Niall Williams - History of the Rain

In the lower cabin which was once the Original House of the MacCarrolls and then became the Cowhouse and then the Carhouse there was a pale blue Ford Cortina. In the early evenings after the farming and before the light died Mam took the key and drove them west along the rim of Clare. Both of them favoured edges. They liked to follow the Shannon seaward, see the end of land on their left, and where current and tide met in choppy brown confluence. Their destination was, like Ken Kesey’s bus, Further. They went like escapees, Mam employing that driving style that was basically blind faith, speed and innocence, hurtling the car around bends, ignoring cracked wing mirrors, whipping of fuschia and sally, birds that shot up clamouring in their wake, hitting the brakes hard when they came around a corner into cows walking home.

I like to picture them, the blue Cortina coming along the green edge on Ordnance Survey Map 17, Shannon Estuary, one of many dog-eared and crinkled maps that for reasons obscure are all pressed between Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (Book 1,958, Penguin Classics, London), David Henry Thoreau’s Walden (Book 746, Oxford World Classics, Oxford) and Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (Book 1,304, Grove Press, New York). On the map there are four different tones of blue for the river, High Water Mark, Low Water Mark, and 5 and 10 Fathoms. I’ve looked at it a long time, the way the green of the land seems to reach out, even off the edge of the page, so that the most western point, Loop Head, doesn’t fit, and is in its own little box on the top. They go everywhere along the southern shore, different evenings to Labasheeda, Knock, Killimer, Cappa, into Kilrush and out again, to Moyasta and down left around Poulnasherry Bay, to Querrin and Doonaha, taking roads that end at a gate on the river, reversing, into Liscrona and Carrigaholt, down to Kilcreadaun Point where Virgil wants to go but the road won’t let him, on again, summer evenings all the way down to Kilcloher for the view there, back up again, into Kilbaha, and finally, racing the sunset to get to the white lighthouse at the Head itself where the river is become the foaming sea. There is no further.

On those drives Virgil felt light, felt illumined. He’d look at Mary and his heart would float. That was the kind of love it was, the kind that radiates, that begins in the eyes of another but soon has got into everything, the kind that makes the world seem better, everything become just that bit more marvellous. Maybe it was because he’d been at sea so long; maybe it was because he was realising how lost he had been and that now here real life was beginning; maybe it was because he was feeling rescued.

Virgil sat in the passenger seat, his eyes on the fields, the ascent and arc of birds, the glassy glints of the river, the broadening sky.

And he looked at things.

I know that sounds ridiculous, but there’s no other way to say it. My father could fall into a quiet, arms folded across himself, head turned, eyes so intently focused that you’d know, that’s all. We would anyway. Strangers might see him and think he’s away in himself , he’s lost in some contemplation, so still and deep would he get, but in fact he was not away at all. He was here in a more profound way than I have the skill to capture. My father looked at things the way I sometimes imagine Adam must have. Like they were just created, an endless stream of astonishments, like he’d never seen just this quality of light falling on just this kind of landscape, never noticed just how the wind got caught in the brushes of the spruce, the pulse of the river. Raptures could be little or large, could come one after the other in a torrent, or singly and separated by long dullness. For him life was a constant drama of seeing and blindness, but, when seeing, the world would suddenly seem to him laden. Charged is the word I found in Mrs Quinty’s class when we did Hopkins, and that’s a better way to say that in those moments I think the world to him was probably a kind of heaven.

He’d see in quiet, and then would come the release.

‘Here, stop. Here.’

Mary looks across at him.

‘We have to go down here.’

She bumps the car on to the ditch. Parking is not in her skillset. Virgil is already out the door. ‘Come on.’

She hurries after him. He reaches back and catches her hand. They cross a field, cattle coming slowly towards them as if drawn by a force.

‘Look, there.’

The sinking sun has fringed the clouds. Rays fall, visible, stair-rods of light extending, as if from an upside-down protractor pressed against the sky. The river is momentarily golden.

It lasts seconds. No more.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she says.

‘We shouldn’t miss these.’

‘No. We shouldn’t,’ she says, looking at him and trying to decide for the hundredth time if his eyes are blue like the sky or blue like the sea.

I’m guessing Mam knew right away this wasn’t a farmer. I’m guessing that if she wanted a farmer she could have chosen from a martful. But maybe she didn’t know he was a poet.

He didn’t know himself yet. He wasn’t thinking of poetry yet.

Having devoted himself to seeing as much of the world as he could, my father now employed the same devotion here. He did exactly what his father would have done. He threw himself into the work on the land. Straight off he demonstrated that he had a genius for making nails go crooked; also an expertise in bending one prong of the fork, blunting hayknives and breaking the handles of spades. Things just went wrong for him. He went out to clean a drain in the back meadow, hacked at the grass till he could see and then clambered down into the rushy sludge.

I, you will already have deducted, am inexpert in farming matters, but I do know that in our farm stones were gifted at finding their way into the very places where no stones should be, weeds were inspired in their choice of Mam’s flowerbeds, and black slugs the size of your fingers came from the river at night on the supposed invitation of our cabbages. Basically, at every moment our farm is trying to return to some former state where muck and rushes thrive. If you look away for one moment in summer your garden will be a jungle, one moment in winter it will be a lake. It’s from my mother that I have the stories of my father’s first attempts at farming. When I was younger and she told how hard it was I wondered if stones, weeds and slugs didn’t fall from the sky, if there wasn’t a sign on our door, or if the Reverend wasn’t somewhere up there pacing Up-jut across the heavens, spying us below, saying here, I’ll send this. This will try him .

Virgil stayed in the drain all day. He worked the spade blindly in the brown water, brought up slippery planes of muck he slathered on the bank so the stained grass along the meadow showed his progress. He thought nothing of spending an hour freeing a rock, two digging out the silted bottom. Why drains clog at all I am not sure. Why when the whole thing has been dug out and the water is flowing it just doesn’t stay that way I can’t say. I don’t know if it happens everywhere, if something there is that doesn’t love a drain — thank you, Robert Frost — or if Faha is a Special Case, if in fact it’s a Chosen Place where God is doing a sludge experiment he couldn’t do in Israel.

When the handle of the spade snapped he worked using just the head, rolling his sleeves but dipping beyond that depth, the rain coming in after a long time at sea and letting itself down on the back of the man stooped below the ground. The cows gathered and watched. In the late afternoon Mam came out in one of the oversized ESB all-weather coats everyone in Faha procured when they started building the power station and she told him he’d done enough for today. Down in the ditch he straightened into a dozen aches, his hair aboriginal with mud, face inexpertly painted with ditch-splash, eyes mascara’d. By rain and drain his clothes were soaked through.