Everything in This Country Must by Colum McCann
* * *
IN THE GRAVEYARD after kayaking he found another pint glass at the site of the young man. This one had no lipstick, but it was ribbed with beer stains, perfect circles from where each gulp had been taken. He took the glass home and she inadvertently cleaned it and put flowers in it and placed it on the table, neatly positioned between the salt and pepper shakers, the flowers nodding in the wind every time the door of the caravan opened. After a while he began to like the idea of the glass being used, and he wondered if, by the end of the summer, he would have a little collection. A neighbor in their housing estate had kept rubber bullets, divining their histories from their scars—what wall they smashed into, what car, what warehouse, what flesh. The deeper the scar, the shorter the distance the bullet had flown. It was a simple logic the boy might apply to the residue of rings that were left on the side of the pint glass.
* * *
IN THE CARAVAN MIRROR it seemed to him that he looked older now and he found a single hair on his chest. In the morning he went toward town with a sort of brazenness and his shirt ambitiously undone.
At the end of the pier he blew kisses to the women who wore the skimpiest bikinis. They gestured back and invited him to their bedrooms and they made love endlessly, sometimes two or three of them all at once—they liked the way he talked and they told him he had the biggest willy they’d ever seen. He chuckled and whooped along the beach-front road, hearing them shout that it was massive, absolutely massive, their husbands together couldn’t find a penis that size if they strung them end to end. When the old man came out of his house and asked him what he had been screaming about, the boy blanched and stuttered and said it didn’t really matter, he was just shouting at the fishing boats, and the old man told him that was as good an occupation as any. When he was far enough away from the house the boy began laughing once more and the women called his name from all angles.
* * *
SHE CAUGHT HIM late one evening sitting on the graveyard wall, smoke rings curling up above his head. She checked through her handbag and told him not to steal any more cigarettes. He lied and told her he would quit.
Your daddy never smoked, she said.
They sat on the cliff, under an inkening sky, and the boy was surprised to see her cry although she said it was the wind that disturbed her eyes. She said she remembered a time before she and his father got married. It was the sixties and they would come down from the north to camp for the weekend in an abandoned wooden hut by the seaside not so far from this town. At night in the old hut they would cuddle. She said this with a wink and the boy laughed with her. Cuddle, she said again. Cuddle. His mother was up on her feet now and animated with memory. There were fishermen in that town, she told him, and often the birds came and plucked whatever fish innards were left near the boats. The birds would fly to the roof of the hut and sometimes drop the leftovers there so the roof had begun to sag and rot, and once a beam fell. The air was sweet and hushed during those summers, and when autumn came, leaves blew in on top of them. They stayed in the hut, his mother and father, cuddling.
His father’s face rose up in his mind, long wispy hair going bald, dark eyes, an abrupt nose. He thought he could reach out and touch him.
She was laughing now as she talked and she seemed suddenly very young to him, but after a while he mentioned his uncle and they felt instantly guilty about their laughter.
Tell me about him, he said.
I never really knew him.
Did Daddy like him?
When they were young, yeah. They worked on the farm together. They had good times. They brought in the hay and milked the cows and mended walls when they needed mending. She paused: When they were older they argued.
What about?
Your father never believed that the cure for war was war.
See, said the boy, even you say it’s a war.
She ran a ringlet of hair around her finger: It’s a war, yes, it’s a war, she said sadly.
Then they should get what they want.
They should, yeah, maybe.
It’s simple.
Nothing’s simple, love.
Do you hate him?
Of course I don’t hate him. He’s my brother-in-law.
I know you hate him. I can tell. You hate him. I know.
Ah, love.
He was set up.
Come on now, let’s—
Eighteen years for explosives he never used, the boy said.
That’s maybe not all he did.
It’s all he got charged for. Explosives.
That’s true, but you never know—
I do know. He was set up.
I don’t like it any more than you do. But others are dying too. Innocent ones.
He didn’t even have a proper trial.
Neither did the ones who died, she said.
The boy thought about this and then said: Why can’t we go home, Mammy?
I thought you liked it here now? With the kayaking and all? I thought you were getting settled in?
The waves pounded on the cliff face below them and the boy plucked at a spear of grass, put it between his teeth. He watched as a shooting star fishtailed in the sky above him.
Why can’t we go home? he asked again.
She sighed: Because I don’t want to be there to see it.
Well, I do.
I don’t want for you to see it, love.
I’m not a child, he said.
They sat in silence until he asked her if his father had ever done anything bad in his life and she said: No, never, and he knew by the way she said it that she was telling the truth.
* * *
ONE SPECIFIC MEMORY of his father came back to him: The boy was just five years old. Some tinkers came to the door to sell a fridge. His father was between jobs, they had little money, and there was no fridge in the house. Milk went sour, leftovers grew mold. His parents had often talked about buying a fridge and this one was being sold for next to nothing, twenty pounds. The boy was excited at the thought of cold milk.
His father stepped outside the door to examine the fridge, but when he found the scorch marks on the side paneling he simply turned and said No, and closed the door on the travellers. Bomb-damaged, said his father to his mother.
* * *
IT’S OVER, she shouted as she ran up the hillside, it’s over, it’s over, it’s over. He threw his notebook in the air and ran out from the caravan. She was thumping the air with her fist. Her cheeks were flushed with color. He hugged her and she spun him around and each of them fell to the ground and kicked their shoes off and sent them cartwheeling through the air. Breathless they lay there in the long grass and she said that the prisoners had released a statement, all was agreed, there were only a couple of formalities left. She stood up and danced on the orange gas cylinder at the back of the caravan. I knew it would finish! she shouted. Thank you, God!
He took her hand and she jumped down from the cylinder and they ran through the grass to the cliffs, where she was panting so hard that she swore she would give up cigarettes forever. They danced way above the sea, twirling and high-stepping. Later, for dinner, she cooked up a huge meal of sausages, rashers, tomato, eggs, and fried bread and they had red lemonade floats for dessert. The ice cream left a rim of white mustache above her lip and he showed it to her in the mirror and she cackled with joy. She broke out a bottle of wine and even allowed him one puff at the very end of her cigarette. He pretended it made him very dizzy and he staggered around the caravan.
Watch this! he roared. Watch this! They turned the radio up very loud and they stepped outside, took hold of each other’s elbows, and began to spin, and for a moment everything seemed minutely perfect.
* * *
LATER THAT NIGHT—after the radio announced another breakdown in the talks—he unzipped his sleeping bag and shimmied his way down to the end of the bed, making sure he didn’t expose himself through the gap in his pajamas. At the foot of the bed he pulled on his father’s w
He filled a saucepan with water, grabbed a loaf of bread from the rack above the stove, and went and sat at the kitchen table. Slowly he tore the crusts from all the slices and arranged them like a fence around the table. He placed the radio in the center of the crusts.
His mother was watching him from across the caravan. Her eyes were red from crying once again.
The only light was that of the moon, which had leaped to the lintel of the window.
He wet the bread and then squeezed it into the approximation of a cylinder. He massaged it gently with his fingers and then pressed tight where the neck should be. The bread gave nicely. It seemed to accept the whim of his hands.
He fanned his fingers down the length of the cylinder and dented the bread with his knife to give it a ribbed appearance at its foot. The blade pressed into the soft bread. He straightened out the bottom so it would stand on its own on the table. Bending down to eye level with the piece, he gave it a crown and a set of eyes that looked out at him crookedly. He smoothed out the remaining thumbprints and then took a pen and tried to fill the eyes in with ink, but the bread wouldn’t take the ink. He thought for a moment and went to the cupboard and found a tin of cocoa. Mixing the cocoa with water, he made a paste.
He put the tine of a fork into the paste and dropped a tiny amount where the eye should be. The brown dye seeped into the bread. The eye looked to him like it was bruised from a fight.
What’s that?
It’s the queen.
She sat up in her sleeping bag: It looks real.
He put it in the palm of his hand and rolled it along his fingertips. The piece had taken him an hour to make and there was a marvelous precision to it, most of all he liked the ribbed bottom. He sat at the table, thinking of his uncle, wondering if it was a suicide and if that was a mortal sin. Yet allowing a man to die would be a mortal sin too, surely? His head spun and his throat felt dry. He continued to roll the chess piece from finger to finger. Under his breath he cursed his uncle’s stupidity and wished he would hurry up and eat something, and then hated himself for the thought of these things.
His mother was still watching him intently, so he stabbed the queen in the eyes with the prong of the fork and when her eyes were hollowed out began destroying the crown. Then he held the chess piece high in the air and licked his lips and then, with great theater, he ate it with a smile and a sort of savagery.
That’s what I think of the Queen, he said.
He chewed while staring at his mother, then picked the bread from between his teeth. It had tasted soggy and awful. His mother propped herself up with her head on her hand and her neck seemed to loll sideways.
Don’t be so angry, please, she said.
He went to the bin and spit the last of the bread out: I’ll be angry all I want to; it’s my life!
Please don’t.
They’re allowing him to die.
Maybe he’s choosing to die, love.
It’s the same thing.
Come here and get some sleep.
I don’t want to sleep.
The bogeyman will get you.
Mammy, he said, I’m thirteen. Bogeyman. Christ!
She fidgeted with the zip on her sleeping bag and she put her head to her pillow and watched him as he spread his hand wide on the table and began to stab the empty spaces between his fingers. The knife made a high sound against the Formica.
Don’t ruin the table.
I won’t.
Why don’t you put the knife away?
He snapped the blade shut.
Fuck the Queen! he shouted suddenly, and he startled himself with the curse. Fuck Maggie Thatcher! Fuck them all! Fucking cunts! Fuck every soldier that ever walked!
There was a silence unlike any he’d heard before.
His mother sat upright in the bed, swung her feet out from the sleeping bag and walked across to the other side of the caravan. She didn’t look at him as she passed, just went and knelt down at her own bed. The backs of her knees creased. Her head bowed.
Give us this day our daily bread, he said viciously.
You go to sleep, young man. I’ll deal with you tomorrow. You’ll not be going anywhere for a while, not kayaking nor nothing else.
He didn’t stir from the table. She finished her prayers and climbed into her bed in the vast and attentive silence. He whispered the line again, Fuck the Queen, loud enough that she might hear, but she had turned her face away. He could hear the sobs into the hood of the sleeping bag, and he said aloud that he was sorry, but she didn’t turn.
A half hour later he said it again—Sorry, Mammy—but she had fallen asleep.
He reached out and began to mold another piece of bread and the hours slid forward and by morning he had made two chess teams—one white, the other the brown of cocoa—just two pieces missing.
* * *
AFTER THREE DAYS he was allowed out again and he ran down to the house, but there was no sign of them in the front, so he stole around to the side window. The old man was napping. His wife sat at a mirror. The boy could see her reflection. There were brown freckles in the glass and she kept shifting her head sideways in order to avoid them. Between her neck cords there was a deep hollow. Her skin seemed corrugated and her eyes were a startling green. She took off her housecoat and the boy ducked his head, and when he looked a second time, she already had her nightdress on. She climbed into the bed and leaned across the old man, reached for a book, and momentarily both their bodies merged into one.
The boy moved away from the house and spat on the ground where the sunlight hit shadow.
* * *
THE WIND CAME UP from the sea as if it were looking for someone. It was the fifty-first day and he had heard that another hunger striker was critically ill and his uncle in the prison hospital was having a hard time focusing his vision, that everything was blurry. A prison guard had come and taunted him with binoculars. There were jokes being made about very thin coffins. His uncle was lying on a sheepskin blanket now to protect his skin, and he had been moved to a waterbed to keep away the sores. The boy imagined what his body might look like: the chest caved in, his arms thin, his hipbones showing through his pajamas. He was unable to walk now, and there were prison orderlies who wheeled him around. Sometimes the orderlies, even though they were Protestants, would bring him tobacco, which was only worsening his cough. He was allowed to sit outside in the prison hospital courtyard for an hour each day, and despite the warm weather his uncle wrapped himself in half a dozen blankets. He liked to make bets with others in the hospital on when certain crows would leave the razor wire of the prison. He had sent out a statement saying he wasn’t afraid of death because it was a cause worth his life.
The boy began to think that death was a thing that only the living carried with them. He remembered a poem from school. Death once dead there’s no more dying then. The line shot around in his mouth as he slumped through town.
Kayaking kept the thoughts away. The world was altered from the position of water. In the repetition there was quietness. He could feel his arms strengthening and a small knot of muscle growing harder at his neck. His back felt tight and powerful. Even his knees no longer protested at the ache. He checked the size of his biceps against the black armband that he wore.
The old Lithuanian allowed him a stint at the rear of the kayak, where most of the movement was controlled, and he made deliberate mistakes so the boy would correct them. The boat went sideways right and he pulled harder left. The old man leaned over so the boy would learn how to use the paddle to steady the boat. Out beyond the harbor, they went sideways into a series of low waves from a passing speedboat and for a moment they surfed along a rush of water until hit by another wave and the boat felt as if it would overturn, but the boy turned the boat bow first into the waves and the Lithuanian nodded his approval.
The boy sensed he had achieved a rhythm with the old man, that there was some inv
Far out, they turned, found shelter in a cove where seals barked on the rocks, and stopped paddling and let the boat drift. The water lapped gently against the side of the boat and the seals barked farther down the shore.
The old man smoked and when the cigarette was finished the boy secretly picked the butt out of the water and put it in his pocket to dry out. He let his paddle float and put his arms behind his head and wondered aloud about what sort of power it might take to club a seal to death.
There’s not much worth dying for, said the old man.
What?
Especially if you’re a seal, he chuckled.
But the boy thought he was talking of something beyond seals, and all of a sudden he felt an anger and he said bitterly: Why did you come here?
Oh, I really don’t think about these things anymore.
Why not?
Because it’s easier not to.
I’d love to club a seal to death, said the boy.
The sun shone down a hard yellow and wheels of light worked on the water’s edge. The boy’s paddle struck the water and moved the boat forward slightly. The old man accepted the anger and leaned into the toil of paddling out of the cove. The wind was at their backs and the boat moved quickly. They brought it parallel to the headland and then swung with ease into the harbor, both the boy and the man silent.
When they got to the pier the boy spat in the water and then put his finger to his nose and let out a stream of snot. The old man gave a small chuckle.
At the pierside the old woman asked them if they were all right. They each nodded and she laughed, distilling the tension. She had brought them lettuce and tomato sandwiches and she brandished them in the air, a grin on her face.