One sunny birthday we get a horse, a grey mare, who because Dad’s wrestling Homer at the time he calls Hippocampus, which in mythology was part-dolphin part-horse and part-bird, could go speedily on land sea and air, none of which dear Hippy actually managed in her lifetime. A man called Deegan brings her from Kilrush in a horsebox behind his dusty old Mercedes. Hippocampus is going by the name of Nancy and keeping her mythological powers under deep cover.
Mr Deegan gets out of his car says great day great day thank God and smacks his hands together. He wears a small felt hat. He wishes Aeney and I happy birthday and asks us aren’t we the lucky ones. This is a lovely quiet horse for you, he says. Oh Jeez she is. He releases the catches either side of the horsebox and makes a shout of Hup! as he lets down the back. Mam is standing beside the cabin with her arms folded and this held-in smile she reserves just for Dad, for when he has done something she thought impossible. Nan is at the kitchen window scowling her opinion of horse-dealers. Mr Deegan goes inside the box and unties Hippy and maybe because of the drowse of the drive or the torment of flies she has had to ignore, she does not move.
‘Hup now, hup. Come on. Come on, young lady.’ Hippy backs down the ramp with stiff-legged reluctance, comes down into our yard and turns out. Her eyes spook a little until Aeney tells Huck to be quiet.
‘There now, take a look at your horse,’ Mr Deegan says. ‘She’s a classy lady, this one.’ He pats her neck, harder than I would have, but Hippy doesn’t seem to mind.
‘What do you think of her, Ruthie?’ Dad asks.
‘She’s lovely.’
‘Will you pet her?’
‘She likes to be petted,’ Mr Deegan says. ‘Oh Jeez she does.’
‘And she’s quiet?’ Mam asks him.
‘Very quiet, Mam.’ Mr Deegan has a broken china smile. Because by horse-dealer’s instinct he knows Mam is harder to impress than Dad he clicks his fingers on an idea. ‘I’ll show you how quiet,’ he says, and then he crouches down and gets in under the horse, so that he is actually in there, squatting sitting-room-style between her four legs. ‘It rains you can always shelter under here,’ he says. ‘She won’t mind.’ He holds a hand out towards me. ‘Want to have a cup of tea in here? I’ll ring for service.’ He tugs twice on her tail. Hippy doesn’t mind. She doesn’t move.
I, who by age eight am already fearful of all cattle and beasts general, who have already decided the natural world is a misnomer, think this is the best horse there ever was. This is Hippy the Wonder Horse. I take Mr Deegan’s hand and go in under her. So then does Aeney.
‘Will she have babies?’ Aeney asks.
‘Foals they’re called,’ I tell him.
‘Will she have foals?’
‘Please God,’ Mr Deegan says. ‘Please God.’
And I think I know then this will be a day I will be remembering. I know it even before Aeney and I get the giggles under there and cannot stop ourselves, and Hippy doesn’t mind or move and the giggles get worse, and they spread to Mam who passes them to Dad in the form of the smile she releases now, because Virgil is wonderful, because somehow, she doesn’t know how, he has got us a horse for our birthday.
It doesn’t matter that Hippy was never actually ridden, that she just stood in the field, and grazed and wanted to be petted, that when we came home from school I petted her because I had read Black Beauty and wanted a good part if Hippy wrote her own autobiography, that Aeney lost interest in her when she wouldn’t go and instead he went river-hunting with Huck for whatever it is that boys hunt. It didn’t matter that months later when Tommy the vet came and examined her he explained that Hippy was approximately a hundred years old, stone deaf, and was employing all of her energy just to stay standing, that my father’s softheartedness had been trod on, that he had paid twenty times what she was worth out of money he didn’t have, somehow none of that matters now, for in these pages now here we are on that hot birthday, my brother and I, giggling mad beneath the mythological horse and making the mark in my heart that says I was happy here.
Chapter 14
There is a scene I love where a brother and sister meet after many years and little communication. They meet in an arranged café in mid-afternoon. The light is dying and the city outside rumbles softly in the complacent time before rush hour. The café is unexceptional and quiet. She comes first, sits at the far end, a table facing the door, nervous in her buttoned raincoat. The waiter is an older man. He leaves her be. The brother enters late with the look but not the words of apology. He kisses her cheek. They sit and the old man brings them teas they do not want, two pots, strong for him weak for her. It is long ago since they said each other’s names aloud, and saying them now has the extraordinary shyness of encounter I imagine on the Last Day. At first there is the full array of human awkwardness. But here is the thing: almost in an instant their old selves are immediately present. The years and the changes are nothing. They need few words. They recognise each other in each other, and even in silence the familiarity is powerfully consoling, because despite time and difference there remains that deep-river current, that kind of maybe communion that only exists within people joined in the word family. So now what washes up between them, foam-white and fortifying and quite unexpectedly, is love.
I cannot remember what book it is in. But it’s in this one now.
Chapter 15
Writing of course is a kind of sickness. Well people don’t do it. Art is basically impossible. Edna O’Brien said she was surprised Van Gogh only cut off one ear. Robert Lowell said what he felt was a blazing out, flashes, nerve jabs in the moments the poem was coming. I myself have had no blazing out, and don’t suppose it’s all that good for your constitution. To stop himself from taking off into the air Ted Hughes had to keep repeating over and over Beneath my feet is the earth, some part of the surface of the earth. The thing is, writing is a sickness only cured by writing. That’s the impossible part.
Once he had started proper, my father never stopped. He was always writing. That’s what I understand now. There was no rest, no pause. It was not that he only wrote when the dishes were cleaned and cleared away in the evening, when he went off alone to the table in the pool of lamplight. It was not that he only wrote when he had the pencil in his hand. It was that whatever part of his brain brought the rhythms and the sounds, whatever part of his mind saw things in the everyday not-really-beauty that was here around our land and the river, that part had clicked On and gotten stuck. There are two things, Tommy Devlin says, that are the mark of genius: one is non-stop buzzing in the brain, the other seeing the next move when there is no next move. He was speaking about Jamesie O’Connor hurling for Clare back in the day but the non-stoppedness is right. There’s seeing in it, and there’s transformation. Things are seen differently to what they are. Not that they are always better or brighter necessarily. It’s not like Bridie Clohessy whose vision was blurry coming from WeightWatchers and mistook Declan Donahue for the Archangel Michael, or Sheila Shanley who took a notion after her husband died, woke one morning and decided to paint everything Buttermilk, walls, windows, stairs, threw out everything she owned that was not a creamy off-white, and became a one-woman effulgence show. Sometimes things are darker, worse, and with inexplicable torment you hear the gulls, whose complaints are complex and constant when they come in over Cappa with cries crazy it seems from banishment.
I didn’t understand that my father’s brain could not rest, or that when he was out in the fields, driving us to town, or sitting to tea, all the time there were words, rhythms, running like one of those programs that don’t shut off somewhere in the back of the computer. All the time there was gathering this sense of mission.
Once people got to hear about it in the mystical way that people of Faha can hear a person taking off their underpants and are the ne plus ultra in the Intelligence & Surveillance league, once word was out that Virgil Swain was writing poetry, there were two immediate first reactions; the men’s: that it was his own fault for ma
rrying Mary MacCarroll; the women’s: her own fault for marrying The Stranger. But after that initial wave had passed a third reaction came and endured, a quiet awe and respect reserved for someone who had chosen such a serene and perfectly impractical career as that of Poet. We’re like that as a people. We can’t help but admire a bit of madness. Even Tommy McGinley was quietly admired despite the kind of hit-on-the-head mouth-open expression he got from eating cork, after hearing on RTE it was the main ingredient in Viagra, and not what they actually said, that the main ingredient was made in Cork. No, in Faha a bit of madness is all right. So, people started giving us books, books they had read and ones they knew they would never read, books that were left to them, books that were bought because they were the cheapest things at church sales, books that came free with newspapers, books that were found in trunks and attics whose titles and binding and print combined to say this is a serious book and to which the finders in our parish invariably responded by thinking: Virgil Swain.
‘This is a book for an intelligent man,’ JJ said, handing over Yeats’s Essays and Introductions (Book 2,222, Macmillan, London) before sitting a while in our kitchen, big hands on his knees, genial eyes smiling and that kind of lovely old-fashioned gentle courtesy you can find in the older people in Faha. After a time he nodded to the fire and added, ‘I don’t think we’ve ever had a poet.’
Of course my father hadn’t exactly chosen poetry. But it was always rising in him; that’s what you get if you read your Abraham Swain and know your The Salmon in Ireland.
At first I didn’t even know that it was poetry. Dad was working, that’s all. I knew it was writing, and I knew it was humming. When you’re young you’re protected by a cloud of vagueness. How our whole household actually worked, how the farming progressed, how many bread loaves were baked and sold, eggs trayed and delivered, how in fact we survived at all – I had no idea. I never wondered, never asked. I may have heard a cow had died, a pine marten had raided our hens, that the car was resting this week, but because Mam was basically Genius Level Ten at guarding her children I never computed these facts, never added them up with Nan mending our mended clothes, Aeney’s trouser legs being let down and let down until they couldn’t be let down any more, fish for dinner again, or the large earthenware jar of coins my mother kept in the window.
Then one day the cloud lifted. In Miss Brady’s class I answered that my father was a writer.
‘Really? That’s wonderful, Ruth.’
I had said it out loud for the first time, a writer, and felt a little ascension myself.
‘Where are his books so?’ God-forgive-me, the Bitch of the Brouders asked, because her father, Saddam, was our leading celebrity and she wasn’t going to be dethroned from Best Father.
I had no answer, Ascension Ends with Crash Landing running in a Breaking News banner across my forehead. Then Miss Brady said, ‘You can be working on a book and be a writer.’
But later when I was standing alone in the yard and trying hard To Look Normal Jane Brouder crossed over with that hideous Anne Jane Monaghan who had only added her middle Jane out of some Cool Girls thing, who believed herself the model for Miss Perfect in the Mr Men series but who I voted Girl Most Likely to Be Lady Macbeth, who later, after her mother had paid a dozen tutors to more or less crow-bar off the top of her head and stuff everything they knew in there, got six As in her Leaving and is now in teacher-training polishing her dictator skills.
‘Is it poems he’s writing?’ she asked, with flawed grammar. She used a tone which implied poetry was something like impetigo, which had devastated the school when the Resettled came from Dublin and for three weeks turned our class into good casting for a leper colony. ‘Is it poetry?’
The two of them looked at me with the exact same look.
‘It’s a story,’ I said.
Still the look.
‘It’s a story, like Black Beauty.’
That’s what I wanted it to be. I wanted it to be a book I brought to school one day. I wanted it to be unsurpassably jaw-droppingly eye-poppingly amazing, a book Loved By Everyone, and somehow through that I would conquer my own oddity and might even be asked to add a middle Jane, which I had briefly decided I would consider but for the misfortune of the rhyme, Ruth Jane Swain, which suggested hooped dresses, wisteria on the veranda, and a haughtiness I personally could never aspire to.
The Janes stood and scrutinised me.
‘It’s a lie,’ Anne Jane said, triumphantly.
‘No it’s not.’
‘Yes it is. I can tell. It’s a lie.’
‘I’m going to ask your brother,’ God-forgive-me said.
‘He doesn’t know.’
‘Why not?’
‘He just doesn’t.’
‘Come on, Anne Jane. Let’s ask him.’
‘Yes, let’s.’
‘Wait.’
‘What?’
‘What?’
‘It’s not finished yet. The book is not finished yet.’
‘Your father’s not actually a writer, is he?’
‘Is he?’
‘Is he?’
That afternoon I walked home pulling overripe blackberries and throwing them into the ground, finding in the purple staining small consolation but adequate image. Aeney had run ahead. Aeney always ran ahead, was always happiest in speed and in any case would be no help in this. In me, exhausted from the defence of having a special father, had bloomed the first dark cloud of betrayal, a small but persistent whispering: I wish my father was not a writer. Why could it not have passed over? Why couldn’t somebody else’s father be a writer and mine a teacher or doctor or councillor?
I brought my frown into the kitchen.
‘Mam?’
‘Yes, Ruth?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right then.’
‘Only.’
‘Yes?’
‘What’s Dad writing? Is it poetry?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you read his poems?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because they’re not ready yet.’
‘You can still be a writer when you’re working on a book,’ I said.
‘Of course you can,’ Mam was working dusting flour. Her arms are basically flour and dough. If she’s not making bread in Heaven when she gets there it’ll be because Bread of Life doesn’t need flour and aprons are only for this world.
‘When will the book be done?’
‘I don’t know, Ruth. Some day.’
‘But soon?’
She paused, as if it was a thing she hadn’t considered, or hadn’t considered until that moment that I might want the book to appear, that in fact my whole status and future happiness and the happiness of all the world, Hello, actually depended on it.
‘Yes, I’m sure. Soon,’ she said. ‘Okay, pet?’
‘Okay.’
That eventually the poems would coalesce or coagulate, or whatever it is that poems do, was not in doubt. The pressures of brain, paper, pencil and time made it inevitable. Because the secret to writing, the entire syllabus, booklist, coursework, of Ruth Swain’s Master’s programme in Creative Writing is four words: Sit in the Chair.
Or, in mine and RLS’s case, Lie in the Bed.
There’s a book inside you. There’s a library inside me.
Sit down.
The words will come, the pages will gather. That’s it. Course over.
So it was just a matter of stabbing a pen into his heart, and putting in the time. And more and more that’s what he was doing. In the morning, my father’s eyes would be gone Japanese, extravagant puffed bags of sleeplessness making them narrow, his silver hair forked on the right-hand side where he had held his leaning head.
‘Was the writing good, Dad?’ was basically my version of Are we there yet?
‘You know you are the most wonderful girl in the world? Have I ever told you that?�
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I nodded, full glob of Flahavan’s with honey swimming in my mouth.
‘No. I don’t think I ever have.’
‘You did!’
‘How can I have forgotten?’
‘You did already!’
‘No, no. I never did. But I will now. Do you know what you are? The most . . .’
I had to finish his sentence. Otherwise he would keep at it. And although even then I feared those critics creeping behind the wainscoting or under the linoleum who would consider me a Sentimental & Exaggerated Character, I will admit I did say: ‘. . . wonderful girl in the world.’
Go on, shoot me.
Once, when I got chickenpox, and had to be separated from Aeney, who never caught anything anyway, a bed was made for me beside Dad’s table and I was back for three nights in his night-composing. At first before writing he read. It was a warm-up. It was sort of like taking the pole down the cinderway, feeling the wind, trotting down to the vault and looking up at it. He read aloud from those writers that he knew were beyond him. When I got to Trinity I would understand they were his canon: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Hopkins, and of course Yeats. They were the bar. They were the ones laid out across the sky overhead if you were a sky person, the salmon if you were a sea one. Basically, The Impossibles.
My chickenpox nights, Virgil read Hopkins. (It was years later, when in the stale yeast-and-socks air of the Arts library I went in pursuit of Hopkins, that I came across GMH’s letter to Richard Watson Dixon, where he says: ‘My vocation puts before me a standard so high that a higher can be found nowhere else.’) Back then chickenpox Ruth was not sure her father was speaking English. Dappled things, couple-colour. Rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim. He spoke the lines aloud, plugged in to what Seamus Heaney called the powerpoint of Hopkins, and soon his head fizzed, fried, sizzled.
Transcendence is the business of poets. That’s what they’re for. They’re not like you and me. They have that extra bit that’s always ready for take-off. Poets understand why God didn’t give us wings: he wanted entertainment. He wanted us to aspire, to ascend. He wanted poetry.
History of the Rain Page 25