Free Songdogs by Colum McCann

belch of steel – the jazz of it all – the vivid oppressive redness of a southern sky, the houses of the rich with pale blue swimming pools, the grasshoppers fried by an old woman in a market. My father took photos of Mam under bright streetlamps and flitting clouds, her eyes looking cocksure into the lens, hair thrown back like a horse’s tail. In one of the shots, down by the Palace of Fine Arts, I noticed that she carried flowers, white dog roses clutched between her fingers. On the long drive home she stayed awake in the passenger seat, passing bottles of Coke to the old man, a mesquite wind blowing through the open windows.
    My grandmother had swapped some rabbits for a few bottles of wine, and she gave them to my parents in the hope that the drink would somehow spur on a grandchild. Ancient as the notion of love, my grandmother went to bed early, whispering fertility prayers. My parents drank. Mam had her own special mug – a clay one which she had cast herself years before, but the old man broke it one night in an argument, smashing it against the bathroom door when she said that he’d had too much to drink. For a while he slept outside and my grandmother was hysterical at his disappearance. It was viciously cold at night, with no clouds in the sky to hold the heat, and sometimes my father might have thought about walking forever, skimming over the arroyos and the cacti and the flowers that held water with a startling parsimony. There were plants that would bloom only once every hundred years. He went searching, but never found one of them in bloom. One evening he went wandering too far and got lost, found himself a small cave and lit a fire in it. The heat expanded the rock. A piece of it unlodged from the roof of the cave and fell down, hitting him on the shoulder. He improvised a sling with his shirt, wandered, lost. A local policeman found him – a search party had been sent out because of some bad news in town.
    My grandmother had passed away. She had been sitting on the porch, waiting for his return, when her hat lifted off in a strong breeze, and she had fallen to the ground. The end of her cane had lodged itself in a gap in the porch steps, and she tripped face forward on to a sharp rock, slicing her forehead wide open, a gash the length of her eyes. It was said that a strange wind blew across her dead body, a circular whirl that carted the rabbit-foot hat around and around and around her corpse, as if in prayer, a rosary of upkicked dust.
    My father found Mam at the edge of town, hysterical, with fists flailing at the sky – she thought that she had lost him too. At home, she tended to his arm and then sank into a deep long-skirted mourning for her mother. Nestling herself under the limbs of the house, she listened for church bells, watched the paint peel on green wooden chairs, remembered things. Rabbits and the way they were skinned. Curious poultices for cut knees when she was a child. The way a pudding was stirred. Blue azaleas embroidered around a pillow. In her family there was a tradition of a year’s grief after a loss, and Mam carried it to full term. My father was different – he had loved the old woman and her eccentricities, but she had been an anchor to the land, to stasis, to the unmoving moments. They were alone now, with no duty to my mother’s family left, so he suggested trips all over the world, strange exotic places the names of which she had only heard whispered in the movie theatre. My mother wouldn’t listen, pulling sable-dark clothes higher on her shoulders, refusing to move around Miguel’s maps until the mourning was finished.
    It wasn’t until eighteen months later that she shed them in favour of some muted skirts, which led to colour once more, and then she began to listen to the whispers.
    In early 1956 a special letter was delivered – half the town was gathered down by the post office while my father opened it. His shoulder still hadn’t recovered fully and he