The Sons of Macomish [Illustrated] [Paperback]

From 'The Sons of Macomish'
It began the night Ivan Murmansk flopped out his dark sweating penis in the bar of the Haddock Arms Hotel and waved his fish-gutting knife above it, saying:
'I vill cut zis ovv so hellp me iv evver I vould betray you!'
The mackerel blade shimmered above his unzipped trousers... the tension eased... he put 'it' back in his underpants, then quietly put the knife away. Thus the Sons of Macomish were born. Ivan himself, mackerel gutter on the good ship Rasputin eight days out of Murmansk, missing his wife Pushka and daughter Anushka, together pressed tightly in photos in a hard leather wallet in his back pocket. Ivan, whose English sounds like a chainsaw badly over-lubricated, dripping oil:
'dozh, dozh, zhizhin, zhizhin, tsts, tsts, ushka, ushka, tootka, tootka...'
And Killibegs, kicked off an Irish trawler for general laziness, plays the mandolin so badly that people buy him drinks not to play at all... who quotes the Easter Proclamation of 1916 backwards, can recite all Christy Moore's songs and generally enlivens pub conversations with snatches of the philosophy of Sir Boyle Roche, the great 18th century Irish eccentric: His favourite quotes from Sir Boyle: 'the greatest of all possible misfortunes is usually followed by an even greater one' or, 'why should we do anything for posterity, for what has posterity ever done for us?' Killibegs, a slender dark oil slick...
Local Highland lad, Conger, who must have a surname somewhere: Mackenzie, MacLeod, MacDonald: short and thick like a Conger, so called because years before, lobster fishing with his uncle, a giant conger eel flipped down the front of his gansy and almost into the nether regions of his oilskin trousers; he punched the huge eel in the head, knocking it far into the sea...
Myself: Cree Dan, born of a Lewis father and full-blooded Cree mother in a sawmill near Flin-Flon Manitoba; Gaelic in one ear, Cree in the other; one language wet and cold, slithering over the brain like an octopus; the other a dry prairie heat of a tongue, a warming, drying fierce prairie wind. My grandfather rode the boxcars with Woodie Guthrie once on the way to Medicine Hat. I usually keep my words to myself because English swims deeper in my brain and must be brought forcibly to the surface like a snapping pike; sometimes all three languages are like so many billiard balls in my head, clanging and clacking...
Yet we are all sons of Macomish, wherever we come from, wherever we go to.
Macomish, Gaelic, 'son of Thomas', MacThomais, Mahomish. A perfect description somehow. Conger's favourite expression: 'Nae doubt', I doubt. Doubting Thomas. The sceptic, lone voice, nay-sayer.
Mahomish: home-ish, looking for a home; ma home, my home, homeless: in Russia, Ireland, Alba, Assiniboia.
Macomish: komische (German) = strange, unusual, odd; a perfect description: with no doubt, doubtless.
Hence, 'The Sons of the Doubter.'
Ivan (as I was saying) put his penis gently back into his trousers and put his mackerel machete back into a fur-covered sheathe. 'The fur of a woolly mammoth,' said Ivan once. Who could doubt it?