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.
Chapter 6
‘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?
In case you’ve fallen out with Carty, at the other end of the village is Lynch’s funeral parlour. There you can exit the world through Toby Lynch’s sitting-room-turned-undertakers. Toby turns off the television and lays a doily over it when he has a corpse, except that time during the World Cup. In my mind he’s played by Vincent Crummles, Theatrical Impressario in Nicholas Nickleby (Book 681, Penguin Classics, London). A lovely man, as they say hereabouts. A lovely man. Toby does the make-up for the Drama Group during Festival season and so Lynch’s is a good choice if you like a little Red Number Seven and Brown Number Four on your cheeks or are planning on making a Good Entrance in the next life.
If
you get past Death and enter the village proper you’ll pass Culligan’s Hardware that’s no longer a hardware shop and MacMahon’s Drapery that’s no longer a drapery since Lidl came to Kilrush and started selling Latvian wellingtons for nothing and blue one-piece overalls that make the farmers look like they’re Nuclear Waste inspectors. The shops still have the names over the doors though and Monica Mac still has some leftover stock in her front sitting room which she sells to select clients who can’t countenance living without being à la Mode MacMahon, which basically means ‘Washes like a hanky’ Mam says.
Hanway’s Butchers is an actual shop. Martin Hanway too is a lovely man, huge hands, he’s one of those farmer-butchers who have their own animals in the fields out back and on warm wet fly-buzzing days in June he leaves the back door open and you can see next month’s chops looking cow-eyed at the stall. I turned vegetarian when I was ten. Nolan’s Shop doesn’t say Nolan’s over it, it says SPAR in garish green, but no one calls it that. You ask someone where Spar is you’ll get blankety blank, as Tommy Fitz says. Despite the Boom and despite the Bust, Nolan’s are hanging on. They survive on selling sweets to the scholars and Clare Champions to the pensioners. Sometimes they have out-of-date cornflakes and Weetabix on Special and get a run on customers who don’t believe in time. Since we decided to impress the Germans and save the world by abolishing plastic bags in Ireland there’ll be any number of customers trying to balance eggs milk carrots turnips cabbage and bread loaves in their arms coming out the door.
The village has three pubs, all of which the Minister for Fixing Things Not Broken wiped out when the drink-driving laws changed and petrol stations started selling Polish beer. Clohessy’s, Kenny’s and Cullen’s are all ghost pubs now. They have about seven customers between them, some of whom are still living. Seamus Clohessy says one roll of toilet paper does for a month.
At the end of the village there’s the Post Office which is no longer a Post Office since the Rationalisation, but following the edict Mrs Prendergast refused to surrender her stamps. Back in the day when Mina Prendergast first got the position from the Department of Posts and Telegraphs and moved into High Office as Postmistress of Faha, she felt a little ascension. She was officially lifted just a few inches above everyone. She started wearing open-toed shoes and hats to Mass, Nan says. And, as Mrs Nickleby said of Miss Biffin, that lady was very proud of her toes. To which there was nothing more that needed saying. The Prendergasts were The Quality, and even though they were living in the rainy forgotten back-end of the country they proved what Edith Wharton said about a defeated people who are without confidence in their own nature, they will cling to the manner and morality of their conquerors. So the Prendergasts had the doilies and the little embroidered napkins and proper teacups and saucers and these tiny teaspoons that you’d need about five scoops with to stop the Earl Grey tasting of ladies’ bathwater. They had the BBC. For Mina the Post Office was proof that she was just that little bit Upper. So taking the stamps from her was out-and-out devastation. She wouldn’t countenance it. And she didn’t. So now the shoes coat and hat ensemble goes to Kilrush weekly and buys stamps, comes back, lays them on the counter and opens for business regardless. Let the Minister run the rest of the country, Mina Prendergast is running Faha PO until the end of this life.
Next to the Post unOffice is Father Tipp’s, the dilapidated Parochial House that was once Grimble the land agent’s, a big imposing two-storey, ten empty rooms commanding the river view where Father Tipp dilutes the pain of exile in Clare by indulging in buttered Marietta biscuits and horse-racing, lives with a fine collection of mahogany, an almighty congregation of mice.
Last house out the road, with footpath, flowerbed, pedestrian crossing and streetlight in front, is the wrought-iron and stone-fronted magnificence of our Councillor, whom pretty much everyone calls Saddam after he went on the trade mission to Iraq. As I live and breathe, Barney Cussen said when the Councillor came into Ryan’s, if it isn’t Saddam. The Councillor didn’t object. A vote is a vote. And it was better than Leatherballs. He had a bald head by twenty-two which gave him a passing impression of intelligence and resulted in him being consulted on all manner of things. Some people become what others think of them, that’s what I’ve decided. So, once the Councillor started getting asked his opinion, fatally he became convinced of the existence of his own intelligence. You ask him a question you get a paragraph. He is focused intently on fulfilling his mandate, he’ll tell you, nodding slow and shrewd and narrowing his eyes to the distance behind you, as if his mandate is all the time trying to escape his focus.
End of the village is the graveyard; it’s crooked and dark and slopes to the river which is always trying to rise and take it, but it’s convenient for the church and means that dead parishioners never have to leave the parish, can enter the next world without having to learn new customs.
You’re out the end of the village now. Take a right and bear left at the Y and you’ll come to a cross. A right at the cross and a left that doesn’t look like a proper left but is more broken-down rough cut by the place Martin Neylon with six pints in him singing ‘Low lie the fields’ climbed the ditch in his Massey Ferguson the time of the ice, widening the road at no charge and leaving his own mark on history in the name Neylon’s Bend.
You’ll feel lost, which is all right, and you’re the only car now which is good because the road is only that wide and you have to slow down anyway behind Mikey who in his turned-down wellies is walking his Ladies, eighteen milking cows, along in front of you. He’ll know you’re behind him and in a salute he’ll sort of raise the bit of black pipe he uses to welt the backsides of those same ladies but he doesn’t turn around or turn the cows in to the side because they’re walking bags of milk those girls and it’s their road too and they graze the bits of grass that grow along the ditches but on the dung-slathered sight of their hanging udders you’ll swear you’ll never drink milk again.
So you travel along at cowspeed and you’ve time between the wipers coming and going to see the houses near the road and the ragged fields that fall down the valley to your left and because it’s summer when you come there’s the yellow gorse bushes that we call furze and when I was small used think was furs. It sort of glows in the fields and because you’re not a farmer you’ll think it’s lovely and not that it shows how poor the land is. You’ll think those patches of rushes are just shading or some other kind of grass they grow here and because you’re driving at cowspeed behind Mikey you’ll have time to look across and now you’ll see this gleam that is the River Shannon and you’ll feel the sense of an ending.
But be careful, the river can take you. It has its own mesmerism, and Mikey is turning the cows into the shed ahead of you and he’s raising his black pipe again that is thanks and apology and acknowledgement that you’re here with us, in our time in our rain.
Drive on a bit further now, stay with the river on your left and follow it towards the sea. Feel the quickening. Look across at the Kingdom looking over at you with a kind of Kerry contentment, and you’re in our townland now. Watch out for various figures bundled in coats and hats, ditch-trawlers in early senescence out trying to gather sticks for the range since the cutbacks came to pay the bankers.
Pass the house of the Saints Murphy, Tommy and Breda, they do our praying for us. Both of them are in the Premier Division of praying and sometimes because we’re such heathens – well, except for Nan who’s a kind of Pagan-Catholic – Mam goes down to them and asks them to say a few Our Fathers or Glory Be’s for us and they do. Tommy and Breda are in their seventies and they have this lovely manner that’s Old Ireland, and you feel sort of quiet in their company like when the choir is singing at Christmas. Tommy is a gentle man and he loves Breda with a kind of folklore love. She’s losing her hair now and bits of it land in the dinners she cooks and the scones she bakes, but Tommy doesn’t object, he sees the hairs and eats away. He loves her too much to say a thing. They sit evenings sipping tea with their hig
h-visibility vests on, kind of glowing neon yellow the way saints should. Tommy and Breda weren’t blessed with children but they have nine laying pullets and any amount of free-range eggs. They’ll give you half a dozen if you stop. But you can’t right now.
Pass the Major Ryan’s and Sam his suicidal dog who’s running out and trying to get under your wheels. The Major’s name derives not from any military career but from the quantity of Majors cigarettes he smoked, right-hand fingers tuberous gold, chest a mazy fibrous mass, and his voice that low husk that caused every audience to crane forward as one in Faha the time of the amateur-drama productions. The dog has been trying to kill himself for seven years, hasn’t managed it yet.
That figure ahead of you is Eamon Egan, fattest man in the parish and proud of it, wouldn’t walk the length of himself, Nan says. Posterboy for the anti-famine look, in the county’s largest navy suit he sits propped on his front wall. Give him a nod, he’ll scowl back because he doesn’t know you and for the rest of the evening he’ll be demented tracking around in his big head playing a game of: who’s the stranger?
You’ll pass the young Maguires who were both in the bank and both lost their jobs in the Bust and are now living in Egan’s mother’s place trying to grow vegetables in puddles. Next door is McInerney’s, smiling Jimmy who’s no oil painting Nan says and never heard of dentistry but discovered the secret to successful marriage was not teeth but Quality Street because he’s fathered fourteen children on Moira and keeps the National School going. Like Matthew Bagnet in Bleak House, Jimmy will tell you he leaves control of everything to his wife. Where Mrs Bagnet was always washing greens, Moira McInerney is doing the same only with underpants. Those’ll be McInerneys under the hedge, or on the ditch, or kicking a ball over your car, some of them pushing the prams of others or flying around on buck-wheeled bikes, and not one of them with a care in the world or even noticing it’s raining.
History of the Rain Page 4
