itself in the air – it kept dropping down near the vats of chemicals, even when he made a shelf for the soil from tiny pieces of wood. One day when he came over he found a note tucked into the chastity belt above the door, ‘Sorry, Miguel, closed for a while.’