History of the Rain

by Niall Williams

  Mother and I said Really? How wonderful for you, only not in words.

  Maureen swung around on the axis of her elbow. ‘That grant’s still on the go, is it, Mina?’

  Mrs Prendergast preferred customers to conversation, and said the last post would be going shortly.

  Once the door had closed and we were alone in the self-possessed but subdued majesty of Faha post office, Mam told Mina Prendergast we had a package for London.

  Mrs Prendergast adhered to best practice and did not ask what it was. She took the package and weighed it. Being poetry it weighed almost nothing. That was the thing I thought of, the lightness, the non-mass of it, how the scales of the real world hardly registered it. Mam and I watched the package being ferried over, faintly regarded, and flipped back on to the counter.

  Mrs Prendergast opened the stamp book, ran her fingers down the back of a sheaf before selecting The One. She tugged it free, dabbed it in the pink concave pad that looked like Aunt Daphne’s powder puff, affixed it with gravity. ‘To London,’ she said.

  And that was all. She didn’t add a question mark. Mrs Prendergast wasn’t asking, just stating, she would be clear on that. It was none of the Post Office’s business. But because London was said, and because in a place like Faha in the dead middle of a wet afternoon just the fact of sending something to London had a certain gravity, and that gravity was something in which it was natural that Faha itself would like to share, because every place liked to feel it was a place that could have something important to send to London, and because the London, without the question mark, just sort of hung there invitational and alone and grammatically incomplete, Mam said, ‘It’s poetry.’

  She didn’t mean to. She regretted it the moment the word poetry was out and dragonflying around the post office. I looked to make sure the door was closed.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Actually, Mrs Prendergast, I wonder if I could ask a favour?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘When a letter comes. From London.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Could I ask you to tell Pat to hold it here for us?’

  We were Swains. We were already in the embossed paisley-print parish roll-book of Odd. Mrs Prendergast pursed her postbox lips but I think Aeney and Our Grief passed through.

  ‘I’d like it to be a surprise,’ Mam said.

  In the background I gave Mrs Prendergast my Forlorn Ruth, my Child of Doom, my cheeks of hollow disport and madly magnified eyes.

  ‘I see.’

  Then the door opened and Maureen Bowe was back. ‘There is a grant,’ she said, more or less exactly the way you’d say There is a God.

  With model discretion Mrs Prendergast slid the package along the counter into Outgoing and to my mother made a nod that did not require movement of her head but happened in her eyes only.

  The poems were gone.

  Mam and I came out into the rain. To all appearances the world was as we had left it – in Church Street Martin Sheehan’s tractor pulled over ass-out and impassable while he spoke out the window with one of the Leahys, Old Tom standing with his bicycle in the crossroad, waiting to direct the no-traffic, Centra having Centra delivery, Nuala Casey squinting out at nothing, John Paul Eustace doing his door-to-door – but we knew it was not. We walked home breathing the thin air you breathe when your heart has moved up into your throat and you want to believe that maybe yes, Emily was right and Hope is a Thing with Feathers, and is flying up out of you right now. The feathers are coming out your mouth and your eyes are O’s watching it rise above the hedgerows and the dripping fuchsia, above the treetops and the electricity lines and the rain, crossing Ryan’s and the Major’s and ours, and making its way right now to London.

  ‘You won’t tell?’ Mam said. ‘I know you won’t,’ she answered, and she looked away, both of us small and quiet, and maybe as close as we could ever be in this life.

  Mrs Prendergast intended to tell no one. She only told Father Tipp because poetry seemed in the realm of prayer, and, because his heart was already at capacity with secrets, Father Tipp only told his housekeeper Orla Egan, and Orla Egan only told Mrs Daly when she was doing her floors windows and etceteras on the Tuesday afternoons because she was helpless to resist revealing her privileges within the priest’s house and liked to have something to say that was not concerned with dirt Dettol Flash and Windowlene. So, because the marvellous is in short supply, because in sharing it a shine comes and reflects well on the ordinary, soon there was no one in Faha who didn’t know Virgil Swain’s poems had gone to London.

  Except for Virgil Swain.

  The way I see it, it was generous and heartfelt. As big Tom Dempsey says, Irish people are appallingly good at giving. So there was not only the first response – A book? – and the universal follow-up – Am I in it? – there was a shy pride, a prayerlike hope, and among adults a quiet but widespread gladness, as if in our parish poetry had become congregational.

  Chapter 3

  How long does it take for someone to see your soul?

  Let’s say there are soul-seers. Let’s say that’s their business. Let’s say they’ve been anointed-appointed for this single task. For souls they’ve got the Zenith Standard. They’ve got Paragon guidelines, Excellence Exemplars. They’ve got Pinnacle sunglasses, perfect vision, and those amber close-fitting 1970s Star Trek suits. Their whole reason for being is to look for these souls. They’ve got their instructions. They’re moving out and they’re all the time on Alert, Transporters set on Ready.

  Dazzlement is what they’re after.

  Like shining, from shook foil.

  They’re looking for ones who have given themselves to what is most intensely seen and felt, ones who because of their natures could not see and feel it without wanting to be closer to it, whose own nature could be a kind of restless yearning, who became oddities, lived in margins, who had before them a standard so high that a higher can be found nowhere else, so that disappointment was keen and constant, their hair turned silver and their eyes the blue of the sea and the sky.

  Let’s say the soul-seers go to their work each day.

  Let’s say they focus their beams.

  How long would it take to find him?

  Because Mrs Quinty had the necessary attributes for playing a minor character, and could remove herself from scenes, my father did not notice that she had been at his table and typed his poems. In matters of his personal space he was not particular. Like Ted Hughes, for a poem he would have squeezed himself into a corner. He did not notice the copies had been touched because he was not thinking of readers. He knew the poems were so far below Readers that that never entered his head. That’s what I understand now. I understand that he bore them mostly out of the spirit of chastisement, not unlike Thomas Dawes whose failings were secret until he fathered a whole family of cross-eyed sons, each one better at crashing cars than the one before, and only one of whom was sometimes sober.

  Virgil still went to his table in the evenings. He still read with voracious appetite, the fat, second-hand, 1,902 pages of The Riverside Shakespeare (Book 1,604, Houghton Mifflin, Boston) becoming a kind of bible, but he did not pick up the pencil. He did not take-off.

  Although you never really know what your parents are feeling, although you can’t quite enter the world as them and see it from inside their eyes, I knew my father was lost, and like Mam I too wanted to rescue him. Maybe some part of it was that I wanted that moment in the future when Prospero says to Miranda, Thou wast that did preserve me, but mostly it was just love.

  I thought by asking him to write me a poem whatever was stalled inside him might restart.

  ‘Will you?’

  His long body was twisted in the chair, face angular, silvery beard climbing up his cheeks. His face was composed now, but his eyebrows were these mad wispy filaments, like the way Sean Custy’s fiddle strings curl off the fiddle head, or Paudie O leaves the extra bits of wires when he’s wired something, as if a reminder that music and electric
ity were live things and could not be contained.

  ‘Doesn’t have to be a long one,’ I said.

  Two deep creases came either side of his mouth. ‘I’m sure I can find a poem written to a Ruth.’

  ‘That’s not what I want. I want yours.’

  He turned to the table covered in books, pushed a hand up the side of his beard. It made the slightest crackle. He pulled it down across his mouth. Beside The Riverside Shakespeare was Tolstoy’s Resurrection, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (Books 2,888 & 2,889, Penguin Classics, London) as well as the green American hardcover of Seamus Heaney’s Poems 1965–1975 (Book 2,891 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York), the white paperback with the black and white photograph of Robert Lowell holding his glasses and leaning to his left beneath the scarlet title Selected Poems (Book 2,892 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, London), John Donne in a mad black hat and with arms folded on the cover of the fat John Donne, The Complete English Poems (Book 2,893, Penguin Books, London), But, besides all of these, the book my eye fell on was the small white paperback of W.B. Yeats’s Selected Poems (Book 3,000, Pan Macmillan, London) because it was open on ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ and because across the page my father had written something in tiny black ink, as if with the poem or the poet he was in dialogue.

  At last my father looked back at me. ‘What would you like it to say?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’ I thought I was being helpful. I didn’t understand the problem, the agony and mystery of it. I didn’t understand then as I do now. I didn’t understand that what he wanted in his poems was Life, and that he couldn’t summon it. Suddenly the air in the room was close, the rain louder, and I knew I had brought him to a naked place. I had brought him where Swains always end up, in the white glare of their own failure. But I would not stop. ‘Will you?’

  He turned fully towards me and he took my hands. ‘Will you write one for me?’ he asked.

  His eyes held me. They held me in a way I will never forget, not because of the blueness or the river depth or the shine, not because of the sadness or the defeat but because it seemed right then that in his eyes was a whole history of yearning and in asking me to write he was passing it to me.

  ‘Mine will be bad,’ I said.

  ‘But you’ll write me one?’

  ‘I will if you will. So, will you?’ I shook his two hands for an answer. ‘Please? Promise?’

  ‘Do you promise?’

  ‘I promise. Now, say “I promise to write something for Ruth.” ’

  ‘I promise to write something for Ruth.’

  In the meantime, we waited. We waited for London to write back. Mam dropped in to the post office; Mrs Prendergast gave her ‘No’ with her eyes, and didn’t let on that everyone in the queue knew what Mam was waiting for, and that everyone had perfect confidence the news would be good. Because Faha is like that. People like a home victory. Unlike Tommy Tuohy, who enjoys cursing Man U, the team he supports, people here are generous once something goes outside the parish. They want it to do well. They supposed that, London being London, there was a fair mountain of poems to be got through and it might take some time, but they knew. They knew because my father was Virgil Swain, and because now that they thought about it, he was more or less exactly what a man who had a book of poetry sent to London should look like.

  Although no one but Mrs Quinty had read his poems, my father became Our Poet.

  I only discovered this because Vincent Cunningham has a heart soft as cooked cabbage, and because as my serial proposer he often came to our house. He came without invitation, appeared in the kitchen, not exactly in the same way the smaller McInerneys did – eating a second dinner at our house after the free-for-all, fork-your-spuds-from-the-bowl, Go! dining chez McInerney – but quiet and courteous, as a friend of Aeney’s and one familiar with loss. Mam of course loved him. All mothers did. They swam right into the place where his mother was dead, and they thought What a nice boy and how neat he always looked, his shirt collar just right inside his round-neck jumper and his hands always clean. Like all the best people, he only ever took tea at the third invitation.

  After one such visit he asked me, ‘Would you like to walk along the road, Ruth?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ruth, walk Vincent some of the way home.’

  ‘He knows the way.’

  ‘Air will do you good.’

  ‘I have air. Look. Nice. Air.’

  ‘It’s all right, Mrs Swain. She’s right. I know the way.’

  Good people are just horrible. You just want to shoot them.

  ‘All right, yes! I’d love to walk along the road.’

  Walking Along the Road is the Faha equivalent of going to the cinema or the mall or the bowling alley in the real world. Vincent thought the road just marvellous altogether.

  ‘I can’t go any faster,’ I said, ‘So if you want to go ahead that’s fine.’

  ‘No, no. This is fine.’

  I walked slower. But you can’t lose a fellow like Vincent Cunningham, he slowed right down. The rain was not rain he took any notice of. ‘Ruth,’ he said, ‘I’m hoping it’ll be soon.’

  I mistook his meaning. I was in Middlemarch then, maybe I was dreaming he was Mr Casaubon, whose proposal Dorothea should have stamped on. But before I could say anything, he said, ‘Your dad’s poems. I hope he’ll hear soon.’

  I did not hit him. Let me put that to bed.

  I did not grab his ear and pull him to me and say ‘How do you know?’

  Maybe my expression did. I am not responsible for my face.

  ‘I just wanted to say, I’m hoping it’ll be soon,’ he said.

  Chapter 4

  It was not soon. Soul-seeing in London was on a go-slow. Mam and I held our breath, and although, from both sides of our family, I had advantages in holding breath underwater, most days I knew we were drowning a little bit more. One day Mrs Hanley came. She was a small brown-eyed terrier with the plainspoken forthrightness of Cork people. Mrs Hanley had buried her husband, but it had taken nothing out of her. She got on with it, she said. The exact opposite of Eileen Waters, who had so far in this life successfully avoided making a direct statement, Mrs Hanley liked to hit a nail on the head. Now she was running the FAS scheme for the unemployed, and because she knew London had still not replied, and because like everyone else she wondered how we were living, by way of asking she told my father he had to join. The scheme was for the betterment to the parish so technically anything he could offer would be eligible.

  What he offered was Yeats.

  It wasn’t a joke.

  I suppose he couldn’t resist. I suppose large dreams sailed their galleons into his brain and he had that kind of brain where strange is just normal in a bit of a storm. That Mrs Hanley agreed to it was maybe the more remarkable.

  I can’t remember who said it, but it’s true that whenever anyone reads Shakespeare they become Shakespeare. Well, the same is true for Yeats. Take an afternoon. Sit and read his poems. Any, it doesn’t really matter. Spend an afternoon, read out loud. And as you do, sounding out those lines, letting the rhythms fall, following some of it and not following more of it, doesn’t matter, because gradually, without your even noticing it at first, just softly softly, you rise.

  You do. Honest. Read poetry like that and human beings become better, more complex, loving, passionate, angry, subtle and poetic, more expressive and profound, altogether more fine.

  That’s what I learned from my father.

  He was given a room in the back of the hall. Six classes. He needed the money but expected no one to come.

  When he came in the front door of the hall there were people looking to find extra chairs. They didn’t say We’re here because you’re the poet who has the book gone to London, they didn’t say We’re sorry your son died or You have to keep hope alive. A higher form of English is practised in Ireland, and direct statement is frowned upon. Nods were passed as Virgil came in. Nobody took their eyes off him as he settled the Collected Poems on the d
esk, and in an instant, trait undiscovered until now but inescapable as his bloodstream, he lifted his chin like the Reverend, and began.

  My father’s teaching style was as improbable as his nature. He stood behind the desk and looked out over the faces peering up at him. He allowed a pause that felt like a prayer, that felt like he was going to attempt this and he had no idea what he was going to say or how he was going to say it or if he even could begin. Then he began. He paced, back and over in the narrow space left to him by the chairs, back and over (six steps), speaking loud and clear off the very top of his head, which was above all of ours, and which it was not difficult to believe was just then exploding. He used his hands sometimes while he read, a kind of downward cutting, sharp, a chop, like that, and sometimes he’d say a line and be taken by the quality of it. He’d repeat it in a softer voice and you knew right then, right at that moment, he was discovering newness in it, and even if you didn’t know what exactly that was you knew you had arrived in a different country from the one outside that was just now discovering it was bankrupt.

  The classes were theatre. They were not a one-man-show in the sense of either structure or performance, did not have any clear sense of progression, did not have pauses, did not adhere to any notion of making points or playing to the audience, but they were electric and before they were done were already becoming part of parish legend: You won’t believe it, but once in Faha.

  Even on those four times I got to go and was stacking the chairs later for Colm the caretaker – Eight in a stack, no more no less – I knew there would be times in the future when someone would look shyly at me and acknowledging wonder with a gentle toss-back of their head say, ‘Do you know, I was at the Yeats.’

  The more you hope the more you hurt. The best of us hope the most. That’s God’s sense of humour. Back then I hoped the soul-seers were coming to Clare. They were putting on their sunglasses, locking in the coordinates and setting out from Russell Square. Because, as Father Tipp said, there’s a religious twist – which may actually be an insoluble knot – in my imagination, I lent them the mute mystique of the Three Wise Men and dreamed them arriving, if not quite on camels then certainly with amazement in their eyes.