Niall Williams - History of the Rain

‘A stranger?’ she says. Nan is sharp as a tack and cute as buttons. She won’t look up from the dough but she’ll let her daughter get it out.

‘I don’t know who he is,’ Mary says.

‘No?’

‘No.’

Mary throws her coat on the door hook, sits to toe the heel of a boot.

Nan gives the dough thumbs. She gives it Almighty Thumbs. Her thumb knuckles stick out like shiny knobs from years of breadmaking. ‘What’s he like?’

‘I don’t know. I hardly saw him.’

‘Didn’t you?’

Mary goes to tend the fire, roughly rakes down the grate and assembles the embers in a little heap.

‘Tall, I suppose?’ Nan asks.

‘I think. I don’t know. I told you, I hardly saw him.’

Nan kneads the story some more. ‘What was he doing? In Shaughnessy’s, I wonder?’

Mary doesn’t answer. She’s not going to speak about him any more. ‘Nothing,’ she says, after a while.

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing. Just looking at the river.’

That night he’s with her in her bed.

Not in that way.

She’s lying in her bed with the curtains drawn and the window open because the April night is softer than tissue and because she can’t get enough air. She’s lying on her side facing the window and the room is loud with that song the river has when the rain is spring heavy and the Shannon flowing fast. She can’t sleep. He won’t let her. What was he doing there? Why did he not turn? She’s angry with him, which marks a deepening and keeps him there, as if already their relationship is a living thing and he is already someone with whom she can get angry. She moves on to her other side and puts the pillow over her ear. But it’s useless. Somehow the river is louder when you cover your ears. It’s like the sea in shells. You hear it in your blood. I used try to escape it with headphones when I told Mam I couldn’t bear to hear the river running any more and for weeks she tried everything, taping the vent in the skylight, hanging chimes made of shells, bringing up Dad’s music and playing it loud, but even J.S. Bach had to pause sometime and between his Movements the river sang and in the end I stood in my nightie and opened the skylight and screamed at it, which is neither great for your reputation or stopping river noise.

Mary’s angry at him. Then she’s angry at herself for even thinking about him. And so in the bed they are joined. It’s not an ideal relationship, but it’s a start. I have the same thing with Vincent Cunningham, so I know. She tells herself to forget about him, but if there’s one sure way not to forget something it’s to say Forget That.

Why is her pillow so lumpy?

Why is the sheet so twisted around her legs?

Why, why, why is there no air in April?

They have a hell of a night together.

In the morning the birds are singing with that extra-demented loudness they have in spring in Clare, they’re all ADHD and they’ve got this urgent message they’re trying to deliver but because God’s a comedian they can only speak it in chirrup. Mary comes into the kitchen. Nan is there already. Since her husband died she can’t bear being in the bed and sleeps in the chair so she’s up before the birds, the bread loaves that were out upside down overnight are now being tapped on their backs before Marty Mungovan who was sweet on Nan from her dancing days comes to collect them.

‘Morning,’ Nan says to her daughter.

But Mary goes straight out the back door and across the haggard to the hen run. She lifts and pulls open the mesh-wire gate and the hens raise an excited clucking. The older ones see that she’s bringing no margarine tub of Layers Mash and turn away and the younger ones in terror run into the wire and poke their heads through it, for a moment scrabbling at the ground for propulsion going nowhere but squawking mad because they know something unusual is happening. Which is true, something has happened. She crosses the Run and stoops in to the House and from the wooden crate that has Satsumas inked into it and a bed of patted-down hay she takes six eggs.

She comes into the kitchen and starts cracking them straight away into a bowl.

Nan knows enough of the human heart not to pass comment.

The eggs get beaten. They get beaten big-time. They get salted and peppered. Then they get beaten some more.

Then they get abandoned. She just stops beating them mid-whisk and leaves them and goes out the back door again, this time not going into the haggard but out the pencil-gravel way where the grass grows up through it in wet April and makes a kind of slug-road into the garden. She goes out the gate and walks with her arms folded across her and her green cardigan pulled over but not buttoned. She never buttons it. There’s something in her can’t stand confinement. It’s a MacCarroll thing. She walks down the road and Marty Mungovan passes her in his van coming to collect the breads and gives her the nod and she just inclines her head slightly in briefest greeting. She hasn’t brushed her hair, she hasn’t done one thing of all the things she might have done in getting ready to go and meet her future husband.

Because right then she’s just curious, she wants to know, that’s all. And she marches down the road that runs parallel to the river and takes its curves from it until she gets to Murphy’s gate and for an instant she hesitates, just one moment, just one moment in which she might say to herself what the hell are you doing? and turn back, just one moment which flies away into the mad chirruping of the birds, then she climbs the gate.

She sees him right away. He’s there, in the same place, in the same pose, watching the river in the same way.

Just the fact of it, just the strangeness and the stillness and the solidity of him of whom she’d been thinking all night, takes her breath. She’s aware her heart jumps into the side of her throat. She’s aware the ground has a spongy spring to it and the sky is huge. He’s there again, standing, looking westward. He’s there. It’s like the French Lieutenant’s woman in the The French Lieutenant’s Woman only in reverse, and with the river instead of the sea, but there’s the same inevitability, the same sense of things just about to go bang.

What’s he doing there?

Mary hasn’t worked out the next step. She didn’t really expect him to be there and came half in the hope that his having vanished again would free her of thinking about him. But now she has to figure out what happens next. She’s crossing the field to the mucky track again and she’s got her arms tighter around her and her head lowered a bit now, but she’s thinking Has he been here all night? And in that there’s madness and attraction both. Right then she doesn’t have the words to explain it. It’s like Colette Mulvihill over in Kilbaha who left The Church and took up Leonard Cohen and when Father Tipp asked her why she just said Mystery, Father, which was a blow to him because the Church had spent fifty years taking the mystery out of it so that now uncaught criminals like Kieran Coyne and Maurice Crossan could become Eucharistic Ministers and the Hosts arrive in a blue van from Portlaoise that says Maguire Bros, Clergy Apparel & Supplies, All Religions, right on the side and Wash Me Please in finger-writing underneath.

Mystery, Father , was about right.

Mary walks along the track. She’s not looking at him. She won’t. But she’s fallen so far in Curiosity there’s no way she’s going to be able to go home again until she’s found out something. Her mind is pulling at the mystery, and it’s flying past River-stalker, Inspector of Riverbanks, Surveyor of Soils & Erosion, Fisher-scout, Salmon-spy, Pathfinder, Priest, but it never gets to Man at the End of Living, it never gets to Man Who has Come to Drown, because she’s not yet acquainted with anything Swain. She doesn’t know about Grandfather Absalom waiting in the candles for The Calling or the pole-vaulting or the Philosophy of Impossible Standard. She doesn’t know poets can have ash in the soul, or that after so much burning there comes a time when there’s nothing left but blowing away or phoenix-rising. She hasn’t read Eileen Simpson’s Poets in their Youth (Book 3,333, Picador, London) or John Berryman’s The Freedom of the Poet (Book 3,334, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) or Peter Ackroyd’s Blake (Book 3,340, Vintage, London), Paul Ferris’s Dylan Thomas (Book 3,341, Dial Press, New York), Paddy Kitchen’s Gerard Manley Hopkins (Book 3,342, Carcanet Press, London) or any of the others my father gathered together in a mad company under the slope of the skylight where once the fire smoked and the hose soaked them all. She doesn’t know that he has seen much of the world, but she feels it. She doesn’t know he has come back to Ireland carrying a caustic disappointment in himself, that he feels is this all there is? , that his life has amounted to nothing, that nothing has happened but Time, and that now he has walked across Ireland Swain-style, fishing the rivers his father described, and is that most dangerous of things, a man looking for a sign. No sign had been seen, until yesterday, when he came to that spot in the river and for no reason that can be explained fell into the conviction that he was meant to be there.