Niall Williams - History of the Rain

I’m not an expert, but when a man finds Meaning in a woman it seems to me you know two things. One, you know you’re going Deep, and Two, you know this is the most high-risk kind of love there is.

For Mam the risk is already clear. She knows there will be no other Virgil Swain coming through Faha. She knows she has to stay there and take care of Nan because Mam has that good big heart of Spencer Tracy in her and she will never let you down. She’ll sacrifice whatever she has to. Some people are just that good, they have this soldier-saint part of them intact and it takes your breath because you keep forgetting human beings can sometimes be paragons. So she’s caught because she knows this is it. This is it . And despite every caution that the Central Council of the Faha Branch of the Irish Countrywomen Association might have offered, that a man not born in the parish, a man not born in the county, or even in The West, a man with no soil on his hands or cattle in his blood, would find it impossible to be happy here, Mam wants to believe he will love her enough to stay, and that once he does everything will be all right.

But she won’t ask him. She won’t go any further in the Book of Stratagems. There’s no summer dresses or lipstick or hairdos or perfume, no invitation to tea, no here’s a cake I baked or there’s a dance in Tubridy’s or I saw you fishing yesterday .

Nothing.

She waits and she suffers and he waits and he suffers, both of them like characters in a cliffhanger at the end of a chapter.

I’m an incurable romantic, according to Vincent Cunningham.

Incurable anyway, I said.

Then I told him that the Latin word for waiting is pretty much the same as suffering, and he went Wow, like I was the keeper of Cool Things and if he could he would have kissed my Knowledge.

My father started fishing. Right down by Shaughnessy’s he started. Mary saw him in the morning when she went to collect the eggs. She stalled in the pen, heard the softest whish wrinkling the air and turned to see his line floating its question mark over the river. ‘He’s fishing,’ she told the hens, who were not indifferent to the news because she spared a few eggs that day.

You and I know that Virgil Swain was not going anywhere. We know he had that same Swain certainty his father had in the candles in Oxford. This is what I am meant to do . And that was unshakeable iron in him.

Faith is the most peculiar thing. It’s Number One in human mysteries. Because how do you do it? Where do you learn it? For the Believers it doesn’t matter how outlandish or unlikely the thing you believe in, if you believe it, there’s no arguing. Pythagoras’s early life was spent as a cucumber. And after that he lived as a sardine. That’s in Heraclitus. That’s what he believed. Beside the east bank of the River Cong in Mayo was a Monks’ Fishing House and the monks laid a trap in the river so that when a salmon entered it a line was pulled and rang a little bell in the monks’ kitchen, and although there were strict laws forbidding any traps nobody ever stopped the monks because they knew the monks believed the salmon were Heaven-sent and even unbelievers don’t want to tax Heaven. Just in case. That’s in The Salmon in Ireland . Bridie Clohessy believes her weight is all water, Sean Conway believes the Germans are to blame for most things, Packy Nolan that it was the red M&Ms gave him the cancer. With faith there’s no arguing.

Virgil Swain believed this was the place he was meant to be. This was the place of which, when I imagine him lying fevered and delirious below decks in the West Indies, or landed in Cape Town and gone ashore with whoever were the real-life versions of Abraham Gray and John Hunter and Richard Joyce, he was dreaming.

It was not so much that it was Faha itself. It was this bend in the river.

River bends have their own potency. Ever since some hand wrote a river flows out of Eden rivers and Paradise are pretty much inseparable. If you’re reading this in Persian think Apirindaeza , in Hebrew Pardes . As far as I can make out there are rivers in every Paradise. Though not always fishermen. Bishop Epiphanius in 403 ad had an epiphany and decided Paradise had in fact two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, but whether these flowed into or out of Paradise was not clear and Augustine made this even more confusing by saying a river flowed out of Paradise and watered Eden, which led to serious problems because according to all maps of Paradise that meant the water had to flow upwards . A conundrum until John Milton solved it by explaining that paradisiacal water defies gravity. We are all looking forward to that.

So, for my father it was this bend in the river.

It was probably only the land from here to McInerney’s and Fisher’s Step, the water thick and wide and the feeling of imminence that the river is about to meet the sea.

So the truth is he didn’t fall in love either, he fell into Faith, which was onetime maybe the Champions League of Love until the sponsors pulled out and now it doesn’t get coverage any more. It’s still in poetry though. That’s where you find faith. I’ll get to that later.

Virgil Swain stayed and fished. He out-waited the length of time it took for Mary MacCarroll to defeat her doubts and start thinking that maybe he was The One. Maybe he wouldn’t be going away.

The first time Dad stepped inside this house he had a salmon with him.

It wasn’t as odd as it sounds. Mam had seen him catch it. She’d seen the non-catching first, the days he spent casting the line and catching a large amount of nothing so that in the village the story was Your Man had nothing on the end of his line, no bait (or hook according to Old Brouder), that he was escaped from somewhere, or was Simple, and was hoping the salmon would catch him.

Mam had seen him and knew he was fishing. She’d seen the way he went about it, the rhythmic rituals he had, the musclework of back and forearm, the interplay of rod and line, pulling and unreeling, that little freeing of shoulder he did before casting into what was above him. She’d seen the fishing going on for days, the actual vigil it was as he stood there, remarkable both for persistence and patience, and the sort of trancelike state it seemed you could get into when you were a man hooked into a river.

But she didn’t know Virgil was trying to catch his father.

She didn’t know that once he stood on the mucky bank at Shaughnessy’s and the hook went into the water he had to plant his feet to stop the tide of regret pulling him in. He knew he was on the threshold of real life, that real life was just behind him up in our house and that here was an Impossible something he was going to do. And now he was stricken by the urging of some kind of basic human need: he wanted to tell his father. He wanted to say Dad because he wasn’t sure he’d ever actually said that to Abraham when he was alive. Dad, I’ve found what I’m going to do. I’m going to do what you couldn’t do. I’m going to make happiness. And I’m going to make it here .

Abraham didn’t reply. But maybe he looked down and saw the candles burning in his son’s eyes because right then and there Virgil caught a salmon.

To you, Dear Reader, this may not seem a Major Plot Point. But to those of us versed in Swaindom, we know it was a blessing.

If you’re like Mona Boyce, who has the narrowest nose in the parish and is permanently engaged in the science of hairsplitting, you’ll say it was a sea trout. But I know it was a salmon.

Nan looked at him in the doorway. He was a jumble of angles. If he wasn’t cradling the salmon his arms would be too long. His hair and face were wet and his eyes glossed with a dangerous amount of feeling. ‘Mary!’ she called over her shoulder, not taking her eyes from him. ‘Mary!’