History of the Rain

by Niall Williams

  ‘So proud of you,’ she said. She knew my battles and knew too that she could not fight them. Her eyes were so green. ‘Holidays!’

  ‘I know. I don’t believe it.’

  ‘A whole summer.’

  ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’

  ‘Do you want to get changed or will you eat first?’

  ‘Changed. Definitely.’

  Nan was sleeping in her chair. I went upstairs and took off my uniform. Then I pulled open the skylight and because Aeney and I had promised it was what we would do on our last day I fired jumper blouse and pinafore out the window. Just like that they were gone, and with sudden lightness I jumped on the bed, and bounced, rising with implausible impossible happiness and bringing my hands to my face to catch my giggles.

  I put on grey jeans and a yellow T-shirt that said ‘Always’. There was so much summer ahead of me I didn’t know what to do first. All the things I had thought of through March April May and June now jostled at the starting gate. How could I begin? How could one minute be Hell and the next Holidays? I lay on the bed and opened a book. I had all the time in the world to read now. And because I knew I had I didn’t. I went downstairs.

  ‘Will you have something now or wait for dinner?’

  ‘I’ll wait for dinner.’

  Peggy Mooney came in the back door. ‘Mary,’ she said. ‘Ruth. Holidays today.’ She was a nervous woman at the best of times and she held her arms across herself, as if she was afraid some part of her would fly away. ‘Only that tomorrow is Sheila’s,’ she said, ‘and I was wondering, Mary, if I could get a few flowers for the altar.’

  ‘The wedding,’ Mam said. ‘Of course you can, Peggy.’ She wiped her hands down her apron.

  ‘O thanks. Thanks very much now, Mary.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. You didn’t need to ask. Come on.’

  The clock of one day is not the same as another. We invented time to make it seem so, but we know it’s not. Things speed up and slow down all the time. The kitchen window was open. There were three flies in the ceiling. The new Clare Champion was on the table, still fresh and folded beside a white plastic bag of sliced ham Dad had brought from the village. Aeney’s cup and empty Petit Filou and spoon were in the sink. The oven was doing that ticking it does when the power has been turned off and the hot metal is contracting. The five-day pendulum clock tocked. The cold tap dropped a drip. Drp! like that, and then another, drp!, the way it always did because Dad was always going to fix it so that generally we took no notice, but right then I did. I was standing by the window and I turned the tap extra hard and looked at it until I was sure it wouldn’t drip. Then drp!, it did. Mam went through the garden with Peggy Mooney, cutting more flowers than were needed, a generosity of flowers bundled into Peggy Mooney’s arms that would make such display that ever after people would come to Mam for flowers, but right then I thought why is she giving away all our flowers?

  Standing at the window I ate a piece of brown bread. I heard a tractor coming from Ryan’s and heard it going past and heard it until it must have turned out by McInerney’s. Then Peggy Mooney’s old car drove away with a passenger seat full of flowers and Mam came in.

  ‘You don’t know what to do with yourself, do you?’ she said, smiling.

  ‘Why did you give away all our flowers?’

  ‘Poor Peggy,’ Mam said. ‘They have nothing, and we have flowers.’ She ran the tap over her hands. ‘Dad will be home soon. He had to get a nozzle for the sprayer,’ she said, and turned off the tap, tea-towelled her hands, and the tap started dripping again.

  ‘Go find your brother,’ Mam said.

  ‘All right.’

  There were more birds. That’s what I thought when I came outside. There were definitely more birds or the ones there were sang more. I went out around the haybarn and the haggard and all of it was sort of busy with birds. I went up to the gate and the stonewall stile and I called ‘Aeney?’ and the birdsong stopped or went elsewhere, and I went into the field that smelled rich and sweet because of the sunshine. The light had that kind of white dazzle you’re not yet used to if you’ve spent all of June in a classroom. The dazzle gave me these stray things moving in my vision, these little fissures or threads that some people call floaters and some fishhooks. They’re sort of what invisible would look like if it was visible and they just move down your seeing and if you follow one down to the end you think that’s the end of it but then there’s another one starting. Light causes it, or tiredness, or just contrariness of blood brain and sunshine. They start when they start and they stop the same.

  I went down the field to the river. I knew where Aeney would be. I knew he would be running the beaten track with Huck, throwing sticks, or sitting down on the far side of Fisher’s Step with the fishing rod, believing that once they passed our bank the fish were catchable there. To prove in myself that these were the holidays I took my time. I told myself You have all the time in the world. I plucked random grasses and let them go. Ryan’s was in meadowing. If you stepped off the track the hay was high to your waist and in that sunlight even I thought it was beautiful. There were bees and flies and midges sort of flecking or flawing the air and that hum which was overtaken by the song of the river as you came to it.

  I could see fifty yards along the bank now, to the point where McInerney’s bushes came down and blocked the view. The other way I could see to Fisher’s Step, and in neither way could I see Aeney.

  It was just like him, to have gone somewhere new.

  That’s how he was. He’d have tired of here and gone elsewhere.

  Go and find your brother.

  Why should I? He’d come home when he was hungry, and Aeney was always always hungry.

  I stopped looking for him.

  I walked along the bank and looked across at Kerry. ‘I have all the time in the world now,’ I said across the river, and then I watched the floaters and fishhooks descend.

  In the distance there was the noise of a tractor, and that was lost inside the noise of another, and you knew there was coming and going happening somewhere and that everything ordinary and everyday was continuing the way the world continues around you and for just these moments you’re the still point at the centre.

  Then I saw Huck.

  He was a white gleam, sitting on the very edge of the bank up at the far end of Fisher’s Step.

  ‘Huck! Here boy! Huck!’

  He didn’t move. It wasn’t surprising. He was Aeney’s dog. He just stayed there, sitting erect and facing the river, but something in his sitting passed into me. For whole seconds I didn’t move. I didn’t run. I just stood there and felt this departure, this separation. The air was buckled. The moment wouldn’t turn right. My heart was in my throat. Something had reached in and seized it and was now taking it out of my mouth. I think I cried out. But the sound was swallowed by the river. Then I was running and time was moving, lurching, too fast, so that soon it would be wrecked and pieces would break up and never come right so that here I am squatting down beside Huck and saying Where is he? Where’s Aeney? Find Aeney, good boy and Huck barks at the river and the suck hole and the water in it is twisting clockwise faster than clocks, and here I am running back through the meadow for no reason not taking the track except the reason that nothing makes sense and I am running in risen clouds of hay dust gold and choking and shouting help help though I know there is no help and here I am breathless in the kitchen where Dad is just home and the tap is dripping drp! and I’m saying He went in the river I know he went in the river and here is Dad diving in the river, and here the whole parish coming, and the Guards and the ambulance and Father Tipp and the summer evening hopelessly horribly beautiful and a hundred men carrying sticks to poke into the rushes and walking out along the length of the bank in the coming dark and being back there the next day at sunrise where Dad years ago had first stood and felt the sign and where now he had spent the night calling Aeney? Aeney? with hoarse terrible wretchedness and praying to God Please please O please and
divers coming and the sun going away and Huck immovable from the spot as now hard and wild and with no mercy the rain came.

  Here is the place where the ground was soft and his feet slid down.

  Here is the brown suck hole where the river comes around and swallows itself.

  Here is Aeney’s rod, found in the rushes.

  Here, three days later, his right sneaker.

  There, my shining brother was gone.

  THREE

  History of the Rain

  Chapter 1

  ‘There is no Heaven. How can there be? Think about it. For starters, if all the good people there have ever been are already there, how big would it have to be? Second, what a social nightmare. It’d be like all the good characters in all the books in the ultimate library of the world left their books, stepped out of their stories and were told just mingle. Anne Archer and Jim Hawkins, Ishmael and Emma Woodhouse. How mad would that be? Dorothea, say hello to Mr Dedalus. What could they possibly say to one another? It’d be excruciating.’

  Vincent Cunningham just sat there looking down. His mother died when he was eight, about six months before he proposed to me for the first time, and, like The Monkees, he’s a Believer. He has Heaven the Standard Version that we learned in school pretty much tattooed on his soul. It’s wings and angels for him, plenty of harps, which I personally can’t stand, and those white cotton clouds that have no rain in them but let you lay back like lounge chairs so you can have your feet up and watch the saints come marching in.

  ‘Sorry, but there is no Heaven,’ I whispered. I didn’t want Mam downstairs to hear. I think in a vague way Heaven sustains her and that, although she doesn’t want to consider the detail and she’s too busy just trying to keep us afloat in this world, she’s sure it lies ahead, like Labasheeda when in the river-fog the road is blind.

  Vincent Cunningham said nothing.

  ‘Okay, say there is. Tell me then, in Heaven who cooks the food?’

  His hazelnut eyes came up to me. ‘There’s no food. You’re never hungry.’

  ‘Thirsty?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s disappointing. What’s TV like?’

  ‘Ruthie.’

  ‘Is Heaven God’s Most Boring Idea? Is that why He keeps it out of sight?’

  ‘It’s not boring.’

  ‘So what do you do?’

  ‘You don’t need to do anything. You’re just happy.’

  ‘Well, I won’t see you there so. I won’t be going. Thank you.’

  ‘You can’t say no to Heaven.’

  ‘I just did.’

  It took him a moment. ‘RLS believed in Heaven,’ he said. ‘You said so.’

  ‘That was Vailima, Samoa.’ It was a quote from RLS my father had written on the back of an envelope that I found inside his American copy of Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths (Book 2,999, New Directions, New York): The endless voice of birds. I have never lived in such a heaven. RLS. Because of its strangeness, because it was in my father’s hand, and because found writing has a curious potency, I had showed it to Vincent. ‘You think when we die we go to Samoa? What should I pack?’

  ‘You’re terrible.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Yes. No. Yes.’

  ‘Look, I have an advantage over you. I’ve thought it through. There is no Heaven. So, I’m just saying, if you’re expecting to see me there, if you’re thinking once you arrive and get over the preliminaries – Hi Peter, wings, harp and whatnot – that you’ll head out and find me and propose, let me just say you’ll be disappointed.’

  He didn’t say anything to that. The eyelashes went down. I was cruel to continue, but you already know I did. ‘The tunnel of light people say they see? Just your peripheral vision shutting down. Your brain dies with floods of light. It’s not a place, it’s just chemistry. You’re the engineer, I’m the Swain. I’m the one supposed to be partial to the outlandish. Nobody believes Milton’s Heaven, nobody believes Dante’s. When Dante arrived he said his vision was greater than his speech, so he stopped describing, thank you very much, which tells you he didn’t believe it. Not really. Because even Dante knew, there is no Heaven.’

  That, I thought, was the end of it. I’d turned my hurt around to hurt him and he looked down at his long-fingered hands and said nothing. He was wearing his socks, his wellies downstairs after crossing the flood. The socks made him look defenceless, the way they do on boys. The rain drove down on us, the skylight streaming. I wished the night hadn’t been so long. I wished I’d slept.

  ‘All right,’ Vincent said, ‘let’s say it’s just a story.’

  And he’d got me there. He knew it. You could tell from the look on his face. ‘It’s just a story,’ he said, ‘but, Ruth, you believe in stories.’ He smiled that smile he’s planning to use on Saint Peter. ‘All it takes is a leap of faith,’ he said. He actually said that, knowing that if there was one thing Swains know, it was how to leap. ‘Take the leap.’

  Then we both heard Timmy and Packy come in downstairs. They said something about the flood and where they had had to leave the ambulance, and how now they were planning to stretcher me across the water. Mam came up the stairs. Vincent Cunningham stood in his socks and looked that look that wanted to say Ruth, you won’t die, you won’t, but because Mam was there it didn’t come out in words. ‘Well,’ he said, and then shot up his right hand, palm out, a sort of paused wave or Stop or I Swear and I saw his eyes were shining and knew he wanted to grab me up in his arms and probably actually kiss me but he just said, ‘I’ll be seeing you.’ Then he turned and was gone and to Vincent Cunningham I did not get to say goodbye.

  After the river took him Aeney became huge. He was big as the sky. He was in every corner of our house. He was at the kitchen table for every meal, came and went on the stairs, blew down the chimney in smoke, rattled the windows, and rained without end. He kept his clothes in the chest of drawers, his mug in the press, his wellies at the back door. He was everywhere. He was in Huck’s brown eyes looking at you with grave and patient and exhausted asking. He was in his schoolbag thrown in the corner and gathering a pale sheen of dust, the creases first like wrinkles and then the whole of it, solemn and undisturbed, laying on the floor and becoming ghost. Aeney was on the road running. He was pulling blackberries in blackberry season. He was in the cuck-oo of the cuckoo that could never be seen but was somewhere on the top of the highest tree, looking down and singing its two-note song that could be joyous or plaintive depending. He was in Treasure Island. He was at our birthday, bigger and sadder for being present but not having presents. He was first one awake at Christmas, last one to come inside the year it snowed. He was in the final visit of the Aunts. He was in the fields and in the village and at the sea. He was in the river.

  The only place he was not was in Faha graveyard.

  You think you won’t survive it. You think there’s a crack right down your face and down your body and it’s so deep the pieces of you will fall apart in the street when someone says his name. You think it can’t be true, you think it was a bad dream and you’ll wake up any moment. You think it can’t have been as simple as that. Why one day, that day, did it just happen?

  And why is the world continuing? How can it? How can the radio be on and the kettle coming to the boil? How can the hens need to be fed?

  You go to bed and you lie there and you listen across to his room for him. You listen for the way he breathes when he sleeps and you don’t, the pulse and breath and clock of him, that was annoying sometimes but was just over there, had been since always, had been since before this world, and now the emptiness of it pulls at you and wants to suck you away and you think Okay let me die tonight I don’t care.

  But you don’t die. You learn to sleep rocking yourself just a little, and making a little low hum no one hears but you, so that the night is never empty and like Peter Pan, un-ageing and evanescent, Aeney can come in through the skylight and you can tell him stories from the books you’ve read.

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sp; Your hand hurts from handshakes. Your eyes and your lips are dried out because the water has been wrung out of you and instead you’ve got this sour yellow anger swilling because why are all these people coming now, and why are they who never said his name before saying it now. None of them know him. None of them know his crooked smile from the inside the way you do, his yell jumping off the swing at the highest point, his crash and tumble and getting-up grin. None of them know it should have been you that drowned.

  Somehow, you have no idea how, you survive.

  Because you are not to die yet, because somebody needs to tell the story, somehow you survive.

  We survive.

  Maybe just so that we can hurt more. Maybe the finest sufferer is the winner. Maybe that was the plan for us. Maybe if we’d marched down to the river and thrown ourselves in that would have made a mess of our chapter in the Book of Swain. In my father’s black rain-mottled copy of the Bible the spine is broken on the Book of Job. Has thou not poured me out like milk and curdled me like cheese is right there.

  It became a long wet summer. I stayed indoors and saw no one but Mam and Dad and Nan. To get me out of the house Dad took me with him to town and we went to the bookshops. He did not say, ‘Read this, it will help you forget your sorrow over your brother,’ but he gave me books, and to avoid the eyes of others I kept mine in them.

  The selfishness of children is absolute and perfect and for the progress of the world perhaps essential. I didn’t really wonder how my parents carried on, didn’t consider the quality of their quietness. If my mother watched over me with extra vigilance, fearful I might slip through some flaw between this world and the next, I felt it only as love.

  That summer my father stopped writing. He still went to the table in the lamplight. He still sat leaned forward with his hand forking up the right side of his silver hair. But he did not pick up the pencil. From his room there came not a sound. Whether the inspiration couldn’t come, whether there ever was anything that could rightly be called inspiration and sometimes descended like a tongue of fire, whether it came and out of spite or hurt or anger he denied it access or outlet, whether he had any intention of ever writing anything again and went to the table at night the same way my mother went to Lough Derg to walk barefoot over the stones and let the hurt bleed out of her, I cannot say. He stopped, that’s all.