This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

  ‘Lookit,’ he said. ‘In a simple switch on the wall is the end of darkness. Is the end of cold. In a simple switch that could go right there –’ he pointed to the same place Purtill had ‘– right there, the power to end all hardship. Think of it,’ he said, looking directly at my grandmother. ‘In one switch, all the cures for loneliness.’

  Delivered in diamond absolutes, it was an invincible argument. Doady blinked at the brilliance of it. Briefly she wore the look of a woman who had spent twenty years trying to get through another day. She was pressing the swelling of her fingers. She wasn’t looking at Ganga. For a moment she couldn’t, for a moment the world was unbearable. Two hens came to the door and jerked their heads in twin jerks to attest whether it was safe to come in or not.

  Then Ganga, who had heard little that was exact of what had been said, but had already developed a deaf man’s intuition for the gist, smacked his hands together, and, turning his round beaming face on us, defeated all arguments by an unassailable conclusion:

  ‘Aren’t we happy as we are?’

  43

  Annie Mooney died in her sleep, Doctor Troy said. The last voice she heard in this world was Christy’s. Christy had sat on the sūgān chair Doady had set beside the window for his calls and told her of the morning he woke with the realisation he wanted to be forgiven. Annie had begun to tell him again it wasn’t required on her part, but all she managed was You don’t and let the rest be silence because she found her breath short and knew a story should never be checked. He had told her all the failures of his life had been failures of love. He told her of the compulsion in him to seek out those he had wronged or slighted or ill-judged, those he had harmed through thoughtlessness. He told her he had found some and not others, and when he couldn’t find someone he tried to make amends through a stranger. He delivered all this with a light touch, laughing a soft laugh every so often at the comedy of himself and the things a man can think up. Doady and I would hear the laugh come out the window and the open front door and experience the inner ah-ha of parents eavesdropping on their son’s courtship and believing things were going well. Christy had talked that night for the prescribed two hours with two intermissions when Annie’s breathing told him the medications had overwhelmed her. At those times he paused and held the receiver out in his right hand, looking at and into it, as though he could see down the line and see the flesh of her hand on the other end, and see her sitting propped there on the armchair with seven cushions that did not defeat the pain in her back and in her bones, her silver hair combed out, and her eyes wetly shining.

  When Annie said, ‘And?’ he came out of that dreaming and service resumed. He told his coming back to Ireland and travelling to Kenmare and on to Sneem and what it had felt to be in those places again where there was the strange human pleasure in painful memory. He talked of the streets that were familiar to her, and his making enquiries in the shops there, and when he did, they were young again, and he was a young man in corduroy britches asking about her in Hillary’s and her heart was fluttering in the upstairs bedroom of her parents’ house when her sister Mina told her. He talked them back to the beginning. He talked them back to where the story had taken a turn.

  And this time it didn’t. He came in the church in a tweed suit heavy with rain. The shoes of him were squeaking, leaking on the tiles, his forehead gleaming like he was a candle.

  ‘Because there you were,’ he said. ‘There you were.’

  Doady and I heard him say that twice. And after that he said nothing at all.

  I have to go now, he told us later, was the last thing she said to him.

  Mrs Prendergast called in the morning to let us know the doctor had been and found her. She was in the chair by the phone.

  The funeral was enormous. It was one of those funerals when it seems that everyone in seven parishes has put down whatever they were doing to be there. I hadn’t much knowledge of country funerals then, but when you came into Faha that morning and saw the gathering, the church overflowing, extra seats and benches of all sorts out the churchyard, the doors of the houses across the way open and people standing and sitting on every surface in the vicinity, the thing that sat in your throat was your heart and the thing you felt I can’t do justice to, but it was We are all part of this and my participation, however small, felt humbling.

  Christy was composed. He was a man who could constantly surprise you and his reaction to Annie’s death was not an obvious grief. He had a gift for accepting life, and that included death. That was the thing I was too young to understand. He sat with Ganga and Doady and me in a privileged place Father Coffey had secured for us near the altar. By that time everyone in the parish already knew the fable of the phone calls, and in the absence of family members and close relations, his was the hand that was shaken in condolence. Doctor Troy acknowledged my loss by a tightening of his moustache and a firm press of my fingers. His eyes said This is the world. The trinity of Sophie and Charlie and Ronnie was there, each in their own variant of magnificence. They each held my hand lightly a moment and were gone, as was true of their place in my life.

  The undertaker, McCarthy, who had a professional expertise for getting the behind-the-scenes story on the deceased, offered Christy a place as pall-bearer, and he took it. Tom Joyce tolling the bell, we all went out behind the coffin into the white screened light of that daytime and paused outside the chemist’s shop, standing to attention in Annie’s absence, but feeling the presence of her everywhere. Then down the crooked slope of Church Street to the graveyard by the river. The avenue had grown narrower in time as more graves were needed, and, by the necessity of being within earshot of the final prayers, the throng came in over ancient graves, some trying to keep inside the kerbing, and some not so much, until soon the cemetery entire was Faha’s most populous place.

  Father Coffey did duty for Father Tom whose chest was at him. The sight of him in his white vestments and purple stole against the green fields and running river was something out of earlier times. His voice cracked calling out the prayers, and when I looked over the sea of heads I could see Doady and Ganga, Bat Considine, Mrs Moore, Master Quinn, Mrs Prendergast, Mrs Queally, Mrs Reidy, Mona Ryan squinting, Mary Falsey upright, Matthew Leary kneeling on his grandfather’s grave, the Cotters, the Keanes, the Breens, the Blakes, the Hehirs, Heaney the hackney, Greavy the guard, The German, Bubs and Roo, any number of Kelly and Clancy children, Sheila Sullivan dabbing her dribbling son, Mrs Sexton and her hat, the Devitts, Davitts and Dooleys, Murrihys and McInerneys, just outside the gate Mick Madigan, and feel something cracked in them all.

  After the prayers, there was a cupped moment. Heads were still bowed. The sunlight was veiled but radiant still, and in that country graveyard it seemed was one of the fundaments of existence, a spirit of community. It sat there, in some part not assuaging but making liveable the harrowing knowledge of I will not see that person in this life again.

  In a moment, the fringes of the crowd would fray. The shops and the pubs would reopen. Tractors would start up, horses and cars be untethered from the yards at Clohessy’s and Bourke’s.

  But first, there was a raised note in Christy’s voice.

  It took a second for those who couldn’t see the graveside, who were on the point of turning away, to turn back when they understood a man was singing. He sang as he had before, shut-eyed, head back and arms down. He sang the same song he had sung outside her window in the night. He sang it as if no one was listening but her. And all of Faha felt the same. In the face of the raw feeling, through a perfect stillness people made themselves invisible. Christy sang all the verses. He sang as though he was sending the song after her, as though the air and words of it could escape the confines of time and space and soon enough reach the next place where she was gone.

  When he finished there was not a sound but for the original ones of river and air.

  He and I went that evening on the bicycles as before. We heard music, but we did not hear Junior Crehan. />
  ‘I’ll be leaving soon,’ Christy said.

  It felt like a blow you knew was coming but knowing hadn’t lessened it.

  ‘I want to thank you,’ he said, and patted his breast for the matches.

  ‘There’s nothing to thank me for.’ I struck the match.

  ‘There is, though. So, thank you.’

  We listened to three players. They were two old men and one woman of indeterminate age who played the concertina. They had a natural expertise that made it seem the music wasn’t a thing learned. They had no ownership of it either. The tunes were in the air thereabouts. They were theirs only in the same way the fields and the rushes and the rain were. They were of that place and had both the poverties and richness of it. And perhaps because of the complex of emotions I was feeling that evening, and because none of them could find their way into words, the more the musicians played the more it struck me that Irish music was a language of its own, accommodating expression of ecstasy and rapture and lightness and fun as well as sadness and darkness and loss, and that in its rhythms and repetitions was the trace history of humanity thereabouts, going round and round.

  Which, in some ways I suppose, is what I’m trying to do here.

  My grandparents never took the electricity. They didn’t act as though there was a lack. They carried on as they were, which is the prayer of most people. They lived in that house until they were carried out of it, one after the other. Because the twelve sons in the corners of the world couldn’t reach a verdict, the house was left to itself. The thatch started sagging in two places like consternated eyebrows, brambles overtook the potato ridges and came up the garden, and soon enough in under the front door. Soon, you couldn’t see the house from the road. Soon, too, the bits of hedging Doady had stuck into the ditch to camouflage the broken Milk of Magnesia bottles grew to twelve feet and fell over and grew along the ground then, marrying thorn bushes and nettles and making of the whole a miry jungle. When the roof fell in the crows that were in the chimney came down to see the songbirds sitting in Ganga’s chair eating Old Moore’s and that way becoming eternal. When grown a man, one of the Kellys took out the kitchen flagstones for a cabin he was making. He took out the stone lintel over the fireplace after, and a year later came back for half the gable when he needed good building stones for a wall.

  In time, as with all modest places of few votes, Government would be looking the other way when its policies closed Faha’s post office, barracks, primary school, surgery, chemist, and lastly the pubs.

  In time, the windmills would be coming. Gairdín na scoile and Páirc na mónaigh would be bulldozed to straighten the bends in the road to let the turbines pass. Any trees in the way would be taken down. Two- and three-hundred-year-old stone walls would be pushed aside, the councillors, who had never been there, adjudging them in the way of the future.

  By that time, my grandparents’ house would be another of those tumbledown triangles of mossy masonry you see everywhere in the western countryside, the life that was in them once all but escaping imagining.

  Christy left the way he had arrived, without fanfare. I felt the loss of him even before he had gone. Which is, I suppose, as good as any a description of love.

  I asked him where he would go.

  ‘I have a brother a monk in France. I haven’t seen him since I was sixteen.’ The chamois face of him crinkled. ‘I’ve a lot more to do before I meet Himself.’

  Of all the things I wanted to say to him, I managed none. I gave him the box of matches, I seem to remember. But possibly that didn’t happen. As I think I’ve said, there are some memories you can’t lean on. You sense the railings of them but you don’t reach out a hand.

  He paid Doady the rest of the week and tried to pay her for the rest of the month, but she wouldn’t have it. For two weeks she didn’t find where he hid the money until Mrs Moore was dusting the willow-patterns. We didn’t know he’d cleared the phone bill either. After he was gone, we started hearing stories of the things he’d been doing around the parish. Little by little they would leak out. He was above with Conefrey’s one day when Kevin had a mare foaling. He was with Michael Dooley doing the barrow in the bog. He was with Breda and Mary and Eileen Donnellan the time all three were hunting their brother’s missing calf. He was cooking daily dinners for Mrs Blackall, from whom he had bought his wedding suit when she had a shop in Kenmare. In his afterlife he grew radiant. What was true and not true hard to distinguish, because in Faha people had an insatiable craving to be part of a good story.

  I missed him. I’ve already said that. I’ll say it again. I missed him as much as you can another human being. The night after he left I found the musketeer’s shirt under my pillow, with a pencilled note. Good luck on the hunt for J. C.

  I stayed on with Doady and Ganga that summer, trying to figure out where the loose wire of my life could lead. At no point did either of them ask me my intention. Nor did Father Coffey the times he found me in the back pew where my prayer was always the same. It’s me.

  That summer there was a fleadh in Miltown and a general gathering of musicians from all corners of Ireland and many come home from elsewhere too. They came like a caravan out of olden times, came on foot and by thumb, by car and van and bus and train, by bicycle and horse and car, carrying their instruments and setting up in every nook and cranny of every pub and house they could find, so that when I arrived the only problem was where to go first. You heard the music escaping out the windows and the front doors. The horses in the street were listening to it. You went in someone’s door in the mid-morning and there were eight musicians of all ages playing on stools, cigarettes smoking and more on a saucer served, the woman of the house unperturbed by a kitchen commandeered in jig-time. They may have been playing since the night before, or the day before, their number growing and diminishing in clock-less time, the only consistency the continuing of the tunes, the glasses, cups, mugs, bottles that lived on every flat surface and never had time to be washed. The players played for each other, listening to and looking at each other’s playing, as though all were relations distant and close at the same time, and when I was in their company loneliness was banished.

  The second day I went there I brought the fiddle. I didn’t come home that night. I may have the night after, but maybe not. Somewhere in Miltown that time, I heard Peggy Healy, Tom McCarthy, Solus Lillis, Patrick Healy, I saw Dan Furey dancing, I heard Micko Dick Murphy playing tin whistle on the bar of a bicycle being carried into town. I heard Cissie and Manus and Josie and Patsy and Sonny, I saw a buck set danced by a crowd come down with Michael Downes from Cloonlaheen on the shores of Doolough, and one evening in a public house out the road by the place called The Hand, I heard a thin man in a dark suit, with an easy, open expression and swept-back hair, playing ‘The Mist-Covered Mountains’ and that man was Junior Crehan.

  O now!

  A bird in a tree had brought the tune to him, he said. He played ‘The Sheep in the Boat’ and other jigs and after he played the hornpipe ‘Caisleán an Óir’. The rest I can’t be sure of. There was ‘The Connaughtman’s Rambles’ and ‘Father O’Flynn’ maybe. He was neither showy nor august, but he had the authority of tradition in him and the sense of that place. The feeling of it can’t be captured. I kept turning to look at Christy, because we’d done it, we’d found him, and I wanted to see the joy I knew would be in his face.

  It was there, even though he wasn’t.

  Listening to Junior play, a key turned in me and a door opened, just not the one I expected. I knew I could never be a player like that, I lacked that skill and belonging, but knew too that music and story would be part of what I would be.

  When Doady said she’d had another letter from Mother Acquin, I told her to write back that I’d heard from my mother and would take it from here myself.

  I came and went from Faha the next few years, living the haphazard made-up life of those following their heart. I took the fiddle with me into the wave of the culture just startin
g to rise at that time. Each time I came back I thought to stay longer, and each time thought I would be back soon.

  When I came to America it was to be for a short time, I would be back in Faha before long, but by dint of life and circumstance before long grew longer and Faha further, and going back cannot be done now. It is not a question of time or distance or money or the coming-apart bicycle of an old man’s health. It is not because I have fallen three times now and know what lies ahead. The truth is, like all places in the past, it cannot be found any longer. There is no way to get there, except this way. And I am reconciled to that. You live long enough you understand prayers can be answered on a different frequency than the one you were listening for. We all have to find a story to live by and live inside, or we couldn’t endure the certainty of suffering. That’s how it seems to me.

  And so, because, at the end, we all go back to the beginning, because of the enduring example of Christy telling his story down the line to Annie, because after more than sixty years my mind is back in that place among those people from whom I took the lesson of how to be a fully alive human being, I will carry on here, carry on through the electric pulses of this machine to tell the one story we all have, the one we’ve lived.

  44

  The 8th of June is the day recorded in the annals above in Dublin for when the parish of Faha was switched on. It says no more than that. It lists all the townlands in the Rural Electrification Scheme and the dates they were connected to the national grid. The last place connected was in 1977.

  In Faha, in the week leading up to the switch-on, there was the general commotion that accompanies all one-off ceremonial occasions in small places, the official and unofficial committees, the drawing-up of the guest list, the redrawing of it when the argument was won that political bias should play no part, the seating plan (where political bias could, and did, play), the flowers, the banners, the music, all of which was informed by the consensus on one abiding principle: that Faha do it better than Boola. There would be all the components of the annual village parade, except this time it would not be moving. In the hierarchy of invitations, one had been sent to the Bishop, in whose palace the electricity had been burning for decades, another to the Deputy whose constituents were still hoping to lay eyes on him. The councillors, the nuns, and the priests of other parishes were on Mrs Queally’s list.