Niall Williams - History of the Rain

The second photo is years later. It was taken by Martin Liverpool the time he was home for the Fleadh, Tommy says. Martin had been working on Merseyside ten years and came home with a touch of the John Hinde’s, the freckled folkloric, seeing Ireland in panoramic Technicolor and Kodak-ing every turf barrow, ass and child, so that when he went back to the sites he had the country kind of captured in snaps that he kept in small cardboard shoeboxes, taking solace from stopping time, and not admitting emigration had lacerated his heart. Martin Liverpool came past our house the day Grandfather was up thatching.

In the photo Spencer Tracy is still recognisable as Spencer Tracy, but his hair is white now. It tufts out from under the flat tweed cap. You can see his hair still has the waves but they’re softer. The big wild tides of his youth are gone. Already passed are the years of ruile buile , the shouting and roaring, the storming in and the storming out, the flying dishes, the sudden wordless reconciliations he always instigated because despite his toughness and salmon-streak Spencer was hopelessly sentimental the way only men can be. The birth of Mam, the years in this house when it had to accommodate two big hearts and minds bashing against each other and making fly the sparks in which the love happened, I can’t really imagine them. You can’t imagine your nan like that. She’s too Nan to accommodate younger versions. All I know is that before Bridget Talty became Nan, before she became guardian of Clare Champions and Watcher of the Fire, before she took to pretending deafness and day and night wearing Spencer Tracy’s cap, she was a young married woman who found herself to be fulltime baker of bread, washer of shirts, getter of turf, raiser of hens ducks and geese and that she did not mind any of it as long as she could have a pack of ten Carrolls Number One cigarettes and go set dancing in the evenings. That’s her legend in the parish. To Comerford’s, Tubridy’s, Downes’s, to Ryan’s, Daly’s and McNamara’s she went, as well as skipping across the fields to house dances, bringing her big bashful Spencer Tracy with her, crossing under kissing starlight, the two of them coming flushed in the back door on to flagged kitchens, doing the Caledonian, the South Galway and the Clare Sets, five Figures, with glistening faces and battering steps, Tops and Tails, shouting ‘House’ and dancing the world simple.

In the photo Grandfather has a white shirt with sleeves rolled, big coarse tweedy trousers the thatch won’t penetrate. The roof has two homemade-looking ladders hanging on it. They are hooked over the apex so it looks like Grandfather is heading up into the big bluer-than-blue sky. Martin Liverpool has given him a shout so he’s turned halfway up the ladder and now he’s in the perfect position, blue sky behind him and straight ahead the same sweeping Shannon river view that I have from the skylight. He doesn’t know his heart attack is on the way. He doesn’t know he has only time to get the thatch finished, the turf home, and two horses shod.

Jaykers God, Tommy says. But he was a fine figure of a man.

Ah well.

That’s where Tommy’s history ends.

But that’s not the end.

The next bit is the fairy tale.

There’s a day in April when it’s raining. The river is running fast. The girl whose father had died, whose mother raised her in the crooked house by the river, who grew up with that broken part inside where your father has died and which if you’re a girl and your father was Spencer Tracy you can’t fix or unhurt, that girl who yet found in herself some kind of forbearance and strength and was not bitter, whose name was Mary MacCarroll and who was beautiful without truly knowing it and had her mother and father’s dancing and pride in her, that girl walked the riverbank in the April rain.

And standing at that place in Shaughnessy’s called Fisher’s Step, where the ground sort of raises a little and sticks out over the Shannon, right there, the place which in The Salmon in Ireland Abraham Swain says salmon pass daily and though it’s treacherous he calls a blessed little spot , right there, looking like a man who had been away a long time and had come back with what in Absalom, Absalom! (Book 1,666, Penguin Classics, London) William Faulkner calls diffident and tentative amazement, as if he’d been through some solitary furnace experience, and come out the other side, standing right there, suntanned face, pale-blue eyes that look like they are peering through smoke, lips pressed together, aged twenty-nine but looking older, back in Ireland less than two weeks, the ocean-motion still in his legs but strangely the river now lending him a river repose, standing right there, was Virgil Swain.

That’s us, from Seaweed to Swain.

I used the long run-up. You have to; otherwise the pole won’t carry you over.

It’s the way Charles Dickens does it in Martin Chuzzlewit (Book 180, Penguin Classics) where in Chapter One he traces the Chuzzlewits back to Adam and Eve. The MacCarrolls go back further. They go back beyond, Martin Feeney says.

The Swain are the written, the MacCarroll the oral. Ours is a history of tongue marrying paper, the improbable marrying the impossible. The children are incredible.

When I call my father Virgil Swain I think he’s a story. I think I invented him. I think maybe I never had a father and in the gap where he should be I have put a story. I see this figure on the riverbank and I try to match him to the boy I have imagined, but find instead a gristle of truth, that human beings are not seamless smooth creations, they have insoluble parts, and the closer you look the more mysterious they become.

Nobody in our parish ever called my father by his name. They called him Verge. And one time I wrote that down along a page of my Aisling copybook, Verge , and thesaurus-ed to find Edge, Border, Margin, before I came to Threshold, and then I thought of it as a verb and got a shiver when I wrote Approach.

My father never really told us where he had been. Deep, deep, and still deep and deeper must we go if we would find out the heart of a man, old Herman Melville says in my father’s copy of Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (Book 1,997, E.P. Dutton, New York), a book that has the smell of basement and on page 167 a tea-stain in the shape of Greenland.

The years between my father’s leaving Ashcroft and his standing on Fisher’s Step are lost. When you’re a child who has grown up on Adventure stories, who had Spencer Tracy for a Talty grandfather and a rushing river outside the door, there was a certain prestige in being able to announce in Faha N.S. that before he lived here my father was Gone to Sea . In a parish where the river opens into the sea the happy children dream of voyaging out, the sad of being sucked out, but either way the sea is magic central. Gone to Sea inspires a certain status. But the prestige was short-lived because I couldn’t expand beyond that phrase, because I got flushed when asked and because that little bug-eyed Seamus Mulvey kept following me around the yard singing ‘Where did he go? Where did he go?’ in that high strangulated whine all the Mulveys got from burning plastic bottles in their fire after the Council starting charging for recycling. ‘Did he go to Africa? Did he go to Australia?’ the round head of him bobbing side-to-side, the bug-eyes shining like sucked Black Jacks, singing scorn and teaching me the universal truth the human mind abhors vagueness, even a tiny mind like Seamus Mulvey’s.

Our father went to sea with Ahab and Ishmael. That’s a fact. But he didn’t find the whale. He came back with the same restless seeking inside him, and added to that a sense of things being infirm.