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

war?”
    â€œYou ask lots of questions.”
    â€œSomebody told me you were in Hiroshima.”
    He laughed uproariously, slapping his thighs. “I have no answer.” He rode silently for a while. “Hiroshima was sad place. Japanese don’t talk about.”
    â€œWere you in Hiroshima?” I asked again.
    â€œNo, no,” he said. “No, no.”
    â€œDo you hate Americans?”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause…”
    â€œYou are very young. You shouldn’t think these things. You should think of making good job with wallpaper. That is important.”
    We rode out to the house at eight every morning. The lawn was dry and cracked. The third floor windows were black with soot. When the radio played it could be heard all over the house. Osobe worked with tremendous energy. In the hot afternoons he rolled up his sleeves and I could see his sinewy arms. Once, when the radio told us of an earthquake in Japan, he blanched and said that the country was suffering from too much pain.
    In the evenings I started going down to the bridge with my friends to drink flagons of cider with the money I held back from my parents. I began to buy my own cigarettes. I read books about World War II and created fabulous lies about how he had been in that southern Japanese city when the bomb had been dropped, how his family had been left as shadows on the town hall walls, dark patches of people on broken concrete. He had been ten miles from the epicenter of the blast, I said, in the shade of a building, wearing billowy orange carpenter pants and a large straw hat. He was flung to the ground, and when he awoke, the city was howling all around him. He had reeled away from the horror of it all, traveling the world, ending up in the west of Ireland. My friends whistled through their teeth. Under the bridge they pushed the bottle toward me.
    Occasionally my mother and father asked me about Osobe, muted questions, probings, which they slid in at dinnertime after I had handed over most of my wages.
    â€œHe’s a strange one, that one,” said my father.
    â€œHiding something, I’d guess,” my mother would respond, the fork clanging against her teeth.
    â€œBit of a mad fellow, isn’t he, Sean?”
    â€œAh, he’s not too bad,” I said.
    â€œPeople say he lived in Brazil for a while.”
    â€œGod knows, he could have,” said my mother.
    â€œHe doesn’t tell me anything,” I said.
    For all I really knew, he had just wandered to our town for no good or sufficient reason and decided to stay. I had an uncle in Ghana, an older brother in Nebraska, a distant cousin who worked as a well digger near Melbourne, none of which struck me as peculiar. Osobe was probably just one of their breed, a wanderer, a misfit, although I didn’t want him to be. I wanted him to be more than that.
    We worked through that hot summer together, finished the Gorman house and started on a few others. I grew to enjoy clambering along the roads on our bicycles in the morning, slapping paste on the walls, inventing tales about him for my friends down under the bridge. Some of my friends were working in the chipper, others were bringing in the tired hay, and a couple were selling golf balls down at the club. Every evening I continued with Osobe stories for them, their faces lit up by the small fire we kept going. We all slurped at the bottles, fascinated by the terror and brilliance of it all. Fireballs had raged throughout the city as he fled, I told them. People ran with sacks of rice in their melted hands. A Shinto monk said prayers over the dead. Strange weeds grew in clumps where the plum trees once flowered, and Osobe left the city, half-naked, his throat and eyes burning.
    *   *   *
    Osobe opened the door to me one morning toward the end of summer. “All the jobs almost done,” he said. “We celebrate with cup of tea.”
    He guided me gently by the arm