And now I wonder what the old man remembers about her these days. Maybe nothing. Maybe silence has cured him of memory. Maybe there’s an absolute vacuum in the anathema of age.
The kettle gave out a high whistle from the kitchen. When I went outside to tell him that the tea was ready he had his back to me — ‘tea’s growing cold!’ — but he didn’t hear me at all, his shadow sliding away from the wheelbarrow, lengthening across the yard, folding against the aluminum siding of the barn. He looked fairly content as he shuffled over to the side door and bent down, started feeding something to the cat. The cat was running around and around his feet like something possessed. He reached out every now and then and grabbed it by the tail, lit himself a cigarette which chugged away from his mouth. A drizzle came down upon him from some rat-grey clouds.
I went up behind him and touched him on the shoulder and he whipped around, startled. It was as if he had forgotten I was there. The cigarette dropped from his mouth.
‘Tea’s ready,’ I said.
‘Ya put me heart in me mouth.’
‘I looked for some biscuits but I couldn’t find any.’
‘Haven’t had a biscuit in a while.’
‘I’ll go shopping tomorrow.’
‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘Sounds like a bargain to me.’
He bent down to try to pick the cigarette up from the ground but his fingers couldn’t quite get it. I reached for it, but his boot crunched it first, ploughed it into the ground.
‘I need some smokes too, Conor.’
‘No you don’t.’
‘Come off it, now. Don’t be doing that to me.’
‘What?’
‘I love the odd smoke,’ he said.
We were quiet for a while, then he rubbed his hands together: ‘You’re getting like Mrs McCarthy for crissake.’
I reached my hands down into my pockets, felt the breeze lisp its way into me: ‘Well, come on so, the tea’ll be fit to dance on.’
‘Just a minute,’ he said, catching the cat’s tail. ‘This little bastard’s hungrier than any I’ve seen before.’
* * *
The town was thin. Dogs and cats were bony. Burros exposed brown racks of ribs as they nudged in along ancient paths. On dusty streets clothes were hung from windows, taking siestas in the sun — the clothes were sparse and worn, bits at the elbows rubbed away, knees vanished or threadbare. Even the vultures that rode the thermals above were lean. They made spirals in the air, their wings beating sparsely against the heat, looking down on the gauntness beneath them, comic black kites with red-raw beaks. Boys aimed up at the vultures with slingshots, tried to keep them in the air, exhaust them. But they flew on, generation giving way to generation, leanness to leanness.
A priest, a mestizo with a face like a poppyseed roll, came once a week, late on Sundays, to celebrate mass. He moved his way through the town on a bicycle, from one church to the other, all sorts of confessions ringing in his ears. Hungover men in shirtsleeves pulled back as the bicycle moved along. Music spilling out from old jukeboxes in the bars died down in reverence. My father took a photo of the priest once, his black cassock raised high in the air as he negotiated an open sewer behind one of the bars, exposing some very dark legs and thin ankles, moving delicately over the river of urine, lips pursed, nose scrunched. Something about the clergy always moved him to expose the pathetic. He delighted in the shot of altar boys getting drunk on mass wine, hair upshooting on their heads, red dribbles down the front of their vestments. But he got in a fierce amount of trouble one morning, just after dawn, when he snapped my grandmother as she prepared to go to church. She was wearing only her undergarments, a corset that could have come from another century, lace zigzagging across it, breasts stuffed into it like a sausage roll, a patina of age upon it. She was stealing out on to the porch to get her Sunday dress, which was drying in the sun. ‘Pig!’ she shouted at him, ‘Go back to your pigpen!’ She was a tiny woman, four feet tall, with a voice that could raise generations of the dead. It boomed from deep inside her bosom-burdened body. ‘Go back and eat slop!’ She threw a bottle at him, narrowly missing his camera. Later, as she moved her way down the road to mass, he tried to apologise, pulling off his hat as he ran beside her, but she spat on the ground in front of him and tilted her own hat on her head. ‘Pig!’
Four weeks later she agreed to talk to him again — but only after he swore that he would go to mass for the rest of his life, every Sunday, without a shadow of a doubt. She lived a life sustained by faith and rosary beads. My mother stood in the corner of the kitchen and giggled when she heard the promise. She was nineteen years old at the time and still given to giggles. She called him ‘Obispo Michael’ — Bishop Michael — after that and gave him a scapular to remind him of his words. He wore it irreverently, walking around with his shirt off in the house, the scapular moving back and forth over turrets of dark chest hair. But he was forced to go to mass every Sunday, up along the street, past the poolhall, and over the small aqueduct that conveyed water from the river. He couldn’t slouch at the back of the church, he was dragged to the front pew with my grandmother, who was so delighted by the outcome that she gave him her favourite set of rosary beads, a black pair that he was embarrassed by when he fished in pockets to look for change. They were made of obsidian and caught the light in a peculiar way.
My grandmother lived with them in the adobe house on the outskirts of town. Her own husband had died ten years before, left dumped in an old oil barrel, his throat cut after a vicious fight. She took up his pastime of skinning rabbits — using the knife as if avenging the death. Every time a baby was born in town she presented the parents with a rabbit’s foot preserved in a jar. The charm was supposed to be especially good in staving off cholera. Only one boy hadn’t been given a rabbit’s foot — his father was suspected of the murder, though nothing could be proved — and my grandmother was looked upon with a mixture of awe and suspicion when the boy died of diarrhoea and muscle cramps in the middle of his second summer. After that, when a woman in town got pregnant, they hurried over to see her, bearing gifts and making oblique references to good-luck charms.
When no rabbits were available for butchering, my grandmother sat on the front porch and simply swiped a knife through the air, back and forth, endlessly, her body swaying with her. The buzzards moved above in their scavenging circles.