Niall Williams - History of the Rain

In any case, the MacCarrolls stayed out of all that. Because of the salmon-time that was in their bloodstream they had a fair bit of knowledge and they hadn’t forgotten the important thing the river had taught them: things pass. The place under their feet changed name a dozen times, but they stayed put.

A share of them got in boats and headed for the horizon. Stands to reason, Tommy says. Wouldn’t there be a restlessness in any man who was once salmon and floating seaweed?

There’s no arguing with that.

I wouldn’t argue with Tommy anyway. Mrs Quinty says three months ago when they brought Tommy to the Regional the surgeon opened him up, and then just closed him up right away again, as if Tommy Devlin had become The Book of Tommy and on every page was written Cancer . Afterwards, Tommy took his book home again to Faha and carried on regardless. He has a kind of Lazarus glow now. There isn’t a person in the parish would deny him anything.

‘My point,’ he says, ‘restlessness a natural by-product of salmon-ness.’

That’s why there’s MacCarroll cousins in Queens and White Plains and Lake View Chicago and Michigan and San Francisco and why there’s a Randy MacCarroll who’s a horse-breeder in Kentucky, a Paddy MacCarroll a sheep-breeder in Christchurch New Zealand, and Caroll MacCarroll who breeds the turtles in Bali.

But a share of them stayed in what became Clare too.

‘The family has a certain contrariness in it,’ Tommy says. ‘D’you see? From time to time the family would burst up in rows, one gang taking a position, the other gang taking the contrary, even if only for the virtue of being contrary, which is a peculiar twist in the Irish mind that dates back to sky and sea people. Some of the MacCarrolls would take a huff and splinter off over the mountains into Kerry or even, God Help us, Cork.’

What you had in the chronicle of the country then was a few centuries of a game of Rebellion-Betrayal, Rebellion-Betrayal, Uprising Put-Down, and Hope Dashed.

The History of Ireland in two words: Ah well .

The Invasion by the Vikings: Ah well .

The Invasion by the Normans. The Flight of the Earls, Mr Oliver Cromwell. Daniel O’Connell, Robert Emmett, The Famine, Charles Stewart Parnell, Easter Rising, Michael Collins, Éamon De Valera, Éamon De Valera again ( Dear Germany, so sorry to learn of the death of your Mr Hitler ), Éamon De Valera again, the Troubles, the Tribunals, the Fianna Fáil Party, The Church, the Banks, the eight hundred years of rain: Ah well .

In the Aeneid Virgil tells it as Sunt lacrimae rerum , which in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation means ‘They weep for how the world goes’, which is more eloquent than Ah well but means the same thing.

There were MacCarrolls on both sides each time. They were Pro and Anti in equal measure. The only thing you could be certain of with a MacCarroll, Tommy says, was that opinions were Strongly Held. It was a seaweed — salmon thing. Salmon aren’t reasonable. They’re the boys for going against the current.

‘Which holds a certain attraction for the Opposite Sex,’ Tommy says, using Capitals.

‘It does?’

‘Oh it does,’ he says.

That’s when he goes Old Testament and starts listing the Begetting. Cearbhall MacCarrill married Fionnuala Ni Something who begat Finn who married Fidelma Ni Something Else and begat Finan who married a Fiona and begat Fintan, and so on. When they emerge out of the seaweed-smelling mists of time they are still marrying and begetting, some of them have dropped the A, others the Mac and some have gotten above themselves and taken up the O, so there are MacCarrolls, McCarrolls, Carrolls and O’Carrolls, all of them with a seawide streak of stubbornness and a character composed of what Nan simply calls salt. Some of them have twelve in the family, one of the Ni’s wins Ovaries of the Year and gives the world eighteen MacCarrolls before sending the ovaries to the Clare Museum in Ennis and lying down on a bed of hay with a bucket of milk.

Tommy is hardcore into the folklore, he’s far gone in ceol agus rince as Michael Tubridy says, has printed his Boarding Pass and been literally Away with the Fairies several times, believing we Irish are Number One folk for lore and in fact in our most humble and affable selves most if not all of the history of the world can be explained. He does the whole MacCarroll seed and breed, draws short of And it Came to Pass , the way Joshua does it in the Book of Joshua but he gives it the same ring. Like some of the women I may have dozed off during routine rounds of begetting but I come back in time for my Grandfather Fiachra who, thanks to Tesco’s box-set, is played by young Spencer Tracy in Captains Courageous when Spencer is a Portuguese-American fisherman called Manuel Fidello, and later by old Spencer Tracy when he plays Old Man in The Old Man and the Sea and gets an Oscar nomination, but the Oscar goes to the thin moustache of David Niven and that salty deepwater Irish melancholy settles for ever into Spencer’s eyes.

Grandfather Fiachra has the Spencer Tracy eyes and the Spencer Tracy hair that is this uncombable wavy stuff that makes it look like he has just surfaced into This World and has a last bit of silver sea still flowing crossways on his head. I never met him. Grandfather MacCarroll is in two black-and-white photographs in Nan’s room. In one of them he’s at his own wedding. He’s in the front porch of Faha church in a black suit with pointy gangster lapels. He’s big and barrel-chested and looks like there’s nothing in the world he won’t meet head on. Back then everyone looks serious. You get a shock when you find out he’s twenty-eight, because the suit and the look and the pose make him older than anyone that age now. There’s a smile around the corners of his mouth and something dancing in his eyes. He’s waiting for his Bride.

She’s a Talty.

Do I need to say more?

(Dear Reader, time is short, we can’t even open The Book of Talty, because if we did we’d get sucked out in that tide. We’d be Gone for Some Time and away into the stories of Jeremiah Talty who was a doctor only without a degree, Tobias Talty who kept a horse in his house, lived on apples and grew the longest beard in the County Clare, his sister Josephine who conversed with fairies, & brother Cornelius who went to the American Civil War and fought on both sides. We might never get back.)

Bridget Talty is coming to the church by horse and cart. She’s coming from fifteen miles away in Kilbaha by the broken road that’s in love with the sea. She’s sitting in that boneshaker beside her father in a wedding dress she’s fighting because she didn’t want to wear one, and has already thrown the veil into a ditch this side of Kilrush. They’re rattling along in sea-spray and salt-gale and suddenly the regular rain turns to downpour. It comes bucketing and her father says rain is good luck for weddings but she doesn’t answer him. She’s foostering with the buttons at the collar of the dress because they’re pinching out her breath and ping! one of them flies off, and ping! another. And she tugs back the collar and holds her head high, so soon face, neck and the upper curve of her breasts are all gleaming with rain and her hair is wild streels tumbling. When she arrives outside Faha church in the cart she’s this drowned heap, proud, beautiful and feckless as she gets off the cart, lands down into a fair-sized puddle, strides through it, muddied shoes and splattered stockings adding the final Bride-à-la-Talty touches as she comes through the church gates.

And standing there waiting, not at the altar but at the front door because that’s the way he’s doing it, Grandfather releases the Spencer Tracy smile around the corners of his mouth, sees the whole of his married life ahead, and thinks: Well now. This is going to be interesting .