Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,161
to the stage.
—
She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse. They arrange their lives in front of her, a few sheets of paper, a pay stub, a welfare check, all they have left. She adds up the figures. She knows the tax credits, the loopholes, the exits and entrances, the phone calls that must be made. She tries to nullify mortgage payments on a house that has floated down to the sea. She gets around insurance demands on cars that are at the bottom of the bayou. She tries to stop bills for very small white coffins.
She has seen others from the Little Rock foundation cleave people open immediately, but she has never been able to get to them so quickly. At first they are stilted with her, but she has learned how to listen all the same. After a half hour or so she gets to them.
It’s as if they’re talking to themselves, as if she is a mirror in front of them, giving them another history of themselves.
She is attracted to their darkness, but she likes the moment when they turn again and find some meaning that sideswipes them: I really loved her. I loosened his shirt before he drifted through the floodgates. My husband put the stove on a layaway plan.
And before they know it, their taxes are done, the insurance claim is laid out, the mortgage companies have been noted, the paper is slid across the table for them to sign. Sometimes it takes them an age just to sign, since they have something else to say—they are off and chatting about the cars they bought, the loves they loved. They have a deep need just to talk, just to tell a story, however small or reckless.
Listening to these people is like listening to trees—sooner or later the tree is sliced open and the watermarks reveal their age.
—
There was an old woman about nine months ago—she sat in a Little Rock hotel room, her dress spread out. Jaslyn was trying to figure out payments that the woman wasn’t getting from her pension fund.
—My boy was the mailman, the woman said. Right there in the Ninth. He was a good boy. Twenty-two years old. Used to work late if he had to. And he worked, I ain’t lying. People loved getting his letters. They waited for him. They liked him coming knocking on the door. You listenin’?
—Yes, ma’am.
—And then the storm blowed in. And he didn’t come back. I was waiting. I had his dinner ready. I was living on the third floor then. Waiting. Except nothing happened. So I waited and waited. I went out after two days looking for him, went downstairs. All those helicopters were flying over, ignoring us. I waded out into the street, I was up to my neck, near drowning. I couldn’t find no sign, nothing, ’Til I was down there by the check-cashing store and I found the sack of mail floating and I pulled it in. And I thought, Holy.
The woman’s fingers clamped down, gripping Jasyln’s hand.
—I was sure he’d come floating around the next corner, alive. I looked and looked. But I never did see my boy. I wish I woulda drowned right there and then. I found out two weeks later that he was caught up high in a treetop just rotting in the heat. In his mailman uniform. Imagine that, caught in the tree.
The woman got to her feet, and went across the hotel room, went to a cheap dresser, yanked a drawer open.
—I still got his mail here, see? You can take it if you want it.
Jaslyn held the sack in her hands. None of the envelopes had been touched.
—Take it, please, the woman said. I can’t stand it no more.
—
She took the sack of letters out to the lake near Natural Steps at the outskirts of Little Rock. The last light of day, she walked on the bank, her shoes sinking in the loam. Birds rose by pairs, bursting upward and wheeling overhead with the sun red on their cupped underwings. She wasn’t sure what she should do with the mail. She sat down on the grass and sorted them out, magazines, flyers, personal letters to be returned with a note: This got lost some time ago. I hope it’s okay to send it on again now.
She burned the bills, all of them. Verizon. Con Ed. The Internal Revenue