Fishing the Sloe-Black River

by Colum McCann

  “You’re too hard on yourself,” says Michael.

  “I’ve been picking my way through a pillar of stone with a pin.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Oh come on, Michael, it’s not as if we’re twenty-one any more. All those years spat away.”

  “It doesn’t help to be bitter,” he says.

  “Oh, and you’re not bitter?”

  “I’ve learned not to think about it.”

  “That’s worse than being bitter, Michael.”

  “Come on,” he says, reaching across to take my hand. “You can’t change the past.”

  “No we can’t,” I say. My hand is limp. “We can’t, can we?”

  Embarrassed at my anger, I tell him once again, for the umpteenth time over the last three days, about how I found out where she was. I decided, only a week ago, to go back and see my father. I brought him a carton of Major because I couldn’t find Woodbines. I have no idea what stirred me to see him, except that one of the other secretaries in Dublin had talked all morning long about her pet collie dog throwing up over her favorite rug. She was actually weeping over it, more for the rug, I imagine, than for the dog. I walked out to the canal and sat watching boys diving in, breaking up the oily slime. Their recklessness astounded me. I went to Heuston station and took a train west.

  He was dead, of course. The couple who had bought our old bungalow had three babies now. They said they had been with my father in a hospital in Galway when, in an oxygen tent, he asked for a nip of Bushmill’s and a smoke. The doctors had told him that he would explode and he had said, “That’s grand, give me a smoke, so.” The husband asked who I was even though he knew exactly who I was. I didn’t want him to bring out nasturtiums or Easter lilies. I told him, in front of his wife, that I was a distant cousin. In a whisper, at the gate, he told me he had heard that Brigid was sick and was living now in a convent in the “Big Apple.” He stole a furtive kiss on my cheek. I wiped it off in disgust, went home to Dublin and made phone calls until I found Michael living in Quebec, a foreman at a building site.

  “Michael, I need to get back in. I can get a flight from London into Canada, no hassle.”

  “I’ll pick you up at the airport in Montreal.”

  “Are you married?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding? Are you?”

  “Are you kidding?” I laughed. “Will you take me there?”

  “Yeah.”

  It’s one highway, 95, all the way, a torrent of petrol stations, neon signs, motels, fast-food spires. Michael talks of a different world beyond this, where in his boredom he watched the sun fall and rise and fall again. San Quentin had taught him about looking out windows. The day he got out, in a suit two sizes too big, he learned how to cartwheel again and ended up tearing the polyester knees. He took a bus to Yosemite and got a job as a guide. He took a motorbike, a “rice burner” he called it, from California to Gallup, New Mexico, where his mother and father pissed away a monthly government check into a dry creekbed at the back of their house. Michael slept in a shed full of Thunderbird bottles, a hole in the corrugated ceiling where he watched the stars, bitterly charting their roll across the sky. He followed them east. He climbed scaffolds to build New York City high-rises. Navaho and Mohawk climbers were in big demand for that type of job and the money was good.

  Then there was a girl. She brought him to Quebec. They climbed frozen waterfalls in a northern forest. The girl was long gone, but the waterfalls weren’t. Maybe, he says, when we get back to Quebec he’ll put me in a harness and spiked boots and we’ll go scaling. I finger my thighs and say perhaps.

  Floods of neon rush by.

  We stop in a diner and a trucker offers Michael ten dollars for the lion-tooth necklace. Michael tells him that it’s a family heirloom and then, trying to make sure that I don’t hear—me, in my red crocheted cardigan and gray skirt—the trucker offers him a bag full of pills. Michael still has that sort of face. It’s been years since I’ve been wired, and I have a faint urge to drop some pills. But Michael thanks the trucker, says that he hasn’t done speed in years and we drive away.

  By late evening the next day, we snarl into the New York City traffic and head down toward the Village. Michael’s eyes are creased and tired. The car is littered with coffee cups and the smell of cigarettes lingers in our clothes. The city is much like any other to me now, a clog of people and cars. It seems appropriate that there is no room for us in the Chelsea Hotel, no more Dylan, no more Behan, no more Cohen remembering us well. Old songs flow through me as we drive away. We stay with a friend of Michael’s on Bleecker Street. I have brought two nightdresses in my suitcase. My greatest daring is that I don’t wear either of them. Michael and his friend curl on the ends of the sofa. I sleep in a bed, scared of the sheets. Four red-beaked hawks in badges grunting down from the thermals by a gentle creek in sequoia sunlight. A bouquet of boys shimmy in from the bogs in brown tweed hats and pants tucked in with silver bicycle clips. My father lights a carton of cigarettes and burns in a plastic tent. A nun runs around with dough rising up in her belly. My wrists pinned to pine needles, no light wind to carry me away. Blood running down the backs of his thighs. The talons of a robin carrying off flowers. I toss and turn in sweat that gathers in folds and it is not until Michael comes over and kisses my eyelids that I find sleep.

  On the drive out to Long Island I buy a bunch of daffodils from a street vendor. He tells me that daffodils mean marriage. I tell him that they’re for a nun. He tugs at his hat. “You never know, hon,” he says, “you never know these days.”

  Michael still gropes for the back of his hair as he drives, and every now and then he squeezes my forearm and says it’ll be all right. The expressway is a vomit of cars but gradually, as we move, the traffic thins out and the pace quickens. Occasional flecks of snow get tossed away by the windshield wipers. I curl into a shell and listen to the sound of what might be waves. I am older now. I have no right to be afraid. I think about plucking the petals from the flowers, one by one. We drive toward the ocean. Far off I can see gulls arguing over the waves.

  The convent at Bluepoint looks like a school. There seems to be little holy about the place except for the statue of Our Lady on the front lawn, a coat of snow on her shoulders. We park the car and I ask Michael to wait. From under his shirt collar I flick out the necklace of teeth and, for the first time since I’ve seen him, kiss him flush on the lips. “Go on,” he says, “don’t be getting soppy on me now. And don’t stay too long. Those waterfalls in Quebec melt very quickly.”

  He turns the radio up full blast and I walk toward the front entrance. Hold. Buckle. Swallow. The words of a poet who should have known: “What I do is me. For that I came.” I rasp my fingers along the wood but it takes a long time for the heavy door to swing open.

  “Yes dear?” says the old nun. She is Irish too, her face creased into dun and purple lines.

  “I’d like to see Brigid O’Dwyer.”

  She looks at me, scans my face. “No visitors, I’m sorry,” she says. “Sister Brigid needs just a wee bit of peace and quiet.” She begins to close the door, smiling gently at me.

  “Is mise a dhreifeur,” I stutter. I am her sister.

  The door opens again and she looks at me, askance.

  “Bhfuil tú cinnte?” Are you sure?

  “Sea,” I laugh. “Táim cinnte.” Yes, I’m sure.

  “Cad a bhfuil uait?” she asks. What do you want?

  “I want to see her. Sé do thoil é. Please.”

  She stares at me for a long time. “Tar isteach. Come in, girl.” She takes the daffodils and touches my cheek. “You have her eyes.”

  I move into the corridor where some other old nuns gather like moss, asking questions. “She’s very sick,” says one. “She won’t be seeing anyone.” The nun who met me at the door shuffles away. There are flowers by the doorway, paintings on the walls, a smell of potpourri, a quality of whiteness flooding all the colors. I sit in a steel chair with m
y knees nailed together, my hands in my lap, watching their faces, hearing the somber chatter, not responding. A statue of the Madonna stares at me. I am a teenager now in a brown convent skirt. It is winter. After camogie, in the school showers, one or two of the nuns stand around and watch my classmates and me as we wash the dirt off our legs. They see bruises on my inner thigh and then they tell me about Magdalene. I ride away from the school gates. I flagrantly pedal my bicycle with my skirt up high. I see her there, on the rock, sucking her finger, making a cross of reeds, the emblem of the saint for whom she was named. My father puts some peat on the fire. That’s grand, give me a smoke, so.

  “Will you join us for a cup? She’s sleeping now.” It’s the old nun who answered the door.

  “Thank you, Sister.”

  “You look white, dear.”

  “I’ve been traveling a long time.”

  Over tea and scones they begin to melt, these women. They surprise me with their cackle and their smiles. They ask of the old place. Brigid, they say. What a character. Was she always like that? The holy spirit up to the ears?

  Two nuns there had spent the last few years with her. They tell me that she had been living in El Salvador in a convent outside a coffee plantation. One day recently three other nuns in the convent were shot, one of them almost fatally, so Brigid slipped out to a mountain for a few hours to pray for their health. She was found three days later, sitting on a rock. They look at me curiously when I ask about her fingernails. No, they say, her fingernails were fine. It was the lack of food that did it to her. Five campesinos had carried her down from the mountain. She was a favorite among the locals. She had always taken food to the women in the adobe houses, and the men respected her for the way she had hidden it under her clothes, so they wouldn’t be shamed by charity. She’d spent a couple of weeks in a hospital in San Salvador, on an intravenous drip, then they transported her to Long Island to recover. She had never talked of any brothers or sisters, though she had gotten letters from Ireland. She did some of the strangest things in Central America, however. She carried a pebble in her mouth. It came all the way from the Sargasso Sea. She learned how to dance. She reared four piglets behind the sacristy in the local church. She had shown people how to skin rabbits. The pebble made little chips in her teeth. She had taken to wearing some very strange colored socks.

  I start to laugh.

  “Everyone,” says one of the nuns with a Spanish accent, “is allowed a little bit of madness, even if you’re a nun. I don’t see what’s wrong with that.”

  “No, no, no, there’s nothing wrong with it. I’m just thinking.”

  “It does get cold down there, you know,” she replies.

  Someone talks about the time she burned the pinto beans. The time the pigs got loose from the pen. The time the rabbit ran away from her. Another says she once dropped a piece of cake from her dress when she knelt at the altar, and one of the priests, from Wales, said that God gave his only begotten bun. But the priest was forgiven for the joke since he was not a blasphemer, just a bit of a clown. The gardener comes in, a man from Sligo, and says: “I’ve seen more fat on a butcher’s knife than I have on your sister.” I leave the scone raisins on the side of the saucer. I am still laughing.

  “Can I see her?” I say, turning to the nun who opened the door for me. “I really need to see her. I have a friend waiting for me outside and I must go soon.”

  The nun shuffles off to the kitchen. I wait. I think of a piece of turf and the way it holds so much history. I should have brought my sister a sod of soil. Or a rock. Or something.

  An old nun, with an African accent, singing a hymn, comes out of the kitchen, carrying a piece of toast and a glass of water. She has put a dollop of jam on the side of a white plate, “for a special occasion.” She winks at me and tells me to follow her. I feel eyes on my back, then a hum of voices as we leave the dining area. She leads me up the stairs, past a statue, eerie and white, down a long clean corridor, toward a room with a picture of Archbishop Romero on the door. We stop. I hold my breath. A piece of turf. A rock. Anything.

  “Go in, child.” The nun squeezes my hand. “You’re shaking.”

  “Thank you,” I say. I stand at the door and open it slowly. “Brigid?” The bedclothes are crumpled as if they’ve just been tossed. “Brigid. It’s me. Sheona.”

  There’s no sound, just a tiny hint of movement in the bedsheets. I walk over. Her eyes are open, but she’s not there inside them. Her hair is netted and gray. The lines on her face cut inward. Age has assaulted her cheekbones. I feel angry. I take down the picture of the Sacred Heart that is spraying red light out into the room and place it face-down on the floor. She murmurs and a little spittle comes out the side of her mouth. So she is there, after all. I look in her eyes again. This is the first time I have seen her since we were still that age. A bitterness in there now, perhaps, borne deep. “I just want some neutral ground,” I say. Then I realize that I don’t know who I’m talking to, and I put the picture back on the wall.

  I sit on the bed and touch her ashtrayed hair. “Talk to me,” I say. She turns slightly. The toast is growing cold on a plate on the floor. I have no idea if she knows who I am as I feed her, but I have a feeling she does. I’m afraid to lay my hand on her for fear of snapping bones. She doesn’t want to be fed. She hisses and spits the bread out of dehydrated lips. She closes her mouth on my fingers, but it takes no effort to pry it open. Her teeth are as brittle as chalk. I lay the toast on her tongue again. Each time it gets moister and eventually it dissolves. I wash it down with some water. I try to say something but I can’t, so I sing a Hoagy Carmichael tune, but she doesn’t acknowledge it. If I tried to lift her, I think I would find a heap of dust in my hand, my own hand, which is speaking to me again, carving out a moving shape.

  I want to find out who is under the bedsheets. “Talk to me.” She rolls away and turns her back to me. I stand and look around the room. It all comes down to a lump in the bed. An empty chamber pot. Some full-bloom chrysanthemums by the window. A white plate with a smear of jam. A dead archbishop on the outside, looking in.

  “Just a single word,” I say. “Just give me a single word.”

  Some voices float in from the white corridor. Frantic, I move to a set of drawers and a cupboard to look at the bits and pieces that go to make up Brigid now. I pull the drawers out and dump the contents on the floor. I cannot understand the mosaic. A bible. Some neatly folded blouses. Long underwear. A bundle of letters in an elastic band. Lots of hairpins. Stamps gleaned from the Book of Kells. Letters. I do not want to read them. A painting of a man sowing seeds, by a child’s hand. A photograph of our mother and father, from a long time ago, standing together by Nelson’s Pillar, him with a cigar, her with netting hanging down from her hat. A copy of a newspaper from a recent election. A Mayan doll. Lotus-legged on the floor, I am disappointed with the clutter of somebody else’s life. I haven’t found what I’m looking for.

  I shuffle to the end of the bed and lift the sheets. Her feet are blue and very cold to the touch. I rub them slowly at first. I remember when we were children, very young, before all that, and we had held buttercups to each other’s chins on the edges of brown fields. I want her feet to tell me that she remembers. As I massage I think I see her lean her head sideways and smile, though I’m not sure. I don’t know why, but I want to take her feet in my mouth. I want to, but it seems obscene, so I don’t. “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, up a lazy river with me.” She mumbles when I lean over her face and kiss her. There is spittle on her chin and she is horribly ruined.

  I walk to the window. Far off, in the parking lot, I can see Michael, head slumped forward on the steering wheel, sleeping. Two nuns look at him through the passenger window, curious, a cup of tea and some scones in their hands. I watch him too, wondering about the last few days. There’s an old feeling within me that’s new now. Those teeth around his nec
k. I want a bicycle again. Sequoia seedlings in the basket. I want to ride through a flurry of puddles to a place where a waterfall is frozen. I will stay here for now. I know that. But when she recovers, I will go to Quebec and climb.

  But there is something I need first. I smile, go away from the window, lean towards Brigid, and whisper: “Where, Sister, did you put those yellow socks of mine anyway?”

  BREAKFAST FOR ENRIQUE

  The only older men I know are the ones who rise early to work. They fish the ocean for sea trout and haddock, flaring out their boats from the wharf before the sun, coming back by mid-morning with huge white plastic barrels full of fish, ready for us to gut. They draw hard on unfiltered cigarettes and have big hands that run through mottled beards. Even the younger ones look old, the hair thinning, the eyes seaward. You can see them move, slow and gull-like, back to their boats when their catch has been weighed, stomping around in a mess of nets and ropes. They don’t talk to the fishgutters. They hand us a sort of disdain, a quiet disregard, I believe, for the thinness of our forearms.

  I think of them always in the mornings, when the light comes in through my curtains. The light is like an old fisherman in a yellow rain-slicked coat, come to look at Enrique and me, wrapped in our bedsheets.

  It’s a strange light that comes this morning, older, thickerwristed, pushing its way through the gap and lying, with its smotes of dust, on the headboard. Goddamn it, aren’t you two just the salt of the earth? Enrique is curled into himself, the curve of his back full against the spindle of his legs. His hair is all about his face. Stubbled hairs in a riot on his chin. His eyes have collected black bags, and his white T-shirt still has smatterings of spaghetti sauce from yesterday’s lunch. I move to brush my lips against his cheek. Enrique stirs a little, and I notice a little necklace of blood spots on the pillow where he has been coughing. Get up out of bed, you lazy shits. I smooth Enrique’s brow where the sweat has gathered, even in sleep.