Niall Williams - History of the Rain

‘You see, he’d want it to be you,’ she says, her hands clasped back-to-back in a reverse of praying, an exhale of peppermint into his smoke.

Grandfather’s face is white, as if he has an instant’s foreknowledge, as if the announcement that is coming has already reached him, like the little shudder in the phone before a text comes proper.

Mrs Cissley can hardly bear to say it, can hardly bear to let out the words because with them will go the last remnant of the long-dreamt future of her Oliver. The hands clasp a moment longer, holding to hope in Wolverhampton. ‘My husband,’ she says, and her tongue touches some bitterness on her lower lip. ‘My husband owned the Falkirk Iron Works.’ The bitterness is also inside her right cheek. The tongue presses there, the lips tighten and whiten. ‘Two million Mills grenade bombs. He made a fortune from the war.’

Mrs Cissley makes no movement but her eyes widen.

‘There are lands in Ireland,’ she says at last, ‘a house and lands. They were. .’ She can’t say it. She just can’t. Then she shakes her head and the name falls out, ‘. . for Oliver.’ And at that her handclasp is undone, the hands open, and the soul of her son flies away.

‘Rain today, Ruthie!’ Nan shouts up through my floor from her place by the hearth downstairs.

She knows I know. She knows I am up in the rain here and watching it weep down the skylight.

‘Rain today, Nan!’ I call back. She cannot come up to my room any more. If she came up she’d never get down. ‘When I go up the next time, I’m staying Up,’ she says, and we know what she means.

Days like today the whole house is in the river. The fields are wrapped in soft grey tissues of weather. You can’t see anything but you hear the water flowing and flowing as if the whole country is washing away out past us. I used think our house would float away out of the mouth of the County Clare. Maybe it still will.

But to keep it in place today I’ll write it here.

Come west out of Ennis. Take the road that rises past the old tuberculosis hospital that Nellie Hayes was in once for months and seventy years later said she remembered seeing blue butterflies there. Drive up the hill, get caught behind Noel O’Shea’s bus as it drags ahead and what Matthew Fitz calls the Scholars are waving back at you and making demented faces that recall their grandfathers.

Turn down left, pass the big Boom houses, seven-bathroom monuments to that time, take a sort of right and suddenly the road is narrow and the hedgerows high since the Council stopped cutting them, and you’re in a green tunnel, winding down and away all the time. That’s what you’ll feel, away , and your wipers will be going because the rain that is coming is not hard or driving but a kind you can’t quite see falling but is there all the same. It started raining here in the sixteenth century and hasn’t stopped. But we don’t notice, and people still say Not a Bad Day though the drizzle is beaded on the top of their hair or in the furrows of their brows. It’s a mist like the old no-reception on the black-and-white television Danny Carmody had and didn’t rightly tune in because he didn’t want to pay the licence, kept just a Going Blind Channel he watched up close in which the figures moved like black dots in white and the licence man said was still television so Danny took the TV out into the garden and said he didn’t have a TV in the house. Well that’s what we live in, that’s what you can see, mouse-grey air seeping, so already you’re thinking this is some other world, this place in the half-light that isn’t even half, not really, not even quarter.

You head along and you know the river is somewhere down here. You’ll feel you’re descending towards it, river in a green underworld. And the drizzle kind of sticks to the windows so the wipers don’t really take it and the fields seem lumpish and bunched together the way you imagine green dancers might if they fell under a spell and lay down. That’s how I think of it, the slopes and slants, the green dips and hills on either side of you.

But keep coming. Keep coming. Stay with the river fields. Where you see the estuary wide and thickly flowing you’ll have a sense of things being sucked out to sea, and you won’t be wrong. There’s a bend called The Yanks because three different sets of them crashed there looking sideways in river-awe. Mind yourself. But keep coming. You’re in the Parish now, about which nothing is more eloquent than the first sentence in Charles Dickens’s first book: ‘How much is conveyed in those two short words — “The Parish!” ( Sketches by Boz , Book 2,448, Penguin Classics, London). This is Faha parish, not fada , meaning long, or fado , meaning long ago, though both are true, not fat-ha , an over-eaters stand-up place, or fadda , as in Our Fadda who Art in Boston, though far and father are in it too, Faha, which one half of the parish politely calls Fa-Ha, and the other, who don’t have time for syllables, make of it a kind of elongated bleat of the note that follows do-re-me, Fa .

There are no signposts to Faha. When the Bust came and Ciaran, the first of the Crowes, had to emigrate he took the signpost out by The Yanks with him. His brother, Tom the tiler, took the one on the road from Killimer. After that it became a custom. Faha went elsewhere. There are signposts to it all over the world, but none in Ireland.

You’ll come to the village first. The Church lets you know someone got there before you and said Jesus , but that’s what you’ll be thinking. ( Gee , if you’re reading the American edition.) You’ll be looking at the crooked twist of the main street, the only street, and the way church and street both tilt down towards the Shannon. It’s a street falling into a river. The church is heading sideways. None of the shops are in a line. They’ve all half-turned their backs on each other, as if centuries ago each one was built out of a fierce independence, shouldering its way in and setting up overnight. Each one tries to take the best view so that the street which is Main, Shop and Church Streets all rolled into one is a ragged westward-facing curve hugging the river. It wasn’t until after the village was built that the shop-owners realised they would all be annually flooded.

Next to the church there’s Carty’s, the funeral parlour. They’re the one with the brass handles on the door, the opaque glass with the Celtic crosses in it, and, inspired touch, the plate of Milky Mints inside the door. Jesus Mary and Joseph Carty is a barrel-chested man with Popeye-arms he keeps crooked as he walks. Looks like a Lego-man, only rounder. He got his name from calling down the Holy Family on all occasions. Jesus Mary and Joseph at the Minor matches against the hairy-legged Kilmurry Ibrickanes, Jesus Mary and Joseph at the price of petrol, at the bankers, the developers, at everything ever proposed by the Green Party, Jesus Mary and Joseph. But don’t worry he’s sweet and has big-man gentleness and restrains himself during the service.

Somewhere standing at a doorway will be John Paul Eustace. He’s the fulltime Life Assurance man, part-time Epistle reader, Eucharistic Minister. Long and skinny, green eyes, narrow nose, oval face that can’t be shaved cleanly, topped with a cowlick of brown hair he tried to dye blonde the time he thought girls would go for it. He has thin lips he keeps wetting and the whitest hands in the county. He’ll note you passing. That fellow couldn’t be fattened, Nan says, which is a curse in Nan language. Navy suit, clipboard in hand, Mr Eustace — Oh call me John Paul, please — stands three inches shorter than his height as he stoops in your doorway. He goes round the houses and drives out the townlands collecting five euros a week for the unforeseen . He has perfected an apologetic air. He’s sorry to be calling, it’s that time again. He never used to call to us, then Dad must have signed us up and he started coming. He’s a threshold man, a door-stepper, who commiserates, lets slip who has taken ill, who has Not Long Left, and who has Nothing to Leave Behind, God help us. Is Mr Swain at home at all?