This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

  By which I mean, ordinary life carried on. By mid-afternoon the July sun that shines in the memories of grandfathers was in April attendance at Mulvey’s field. Three months ahead of his habit, Hickey of Miltown dusted off his ice-cream van and met the crowd coming out with the offer of a threepenny vanilla and a squirt of what it said on the bottle was strawberry. From the fever of the match and the feeding of a hungry sun on skin rain-soft and sun-virginal, the supporters of both parishes were pinked like salmon. The Booleans, whose options for entertainment were few in Boola, hung around in Faha, and in the same way that they landed holus-bolus whenever there was a gamble or a bingo or a card drive, employing a schooled practice of cheats and tokens to take the prizes back with them, they sought out whatever bounty the parish offered.

  The episode of the dawn singing was not discussed until after the game, when it made its way sideways into the talk, first by way of Kitty Meade who with vividness, exactitude and dramatic pause described to Dympna Fennel in Bourke’s what she had not witnessed, and then by Dympna who, in telling Cissie Casey, added the flourish of Christy’s dropping on one knee and sweeping from his head a straw hat.

  Once standing, any decent story has a life of its own and can run whichever way it wants. So the details that Doady came home with, Christy’s calling out Annie’s name, his beating the chemist’s door with his fist and crying against the glass, like a child with a runny nose it may have picked up anywhere.

  The point is, the story was alive and kicking, and although she was too crafty to say anything once she got home, it lived unspoken in the glassed look of Doady’s eyes at teatime and in the Do Not Disturb imperative with which she flattened the paper and dipped the pen to draft an epistle to Kerry that evening.

  20

  By some mechanism of the heart that I could not have explained then, and cannot explain now, the second time my mother fell, I felt it was my fault. I was twelve. I was alongside her in town. We were on an expedition for long trousers. I had come into a cool and distant personality which was marked not by sullenness but by silence and remove. I had an affliction that is more common than generally understood, I was terrified of people, and of my own strangeness. So, I was alongside her, but not with her. We came out of a shop on Harcourt Street.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. Just that. The smallest round of sound, that she would have swallowed if she could, to save herself from making a show in the public street. I looked to her, and what I saw I would never forget. Her eyes seemed cellophaned, something had entered her and screened off the world, and she reached out a blind hand to reassure herself and maybe to reach for me. But she was already falling. Your mother is falling. And in all the times you replay that instant you can’t quite believe the simplicity of it, the unannounced arrival of calamity on an ordinary day in the ordinary street, and in all those times you make the move you didn’t make to save her, it’s just a shudder, a spasm of rescue that’s in the pulse of humanity but in the dream version you do make it, you push aside the idiot embarrassment you’re feeling and you reach out a hand that can’t save her from crashing on to the path, but you reach it and maybe sometimes you jump forward and you get your whole body in the way to break the fall so that your mother and you fall together on to the cold indifferent concrete of Harcourt Street and her head does not go crack like that, crack, so sharp, so violent and unexpected that in the same instant your stomach turns and you vomit in fierce convulsions as if a foulness is being pumped up out of where you knew it always was, and there’s nothing you can do, because now here it is, here is how the world goes, your mother fallen and you throwing up but keeping your head forward to save your new secondary-school shoes.

  In all those times, my mother doesn’t just say Oh and then fall in the street. But that is what happened. I don’t move to save her. I don’t save her. She falls. I get sick. For a long time, that’s all there is. Later I will think this was the time the angels were coming. Because although my mother does not move, although I look sideways from the fawn sput of the paroxysm and see that she is not moving, my mother is not dead. She is to be saved. And there is a man bent down to her, and he looks over at me not moving towards her and then looks back to her in that slow and serene dreamtime that surrounds catastrophe when a breach has opened in the everyday and a bridge is still some ways off.

  My mother does not die. When she comes home from the hospital she has lost her walk, but she may recover it. To absolve me of the stained feeling that her fall was my fault, and to bring her back to full health, I open a round of night-time negotiations, which take the form of prayer.

  When she starts to lose her speech, I realise that prayer is not going to be enough.

  21

  There was no reason to suppose the fine weather had only come for Easter, but if reason accounted for all that human beings did the history of the world would be a straightforward telling. Everyone in Faha supposed it. Wasn’t it lovely it stopped raining for Easter? Blessedness was not only still in the vocabulary of the everyday, but in its actuality too. So, when the same sun rose over Tuesday, the same sheet of blue stretched over the river and gave the grass the green of May-time, people who lived then in the weather, and were of it, felt the silent lift in their hearts and the sense of grace that in my mind is linked with that old word, bestowed.

  Something was being bestowed. Not that many dared say so outright. Perhaps because of a not-yet-eroded belief in the nearness of the unknown, and an unknown with a broad yellow malicious streak in it, people didn’t tempt bad luck by claiming good. Things said out loud had a potency, a man on a high horse was easily knocked, and no one wanted to say We are blessed.

  But it was felt. The five days of sun were already enough to be a good summer in Faha most years. And when Christy and I went about the townlands with the memorial there was no one we met who was not livened by the light and the warmth. To some, of course, blessedness is a curse coming. It’s not right at all, this weather. And, as though playing a close-to-the-chest card game against an opponent deep and devious and invisible, people like Maureen Tohill and Timmy Hayes gave out a contrarian view, It won’t keep up, and We’ll be paying for this yet, bluffing the Almighty to show his hand and keep the sun shining just to spite them.

  The sense of the new was doubled by the arrival of the electricity crews. Faha was not a parish visited by strangers, those who did come were mostly lost or looking for gravestones, and the sight of the Fordson vans, the small brigades of men ready and robust and confident, sharpened the air and made real the feeling that something was happening.

  As with everything since the seven days of creation, work was behind schedule. The confirmation of the signatories to the memorial, a foregone conclusion, a dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s according to headquarters, was to have been completed before the poles went up. Christy was to have secured the agreements and delivered them to the District Office where they would be locked into a drawer ironclad as affidavits should any of what Harry Rushe called backsliding happen. But by the time the crews arrived there were still gaps in the forms. Holding out was a quirk in human nature and those who lived in the Last Minute had found not only was there no penalty in lateness but often a bonus not granted the timely. Besides which, because nothing in Faha ever came on time, because like in all distant places where insignificance was countered by seizing small controls, in a time where clocks were individual and wound by hand, where Considines ran later than Clearys who ran later than God help us the O Malleys, where What’s your rush? followed the offer of the second and the third mug of tea, reasons for haste were harder to find, and the need to meet a deadline was understood to be an invention of convenience.

  Not for the first or last time, correct procedure was disregarded and the crews were already in fields and holes for the electricity poles being dug when the dawn birds were resting from their chorus. Vans, one, two, and now a third, came past open doorways, making a first noise of traffic and rising a cloud of dust off the backs of
boreens whose bramble and thorn bushes were soon wearing the pale brown petticoats of an imperishable dirt. The poles, felled in Finland, carried a foreign scent and when ten of them were brought past on a labouring lorry the purity of their pine escaped the creosote and in the parish mind became for some time the smell of electricity.

  People came out to watch the vans and lorries pass. Grandmothers were sat outside in armchairs to wait for the next ones, and when the news came that one of the vans had driven over Dilly Conway’s hen, or sent Honan’s cattle three miles down the road, these only made more real the air of change, and the truth that the parish had arrived on a threshold.

  In the way that these things happen, without an order or contract, one man offering and another saying All right so, horses were called up for the same tireless and unpaid duty as had been since the Flood, and Sean Conaty led two draughts up to Whelan’s place to drag the timbers, and Matty Keane had another horse over in Ryan’s doing the same and neither Sean nor Matty were conscripted or salaried but doing what they considered their bit, because Why wouldn’t you?, because, despite what an old man might fall prey to thinking in the grey afternoon of the world’s saddest days, goodness is native.

  Besides which, Sean and Matty and others too were alike infected by the same enthusiasm and belief, that they were part of the engine of nation, and that that engine had arrived in Faha after nearly a lifetime of coming. Playing your part was a valid notion then. The country wasn’t forty years old yet and hadn’t the exhaustion of midlife.

  So, as Christy and I went about making good the gaps in the memorial, there was electric business going on about us. Christy showed no sign of the failure of his dawn singing at the door of the chemist’s, and because of a pimpled petrification of the awkward I did not bring it up. I chose Ganga’s method for dealing with catastrophe and pretended nothing had happened. It wasn’t so easy. The scene not only stayed with me, it grew larger for not being spoken and proved perhaps the theorem of imaginary numbers by showing that the imagination is many times the size of reality. I kept looking sidelong at Christy as we walked the bicycles or came in and out of houses. What was he thinking now? Had he accepted the defeat of his tactic and was he now resigned to leaving Annie Mooney alone? Had the singing somehow absolved him of whatever wrong he thought he had done her? Warming in the sun, the questions multiplied, and by the time the sweat of noon was falling off our foreheads and we were laying the bicycles in against the wall by Master Quinn’s field, I had to abandon Ganga’s philosophy.

  We were inside the baked top corner of the field with a view of the valley. Christy sat on his jacket, leaning back for support on one elbow. Though a big man, he had a natural ease in how he lay himself. It was a thing I noticed, mostly because it escaped me. To sit on the ground and look natural, and not, as I seemed, to be missing a chair. He lay propped and easy while I unbound the cloth about the egg sandwiches.

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Beautiful.’

  He ate the way he always ate, heartily. I was looking for lovesickness. I was looking for heartache, for sorrow or self-reproach or the sour stomach of contrition. But I saw none and after a time decided to approach the matter the Fahean way, by coming at the thing the long way round.

  ‘There was good music the other night.’

  ‘There was.’

  I let the birds have the interlude. In urgent conclave, they were doing a demented singing, half of them trying to convince the others this was breeding time.

  ‘No sign of Junior Crehan, though,’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ll hear him yet. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Yes. No.’

  I can’t say I was schooled in what it looked like to see a woman in a man’s mind, what or even where she might be remarked, in the lips, the flesh of the cheeks, the small wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, the eyes themselves so blue and deep. I couldn’t say how exactly, but after a time I knew she was there, and that like a salmon rising up through the rivers of him, if I waited she’d leap out of his mouth.

  The sun bore down, Spanishing the air. Swallows, returning, must have questioned their coordinates. The birdsong was just hectic. Though the day was already warm and the sky cloudless, people still lit fires for cooking, pale turfsmoke sitting in small plumes above the chimneys wondering where the wind had gone. It made for a dreamlike scene, if your dreams ever take you to idylls. Down the valley you could see the townlands of Kilmac and Corry, the fine hill fields of the Murrihys, the bad bog ones of the Murphys. There were cattle standing in the puzzle of puddles gone, the ground hardening and the grass sweetening as it sucked the sun out of the sky. You could almost hear it happening.

  And because old men no longer need adhere to the convention of time, and because memory dissolves it, I can be there still. I can be sat on the grass at our lesser picnic on the top of Master Quinn’s field and feel the sun striking down and know something of the peace of that pause, the dawning that opens in a person, which is not yet at the point of understanding, not yet anything solid or sure as a thought, but happens in a way that you may not realise until years later and miles away when it comes to you that just then, just there, you were brushed with nothing less than eternity, catching a sense of a place that has been before you and will be after you, and both were contained in that moment. In the mid-distance birds landing and lifting that were the same birds since forever and would be forever, and you in that forever too, sitting on the dry grass of a hill field in Faha aware that your whole life is an instant, knowing it for what it is, and so too then knowing something of the deep sleep of the fields, the smile of spring and what mercy there is in a fall of sunlight.

  Patience is the hardest virtue. I couldn’t hold out any longer.

  ‘You sang well. The other night,’ I said at last. ‘At the chemist’s.’

  Christy palmed his beard. The chamois of his face crinkled in a wince. ‘I’m not sure I did.’

  I was already committed, I might as well go further. ‘Is that what you planned? To sing for her? Mrs Gaffney. Is that what you wanted to do? Is it done now? Are you done? I mean, is that it?’

  ‘No. No. That won’t do.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well,’ he looked a small ways in front of him at a bare truth, and then turned to me and said, ‘because, I told you, I broke her heart.’

  I couldn’t meet his eyes. I took a bite of the bread.

  The thing about Doady’s brownbread is when you take a bite of it you’ve taken a bite out of the elements, earth, air, fire and water all, and while your mouth negotiates with the grainy dryness now made a ball by the moisture of the butter, while you realise that by an alchemy of bakery the lump of the bread in your mouth is bigger than it seemed in your hand, keep chewing, and that there’s nothing you can do now because you’re getting a first-hand practical demonstration of what Duns Scotus called Thisness, keep chewing, the dense solid mass of the undeniable, you can say nothing for a bit. You can wave at a couple of drowsy bees warmed awake and delirious on the early coconut of the furze blooms. You can make a low throat sound to signal you’ll say something shortly, but while you’re eating Doady’s brownbread, keep chewing, you’re gagged by the essential stuff of substance, that insists on its own primacy, that, like life itself, is partways laughing at you and partways saying Take me seriously, because otherwise it may just choke you. So, I said nothing for a bit.

  Christy leaned to one side and took out a crushed pack of cigarettes. He tapped one out and rolled it between his hands, all the time looking down the Master’s field. He put the cigarette to his lips and by instinct more than intention patted the pocket of his jacket on the grass beneath him. I had the matches and struck one and the smoke veiled his face and lent him that look that smokers have, when their thoughts seem visible and there’s a door open to intimacy.

  ‘How?’

  He drew on the cigarette, watched the smoke move away from him. ‘In St Michael
’s church, Sneem, County Kerry, I left her at the altar.’

  22

  There was nothing to say to that.

  At least nothing I could come up with. The idea of it landed in my brain and blew everything else aside. It seems an obvious point now, but I hadn’t lived long enough to know there’s an infinity of ways to tell the same story, that human failure is a history without end, but so too human endeavour, and that between both lies the lot of the living. Nor did I know how an older person must accommodate the younger one inside them, and the first part of my reaction was an inner violence as I tried to reconcile the Christy I thought I had come to know with a man who could leave a woman at the altar. I was all absolutes and ideals, remember, I had been nowhere, knew maybe half a dozen people, none of them well. So, without knowing any further details, I made a proverbial rush to judgement and stood up with the sinking feeling that was Christy free-falling off the silver ladder of my estimation.

  Doing the Christian thing, I was to realise, was maybe only achieved by Christ. What settled in me was the bilious soup of disappointment. I turned away, took up the bicycle and cycled ahead, head up, glinting in the sunlight, a skinny Fahean version of a latter-day knight, carrying like a badge of honour the fifty-year hurt of the spurned Annie Mooney.

  Over the next few days, Christy made no further progress in his personal atonement. As when, over the draughtboard, Ganga put his two thumbs inside his braces and gave small outward pulls, he was considering his move. I was small help, which is charitable for none. We went about the business of securing the signatories and, as though sealed inside the inviolable privacy of males, for a time said nothing more about Mrs Gaffney or Annie Mooney or fifty-year-old broken hearts.