Tommy is hardcore into the folklore, he’s far gone in ceol agus rince as Michael Tubridy says, has printed his Boarding Pass and been literally Away with the Fairies several times, believing we Irish are Number One folk for lore and in fact in our most humble and affable selves most if not all of the history of the world can be explained. He does the whole MacCarroll seed and breed, draws short of And it Came to Pass, the way Joshua does it in the Book of Joshua but he gives it the same ring. Like some of the women I may have dozed off during routine rounds of begetting but I come back in time for my Grandfather Fiachra who, thanks to Tesco’s box-set, is played by young Spencer Tracy in Captains Courageous when Spencer is a Portuguese-American fisherman called Manuel Fidello, and later by old Spencer Tracy when he plays Old Man in The Old Man and the Sea and gets an Oscar nomination, but the Oscar goes to the thin moustache of David Niven and that salty deepwater Irish melancholy settles for ever into Spencer’s eyes.
Grandfather Fiachra has the Spencer Tracy eyes and the Spencer Tracy hair that is this uncombable wavy stuff that makes it look like he has just surfaced into This World and has a last bit of silver sea still flowing crossways on his head. I never met him. Grandfather MacCarroll is in two black-and-white photographs in Nan’s room. In one of them he’s at his own wedding. He’s in the front porch of Faha church in a black suit with pointy gangster lapels. He’s big and barrel-chested and looks like there’s nothing in the world he won’t meet head on. Back then everyone looks serious. You get a shock when you find out he’s twenty-eight, because the suit and the look and the pose make him older than anyone that age now. There’s a smile around the corners of his mouth and something dancing in his eyes. He’s waiting for his Bride.
She’s a Talty.
Do I need to say more?
(Dear Reader, time is short, we can’t even open The Book of Talty, because if we did we’d get sucked out in that tide. We’d be Gone for Some Time and away into the stories of Jeremiah Talty who was a doctor only without a degree, Tobias Talty who kept a horse in his house, lived on apples and grew the longest beard in the County Clare, his sister Josephine who conversed with fairies, & brother Cornelius who went to the American Civil War and fought on both sides. We might never get back.)
Bridget Talty is coming to the church by horse and cart. She’s coming from fifteen miles away in Kilbaha by the broken road that’s in love with the sea. She’s sitting in that boneshaker beside her father in a wedding dress she’s fighting because she didn’t want to wear one, and has already thrown the veil into a ditch this side of Kilrush. They’re rattling along in sea-spray and salt-gale and suddenly the regular rain turns to downpour. It comes bucketing and her father says rain is good luck for weddings but she doesn’t answer him. She’s foostering with the buttons at the collar of the dress because they’re pinching out her breath and ping! one of them flies off, and ping! another. And she tugs back the collar and holds her head high, so soon face, neck and the upper curve of her breasts are all gleaming with rain and her hair is wild streels tumbling. When she arrives outside Faha church in the cart she’s this drowned heap, proud, beautiful and feckless as she gets off the cart, lands down into a fair-sized puddle, strides through it, muddied shoes and splattered stockings adding the final Bride-à-la-Talty touches as she comes through the church gates.
And standing there waiting, not at the altar but at the front door because that’s the way he’s doing it, Grandfather releases the Spencer Tracy smile around the corners of his mouth, sees the whole of his married life ahead, and thinks: Well now. This is going to be interesting.
The second photo is years later. It was taken by Martin Liverpool the time he was home for the Fleadh, Tommy says. Martin had been working on Merseyside ten years and came home with a touch of the John Hinde’s, the freckled folkloric, seeing Ireland in panoramic Technicolor and Kodak-ing every turf barrow, ass and child, so that when he went back to the sites he had the country kind of captured in snaps that he kept in small cardboard shoeboxes, taking solace from stopping time, and not admitting emigration had lacerated his heart. Martin Liverpool came past our house the day Grandfather was up thatching.
In the photo Spencer Tracy is still recognisable as Spencer Tracy, but his hair is white now. It tufts out from under the flat tweed cap. You can see his hair still has the waves but they’re softer. The big wild tides of his youth are gone. Already passed are the years of ruile buile, the shouting and roaring, the storming in and the storming out, the flying dishes, the sudden wordless reconciliations he always instigated because despite his toughness and salmon-streak Spencer was hopelessly sentimental the way only men can be. The birth of Mam, the years in this house when it had to accommodate two big hearts and minds bashing against each other and making fly the sparks in which the love happened, I can’t really imagine them. You can’t imagine your nan like that. She’s too Nan to accommodate younger versions. All I know is that before Bridget Talty became Nan, before she became guardian of Clare Champions and Watcher of the Fire, before she took to pretending deafness and day and night wearing Spencer Tracy’s cap, she was a young married woman who found herself to be fulltime baker of bread, washer of shirts, getter of turf, raiser of hens ducks and geese and that she did not mind any of it as long as she could have a pack of ten Carrolls Number One cigarettes and go set dancing in the evenings. That’s her legend in the parish. To Comerford’s, Tubridy’s, Downes’s, to Ryan’s, Daly’s and McNamara’s she went, as well as skipping across the fields to house dances, bringing her big bashful Spencer Tracy with her, crossing under kissing starlight, the two of them coming flushed in the back door on to flagged kitchens, doing the Caledonian, the South Galway and the Clare Sets, five Figures, with glistening faces and battering steps, Tops and Tails, shouting ‘House’ and dancing the world simple.
In the photo Grandfather has a white shirt with sleeves rolled, big coarse tweedy trousers the thatch won’t penetrate. The roof has two homemade-looking ladders hanging on it. They are hooked over the apex so it looks like Grandfather is heading up into the big bluer-than-blue sky. Martin Liverpool has given him a shout so he’s turned halfway up the ladder and now he’s in the perfect position, blue sky behind him and straight ahead the same sweeping Shannon river view that I have from the skylight. He doesn’t know his heart attack is on the way. He doesn’t know he has only time to get the thatch finished, the turf home, and two horses shod.
Jaykers God, Tommy says. But he was a fine figure of a man.
Ah well.
That’s where Tommy’s history ends.
But that’s not the end.
The next bit is the fairy tale.
There’s a day in April when it’s raining. The river is running fast. The girl whose father had died, whose mother raised her in the crooked house by the river, who grew up with that broken part inside where your father has died and which if you’re a girl and your father was Spencer Tracy you can’t fix or unhurt, that girl who yet found in herself some kind of forbearance and strength and was not bitter, whose name was Mary MacCarroll and who was beautiful without truly knowing it and had her mother and father’s dancing and pride in her, that girl walked the riverbank in the April rain.
And standing at that place in Shaughnessy’s called Fisher’s Step, where the ground sort of raises a little and sticks out over the Shannon, right there, the place which in The Salmon in Ireland Abraham Swain says salmon pass daily and though it’s treacherous he calls a blessed little spot, right there, looking like a man who had been away a long time and had come back with what in Absalom, Absalom! (Book 1,666, Penguin Classics, London) William Faulkner calls diffident and tentative amazement, as if he’d been through some solitary furnace experience, and come out the other side, standing right there, suntanned face, pale-blue eyes that look like they are peering through smoke, lips pressed together, aged twenty-nine but looking older, back in Ireland less than two weeks, the ocean-motion still in his legs but strangely the river now lending him a river re
pose, standing right there, was Virgil Swain.
Chapter 2
That’s us, from Seaweed to Swain.
I used the long run-up. You have to; otherwise the pole won’t carry you over.
It’s the way Charles Dickens does it in Martin Chuzzlewit (Book 180, Penguin Classics) where in Chapter One he traces the Chuzzlewits back to Adam and Eve. The MacCarrolls go back further. They go back beyond, Martin Feeney says.
The Swain are the written, the MacCarroll the oral. Ours is a history of tongue marrying paper, the improbable marrying the impossible. The children are incredible.
When I call my father Virgil Swain I think he’s a story. I think I invented him. I think maybe I never had a father and in the gap where he should be I have put a story. I see this figure on the riverbank and I try to match him to the boy I have imagined, but find instead a gristle of truth, that human beings are not seamless smooth creations, they have insoluble parts, and the closer you look the more mysterious they become.
Nobody in our parish ever called my father by his name. They called him Verge. And one time I wrote that down along a page of my Aisling copybook, Verge, and thesaurus-ed to find Edge, Border, Margin, before I came to Threshold, and then I thought of it as a verb and got a shiver when I wrote Approach.
My father never really told us where he had been. Deep, deep, and still deep and deeper must we go if we would find out the heart of a man, old Herman Melville says in my father’s copy of Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (Book 1,997, E.P. Dutton, New York), a book that has the smell of basement and on page 167 a tea-stain in the shape of Greenland.
The years between my father’s leaving Ashcroft and his standing on Fisher’s Step are lost. When you’re a child who has grown up on Adventure stories, who had Spencer Tracy for a Talty grandfather and a rushing river outside the door, there was a certain prestige in being able to announce in Faha N.S. that before he lived here my father was Gone to Sea. In a parish where the river opens into the sea the happy children dream of voyaging out, the sad of being sucked out, but either way the sea is magic central. Gone to Sea inspires a certain status. But the prestige was short-lived because I couldn’t expand beyond that phrase, because I got flushed when asked and because that little bug-eyed Seamus Mulvey kept following me around the yard singing ‘Where did he go? Where did he go?’ in that high strangulated whine all the Mulveys got from burning plastic bottles in their fire after the Council starting charging for recycling. ‘Did he go to Africa? Did he go to Australia?’ the round head of him bobbing side-to-side, the bug-eyes shining like sucked Black Jacks, singing scorn and teaching me the universal truth the human mind abhors vagueness, even a tiny mind like Seamus Mulvey’s.
Our father went to sea with Ahab and Ishmael. That’s a fact. But he didn’t find the whale. He came back with the same restless seeking inside him, and added to that a sense of things being infirm.
‘Where did you sail to?’ Aeney asked.
Dad lay between us on Aeney’s bed-boat. We were eight and in school had started doing Geography. At night-time Aeney took the Atlas to bed and before Mam called up Lights Out I joined him under the blue duvet with the white floating clouds on it and we looked at maps and took a kind of comfort from the way no matter how big a place was, if it was big as all of South America say, it still fitted inside a page. Aeney was a boy who dreamed. And so when he was looking at the maps you could sort of feel his brain whirring and you knew that afterwards in his sleep he’d still be travelling in those places.
‘Where did you sail to?’
Dad lies between us on top of the floating clouds, his long thin body a ridge of mountains that I can walk two fingers on. That April day when Mam first found him on Fisher’s Step he had D.H. Lawrence’s ragged reddish-brown beard, the one from the madly wrinkled cover of the Selected Poems (Book 2,994, Penguin, London), but we weren’t born until long after that, so by now his beard is silver and I can walk my fingers right up along his shoulders and over his collar into it and I get a good way into the softness of his beard before he makes a pretend snap and a shark sound and I scream and save my fingers for another while.
‘Where did you sail when you were a sailor?’
‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’ll tell you, but you mustn’t tell anyone.’
‘We won’t. Sure we won’t, Aeney?’ I lie, looking across at Aeney to make sure he won’t mention Seamus Mulvey.
Aeney shakes his head the way small boys do, with a kind of complete and perfect seriousness. His eyes are Os of wonder and gravity.
‘Tell us.’
‘Well,’ Dad says. ‘Do you know where the Caribbean is?’
Aeney flicks the pages of the Atlas. ‘Here.’ He holds it across the mountain ridge so I can see.
Dad smiles that smile he has that’s near to crying. ‘That’s right.’
‘Did you sail there?’
‘I did.’
‘What was it like? Tell us.’
‘It was hot.’
‘How hot?’
‘Very very hot.’
‘And why were you there? What were you sailing there for?’ Aeney wants to understand how you can get into a map that’s on page 28 of an Atlas.
‘Why was I there?’ Dad says.
‘Yes.’
My father’s eyes are looking straight up at the slope of the ceiling and the cutaway angle where the skylight is a box of navy blue with no stars. The question is too big for him. I will see this often in the years to come, the way he could suddenly pause on a phrase or even just a word, as if in it were a doorway and his mind would enter and leave us momentarily. Back then we thought it was what all fathers did. We thought that fatherhood was this immense weight like a great overcoat and there were all manner of things your father had to be thinking of all the time just to keep the overcoat from crushing him. ‘Well,’ he says at last, ‘that’s a long story.’
‘All right.’ Aeney props himself up on his elbow. One look at his face and you know you can’t disappoint him. You just can’t. Before they are broken small boys are perfect creations.
‘Well,’ Dad says. ‘I’ll tell you the short version.’
I move in closer. My head is against my father’s side. It’s warm in a way only your father’s body is warm and his shirt smells the way only your own father’s can. It’s a thing impossible to explain or recapture, because it’s more than a smell, it’s more than the sum of Castile soap and farm sweat and dreams and endeavour, it’s more than Old Spice aftershave or Lux shampoo, more than any combination of anything you can find in the press in his bathroom. It’s in the heat and living of him. It goes out of his clothes after three days. That’s a thing I learned.
But then I am not thinking of any of that. I press myself into the warmth of my father and his arm lifts and comes around me. His other arm comes around Aeney.
‘Well, it was a big-enough ship,’ my father begins. ‘It belonged to a Mr Trelawney.’
Aeney needs details. ‘What kind of man was he?’
‘A good man. But he couldn’t keep a secret.’
‘Why not?’
‘It was just his failing. But he had a cool head, so that was good. Anyway, he owned the ship and he came with us. And brought with him his friend, a Doctor Livesey.’
‘Was he good?’
‘He was. He treated everybody the same.’
‘That was good.’
‘Yes.’
‘What was the Captain’s name?’
‘Smollett. He was a good Captain.’
‘You need a good Captain. Who else?’
‘There were plenty. There was a Mr Allardyce, Mr Anderson, and Mr Arrow.’
‘They are all As.’
‘Quiet, Ruth. What was Mr Arrow like?’
‘Mr Arrow drank. Even though it was not allowed.’
‘Did he fall overboard?’
‘Yes. He fell overboard during the night when we got to the Caribbean. His body was never seen again.’
Dad allows a
pause for Mr Arrow’s body to sink without trace.
‘There was also Abraham Gray.’
‘What was he like?’
‘He was a carpenter. At first I didn’t like him, and when you’re on a ship with somebody you don’t like that’s no fun. But then he did some good things and I saw a different side of him. And in the end he saved my life.’
‘Did he?’
‘He certainly did.’
‘How?’
‘That comes later. First, who else? There was John Hunter, there was Richard Joyce. And Dick Johnson. He always had a Bible with him. Everywhere he went. He thought it would protect him in the seas.’
‘And did it?’
‘He didn’t drown. But he got malaria.’
‘Was that bad?’
‘Yes, Ruthie.’
‘He died?’
‘He did.’
We pay our respects to Mr Johnson as he follows Mr Arrow into the dark.
‘George Merry, Tom Morgan, O’Brien. We never knew O’Brien’s first name. He was just O’Brien.’
‘Good?’ Aeney’s O eyes.
Dad makes tremor an invisible whiskey bottle at his lips. Poor O’Brien.
‘The Caribbean, you know, is not a place. It is many places. Islands. Some of them are so small they’re not even on that map. But all of them are beautiful. The water is this marvellous blue. It’s so blue that once you see it you realise you’ve never seen blue before. That other thing you were calling blue is some other colour, it’s not blue. This, this is blue. It’s a blue that comes down from the sky into the water so that when you look in the sea you think sky and when you look at the sky you think sea.’
Aeney and I lie there and realise we’ve never seen blue, and how amazing it must be, and for a while I try the difficult trick of seeing what I’ve never seen except through my father’s telling. I set him sailing in the very best blue I can imagine, but know that is not blue enough.
History of the Rain Page 15