Niall Williams - History of the Rain

‘We’ll do it now,’ my father said.

‘What? No. That’s not. .’

But before he could finish his sentence my father had taken one of Ryan’s buckets and, slurp , dipped it in the river to clean it out, slurp , dipped it again, and was now carrying it slapping and brim-spilling back across the field towards the house.

Or so the mythology goes.

‘Virgil, no. I didn’t mean. There’s no need for. .’

‘We’ll do it now,’ my father said again. He was already past the priest, going the easier track home, and Father Tipp was already hurrying after, already wondering what the hell had happened, in the confusing cloud of his midges trying to figure out where in his strategy the error had occurred. ‘Stop! Wait a minute,’ he called, knowing that my father would not stop or wait a minute.

‘I won’t do it,’ the priest said.

‘Then I will.’

And he would. That was one thing Father Tipp said he knew. Everyone in the parish knew Virgil Swain enough by then to know that when he made a decision, no matter how ill-advised, mulish, in fact ass-backward as Seanie the Yank says, he stuck to it. So as Father Tipp came scampering after him he had to change tack, hurry through the broad headings of the Act and its Consequences: on the one hand the fact that this would mean the baptisms were done, on the other it would not be in the church; on the one hand he would be enlisting two more into the Faith, on the other this man had a bucket of river water. On the one hand so more or less did John. On the other-other, if word ever got to the Bishop.

‘I think I have holy water in the car.’

Whether my father was afraid that we would not survive until the priest returned from his holidays, whether he was saving us from an afterlife of wandering among the unblessed, had over-Dante-ed on the short fat green-backed edition of The Divine Comedy (Book 999, Modern Library, New York) that has M.P. Gallagher, Rome written on an unposted envelope inside, whether it was in compliance with Abraham’s thinking or in defiance of the Reverend’s, whether it came abruptly out of the fracture and loss of the poem, whether the poem itself was to be about river-birth and renewal and the priest’s question had been trigger for the outlandish fact of it, I can never decide.

When Father Tipp went to his car the plastic bottle of Holy Water was empty. He’d been over-liberal at Prendergast’s the day before. When he came in the front door to tell them he’d send to the Parochial House for more he came face to face with the chastening truth that there is a tide in things, for Ryan’s bucket was in the centre of the flagstone floor, my father was kneeling, cradling Aeney in his arms, and the waves of praying were just waiting for his blessing to dip us into the brimming water.

Nearly twenty years later, still in exile and sitting up here in the attic room beside the bed, that’s how Father Tipp told it. Lest I fear our baptism sub-standard in religious terms, he added that no sooner had he started proceedings than there was a general shuffling among the gathered witnesses pressed tight and pretty much steaming inside our kitchen. Everyone closed in around us, everyone wanted to see. It was as if our story was already being told and was moving the hearts of Faha, making people think These two will need help , for right then there was an opening of shirt buttons, a rummaging in handbags, in wallets and coat pockets, a general flurry of rooting about, and then, as the river water was being scooped from the bucket, into our swaddling on the kitchen floor came assorted Miraculous Medals, rosary beads, Memorial cards, brown and blue and green scapulars of various antiquity (and body odour), two Padre Pios, two Pope John Pauls, one Little Flower, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, Patron-of-the-Missions card, several (because we had been Lost & Found) Saint Anthonys, one Saint Teresa of Ávila, Patron of Headache Sufferers, and from the handbag of Margaret Crowe a sort of crouched-down Lionel Messi-looking Saint Francis of Assisi, all of them well-worn and used and in our first moments in this world falling around Aeney and I now like holy human rain.

My father used Aisling copybooks. He wrote in pencil. Like Robert Lowell (and Margaret Hennessy, who looked like she had been returned to Faha after abduction by aliens), he often put his head to one side, as if one ear was leaning towards a sound that was not yet in this world. He hummed. He also tapped. I was afraid of sleep. I lay in his lap, small as a sonnet, and just as difficult.

He sat and hummed. Then suddenly he leaned across and I was lost in the deep coarse smell of the river-fields in his jumper and heard, somewhere invisibly above, the soft rubbing sound of pencil on paper.

He leaned back, hummed what he had written. We rocked on.

Aeney had no jealousy in him. I think at first he didn’t know he was a twin. It is different for boys. Boys are born as masters of the universe, until a bigger master knocks them down. I cried; Aeney slept. I was picked up and carried out from where our cots were in Mam and Dad’s, taken up the steep stair that RLS would be delighted to know was called a Captain’s Ladder, on to the little landing and into the chill space that Before Conversion was then the attic and later Aeney’s and mine. Up here, spilled pool of light and stack of books, was my father’s pine table and chair. Up here by the bar-heater he wrote the first poems with me on his lap. When I woke in the mornings I was back in my cot, and felt, well, composed . My brother did not care. Even when later he discovered I could not sleep unless held, when he sometimes woke and looked across and his sister was vanished, he appeared unperturbed. Maybe he wasn’t that attached to me. Maybe he had a finely developed and fearless sense of the world to come, or had the unshakeable confidence of the first-born, that first landing in the plump arms of Nurse Dowling, which had informed him that things would be all right . The only fracture in this, the only inkling of otherwise was what only I knew, the way Aeney’s hand in sleep went to his sleeve or the label of his pillow so that he was always holding on to something and never adrift.

Each family functions in their own way, by rules reinvented daily. The strangeness of each of us is somehow accommodated so that there can be such a thing as family and we can all live for some time at least in the same house. Normal is what you know. In our family it was unremarkable that my father had no income, that he hummed above the ceiling, only went into a church when there was no Mass on, fished religiously, had a book permanently sticking out of his pocket so his pockets were always torn at the edges, or to himself sang undervoice and off-key what I didn’t know then was the Psalms. It was not curious that he liked jam with sausages, was no more odd than Nan sitting on Clare Champions and smoking up the chimney or Aeney’s craving for salt on everything, cornflakes, hot chocolate and cake. Nothing in your own family is unusual.

I think nothing of it on the morning the Tooth Fairy has come to be brought by my mother out in the not-quite-rain to find my father, and to find him waiting for a cow to calve while reading aloud. It’s the dirty white paperback of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (Book 1,112, Avon Books, New York) but back then I think it’s a story for the cows.

‘There she is!’ The book goes into his pocket. He kneels down to me. Always in happiness my father seemed on the point of tears. I thought it normal. I thought every adult must have these huge tides of emotion rising. Every adult must feel this wave of undeserving when they kneel down and see the marvel of their children.