Niall Williams - History of the Rain

‘We’d beat the Brits anyway,’ Packy said. Then, after a time, he added, ‘Of course they’d have Shakespeare.’

And after another while: ‘And Charles Dickens.’

And after another while: ‘And Harry Potter.’

The Consultant says we need to take a more aggressive approach. He says the Stage of Monitoring is over. I will need to stay for an extended period. He prefers Dublin to Galway but the choice is ours. There will be two stages of treatment, remission induction therapy and post-remission therapy. I will need a venous access device, he says. Interferon-Alpha has to be injected daily. The side effects may be fevers, chills, muscle aches, bone pains, headaches, concentration lapses, fatigue, nausea and vomiting.

But he is very positive. Very.

We need to go home and prepare ourselves. He’ll see me in a couple of weeks’ time.

Then we’ll start to turn back the tide on this thing, he says.

Astonishingly, after sex my mother did not become pregnant. She may have been the only woman in Ireland not to. At that time women got pregnant by wearing short skirts and high heels. High heels were notorious for it. Kilrush was virtually all high-heel shoe shops.

That first year the whole parish was waiting for Aeney and me to show up. The women in the Women’s Aisle, convinced that the real reason Mary had married The Stranger was that she was already Expecting, were chancing sidelong glances during the Consent-creation as Margaret Crowe calls it to see if there was a curve like a river bend coming in my mother’s wool coat. The men in the Men’s Aisle were intentionally looking away, because men’s dreams die with slow stubborn reluctance and denial is a strong suit in these parts; She-isn’t-married, she-isn’t-married running like a bass line in low hum into the candle vapours.

Aeney and I were still out at sea.

In the meantime my father’s farming went poorly. Our cattle were unique in being able to eat grass and get thinner. They added to this a propensity for drowning. One drowned is bad luck, two is the devil himself, three is God.

But God (or in Freudian, Abraham) wasn’t going to beat Virgil. My father took every setback as a trial, doubled the lines of wire, re-staked the fence, then made a double perimeter along the river when he came out one morning to see a whole portion of it, posts and wire both, had been pressed forward into the water. The following night he camped out in the field. He sat hunkered in a greatcoat in the rain, peering through the dark for the ghost-shapes of the cattle, listening inside the running of the river for the approach of hooves. He would not be defeated. Not another beast would drown even if it meant he had to camp there every night. When at last he saw the bruise of dark upon dark that was a cow coming to the fence he stood and waved his arms wildly and hallooed. The cow jolted out of its cow-dream and looked at him like he was the one was mad.

‘Back! Go on! Back! Hup! Hup!’

The old cow didn’t move, so determined was she in drowning.

Virgil had not thought to bring a stick.

‘Hup! Go on! Hup!’

Still she stood there, her eyes wilding a bit looking past him at the river and puzzling on why he was not letting her pass. She swung a half-step around to see if that would placate him.

It didn’t. Virgil smacked his hand on her backside, ‘Hup!’, and in surprise she kicked out both hind legs, a not undainty lift and back-flick that caught him on the shin and buckled him. He was lying on the ground beside the wire before his brain had time to tell him she had broken his tibia.

The cow still had her backside to him. Now others of the herd approached through the dark.

Were they all come to drown? He grasped on to his shin with both hands, pressing, as if he could squeeze the parts together, but the pressure only shot the pain deeper. He roared out. And maybe because the cattle knew the sound of pain or because they had been distracted on their way into the river, or because cows can’t keep two thoughts in their head at the same time, they stopped. They stood and watched him. After a while one of them got the idea there was maybe sweeter grass over in the far corner where she had been an hour earlier and where there certainly was not but she went anyway and the others in cow fashion followed and that night none drowned.

My father crawled back across the field. He banged on the back door because he could not stand to get the latch.

The following afternoon, when Virgil’s leg was set and he was seated in two chairs inside the window, Jimmy Mac called in to see him. He listened to the full account of our cattle that were bent on drowning. Then he nodded slowly, scratched at the starter beard he always wore except on Sundays. ‘It wouldn’t be,’ he said, ‘because they’re looking for water to drink, would it?’

My father told that story. Like all the stories he told it was against himself. He was never the hero, and from this I suppose we were to learn a kind of grace, if grace is the condition of bearing outrageous defeat.

One year he decided to put the Big Meadow in potatoes. I think that’s how you say it, to put it in potatoes. The principle was simple. You bought the seed potatoes, you opened the drills, popped in the seeds, closed them again. For each seed you had bought there would be a minimum tenfold yield. Maybe twentyfold if the year came good. Tommy Murphy had a Cork cousin with a harrow. The cousin had moved to Clare and was only just making the adjustment. He came and stood on the wall and looked over into the field. ‘There’ll be a few stones,’ he said. ‘They’ll need picking.’

Turns out he had the Cork mastery of understatement. Who knew one field could harbour so many stones? If they were laid out end-on-end there would be no field. If you were of an Old Testament bent like Matthew Bailey you’d suppose the stones rained each night from the sky. Maybe they did. Or maybe every farmer in the parish had already dug out their stones years ago and dumped them in our fields when the MacCarrolls were wistfully watching the Atlantic and sucking seaweed. It turns out we had a world-class collection. There were top stones, mid-stones, deep stones. Then there were rocks.

Virgil gave his back to them. The skin of the tops of his fingers too, the joints of both thumbs, the exterior knuckles of both hands, the balls of his knees. He’d be out before the birds in the March morning, stamping heat into his wellingtons, letting himself out the back door, breath hawing, ear-tips freezing as he crossed up over the opened field to the top corner where he sank to his knees, having decided kneeling was a better method than bending. He scrabbled at the ground, picked out stones, tossed them towards the barrow, dawn rising to the hard mournful clack clack that startled the magpies until it became habitual and they came and took the worms that had risen without realising what the birds knew, that men opened ground in Spring and potatoes went in around St Patrick’s Day.

What does a man think of when he’s all day on his knees in a field beside the river? I have no idea. I suppose it would have occurred to some that maybe the field was unsuitable. But like me, in matters farming my father was an innocent, and so I’m guessing he just supposed this was what it meant to work the land. If you’re a Latin reader, take a break here, have a read of Virgil’s Georgics , written about 30 bc, and you’ll see that Virgil had his troubles with farming too. But he didn’t have our stones. On our farm there were always too many stones.

My father filled a barrow to the brim and shortly discovered he had invented a new ache, straightening. He went to hoist the barrow handles, and had a blinding insight out of Archimedes: stones were heavy, ground was soft. He couldn’t push it. The wheel sank.