Niall Williams - History of the Rain

My father by that stage was already Elsewhere. He was already writing the poems that were coming into his head now like weird butterflies in March, already farming the fourteen acres of the worst land in Ireland, growing rushes and puddles and rearing the thinnest Friesian ladies to ever make an appearance at Clare Marts. I should have known something when he took out the fishing rod. I should have seen in the way he assembled it, the way he stood in the front garden practising a cast, throwing a line through the midge-veils trying to hook the invisible, that salmon fishing was serious business.

So too was starvation. You have no money but you have a river full of fish passing your front door. You figure it out.

Dad loved Aeney more than anything, but he couldn’t show it. He just couldn’t. There’s a Code for fathers in Ireland. Maybe it’s everywhere, I don’t know, I haven’t cracked it. My father followed the Code. He was careful about his children, he didn’t want to ruin us though somehow felt sure he would. He thought Aeney and I were marvels but he didn’t want to make a mistake. Maybe he thought Abraham was watching. So he’d probably thought about it for a long time before he came in from the casting and decided he should go fishing with Aeney. Dad could be sudden like that. He couldn’t help it. It’s the nature of Poets. You don’t believe me, look up William Blake, say hello to those impulses, go meet Mr John Donne in a dark church some time, spend a summer’s day with young William Butler, Ace Butterfly-catcher.

Dad shook Aeney awake early in the morning, said, ‘Come on.’

I lay in my boat-bed listening to them whispering downstairs at breakfast, the soft rubbery stamping as they put on their wellies, the small rattle of the tin container that held the flies, the hard fallback clack of the latch when they went out the door.

I should have gone.

At that moment I knew I should have gone. But I was addicted to my own cleverness and wouldn’t go round twin theory.

In families it’s hard to trace the story. If you’re in it the Plot Points aren’t clearly marked. You don’t know when things turn until much later. You think each day is pretty much as dull as any other, and if there is something happening it’s not happening in your family and it’s definitely not happening in Faha. You think your own oddness is normal. You think Nan harvesting a lifetime of Clare Champion s is normal. You think having a grandfather who published a book but didn’t want his name on it is normal, having a father who wants to be a poet but has to be a farmer, who has no clue about farming, and won’t publish any poems, all Normal.

My father and Aeney didn’t catch a salmon that day. They caught some other fish. The thing that happened was not about the catch. It wasn’t about a father and son standing on the Shannon riverbank, it wasn’t Now listen here, Son , it wasn’t directed by Robert Redford or lit gorgeously like A River Runs Through It , it wasn’t that my father opened his heart and said I think my life has been a colossal mistake, that every poem I write fails, that we have no money, or that Aeney told him he had a secret crush on Jane Brouder. What happened was at first neither discernible nor understood.

It was just this: that day my brother Aeney fell in love with the river.

When Grandfather Abraham was gone Grandmother had a brief moment of Victory, as if by outliving him she could lay down her cards and declare that she’d finally won the Game of Marriage. It wasn’t until the long evenings of the following winter, hounds gnawing on the stringy twines of the Indian rug and developing the first stages of what my father said was curry-scented incontinence, sash windows rattling like denture laughter, and the fire blowing down these great black puffs, that she realised he might be the one laughing now.

The aunts were away in the kind of school where books are balanced on your head. Esther, the eldest, would graduate in a year and go directly into The Bank. It was how it was done in those days. If you were smart and proper like Esther and could wear a skirt and blouse and had been trained by a crack squadron of nuns to sit perfectly upright and keep your knees together and your hair in a really really really tight bun you could be Mr Enright’s Secretary. You could live in a flat in Rathmines and own a Raleigh Ladies’ Bicycle, spend your evenings with Persil washing powder and a Philips steam iron and head into Dublin in the mornings fresh as Palmolive. The Sixties were starting then, but not in Ireland. Maybe the Ministers were thinking of Rolling Out the new era but they had to run it by the Censorship Board, and anyway Aunt Esther was always a few decades behind. Poor thing, she was of a nervous disposition and couldn’t bear the thought of things not being just so. Mr Enright never had a pencil out of place. Banks in those days were pretty much like churches; you put on your best clothes to go into them, and a Banker was a Very Good Catch. Aunt Esther had her hopes I suppose, but Mr Enright realised he’d ruin a perfectly excellent secretary by marrying her. Instead he chose the deeply unsuitable daughter of the bank’s president and took up golf. Aunt Esther attended the wedding. When I think of her I think of her as the tall girl in the back of the wedding photos, the big-boned one with the abashed air who has tirelessly shopped for just the right dress for the occasion but who says Yes of course when the photographer suggests maybe a better position for her would be in the third row. Aunt Esther attended a lot of weddings, I think, and only gradually did the corroding disappointment of the world work its way into her soul. Hope, you see, takes a long time to die. When we visited her in St Jude’s, the nursing home that would later change its name to Windermere and eventually welcome Aunt Daphne, Aunt Esther had to hold on to her hands tightly they shook so much. She wore a pale-blue cardigan and white blouse with the cuffs just showing and a white linen handkerchief pressed in next to her left wrist. She couldn’t keep her head still, it sort of juddered like these bolts of electricity were hitting it but she kept fighting them, she kept trying to keep herself still and proper and Receive her brother’s children because that was the right thing to do and I just stood there with Aeney beside our father seeing Dad’s eyes glass up and thinking it was pretty much the definition of Impossible for a woman suffering this badly to have such grace.

Daphne and Penelope had each other. They were never a problem to Grandmother. They were their own mini-company and, as I said, from early on they Selected their own Society and shut the door.

But what was Grandmother to do with Virgil? Without his father she feared her son would, well, I’m not sure what she feared exactly, but considering Abraham and considering The Reverend, maybe it was safe to suppose something Swain-odd. By that stage Ashcroft was in the first stages of dilapidation. It’s another truth universally acknowledged that a woman without a husband suddenly notices the frailties of her accommodation. She knew it hadn’t happened overnight but she woke one morning and noticed that dry, wet and medium damp rot had settled throughout the house, that paint was leaving the upper walls of the drawing room in alarmingly large bubbled flakes, the floorboards in the foyer were being eaten at their ends, the piano lid had a subtle but certain buckle and the guest-room chimney was lying out in the middle of the Front Circle. So while she figured out what to do with Virgil she told him to attend to these.

That was Grandmother’s style. Attend to these please, Virgil . And off out the door with her, doing the Kittering version of Queen Victoria, and keeping her nose tilted up just enough to keep breathing in sweet denial.