Everything in This Country Must by Colum McCann Read Free Book Online Page A

again.
    He pulled his shirt over his head and moved farther away to a stone wall that ran like a bad suture toward the sea.
    *   *   *
    BACK HOME , there had been protests. Huge crowds lined up, carrying pictures, chanting as they made their way down the street. Once he had gone with his mother. She had held his hand, which was all right because he was still only twelve then. He could feel her nervousness and she kept her head down as she walked, watching her feet. A blue head scarf obscured most of her face. When she introduced herself to another woman she used her maiden name. The boy elbowed her. She leaned down and told him to shush or they would go right home. They moved along with the crowd, his mother sad and weary, talking to him about other marches in the sixties. They had been more hopeful, she said. There was trouble, sure, but it was a different sort of trouble, less menacing, more optimistic. She said the trouble nowadays tasted bitter.
    Nobody even knows what a civil right is, she said, and her voice went high as if the past had just escaped her and she was surprised by its disappearance.
    After a while, the boy didn’t listen to her, just walked along excitedly. He loved the sound of the voices around him and he carried himself with a sort of bravado. His arms swung by his side. On the ground he found a poster of the Free State with a balaclava painted on it so that the country itself seemed to have the face of a gunman. He picked the poster up and brandished it until the wind took it and it sailed back over the crowd. His mother lit her cigarettes anxiously. Down near the Diamond they heard the first rumors about petrol bombs being thrown farther on down side streets. The boy felt his fingers tingle generously at the thought of fire in the streets, but his mother grabbed his elbow and they immediately retreated home, with her dragging him so that the toes of his shoes were almost ripped by the pavement.
    He had tried to dig his heels in and for the first time ever she had slapped him, lightly, on the cheek. They were standing outside a butcher’s shop. It had been burned down earlier that week and a couple of charred carcasses were still hanging on hooks. The boy stared over her shoulder at the meat that dangled in midair. Her light slap still stung his cheek and then he had begun to cry and they walked the streets together, her arm around his shoulder.
    At home on Casement Row she locked the door, turned off the lights, and then she began to soak a duvet in the bath as she always did, just in case.
    They sat in the darkness and listened to the sounds of the street.
    He could tell a Saracen just by the way the wheels sounded against the tarmac. Or the direction of a helicopter by whichever windowpanes were rattling more, front or back. He picked at the stuffing that came from the arm of the couch and secretly spat the yellow sponge across the room. Boys his age were out there, firing stones. He had developed a specific scowl for his mother to see. It involved lifting the left side of his lip and scrunching up the side of his face. The scowl deepened as the riots went on, week after week.
    There were all sorts of discussions on the radio as representatives of those on the blanket protest began to talk about a hunger strike. Decriminalization, remission, segregation, intransigence, political status. The words spun around in the boy’s head.
    He thought that God must have been a sly and complicated bastard to give people different words for normal things.
    There was a statue of the blessed Saint Martin de Porres that they kept on the mantelpiece. His mother liked it, she joked, because it looked like Al Jolson. She took it down from the shelf when the hunger strike began and the boy had asked her why but she didn’t reply. He thought maybe it had something to do with music. She was singing in a bistro in the city center. When the riots were at their worst she would take him to the bistro and have him sit