Niall Williams - History of the Rain

I think she knew then he wasn’t giving up.

‘You look drowned,’ she said.

That evening Virgil went out after dinner to check on the cows. That, he knew, was an important part of farming. Just before darkness, Check on the Cows. If you’re getting some idea of my father you’ll already know he had no idea what to check for except their actual presence. If they were standing he pretty much thought they were okay. If they were lying down he’d Hup! a few times to get them to stand and then walk away, leaving the same ladies wondering why they were gotten up and wearing the cow expression of People are Puzzling. That first evening, while Mam and Nan did the dishes, he went across the fields. Darkness was falling. He was used to sea-dark which is darker than any. What he wasn’t used to was the sense of things flying invisibly above him. He had the impression the air was full of nightblack cloths, shreds, rags, falling out of the heavens. But not landing. With impossible swiftness one swooped, arced, vanished, and another came. He ducked, raised his hand over his head, and then realised the air was thronged with bats.

I know them. I’ve seen their grandchildren. They go home into this tiny hole in the angle of the eaves at McInerney’s. More come out than go in, which has always been true of McInerney’s house. I’ve grown up in the country, bats don’t frighten me. But Virgil’s blood was chilled, as if bats were a portent, as if he was being reminded right then paradise isn’t going to be easy, there’s darkness in the world, and instead of coming back across the field he clambered out over the crooked gate on to McInerney’s road.

The gravel underfoot was helpful. The bats didn’t overfly the road. He walked between the high shoulders of the wild fuchsia.

Then he saw the torches.

In the wide deep dark we have in Faha a single torch can be seen a long way. These were dozens. They were a lighted river, winding out from the village, thinning in places, thickening in others, but all coming towards our house.

Virgil’s first thought was guilt. Father Tipp says the two signs of saints are guilt for no reason and being caught in a constant tide of undeserving. I think my father thought he deserved what was coming. I think he knew he had taken the most beautiful girl in the parish and so his first thought was They are coming for me .

He’d been away, remember. He’d been on the sea with his imagination a long time, and in that imagination this was the kind of thing that happened in William Faulkner, they came with torches. They let their disapproval out in fire. They were going to come and burn down our house.

But this was not a few men.

This was everyone. The whole parish was on its way.

He stood in the road. That’s the thing that gets me in this story. That’s the thing that surprises me when I force Tommy Devlin to tell it. Virgil just stood in the road. He didn’t come running to tell Mam and Nan, didn’t rush in, bolt the door, push the table up against it cowboy-style and say Injuns . He stood in the road and waited and that river of lights kept coming.

When the river turned the corner near Murphy’s he saw it was not made of men. They were figures out of phantasm, Tommy says. He enjoys that word. Phantasm . Some had cone heads and misshapen bodies. Some had masks and were huge tall women with dresses that couldn’t button over bosoms. Some were white and mountain-shaped, a sheet thrown over them, others in sacks and straw, their faces blackened. There was not a single recognisable human being.

When the river turned the corner near Murphy’s it saw Virgil Swain.

And it stopped.

To stop a river that long is not easy, and so all the way back along it there was jostling and pushing and a great murmuring that rose and went along the length. The murmur didn’t materialise into language proper. But there was a chorus of shshshshshshshshshsh and then Virgil was standing a hundred yards from our house face to face with a figure whose head was a wicker cone that rose to eight feet.

‘Turn back,’ my father said. He said it just the way Spencer Tracy would have, because, although outnumbered by three hundred and twenty-seven to one, he wasn’t going to let them come burn down the house.

Coney shook his head. The river wouldn’t turn back but wouldn’t say why either. Cone Head didn’t want to give himself away. That was the bit that made it difficult. He shook the cone more eloquently. The whole front row of cone-heads shook theirs. There was a whole lot of shaking going on.

‘Turn back!’ my father shouted out over the entire river, which was swelling and thickening now at the headwaters. Masked figures were pressing forward to see what was happening.

‘Turn back. Go home!’

There was more head-shaking, gestures of confusion and refusal. But still none would speak.

And I suppose it might have remained a stand-off but for Mam calling ‘Virgil!’ in this hard whisper behind him. ‘Virgil!’ He turned to look back at her and she was waving frantically for him to come to her. ‘They’re our bacochs ,’ she said. ‘Straw Boys. They’re here to celebrate our wedding.’

Virgil looked at the river that was made of the men and women of the entire parish in what varied ingenious and bizarre disguises they could manage, and he saw that some were carrying not weapons but fiddles and bodhráns and he took a step backwards, and then another, and Mary put her hands over her mouth to hold the laughter but it was giggling up in her eyes and she took his hand and they ran the last of the way back along the road and in the gate and were in the house just moments before the river poured in after them.

Are you there?

Days like this when I wake and feel more tired than I did when I went to sleep I can’t quite believe in you.

Dear Reader, are you a figment?

It’s hard to live on hope. Living on hope you get thin and tired. Hope pares you away from the inside. You’re all the time living in the future. In the future things will be better, you hope, and you’ll feel better and you won’t wake up feeling like someone has been taking the life out of you drip by drip while you slept. The whole country is living in the future now. We’re in this Terrible Time but in the future we’ll be all right again. We just have to keep hoping. But Moira Colpoys got first-class honours in her Social Science degree and Mrs Quinty says she sent out a hundred CVs in Dublin, every and any kind of job, got only one reply and when she went to the interview there were three hundred people and two hundred of them had been working for ten years and so yesterday Mr and Mrs Colpoys took her to Shannon and by now she’s arriving in Perth and tomorrow she’ll start looking to find the Davorens who she doesn’t really know but they’re from the parish and went out there last year and got a start in a tyre factory. The Colpoys are both in their sixties and she’s their only. Mrs Quinty says when Mr and Mrs Colpoys stopped into Maguire’s for petrol and milk on the way back they looked ten years older. They’re just going to hope things improve, Mrs Quinty says. They have that big damp old house they rattle around in, the one that looks like a tall grey shell and was my first model for Miss Havisham’s Satis House and has already been robbed twice since the Bust, and in there they’ll be, wearing three pairs of socks and sitting close to the fire, and hoping.

To have hope you have to have faith. That’s the crazy bit. You have to believe things could get better. You have no idea how exactly, but somehow. It’s a blindness thing, faith. But I seem to see too much. I lie here in the boat-bed when I wake up. I’m supposed to call Mam right away so she’ll come and pull open the curtains and use her best cheery voice to banish any gloom, but some days I don’t. I wake and feel the exhaustion of morning. I wonder where I go from here, and how any going could possibly happen, and look across the room at all the books and I wonder if maybe I am doing what I set out to do, if maybe I am finding my father.