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

to the chair in the middle of the room. Looking around I noticed that he had been wallpapering again. He had papered over the old pattern. There were no bubbles, no stray ends, no spilled paste around the edges. I imagined him staying up late at night, humming as he watched the colors close in on him. The rest of the cottage was a riot of odds and ends—dishes and teacups, an Oriental fan, wrapped slices of cheese, a futon mattress rolled in the corner. There was a twenty-pound note sitting on the small gas heater near the table. Another ten-pound note lay on the floor, near the table. His brown hat was hung up on the door. There were paintbrushes everywhere.
    â€œYou did good job,” he said. “Will you go soon school?”
    â€œIn a few weeks.”
    â€œWill you one day paper? Again. If I find you job?” he said.
    Before I could answer he had sprung to his heels to open the front door for a marmalade-colored cat, which had been scratching at the door. It was a stray. We often saw it slinking around the back of the chipper, waiting for some scraps. John Brogan once tried to catch it with a giant net but couldn’t. It scurried away from everyone. Osobe leaned down on his hunkers and, swooping his arms as if he were going to maul it, he got the cat to come closer. It was almost a windmill motion, smoothly through the air, his thin arms making arcs. The cat stared. Then, with a violent quickness, Osobe scooped it up, turned it on its back, pinned it down with one hand and roughly stroked his other hand along its belly. The cat leaned its head back and purred. Osobe laughed.
    For a moment I felt a vicious hatred for him and his quiet ways, his mundane stroll through the summer, his ordinariness, the banality of everything he had become. He should have been a hero or a seer. He should have told me some incredible story that I could carry with me forever. After all, he had been the one who had run along the beach parallel to a porpoise, who filled his pockets full of pebbles, who could lift the stray orange cat in his fingers.
    I looked around the room for a moment while he hunched down with the cat, his back to me. I was hoping to find something, a diary, a picture, a drawing, a badge, anything that would tell me a little more about him. Looking over my shoulder I reached across to the gas heater, picked up the twenty-pound note and stuffed it in my sock, then pulled my trousers down over it. I sat at the wooden table, my hands shaking. After a while Osobe turned and came over toward me with the cat in his arms, stroking it with the same harsh motion as before. With his right hand he reached into his overalls and gave me a hundred pounds in ten new notes. “For you school.” I could feel the other twenty-pound note riding up in my sock, and as I backed out the door a sick feeling rose in my stomach.
    â€œYou did very good job,” he said. “Come back for visit.”
    It was only afterward that I realized I never got the cup of tea he offered.
    That night, full of cider, I stumbled away from the bridge and walked down along the row of houses where Osobe lived. I climbed around the back of the house, through the hedge, along by some flowerpots, rattling an old wheelbarrow as I moved up to the window. He was there, slapping paste on the wall in gentle arcs. I counted five separate sheets, and the wall must have come a good quarter of an inch closer to him. I wanted him to be sloppy this time, not to smooth the sheets out, to wield the knife in a slipshod way, but he did the job as always, precise and fluid. The whole time he was humming and I stood, drunk, rattling the change from the twenty-pound note in my pocket.
    *   *   *
    Years later, when I was acquiring an English accent in the East End of London, I got a letter from my father. Business was still slow and a new wave of emigration had left its famous scars. Old Mrs. Hynes still hadn’t kicked the bucket. Five