History of the Rain

by Niall Williams

  Mam was still just Mam. Yes, she’d cried, and yes she’d been wretched when the callers came and again at the time we had the Mass that Dad said he wouldn’t go to and she’d shouted at him, the only time I ever heard her, and in compromise Father Tipp said he’d say the Mass here in the kitchen and Dad said all right to that, and yes, she let her hair go tangled more often, but once the worst was over she had sort of recovered, if recovered is something people ever do. What I mean I suppose is that she carried on. Women carry on. They endure the way old ships do, breasting into outrageous waters, ache and creak, hull holed and decks awash, yet find anchorage in the ordinary, in tables to be wiped down, pots to scrub, and endless ashes to be put out. The only changes in Mam were that now whenever she was in the village she went into the church to light a candle, and that since Peggy Mooney’s she was continually asked for flowers for the altar, and she obliged, and in the way customs form in small parishes soon it was clear that Mam would be cutting our flowers and bringing them into Faha church until the end of time.

  I had a season to grieve, and then had to go to the Tech on my own. But the fact is grief doesn’t know we invented time. Grief has its own tide and comes and goes in waves. So when I went I was no more over it or out of it or any of the other absurd things whispered in my wake going down the corridors. For the first weeks I had a status above Julie Burns who had to have all her teeth removed, or Ambrose Trainer who had come from Dublin and had an infected nose piercing. My status was Half. I was The Other One. I was the one who had Half of Her Gone. In the toilets that mascara’d ghoul and Trainee Vampire Siobhan Crowley asked me, ‘Can you feel him? Over there, on the other side? Can you?’

  Teachers too treated me with circumspection. My story had preceded me into the staffroom, and created that space around you that stories do. I moved from The Girl Who Wears Glasses to The Girl Who Had the Brother to The Girl Who Walked On Her Own to The Girl Who Read, parts I stepped into with alacrity and relief, relishing the solitude and soon somehow proving both adages, that our natures are incontrovertible, and we become what others expect.

  Stories though wear thin after a time. In this world compassion is a limited commodity, and what is first considered appropriate so soon becomes annoyance. Why is she still like that?

  She does it for effect.

  She likes the attention.

  She’s just so, odd.

  As if wilfully, and to further confirm the indelible quirk of my own character, I loved poetry. Mrs Quinty, who was unlike Miss Jean Brodie In Her Prime in all things except seeing in some girls a flicker of intelligence, became aware of it when we read Seamus Heaney’s ‘Mid-Term Break’, the one where his brother dies, where in the second-last line we learn the bumper knocked him clear, and I said I liked that clear because it went with the classes to a close in the second line and though sad somehow clear had hope in it. Mrs Quinty did not know then that my father had prepared the ground, that I was already hum-familiar, or that I was drawn to poetry for reasons of mystery. She gave me the anthologies the sale reps brought her and which she had told them she would consider using. Small and taut and resolute she came down the classroom, placed one on my desk and said, ‘You might like to take a look in this.’ Just that. She did not edit, guide or censor. She didn’t go Teacher Mode, didn’t ask me to tell her what I thought or to write up a report or turn the gift into an exercise. She did the most generous and implausible thing, she gave me poetry.

  Note to future Swains: reading a poetry anthology in the school yard, while it now has precedent and may appear natural and unremarkable to Swain-minds, is not best equipment for the vicious nightmare that is teenagehood. Reading poetry sealed my fate. In the Tech it classified as off-the-scale weird and left me in the same company as Kiera Murphy the Crayola-eater and Canice Clohessy, The Constipated, in whose unique case shit didn’t happen.

  I lost the skill of dialogue. I was invited to no birthday party, except the time Mr Mulvihill, who had married an easterly wind called Irene, and to spite her, phoned to say he was inviting the whole year to his Sinead’s fourteenth.

  I didn’t go, and I didn’t care. When I lost my brother I lost more than half the world. I was left in somewhere narrow as the margin, and in there, parallel to the main text, I would write my marginalia.

  Chapter 2

  There are four of us in purgatory, a concept I didn’t believe in until I was in it. I am the youngest. Eleanor Clancy is the oldest. Like Miss Toppit in Martin Chuzzlewit she wears a brown wig of uncommon size. She says Ah pet to me and to the nurses and when they lift her out of bed her shins are sharp and look like they’ll snap so I look away. Mrs Merriman doesn’t speak at all now. She did when she came in, but now she’s too upset. She’s too upset to be here. She wants to remain in the actual world, where her Philip needs her and will not manage without her. She doesn’t want to be in this in-between place, which is neither here nor there. Mrs Merriman has the side with the wall and to it does her wailing, these high waily moans she tries to strangle coming out and that we pretend not to hear. Jackie Fennell is our cheerleader. She looks like one of those actresses they get for TV hospital dramas. There can’t be anything wrong with you when you’re that gorgeous. Jackie’s Lucozade is white wine smuggled in by Benny, so she can’t share it. But she could get me Green & Black’s chocolate or Glamour or magenta nail varnish if I wanted. We’re all here for something different. There are more things that can go wrong with you than you can shake a stick at, Timmy said.

  I’ve a pain in my face telling you where it hurts, Mrs Merriman said.

  My body which my dungeon is, RLS said.

  The curtains are blue plastic and they come around in a single soft swish and when they do you know it’s Business.

  Mr Mackey comes with Dr Naradjan to look at my results. Mr Mackey is The Top Man; he has the world’s most perfect suit and was either born in a new white shirt or can put one on without adding any human creasing. His only flaw is those ties with little symbols on them somebody pretended for a laugh would catch on. Today they are silver fishes.

  ‘I am quite concerned about these, Ruth,’ he says.

  When it comes to that multitude covered by what Mina Prendergast with nineteenth-century-drawing-room manners calls Matters of the Heart, some women are practical. Some women see the hurt, consider the damage, and embark on a remedy right away. Some women have no hopelessness in them. They will surrender their beauty, sacrifice music dancing laughter, suffer heartache so profound there’s a clean hole right through the centre of them, but still they will not be defeated. My mother is one of these.

  Mam knew that Virgil had stopped writing. She knew whatever had been turned on was now turned off, and after a time it was her natural reaction to go looking for the pliers and spanners and whatever to get it going again.

  Washers maybe. Aren’t they a thing? I’m running a little short of time to fix my metaphors. Anyway Borges said writing is better when you leave your mistakes in. If Shakespeare had an editor we wouldn’t have Shakespeare.

  The remedy, she decided, was in poetry. Mam had read pieces of some of my father’s poems, but they were always works-in-progress. It was always over his shoulder, bringing him a cup of tea, or telling him she was going to sleep, always just a glance and allowed always with the understanding that he was going to make them better. These were just drafts of the thing he was trying to get at. That was the thing about the poetry of Virgil Swain. You’ll already know that from his Swain-ness. You’ll already know a poem is the most impossible thing. It’s cruel and capricious and contains within it its own guarantee of failure. What you think you’ve caught in the poem today is not there when you go to look at it tomorrow. Under the spell of Mrs Quinty’s poetry anthologies I can admit I wrote some poems myself, and they were all brilliant until they were rubbish.

  Mam had read bits, that’s all, and though she’s the first to say she knows one hundred per cent of precisely nothing about poetry, and considers just the f
act of it, the construction, the craft, the art that has to go into it, a kind of astonishment in itself, she thought Virgil’s poems marvellous.

  They were not love poems in any normal sense. They were not addressed to her, but in a more profound way they were for her. They were for her because they had sprung out of the life she had let Virgil into. There were Aisling copies full of them. Sometimes a whole copy would be filled with different versions of the same poem. The first pages would be maybe a single phrase, a line going across the page in mouse-grey pencil. Then the same line would be written again underneath, but this time altered slightly, maybe an added comma, or a word changed or the tense of the verb or there’d be the half of a second line added and overhanging. As if he’d pulled a little too urgently at the first line and it had come bringing with it the next, but the line had snapped and he’d lost it. He’d started on a new page, written the first phrase again. There’d be nothing else on that page. You’d know he’d spent the whole night just looking at it. There’d be pages with images that came to him, ones that he’d try variants of and reject, the grey mouse scratching a line through them. Other copies might have ten, twelve poems in them, whole and clean and perfect. He liked to write a poem out neatly when it was done, a single mistake, a spelling, a smudge of the pencil, an interruption from me maybe and he turned the page and wrote it out again. It was a way of testing it, I think, and in all tests the poems failed. They were not ready.

  But then Virgil had stopped trying.

  A poet who can’t write is a sad thing. You can see he’s fallen in the pit and the sand and the grime stick to his singlet and shorts. Because it’s his nature he still looks up, still sees the bar up there against the blue, but he has no way to ascend.

  Mam decided the remedy was that my father needed the world to respond. He needed the living worldly equivalent of Abraham or the Reverend to read the poems and say Not bad, not bad at all, which would be the Swainish translation of some London editor’s Bloody marvellous. She had heard me tell of Mrs Quinty and the gift of the poetry anthologies, and so supposed Mrs Quinty was the only one in the parish to be trusted to open my father’s copies.

  On Wednesday afternoons then, when my father was sent to Kilrush to get messages and the Tech took halfday to let the teachers, like warriors in the Iliad, bandage their wounds before the next day’s assault, Mrs Quinty came to our house. She brought her typewriter with her. Typewriters were already antiques by then. (In the Tech we did have six computers in the computer room; but holes being irresistible to boys, all had pencil-tops, paperclips, chewing-gum, balls of snot and other unmentionables stuck in their drives, blinked spastically, spent a whole class saying rebooting and were ageing virgins who had never Gone on the Internet, so Mrs Quinty decided computers were marvels for The Next Generation.)

  She came in the back door carrying her typewriter in its own case.

  ‘Virgil is not to know,’ Mam said.

  Mrs Quinty had already Had Her Disappointment as far as her husband Tommy staying in Swansea was concerned and was no stranger to keeping secrets.

  ‘Nobody can know, but us,’ Mam said, when she came back down from showing Mrs Quinty where to start and the tap tap tap ding was already going gangbusters if gangbusters is what poems go when at last in the ecstasy of release.

  I wouldn’t tell. I knew this was love. I knew it was love with hurt in it and already knew that was the real kind. I knew this was Mam attempting to save Dad, and knew that in the clicking of the keys, crisp and cold and even (thank you, Wenceslas), Virgil Swain, poet, was becoming actual. In time he would come downriver into an anthology.

  Except for its complications, as Barry Lillis says, the plan was simple. Mrs Quinty was to come on Wednesdays. Virgil would be sent on Messages to Brews in Kilrush, an emporium of everything, and after he could go to the library. Mrs Quinty was to work her way through the years of Aisling copies and type up only those poems that seemed to her complete. She was to put them back exactly as she found them. Before leaving she was to give Mam each Wednesday’s poems. She was to make no copies. She was to be paid each week an hourly rate from the money Mam kept inside Lester the China Dog who was discovered hollow when he lost his tail in a fall.

  Mrs Quinty said she would take no payment. ‘It’s poetry,’ she said, eyes gone big behind the dust on her glasses and mouth tight and tiny.

  ‘If you won’t take payment you can’t type the poems.’

  She took payment. (She kept every penny of it in a brown envelope in the top drawer of her mahogany bureau. That money was never spent, and later she gave it to me and I gave it to Father Tipp in Irish Christian-Pagan fashion, partly for prayers and partly for superstition.)

  Mam took each Wednesday’s poems and put them inside the second copy of the phonebook Pat the Post had stuck in our hedge the time the phone company were trying to prove the expansion of their customer base. She did not read the poems and she didn’t let me read them. I think it was in case she had a change of heart, or in case the same thing happened to her that happened to Dad and she read them and found that after all they were not dreadful, but worse, average. She took the poems and fed them flat and singly into the phonebook. She laid them between Breens and Downes and Hehirs and O’Sheas and put the phonebook under her clothes in the bottom drawer. Each week more poems met the general alphabetised population of the County Clare, the whole enterprise taking on the timeless implausibility of fable.

  The poems gathered.

  When Mam went to bed at night she knew they were right there in the bedroom. She could feel them. I could feel them. If I tried hard and closed my eyes tight and listened into them beyond the rain I could hear them.

  I know, weird. Believe what you like. (See: Religions.)

  That the book would soon be real, that a slim grey volume with by Virgil Swain on it would come in the post, was not in doubt. Nor that it would be greeted with wonder. I of course had no idea, and still have no idea, and I expect will probably never have an idea, of how business and money works, and how it would or could work in relation to something as impossible as poetry. But it seemed a natural expectation that once the book was published things would improve for us, and something would be healed.

  After six Wednesdays, Mrs Quinty came down the stairs and said, ‘That’s the last of it.’ She stood and gave herself a little tightening tug. The poetry had kept a cold at bay for six weeks.

  ‘There’s a good-sized book,’ Mam said.

  ‘There is.’

  Then Mrs Quinty wrinkled her nose to lift her glasses upward and asked, ‘What will you call it?’

  Mam hadn’t got that far. ‘Poems?’

  Mrs Quinty stood back, pressed her hands together, and allowed that suggestion to wilt in the daylight. ‘Perhaps something . . . better?’ she said.

  They stood in the kitchen either side of the perplexity. I was at the table with the Explorations anthology, the one that was used before the Department became afraid of being unpopular with fourteen-year-olds, the one that set the bar high, the one that had Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ in it, Hence loathed Melancholy, of Cerberus and blackest midnight born. I looked up. ‘Is there any poem longer than the others?’

  ‘There is,’ Mrs Quinty said. With her middle finger she pushed the glasses to full magnifying. ‘There is one. It’s about . . .’

  She didn’t need to say Aeney.

  ‘It’s called “History of the Rain”.’

  Five minutes later the complete History of the Rain was stacked on a sheet of white tissue paper that had come inside a cardigan box from Monica Mac’s Drapery. It smelled of lilies or Monica Mac’s lily spray. Mam folded the tissue paper over the poems. You could see the title through it. I held the fold closed while Mam slipped a thin green ribbon underneath and brought it up and over and tied the bundle and pressed the bow flat so it would seem less pretty.

  ‘There now,’ she said. She looked at me and smiled the sad smile of our complicity and her eyes had that look
of Please God in them. Maybe just because these were poems, or maybe the same way chocolate grows in your mind in Lent, now that they were there in front of us we had a kind of, I don’t know, reverence about them. We wrapped them again in brown paper and tied the package with string.

  ‘You have the handwriting, Ruthie,’ Mam said, showing me the publisher’s address that Mrs Quinty had found for her. ‘You do it.’

  I wrote it careful as anything. I wrote it the way my father would have. Then Mam and I took our coats and walked to the village. I carried the poems inside my coat away from the rain.

  Maureen Bowe was in Mina Prendergast’s. Maureen was a woman whose range of opinion and depth of pronouncement were not, as Edith Wharton might say, encumbered by illiteracy. But I liked her. She lived in a two-room house with three fly-cemeteries hanging from the ceiling, had left school at fourteen but had Yoda-Level understanding of the world, in particular her rights and the workings of social welfare. Maureen could be fun to listen to, but we were burdened with hope and did not enjoy the delay.

  ‘Mary. And Ruth,’ she said, turning her giant self around with one elbow still holding her place on the counter.

  ‘Maureen.’

  She waited to see if we would offer anything for her to comment on.

  ‘Will it ever stop?’ she asked. The rain had almost exhausted comment. ‘I have a leak. Back kitchen. Tom Keogh that built it. A flat roof about as useful as wallpaper.’ For a moment she let the leak drip in her mind and then added: ‘I think there’s a grant out of flat roofs now.’