Niall Williams - History of the Rain

Everything was already in place; that was the thing. If he opened a drawer in the dresser he’d find it crammed with what appeared to be rubbish — dried-out Crayola markers, worn-down stubby pencils, tangles of string, rubber bands, playing cards with the Seven of Diamonds and the Three of Spades missing, a single red battery, a round flat box of hard sweets long stuck together, a golfball, a tiny screwdriver that came in a Christmas Cracker, matchbooks, a yoyo, a mouth organ — things unremarkable except in the aftermath of death when they take on themselves a portion of haunting.

Where would he fit in this house?

The kettle began to boil. ‘Are you sure you won’t have tea?’

‘That’s not boiled. Leave it boil a while.’ She didn’t look up. The dough was surrendering. ‘What are you intending to do?’

‘To do?’

‘Here. For a living.’ With full forearm force, bang! she flung the dough down on to the floury table.

‘Well, there’s the land,’ Virgil said.

‘The land is bad. You’re not a farmer.’

‘I could learn.’

The kettle was at full steam now, an urgent plume racing to ten o’clock, but he didn’t lift it.

‘Do you know anything else?’ She didn’t look up. She gave the kneading the thumbs.

What did he know ?

He knew Ahab, he knew Mr Tulkinghorn, he knew Quentin Compson and Sebastian Flyte and Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Bovary and Alyosha Karamazov, he knew Latin Declensions and French Verbs, Hernán Cortés, Euclid, Knots, the Capitals of the World, how to parse a sentence, how to live on tinned food and powdered milk, he knew what the sun looked like in the eveningtime in December off Punta Arenas, how the wind off Cape Town carried the scent of sage in spring, he knew tides and tempests, he knew there was an island in Cuba called La Isla de la Juventud that bore exact resemblance to the geography of RLS’s Treasure Island, but Virgil Swain did not know anything he could do in the County Clare.

Nan worked the dough into a rough circle, and then with the base of her hand chopped a cross into the top. ‘The land it will have to be then,’ she said. She rubbed her hands together, balling crumbs she slapped off her palms. ‘I’ll have tea, so.’ She drew on the last of the cigarette, turned on the tap and doused the ash, looked out the window at the haggard and the haybarn with the three panels hanging loose. ‘If you’re making it.’

Irish people hate to lose face. That’s Number One dictum. That’s why the Bust was what Kevin Connors called an unholy show, and why the whole nation was mortified at the carry-on of the bankers and developers. Not so much because it happened, but because everyone in the world now knew that it had happened and we were once again Those Irish. We’ll bear anything in the privacy of our own homes, as long as the world doesn’t have to know.

How Public, like a frog, is dear Emily’s version (Book 2,500, Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems , Faber & Faber, London).

So, right then and there, Nan decided that if Virgil Swain was going to be a farmer he wasn’t going to be one that people would laugh at.

She opened the kitchen door, shouted, ‘Mary, come get your tea!’ and told Virgil, ‘Come with me.’

They went out on the acres, Nan in cuff-down wellies and hooded green army coat, Virgil in a too-long woollen jumper under the leather jacket and the low fishing boots that were already drinking mud before they crossed the Fort Field. They went in sinking Suck Mode, each step announcing itself, a kind of spluck-splosh procession that scattered the blackbirds back up into the rain and down into the next field, Nan travelling faster because she knew how to do the swaying-hip swing, dip and recover that people here know is how you walk these wet river fields, which means you don’t step down you sort of roll across them, which is great for waterland walking but maybe the reason the parish is Number One in Clare for hip replacements. She spoke curtly as she went. ‘The drain on the western corner needs clearing every month.’ It looked like it hadn’t been cleared in years. ‘A wet spring and you can’t travel this field till August.’ It had several silver ponds in it. ‘This is The Big Meadow.’ ‘This is the Small Meadow. My husband cut it by hand.’ She took him across every inch of the land in which we grew muck puddles, rushes and occasional grass. He didn’t say anything. They climbed the wall into Lower Meadow, because the gate was no longer attached to the pier, was tied with twine and looped with crazy brambles. He offered her his hand but she didn’t take it, stepped in front of him and crossed with goat nimbleness, turned to look back when she heard the clatter of falling stones as he came after. In the Bog Meadow she showed him the four cows. She called ‘Hup!’ to them on the top of the stile, maybe to alert them that here was the new farmer, to have them do that whole-body-shiver thing horses do and present their best profiles. But whether from the mesmerism of the rain, the dullness of having several stomachs full of twisted mulch or the fact they were wearing brown-stockings of mud to their hocks, the cows were in cow stupor and didn’t move. ‘That’s our stock,’ Nan said.

Virgil looked at them. He had no clue what to say. The rain that was not called rain was falling on both of them. The river was running the way it is always running to get away and there was a little edgy breeze coming across from McInerney’s to remind you the back of your neck was wet. ‘Beautiful,’ he said.

Now that was not what Nan expected. She had no answer for that. She looked at him.

But Virgil was already away in the Philosophy of Impossible Standard. In a way, it helped that the land was as bad as it was. It meant that here he would not only have to Out-Wiltshire Wiltshire he would also have to Out-Ashcroft Ashcroft. So the effect was not to discourage him, it was the contrary. I may be the only one who thinks that here in Muck-and-Drizzle land is the least-like-paradise place there is in the whole country, but even so you’d have to say it was going to take dreaming.

‘That’s all of it,’ Nan said, with the kind of low voice people use at the end of a long confession when everything terrible has been told. ‘We’ll go back so. Mary will be up.’

‘I’ll stay here. I’ll be back in a while.’

‘There’s no need.’

‘I know. But I’d like to.’

His eyes were dangerous. That’s what Nan must have thought. They had that look that told you they were seeing more than you were.

‘If you’re sure.’ She didn’t look at his eyes.

‘I’m sure.’

‘Right so.’

She hip-swung her way back across the fields. When she came in to the questions in her daughter’s expression in the kitchen, she said, ‘He wants to stay out.’ And in a single moment the two of them shared a look that said those things in silent mother-daughter language that would take a hundred books and more years to tell.

After the hens and the ware and the ashes and the peeling, Mary went out to find him. She was afraid his heart was cracked. She was afraid the reality of the place would have overwhelmed him, that she’d find him under a dripping hedgerow in a distant corner ready to announce they couldn’t make a life there. Then she saw him. He was on the far edge of the Bog Meadow inside a silver nimbus.

It was a trick of the light. Wanting to make his first impression on that landscape he had come upon a length of barbed wire buried in the grass. He’d started to pull it up and found that time and nature had firm holds. But he’d persisted in the way only my father could. The hopeless was his domain. He just kept at it. Barbs bloodied his fingers. One tore a long meandering scar on the back of his hand that years later Aeney and I said was like a river and my father said which river and we said the River Virgil. At last the grass made a resentful ripping and surrendered the wire. He’d worked his way along it then, finding the forgotten bounds, lifting the rotted sticks that were once the fence posts. But as he did, the wire freed from tension began to coil and tangle behind him. It was the way God played with my father. Even a small success was mercilessly pursued by failure. He’d gone back to try and straighten out the wire and by the time my mother saw him he was standing inside it, the coil shimmering glints in the rainlight and my father this soaked figure laughing in the trap of the practical.