Niall Williams - History of the Rain

But be careful, the river can take you. It has its own mesmerism, and Mikey is turning the cows into the shed ahead of you and he’s raising his black pipe again that is thanks and apology and acknowledgement that you’re here with us, in our time in our rain.

Drive on a bit further now, stay with the river on your left and follow it towards the sea. Feel the quickening. Look across at the Kingdom looking over at you with a kind of Kerry contentment, and you’re in our townland now. Watch out for various figures bundled in coats and hats, ditch-trawlers in early senescence out trying to gather sticks for the range since the cutbacks came to pay the bankers.

Pass the house of the Saints Murphy, Tommy and Breda, they do our praying for us. Both of them are in the Premier Division of praying and sometimes because we’re such heathens — well, except for Nan who’s a kind of Pagan-Catholic — Mam goes down to them and asks them to say a few Our Fathers or Glory Be’s for us and they do. Tommy and Breda are in their seventies and they have this lovely manner that’s Old Ireland, and you feel sort of quiet in their company like when the choir is singing at Christmas. Tommy is a gentle man and he loves Breda with a kind of folklore love. She’s losing her hair now and bits of it land in the dinners she cooks and the scones she bakes, but Tommy doesn’t object, he sees the hairs and eats away. He loves her too much to say a thing. They sit evenings sipping tea with their high-visibility vests on, kind of glowing neon yellow the way saints should. Tommy and Breda weren’t blessed with children but they have nine laying pullets and any amount of free-range eggs. They’ll give you half a dozen if you stop. But you can’t right now.

Pass the Major Ryan’s and Sam his suicidal dog who’s running out and trying to get under your wheels. The Major’s name derives not from any military career but from the quantity of Majors cigarettes he smoked, right-hand fingers tuberous gold, chest a mazy fibrous mass, and his voice that low husk that caused every audience to crane forward as one in Faha the time of the amateur-drama productions. The dog has been trying to kill himself for seven years, hasn’t managed it yet.

That figure ahead of you is Eamon Egan, fattest man in the parish and proud of it, wouldn’t walk the length of himself, Nan says. Posterboy for the anti-famine look, in the county’s largest navy suit he sits propped on his front wall. Give him a nod, he’ll scowl back because he doesn’t know you and for the rest of the evening he’ll be demented tracking around in his big head playing a game of: who’s the stranger?

You’ll pass the young Maguires who were both in the bank and both lost their jobs in the Bust and are now living in Egan’s mother’s place trying to grow vegetables in puddles. Next door is McInerney’s, smiling Jimmy who’s no oil painting Nan says and never heard of dentistry but discovered the secret to successful marriage was not teeth but Quality Street because he’s fathered fourteen children on Moira and keeps the National School going. Like Matthew Bagnet in Bleak House , Jimmy will tell you he leaves control of everything to his wife. Where Mrs Bagnet was always washing greens, Moira McInerney is doing the same only with underpants. Those’ll be McInerneys under the hedge, or on the ditch, or kicking a ball over your car, some of them pushing the prams of others or flying around on buck-wheeled bikes, and not one of them with a care in the world or even noticing it’s raining.

You pass on and you think that’s the end of the houses. The road nearly touches the river.

Then look, a last house. You’re here.

According to Assumpta Elliott, our house is no great shakes. She was one of the Rural Resettled who came down from Dublin to populate us but then discovered what wind coming up the river off the Atlantic felt like, couldn’t get used to walking slantways or being rain-washed and, Great Shakes herself, Unsettled back again. I like our house. It’s a long low farmhouse with four windows looking over a small garden of Mam’s drowned flowers. Out back are the three muck fields where our cows paddle in the memory of actual grass.

The house faces south, as if its first MacCarroll builders had the stubborn optimism of my Mam and believed there would maybe be some sunlight sometime. Or maybe they wanted it to have its back to the village, which is about three miles away. Maybe they were making a point, or had that little distance in them that used get me into trouble in school when The Witches Mulvey made out I thought I was better than everyone, that I was Snoot Ruth, which to tell the truth I didn’t mind so much, and anyway it was only because I had vocabulary.

You come in the front door and within three feet you’re facing a wall — the MacCarrolls weren’t the best at planning. You have to turn right or left. Right brings you to The Parlour.

Once The Parlour was the Good Room, preserved for the possible visit of His Holiness or John Francis Kennedy, whoever made it first, complete with The Good Armchairs set at angles appropriate for polite conversation before the tiled fireplace, upon which sit Chester and Lester, china dogs that came one Christmas from my Swain aunts and which in my daydreams often scampered alongside me when I went off with The Famous Five for ginger beer — second-hand Enid Blytons were a speciality at Spellissey’s in Ennis, they were your First Books once and you were to graduate from Enid into Agatha, Blytons to Christies, because books were Mysteries, the whole of life a Whodunit, which is kind of MacCarroll Deep if you think about it.

But don’t, because Look, there’s a glass case with assorted other ceramics, tiny cream Belleek bell with tinier shamrocks, brass Celtic cross, miniature Virgin Mary who, First Miracle of Faha, transformed herself into a plastic bottle with blue cap-crown, a Waterford Crystal clock without battery, never had a battery because it was beautiful and didn’t need to also tell you that beauty and everything else passes — thank you, Mr Keats — and to the left of this a glass-topped table with embroidered doily and tile coaster of Lourdes should His Holiness wish to put down his pint. Once, this room was the sanctum saculorum, the fiddly-dee fiddly-dorum, the Havisham Headquarters of our house, the great untouched — and often undusted — that was kept for special occasions which, like good fortune, to our family never arrived. Then Nan Nonie moved in and a bed was put in one corner of the room — His Holiness would understand — and a belted trunk of her clothes which was always open and because she preferred Flung to Folded lent an air of lewd display that might have challenged His Holiness a little, to say nothing of her Po.

Eventually The Parlour became Nan’s Parlour then just Nan’s. There she keeps her Complete Collection of Clare Champions , an ever-expanding series of yellow mountains of newspaper in which is recorded the full entire life of the county, which means that if you had the time you could start upstairs here reading the exploits of some lads in Troy and work your way through all recorded civilisation right up to the savage blow-by-blow of the Saint Senan’s Under-14s two days ago. The Champions are an inexhaustible chronicle of everything that happened here in Nan’s lifetime. She never goes back to reread it, never does any old-style finger and blackened-wet-thumb googling, flicking the pages to find something. It’s enough that the papers passed through her hands once, that once she lived through that particular week. Now their physical presence filling up the room is a kind of testament to her enduring, to the River of Time and her unsinking through it. That’s how I’ve come to think of it anyhow. No one pays it any mind, or thinks it the least bit odd. That’s the thing about Faha. When Lizzie Frawley was pregnant with an imaginary child, and for fifteen months sat sideways in Mass to accommodate an invisible bulk which she’d sometimes tap gently, no one said a word.