History of the Rain (26 page)

How Public, like a frog, is dear Emily’s version (Book 2,500, Emily Dickinson,
Complete Poems
, Faber & Faber, London).

So, right then and there, Nan decided that if Virgil Swain was going to be a farmer he wasn’t going to be one that people would laugh at.

She opened the kitchen door, shouted, ‘Mary, come get your tea!’ and told Virgil, ‘Come with me.’

They went out on the acres, Nan in cuff-down wellies and hooded green army coat, Virgil in a too-long woollen jumper under the leather jacket and the low fishing boots that were already drinking mud before they crossed the Fort Field. They went in sinking Suck Mode, each step announcing itself, a kind of spluck-splosh procession that scattered the blackbirds back up into the rain and down into the next field, Nan travelling faster because she knew how to do the swaying-hip swing, dip and recover that people here know is how you walk these wet river fields, which means you don’t step down you sort of roll across them, which is great for waterland walking but maybe the reason the parish is Number One in Clare for hip replacements. She spoke curtly as she went. ‘The drain on the western corner needs clearing every month.’ It looked like it hadn’t been cleared in years. ‘A wet spring and you can’t travel this field till August.’ It had several silver ponds in it. ‘This is The Big Meadow.’ ‘This is the Small Meadow. My husband cut it by hand.’ She took him across every inch of the land in which we grew muck puddles, rushes and occasional grass. He didn’t say anything. They climbed the wall into Lower Meadow, because the gate was no longer attached to the pier, was tied with twine and looped with crazy brambles. He offered her his hand but she didn’t take it, stepped in front of him and crossed with goat nimbleness, turned to look back when she heard the clatter of falling stones as he came after. In the Bog Meadow she showed him the four cows. She called ‘Hup!’ to them on the top of the stile, maybe to alert them that here was the new farmer, to have them do that whole-body-shiver thing horses do and present their best profiles. But whether from the mesmerism of the rain, the dullness of having several stomachs full of twisted mulch or the fact they were wearing brown-stockings of mud to their hocks, the cows were in cow stupor and didn’t move. ‘That’s our stock,’ Nan said.

Virgil looked at them. He had no clue what to say. The rain that was not called rain was falling on both of them. The river was running the way it is always running to get away and there was a little edgy breeze coming across from McInerney’s to remind you the back of your neck was wet. ‘Beautiful,’ he said.

Now that was not what Nan expected. She had no answer for that. She looked at him.

But Virgil was already away in the Philosophy of Impossible Standard. In a way, it helped that the land was as bad as it was. It meant that here he would not only have to Out-Wiltshire Wiltshire he would also have to Out-Ashcroft Ashcroft. So the effect was not to discourage him, it was the contrary. I may be the only one who thinks that here in Muck-and-Drizzle land is the least-like-paradise place there is in the whole country, but even so you’d have to say it was going to take dreaming.

‘That’s all of it,’ Nan said, with the kind of low voice people use at the end of a long confession when everything terrible has been told. ‘We’ll go back so. Mary will be up.’

‘I’ll stay here. I’ll be back in a while.’

‘There’s no need.’

‘I know. But I’d like to.’

His eyes were dangerous. That’s what Nan must have thought. They had that look that told you they were seeing more than you were.

‘If you’re sure.’ She didn’t look at his eyes.

‘I’m sure.’

‘Right so.’

She hip-swung her way back across the fields. When she came in to the questions in her daughter’s expression in the kitchen, she said, ‘He wants to stay out.’ And in a single moment the two of them shared a look that said those things in silent mother-daughter language that would take a hundred books and more years to tell.

After the hens and the ware and the ashes and the peeling, Mary went out to find him. She was afraid his heart was cracked. She was afraid the reality of the place would have overwhelmed him, that she’d find him under a dripping hedgerow in a distant corner ready to announce they couldn’t make a life there. Then she saw him. He was on the far edge of the Bog Meadow inside a silver nimbus.

It was a trick of the light. Wanting to make his first impression on that landscape he had come upon a length of barbed wire buried in the grass. He’d started to pull it up and found that time and nature had firm holds. But he’d persisted in the way only my father could. The hopeless was his domain. He just kept at it. Barbs bloodied his fingers. One tore a long meandering scar on the back of his hand that years later Aeney and I said was like a river and my father said which river and we said the River Virgil. At last the grass made a resentful ripping and surrendered the wire. He’d worked his way along it then, finding the forgotten bounds, lifting the rotted sticks that were once the fence posts. But as he did, the wire freed from tension began to coil and tangle behind him. It was the way God played with my father. Even a small success was mercilessly pursued by failure. He’d gone back to try and straighten out the wire and by the time my mother saw him he was standing
inside
it, the coil shimmering glints in the rainlight and my father this soaked figure laughing in the trap of the practical.

I think she knew then he wasn’t giving up.

‘You look drowned,’ she said.

That evening Virgil went out after dinner to check on the cows. That, he knew, was an important part of farming. Just before darkness, Check on the Cows. If you’re getting some idea of my father you’ll already know he had no idea what to check for except their actual presence. If they were standing he pretty much thought they were okay. If they were lying down he’d Hup! a few times to get them to stand and then walk away, leaving the same ladies wondering why they were gotten up and wearing the cow expression of People are Puzzling. That first evening, while Mam and Nan did the dishes, he went across the fields. Darkness was falling. He was used to sea-dark which is darker than any. What he wasn’t used to was the sense of things flying invisibly above him. He had the impression the air was full of nightblack cloths, shreds, rags, falling out of the heavens. But not landing. With impossible swiftness one swooped, arced, vanished, and another came. He ducked, raised his hand over his head, and then realised the air was thronged with bats.

I know them. I’ve seen their grandchildren. They go home into this tiny hole in the angle of the eaves at McInerney’s. More come out than go in, which has always been true of McInerney’s house. I’ve grown up in the country, bats don’t frighten me. But Virgil’s blood was chilled, as if bats were a portent, as if he was being reminded right then paradise isn’t going to be easy, there’s darkness in the world, and instead of coming back across the field he clambered out over the crooked gate on to McInerney’s road.

The gravel underfoot was helpful. The bats didn’t overfly the road. He walked between the high shoulders of the wild fuchsia.

Then he saw the torches.

In the wide deep dark we have in Faha a single torch can be seen a long way. These were dozens. They were a lighted river, winding out from the village, thinning in places, thickening in others, but all coming towards our house.

Virgil’s first thought was guilt. Father Tipp says the two signs of saints are guilt for no reason and being caught in a constant tide of undeserving. I think my father thought he deserved what was coming. I think he knew he had taken the most beautiful girl in the parish and so his first thought was
They are coming for me
.

He’d been away, remember. He’d been on the sea with his imagination a long time, and in that imagination this was the kind of thing that happened in William Faulkner, they came with torches. They let their disapproval out in fire. They were going to come and burn down our house.

But this was not a few men.

This was everyone. The whole parish was on its way.

He stood in the road. That’s the thing that gets me in this story. That’s the thing that surprises me when I force Tommy Devlin to tell it. Virgil just stood in the road. He didn’t come running to tell Mam and Nan, didn’t rush in, bolt the door, push the table up against it cowboy-style and say
Injuns
. He stood in the road and waited and that river of lights kept coming.

When the river turned the corner near Murphy’s he saw it was not made of men. They were figures out of phantasm, Tommy says. He enjoys that word.
Phantasm
. Some had cone heads and misshapen bodies. Some had masks and were huge tall women with dresses that couldn’t button over bosoms. Some were white and mountain-shaped, a sheet thrown over them, others in sacks and straw, their faces blackened. There was not a single recognisable human being.

When the river turned the corner near Murphy’s it saw Virgil Swain.

And it stopped.

To stop a river that long is not easy, and so all the way back along it there was jostling and pushing and a great murmuring that rose and went along the length. The murmur didn’t materialise into language proper. But there was a chorus of
shshshshshshshshshsh
and then Virgil was standing a hundred yards from our house face to face with a figure whose head was a wicker cone that rose to eight feet.

‘Turn back,’ my father said. He said it just the way Spencer Tracy would have, because, although outnumbered by three hundred and twenty-seven to one, he wasn’t going to let them come burn down the house.

Coney shook his head. The river wouldn’t turn back but wouldn’t say why either. Cone Head didn’t want to give himself away. That was the bit that made it difficult. He shook the cone more eloquently. The whole front row of cone-heads shook theirs. There was a whole lot of shaking going on.

‘Turn back!’ my father shouted out over the entire river, which was swelling and thickening now at the headwaters. Masked figures were pressing forward to see what was happening.

‘Turn back. Go home!’

There was more head-shaking, gestures of confusion and refusal. But still none would speak.

And I suppose it might have remained a stand-off but for Mam calling ‘Virgil!’ in this hard whisper behind him. ‘Virgil!’ He turned to look back at her and she was waving frantically for him to come to her. ‘They’re our
bacochs
,’ she said. ‘Straw Boys. They’re here to celebrate our wedding.’

Virgil looked at the river that was made of the men and women of the entire parish in what varied ingenious and bizarre disguises they could manage, and he saw that some were carrying not weapons but fiddles and bodhráns and he took a step backwards, and then another, and Mary put her hands over her mouth to hold the laughter but it was giggling up in her eyes and she took his hand and they ran the last of the way back along the road and in the gate and were in the house just moments before the river poured in after them.

Chapter 6

Are you there?

Days like this when I wake and feel more tired than I did when I went to sleep I can’t quite believe in you.

Dear Reader, are you a figment?

It’s hard to live on hope. Living on hope you get thin and tired. Hope pares you away from the inside. You’re all the time living in the future. In the future things will be better, you hope, and you’ll feel better and you won’t wake up feeling like someone has been taking the life out of you drip by drip while you slept. The whole country is living in the future now. We’re in this Terrible Time but in the future we’ll be all right again. We just have to keep hoping. But Moira Colpoys got first-class honours in her Social Science degree and Mrs Quinty says she sent out a hundred CVs in Dublin, every and any kind of job, got only one reply and when she went to the interview there were three hundred people and two hundred of them had been working for ten years and so yesterday Mr and Mrs Colpoys took her to Shannon and by now she’s arriving in Perth and tomorrow she’ll start looking to find the Davorens who she doesn’t really know but they’re from the parish and went out there last year and got a start in a tyre factory. The Colpoys are both in their sixties and she’s their only. Mrs Quinty says when Mr and Mrs Colpoys stopped into Maguire’s for petrol and milk on the way back they looked ten years older. They’re just going to hope things improve, Mrs Quinty says. They have that big damp old house they rattle around in, the one that looks like a tall grey shell and was my first model for Miss Havisham’s Satis House and has already been robbed twice since the Bust, and in there they’ll be, wearing three pairs of socks and sitting close to the fire, and hoping.

To have hope you have to have faith. That’s the crazy bit. You have to believe things
could
get better. You have no idea how exactly, but somehow. It’s a blindness thing, faith. But I seem to see too much. I lie here in the boat-bed when I wake up. I’m supposed to call Mam right away so she’ll come and pull open the curtains and use her best cheery voice to banish any gloom, but some days I don’t. I wake and feel the exhaustion of morning. I wonder where I go from here, and how any going could possibly happen, and look across the room at all the books and I wonder if maybe I am doing what I set out to do, if maybe I am finding my father.