‘They were no good, Ruth.’
I didn’t say anything. A better Ruth would have gone after them, a Ruth not afraid of the river. I stood silently by. I watched the poems go, and felt a laceration, which was partly my own but partly too my father’s, for I knew what throwing them into the river had cost him. I knew Abraham and the Reverend were right there. I knew he had failed the Impossible Standard and believed at that moment that everything he had done had been a failure. He had lost his son to the river, and then almost all of us in a fire that he was not even aware had been moving through the house while he had continued writing a poem he now considered useless.
I think I knew then that a letter would come from London, that Mam would open it in the corner of Faha Post Office. That I would watch her read it and hear the sharp intake of her breath and then take the letter from her and read Dear Mrs Swain, we thank you for your letter. We are sorry to say we have no record of ever receiving History of the Rain.
We moved back in to our house. My father was hushed, like a man with ashes in his soul.
Eloquent in his own way, Father Tipp brought a set of Yeats left to him by a cousin in Tipperary who was unaware of his taste. These were the hardcover Mythologies, Autobiographies, Essays & Explorations and Collected Poems (Books 3,330, 3,331, 3,332 & 3,333, Macmillan, London), each of which I later discovered must to my father have had an air of peculiar prompting, because though they had gone elsewhere about the world on their inside flyleaves they bore stamps in green ink that said ‘Salisbury Library, Wiltshire’.
‘They need a finer mind than mine,’ the priest said.
My father took them with chin-tremble and head tilted to the ceiling to keep his eyes from spilling. Everything now was bigger than saying.
‘Thank you, Father,’ he said.
If wings could come they were coming then. In the three days that followed, while he sat in Aeney’s sky-room and read Yeats, my father was ascending.
On the third day I came home from school into the kitchen and called ‘Hello’ up to him. He did not answer. I climbed the Captain’s Ladder through the smells of fire and rain. I said, ‘Dad, I . . .’
And that’s all I said, because there, at his desk under the skylight, in the pale gleam of the rain, my father was dead.
Chapter 6
Taking you down.
That’s what the nurses say. Tomorrow, Ruth, we’ll be taking you down.
Mrs Merriman was taken down but she did not come back up. I have Mr Mackey so I am In Good Hands. I have said I don’t want details. I don’t want medical language. I don’t want a venous access device in here, or Interferon therapy or acetaminophen or arsenic trioxide or all-trans retinoic acid. I don’t want them in my pages. I want mine, like Shakespeare’s first folio, to be To the Great Variety of Readers, from the Most Able to Him that Can but Spell. (You kno who you ar.) I don’t want mine suffocated by science. I want mine to breathe, because books are living things, they have spines and smells and length of life, and from living some of them have tears and buckles and some stains.
Mrs Quinty has come up to Dublin. I told her not to, I told her when I was leaving there was no need, and that if you believe illness is everywhere the last place you should visit is a hospital. But that woman, though small, is irrepressible. She came into the ward like a short fat bird, buttoned coat, blue handbag and tighter-than-ever hairdo. Mam hugged her and Mrs Quinty said, ‘Don’t, I’m all wet,’ and then she looked at me and put a hand, flat, against her breastbone, pat, just like that, as though lidding what was open.
‘Dear Ruth,’ she said, and, after regaining herself, ‘Goodness. Do they not know how to fix up a pillow?’
Mrs Quinty brought the parish with her. She brought cards and well-wishes, news of candles and prayers, and then, mindful not to burden her visit with concern, recounted stories; Danny Devlin had taken his toilet out and thrown it in his front garden ahead of the toilet tax, said he’d knock his chimney ahead of the chimney tax, and brick in his windows before they came taxing daylight. (A country that understands the potency of imagery, the memory of our bankers, Mrs Quinty said, was to be enshrined in perpetuity in septic tanks.) Kevin Keogh, though he had about as much love for her as a small donkey, had surrendered at last and married Martina Morgan. The government, believing itself attuned to the pulse of the nation, had proposed abolishing the Senate, just as the Senate, Mikey Lucy said, were about to propose abolishing the government. Sean Connors had written from Melbourne and told his father he missed being with him at the silage, and in mute desolation Matt Connors had taken a poss of it, put it in a padded envelope and brought it to Mina Prendergast for posting, silage being for the Connors what the smell of coalsmoke was to Charles Dickens, and guava to Gabriel García Márquez, the indelible imprint of home.
All paradises are lost. The Council, Mrs Quinty said, has given up the ghost. The roads are going away. The windmills are coming. In the ghost estate, in disgust at the failures of promise, two of the Latvians have constructed an artificial paradise out of drugs and alcohol and raised a flag of Germany.
The river has continued to rise. It took the graveyard, left tombstones standing upright in the Shannon, then it came up Church Street for the church, and Mary Daly, who was still kneeling praying like in T.S. Eliot to the brown God, had to be ferried out just as she was starting to levitate or drown, depending on who was telling it. Our house, home to too many metaphors, had become metaphoric and needed a bailout. The McInerneys were at it.
‘You’ll only hear it from others so I might as well tell you,’ Mrs Quinty added, and pursed her lips and sat a little more erect to announce: ‘Mr Quinty has returned.’
The way she said it you knew she was still deciding what to do with him. Mam and I looked elsewhere.
‘Stomach ulcers,’ she said, with not entirely disguised pleasure, and left it at that.
Mrs Quinty is the only living person who read History of the Rain. When it was gone, and I asked her to remember it, she could not. Because of the haste, and the need to be undiscovered, the typing not the poems had taken her attention. She would touch her lip then put her hand out in front of her as if the words were coming, as if a speech bubble was forming, but no, she’d say, she would not do my father an injustice and give me a misremembered line.
In the white paperback of Yeats’s Selected Poems, beside ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, I read the two lines my father had written. Why did you take him? And Why does everything I do fail? And from those questions I understood Virgil Swain was applying the Impossible Standard to God.
I cannot say that my father had faith in God. The truth is that he had something more personal; he had a sense of Him, the Father of the Rain. The poems, the raptures and the despair I have come to think of as part of a dialogue; they were expressions of wonder and puzzlement, a longing for ascension and an attempt to make endure in this world a spirit of hope. So in my mind, day by day, the poems became greater for not existing.
This was the truth I clung to when the report into his death came back, when we were told my father had had a tumour curved like a hook in the parietal lobe of his brain. The tumour was embedded, and had been growing for some time, the Doctor said. The way he said it I knew he thought it explained the raptures, the ecstasies that produced the poems. The tumour explained everything. The tumour was the whole story. And right then I knew that that was the wrong story and that I would have to write the truth.
That Vincent Cunningham is unreal.
Who takes a bus from Faha to Ennis – that foul fumy rattling boneshaker Dennis Darmody, who has the look and personality of a corkscrew, drives kamikaze around Blind Faith bends – who takes that, and then stands waiting for the Ennis-to-Dublin, whose passengers are all Free-Pass pensioners who go up and back not because they have business in Dublin but because they have free-passes and wiped-out pensions, who buys the Day Return when the journey is four hours each way, when they haven’t ten euro to their name, when they shou
ld be studying for exams, and half the country is under water? Who brings Quality Street?
Vincent Cunningham comes squelching down the hospital corridor in wet sneakers and stands at the ward entrance with a general drowned look. If I said ‘Go away’ he would. He would take the bus back again, and, inconceivably but truly, he would not resent it.
‘Mrs Quinty says I will not die.’
It was not my best greeting, but time was short. This is my last Aisling. I was fasting and anxious and sounds were blurry and my style was breaking up.
Vincent Cunningham sits in my visitor seat. Mam is gone downstairs with Mrs Quinty. Across the way Jackie Fennell looks at him and raises her perfectly curved perfectly plucked eyebrows and passes me the most unsubtle of nods.
‘Of course you won’t,’ Vincent says.
‘I cannot, according to Mrs Quinty, because in my writing there is such life.’
I also cannot because Alice Munro says the whole grief of life will not do in fiction. You can’t have so much sorrow – readers will throw the book against the wall.
‘You won’t,’ Vincent says again. But the way he says it sends this deep furrow down between his eyebrows and I know he’s only saying it.
‘But if I do.’
‘You won’t.’
‘Vincent Cunningham.’
He swallows his objection. He is pleased and abashed to hear me say his name. ‘Yes?’
‘If I do, two things.’
‘Two things.’
‘First, you know what to do with all my pages?’ Have I said, his eyes are the kindest? He has shaved for the journey, plastic blue Gillette that makes his cheeks look quite polished. Really, there’s a shining in all of him. ‘You remember?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
‘What’s second?’
‘Second is actually first. Second, is that you should kiss me.’
I may have been floating. I had the feeling I was floating.
‘I do not think that if I am going to die,’ I said, ‘I should die without having been kissed.’
Only through story can we tolerate death.
How else can we forgive God?
I asked my father to write me a poem. He never quite did. But he left a handwritten will that was witnessed by John Paul Eustace and in it he gave the details of the life assurance he had been paying, and in it he said: ‘For Ruth, my books.’
Just that. For Ruth, my books.
On the day I could bring myself to go in and look at them, a library of books burned and drowned but undestroyed, I saw that on his desk was The Salmon in Ireland and folded inside it was a page in his handwriting. On the top it said: for Ruth Louise Swain. And underneath, at random angles, were words and phrases, some underlined, some overwritten, and others crossed out, a scattering trying to become a gathering.
Here: My father climbed the sky.
Here: from cinderway ascend.
Salmon-ascent, struck out then written again then crossed out again.
Spire/Aspire.
Leap leap the
On the right-hand side in a pencilled circle: Tommy okay. Beneath it: Morrow, Eacrett, Cheatley & Paul.
Leap
In a small rectangle: ‘We’re going fishing.’
Here: Fish/Fly and Water/Sky
Ever the light that lures and eludes/ ever the
On the left-hand side a gently curved question mark that could be a fishing line but is in fact a bend in the river
Leap
Only in love the light ascending/
And last, in the faintest leaden grey, his hand hardly pressing the words into the page: I will make things better.
And that’s all. In fragments for me, the impossible poem of him.
So in a way he kept his promise.
And here, in my way, I am keeping mine.
If I am dead my pages will be put with his page and pressed inside The Salmon in Ireland and Vincent Cunningham will bring them to the River Shannon and throw them in.
If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book did not and does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows.
Because here is what I know: the rain becomes the river that goes to the sea and becomes the rain that becomes the river. Each book is the sum of all the others the writer has read. Charles Dickens was a writer because his father had a small library and because solitude was not lonely with Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote. Each book a writer writes has all the others in it, so there’s a library that’s like a river and it keeps on going. My book has in it all the books my father read, and in that way his spirit survives, as mine does, because although impossible there is a communion between readers and writers, and that though writers write and fail and write and fail again the failing is what counts, being against the current and making the leap, and his leap and mine lands him impossibly here now where he walks towards a sparkling river, and where a man with flowing hair and vivid eyes comes to meet him. RLS greets him with a raised hand and welcoming expression and in softest accent calls the name Virgil. RLS has a warming smile, a quick wit and a hundred stories to tell. The ground is new grass, the air almost tender because air in the afterlife is and is so sweet and as my father breathes it in he cannot believe this place or this company, both of which are made better by being impossible. Impossible too the quicksilver brilliance, the sun-bounce and shine of the River Shannon. Impossible the birds, so many and so joyful. Impossible the sky, blue and bluer now, with butterflies, while all the time the two men bear onwards along the riverbank. Impossible that RLS hums now, humming a not-yet-line of a not-yet-poem. Impossible that my father does the same, and that to him RLS glances his shone dark eyes and in them there is such recognition and joy that both now go humming, a sound somewhere between bird and man, otherworldly in this one but natural in that, impossible too that my father looks down the bank and sees ahead of them how that place, a bend in the river, has become familiar and his breath is shortened and his heart quickened because here is Uncle Noelie in his good suit coming and he looks better than he ever looked in this life, his All-Ireland winning look, and he waves in recognition and points back along the bank where my father sees the fair head of a boy and he has to take the leap and believe in the impossible now because though he blinks and palms his forehead the boy does not go away and Aeney becomes clearer and clearer and is not yet looking but, contentedly, patiently, fishing that river in the afterlife. And RLS stops and says, ‘There now,’ in that softest Scottish accent, drawing back his hair with one hand, and smiling, his whole demeanour radiant from X marking the spot and treasure found. ‘Your son,’ he says.
And, impossibly, my father sees that it is. Aeney turns and sees too. He lays down the fishing rod. He runs the way he has always run, that way of running that seems a natural expression of human grace, and he comes to Dad who comes to him and wraps his arms around him and lowers his head into the golden hair and they hold to each other impossibly long, long, longer still, and in their embrace is all our story, past present and to come, in it is the knowledge that Mam will be all right and that though she will be lonely and sad she will take comfort in the candles where one day in Faha church she will sit up with the clear and absolute certainty her husband has found her son, in that embrace is the knowledge that I will at last go into Remission and begin to get better, that I will ret
urn home, that, impossibly, I, Ruth, will write this book, that Mrs Quinty will type my pages, that you will read them, that Vincent Cunningham will come calling, for conversation and slightly salty kisses, and that one day, impossibly, he will take me walking for my first time out the front door and I will go to the river with him and not fear water or sky, not fear failure or doom because I will know somehow we can come through, and our story is of enduring and aspiring and that it is enough to keep hoping and to keep telling stories, for each other and about each other, collaborating in the elaborate history of ourselves so that in stories we exist, knowing that in this world in this time enduring is all our victory, but victory nonetheless, and I Ruth Swain will know that love is real and forgiveness complete because, at last, unimaginably, implausibly, impossibly, the rain will have stopped.
Acknowledgements
My father believed in education, at a time when education meant books. Twice a month he took us to the library, and those visits remain among the most cherished memories of my growing up. Apart from the browsing and the borrowing, just to be for an hour in the physical company of so many books was inspiring and moving in a way that is perhaps hard to explain today, but for which I will always be grateful. When my father died, in his will he asked that his books be left to me. Among them was The Salmon Rivers of Ireland by Augustus Grimble.
One book inspires another. To any reader of this novel the debt I owe to so many writers will already be apparent. The debt to readers perhaps less so.
Over the five years I have been working on this book Caroline Michel achieved the impossible standard and kept believing in it, when it was still invisible. Her friendship and support has meant everything. My thanks too to Anna Jean Hughes and Rachel Mills and the whole team at Peters, Fraser & Dunlop.
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