History of the Rain

by Niall Williams

  Now, having followed the advice of Richard Penn, Esq. whose twin-volume Maxims & Hints for an Angler and Miseries of Fishing (John Murray, Albemarle St., London, 1833) have long been indispensable to the present author, namely ‘when you commence your acquaintance with a salmon, allow a brief period for introductions’, it is time to delay no more but take a steady stance, survey the river, breathe, and cast.

  Chapter 4

  People are odd creations, this is my theme. None odder than Swains.

  On the fourteenth of August 1914 the 2nd Battalion of the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry landed at Boulogne, France.

  What happened next I imagine sometimes when I am brought out of the county by ambulance. When the Minister redrew the map of hospitals in Ireland, calling them Centres for Excellence, she forgot about Clare. It’s often done. We’re neither one thing nor the other, neither South nor West; we’re between the blowsy tramp of Kerry and the barrel-chested Galwegians, both of them dolling up, dyeing their hair and pushing to the front. So, if in Clare you have Something, as I have, you have to be brought out.

  Timmy and Packy come for me. Timmy has flaming orange hair and the Hurling bug and if you give him the slightest encouragement he’ll let you enjoy samples of his throat-singing. Packy’s mother has done the impossible and made him think he’s good-looking, but they’re lovely really. We go without the siren but there’s still that smell that is the opposite of sickness but makes you think of it anyway. And there I imagine him, Grandfather Swain in France.

  Nobody now living was there. That’s the thing. But a lot of them are in the pages of books. My grandfather is inside the skinny smoky copy of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (Book 672, Fawcett paperback, New York), in the stern stiff-feeling pages of The Guns of August (Book 1,023, Barbara Tuchman, Macmillan, London) and the buckled second-hand Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War One (Book 1,024, John Ellis, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore), books my father read to see if he could find his father.

  Here is the long tall stretch of Abraham. He’s in a trench, cold rat-run muck-puddle, suck and splash, cigarette smoke and then stillness. He believes he is there for a purpose, that he was called for this and he waits in the line for the word to come. The waiting is the worst for someone like him. He’s got all that mind, all that inner country he keeps going around in, mines and craters, caverns and dead ends. Mind has Mountains, that’s in Gerard Manley Hopkins (Book 1,555, Poems & Prose, Penguin, London). Or, put another way, there’s a man, Gerry Quinn, lives under the shadow of Croagh Patrick in Mayo and says he goes up the mountain most days and when they asked him on the radio why he does it he said at this stage that mountain’s part of me. In Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen it comes out as ‘I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me.’

  There in the trenches our Abraham goes up and down those inner mountains bigtime.

  What am I supposed to do with this life? is a common Swainism. It’s just about embedded under the skin and the way the hook is you can’t pull it out, it just makes things worse. So Grandfather Abraham wriggles on the question and waits for the word. When the command comes, when Captain John Weynsley Burke appears in the trench looking all dry-cleaned and Dad’s Armyish and says, ‘Cigarettes out, chaps. Today I’m going to get you medals,’ Abraham does not hesitate. He doesn’t think there’s German guns waiting to fire on him or that the next moment might be his last. He trusts that This Is It, O boy, he trusts that there is a purpose, however blind and mysterious, and it’s pulling him in now. He can hardly breathe with the swift tow, the sense of the Great Fisher getting him on the line, and the free feeling of just going, of release. He’s filled with a sudden bright-red bloom of elation. He tosses his ciggy, shouts out, and into the air already streaming with German gunfire he leaps.

  Zip zip zip the bullets fly into him.

  He sees the tears in his uniform and thinks: that’s interesting.

  But he keeps going.

  Then he sees the blood coming. Why is that?

  Because there’s no pain yet. There’s too much adrenalin and rhetoric in his bloodstream. There’s whole chunky paragraphs of What it Means to King and Country. Never mind God. There’s fine speeches still pumping up along his arteries, principal and subordinate clauses, the adjectival, the adverbial, in gorgeous Latinate construction and hot breath. It’s the Age of Speeches. There’s exclamation marks doing needle dancing in his brain, and so he gets twenty yards into the war.

  Zip zip zip. Splash muck-puddle splash.

  He looks sideways and sees Haynes, Harrison, Benchley, spinning backwards like they’ve been hooked, invisible lines whipping them off their feet and into the Next Life. It’s very Spielberg. Only without the John Williams soundtrack.

  Grandfather’s running on. God bless him, Auntie D says when she tells it, as if she’s still not sure he’ll make it through her narrative and any of us will ever be born. The way she tells it, sitting bolt upright in Windermere Nursing Home, Blackrock, room at maybe thirty degrees which is the way the Filipino nurses like it, I’m not sure I will be.

  Abraham’s leaking now, a sticky slather of blood gathered at his belt, but he’s still running and getting ready to fire his First Shot of the War. His rifle is wavering, they haven’t really explained this bit, that running & shooting is quite different to standing & shooting and that running & shooting while being shot at is for obvious reasons, chaps, not taught at all. It’ll come to you; don’t worry, men.

  Grandfather doesn’t see any Germans. Germans being Germans, they’ve taken a practical approach and decided to keep their heads down and their guns up. It’s more technik than the valiant British method of running at bullets.

  So, as Abraham is about to fire in the general direction of where there might be Germans, zip! another rip comes in his uniform just below the heart and instantly whop down he goes.

  And that’s it for Grandfather.

  There’s a Gap.

  A white space in which he’s gone from the world.

  I know what that’s like too, when the last thing you feel is the pinch in your arm and this might hurt just a little and you’re off into the wherever depending on the length and breadth of your imagination. My father has a whole section of his library just for this. Here’s Thomas Traherne (1637–74), poet, mystic, entering Paradise (Book 1,569, The Faber Book of Utopias, John Carey, Faber & Faber, London): ‘The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor was ever sown . . . the dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold. The Gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees, when I saw them first through the gates, transported and ravished me . . . The men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal Cherubims! And the young men glittering and sparkling angels; and maids, strange and seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street and playing were moving jewels.’

  Paradise has actual gates?

  Thank you, Thomas. We’re back: Grandfather’s dead in a hole in the ground.

  It’s a bomb crater. The artillery boys have had fun blowing holes in France and some of the holes like this one are deep. He’s down there on his side, his mind doing last-minute preparations for the Afterlife, when the whole attack above retreats and the Germans take their turn to advance.

  It’s like Dancing in Jane Austen, Advance and Retreat, only with guns and mud. The German attack passes Grandfather’s Hole.

  But one German sees Grandfather move below and he jumps down. He does. He jumps down into the hole. And he whips out his bayonet.

  It’s in this thin little protective scabbard that keeps the blade clean. What Grandfather sees is a flash of light. He pulls out his pistol.

  Only his arm isn’t working so that doesn’t actually happen.

  He tries again, thinking pull out your pistol, but there’s only this torso-wriggle in the mud, and now the German is closing in on him. Grandfather’s looking at his arm
s telling them to wake up but he sees his whole chest is this tacky darkness and he realises the bayonet is the least of his worries.

  The German is standing over him, full sky behind his head, and knife in his hand.

  And then, flat German face perspiring, eyes intelligent and calm, he leans down to Grandfather and does the most remarkable thing; he taps Grandfather twice on the shoulder.

  ‘Tommy okay,’ he says. ‘Tommy okay.’

  Then he takes the bayonet and cuts a strip of cloth and with swift efficiency ties a tourniquet round Grandfather’s arm. He opens his pack of Whatever-To-Use-if-Shot that the Germans have given their soldiers and he splashes some on Grandfather’s chest wound.

  He looks at his handiwork a moment. Being German there are no loose bits. He nods. Grandfather sees the eyes he is to remember all his life.

  ‘Tommy okay,’ he says.

  Then the German soldier goes back to War.

  He climbs up the side of the crater, into Round Two of Advance Retreat, and is shot clean through the centre of his forehead.

  Next thing Grandfather knows he’s on a stretcher. He’s not in Paradise; there are no gold streets, no immortal wheat, not a single Cherub. Instead he’s in that bounce that I know too, when you’re tied into the stretcher and they carry you along and all you can see is the sky above moving backwards like you’re floating downriver and thinking how peculiar it is to be on your back moving through the world.

  On good days it can be a bit Michelangelo, like you’ve drunk Heaven-Up I told Timmy and he liked that and said you’re a poet like your dad. On good days before a treatment when the sky is that blue and deep and you’re being borne along you feel you never saw it before, you feel it’s not a roof but a door and it’s actually quite open if you just take the time. That’s my revelation anyhow. No angels though. I’ve never gone the whole Sistine.

  German-bandaged, Grandfather was carried back to British Lines. The red bloom soaked out from his chest like the Overdone Imagery Mrs Quinty says I use all the time.

  I don’t give a Figroll, I should have said.

  The thing is, it wasn’t what he was expecting. So the first phase is just this enormous surprise, this O that this is how the plot is twisting. Along he goes in the stretcher and he’s all the time expecting that he’s done, that if the pain would lessen he could just close his eyes and wake up in Thomas Traherneland. Because he does believe in a next life, his version is one of those blue-sky kinds with the light coming from behind huge white-puff clouds and saints kind of standing on them like very serene superheroes who’ve decided long wavy hair in the seventies was the look and a peach or apricot robe was quite comfortable in the weather up there. That kind of afterlife. Anyway, what with all the Latin and kneeling and candles Abraham’s pretty much got the passport. So there he is, blood crisping, eyelids kind of butterfly-fluttering, Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison on his lips, and here are the hands of the angels coming to lift him up.

  Only they’re a little rough.

  That’s because they belong not to an angel but to a young medic called Oliver Cissley. Oliver’s so ardent it’s given him glossy eyes and fierce neck acne but he has come to war to save lives.

  Grandfather is delivered to Cissley right there on a plate and so bingo! Young Oliver gets to work just as Grandfather is in that place between Living and Dying, between Fish and Fisherman, my father says, and Oliver thinks this is what he came for and starts whipping the bullets out – one, two, and actually yes, there, three – and hauling Abraham back from the Hereafter.

  Grandfather is a Near Thing.

  Which is no fun. Believe me.

  Because for Grandfather then there was only Falling Back Down to Earth, which is not great and just plain awful for a pole-vaulting salmon.

  Chapter 5

  Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

  That’s pure MacCarroll. We have mixed metaphors and outlandish similes for breakfast.

  When you transplant a little English language into a Clare Bog this is what happens, Miss Quinty.

  Ruth Ruth Ruth.

  It’s just so fecund.

  Ruth Swain!

  Grandfather survives. The War moves away and he stays behind. They give him a little time to recover and see if he can Take up Arms again but he can’t even Take up Hands. The holes in his chest and the soul-thick air of the battlefields of Boulogne join forces to give him pneumonia and next thing he’s on his way back to England without Messrs. Morrow, Eacrett, Cheatley & Paul, all of whom are growing poppies in France, and he’s moved into a Home called Wheaton in Wolverhampton.

  Years later my father tried to find him there, first by reading everything he could of World War One, then by leaving us one October and going by train, ferry and bus to Wolverhampton long after Abraham was dead and Wheaton Home had been turned into fifty-six apartments for people who didn’t see ghosts. I don’t think he found him, but when he came back Mam said he smelled of smoke.

  Great-Grandmother Agnes is dead when Abraham returns. In those days you could die beautifully of Failure of the Heart, and that’s what she did, prayers said, palms together, close your eyes and bumps-a-daisy, another one for Greener Pastures, My Lord.

  When the authorities ask Abraham of any living relatives he says he has none. A caustic shame is the natural by-product of the Impossible Standard.

  So, at this stage in Our Narrative it doesn’t look great for my chances. (See Book 777, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne, Penguin Classics, London.)

  (Has its advantages I suppose. For one thing, I won’t die at the end.)

  Abraham has had his soul burned. That’s what I’ve decided. He’s had an Icarus moment, only English Protestant-style. Like all of England he has fallen the long distance from Rudyard Kipling to T. S. Eliot, which is a long way, and it left him with ashes on his soul. He was not worthy. He’s a Veteran at age twenty. So he sits in a fusty room with a narrow bed and a small window that gives a view of the fumy skies of Wolverhampton and starts smoking himself to death. He can’t believe he’s still alive. He’s God’s Oversight. He should have been the hasty three-and-a-half feet under the sunny sweet-scented fields of France where they put Morrow, Eacrett, Cheatley & Paul together so they could get on with enjoying the hurdy-gurdy of the afterlife. Instead, Abraham Swain has been caught halfway, between worlds, and this is where he’s to stay the rest of his days.

  He’s failed the Philosophy of Impossible Standard and so he lets his father believe he’s dead. He lives one of those quiet little lives no one notices, wearing brown trousers, walking to the shop, ‘Daily Mail today, sir?’, chainsmoking through the horse-racing in the long dull afternoons.

  And, Dear Reader, years pass.

  But there’s always a Twist.

  Remember Oliver? Well, here comes a fine old lady, handsome, stately, wonderfully neat, who knocks with no nonsense on the door of Abraham Swain and sweeps into his room very much like Mrs Rouncewell in Bleak House (page 84, Book 179, Penguin Classics, London) from whom I have borrowed some of her character.

  Mrs Rouncewell has had two sons, of whom the younger ran wild, and went for a soldier, and never came back. Even to this hour, Mrs Rouncewell’s calm hands lose their composure when she speaks of him and, unfolding themselves from her stomacher, hover about her in an agitated manner, as she says, ‘What a likely lad, What a fine lad, What a gay, good-humoured, clever lad he was!’

  Only her name here is not Mrs Rouncewell, but Mrs Cissley. Her Oliver the very one that saved Abraham and who wrote letters to his mother from the Front – What a likely lad, What a fine lad – the poor woman’s hands fluttering about at the near mention of his name. And in these letters – ‘Look, I have them here’ – and indeed she does and dips in and takes from her large black bag a pale wing of pages smelling of peppermints.

  ‘This one,’ she says. ‘This one tells how he saved you. Abraham Swan.’

  ‘Swain.’

  She lays the letter
before him. Freed of it, her hands catch each other in mid-air and pull themselves down on to her lap into a moment’s peace. Then, while Grandfather reads of himself as the miracle Swan, head turned and squinting one-eyed to inhale, Mrs Cissley says: ‘His brother died young. Oliver was Our Hope.’

  Slowly rises the Swain brow.

  Mrs Cissley’s hands rise up off her stomach, catch each other, wring, twist, interlock, fly free and fall once more to her lap, leaving in the air an old-soap scent of despair that won’t wash away. Her face cannot accommodate the population of emotions. Some of them are pushed down on to her neck where they get together to set off a poppy bloom in the shape of France.

  ‘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.