Fishing the Sloe-Black River by Colum McCann

Author:Colum McCann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

A WORD IN EDGEWISE

Look at you and a smile on you like the cracked vase that Mammy kept in the kitchen cupboard. The flowery one. With the downward chink, like an upturned smile. Daisies, I think they were, with little yellow figurines leaping all the way through them. A poet one time wrote about a vase, or an urn, and something about beauty and truth. A damnsight we were away from truth those nights, hai? You jumping around the dancehall like a prayer in an air raid, your hair running wild and frothy all around your shoulders. Weren’t we a sight? You, sneaking off down to the town square with Francis Hogan, the only lad in town with a motorcar, done up to the nines, your mascara on, your ginger hair flying. Him with his elbow hung out the window, smoking, his curls all slicked back with oil. What a sight! Me sitting sidesaddle on Tommy Coyne’s red tractor, chugging our way out to the fields behind the elderberry forest, going to make hay, as we say. Wasn’t that the time of it? A tube of lipstick was a precious thing in those days.

The young ones nowadays, they don’t think we were up to it at all. Here we are, getting letters from the grandkids, all over the globe, and I’ll be bowled arse-over-backward if they think we ever misbehaved. Did I tell you about the letter I got a few days ago from young Fiachra in Amsterdam? Tells me the tulips look lovely in spring. I ask you, eighteen years old and he wants me to think he’s looking at the tulips! Not only making hay, but he’s probably threshing the damn stuff as well. They do that sort of thing in Amsterdam. It’s a long way from Tipperary. Or a long way to tip her hairy, as Tommy Coyne was once heard to sing, outside the dancehall, sitting on the back of his tractor. Holy God! I don’t mean to be rude, Moira, but I kid you not. Sitting on the back of his tractor with the blackberry juice on his teeth and his hair in a cowlick: It’s a long way to tip her hairy, it’s a long way to go, it’s a long way to tip the hairy of the sweetest gal I know, Godblessher. God bless us and save us! It’s the years, Moira. I’m wont to ramble, as you well know.

Lipstick. Cleanser. Mascara. A touch of rouge. Eyeliner. The whole nine yards. We’ll have you smiling yet. Come off it now, of course we will. Anyway, didn’t Da get into awful conniptions over me knocking the kitchen teapot over the night we came in from the dancehall? Smashed on the kitchen tiles, it did, with an awful racket. Ricocheting through the house. Us standing there, the smell of drink on our breaths, in those blue dresses sent from Paris by Aunt Orla. Him as big as the Rath-cannon elk, roaring: “Weren’t you two supposed

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