Songdogs by Colum McCann Page A

death. Every time a baby was born in town she presented the parents with a rabbit’s foot preserved in a jar. The charm was supposed to be especially good in staving off cholera. Only one boy hadn’t been given a rabbit’s foot – his father was suspected of the murder, though nothing could be proved – and my grandmother was looked upon with a mixture of awe and suspicion when the boy died of diarrhoea and muscle cramps in the middle of his second summer. After that, when a woman in town got pregnant, they hurried over to see her, bearing gifts and making oblique references to good-luck charms.
    When no rabbits were available for butchering, my grandmother sat on the front porch and simply swiped a knife through the air, back and forth, endlessly, her body swaying with her. The buzzards moved above in their scavenging circles.
    One morning, when she was out walking, she flung a stone at a passing cottontail, near a mesquite tree, caught it in the head, stunned it temporarily, hobbled over on a walking stick to finish it off, but tripped in a pothole and broke her leg. ‘I wish I’d gotten that creature,’ she told the doctor, ‘I’d have died happy then.’ What disturbed her the most was that the cottontail had been left to the black birds, the carcass swooped down upon quickly – there wasn’t even a skin to be found. The doctor laid her up in bed for months but others brought her rabbits to skin. Propped up by pillows, she laid old grain sacks around her to contain the blood and hides. The Virgin of Guadalupe stared from the bedside table. When my grandmother was finished she laid her head back on the pillow and muttered a melody of strange prayers to the small white statue. She insisted on wearing a big straw hat, even in bed.
    My grandmother tried to get Mam to learn how to skin rabbits, learn the skill, preserve the tradition, but my mother wasn’t interested.
    Geraniums grew up from old paint pots that were hung from the porch of the house. A cow skull, decorated merrily with colours, was hung near the front door in front of the rusty fly screen. On top of the roof was a weather-vane that never moved anymore, simply pointed east, even in the strongest of winds. My father climbed on the roof and tried to get it to move – Mam had asked him to fix it so she could watch the direction of her winds – but it wouldn’t budge. During the wedding a drunk had climbed up on the roof and played the guitar for them, but he fell and landed sideways on the vertical spindle, cutting himself and leaving a nasty scar on his ribcage. His wife said that the cut never healed, that he still felt the breeze roll through the wound and that my father – by virtue of being a gringo – should pay him some compensation. Seeing the man outside the town bar, my mother pointed to his ribcage: ‘Which way’s the wind blowing today, Benito?’ The man reared up his leg and let out a giant fart, to the delight of some men squatting on the ground. ‘I think it’s heading south,’ she simply said, as she turned and walked away. That night she left a plate of beans outside the man’s house – it was fair compensation, she said, and the only compensation he would get.
    When she walked around the town the local boys still flung big glances at her. Maybe they thought that the man in the big brown hat was some sort of wicked apparition, that one morning they’d all wake up and he’d be gone as easily and as mysteriously as he had come.
    But they saw her settling into her new life, bit by bit. Her hair grew out. She began growing vegetables near the porch – tying herself to the soil. It was rough and bitter work, kneeling down in patterned dresses, mangy dogs scrabbling around the fence, dirt so hard that it ripped out the underneath of her fingernails. She gave the job a tolerable accent with a little tequila, sipped from large bottles as she worked on her hands and knees. When dust was kicked up in her face she spat it out on