Niall Williams - History of the Rain

They kept coming.

There may have been a schedule nailed up on our front door.

The black-and-white Frank Morgan who played Professor Marvel then The Gatekeeper, The Carriage Driver, The Guard and finally the Wizard of Oz looked in the open window and said: ‘I just dropped by because I heard the little girl got caught in the big —’

Sorry. Fecund.

After a first general enquiry about my health, conversations ran over and back above me, unbounded. A universal truth is that in the company of an ill person people speak of illness. Hereabouts Illness-tennis is played by masters. No sooner did someone serve a burst gall bladder — A Tony Lyons in Upper Feeard, cousin to Eileen who was a McDermott and had the Hospital Bug — than they got a backhand pancreatic cancer, with topspin — Sean O’Grady of the O’Gradys beyond in Bealaha, not the one who was married to the one of the Kerry Spillanes who had the red hair and went off with the Latvian, the other one, who had the arm after the accident, was going out for it must have been on to ten years with that wonderful Marie of the O’Learys, had already survived a family so numerous that two of them were named Michael, and the father who went into Crotty’s pub in Kilrush and woke up in Paddington, him.

‘Is that right?’

‘That’s right.’

The true masters were all women. From what I could tell, Bless-us-and-save-us, poor man generally signalled the end of a set.

The men, because of their higher nature Vincent Cunningham says, were generally more squeamish, spoke of matters National, Meteorological and Agricultural, from which I learned that on Clare FM Saddam said Green Shoots of Recovery had been seen, to which Jimmy Mac added, coming out of his own backside, that the rain was biblical and had just officially Gone Beyond a Joke, that Father Tipp was going to say a Mass for Dry Weather, and that Nolan’s bull had sore back feet and so, much as he wanted to, he couldn’t incline himself to Do the Business.

But before they left, all of them, one way or another, told me that I would be grand just grand, you wait and see ; some undercut their own statements of confidence, or supplied the grounds for it, by adding they would be lighting candles and praying for me.

They came and went the way Irish people do, like ones doing rounds on what they hope is Holy Island under the unknown chastisements of the rain.

When they went downstairs I expect they saw Nan holding Baby Jesus and had this inner O shit feeling but which in Mrs Prendergast came out as O my goodness .

By then Mam was too worried to have dialogue. The river was coming across the field.

Jimmy Mac stood in the kitchen; ‘Jesus,’ he said. But he was looking out the window. And when he turned back he told Mam, ‘We’ll get sandbags,’ and was gone out the back and wellying across the tongue of water coming in the drive before she could say thank you.

He came back in his tractor in fifteen minutes, a transport box of sand and cab full of empty 10-10-20 bags and any number of McInerneys, most of who were not believers in coats. By rain-telegraph Mickey Culligan and Finbar Griffin came too, my Gentleman Callers, sputter-roaring their tractors out into the river-field and using whatever you use to reopen the drain that never drained and to make these brown scars across the field to delay the progress of the flood, each of their tractors going bogging good-o, little Mickey Mac said with ten-year-old glee, eyes polished and nose dripping free and clear and unheeded when he came in to say they were going to sandbag our front door now. The first of the bags thumped down a minute later, then the next, as men and boys passed the windows, swinging over and laying in the bags, working tenacious and resolute, with a kind of uncomplaining Clare defiance and goodness, putting a pause on the river, and whether saving me or Jesus at that point immaterial.

I cannot sleep.

Tonight it seems impossible that anyone sleeps. How can they?

My blood aches.

The rain won’t stop. It just won’t, it’s like the sky is irreparably holed. I think it can’t keep up like this , I think nowhere does it rain like this, soon, soon it will ease , and when it doesn’t, when it just keeps on hammering, I think of Paul Dombey hearing the tide and thinking it is coming to take him and saying ‘I want to know what it says, the sea. What is it that it keeps on saying?’ and I sit up in bed and hold on to my knees and close my eyes and rock slowly back and forth and back and forth and back and forth until it comes to me clear and sure so that somewhere inside my rocking and my darkness I know that what the rain is saying is Sorry .

That day it was not raining. We got a half-day for the holidays and ran out into summer when summer was still a word plump and generous and there was actual sunshine and time was impossibly deliciously luxuriously long and the idea of summer stretched out ahead so that now as you entered it you could not imagine it ever ending. The whole school ran out the school gates, schoolbags bouncing on backs, and last watercolour paintings buckling a little in the hands holding them. There was pushing and yelling getting through the gate. Parents were standing by their cars. Noel McCarthy was in his mini-bus, the window down and the radio letting Martin Hayes’s fiddling float-dance over us.

Aeney ran; I didn’t. He always ran. I’d like to say it was because he knew he was finished with Mr Crossan, I’d like to give a reason, but the truth is he ran just for the sake of running and I suppose for freedom. His fair hair went round the corner.

I let the school go. When I saw Vincent Cunningham had stayed waiting outside the gate I said, ‘Go home. I’m not walking with you,’ and he said ‘Okay’ like I hadn’t hurt him and ran on. I walked around the yard pretending to look for something and when everyone was gone except the teachers who were having holiday coffees and doing whatever teachers do in empty schools I walked out the gate. I walked with what I hoped was the reserve and maturity befitting Our Last Day, the end of Primary. Aeney and I were done. We would not be back there.

The cars were already gone, the road returned to that quiet it kept all day except for at nine and three o’clock. I walked the bend for home. The air was warm, the fuchsias so full of buzz you imagined if you stopped and looked, as I did, that you would see nothing else but bees. But you didn’t see them. Hum and drone were just there, like an engine of summer, tirelessly invisibly turning. I took my time because time was suddenly mine. I had been waiting for this day all year. I had been waiting for it ever since I realised that Aeney and I did not belong in the school, that Aeney maybe belonged in no school, and that without intention I had read myself away from girls my age and was in the true sense of the word, Alien, other. That Secondary school would be better, that there I would encounter like-minded girls, Serious Girls , as Mrs Quinty said she hoped to find, was then not in doubt, in the same way that at the end of Secondary I would cherish a brief confidence that in Third Level things at last would be different and intelligence and oddness found to be normal.

I dawdled. I plucked a buttercup and rubbed out its yellowy heart on the tartan pinafore which I had always, always hated, flushing a little with the thrill of staining with impunity and the anticipation of seeing my uniform thrown in a corner. It was my slowest walk home ever. When I came in the back door Mam said, ‘Well,’ and came and hugged me. ‘You did it,’ she said. ‘That’s the end of that.’

She held on to me longer than my new status would allow in the future, but right then I did not resist, my head in against her, and coming around me warm and deep and smelling of bread the many things that are contained in the word mother . I think I knew it was a hug I would remember always.