History of the Rain (35 page)

Once he had started proper, my father never stopped. He was
always
writing. That’s what I understand now. There was no rest, no pause. It was not that he only wrote when the dishes were cleaned and cleared away in the evening, when he went off alone to the table in the pool of lamplight. It was not that he only wrote when he had the pencil in his hand. It was that whatever part of his brain brought the rhythms and the sounds, whatever part of his mind saw things in the everyday not-really-beauty that was here around our land and the river, that part had clicked On and gotten stuck. There are two things, Tommy Devlin says, that are the mark of genius: one is non-stop buzzing in the brain, the other seeing the next move when there is no next move. He was speaking about Jamesie O’Connor hurling for Clare back in the day but the non-stoppedness is right. There’s seeing in it, and there’s transformation. Things are seen differently to what they are. Not that they are always better or brighter necessarily. It’s not like Bridie Clohessy whose vision was blurry coming from WeightWatchers and mistook Declan Donahue for the Archangel Michael, or Sheila Shanley who took a notion after her husband died, woke one morning and decided to paint everything Buttermilk, walls, windows, stairs, threw out everything she owned that was not a creamy off-white, and became a one-woman effulgence show. Sometimes things are darker, worse, and with inexplicable torment you hear the gulls, whose complaints are complex and constant when they come in over Cappa with cries crazy it seems from banishment.

I didn’t understand that my father’s brain could not rest, or that when he was out in the fields, driving us to town, or sitting to tea, all the time there were words, rhythms, running like one of those programs that don’t shut off somewhere in the back of the computer. All the time there was gathering this sense of mission.

Once people got to hear about it in the mystical way that people of Faha can hear a person taking off their underpants and are the
ne plus ultra
in the Intelligence & Surveillance league, once word was out that Virgil Swain was writing poetry, there were two immediate first reactions; the men’s: that it was his own fault for marrying Mary MacCarroll; the women’s: her own fault for marrying The Stranger. But after that initial wave had passed a third reaction came and endured, a quiet awe and respect reserved for someone who had chosen such a serene and perfectly impractical career as that of Poet. We’re like that as a people. We can’t help but admire a bit of madness. Even Tommy McGinley was quietly admired despite the kind of hit-on-the-head mouth-open expression he got from eating cork, after hearing on RTE it was the main ingredient in Viagra, and not what they actually said, that the main ingredient was made in Cork. No, in Faha a bit of madness is all right. So, people started giving us books, books they had read and ones they knew they would never read, books that were left to them, books that were bought because they were the cheapest things at church sales, books that came free with newspapers, books that were found in trunks and attics whose titles and binding and print combined to say
this is a serious book
and to which the finders in our parish invariably responded by thinking: Virgil Swain.

‘This is a book for an intelligent man,’ JJ said, handing over Yeats’s
Essays and Introductions
(Book 2,222, Macmillan, London) before sitting a while in our kitchen, big hands on his knees, genial eyes smiling and that kind of lovely old-fashioned gentle courtesy you can find in the older people in Faha. After a time he nodded to the fire and added, ‘I don’t think we’ve ever had a poet.’

Of course my father hadn’t exactly
chosen
poetry. But it was always rising in him; that’s what you get if you read your Abraham Swain and know your
The Salmon in Ireland
.

At first I didn’t even know that it was poetry. Dad was working, that’s all. I knew it was writing, and I knew it was humming. When you’re young you’re protected by a cloud of vagueness. How our whole household actually worked, how the farming progressed, how many bread loaves were baked and sold, eggs trayed and delivered, how in fact we survived at all – I had no idea. I never wondered, never asked. I may have heard a cow had died, a pine marten had raided our hens, that the car was resting this week, but because Mam was basically Genius Level Ten at guarding her children I never computed these facts, never added them up with Nan mending our mended clothes, Aeney’s trouser legs being let down and let down until they couldn’t be let down any more, fish for dinner again, or the large earthenware jar of coins my mother kept in the window.

Then one day the cloud lifted. In Miss Brady’s class I answered that my father was a writer.

‘Really? That’s wonderful, Ruth.’

I had said it out loud for the first time,
a writer
, and felt a little ascension myself.

‘Where are his books so?’ God-forgive-me, the Bitch of the Brouders asked, because her father, Saddam, was our leading celebrity and she wasn’t going to be dethroned from Best Father.

I had no answer,
Ascension Ends with Crash Landing
running in a Breaking News banner across my forehead. Then Miss Brady said, ‘You can be working on a book and be a writer.’

But later when I was standing alone in the yard and trying hard To Look Normal Jane Brouder crossed over with that hideous Anne Jane Monaghan who had only added her middle Jane out of some Cool Girls thing, who believed herself the model for Miss Perfect in the Mr Men series but who I voted Girl Most Likely to Be Lady Macbeth, who later, after her mother had paid a dozen tutors to more or less crow-bar off the top of her head and stuff everything they knew in there, got six As in her Leaving and is now in teacher-training polishing her dictator skills.

‘Is it
poems
he’s writing?’ she asked, with flawed grammar. She used a tone which implied poetry was something like impetigo, which had devastated the school when the Resettled came from Dublin and for three weeks turned our class into good casting for a leper colony. ‘Is it
poetry
?’

The two of them looked at me with the exact same look.

‘It’s a story,’ I said.

Still the look.

‘It’s a story, like
Black Beauty
.’

That’s what I wanted it to be. I wanted it to be a book I brought to school one day. I wanted it to be unsurpassably jaw-droppingly eye-poppingly amazing, a book Loved By Everyone, and somehow through that I would conquer my own oddity and might even be asked to add a middle Jane, which I had briefly decided I would consider but for the misfortune of the rhyme, Ruth Jane Swain, which suggested hooped dresses, wisteria on the veranda, and a haughtiness I personally could never aspire to.

The Janes stood and scrutinised me.

‘It’s a lie,’ Anne Jane said, triumphantly.

‘No it’s not.’

‘Yes it is. I can tell. It’s a lie.’

‘I’m going to ask your brother,’ God-forgive-me said.

‘He doesn’t know.’

‘Why not?’

‘He just doesn’t.’

‘Come on, Anne Jane. Let’s ask him.’

‘Yes, let’s.’

‘Wait.’

‘What?’

‘What?’

‘It’s not finished yet. The book is not finished yet.’

‘Your father’s not actually a writer, is he?’

‘Is he?’

‘Is he?’

That afternoon I walked home pulling overripe blackberries and throwing them into the ground, finding in the purple staining small consolation but adequate image. Aeney had run ahead. Aeney always ran ahead, was always happiest in speed and in any case would be no help in this. In me, exhausted from the defence of having a special father, had bloomed the first dark cloud of betrayal, a small but persistent whispering:
I wish my father was not a writer
. Why could it not have passed over? Why couldn’t somebody else’s father be a writer and mine a teacher or doctor or councillor?

I brought my frown into the kitchen.

‘Mam?’

‘Yes, Ruth?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘All right then.’

‘Only.’

‘Yes?’

‘What’s Dad writing? Is it poetry?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you read his poems?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because they’re not ready yet.’

‘You can still be a writer when you’re working on a book,’ I said.

‘Of course you can,’ Mam was working dusting flour. Her arms are basically flour and dough. If she’s not making bread in Heaven when she gets there it’ll be because Bread of Life doesn’t need flour and aprons are only for this world.

‘When will the book be done?’

‘I don’t know, Ruth. Some day.’

‘But soon?’

She paused, as if it was a thing she hadn’t considered, or hadn’t considered until that moment that I might want the book to appear, that in fact my whole status and future happiness and the happiness of all the world, Hello, actually depended on it.

‘Yes, I’m sure. Soon,’ she said. ‘Okay, pet?’

‘Okay.’

That eventually the poems would coalesce or coagulate, or whatever it is that poems do, was not in doubt. The pressures of brain, paper, pencil and time made it inevitable. Because the secret to writing, the entire syllabus, booklist, coursework, of Ruth Swain’s Master’s programme in Creative Writing is four words:
Sit in the Chair
.

Or, in mine and RLS’s case,
Lie in the Bed
.

There’s a book inside you. There’s a library inside me.

Sit down.

The words will come, the pages will gather. That’s it. Course over.

So it was just a matter of stabbing a pen into his heart, and putting in the time. And more and more that’s what he was doing. In the morning, my father’s eyes would be gone Japanese, extravagant puffed bags of sleeplessness making them narrow, his silver hair forked on the right-hand side where he had held his leaning head.

‘Was the writing good, Dad?’ was basically my version of
Are we there yet?

‘You know you are the most wonderful girl in the world? Have I ever told you that?’

I nodded, full glob of Flahavan’s with honey swimming in my mouth.

‘No. I don’t think I ever have.’

‘You did!’

‘How can I have forgotten?’

‘You did already!’

‘No, no. I never did. But I will now. Do you know what you are? The most . . .’

I had to finish his sentence. Otherwise he would keep at it. And although even then I feared those critics creeping behind the wainscoting or under the linoleum who would consider me a Sentimental & Exaggerated Character, I will admit I did say: ‘. . . wonderful girl in the world.’

Go on, shoot me.

Once, when I got chickenpox, and had to be separated from Aeney, who never caught anything anyway, a bed was made for me beside Dad’s table and I was back for three nights in his night-composing. At first before writing he read. It was a warm-up. It was sort of like taking the pole down the cinderway, feeling the wind, trotting down to the vault and looking up at it. He read aloud from those writers that he knew were beyond him. When I got to Trinity I would understand they were his canon: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Hopkins, and of course Yeats. They were the bar. They were the ones laid out across the sky overhead if you were a sky person, the salmon if you were a sea one. Basically, The Impossibles.

My chickenpox nights, Virgil read Hopkins. (It was years later, when in the stale yeast-and-socks air of the Arts library I went in pursuit of Hopkins, that I came across GMH’s letter to Richard Watson Dixon, where he says: ‘My vocation puts before me a standard so high that a higher can be found nowhere else.’) Back then chickenpox Ruth was not sure her father was speaking English.
Dappled things, couple-colour. Rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim
. He spoke the lines aloud, plugged in to what Seamus Heaney called the powerpoint of Hopkins, and soon his head fizzed, fried, sizzled.

Transcendence is the business of poets. That’s what they’re for. They’re not like you and me. They have that extra bit that’s always ready for take-off. Poets understand why God didn’t give us wings: he wanted entertainment. He wanted us to aspire, to ascend. He wanted poetry.

My father could read a poem five or six times, more, over and over, reading quietly but intently, the lines like a ladder or a prayer rising until the time when he put the book aside and then was utterly quiet. He sat, leaned forward, stared at the page. I did not move. The room contracted. The rain and the rain-wind rattled the slates, whipped the loose wire from the TV aerial,
whp whp
, against the roof. It didn’t stop,
whp whp whp
, and in time became a charioteer who rode down the sky,
whp whp
, came in over the dark river that had swallowed the stars, and settled just above our house.