‘Close your eyes to see it,’ he says.
We both close our eyes. Just when I think I am seeing it he lifts his arms from around us and our heads slide back deeper into the pillow on Aeney’s bed. The bed rises as the mountain ridge goes away and my father eases himself off. I’m in the warm space that still smells like him and I’m thinking of sailing towards an island in the marvellous blue.
Aeney doesn’t want to imagine. He wants the real thing. He wants to be there. ‘Tell us more.’
‘I will,’ Dad says. ‘But just get to the island now. Just arrive. Tomorrow I’ll tell you about Mr Silver.’
‘Mr Silver?’
‘Shsh. Lie back.’
‘But who is he?’
‘His name was John. We called him Long, even though he wasn’t.’
My eyes are closed, but I can feel Dad pull the covers up around Aeney. His voice is quiet because he thinks Ruthie is already asleep. Very gently he pats Aeney’s head and at his ear whispers, ‘He had a wooden leg.’
Chapter 3
We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.
When Mary MacCarroll sees Virgil Swain on Fisher’s Step she doesn’t fall in Love right away. She falls in Curiosity, which is less deep but more common. She sees a man with a sunburned face and ragged beard and presumes he’s a fisher. She has come out of the house to clear her head and walked in the April rain without purpose or destination. Often she walked the riverbank. The Shannon is a masculine river. It’s burly and brown and swollen with rain. It shoulders its way out between Kerry and Clare with an indifferent force but when you walk alongside it down where the fields fall away and the line of the land is this frayed green edge you can get a kind of river peace. I used to love walking there. Running water is best for daydreams, Charles Dickens said, and he was right.
Mary sees the man and knows he’s a stranger. He is standing looking at the river the way only fishermen do. But she sees no rod or tackle, and as she approaches she has enough sense of her own beauty to expect him to turn to look at her.
He doesn’t.
She walks three feet behind him, and he doesn’t turn. She goes on down the bank, discovers a seed of curiosity is cracking in her, and opening now, unfurling a first feathered edge as she thinks he’s looking now and makes as though tossing her hair but is checking to see if his head has turned.
It hasn’t.
She is only eighteen but has already taken enough possession of the world to know her own impact in it. It isn’t vanity like Anna Prender in Kilmurry who’d be happy if you carried a full-length mirror alongside her or Rosemary Carr inside in Kilrush who Nan says is in love with her own backside, it’s a natural thing. It’s what happens in small places. It’s what happens when your father was Spencer Tracy and you come to Mass walking with your head MacCarroll high and have a kind of ease and grace that people notice. It’s what happens when the timbers of the Men’s Aisle groan under the forward strain as you come up to Communion, or the biggest male attendance in Faha church occurs the evening of the Feast of Saint Blaise when Father Tipp is going to bless your arched bare throat. Something like it is in a poem of Austin Clarke’s in Soundings which Mrs Quinty used to teach us in TY. The ‘Sunday in every week’ one.
She’s used to it, that’s all.
And he doesn’t turn.
Well that’s fine. She doesn’t really care. She walks on down the river to the end of Ryan’s and she crosses out over the place where the wire ends. She goes along by O’Brien’s and up to Enright’s, all the time the rain falling softly and all the time the seed feathering some more.
Who is he?
She stops to talk with one of the Macs who are out counting cattle and says there is a stranger back along the way, but she only gets a that right? in reply and that doesn’t satisfy the thing the Curiosity craves. It wants to talk about him. It doesn’t matter what is said as long as something is, as long as somehow the mystery of him gets out of the place inside where the feathering is madding now.
She goes back along the bank, back past O’Brien’s and Enright’s and over the wire into Shaughnessy.
There he is, in the very same place. He hasn’t moved.
This time she can look at him as she approaches. She can allow the Curiosity what it needs, it needs detail; the way in profile his hair looks roughly barbered, the way the beard runs down into his shirt collar, the way the sun and sea have early-aged him. Details: boots without laces, she has never seen boots like them, trousers foreshortened by long wear and knee-gathers, the shirt that had once been white, the jacket he wears, tan leather, square-cut, thousand-creased, both dark-polished and dulled by weather, the jacket which later she will learn he got in Quito in Ecuador and from which he cannot be separated. There’s a paperback book that’s too tall for the jacket pocket. (It’s the Collier Books edition of W.B. Yeats’s Mythologies, Book 1,002, published in New York, priced $4.95, and on the cover the poet is young and melancholic, forelock falling on to his left eyebrow. It’s the book that brought Virgil back to Ireland, the one that begins with ‘A Teller of Tales’ where WB says the stories in it were told to him by Paddy Flynn in a leaky one-roomed cabin in the village of Ballisodare. It’s the one where he says In Ireland this world and the world we go to after death are not far apart. The tops of pages are river-and-rain-warped, the whole book buckled a bit from travel, age and pockets, but it’s a book that feels companionable somehow, if you know what I mean. In it there are many pages with lines underscored, or in some cases with just ascending wing-like Nike tick-marks next to a paragraph. Sometimes the marks have been made in different inks and therefore different times, so that in ‘Drumcliff and Rosses’ after Yeats tells of Ben Bulben and Saint Columba there’s a wavy black line under how he climbed one day to get near Heaven with his prayers, but in ‘Earth, Fire and Water’ there are two red strokes slashed down in the margin next to I am certain that the water, the water of the seas and of lakes and of mist and rain, has all but made the Irish after its image. Between pages 64 and 65, ‘Miraculous Creatures’, there’s one of those old grey cinema tickets on which is printed Admit One.)
Mary hasn’t seen a man so still, she hasn’t seen a man with a jacket like that, with a book in his pocket.
She walks back towards him. He’ll say hello this time, she thinks. He’ll know it’s me. Somehow he’ll have seen me the first time without my knowing and this time he’ll turn and say hello.
Maybe he’ll just turn and nod, she thinks. But at least then she will see his face.
She goes along the track by the river, it’s muck-tacky with rain, heels of her boots sucking. She is ten yards from him, then five; then she is passing behind him. He hasn’t turned.
What is the matter with him?
If she reaches she could put her hand on his back. If she reaches she could shove him into the river, and for a flash moment she is the girl who will do it, who will suddenly stop and push her two hands into the small of his back and send him spinning into the Shannon.
What is the matter with him? Is he deaf or blind or just rude?
She goes ten yards past when she decides to turn and tell him that this is Matty Shaughnessy’s field and it’s private. Fifteen when she thinks no she won’t. Twenty when she thinks she will fall over, go the full Jane Austen, hurt her ankle and cry out, twenty-five when she’s too mad and won’t give him the satisfaction and thirty when she comes through the stile out of the field and looks back to see him still standing there.
‘There’s a stranger down at the river,’ she tells her mother. And that is a first relief. It’s relief just to say stranger because then he is already somebody, and she is already connected to him.
That’s how I see it anyway. That’s how I see it when I ask Mam ‘How did you first meet Dad?’ and each time she tells me the story of Not Meeting, of Passing by, and how it seems to me God was giving them
every chance not to meet, and the singular nature of their characters will mean their stories will run parallel and never do a Flannery O’Connor. Never converge.
‘Is there?’ Nan says. She’s flour-elbows in this scene. It’s a bit Walter Macken meets John B. Keane because she’s breadmaking the loaves she sells in Nolan’s shop to keep them alive. Her dancing days are over and Spencer Tracy is on black-and-white reruns in her head now, but she knows this day is coming. You can’t have a daughter that beautiful and not know.
‘A stranger?’ she says. Nan is sharp as a tack and cute as buttons. She won’t look up from the dough but she’ll let her daughter get it out.
‘I don’t know who he is,’ Mary says.
‘No?’
‘No.’
Mary throws her coat on the door hook, sits to toe the heel of a boot.
Nan gives the dough thumbs. She gives it Almighty Thumbs. Her thumb knuckles stick out like shiny knobs from years of breadmaking. ‘What’s he like?’
‘I don’t know. I hardly saw him.’
‘Didn’t you?’
Mary goes to tend the fire, roughly rakes down the grate and assembles the embers in a little heap.
‘Tall, I suppose?’ Nan asks.
‘I think. I don’t know. I told you, I hardly saw him.’
Nan kneads the story some more. ‘What was he doing? In Shaughnessy’s, I wonder?’
Mary doesn’t answer. She’s not going to speak about him any more. ‘Nothing,’ she says, after a while.
‘Nothing?’
‘Nothing. Just looking at the river.’
That night he’s with her in her bed.
Not in that way.
She’s lying in her bed with the curtains drawn and the window open because the April night is softer than tissue and because she can’t get enough air. She’s lying on her side facing the window and the room is loud with that song the river has when the rain is spring heavy and the Shannon flowing fast. She can’t sleep. He won’t let her. What was he doing there? Why did he not turn? She’s angry with him, which marks a deepening and keeps him there, as if already their relationship is a living thing and he is already someone with whom she can get angry. She moves on to her other side and puts the pillow over her ear. But it’s useless. Somehow the river is louder when you cover your ears. It’s like the sea in shells. You hear it in your blood. I used try to escape it with headphones when I told Mam I couldn’t bear to hear the river running any more and for weeks she tried everything, taping the vent in the skylight, hanging chimes made of shells, bringing up Dad’s music and playing it loud, but even J.S. Bach had to pause sometime and between his Movements the river sang and in the end I stood in my nightie and opened the skylight and screamed at it, which is neither great for your reputation or stopping river noise.
Mary’s angry at him. Then she’s angry at herself for even thinking about him. And so in the bed they are joined. It’s not an ideal relationship, but it’s a start. I have the same thing with Vincent Cunningham, so I know. She tells herself to forget about him, but if there’s one sure way not to forget something it’s to say Forget That.
Why is her pillow so lumpy?
Why is the sheet so twisted around her legs?
Why, why, why is there no air in April?
They have a hell of a night together.
In the morning the birds are singing with that extra-demented loudness they have in spring in Clare, they’re all ADHD and they’ve got this urgent message they’re trying to deliver but because God’s a comedian they can only speak it in chirrup. Mary comes into the kitchen. Nan is there already. Since her husband died she can’t bear being in the bed and sleeps in the chair so she’s up before the birds, the bread loaves that were out upside down overnight are now being tapped on their backs before Marty Mungovan who was sweet on Nan from her dancing days comes to collect them.
‘Morning,’ Nan says to her daughter.
But Mary goes straight out the back door and across the haggard to the hen run. She lifts and pulls open the mesh-wire gate and the hens raise an excited clucking. The older ones see that she’s bringing no margarine tub of Layers Mash and turn away and the younger ones in terror run into the wire and poke their heads through it, for a moment scrabbling at the ground for propulsion going nowhere but squawking mad because they know something unusual is happening. Which is true, something has happened. She crosses the Run and stoops in to the House and from the wooden crate that has Satsumas inked into it and a bed of patted-down hay she takes six eggs.
She comes into the kitchen and starts cracking them straight away into a bowl.
Nan knows enough of the human heart not to pass comment.
The eggs get beaten. They get beaten big-time. They get salted and peppered. Then they get beaten some more.
Then they get abandoned. She just stops beating them mid-whisk and leaves them and goes out the back door again, this time not going into the haggard but out the pencil-gravel way where the grass grows up through it in wet April and makes a kind of slug-road into the garden. She goes out the gate and walks with her arms folded across her and her green cardigan pulled over but not buttoned. She never buttons it. There’s something in her can’t stand confinement. It’s a MacCarroll thing. She walks down the road and Marty Mungovan passes her in his van coming to collect the breads and gives her the nod and she just inclines her head slightly in briefest greeting. She hasn’t brushed her hair, she hasn’t done one thing of all the things she might have done in getting ready to go and meet her future husband.
Because right then she’s just curious, she wants to know, that’s all. And she marches down the road that runs parallel to the river and takes its curves from it until she gets to Murphy’s gate and for an instant she hesitates, just one moment, just one moment in which she might say to herself what the hell are you doing? and turn back, just one moment which flies away into the mad chirruping of the birds, then she climbs the gate.
She sees him right away. He’s there, in the same place, in the same pose, watching the river in the same way.
Just the fact of it, just the strangeness and the stillness and the solidity of him of whom she’d been thinking all night, takes her breath. She’s aware her heart jumps into the side of her throat. She’s aware the ground has a spongy spring to it and the sky is huge. He’s there again, standing, looking westward. He’s there. It’s like the French Lieutenant’s woman in the The French Lieutenant’s Woman only in reverse, and with the river instead of the sea, but there’s the same inevitability, the same sense of things just about to go bang.
What’s he doing there?
Mary hasn’t worked out the next step. She didn’t really expect him to be there and came half in the hope that his having vanished again would free her of thinking about him. But now she has to figure out what happens next. She’s crossing the field to the mucky track again and she’s got her arms tighter around her and her head lowered a bit now, but she’s thinking Has he been here all night? And in that there’s madness and attraction both. Right then she doesn’t have the words to explain it. It’s like Colette Mulvihill over in Kilbaha who left The Church and took up Leonard Cohen and when Father Tipp asked her why she just said Mystery, Father, which was a blow to him because the Church had spent fifty years taking the mystery out of it so that now uncaught criminals like Kieran Coyne and Maurice Crossan could become Eucharistic Ministers and the Hosts arrive in a blue van from Portlaoise that says Maguire Bros, Clergy Apparel & Supplies, All Religions, right on the side and Wash Me Please in finger-writing underneath.
Mystery, Father, was about right.
Mary walks along the track. She’s not looking at him. She won’t. But she’s fallen so far in Curiosity there’s no way she’s going to be able to go home again until she’s found out something. Her mind is pulling at the mystery, and it’s flying past River-stalker, Inspector of Riverbanks, Surveyor of Soils & Erosion, Fisher-scout, Salmon-spy, Pathfinder, Priest, but it never gets t
o Man at the End of Living, it never gets to Man Who has Come to Drown, because she’s not yet acquainted with anything Swain. She doesn’t know about Grandfather Absalom waiting in the candles for The Calling or the pole-vaulting or the Philosophy of Impossible Standard. She doesn’t know poets can have ash in the soul, or that after so much burning there comes a time when there’s nothing left but blowing away or phoenix-rising. She hasn’t read Eileen Simpson’s Poets in their Youth (Book 3,333, Picador, London) or John Berryman’s The Freedom of the Poet (Book 3,334, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) or Peter Ackroyd’s Blake (Book 3,340, Vintage, London), Paul Ferris’s Dylan Thomas (Book 3,341, Dial Press, New York), Paddy Kitchen’s Gerard Manley Hopkins (Book 3,342, Carcanet Press, London) or any of the others my father gathered together in a mad company under the slope of the skylight where once the fire smoked and the hose soaked them all. She doesn’t know that he has seen much of the world, but she feels it. She doesn’t know he has come back to Ireland carrying a caustic disappointment in himself, that he feels is this all there is?, that his life has amounted to nothing, that nothing has happened but Time, and that now he has walked across Ireland Swain-style, fishing the rivers his father described, and is that most dangerous of things, a man looking for a sign. No sign had been seen, until yesterday, when he came to that spot in the river and for no reason that can be explained fell into the conviction that he was meant to be there.
He has no more idea of why than she does.
But he has that Swain ability to believe in the outlandish. The family has history in it.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asks him. The thing is too big in her to get out delicately.
He doesn’t move. He’s been standing too still and too long and maybe he thinks it is his own mind asking. But then there’s the difference in the air. There’s something he can’t see but feels and he turns and looks at her.
History of the Rain Page 16