This Side of Brightness by Colum McCann Read Free Book Online

lies back in her bed—the sheets, rough to the touch, are made from bleached flour bags, still faintly fragrant of something like wheat—and she thinks of her husband and his pocket watch, wonders if it is still running in the river soil. At night Maura remembers herself to sleep and wakes to find the smell of wheat even stronger. Sometimes, in her drowsiness, she thinks she has returned to the ocher fields of Roscommon with a confetti of swans beating across the sky, but when she rises to look out the window it is the gas lamplights of Manhattan that stare back at her.
    When she’s well enough to take visitors, she puts a dark dress over her nightgown, props herself up in bed, and says nothing about the dreams that she has of her husband’s watch—it is there, ticking away in his ribs, his bones are knotted together with suspenders, and the second hand is counting the drip-away of his flesh.
    After a month Maura finds work in a paintbrush factory not too far from the East River. The foreman allows her to take the baby with her. She wipes a clean circle in the dusty factory window so she can look outside and imagine Con resurrecting himself upward through the water. He will fly out with his shovel in his hands and roar at the sun. The light will glint off the studs on the heels of his shoes. He will somersault through the air and then descend with the geyser, into the river, hanging on for a moment to a floating plank. He will swim to shore with a grin on his face, and she will meet him on the dockside and hug him and kiss him. He will stroke the cheek of his unseen child and say, “Jaysus, Maura, what a beauty.”
    All day long Maura imagines this as she stuffs bristles into paintbrushes. Her fingers develop calluses from the work. At the end of her shift she takes the baby carriage and lifts it down the stairs, developing muscles in her arms from the weight. The mass card sits in her pocket, Con’s face permanently at her hip. When she arrives home she props the card up on the piano and strikes a few notes. She looks around the room and waits for his hands to touch her shoulders.
    Nathan Walker visits on Sunday afternoons, aware that his skin color would provoke too many whispers if he came late at night. He takes off his shoes at the bottom steps so his feet don’t sound out on the wooden stairs, climbs the four flights noiselessly, leaves his chewing tobacco in a flowerpot, and knocks on the door.
    Maura looks along the length of the corridor to make sure nobody has seen him. She guides him inside by the elbow. He keeps his eyes to the floor.
    â€œYou eating all right, Nathan?”
    â€œYes, yes.”
    â€œYou sure now? I’ve seen more fat on a butcher’s knife.”
    â€œI’m eating just fine, ma’am.”
    â€œWell, you look a mite skinny to me.”
    â€œBelieve me, I ain’t lacking.”
    â€œI have some potatoes.”
    â€œNo thank you, ma’am, I just ate.”
    â€œReally, I insist.”
    â€œWell,” he says, “if they’re gonna go to waste, ma’am.”
    Embarrassed at the feast she has prepared, Maura too lowers her eyes. After potatoes and meat and tea and biscuits, she lets Walker take Eleanor into his huge arms. It is strange for Maura to watch the young man with her child, his bigness making the baby seem minuscule. Such a clash of skin. It worries her, and she keeps an eye on Walker. She has heard stories of his kind, yet she sees the gentleness in him. Sometimes Walker rocks Eleanor back and forth to sleep on his knees and when he feeds her he pretends the metal spoon is a zeppelin negotiating the sky between them. Walker always places a one-dollar coin on the mantelpiece when he leaves, and Maura O’Leary puts the money away in a biscuit tin marked ELEANOR .
    Walker leaves the tenement house quickly, furtively.
    Later, he must sit at the back of a movie house, and during Tillie’s Punctured