History of the Rain

by Niall Williams

  In the lower cabin which was once the Original House of the MacCarrolls and then became the Cowhouse and then the Carhouse there was a pale blue Ford Cortina. In the early evenings after the farming and before the light died Mam took the key and drove them west along the rim of Clare. Both of them favoured edges. They liked to follow the Shannon seaward, see the end of land on their left, and where current and tide met in choppy brown confluence. Their destination was, like Ken Kesey’s bus, Further. They went like escapees, Mam employing that driving style that was basically blind faith, speed and innocence, hurtling the car around bends, ignoring cracked wing mirrors, whipping of fuschia and sally, birds that shot up clamouring in their wake, hitting the brakes hard when they came around a corner into cows walking home.

  I like to picture them, the blue Cortina coming along the green edge on Ordnance Survey Map 17, Shannon Estuary, one of many dog-eared and crinkled maps that for reasons obscure are all pressed between Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (Book 1,958, Penguin Classics, London), David Henry Thoreau’s Walden (Book 746, Oxford World Classics, Oxford) and Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (Book 1,304, Grove Press, New York). On the map there are four different tones of blue for the river, High Water Mark, Low Water Mark, and 5 and 10 Fathoms. I’ve looked at it a long time, the way the green of the land seems to reach out, even off the edge of the page, so that the most western point, Loop Head, doesn’t fit, and is in its own little box on the top. They go everywhere along the southern shore, different evenings to Labasheeda, Knock, Killimer, Cappa, into Kilrush and out again, to Moyasta and down left around Poulnasherry Bay, to Querrin and Doonaha, taking roads that end at a gate on the river, reversing, into Liscrona and Carrigaholt, down to Kilcreadaun Point where Virgil wants to go but the road won’t let him, on again, summer evenings all the way down to Kilcloher for the view there, back up again, into Kilbaha, and finally, racing the sunset to get to the white lighthouse at the Head itself where the river is become the foaming sea. There is no further.

  On those drives Virgil felt light, felt illumined. He’d look at Mary and his heart would float. That was the kind of love it was, the kind that radiates, that begins in the eyes of another but soon has got into everything, the kind that makes the world seem better, everything become just that bit more marvellous. Maybe it was because he’d been at sea so long; maybe it was because he was realising how lost he had been and that now here real life was beginning; maybe it was because he was feeling rescued.

  Virgil sat in the passenger seat, his eyes on the fields, the ascent and arc of birds, the glassy glints of the river, the broadening sky.

  And he looked at things.

  I know that sounds ridiculous, but there’s no other way to say it. My father could fall into a quiet, arms folded across himself, head turned, eyes so intently focused that you’d know, that’s all. We would anyway. Strangers might see him and think he’s away in himself, he’s lost in some contemplation, so still and deep would he get, but in fact he was not away at all. He was here in a more profound way than I have the skill to capture. My father looked at things the way I sometimes imagine Adam must have. Like they were just created, an endless stream of astonishments, like he’d never seen just this quality of light falling on just this kind of landscape, never noticed just how the wind got caught in the brushes of the spruce, the pulse of the river. Raptures could be little or large, could come one after the other in a torrent, or singly and separated by long dullness. For him life was a constant drama of seeing and blindness, but, when seeing, the world would suddenly seem to him laden. Charged is the word I found in Mrs Quinty’s class when we did Hopkins, and that’s a better way to say that in those moments I think the world to him was probably a kind of heaven.

  He’d see in quiet, and then would come the release.

  ‘Here, stop. Here.’

  Mary looks across at him.

  ‘We have to go down here.’

  She bumps the car on to the ditch. Parking is not in her skillset. Virgil is already out the door. ‘Come on.’

  She hurries after him. He reaches back and catches her hand. They cross a field, cattle coming slowly towards them as if drawn by a force.

  ‘Look, there.’

  The sinking sun has fringed the clouds. Rays fall, visible, stair-rods of light extending, as if from an upside-down protractor pressed against the sky. The river is momentarily golden.

  It lasts seconds. No more.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she says.

  ‘We shouldn’t miss these.’

  ‘No. We shouldn’t,’ she says, looking at him and trying to decide for the hundredth time if his eyes are blue like the sky or blue like the sea.

  I’m guessing Mam knew right away this wasn’t a farmer. I’m guessing that if she wanted a farmer she could have chosen from a martful. But maybe she didn’t know he was a poet.

  He didn’t know himself yet. He wasn’t thinking of poetry yet.

  Having devoted himself to seeing as much of the world as he could, my father now employed the same devotion here. He did exactly what his father would have done. He threw himself into the work on the land. Straight off he demonstrated that he had a genius for making nails go crooked; also an expertise in bending one prong of the fork, blunting hayknives and breaking the handles of spades. Things just went wrong for him. He went out to clean a drain in the back meadow, hacked at the grass till he could see and then clambered down into the rushy sludge.

  I, you will already have deducted, am inexpert in farming matters, but I do know that in our farm stones were gifted at finding their way into the very places where no stones should be, weeds were inspired in their choice of Mam’s flowerbeds, and black slugs the size of your fingers came from the river at night on the supposed invitation of our cabbages. Basically, at every moment our farm is trying to return to some former state where muck and rushes thrive. If you look away for one moment in summer your garden will be a jungle, one moment in winter it will be a lake. It’s from my mother that I have the stories of my father’s first attempts at farming. When I was younger and she told how hard it was I wondered if stones, weeds and slugs didn’t fall from the sky, if there wasn’t a sign on our door, or if the Reverend wasn’t somewhere up there pacing Up-jut across the heavens, spying us below, saying here, I’ll send this. This will try him.

  Virgil stayed in the drain all day. He worked the spade blindly in the brown water, brought up slippery planes of muck he slathered on the bank so the stained grass along the meadow showed his progress. He thought nothing of spending an hour freeing a rock, two digging out the silted bottom. Why drains clog at all I am not sure. Why when the whole thing has been dug out and the water is flowing it just doesn’t stay that way I can’t say. I don’t know if it happens everywhere, if something there is that doesn’t love a drain – thank you, Robert Frost – or if Faha is a Special Case, if in fact it’s a Chosen Place where God is doing a sludge experiment he couldn’t do in Israel.

  When the handle of the spade snapped he worked using just the head, rolling his sleeves but dipping beyond that depth, the rain coming in after a long time at sea and letting itself down on the back of the man stooped below the ground. The cows gathered and watched. In the late afternoon Mam came out in one of the oversized ESB all-weather coats everyone in Faha procured when they started building the power station and she told him he’d done enough for today. Down in the ditch he straightened into a dozen aches, his hair aboriginal with mud, face inexpertly painted with ditch-splash, eyes mascara’d. By rain and drain his clothes were soaked through.

  ‘Virgil, come in home.’

  He smiled. That’s what he did, he smiled.

  It was a rapture thing. But also, Swains are extremists.

  Just like saints. And mad people.

  ‘There’s a bit more,’ he said.

  ‘You’re drowned.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  It was straight-down rain. It was washing his face. It was hopping off the shoulders of the ESB all-
weather.

  ‘Virgil.’

  ‘I’ll get this cleared. Then that’ll be one job done.’

  She looked down at him, her new husband, and looked back along the three-quarters of the drain that had been cleared but was not yet running. Dark patches of dug-out muck lay along the bank like a code, symbols in an obscure proving in mathematics that had progressed so far but was still short of conclusion, still short of anything being proven.

  ‘Are you going to be impossible?’ she asked. She knew the answer before he gave it.

  Rain and ardour were glossing his eyes. ‘I think so.’

  She had to bite her lip to stop herself from smiling. She had that falling-off-the-world feeling she often got around him, a feeling that came swift and light and was so unlike the weight of the responsible that had come into the house after her father had died that it felt like wings inside her.

  ‘All right so,’ she said. And then she turned and walked back across the puddle-meadow, three luminous bands on the back of her coat catching the last light and making it look as if in her tiers of candles were lit.

  There was no boiler or central heating in our house then. There was the range and the fire and large pots for hot water. When Virgil came in evening had fallen. Nan was gone to the Apostolics. He stooped in under the rain-song on the corrugated roof of the back kitchen smelling prehistoric. ‘I freed it,’ he said.

  ‘Take off your clothes,’ Mary said. To escape the compulsion to embrace him, she turned to the four pots she had steaming.

  He saw the stand-in tub on the floor.

  ‘Take off everything.’

  When I read the white lily-scented paperback editions of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow (Books 1,666 & 1,667, Penguin Classics, London) that’s where I find them.

  Mary dips and squeezes the sponge. Steam rises.

  Virgil steps naked on to the flags of the floor.

  Chapter 8

  Today when they carried me out into the ambulance Mam held my hand tight. I had my eyes closed. Timmy and Packy have got the hang of the stairs and the narrowness of the doors and there was no banging on jambs or jerkiness on the steps and when the rain touched my face I didn’t panic, and I didn’t open my eyes until I was strapped into that small space and we were moving. Then Mam dabbed my face two gentle dabs and took my hand in hers again, and I was glad of it, even though I’m not ten years old or even twelve. It’s because people are so perishable. That’s the thing. Because for everyone you meet there is a last moment, there will be a last moment when your hand slips from theirs, and everything ripples outwards from that, the last firmness of a hand in yours that every moment after becomes a little less firm until you look down at your own hand and try to imagine just what it felt like before their hand slipped away. And you cannot. You cannot feel them. And then you cannot quite see them, there’s blurry bits, like you’re looking through this watery haze, and you’re fighting to see, you’re fighting to hold on, but they are perishing right before your eyes, and right before your eyes they are becoming that bit more ghost.

  We were in Tipperary before Mam took her hand from mine.

  Because this was going to Dublin again, because this was The Consultant, Timmy and Packy went Extra Reverential, and because Timmy could see I was paler and thinner than last time and because he knew I was Book Girl he tried to leaven literature into the conversation.

  ‘Ruth, tell me this. Wouldn’t Ireland win the World Cup of Writing?’

  ‘There is no World Cup of Writing,’ Packy told him, and then, discovering a hair of doubt across his mind, turned back to me and asked, ‘Is there?’

  ‘I know there isn’t,’ Timmy said. ‘But if there was, I’m saying. Do you know what the word IF is for?’

  ‘You’re some pigeon.’

  ‘If is for when a thing is not but if it was. That’s why you use If. If you didn’t use if then the thing would be. That’s the distinction.’

  Packy’s response was to put the wipers up to Intermittent Four.

  ‘Most of life depends on If,’ Timmy said, going deeper.

  Maybe a mile of road went by and he resurfaced with: ‘We’d have eleven World Class, wouldn’t we, Ruth?’

  ‘Living or dead?’ Packy asked, and when Timmy threw a glare across at him Packy shrugged and said, ‘What? I’m only saying. You need to know the rules.’

  ‘With writers it makes no difference.’

  ‘All right so,’ he said and started trying to think of the poems he’d done in school.

  Timmy reached across and put us back on Intermittent Three.

  ‘Yeats is one anyway,’ Packy said.

  ‘Centre midfield,’ Timmy said.

  ‘That other one was a goalkeeper.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Your man, we did him for the Leaving.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The goalkeeper.’ Packy looked ahead into the rain for him. ‘Paddy Kavanagh.’

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘He was. I heard that once. Goalkeeper. Blind as a bat too. Who’s centre forward?’

  ‘Who do you think, Ruth?’ Timmy’s eyes were on mine in the mirror.

  ‘Both sexes?’ Packy asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well if living or dead, then men or women, right?’

  Timmy looked at him like a man who had just taken up golf, a wrinkle of perplexity across his brow.

  ‘What about your one who won the prize? Who’s she again?’ Packy went fishing for the name.

  The rain was coming fast, sitting a long time on the windscreen between wipes so we sped sightless then saw then were sightless inside the rain again.

  ‘We’d have a good team all right,’ Timmy said. His eyes were back on mine. I looked away. I hadn’t the energy for conversation. I was feeling that kind of weakness you feel where you imagine there must be a valve open somewhere inside you. Somewhere you’re leaking away. It’s slow and silent but all the time something is flowing out of you, there’s a lessening and a lightening and sometimes you get so tired you don’t want to fight it, you just want to close your eyes and say all right then, go on, flow away.

  ‘Enright!’ Packy said. ‘That’s her.’

  Timmy half-turned back to us, spoke through the sliding window. ‘Did you read that one, Ruth?’

  Mrs Quinty had given me The Gathering, partly because it had won a prize and partly because it was a Serious Book by a Woman, and she wanted to encourage me, she wanted to say See, Serious Girls Can Win, but she would be afraid to say anything so direct so the book had to do the saying as books often do. I loved it, but the publishers had put this staring boy in black-and-white on the front of the paperback with only his eyes in colour and they were a piercing blue that I just couldn’t look at so I had to bend back the cover. Then when I got to page 71 where she writes about a man with an indelible watermark of failure I had to stop because of sinking.

  ‘How’s your own book coming, Ruth?’ Timmy asked. ‘Ruth wants to be a writer,’ he told Packy.

  I didn’t want to be a writer, I wanted to be a reader, which is more rare. But one thing led to another.

  I’m not writing a book, I’m writing a river, I wanted to say. It’s flowing away.

  ‘I think I need to sleep,’ I said.

  Mam stroked my brow. Three soft strokes. ‘You go ahead,’ she said. ‘Close your eyes.’

  ‘We’d beat the Brits anyway,’ Packy said. Then, after a time, he added, ‘Of course they’d have Shakespeare.’

  And after another while: ‘And Charles Dickens.’

  And after another while: ‘And Harry Potter.’

  The Consultant says we need to take a more aggressive approach. He says the Stage of Monitoring is over. I will need to stay for an extended period. He prefers Dublin to Galway but the choice is ours. There will be two stages of treatment, remission induction therapy and post-remission therapy. I will need a venous access device, he says. Interferon-Alpha has to be injected daily. Th
e side effects may be fevers, chills, muscle aches, bone pains, headaches, concentration lapses, fatigue, nausea and vomiting.

  But he is very positive. Very.

  We need to go home and prepare ourselves. He’ll see me in a couple of weeks’ time.

  Then we’ll start to turn back the tide on this thing, he says.

  Chapter 9

  Astonishingly, after sex my mother did not become pregnant. She may have been the only woman in Ireland not to. At that time women got pregnant by wearing short skirts and high heels. High heels were notorious for it. Kilrush was virtually all high-heel shoe shops.

  That first year the whole parish was waiting for Aeney and me to show up. The women in the Women’s Aisle, convinced that the real reason Mary had married The Stranger was that she was already Expecting, were chancing sidelong glances during the Consent-creation as Margaret Crowe calls it to see if there was a curve like a river bend coming in my mother’s wool coat. The men in the Men’s Aisle were intentionally looking away, because men’s dreams die with slow stubborn reluctance and denial is a strong suit in these parts; She-isn’t-married, she-isn’t-married running like a bass line in low hum into the candle vapours.

  Aeney and I were still out at sea.

  In the meantime my father’s farming went poorly. Our cattle were unique in being able to eat grass and get thinner. They added to this a propensity for drowning. One drowned is bad luck, two is the devil himself, three is God.