Niall Williams: History of the Rain

‘They were my father’s. I’m going to read them all before I die.’

Mrs Quinty doesn’t approve of any mention of dying. From her sleeve she takes the handkerchief and applies it with a light brushing to beneath her nose where the deadly word may be lingering. She catches what must once have been her lower lip in her top teeth. There is a little pinking, a flush of feeling that the powder on her cheeks cannot camouflage. She looks at the wild stacks, the ones that rise behind the others, so it seems we are in a sea and there are waves of books coming towards the boat-bed and somewhere in there my father has gone.

She doesn’t quite know what to say.

‘I don’t quite know what to say,’ she says.

‘That’s all right, Mrs Quinty.’

Against the cresting of emotion she tightens herself a bit more. She pulls in her narrow shoulders and presses her knees together and she actually seems to go in a little. I am sorry for upsetting her, and allow a time when we both just sit here, me in the bed and she beside it, and we let the sounds of the rain take the conversation away.

‘Well now,’ Mrs Quinty says, giving herself a little tug. ‘That is a lot of rain.’

And neither of us speaks again for some moments, we just sit up here in this sky-room flowing with rain. Then I turn to Mrs Quinty and nod towards the books that all smell of fire and rain and I tell her, ‘I am going to read them all because that is where I will find him.’

I left my boy-blur in the air.

Always, you’ll be glad to know, from his vaults Grandfather landed; but always with an unsayable disappointment.

He excelled at the school of Mr Tupping and so was quickly moved to another. The Standard rose. He was moved ahead a year, and still excelled. He came home on holidays with glowing reports but the Reverend was in his church or out seeking the few roads in Wiltshire he hadn’t foot-stamped yet. The Philosophy allows for only one result: we fail the Standard. We suck small hard-boiled stones of disappointment in everything. The Swain face is narrow and, in the case of my aunts, seems to chew its own cheeks.

Abraham went to Oxford to Prepare for Life, which was the Reverend’s term for what Abraham was to do while waiting to get The Call. He was to go up to Oxford and read Classics — which were not in fact the red hard-covered James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (Book 7, Regent Classics, Somerset), the fat full water-swollen Oliver Twist (Book 12, Penguin Classics, London) that has come unglued at Chapter the Forty-Fifth, ‘Fatal Consequences’, and smells amazingly like toast, or even Tolstoy’s Master and Man (Book 745, Everyman edition, New York) which belonged once to someone who left no further mark on this world other than the peculiarly rigid handwriting with which he wrote belongs to Tobias Greaves on the flyleaf of that stiff paperback. It turns out that Classics meant none of these but a lot of Greek and Latin in slim matching volumes in red or green hardcovers with glossy cream pages intent on sticking together and sealing themselves for good.

Read and wait; that was the plan.

God had a good few clients in those days and He hadn’t had anyone invent mobiles or texting yet so it took time to get around to calling them each individually at whatever they were doing, so you just had to wait. The Vocation would come in due course; the Reverend was sure. Abraham was going into the Ministry. After all, Soul-polishing was the family business.

So my grandfather waited. He read his load of Latin. He found one of the venerable poles they had there in Oxford and with it he reached New Heights.

You’d think that with him being so often that bit nearer the sky, and having that big-hint name, Abraham , he’d have gotten The Call right away. It was like he was knocking at the door. I suppose God might have thought it was a bit forward of him. He might have thought Abraham had a case of the Mickey Nolans who Nan says thinks three fingers of hair gel and pointy shoes makes him The Chosen One. Ever since it worked on Pauline Frawley, hoisting her skirt up four inches in the Ladies in Ryan’s before going out to shake her altogether in front of him to TJ Mooney’s version of Neil Diamond, he’s convinced he’s God’s Gift.

Well, anyway, turns out God had enough gifts right then, and didn’t have any great need for Abraham Swain. There was Grandfather sitting in the library all morning reading his lyric verse in Latin, his Catullus and Horace and getting on first-name basis with the Hendecasyllabic, the Lesser and Greater Asclepiad, the Glyconic, those boys, and in the late afternoon vaulting himself like an offering up against the damp skies of Oxford, as if he was shouting Helloooo Lord .

But no, The Call didn’t come. The Almighty Fisher wasn’t fishing.

I suppose the son of a different Reverend might have faked it, might have gone home and said yes Dad, He hooked me Wednesday , but my grandfather was a Swain, and he expected perfectly clear and personal communication because the whole Philosophy is based on the notion that one thing alone is for certain: God meets the Standard.

When He calls you you’re Called.

And so my grandfather couldn’t lie. He thought maybe The Call would come in a church and so he spent a fair bit of time in the evening candles. And from his kneeling intensity some soul-absorption must have happened, genetically unmodified, because our family has paid a small fortune to chandeliers Rathbone & Sons, Dublin, and we have the only house in Faha whose curtains smell of candle wax.

(I thought I should call our village something else. I spent a whole week writing names in the back pages of an Aisling copy. Musical ones like Shreen, Glaun, Sheeda, mysterious ones like Scrapul, meaningful ones like Easky, which is fishy, or Killbeg, which is basically Small Church. I was going to use Lisnabrawshkeen which is the village in the skinny white paperback of The Poor Mouth (Book 980, Flann O’Brien, Seaver Books, New York) and has the opening line ‘I am noting down the matters which are in this document because the next life is approaching me swiftly’ but every time I said Lisnabrawshkeen I felt I was spraying a little speech impediment at the reader. Lisnabrawshkeen . I was afraid of using Faha because if these pages get out in the world there’ll be right roolaboola, not because of scandal, not because of outrage, but because everyone will try to find out if they’re In It. In these parts to be in a book is still something.

‘Will I get a mention?’ Father Tipp asked me, sitting in beside the bed, tugging both knees of his trousers to protect the crease and, in the Good Cause of Less Ironing, giving display to the scariest three inches of white shin you ever saw. That priest is a lovely man, but his skin is seriously white .

To be Left Out of the Narrative is catastrophe altogether.

What did you do to her to be Left Out? I can imagine the long faces, like the man in Pickwick who found fly buttons in his sausage.

Irish people will read anything as long as it’s about them. That’s what I think. We are our own greatest subject and though we’ve gone and looked elsewhere about the world we have found that there are just no people, no subject as fascinating as We Ourselves. We are simply amazing. So, even while I’m writing these words in my copy, there’s a whole throng, Allens Barrys Breens Considines Cartys Corrys Dooleys Dempseys Dunnes Egans Flynns Finucanes Hayes Hogans and — don’t even begin the Macs and Os — all angling over my shoulder in the bed here to see if they’re In.

The Ark.

Sit back. Leave room. If I live I’ll get to you all.)