History of the Rain

by Niall Williams

  Aeney’s shining started Day One. He swam down the River Mam ahead of me and when he was landed he landed in the amazed wet eyes of my father. He was lifted gleaming in the gentling giant arms of Theresa Dowling, District Nurse, and she said There now and smiled the big dimple smile she has even though Aeney had started crying. He cried as if crying was a language he alone knew and in it there was something urgent he needed to say. Not the bumping rocking in the plump boat-hams of the District Nurse, not the view he was carried to of the swirling Shannon, not the first super-delicate cradling of Dad nor the warm damp breast of Mam stopped him. In the family legend, Aeney cried until I swam downriver after him, until Theresa Dowling said Oh and out I came, Australian front-crawling, red and gasping and apparently particularly hairy. Then he stopped.

  Because, just like his father, our father was not young when we were born, there was an extra-ness to the joy. It’s not that we were unexpected, it’s that until his children were in his arms he hadn’t actually gotten further than the imagining of us. He was a poet, and the least practical man in the world. And a baby is a practical thing.

  Two babies, well.

  Right away Aeney was better at things than me. He knew the first skill of babies, Put On Weight, and thrived into early handsomeness before he was one year old. He was the kind of baby people peered in at. He was Number One Baby at Mass. Our first Christmas Maureen Pender wanted him to play Jesus on the altar, and he only lost out because Josephine Carr on the committee disqualified him saying Jesus was not a twin and put forward her tiny three-year-old Peter who God Bless Him she must have been feeding birdfood because he ended up not growing at all, playing the Faha Jesus until he was five, and is a trainee jockey above in Coolmore now.

  Aeney had the golden hair nearly right away. His eyes blued. We both have the same eyes, but his grew blue as our father’s, as if he’d swam up through some underworld Mediterranean and some of it glinted still in the pools of his eyes.

  How do you capture a brother as elusive as Aeney? How do you capture someone who was always slipping away?

  His favourite foods, apples, Cheddar cheese, purple Cadbury’s Roses, Petit Filous.

  His favourite colour, red.

  His favourite sound, the singing of the cuckoo when it came, and which he always wanted to be first to hear, and for which he would go hunting by Ryan’s and McInerney’s, but would always be beaten by Francie Fahy who held the title: First in Faha to Hear the Cuckoo. But as Jimmy Mac says, Francie had family connections there.

  Aeney’s favourite clothes, a pair of muddy blue no-brand runners whose laces were so stained you couldn’t tell they were once white except for the places beneath the eye-hole flap, a pair of khaki trousers whose knees Nan patched so many times they looked padded, a red jumper that was two sizes too big for him and which he wore holding the cuffs that came halfway down his palms. The cuffs frayed from being held and every so often Mam trimmed back the strands. He wore the jumper again and they frayed again and she trimmed them again but she never threw it out. He liked holding on to something. When he was small he held the label inside his pillowcase when he slept. Only I know that. I was not a sleeper. His hand in sleep searched to find it. He would take the label between thumb and forefinger and just move it slightly against itself, over and back, as if the smallest friction was sufficient, as if with that he knew he was still in the world.

  His favourite thing to do, run. He’s a flier, Mr Mac said the year he formed the new Community Games Committee and decided Faha was going to be Put on the Map. Aeney was going in the Under-Eights on Honan’s field.

  At that stage it was generally presumed that I was not someone who was going to Put Faha on the Map and so once the races started I was to share with Dympna Looney the important job of Holding the Ribbon at the finish line, which I didn’t think very important but my father said was Homeric, and though I didn’t know what that meant it made me feel a little flush of importance.

  ‘Breasting the ribbon, Ruthie,’ he said, ‘you’re the line between one world and another.’

  He could say things like that. He could say things no other dad could say, and because parents are mysterious anyhow, because they belong in another world, you don’t ask, you just nod and feel you’ve entered a little bit into the mystery yourself.

  The field was lined with these triangular flags Margaret Crowe had cut out of a pale-blue bolt of Virgin Mary cloth she’d got from Bowsey Casey’s and Rory Crowley had hand-painted a big lop-sided oval on the cow-plopped field. There, various of our able-bodied were desporting themselves as Homer says, which in this case meant doing Serious Stretches and running back and forth in little show-offy dashes they’d seen on RTE Olympic coverage with Patrick Clohessy alongside doing demented Jimmy McGee commentary into an empty Coke bottle. The whole clan of the McInerneys were there, tearing around like brown-nosed bluebottles, no hope that a single one of them would ever run in a straight line.

  In order to put Faha on the map the entire parish showed up. Jesus Mary and Joseph Carty, Father Tipp, Monica Mac, Tommy Fitz, Jimmy Mac, the Major, the Saint Murphys, Vincent Cunningham and his father Johnny, John Paul Eustace in his navy suit, even Saddam. Everyone gathered in good-humoured admiration of their own seed and breed as Marty Mungovan says. Honan’s cows were exiled to a rushy wasteground where a loose string of electric fence kept them, looking on with mournful moo-faces or maybe they were cow-smiling that the plenitude of their dungs in the running track had supplied the setting with bountiful midges and flies. In Faha Community Games you ran with your mouth closed.

  Dad was always awkward in scenes like this. He was a Swain and Swains are not for joining in. They’re not part of the General Population somehow. There’s this little remove, this stepped-back quality that means Dad is going to be the one over at the edge of the field. While Mam is in there helping out, getting Mona Halvey’s wheelchair across the tufted ground, selling Draw tickets, filling little plastic cups with MiWadi and trying to keep the McInerneys from drinking them all before the games begin, Dad is over on his own, he’s in red corduroy trousers that are seriously baggy and bunch at his waist where the belt tries to make them fit, he wears two shirts instead of a jacket. His silvery hair is grown long and occasionally wild strands fly in the wind. But he doesn’t care at all. He has a book with him. It’s going to appear to those who don’t know him that he doesn’t want to be part of this, that he holds himself apart on purpose and that it comes from the fact that he’s not one of them.

  The truth is, he’s not one of anything or anyone. It’s not pride, it’s not even a choice. There’s a skill he doesn’t have, and as he stands on the edge of the field his heart must fall a little when he looks up from a page and realises his children don’t have it either.

  Aeney is having his paper number pinned on. Mr Mac is down on one knee telling him tactics for seven year olds. I’m getting ready to unroll the ribbon when Jane Bitch of the Brouders, God-forgive-me, says tell your brother not to win. Noelie Hegarty is to win because his baby brother Sean died. She has her little entourage with her, a white ankle-sock brigade of holy head-tossers. Their aim is to out-nun Mother Teresa.

  ‘I’ll tell him no such thing.’

  ‘Then I will,’ she says, and flounces across the field to him.

  I’m holding the ribbon taut when Aeney comes running. I can see the wild delight in his eyes. He’s ahead of the rest of the field, legs flashing so superfast you think he’ll have to fall down, running so quickly that everyone watching him smiles. You can’t help yourself. He’s going so fast his number flies off. There’s actual July sunlight glancing off his hair. The whole parish roars him on. He’s coming up the not-so-straight straight, chest out and his little arms flashing, and he can see me just ahead holding the ribbon. Ribbon-holders are not supposed to cheer, but inside the roar I do a little go on Aeney go on Aeney and the ribbon wavers a little until Dympna gives me her future-headmistress look and tugs it taut.

  And then
Aeney’s going in slow motion.

  Slow and slower still.

  And Noelie Hegarty is coming up alongside him.

  And Noelie Hegarty is going past him.

  Come on Aeney.

  But he doesn’t. Noelie Hegarty breasts the ribbon.

  Afterwards, Jane Brouder goes and says something to Aeney, she talks to him like they’re New Best Friends, and then she walks past me, pout-and-button nose raised to ten o’ clock and ass eloquent.

  Dad said well done to Aeney. He said it quietly, firmly, and the way he looked at him he seemed to be seeing deeper, as if the two of them shared some secret and it was a Swain thing.

  The following year Aeney didn’t run. He only liked running on his own after that, after that he only ran by the river. Dad never said Aeney, you should take part in races, or You have to, he never said a thing, never showed any disappointment, but, years later, folded carefully in Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, I found the creased rectangle of Aeney’s paper number that had fallen off that day.

  Aeney preferred outdoors to indoors. He didn’t freckle, he tanned, which if you ask me is a clear sign of being Chosen. It’s up there with perfect hair and teeth that actually fit inside your mouth. Aeney climbed every tree he could find. I think it was Jim Hawkins Syndrome, wanting to be Up Top in the crow’s nest in the Hispaniola. I’d stand below on the ground and watch him work his way up into the big chestnut at the gate into the Long Meadow. If the tree didn’t end, if there wasn’t a highest branch, I think he’d be climbing upwards still. That’s my brother. I’d lose him in the leaf canopy and then be sitting below reading a book, every so often craning my neck to look up the way you look when a bird disappears into a tree but sings still. He wasn’t a bird though; often out of the treetop I’d hear this sudden clatter and quick-snapping and a cry, all instantaneous, and I’d drop the book and shout out his name and look up and not see him but see the tree come alive somewhere above, a flutter of leaves descending, a white-snapped branch sailing down, and Aeney unseen coming crash spin grab-falling through the upper greenery, a kind of antic acrobatics bred in certain boys in which danger is neither seen nor felt. He falls fifteen feet inside the tree, but clings on somewhere, I see only the blue runners dangling for a moment, pedalling the air until they find the branch.

  ‘Aeney? Aeney, are you okay?’

  I hear him laughing. Up in the tree he’s laughing. Then he calls down, ‘Yeah.’ And he climbs upwards again. He climbs like he’s in his own inner Duffy’s Circus and somewhere up here is the glittering girl. He climbs until he must be out in the sky and see the river from above.

  God, Pauline Dempsey said, has His hand on certain people’s shoulders.

  He’d be better covering knees, Nan said.

  Despite Nan’s knee-patching, by the time Aeney was seven both of his knees bore raised wrinkly scars in crescent shapes. He showed me but he didn’t care. Blood-crusted, pebble-embedded, skin-flapped, and often an iodined purplish blue, on his knees were written his adventures. I thought of that one day years later in Mrs Quinty’s class when we read Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about the tremendous fish. The fish had escaped many hooks but bore their marks. He was caught at last. (Book 2,993, Collected Poems, Elizabeth Bishop, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York.) But that fish was old.

  The first time Dad took Aeney fishing Dad didn’t know what was going to happen. I was asked if I wanted to go, but by then I was already working on my Twin Theory, that if one twin loves the outdoors the other loves the indoors, one likes books the other music, one red the other black. The back pages of my copies had whole lists. So when Aeney said yes to fishing I said no. I didn’t know then the history of salmon in the Swains, I hadn’t seen Grandfather’s Salmon Journals, read The Salmon in Ireland, or thought my ability to remember everything, to amass knowledge, was in any way connected to fish.

  My father by that stage was already Elsewhere. He was already writing the poems that were coming into his head now like weird butterflies in March, already farming the fourteen acres of the worst land in Ireland, growing rushes and puddles and rearing the thinnest Friesian ladies to ever make an appearance at Clare Marts. I should have known something when he took out the fishing rod. I should have seen in the way he assembled it, the way he stood in the front garden practising a cast, throwing a line through the midge-veils trying to hook the invisible, that salmon fishing was serious business.

  So too was starvation. You have no money but you have a river full of fish passing your front door. You figure it out.

  Dad loved Aeney more than anything, but he couldn’t show it. He just couldn’t. There’s a Code for fathers in Ireland. Maybe it’s everywhere, I don’t know, I haven’t cracked it. My father followed the Code. He was careful about his children, he didn’t want to ruin us though somehow felt sure he would. He thought Aeney and I were marvels but he didn’t want to make a mistake. Maybe he thought Abraham was watching. So he’d probably thought about it for a long time before he came in from the casting and decided he should go fishing with Aeney. Dad could be sudden like that. He couldn’t help it. It’s the nature of Poets. You don’t believe me, look up William Blake, say hello to those impulses, go meet Mr John Donne in a dark church some time, spend a summer’s day with young William Butler, Ace Butterfly-catcher.

  Dad shook Aeney awake early in the morning, said, ‘Come on.’

  I lay in my boat-bed listening to them whispering downstairs at breakfast, the soft rubbery stamping as they put on their wellies, the small rattle of the tin container that held the flies, the hard fallback clack of the latch when they went out the door.

  I should have gone.

  At that moment I knew I should have gone. But I was addicted to my own cleverness and wouldn’t go round twin theory.

  In families it’s hard to trace the story. If you’re in it the Plot Points aren’t clearly marked. You don’t know when things turn until much later. You think each day is pretty much as dull as any other, and if there is something happening it’s not happening in your family and it’s definitely not happening in Faha. You think your own oddness is normal. You think Nan harvesting a lifetime of Clare Champions is normal. You think having a grandfather who published a book but didn’t want his name on it is normal, having a father who wants to be a poet but has to be a farmer, who has no clue about farming, and won’t publish any poems, all Normal.

  My father and Aeney didn’t catch a salmon that day. They caught some other fish. The thing that happened was not about the catch. It wasn’t about a father and son standing on the Shannon riverbank, it wasn’t Now listen here, Son, it wasn’t directed by Robert Redford or lit gorgeously like A River Runs Through It, it wasn’t that my father opened his heart and said I think my life has been a colossal mistake, that every poem I write fails, that we have no money, or that Aeney told him he had a secret crush on Jane Brouder. What happened was at first neither discernible nor understood.

  It was just this: that day my brother Aeney fell in love with the river.

  Chapter 18

  When Grandfather Abraham was gone Grandmother had a brief moment of Victory, as if by outliving him she could lay down her cards and declare that she’d finally won the Game of Marriage. It wasn’t until the long evenings of the following winter, hounds gnawing on the stringy twines of the Indian rug and developing the first stages of what my father said was curry-scented incontinence, sash windows rattling like denture laughter, and the fire blowing down these great black puffs, that she realised he might be the one laughing now.

  The aunts were away in the kind of school where books are balanced on your head. Esther, the eldest, would graduate in a year and go directly into The Bank. It was how it was done in those days. If you were smart and proper like Esther and could wear a skirt and blouse and had been trained by a crack squadron of nuns to sit perfectly upright and keep your knees together and your hair in a really really really tight bun you could be Mr Enright’s Secretary. You could live in a flat in Rathm
ines and own a Raleigh Ladies’ Bicycle, spend your evenings with Persil washing powder and a Philips steam iron and head into Dublin in the mornings fresh as Palmolive. The Sixties were starting then, but not in Ireland. Maybe the Ministers were thinking of Rolling Out the new era but they had to run it by the Censorship Board, and anyway Aunt Esther was always a few decades behind. Poor thing, she was of a nervous disposition and couldn’t bear the thought of things not being just so. Mr Enright never had a pencil out of place. Banks in those days were pretty much like churches; you put on your best clothes to go into them, and a Banker was a Very Good Catch. Aunt Esther had her hopes I suppose, but Mr Enright realised he’d ruin a perfectly excellent secretary by marrying her. Instead he chose the deeply unsuitable daughter of the bank’s president and took up golf. Aunt Esther attended the wedding. When I think of her I think of her as the tall girl in the back of the wedding photos, the big-boned one with the abashed air who has tirelessly shopped for just the right dress for the occasion but who says Yes of course when the photographer suggests maybe a better position for her would be in the third row. Aunt Esther attended a lot of weddings, I think, and only gradually did the corroding disappointment of the world work its way into her soul. Hope, you see, takes a long time to die. When we visited her in St Jude’s, the nursing home that would later change its name to Windermere and eventually welcome Aunt Daphne, Aunt Esther had to hold on to her hands tightly they shook so much. She wore a pale-blue cardigan and white blouse with the cuffs just showing and a white linen handkerchief pressed in next to her left wrist. She couldn’t keep her head still, it sort of juddered like these bolts of electricity were hitting it but she kept fighting them, she kept trying to keep herself still and proper and Receive her brother’s children because that was the right thing to do and I just stood there with Aeney beside our father seeing Dad’s eyes glass up and thinking it was pretty much the definition of Impossible for a woman suffering this badly to have such grace.