History of the Rain

by Niall Williams

  But God (or in Freudian, Abraham) wasn’t going to beat Virgil. My father took every setback as a trial, doubled the lines of wire, re-staked the fence, then made a double perimeter along the river when he came out one morning to see a whole portion of it, posts and wire both, had been pressed forward into the water. The following night he camped out in the field. He sat hunkered in a greatcoat in the rain, peering through the dark for the ghost-shapes of the cattle, listening inside the running of the river for the approach of hooves. He would not be defeated. Not another beast would drown even if it meant he had to camp there every night. When at last he saw the bruise of dark upon dark that was a cow coming to the fence he stood and waved his arms wildly and hallooed. The cow jolted out of its cow-dream and looked at him like he was the one was mad.

  ‘Back! Go on! Back! Hup! Hup!’

  The old cow didn’t move, so determined was she in drowning.

  Virgil had not thought to bring a stick.

  ‘Hup! Go on! Hup!’

  Still she stood there, her eyes wilding a bit looking past him at the river and puzzling on why he was not letting her pass. She swung a half-step around to see if that would placate him.

  It didn’t. Virgil smacked his hand on her backside, ‘Hup!’, and in surprise she kicked out both hind legs, a not undainty lift and back-flick that caught him on the shin and buckled him. He was lying on the ground beside the wire before his brain had time to tell him she had broken his tibia.

  The cow still had her backside to him. Now others of the herd approached through the dark.

  Were they all come to drown? He grasped on to his shin with both hands, pressing, as if he could squeeze the parts together, but the pressure only shot the pain deeper. He roared out. And maybe because the cattle knew the sound of pain or because they had been distracted on their way into the river, or because cows can’t keep two thoughts in their head at the same time, they stopped. They stood and watched him. After a while one of them got the idea there was maybe sweeter grass over in the far corner where she had been an hour earlier and where there certainly was not but she went anyway and the others in cow fashion followed and that night none drowned.

  My father crawled back across the field. He banged on the back door because he could not stand to get the latch.

  The following afternoon, when Virgil’s leg was set and he was seated in two chairs inside the window, Jimmy Mac called in to see him. He listened to the full account of our cattle that were bent on drowning. Then he nodded slowly, scratched at the starter beard he always wore except on Sundays. ‘It wouldn’t be,’ he said, ‘because they’re looking for water to drink, would it?’

  My father told that story. Like all the stories he told it was against himself. He was never the hero, and from this I suppose we were to learn a kind of grace, if grace is the condition of bearing outrageous defeat.

  One year he decided to put the Big Meadow in potatoes. I think that’s how you say it, to put it in potatoes. The principle was simple. You bought the seed potatoes, you opened the drills, popped in the seeds, closed them again. For each seed you had bought there would be a minimum tenfold yield. Maybe twentyfold if the year came good. Tommy Murphy had a Cork cousin with a harrow. The cousin had moved to Clare and was only just making the adjustment. He came and stood on the wall and looked over into the field. ‘There’ll be a few stones,’ he said. ‘They’ll need picking.’

  Turns out he had the Cork mastery of understatement. Who knew one field could harbour so many stones? If they were laid out end-on-end there would be no field. If you were of an Old Testament bent like Matthew Bailey you’d suppose the stones rained each night from the sky. Maybe they did. Or maybe every farmer in the parish had already dug out their stones years ago and dumped them in our fields when the MacCarrolls were wistfully watching the Atlantic and sucking seaweed. It turns out we had a world-class collection. There were top stones, mid-stones, deep stones. Then there were rocks.

  Virgil gave his back to them. The skin of the tops of his fingers too, the joints of both thumbs, the exterior knuckles of both hands, the balls of his knees. He’d be out before the birds in the March morning, stamping heat into his wellingtons, letting himself out the back door, breath hawing, ear-tips freezing as he crossed up over the opened field to the top corner where he sank to his knees, having decided kneeling was a better method than bending. He scrabbled at the ground, picked out stones, tossed them towards the barrow, dawn rising to the hard mournful clack clack that startled the magpies until it became habitual and they came and took the worms that had risen without realising what the birds knew, that men opened ground in Spring and potatoes went in around St Patrick’s Day.

  What does a man think of when he’s all day on his knees in a field beside the river? I have no idea. I suppose it would have occurred to some that maybe the field was unsuitable. But like me, in matters farming my father was an innocent, and so I’m guessing he just supposed this was what it meant to work the land. If you’re a Latin reader, take a break here, have a read of Virgil’s Georgics, written about 30 bc, and you’ll see that Virgil had his troubles with farming too. But he didn’t have our stones. On our farm there were always too many stones.

  My father filled a barrow to the brim and shortly discovered he had invented a new ache, straightening. He went to hoist the barrow handles, and had a blinding insight out of Archimedes: stones were heavy, ground was soft. He couldn’t push it. The wheel sank.

  ‘Only the birds witnessed your father’s ignominy,’ he told us. ‘Taking stones back out of the barrow again.’

  Instead of the barrowing he decided to make mounds, conical clamps of stones at the edge of furrows. They are still there. The grass has overgrown them and so they make our back meadow look like an artist installation or a green sea with frozen wave caps rising. They are a monument to the Potato Years, I suppose. Mac’s cattle use them as backside-scratchers.

  Virgil devolved a Swain Method. Day after day he went along on his knees taking out the stones. Then he went along on his knees putting in the seed potatoes. His hands were like old maps. Every wrinkle and line had some of our field in it. When he had the seeds in, Murphy’s cousin came back and covered them. The cousin stood on the wall after, my father a curved C-shape beside him. ‘This place is nicely cursed with stones,’ the cousin said in Corkish. He gave this insight air and time, then he threw a curt nod towards the now invisible potatoes and added the Pagan-Christian Superstition-Blessing combo we use here to cover all bases, ‘Well, may they be lucky for ye. God bless ’em.’

  God, it turns out, is not a big fan of potatoes in Ireland. It may be unfinished business between Him and Walter Raleigh. Maybe, like tobacco, the potatoes were never supposed to have been brought to this part of the world. Maybe God hadn’t put them here in the first place because He knew what He was doing and they were supposed to stay in South America. They definitely weren’t meant to come to this country. That much is clear. If you recall He’d already sent a pretty major message to that effect. Stop Living on Potatoes, Irish People, was the gist of it. Catch Fish was the follow-up, but it didn’t take.

  Still, two weeks before Easter my father’s first potatoes had sprouted. Mary came to the back gate and looked out at her husband inspecting the ridges, and in the green shoots I’m guessing she saw a vindication. He was not mad, he was just a dreamer. Men are much bigger dreamers than women anyway. That’s a given. Read Nostromo (Book 2,819, Joseph Conrad, Penguin Classics, London), read Jude the Obscure (Book 1,999, Thomas Hardy, Macmillan, London), read as far as my father and then I got to, page 286, Volume One, in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (Book 2,016, Doubleday, New York), read the 1975 Reader’s Digest Condensed History of the World (Book 1,955, Reader’s Digest, New York), and tell me men aren’t dreamers. But this was a good dream. Maybe it was the best dream, the original one, that a man and woman could live together on a piece of land beside the river, the dream that you could just be. Although every windowsill-s
itter outside the post office had said MacCarroll’s field wasn’t suitable to grow five acres of potatoes, there the potatoes were. Mary entered the kitchen like a dancer. Her mother was knuckling dough. ‘They’re growing,’ Mary said.

  Nan knuckled the dough some more.

  ‘They’re growing,’ she said again. ‘The potatoes.’

  ‘My bones are telling me I don’t like the weather that’s coming,’ her mother answered, and slipped her mouth in under the ash tube.

  It wasn’t rain exactly. It was weather that descended like a cloud. It was there in Holy Week, a fog that was more than a fog and a mist that was more than a mist because it was dense like a fog and wet like a mist but was neither and was neither drizzle nor rain proper. It came between the land and the sky like a blindness. It just hung there, this mild wet grey veil through which the river ran and escaped. But the potato stalks relished it. Maybe because it was a kind of South American jungle weather, maybe because it was mythic like them, the potatoes flourished, rising quickly towards the promise of May. My father was out with his spade, mounding earth against the sides of them, thinking nothing of the weather that was sticking to him or the fact that for forty days the field hadn’t seen the sun.

  It was a triumph. Despite the weather the blossoms came. My father had a shining shook-foil dazzlement in him, that extra-ness of light or energy or just life which Aeney and I would come to know so well. Literally a kind of brilliance, I suppose. You saw it on him and in him. He had to find ways to let it out and he hadn’t found the poetry yet.

  It was another week before Virgil saw the blight.

  The neighbours knew it before him. Maybe the whole country did. But nobody wanted to say. As Marty Keogh says, we can be fierce backward about coming forward. No one likes to be the bearer of bad news. Maybe they think that if no one picks it up and bears it then the bad news will rot away where it is, which Marty thinks not a bad thing and might have saved us from the Bust only for the fact that we were paying the lads on the radio to tell us we’re doomed. In any case, the potato stalks started withering. Virgil went out one May morning, the drizzle cloying, the birds I suppose with diminished eloquence, and at last saw what was blatant. He didn’t at first think it was blight. Although it was raining and had been raining and would continue to rain, he thought it looked more like drought. The green of the leaves was dulled as if from an absence of water. He took a leaf in his hand. It was in the softness of dying and curled instantly to a crêpe consistency. He stayed out in the field. He tramped up and down the ridges. He had not sprayed against blight because it simply had not occurred to him. Because he was in that innocent or ignorant state depending, where you believe God is good and hard work alone will bring reward.

  The stalks blackened overnight. It turns out there was a given wisdom that potatoes beside rivers are doomed, and that wisdom was aired generally now, only not in my father’s company. He dug up a plant. Beneath it were potatoes smaller than stones. They were savagely acned. When he held one in his hand he could press his thumb through the pulpy heart.

  He did not call the Murphy’s cousin. He did not tell anyone but my mother, and that afternoon went out with the barrow and began singlehandedly to dig up the five acres of that failed crop. It took days. The cattle in the next field over watched as he mounded the stalks. The mounds smelled like disease. They had to be burned. But they would not. Twisted tubes of the Clare Champion flared and went out. He walked into the village and bought kerosene from Siney Nolan who sold it to him with grave lowered eyebrows and knew but did not say What do you need that for?

  The following year he tried the potatoes again.

  This time he sprayed.

  This time there was no blight.

  This time it was river worms that destroyed them.

  Those potatoes were all right, Mam said, when she told it. Aeney and I were maybe ten. All of us were at the table. A large bowl of floury potatoes had summoned the story.

  ‘The way I remember it, those potatoes were all right,’ she said. She looked closely at one she held upright on her fork, ‘If you cut around the worms.’

  I screamed and Aeney ughed and Mam laughed and Dad smiled looking at her and letting the story heal.

  ‘Mammy!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t say that word,’ I said.

  ‘What word?’

  ‘Worms worms worms,’ Aeney said, scratching the table with the wriggling fingers of both hands, quoting but not exactly performing Hamlet.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with . . .’

  ‘Don’t!’

  ‘As long as you cut around them,’ Mam said.

  I screamed again and Aeney came at me with the worm fingers and slimed them gleefully along my neck. I scrunched my chin down which is, I know, pathetic Girl’s Defence, Baby Edition, but all I could think of given that my brain was all worms. And he kept doing it, which in my experience is Typical Boy. Anyway, next thing, Dad had come with his two hands palm-to-palm like snappers and whop! He’d golloped up Aeney’s worms. He kept them imprisoned in his snappers and Aeney yelled and Dad laughed and I was saved and in turn now laughed at Aeney captured in Dad’s hands. Somehow the worm-ruined potatoes had become this happiness, somehow the years-ago hurt had transformed, and I think maybe I had a first sense then of the power of story, and realised that time had done what Time sometimes does to hardship, turn it into fairy tale.

  Chapter 10

  And still we were not born.

  Your narrator, you may already have grasped, is not gifted in matters chronological. Chronos, the God with the three heads who split the egg of the world into three even parts, and started the whole measuring-out business, never appealed to me.

  Neither did the DC Comics version Vincent Cunningham says is right cool.

  Aeney and I were not yet on the horizon of this world. Sometimes I like to think we were in another one, having just a wonderful time. I like to think not of The World to Come but of The World That Came Before, for which so far in Literature I have found no descriptions. There is something in Edward Joseph Martyn’s peppermint and mothball-smelling Morgante the Lesser (Book 2,767, BiblioBazaar, South Carolina) but it’s more a World Elsewhere really. When Mr Martyn wasn’t helping W.B. Yeats found the Abbey Theatre he squeezed in a little time to do the bit of writing, and in this he describes the perfect world of Agathopolis. In Agathopolis Mass is attended every morning after everyone has a good thorough full-body wash. After Mass you sit around on grandstands and watch military reviews.

  Unreal.

  Here’s a better one. Think of any of your favourite characters, and then picture them in the time before they entered the story. They existed somewhere, in a World Before. Hamlet as a small boy. (Hamlet Begins in the Warner Brothers version.)

  Macbeth as a teenager. (Out of his pimples The Dark Prince Rises. Sorry, fecund.)

  Anna Karenina in school. She probably had someone like Miss Jean Brodie in her prime for a teacher not Mrs Pratt who we had and who, like Miss Barbary in Bleak House, never smiled and because I was Plain Ruth Swain told me I shouldn’t rule out the nuns, she herself who had a gawky face on her that Tommy Fitz proved by Google was identical to a Patagonian Toothfish.

  In the World Before This One, Aeney and I were waiting. We knew there was longing for us. We wanted to come. But once we did we knew that time was going to start and that meant time was going to end too, so we hung out in distant seas a while longer. We didn’t mean any harm. And anyway the story wasn’t ready for us yet. There are precedents. It’s ten chapters before Sam Weller appears in The Pickwick Papers (Book 124, Penguin Classics, London), nineteen before Sarah Gamp arrives in Martin Chuzzlewit (Book 800, Penguin Classics, London). But Mary and Virgil were losing hope of ever having children. My father was certain it was his fault. Thanks to the Reverend and thanks to Abraham he had the Swain genius for finding fault in himself. He came up short of the Standard in everything. What it was like to live with that inside you, w
hat it meant to be subject to the constant duress of failing the Impossible, to aspire and fall, aspire and fall, to flick between the cathodes and anodes of rapture and despair, I can only imagine. I don’t aspire. My hope has a small h. I hope to get to the end.

  Because, first-off, Mary was a woman, and secondly because she was a MacCarroll, Mam took the news of being unpregnant stoically. She didn’t go do-lally. She didn’t drama-queen. Maybe she knew about the Late Arrivals thing, or maybe Mam just has more faith.

  In the evenings after work Virgil would go out in a long buff-coloured coat he had brought back from somewhere in Chile, the one that was split deep up the back so you could ride vaquero-style, that had two tails that flew out and in a crosswind came up like wings. He walked miles along the riverbank. It was chance. It was a fluke of biology. That was all. Don’t be stupid. There was no message, no meaning in it. It was not a Judgment.

  But it felt like one.

  To save my father from himself my mother took him dancing; Nan’s set-dance addiction had gone down the bloodstream and transmogrified into Jive in Mam at which Virgil was hopeless but did anyway because it made her smile and he was addicted to that. His long frame sole-shuffling was not exactly dancing. Elbows crooked, arms out, he seemed to be doing The Coat-hanger. By living in Ashcroft with Mother Kittering he had missed out on that whole stage of development where bad clothes, peer pressure and pimples combine to teach you how to mimic the cool people. My dad literally had no clue. But Mam didn’t mind. Everything about him was evidence of something special, when special was still a good word.

  They went to plays in halls. They went to the Singing Club. They went to the Kilrush Operatic Society’s production of The Bohemian Girl at the Mars Theatre, with Guest Artists (all of whom have sung at Covent Garden, the flyer says. It lies folded inside the yellowed dog-eared and generally dirt-smelling copy of John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, Book 2,601, Corgi, London). One night they went to see Christy Moore who sang with shut eyes the Christie Hennessy song that became Virgil’s favourite because in it was the line ‘We’d love to go to Heaven, but we’re always digging holes’ which my father said summed up we Irish and was more profound than Plato.