Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,137
put me in the bed beside them and read us all to sleep. Then she slipped her wide arms under me and carried me to my own mattress, which, because of the layout of the house, was in the narrow hallway outside her bedroom. I can still to this day hear my folks whispering and laughing before they went off to sleep: perhaps it is all I want to recall, perhaps our stories should stop on a dime, maybe things could begin and end right there, at the moment of laughter, but things don’t begin and end really, I suppose; they just keep on going.
On an August evening when I was eleven, my father walked through the door with a splatter of paint on his shoes. My mother, who was baking bread, just stared at him. He had never before, not once, ruined his clothes while out painting. She dropped a teaspoon to the ground. A little patch of melted butter spread on the floor. “What in the name of Luther happened t’you?” she whispered. He stood pale and drawn, and gripped the edge of the red-and-white-checked tablecloth. He seemed like he was swallowing to steady his voice. He faltered a little and his knees buckled. She said: “Oh, Lord, it’s a stroke.” She put her arms around him.
My father’s narrow face in her big hands. His eyes skipping past hers. She looked up and shouted at me: “Gloria, go get the doctor.”
I slid out the door in my bare feet.
It was a dirt road in those days and I can recall the texture of each step—it sometimes feels that I’m running that road still. The doctor was sleeping off a league of hangovers. His wife said he couldn’t be disturbed, and she slapped me twice on either side of the face when I tried to break past her up the stairs. But I was a girl with a good set of lungs. I screamed good and loud. He surprised me when he came to the head of the stairs, peered down, and then got his little black bag. I rode for my very first time in a motorcar, back to our house, where my father was still sitting at the kitchen table, clutching his arm. It was, it turned out, a mild enough heart attack, not a stroke, and it didn’t change my father much, but it took the wind from my mother’s heart. She wouldn’t let him out of her sight: she was afraid he’d collapse at any moment. She lost her job at the newspaper when she insisted that he had to come sit with her as she cleaned: the editors couldn’t abide the thought of a colored man sifting through their papers, though they saw nothing wrong with a woman doing it.
One of the most beautiful things I ever saw—still, to this day—was the sight of my father getting ready to go fishing one afternoon with some friends he’d made at the local corner store. He bumbled his way around the house, packing. My mother didn’t want him to carry any of it, not even the rod and tackle, for fear it might strain him. He slammed more tackle into the picnic basket and shouted that he’d carry any damn thing he wanted. He even loaded the basket with extra beer and tuna-fish sandwiches for his friends. When a whistle came from outside, he turned and kissed her at the door, tapped her rear end, and whispered something in her ear. Mama snapped her head back and laughed, and I figured years later that it must’ve been something good and rude. She watched him go until he was almost out of sight beyond the corner, then she came back inside and got on her knees—she wasn’t a godly woman, mind; she used to say that the heart’s future was in a spadeful of dirt—but she began praying for rain, an all-out serious prayer that might bring my father back quickly so she could be with him.
That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it’s hard to think you’ll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it’s just so comfortable you don’t want to have to develop your own.
I will not for the life of me forget the sign they painted for me