Fishing the Sloe-Black River by Colum McCann

of the council houses were empty now, and even the Gorman house had been sold once more. The American in his Cadillac had never arrived with his five blond daughters. The hurling team had lost all its matches again this year. There was a bumper crop of hay.
    On the last page of the letter he told me that Osobe had died. The body was not discovered for three days, until my Aunt Moira called around with a basket of fruit for him. My father said that when he went into the house, the stench was so bad that he almost vomited. Children gathered at the front door with their hands held to their noses. But there was a whipround made in Gaffney’s pub that extended out to the streets. People threw generous amounts of money in a big brown hat that the owner of the chipper carried from door to door. My aunt chose him a fine coffin, although someone said that he might have been offended by it, that he should have been sent back to Japan to be cremated. She scoffed at the suggestion and made a bouquet of flowers for him.
    There was a party held the night of the funeral, and rumors were flung around according to the depths of the whiskey bottle—but more or less everyone was sure now that he had been a victim of Hiroshima. All the young boys who had worked for him in the summer months had heard vivid details of that frightening August morning. He had run from the city in a pair of wooden sandals. All his family had been killed. They had been vaporized. He was a man in flight. By the early, sober hours of the morning, my father added, the talk was that Osobe was a decent sort, no matter what his history was. Over the years he had employed many young men to work with him, treated them fairly, paid them handsomely, and confided in them about his life. They laughed at how strange his accent had become at the end of it all—when he went to the shop to buy cigarettes he would lean over the counter and whisper for pack of fags, prease. The sight of him carrying that big ladder on his bicycle would be sorely missed around town.
    But the strangest thing of all, my father said, was that when he had gone into the house to recover the body, the room had seemed very small to him. It was customary to burn the bedsheets and scrape the paper from the walls when someone had been dead that long. But he took a knife to the paper and discovered it was a couple of feet thick, though it didn’t seem so at first glance. Layers and layers of wallpaper. It looked as if Osobe had been gathering the walls into himself, probably some sort of psychological effect brought on by the bomb. Because the wallpaper had been so dense, the town council had decided simply to knock down the house, burying everything Osobe owned in the rubble. There had been no clues there, no letters, no medical papers, nothing to indicate that he had come from that most horrific of moments.
    I rode my bicycle around London that night. I plowed along to no particular place, furious in the pedals, blood thumping, sweat pouring from my brow. The chain squeaked. A road in Ireland rose up in front of me—a road of grass grown ochre in the summer heat, a thin figure in a brown hat along the river, a cat the color of the going sun, a wall brought closer in slow movements, a road that wound forever through dry fields toward a gray beach, a road long gone. I found myself down by the Thames in the early morning. I dropped a single twenty-pound note into the water and watched it as it spun away, very slowly, very simply, with the current, down toward some final sea to fete the dead, their death, and their dying too.

THROUGH THE FIELD
    See, the thing about it is that klein grass was about going out to head. It was hot out there—like Kevin says, it was hotter than a three-peckered goat—and I was keen on getting the whole job done as soon as possible, before we got ourselves a rain and lost all the nutrient to seed. I never seen a field look so good, a big sweep of grass almost