Niall Williams - History of the Rain

Which, I’m sorry, is just weird. Passing on . It’s not even grammatical. It just hangs there, vague and inconclusive. It’s like saying he went up to .

Passed on to where , exactly?

Anyway, the outfit was for his own funeral. Uncle Noelie came home, laid the suit shirt and etceteras on the bed, the shoes beneath. All day he worked his few fields in his farming trousers boots woolly jumper and what-have-you, but when he went to bed at night in that small farmhouse he put on the suit shirt and tie, left the shoes, laces undone, below, then he lay out, hands-joined, posed, so if he died in the night he’d be dressed for Departure.

Joe Brogan passed his house most days on his way to the buildings back in the time when there was buildings happening and between them down in The Crossroads one evening they’d worked out that Uncle Noelie was to open his curtains when he woke and that way there was no need for Joe to come in to check on him. He could just drive by, because, both bachelors, they weren’t intimate on that level, there’d be no calling in, no need for tea and goldgrains, they were both clear on that, none of that, no, there’d just be this business of the curtains because Uncle Noelie had related his two mortal fears. The first was Not Being Found, of Mouldering Away, Sean Hayes says (and you’d moulder faster in among all those trees). How long you would be mouldering would depend on whether you went to Mass or not. Not because of mystical preservation but because if you were a Regular you’d be missed after two Sundays. There’d be that gap in the back of the Men’s Aisle where you stood with the Head-downers. That was the unsaid secret advantage to church-going. But if you were an Irregular like Uncle Noelie then who knows, you could be Not Found until the trees fell through the roof and some of the Hourigans came in to rob the place.

The second fear was Being Found. If you were taken unawares, if you were found in what Nan calls your All Together, then the shame of that, the thought of the whole slew coming poking around your kitchen nosing into the front bedroom and seeing you with your what Mona Moynihan calls croissant just sort of sitting here, would be enough to ruin the first several weeks of your time in Heaven.

So Uncle Noelie came up with his plan. Each night he pulled the curtains, combed the little bit of hair crossways on the front of his head, put on the suit and lay out on the bed ready for take-off.

And it worked too.

It worked two ways. It worked first that when he woke up in the morning in the suit and he realised he wasn’t at his own funeral he smiled. He smiled that lovely small round nut face of his and thought how well he looked and what a surprise it was no woman had ever found him. He rose and undressed with the sort of secret knowledge of his Happy End ahead. And it worked too because when one morning Joe Brogan drove by and the curtains were closed Uncle Noelie was only Gone a short while, and later that evening Mrs Quinty told my mother he made A Beautiful Corpse.

I was thinking about Uncle Noelie today when I was in the Regional. I was thinking about being Gone and wondering where Gone was and what it would be like and what the weather there would be. It’s a thing you just never hear, the weather in the next life.

On the one hand it can’t be raining there all the time.

But then if you were an African maybe that’s what you’d be hoping for.

On the other hand if it was blazing hot like it was that one summer when Nan went salmon-coloured and couldn’t stand up for falling down, Mick Mulvey started sporting the sombrero and olive-oiling himself and Father Tipp had to ask Martin Malone to stop wearing the micro-shorts to Mass, well that would be no fun at all. Irish people would be a freckled show in a sunny Heaven.

Just before Doctor Naradjan came in to do my Check-Up I was starting to wonder if you can only get to Heaven if you believe in it. Is it like Santa, where once you stop believing he stops coming? I know, thinking too precisely on th’event , but when you’re lying in bed with your body going nowhere your mind sort of heads off. Anyway, just for a minute then I had maybe a glimpse of Ruth’s Version because I was seeing Uncle Noelie in the Good Suit walking across his own fields and none of the forestry was there and across the river the hill fields weren’t thumping with windmills and it was just the right kind of All-Ireland weather in September. Noelie’s hair was still combed crossways and he had his teeth so he was smiling natural and he was back in a better version of his own familiar place. He was carrying a small Clare flag for the hurlers like he knew this year with Davy the lads were going to do it, and he was coming closer and I knew he had something he wanted to tell me and I tried to say his name out loud but I couldn’t because I was in a ward in the Regional and I lost belief or vision or whatever and the whole scene sort of passed into nothing, the ground unreal and the story failed.

A salmon egg dropped from waist-height will rebound, quite in the manner of a tennis ball.

I thought you’d want to know that.

My father wasn’t immediately aware of any burden on him.

Perhaps on Sunday mornings when Grandmother led the girls to church in Trim, that formidable line of what Nan calls the Polished Shoe Brigade, Head Girl material each one, marching up to that front pew in pleated wool coats with natural imperiousness and sitting so astonishingly upright because Nan says something in the breeding meant they had no backsides, perhaps then he wondered. He was left to himself in the house, and played Orphan.

He read. He read everything he could find. He loved books about explorers. Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Vasco da Gama, Francis Drake, Hernán Cortés. The names alone took him away. I see him looking up from a page, it’s the strange deadened quiet I know on country Sunday mornings when the Christians are at Mass and you feel so other that you have to occupy your time or you fear the Old Testament God himself will come up the stairs and say YOU! The rain is streaking down the long rattling windows of Ashcroft. The unfired chimneys are singing. He reads of those ships sailing into the New World and after a time he looks up and to no one but his own imagination says, ‘Hernán Cortés,’ which is maybe the only time anyone has said that name aloud in the County Meath but works as a kind of super-economy SwainAir flight to take him into the Aztecs. He can feel the sun scorch his brow. Those ancient oak floorboards of Ashcroft are a softly swaying deck, arriving under an azure sky, creaking in the surprise of the sudden furnace, discovering salt in all its wounds. And he says ‘Vasco Núñez de Balboa’ and in that damp room in the dead Sunday morning my father becomes the first European to see the Pacific Ocean.

One Sunday in the attic Virgil found his father’s rubbery black gasmask. When he put it on he became an alien, sucking breath through the heavy nozzle filter and crawling along the floorboards like he was a creature out of his element or newly landed on the planet. He loved that. He loved the strange privacy of being different. He loved the secret life inside him and could stay there in that inner country all day. What he thought of not going to church he never said. He never went. That was that. And when Aeney and I were old enough to realise this was a little odd, and that no one in Faha had a father who played Mozart at full volume to the river while the rest of us went to Mass, it was just another small piece of the puzzle we already knew: our father was a genius.

Eventually, Virgil was sent to Highfield School to Mr Figgs. Figgs was a bald low-sized little sneeze who came from Brighton and was soon dismayed to find Irish weather the perfect seedbed for headcolds. His face was never free of his handkerchief. It dabbed, wiped, rubbed and received the sniffled sneezed and blown expressions of the Figgs nostrils. Still, Figgs knew his figures, knew language too, and quickly saw that Virgil Swain had Serious Potential. To save him from contamination from the Dolts he put my father in the front row next to the Sniffleodeon that was his own desk. While the Michaels and Martins, the Tommys and Timothys of Highfield got about the business of educating each other through Advanced Ink-drinking, Higher Thumping, Desk-kicking, Flicking snot and/or spitballs into the miry curls of the boy up front, Mr Figgs taught my father in a conspiratorial whisper. His handkerchief he lay on the desk at the ready. Across a pale nimbus of free-associating germs he craned his damp pink face and spoke Algebra.