Niall Williams - History of the Rain

‘Breasting the ribbon, Ruthie,’ he said, ‘you’re the line between one world and another.’

He could say things like that. He could say things no other dad could say, and because parents are mysterious anyhow, because they belong in another world, you don’t ask, you just nod and feel you’ve entered a little bit into the mystery yourself.

The field was lined with these triangular flags Margaret Crowe had cut out of a pale-blue bolt of Virgin Mary cloth she’d got from Bowsey Casey’s and Rory Crowley had hand-painted a big lop-sided oval on the cow-plopped field. There, various of our able-bodied were desporting themselves as Homer says, which in this case meant doing Serious Stretches and running back and forth in little show-offy dashes they’d seen on RTE Olympic coverage with Patrick Clohessy alongside doing demented Jimmy McGee commentary into an empty Coke bottle. The whole clan of the McInerneys were there, tearing around like brown-nosed bluebottles, no hope that a single one of them would ever run in a straight line.

In order to put Faha on the map the entire parish showed up. Jesus Mary and Joseph Carty, Father Tipp, Monica Mac, Tommy Fitz, Jimmy Mac, the Major, the Saint Murphys, Vincent Cunningham and his father Johnny, John Paul Eustace in his navy suit, even Saddam. Everyone gathered in good-humoured admiration of their own seed and breed as Marty Mungovan says. Honan’s cows were exiled to a rushy wasteground where a loose string of electric fence kept them, looking on with mournful moo-faces or maybe they were cow-smiling that the plenitude of their dungs in the running track had supplied the setting with bountiful midges and flies. In Faha Community Games you ran with your mouth closed.

Dad was always awkward in scenes like this. He was a Swain and Swains are not for joining in. They’re not part of the General Population somehow. There’s this little remove, this stepped-back quality that means Dad is going to be the one over at the edge of the field. While Mam is in there helping out, getting Mona Halvey’s wheelchair across the tufted ground, selling Draw tickets, filling little plastic cups with MiWadi and trying to keep the McInerneys from drinking them all before the games begin, Dad is over on his own, he’s in red corduroy trousers that are seriously baggy and bunch at his waist where the belt tries to make them fit, he wears two shirts instead of a jacket. His silvery hair is grown long and occasionally wild strands fly in the wind. But he doesn’t care at all. He has a book with him. It’s going to appear to those who don’t know him that he doesn’t want to be part of this, that he holds himself apart on purpose and that it comes from the fact that he’s not one of them.

The truth is, he’s not one of anything or anyone. It’s not pride, it’s not even a choice. There’s a skill he doesn’t have, and as he stands on the edge of the field his heart must fall a little when he looks up from a page and realises his children don’t have it either.

Aeney is having his paper number pinned on. Mr Mac is down on one knee telling him tactics for seven year olds. I’m getting ready to unroll the ribbon when Jane Bitch of the Brouders, God-forgive-me, says tell your brother not to win. Noelie Hegarty is to win because his baby brother Sean died. She has her little entourage with her, a white ankle-sock brigade of holy head-tossers. Their aim is to out-nun Mother Teresa.

‘I’ll tell him no such thing.’

‘Then I will,’ she says, and flounces across the field to him.

I’m holding the ribbon taut when Aeney comes running. I can see the wild delight in his eyes. He’s ahead of the rest of the field, legs flashing so superfast you think he’ll have to fall down, running so quickly that everyone watching him smiles. You can’t help yourself. He’s going so fast his number flies off. There’s actual July sunlight glancing off his hair. The whole parish roars him on. He’s coming up the not-so-straight straight, chest out and his little arms flashing, and he can see me just ahead holding the ribbon. Ribbon-holders are not supposed to cheer, but inside the roar I do a little go on Aeney go on Aeney and the ribbon wavers a little until Dympna gives me her future-headmistress look and tugs it taut.

And then Aeney’s going in slow motion.

Slow and slower still.

And Noelie Hegarty is coming up alongside him.

And Noelie Hegarty is going past him.

Come on Aeney.

But he doesn’t. Noelie Hegarty breasts the ribbon.

Afterwards, Jane Brouder goes and says something to Aeney, she talks to him like they’re New Best Friends, and then she walks past me, pout-and-button nose raised to ten o’ clock and ass eloquent.

Dad said well done to Aeney. He said it quietly, firmly, and the way he looked at him he seemed to be seeing deeper, as if the two of them shared some secret and it was a Swain thing.

The following year Aeney didn’t run. He only liked running on his own after that, after that he only ran by the river. Dad never said Aeney, you should take part in races, or You have to, he never said a thing, never showed any disappointment, but, years later, folded carefully in Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid , I found the creased rectangle of Aeney’s paper number that had fallen off that day.

Aeney preferred outdoors to indoors. He didn’t freckle, he tanned, which if you ask me is a clear sign of being Chosen. It’s up there with perfect hair and teeth that actually fit inside your mouth. Aeney climbed every tree he could find. I think it was Jim Hawkins Syndrome, wanting to be Up Top in the crow’s nest in the Hispaniola . I’d stand below on the ground and watch him work his way up into the big chestnut at the gate into the Long Meadow. If the tree didn’t end, if there wasn’t a highest branch, I think he’d be climbing upwards still. That’s my brother. I’d lose him in the leaf canopy and then be sitting below reading a book, every so often craning my neck to look up the way you look when a bird disappears into a tree but sings still. He wasn’t a bird though; often out of the treetop I’d hear this sudden clatter and quick-snapping and a cry, all instantaneous, and I’d drop the book and shout out his name and look up and not see him but see the tree come alive somewhere above, a flutter of leaves descending, a white-snapped branch sailing down, and Aeney unseen coming crash spin grab-falling through the upper greenery, a kind of antic acrobatics bred in certain boys in which danger is neither seen nor felt. He falls fifteen feet inside the tree, but clings on somewhere, I see only the blue runners dangling for a moment, pedalling the air until they find the branch.

‘Aeney? Aeney, are you okay?’

I hear him laughing. Up in the tree he’s laughing. Then he calls down, ‘Yeah.’ And he climbs upwards again. He climbs like he’s in his own inner Duffy’s Circus and somewhere up here is the glittering girl. He climbs until he must be out in the sky and see the river from above.

God, Pauline Dempsey said, has His hand on certain people’s shoulders.

He’d be better covering knees, Nan said.

Despite Nan’s knee-patching, by the time Aeney was seven both of his knees bore raised wrinkly scars in crescent shapes. He showed me but he didn’t care. Blood-crusted, pebble-embedded, skin-flapped, and often an iodined purplish blue, on his knees were written his adventures. I thought of that one day years later in Mrs Quinty’s class when we read Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about the tremendous fish. The fish had escaped many hooks but bore their marks. He was caught at last. (Book 2,993, Collected Poems , Elizabeth Bishop, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York.) But that fish was old.

The first time Dad took Aeney fishing Dad didn’t know what was going to happen. I was asked if I wanted to go, but by then I was already working on my Twin Theory, that if one twin loves the outdoors the other loves the indoors, one likes books the other music, one red the other black. The back pages of my copies had whole lists. So when Aeney said yes to fishing I said no. I didn’t know then the history of salmon in the Swains, I hadn’t seen Grandfather’s Salmon Journals, read The Salmon in Ireland , or thought my ability to remember everything, to amass knowledge, was in any way connected to fish.