This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

  In the early part of the evening I hadn’t the guile to draw the stories, and in the latter the brown bottles had, as Siney O Shea would say, separated me from my wits. I cannot be sure what I heard that night, what I heard later and added to the fog-memory, and what invented, a perplex that deepens after sixty years, but with less consequence. The truth turns into a story when it grows old. We all become stories in the end. So, though the narrative was flawed, the sense was of a life so lived it was epic. I grew aware that night in Craven’s that Christy carried with him the prodigious mythology of himself, but not yet that he wanted to tell it, or needed someone to tell it to.

  Disproving the wisdom common then that fortune was to be found overseas, he had returned to Ireland owning nothing but the linen suit on his back and what he held in the small suitcase. Unperturbed by arriving home and in his Third Age, with less than he had set out, he had answered an advertisement by the Electricity Supply Board for able-bodied men to work on establishing the rural network. The interviews were held in headquarters, Merrion Square, Dublin, but, aware of the bifurcated nature of the nation and the challenges of integrating into rural communities, the preference was for men from the country.

  ‘I told them to send me to Kerry,’ he said. ‘They did. I went to Sneem. Do you know Sneem?’

  I didn’t. In Craven’s he had let Sneem have its moment, but I hadn’t known why.

  ‘Then I knew I had to come to Clare.’ He had tapped that out on my knee, my knee now remembered. But why, what Clare meant to him, what purpose he had here, and whether he had told me, were all vanished in the aches of morning.

  When at last I came downstairs, the house was in disorder, and Christy was helping Doady carry her mattress out the front door. Sunlight was flooding in. Like a blessing, the sunshine had come in time for Easter and that springtime remedy which in Faha was called airing, and which since Noah had been part of the clockwork of mankind, and since Christ part of the preparation for Resurrection, was already in full swing. (I don’t reference Noah casually here. Once, in boyhood, footing turf up on Breen’s bog, I had asked Ganga about the whitened bones of giant trees the cutaway of the bog had exposed. ‘This was an oak forest, Noe, the time of Noah,’ he had said, as if that history was almost recent, pausing to look with happy amaze at the memory of the flood waters departing.) Now, every window was open. Curtains, by pyjama cord, trouser belt, braces, frayed lengths of sugan, were tied up, not only to let the fresh air in and the dust out, but also to let go of the wintering, because God, whose mercy was never in doubt, had finally forgiven what sins the parish had amassed, and turned off the rain.

  Not that it was a magnificent day now. I don’t mean that. Just that there was light and a lightening, a lifting, and when I stepped outside the air had the slender, quickened and hopeful spirit that is in the word April. Since early morning Doady and Ganga had been emptying the house of all clothes and soft furnishings. As though parked there by flying Persians, mats and carpets were lying about the yard. Blankets, pillows and cushions were scattered along form-benches. Across every bush were spread not only sheets, towels, teacloths, but, with an absence of restraint and even an air of display, knickers and underpants, slips, tights and other sundries. Drawers had been emptied. Things hitherto unseen were disporting themselves like sunbathers, the entire garden colourfully draped and looking as though partaking in a pagan custom, like the hanging of lights on trees.

  I stepped in to relieve Doady and help with the mattress, and Christy and I set it, their marriage bed of forty years, with distinct Ganga and Doady hollows, at a slope, unabashedly facing south to Kerry and the full sun.

  With a little swill of guilt, I saw the two bicycles from the night before were leaning to at the gable of the cow cabin, evidence of the debauch cleaned without comment by Ganga who, with the dispensation of the fine weather, had gone to the bog with Joe.

  Charged by the sun, but certain that its appearance would have the short-lived character of all novelties, Doady was all business. While Christy and I breakfasted on tea in the hand and a burnt scone, she whirled around the kitchen with the briskness of those butterflies that must condense a lifetime into a few days. Where they angled inside the house, the lowered lances of God’s sunlight showed no mercy. Like the 100-watt bulbs, they revealed the coating of time on all surfaces and the air thick with the tiny motes of a travelling dust. The windows were discovered to be opaque, screened with smoke and printed with thumbs, palms and smears that had escaped the forensic of the Christmas clean undertaken in December dark. Now, the sunshine more than redoubled the urgencies of Easter. Since the first telling of the story of Calvary every house in the country was rendered spotless for the Resurrection of the Christ, but in Faha that morning there was spirit added to industry, the sun made actual all metaphors and, if not quite the pallid brightness of Jerusalem, to those with the deep and untroubled well of Doady’s conviction, it must have seemed as though this year the Father Himself was setting the scene for the drama of the Son.

  I’ll say this too. It seems to me, there was little culture of complaint then. I may be wrong here, but in my thinking hardship had been part of history for so long it had become a condition of life. There was no expectation things could, or would, be otherwise. You got on with it, and through faith, family and character accommodated as best you could whatever suffering and misfortune was yours. And so, it was only gradually, over the days to come, when they lifted their eyes and saw the improbable plane of blue overhead, that people began to acknowledge to themselves that up to now they had been living under a fall of watery pitchforks.

  At that time, there endured in Faha an antique belief common in all rainy places, that sunlight was curative. Down the road the Miniters put their white, blind, hairnetted grandmother outside in her armchair where she sat in a citrus dream of Spain. By noontime the mouse-coloured mustiness that was in every house in the parish, and which people thought was the smell of mankind, had begun to resolve and vanish. Some clothes carried into the garden let escape brown flights of moths whose larvae dated to the days of Parnell and who now transitioned to powder in mid-air. I saw them but did not remember for fifty years until I saw a figure pixelate on a screen. The moths of Easter, I said aloud, and they flew in memory and dissolved again the way the smallest things of your life do. Many garments, which had been living on borrowed time, were discovered decrepit and began to fray in the firm fingers of the sun. Set outside, big-jointed furniture creaked an asymptotic series of aches that soon went unremarked because it was understood to be the bone-music of resurrection. Some items, invulnerable to time and decay, and prized accordingly, were borne outside for no reason other than the personified one that the air would do them good, and the shelves that were home to them could be dusted. So Doady carried out her two pieces of Limoges china – a wedding gift from a hotel owner in Kenmare where she had been a scullery maid – a pink Staffordshire dish that was part of a collection that was never collected, two brass candlesticks that saw service only at Christmas and funerals, where like formal courtiers they would stand at the head and foot of the laid-out, and finally, any number of those blue willow-patterned plates and platters that for reasons lost in time had been ordained the good ware and were in every house in the parish then.

  It was the finest airing in memory. When everything was outside and garden and yard had the appearance of a blithely hurricanoed bazaar, Doady stood in the midst of all they owned. The broad light of day was only growing broader. It was already certain to be a remarkable day. But that was inseparable from the temporality of it: it won’t last, fortune never did.

  Doady surveyed the accumulation of a lifetime without the slightest emotion. ‘These things happen,’ she concluded at last, and went inside to begin scouring.

  Christy did not need an assistant. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, he was not empowered to employ one. Why he said he did has remained a mystery to me, except for the fact that he enjoyed an audience.
r />   In what was the first enduring change to the landscape since the human desire to be elsewhere had drawn the roads, the line for the electricity, devised in the high-ceilinged Georgian rooms of headquarters in Dublin, had now been pegged out across the unforgiving fields of west Clare. Dermot Mangan’s poles had begun to arrive and were stockpiled in various locations on the edges of the parish where they were playground mountains to children whose mothers were soon to discover the fun of cleaning creosote. Wayleave notices had already been served for each pole. But, with the casual imperiousness of officialdom, the authorities had failed fully to appreciate what it meant to impose something as radical as posts and wires over ground that had remained unchanged since creation, what, with the perplex of our particular history, it meant to let someone or something into your land. They had fallen prey to a classic trap of conceit and the very condition that at least since the Pale had resulted in one side of the country distrusting the other. They had also overlooked the soul-stubbornness that was an essential for survival in the porous west. An amount of what Harry Rushe, the Area Organiser, called backsliding had taken place, and now some of these yahoos are starting to dig in, he had told the field crews.

  The long delay had had something to do with it. Between the heady night of the hall meeting and the appearance of any crewmen, the reality of an electrified future for Faha had faded. Many who had been swayed by the rhetoric found that resolves born of fine speeches did not endure, and in the deep privacies of their person men felt foolish and chastened for having envisioned wonders.

  But Rushe had small time for subtlety, and particularly for the people in the furthermost corners. Betraying a caustic he had absorbed from the Brothers in Limerick, he had told the crews the best way to solve any disputes was shame. ‘So, ye want to be behind the times, is that it? That’s what you tell ’em.’

  This was a tricky one, on three grounds. First, being behind the times was not the spur it might have been to a townie, who maybe lived within the illusion that they were not in a backwater on a salted rock in the middle of the Atlantic. Faha knew it was not only behind the times, but much further back than that, it was outside the times altogether, And what of it? Second, there was the question of unworthiness. This had been ingrained by the Church from birth. With recourse to a pure Aristotelian logic, the bishops understood that making people feel lesser was a way of making the Almighty mightier, and with native extremism Faha took that to new lows. If there was something good out there, we probably didn’t deserve it, was the basic position. Cormac Tansey, of course, went further: if there was something bad out there, he deserved that. The whole notion of unworthiness began to disappear, coincidental with the Church, by the approach of the millennium. But then it was absolute. And finally, farmers, with the natural caution of those who lived within the uncertainties of season and the brevity of life cycles, understood that of the land they were custodians only, and so change was always to be resisted.

  As was traditional, but contrary to the clockwork of Rushe’s nature, the roll-out was behind schedule. On every front there were impediments, setbacks, delays, the trials of which inflamed his gums and glossed his eyes. Addressing the field crews he was het up, face flushing into his ginger hair and short arms out stiff like a tweed penguin. ‘If any farmer says he won’t allow a pole, if he bars any gate, make no bones about telling him he will face the might of the Law. Tell him he will be taking on the State, and all her agencies, officers and Justices, and will not only incur and visit upon himself the expenses thereof but relegate his parish to the bottom-most rung.’

  Christy was there to hear him, and told me now as we set out, judiciously walking the bicycles, to call on farmers, affirm their signatures on the memorial, and let them know the construction crews would be arriving immediately after Easter. ‘Today we are the agencies of the State, Noe,’ he said grandly and patted the State-issued leather satchel which bore the names of the signatories.

  The State, in truth, was moidered with a headache.

  The morning continued to lift, a last flotilla of clouds just then departing out the estuary. There was one of those mild breezes that in April can seem eloquent. What I remember are the birds, sudden quickened flights of them, ten, twenty taking flight together, with a magician’s flourish, leaving bare one tree and finding another.

  From a lifetime, how do you recall such a thing? The truth is you don’t exactly. But you think you do, and you might have. At this stage that’s good enough. Main point is, it seems to me every life has a few gleaming times, times when things were brighter, more intense and urgent, had more life in them I suppose. In mine, this was one.

  We came up the hill by the fort, stopped at Matt Cleary’s, a contrarian. We left the bicycles by the cow cabins. Matt was out in the haggard and came warily, followed by a little inquisitorial committee of hens. He had the wan face of a farmer in calving season, eyes small from lack of sleep and close encounters with viscera. He knew who I was, he said, but this man?

  ‘With the Electricity Board,’ I told him.

  Christy was looking at Matt’s way of pursing up his mouth and holding his head back a few inches, as though all in front of him was untrustworthy. Matt was looking at the blue suit. So were the hens. ‘That right?’ Matt said. He was fifty, singular in the parish because of his relation with the Doherty family, where he had courted the mother but married the daughter. Both lived with him, along with the hens.

  ‘We’re just visiting those whose land is to be crossed. The poles are here and the crews will be coming. You signed the waiver,’ Christy said, rummaging in the satchel.

  ‘Did I, though?’

  This was a surprise. Christy checked the form, showed Matt his signature. ‘Is this not your signature?’

  Matt peered at it, pulled back his head, shrugged. ‘Who could say?’

  Straightforwardness was not in Faha’s nature. There were reasons, historic, geographic, politic, civic, linguistic, possibly biologic, and all of them were operating behind Matt Cleary’s dull grey eyes. Like many another in the parish, he was a privacy specialist and scrupulous with personal information. It’d be unchristian to call him a fanatic. Faced with the impasse, Christy was neither hasty nor confrontational.

  ‘Right,’ he said, nodded, and looked down at the signed memorial. He studied the form some, then held it out to Matt. ‘Whose signature do you think it might be? Do you see there, where it says Matt Cleary?’

  Matt looked at his own handwriting. He shooed a hen from pecking the cuff of his trouser, stood in a random of flies.

  ‘Is that your hand, do you think?’ Christy asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Give me your pen,’ Matt said, and Christy gave him one and Matt made three clean strikes right through his signature. ‘No, I’d say.’ He handed back the memorial.

  We walked out the yard after, silent until we got to the bicycles. The hens didn’t come out past the gate. Down in the village Tom Joyce was tolling the angelus bell, the sound like silver rings thrown one after the other across the sky.

  ‘Human beings are creations more profound than human beings can fathom.’ Christy mounted his bicycle. ‘That’s one of the proofs of God,’ he said, ‘there’s no other explanation.’ And he smiled and pushed off and freewheeled ahead of me down the hill, the blue jacket winging out and the bulk of him flying past the hedgerows like a class of contented bird, only bigger.

  With respect to his girth and his years, Christy did not cycle up hills, slopes, or the most gradual inclines. We walked mostly.

  We went to Tom Pyne’s, a low little lump of a house with faulty chimney; in bad weather the smoke came out the window, in good it came out the front door, but either way went unremarked.

  Many were the houses of a people who lived outdoors at the time, a thing I didn’t consider, nor how the electricity would change the habits of centuries. We went to Marty Mac’s, to Marrinan’s and Collins’s, and met with a range of response from open enthusiasm to closed refusal. A
t most houses, there was an enlivened air of Eastering, and in the novel sunshine something extra about it. Outside, clothes were flapping on lines. Inside, paint pots, polishes, pastes of soda, of vinegar were being employed in urgencies of renewal. The same way it happened at Christmas, there was a personal sense of the coming feast day, as though, once he rose on Sunday, Jesus himself might drop by. A mirror of what confession was for the soul, surfaces had to be made spotless. I’m probably not the only one who, going from house to house and witnessing this, would have thought: what soaps and abrasives it might take to launder my spirit. To which you’ll say: You were only seventeen, or maybe, That’s because you were only seventeen.

  Delineated I’m not sure how, in Faha whitewashing was a job for the women. Clouds of lime were mixed up in buckets and daubed on the cabins with elder sweeping brushes whose bristles were combed one way by wear and which had been retired to this last job. The wash went up grey, streaked and maculate, but, like old men, blanched as it dried. A thing to behold, the townland turning white.

  We walked the bicycles along by Griffin’s, took a scowly look from Griffin, whose blood was curdled by the fact that the electric line was not going to cross his land, and so, not only would there be no compensation, but his neighbour Carthy would profit. Neighbours, as Jesus knew, can be a not insignificant challenge to anyone’s Christianity.

  After a time, we came past the big house of Mrs Dinah Blackall, a Faha notable, now of great age, whose judgement had decayed, and who survived I’m not sure how. Her mind was like a bookcase whose shelves had been pulled away, leaving the books pell-mell. All the stories of her life were in there, only confounded one into the other. Christy stopped by the rusted gate to Blackall’s avenue, or rather, with only nominal brakes, stuck his boot-heel into the ground and by juddering intervals came to a halt. He laid the bicycle in the ditch.