Niall Williams - History of the Rain

Perhaps because my father had discovered that, despite the weather, there was some profound affinity between the Deep South, Latin America, and the County Clare, on his shelves in various editions are almost all of what Professor Martin called the dangerously hypnotic novels of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez. Dickens is the only other whose work is so present. Prompted perhaps by his own name, Virgil liked the epic quality, the messiness of generations, the multitude of figures drifting in and out and the certainty that time was not a straight line. Ever since Ashcroft he liked to be lost in a book. It was firstly the Elsewhere thing. It was the pull of other worlds that, though he would jab Up-Jut at me for saying so, went all the way back to The Reverend. Old Absalom, Old Shave-Shadow, was the forerunner because there was something in a Swain that was drawn out of this world, something that made them Look Up or Out or Over and which at its best was somewhere between pole-vaulting salmon-sense and Robert Louis Stevenson Syndrome and at its worst resulted in the Reverend’s ignoring wife and child to go graveyard-walking under starlight and becoming addicted to beeswax candles.

But it was also nourishment , a thing I only came to understand later.

So yes, Virgil liked to be lost in a book, and he read with the smallest rocking of his upper body, a kind of sea-sway that if you listened hard because you were laying in his lap and were supposed to be asleep was accompanied by the thinnest murmuring. I was already The Twin Who Doesn’t Sleep (which, Dear Reader, is an out-and-out lie. I did sleep, in fact, slept sweetly and soundly, beautifully actually, but only when held, which is not weird but perfectly sensible and if you don’t believe me you haven’t read your Hamlet and should sit in a corner and do some deeper thinking about the Undiscovered Country then you too will want to be held while sleeping. So, please ) so I was on his lap and could hear the steady sound of his reading. It’s not that he mouthed the words. It’s that they sort of hummed in him. It’s like there was a current or a pulse in the page and when his eyes connected to it he just made this low low thrum. John Banville would know the word for it, I don’t. I only know the feeling, and that was comforting. I lay in his lap and he read and we sailed off elsewhere. Dad and I went up the Mississippi, to Yoknapatawpha County, through the thick yellow fog that hung over the Thames or in through those dense steamy banana plantations all the way to Macondo. We went in the large lumpy blanket-covered Sugan boat-chair that was placed in by the Stanley range where our cribs were put to keep us warm and where Aeney slept like the Pope Nan said but I cried and was lifted, swaddled in West Clare Tropic, sucked my tiny thumb and was ready for departure.

I fell asleep in strange places. Dear Emily said there is no frigate like a book to take us away, and as I told Vincent Cunningham even though Emily couldn’t put a straight parting in her own hair and had a face that Never Saw the Sun she was World’s Number One Explorer of the Great Indoors, and in that too she was right. Dad and I went some places, and because some things, most things in my experience, are more vivid when you haven’t seen them, I know Mississippi better than Moyasta.

What none of us realised and what at first of course Virgil didn’t realise either was that the library he was building would in fact become a working tool, a consultancy, and that it was leading somewhere.

He had no intention of writing.

He loved reading, that was all. And he read books that he thought so far beyond anything that he himself could dream of achieving that any thought of writing instantly evaporated into the certainty of failure.

How could you even start? Read Dickens, read Dostoevsky. Read Thomas Hardy. Read any page in any story by Chekhov, and any reasonable person would go ah lads , put down their pencil and walk away.

But Swains and Reasonableness, you already know, are not best acquainted. And anyway the certainty of failure was never a Swain deterrent. (See: Pole-vaulting.) Besides, I think there was already something in my father that wanted to aspire . It was pre-set in the plot, and only waiting for the day when the brimming would reach the point of spilling.

Aeney and I were that day.

First he went outside. He went out through the nods and mumbles, the drizzle-heads, the Well-Dones and the Good-Mans, marched down to the river which was sort of his version of church and tramped along at Reverend-pace, wordless and grave and impossibly full, rain veils billowing the way old Richard Kirwin tried to convince me once was how angels appear in Ireland, between sky and earth this vaporous traffic.

Virgil couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe that we were born, that he was a father. It’s not that he was ignorant of biology, or that for months my mother hadn’t carried us with MacCarroll aplomb. She had. The whole parish knew that at least one of us was coming, and though our sex was polled variously, Mam carrying-to-the-front, to-the-side, to-the-other-side, depending on personal bias, political affiliation and glasses prescription, there was never a doubt that Virgil was about to be a father. But still our arrival was a shock. The moment we appeared in the kitchen, Aeney pink, shining and wondrous, I hairy, Virgil’s life was changed. And he knew it. It was risen up. That’s the part you have to understand. I suppose it may be so in all fathers, I don’t know. It was a sort of epiphany, Ecstasy even, which as far as I can tell has more or less disappeared out of life now ever since the Church went wonky and sport took over the terrain of Glory. But if you cross your Swain & Salmon lore, add in a little of the lonely depths of Virgil when he was a boy, you’ll come to it.

At the plashy bend just past Ryan’s wet meadow, there where they have the bockety homemade sort-of-jetty where for reasons private the Ryans keep loops of baler twine, rope and buckets, he stopped, turned his face to the sky. He had to breathe. Joy was a huge balloon inflating in his chest. Or a white flame scorching it. Or a dove rising. I wish I was a poet.

Point was, he couldn’t contain it.

He was a father . And in the same instant, by the curious calculus of the heart, he missed his own father. It was not Abraham himself but a better, kinder interpretation, an Abraham that had not existed except as possibility, but who now took over the role as in my father was proven the truths the New Testament is more humane than the Old and the world looks joyous to the joyful.

He wanted to shout out. He wanted to wave his hands in the air, to halleluiah, do a few steps, go Big Gesture, the way Burt Lancaster does in the video of The Rainmaker which Mrs Quinty gave me and which I can’t give back because the machine ate the tape when Burt went spittle-spraying and just a tinsy-winsy little bit Over the Top.

None of which, thank the Lord, Brothers and Sisters, Virgil actually did. What he did was stand beside the river.

That’s where he found the rhythm.

There were no words at first. At first there was a kind of beat and hum that was in his blood or in the river and he discovered now somewhere in his inner ear, a pulsing of its own, a kind of pre-language that at first he wasn’t even aware he was sounding. It was release. It was where the brimming spilled, in sound. To say he hummed is not right. Because you’ll suppose a tune or tunefulness and there was none, just a dull droning inside him. He went up and down the riverbank. He went the way Michael Moran the Diviner goes when he’s going round and round a source, head bent and almost holy, shoulders stiff, serious neck-crane like Simon the Cross-carrier, wispy hairs on the back of his neck upright and all of him attentive to an invisible elsewhere.