This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

  That Spy Wednesday, in the absence of Conlon, the men stood around and talked and didn’t talk. Most of them lived in a green isolation, found solace in company without needing it to be scintillating.

  Doady reappeared from the throng in Clohessy’s, avoided getting snared in the veil mantilla of Kathleen Connor, whose head was full of funerals, and nodded a single nod down the street in the direction of her husband. Ganga said, ‘O now,’ and left the men and joined her. They went into Clohessy’s yard, untethered Thomas and mounted what they called the car, but was in fact a flatbed cart pulled by a horse already older than me, who knew the time of horses was ending and had the melancholy and manner of an ancient. Many had a pony and trap they brought out on Sundays. But Ganga and Doady had little vanity and thought Christ would appreciate the savings and overlook the plainness of the transport. In 1958 my father in Dublin drove a black Ford, had been driving a car since he was twenty-five years old, washed it every Saturday morning and picked from the floormat any pebble or dirt so it retained an air of dark chariot, but in Faha his father drove the horse and car no different to his father or his before that and probably all Crowes back across the thresholds of ages since Faha had come out of the sea. Ganga neither wished for a motor car nor thought less of those who did. In her secret heart Doady may have yearned for the luxury and grandeur, but, if so, she had early quenched that girlish dream, pinched it out so that the chill and damp, the rattle and shake of the horse and car on the Faha road did not make her regret her life.

  The church bells had rung and I knew they were on their way out of Faha as I stood outside like a lesser disciple with the burning taper. The man, Christy, was gone. I tossed the taper, and then noticed the small blue heap of his suit on the grass across by the riverbank and perhaps in the same moment saw the off-gold crown of his head in the river.

  For an island people, at that time we were appalling swimmers. Whether from an overdeveloped respect for the power of nature, a shame of undress, or breathtaking stupidity, no one learned how to swim then. Most went into the water only occasionally and a good deal of these were trouser-rolled-to-the-knee men who stepped into the low waves at Kilkee with hats on and heads down, their whiter-than-white feet under the surface a source of some astonishment and their big toes digging into the sand like an experiment in worms. As always, the women were more daring and the sight of girls shrieking in the icy waters, holding high their skirts and running bare legs back out of the foam was not uncommon, and one of the principal reasons for men going to the seaside. But none of this was actual swimming. For those who did strip off, swimming was achieved by a sort of head-up back-and-over tossing accompanied by wild arm and leg thrashing in the belief that you could outrun drowning if you thrashed fast enough.

  When you saw someone in the river your first thought was not swimming, it was drowning.

  In a lifetime there’s more than one doorway. Even as I was running I think I knew this was one.

  It’s not so easy to run across a field in springtime, and in my memory a field like Ganga’s, pock and lump, dung and rushes and slick April grass, was treachery. And because an old man has only the story of his own life I am running across it still, a lanky seventeen-year-old from Dublin, shy and obdurate both, running with a premonition that I thought was doom but was maybe fate if you’re a party to that. I was running believing I was going to save him, when of course it was he who would save me.

  At the edge of the field I clambered over the stone wall and crossed the road that came alongside the estuary. I may have been calling to him. I was probably waving. I’m still not sure how I intended to save him. Maybe by shouting. He was a good ways into the flow of the river, and that river was cold, there was nothing clement or forgiving about it, it was a dark tongue and each year swallowed some more of the despairing.

  I was stopped next to his clothes. I called his name again, and this time Christy turned his head and yelled out. So compelling is the evidence of our own eyes and ears, so swift is your mind to assemble your own version of the story, that one of the hardest things in this world is to understand there’s another way of seeing things. It was a yell ripped out of his chest, a head-back and full-mouthed howl. But his arm came up through the water then, his palm flagged, and, with a great slow rolling, he swam towards me.

  Out on the road came Doady and Ganga on the horse and car. They slowed when they saw me standing next the river and were stopped when, with significant difficulty, a leg thrown up and sliding back, a hand grabbing rushes, Christy eventually clambered out on to the bank, pale, slimed, smiling, and altogether naked.

  At the time you’re living it you can sometimes think your life is nothing much. It’s ordinary and everyday and should be and could be in this or that way better. It is without the perspective by which any meaning can be derived because it’s too sensual and urgent and immediate, which is the way life is to be lived. We’re all, all the time, striving, and though that means there’s a more-or-less constant supply of failure, it’s not such a terrible thing if you think that we keep on trying. There’s something to consider in that.

  When Christy came up to the house he was dressed in the wrinkled suit and smelled like the river. His hair and beard were darkened and he’d lost ten years. He knuckled the jamb of the open door and Ganga shot out of his chair to greet him. ‘O now,’ he said, and although he had not the slightest idea what this man was doing there, his big face beamed.

  ‘Christy,’ Christy said.

  ‘Christy,’ said Ganga, as though that was wonderful altogether.

  I was sitting in the nook by the hearth, the darkest place in that room, and looking at the silhouette on the threshold against the daylight that was not yet actual sunshine just the glow of after-rain. There was the motion of light behind him, raindrops pulsing on the far thorn bushes so they seemed pearled or Christmas-lit in April. What I was thinking was: this is what Faha is like. What I was thinking was: this man had not the slightest scintilla of abashment at having been seen naked, and, although I could not have explained it in words: something has happened. Then, Doady, in testament to the unprescribed character of Kerry people, or her own impenetrable nature, wiped her hands in the teacloth, left it by the basin, and, with arms folded across herself, said, ‘You’re early.’

  In that instant of perplex and delight both, Ganga realised she was expecting this Christy, and that forty years of marriage had not mummified the wonder of Aine O Siochru.

  A key thing to understand about Ganga was that he loved a story. He believed that human beings were inside a story that had no ending because its teller had started it without conceiving of one, and that after ten thousand tales was no nearer to finding the resolution of the last page. Story was the stuff of life, and to realise you were inside one allowed you to sometimes surrender to the plot, to bear a little easier the griefs and sufferings and to enjoy more fully the twists that came along the way. He stepped aside as Doady eyeballed the visitor and shot out: ‘After Easter, they said.’

  The man shrugged. ‘I came early,’ he said, as though he himself was not in charge of his own arrival.

  ‘The room is above in the garret. You’ll have to share with our grandson who we weren’t expecting but is here now,’ Doady said. ‘We don’t know for how long.’

  I caught the inference, took no offence. Christy was not bothered.

  ‘The bed is … plain,’ she said.

  ‘Any bed at all is fine.’

  ‘We’ve not had a lodger.’ She looked at him blank and big-eyed through the roundrims. ‘I don’t know the rates.’

  His face crinkled. It passed as a smile when you saw his eyes. ‘I paid three pounds a week in the County Meath.’

  ‘You were robbed.’

  ‘Jeez, you were,’ Ganga said, and pushed a palm across the top of his head.

  ‘We have no toilet. No electric. Fifty shillings a week.’ Doady was getting the hang of bargaining against herself. ‘If you go home weekends, thirty-f
ive shillings a week. We have our own eggs and brownbread so my only cost will be the meat.’

  ‘No meat for me,’ Christy said. ‘You’ll be spared that.’

  It was unclear to Doady whether he was forgoing the meat to seek a lower rent or simplify the cooking. ‘After Saturday, there’ll be meat.’

  ‘Not for me,’ he said.

  Now, at that time, perhaps because stomachs recalled the privations of war, or in folk memory the famine, for a man not to eat meat was almost against God. In Faha there were no vegetarians until Arthur and Agnes Philpot arrived in a faded-to-pink Volkswagen van from Bristol in the 1970s, moved into a plot of muck and rushes behind John Joe the whistle player’s, began slashing brambles and digging drills and were overcome with the generosity of John Joe who by way of welcome said Go ahead, take all my cow dung.

  To not eat meat was penitential, which, outside of a season of penance, suggested an inner turmoil. Doady was still blinking at this when Ganga offered ‘Fish?’ and Christy said, ‘A fish is beautiful.’ He offered Doady a large hand. ‘Shall we settle on a pound a week?’

  So, it was transacted. I showed him up the steep Captain’s Ladder to the garret room. For a big man, he was fairly souple, as they say in Faha. He put down his case, toed off his boots, laid out on the bed whose mattress was as giving as a cream cracker, and promptly fell asleep.

  8

  When I came downstairs, Ganga whispered, ‘He’s an electric man,’ and nodded one good nod which translated as Now for you.

  His lodging had been arranged by telephone, Doady taking the call when Ganga was out and agreeing to house the lodger for the duration while the electric was being installed in the parish. The fact that the house had a telephone had signalled it as eminent and would facilitate reports back to headquarters.

  Twelve years after it was first proposed in Dublin, two years after the adept and wily politicians across the river had lit the north of Kerry like a fairground, Faha was now moving into the last stage of electrification. The policy at the time was to connect what were considered the most profitable areas first, and so the parish had remained in ignoble darkness years after towns and villages east of it. Three years earlier, an official canvass had taken place. An Area Organiser called Harry Rushe had come door-to-door extolling the virtues of various appliances that would banish hardship, transform mundane chores into pleasures. Rushe, a scientist pressed into being a salesman, was a blunt individual from the cosmos of Limerick. He aimed to secure the signatures and be gone. He had little appreciation for the subtleties of the situation or the complex nature of the Fahaeans. He knew that he was advocating for the single greatest change in the way of life there but didn’t have the acuity to understand why anyone might object. This was a country that through the ministry of the Church and other interested parties was encouraged to think of change not only with suspicion but outright fear, a country where most of the politicians were elected on the familiarity of their surnames, and when they died were replaced by their sons whose principal qualification was they were the same as what went before. The President was in office until he was ninety. Rushe, a ginger block with short arms, came in the doors of the parish, stood in dim kitchens, a dog sniffing at his trouser legs, and by rote listed marvels – a pump which would make water come out of taps, boil at the touch of a switch, a room bright enough to see across.

  I’m aware here that it may be hard to imagine the enormity of this moment, the threshold that once crossed would leave behind a world that had endured for centuries, and that this moment was only sixty years ago. Consider this: when the electricity did finally come, it was discovered that the 100-watt bulb was too bright for Faha. The instant garishness was too shocking. Dust and cobwebs were discovered to have been thickening on every surface since the sixteenth century. Reality was appalling. It turned out Siney Dunne’s fine head of hair was a wig, not even close in colour to the scruff of his neck, Mick King was an out-and-out and fairly unsubtle cheater at Forty-Five, and Marian McGlynn’s healthy allure was in fact a caked make-up the colour of red turf ash. In the week following the switch-on, Tom Clohessy couldn’t keep mirrors in stock, had a run on hand-, oval-, round- and even full-length as people came in from out the country and bought looking glasses of all variety, went home, and in merciless illumination endured the chastening of all flesh when they saw what they looked like for the first time.

  Rushe brought with him testimonials from householders in the east of the country. ‘“O what a Boon and Solace is the electric,”’ he read aloud in a dead voice, unaware that in Faha theatre was esteemed. He also had a memorial to be signed if the householder agreed in principle to take the electric when it would come. On his first round, he used the oldest tactic, the names of neighbours who had already signed up, but then realised he had underestimated because that was the very reason some people refused to sign. On a second round, he deployed the second oldest tactic. He brought Father Coffey with him. The young curate was an advocate of modernity. (Father Tom was not, either because he no longer believed the world capable of improvement, or because he knew the electricity bills would leave nothing for church dues.) Father Coffey was energetic and intense. His eyes were lit. His cheeks burned plum. Inflamed with zeal, he spoke more quickly than he intended and found himself employing the stratagem of the Gaelic Athletic Association, which, in the cause of football and hurling, had turned the Second Commandant on its head by instilling a fierce parochial rivalry to the point of hatred of your neighbouring parish. Father Coffey conflated this with freedom from slavery in Egypt, confusing the biblical reading by adding that if everyone in Faha didn’t sign the Electricity Board would pass over, and switch on the parish of Boola instead. Faha would be left in a mean and shameful dark while the Boolaeans would be illumed, he said, like seraphim.

  These arguments won over a majority. In truth, the priest hadn’t needed to speak at all. His presence was enough.

  Showing a keen understanding of the national character, the Electricity Board had secured a concluding masterstroke. By special arrangement, and the goodness of His Grace the Archbishop, each house that took the electricity would get a free Sacred Heart Lamp. The small red bulb with the illumined crucifix would be set up near the ceiling and show all callers that this was a house where the Lord was always present. (In due course, a sanctimonious salesman called Finn Clerkin would come in the wake of the electricity men with a framed print of Jesus exposing his red heart. That print was a bestseller. In time, it would be hard to find a house that didn’t have one. It was put up behind the lamp, and even in those houses where in fear of the bill the electric light was not turned on, the Lord maintained a ruddy glow.)

  As I’ve said, I am keenly aware I am dealing in antiquities. When you are born in one century and find yourself walking around in another there’s a certain infirmity to your footing. May we all be so lucky to live long enough to see our time turn to fable.

  Following the collection of signatures, Rushe disappeared, and nothing happened. Some were certain the entire exercise had been a fiction, or that the unschooled penmanship of people’s signatures had failed to assert the reality of their persons. In the following three years stories of the electric would find their way to the church gates: at the National Wholemeal Breadmaking Championships which were held in Tramore, and where the electrical sponsor’s intention was to conclude once and for all the argument of the best method for baking bread, the billing being ‘Pot Oven versus Electric Oven’, a gale had blown up and twisted the back half of the tent towards the sea. Unwilling to surrender to nature, the adjudicators had urged Keep Baking! Keep Baking! But the rain made the electricity short out, the electric bakers stood idle, and the Pot Oven bake of Mrs Fidelma Healy carried the prize home to Cork. That’s a fact.

  In these stories the future of modernity was uncertain and people were consoled to backwardness. Nothing happened and continued to happen. Then, one Sunday from the altar, Father Coffey stirred the congregation from their
Latinate sleep by announcing a meeting in the hall to establish a Rural Electrification Committee for Faha. ‘The notional is to be made actual,’ he said, and in the instant after, realising his register had gone over the heads of the parishioners, added: ‘The electricity is coming.’

  On the night, the hall was packed, not least because it was rumoured the Deputy might be there, and people wanted to see what their public representative looked like. The building itself belonged to Eustace, wasn’t yet the community centre. It was a long narrow shed that by an act of communal dreaming converted once a month into a dance hall, except during Lent, when it converted into a theatre. Old Dan was the caretaker then, as Young Dan would be later, and Younger Dan after him, and Old Dan knew that human animation would offset the absence of heating. There was a table and six chairs set on the stage. By prearrangement, the two priests took their places, then Doctor Troy, hands pressed deep into the pockets of his tweed jacket, that same air of wound and wisdom that had settled on him since the death of his wife. The doctor kept his foreignness to Faha intact by being punctual, a thing unique in the parish, and establishing the phrase Troy-Time, which meant exact and the opposite of Tom-Time, which meant any time other than when Tom Keane said. Mrs Reidy, powdered and pursed, hair curled to within an inch of its life, sat in next to Father Tom, and finally, on the very point when it seemed he must not be coming, Master Quinn strode in, climbed the steps at the front of the stage in a manner befitting a headmaster of the national school and his annual role as leading man in the amateur productions. From paucity of entertainments or respect for a discipline old as the Greeks, the ability to stand and deliver a speech was still venerated, and the hall fell into a hush the moment Master Quinn stood. And a moment after, as ordained by Rushe’s directive that every tactic be employed to remind people these were matters of State, the one of the Kellys whose nose was never dry appeared from the wings. With the same freckled bemusement with which he would tell of it thirty years later in Melbourne, Australia, he laid a tin whistle against his lower lip and delivered the first notes of the National Anthem.