Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,135
the dark that he had seen something he could not forget, a jumble of words, a man, a building, I could not quite make it out. I can only hope that in the last minute he was at peace. It might have been an ordinary thought, or it might have been that he had made up his mind that he would leave the Order, and that nothing would stop him now, and he would come home to me, or maybe it was nothing at all, just a simple moment of beauty, a little thing hardly worth talking about, a random meeting, or a word he had with Jazzlyn or Tillie, a joke, or maybe he had decided that, yes, he could lose me now, that he could stay with his church and do his work, or maybe there was nothing on his mind at all, perhaps he was just happy, or in agony, and the morphine had scattered him—there are all these things and there are more—it is impossible to know. I hold in confusion the last moments of his language.
There was a man walked the air, I heard about that. And Corrigan had spent the night sleeping in his van down near the courthouse. He got a ticket for it. On John Street. Perhaps he woke up, stumbled out of his van in the early morning, and saw the man high up there, challenging God, a man above the cross rather than below—who knows, I cannot tell. Or maybe it was the court case, that the walker got off free, while Tillie was sent away for eight months, maybe that annoyed him—these things are tangled, there are no answers, maybe he thought she deserved another chance, he was angry, she shouldn’t have gone to jail. Or maybe something else got to him.
He told me once that there was no better faith than a wounded faith and sometimes I wonder if that is what he was doing all along—trying to wound his faith in order to test it—and I was just another stone in the way of his God.
In my worst moments I am convinced that he was rushing home to say good-bye, that he was driving too fast because he made up his mind, and it was finished, but in my best, my very best, he comes up on the doorstep, smiling, with his arms spread wide, in order to stay.
And so this is how I will leave him as much, and as often, as I can. It was—it is—a Thursday morning a week before the crash, and it fits in the space of every other morning I wake into. He sits between Eliana and Jacobo, on the couch, his arms spread wide, the buttons of his black shirt open, his gaze fixed forward. Nothing will ever really take him from the couch. It is just a simple brown thing, with mismatching cushions, and a hole in the armrest where it has been worn through, a few coins from his pocket fallen down into the gaps, and I will take it with me now wherever I go, to Zacapa, or the nursing home, or any other place I happen to find.
ALL HAIL AND HALLELUJAH
I KNEW ALMOST RIGHT OFF. Them two babies needed looking after. It was a deep-down feeling that must’ve come from long ago. Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.
I grew up in southern Missouri. The only girl with five brothers. It was the years of the Great Depression. Things were falling apart, but we held together as best we could. The house we lived in was a small A-frame, like most houses on the colored side of town. The unpainted timbers sagged around the porch. On one side of the house was the long parlor, furnished with cane chairs, a purple divan, and a long table, rough-hewn from the bed of a broken cart. Two large oak trees shaded the other side of the house, where the bedrooms were built to face east into sunrise. I hung buttons and nails from the branches, a wind chime. Inside, the floors of the house were unevenly spaced. At night, raindrops fell on the metal roof.
My father used to say he liked to sit back and listen to the whole place make noise.