Fishing the Sloe-Black River by Colum McCann Read Free Book Online

rolls of pale green wallpaper were balanced in his front basket, and I carried two cans of paste in my right hand, steering the bicycle with the other. I saw Paul Ryan hanging out by the school, smoking a long cigar. “Ya get slanty eyes from wanking too much, Donnelly,” he shouted, and I tucked my head down toward the handlebars.
    The Gorman house had been bought by an American millionaire just three months before. There were schoolboy rumors that the American drove a huge Cadillac and had five blond daughters who would be fond of the local disco and, on excellent authority, were known to romp behind haystacks. But there was nobody there when we arrived on our bicycles. Osobe produced a set of keys from his overalls and walked slowly through the house, pointing at the walls, motes of dust kicking up from behind him. We made five trips on the bikes that day, carrying rolls of wallpaper and paste each time. At the end of the day, after I had brought a ladder over my shoulder from his house, he produced a brand new ten-pound note and offered it to me.
    â€œTomorrow we start,” he said, and then he bowed slightly. “You are fast on bicycle,” he said.
    I went outside. The sun was settling over the town. I heard Osobe humming in the background as I leaped on my bike and rode toward home, the money stuffed down deep in my pocket.
    *   *   *
    That summer I read books in my bedroom and I wanted Osobe to tell me a fabulous story about his past. I suppose I wanted to own a piece of him, to make his history belong to me.
    It would have something to do with Hiroshima, I had decided, with the children of the pikadon, the flash boom. There would be charred telegraph poles and tree trunks, a wasteland of concrete, a single remaining shell of a building. People with melted faces would run wildly through the streets. Bloated corpses would float down the Ota River. The slates on the roofs of houses would bubble. He would spit on the American and British soldiers as they sat under burnt cherry blossom trees, working the chewing gum over in their mouths. Perhaps, in his story, he would reach out for the festered face of a young girl. Or massage the burnt scalp of a boy. A woman friend of his would see her reflection in a bowl of soup and howl. Maybe he would run off toward the hills and never stop. Or perhaps he would simply just walk away down narrow roads, wearing wooden sandals, a begging bowl in his hands. It would be a peculiar Buddhist hell, that story of his, and a B-29 would drone in constantly from the clouds.
    But Osobe stayed silent almost the whole time as he stood in that big old house and spread paste on the walls in long smooth motions, humming gently as the house began to take on color. “Sean,” he would say to me in his comically broken English, with his face cocked into a smile, “someday you will be great wallpaper man. You must think how important this job. We make people happy or sad if we do bad job.”
    He would buy big bottles of Club Orange and packets of Goldgrain biscuits and spread them out on the ground during lunchtime. He brought a radio one morning and his old body swayed with movement as he tuned in to a pop station from Dublin. Once, for a joke, he swiped a ladder away from me and left me hanging from a door ledge. He was deft with a knife, slicing the wallpaper in one smooth motion. At the end of the day he would smoke two cigarettes, allowing me a puff at the end of each one. Then he would sit, lotus-legged, in front of a newly decorated wall and nod, smiling gently, rocking back and forth.
    â€œWhat is Japan like?” I asked him one evening as we were cycling home, my palms sweaty.
    â€œLike everywhere else. Not as beautiful like this,” he said, sweeping his arms around the fields and hills.
    â€œWhy did you come here?”
    â€œSo long ago.” He pointed at his nose. “Don’t remember. Sorry.”
    â€œWere you in the