History of the Rain (36 page)
Slowly then, the slightest angling back and forth of his body that pressured the back legs of the wooden chair into a thin creak, my father rocked and began to hum. He picked up the pencil. He moved his whole body towards the page. I lay in my unsleep as the under-voiced hum turned to phrase. And though I had not words for it I knew that we were in Lift-Off, I knew that I was hearing the poem
happen
, that there was air under us and we were away, in some other place where marvels were and dazzlement common. I knew that nothing in the ordinary world was quite like this and I lay there, hoping the spots on my skin would not vanish for a time, for a time happy in the confluence of sickness and poetry.
When the book didn’t come, and didn’t come, I perfected my skill of Standing Alone in the yard. Silently I worked on my narrative voice.
My dear Jane-sows. You are dunghills. Pissed-on nettles. Spews of vomit. Period pains. You are stuck-up vindictive ignorant pony-tailed piglets. I wish you misery and pimples, hair that will never come right, husbands with hairy backs and breaths of cauliflower
.
(Later, in Editorial, fearing Mrs Quinty might think my narrator a bit Swain Extreme, and that use of Black Arts might be held against me in the next life, I amended that to the blessing Tommy Devlin says Mona McCarthy used after the exhausting three-day – two-geese, four-duck, five tart – visit of her American third cousins. She waved them a serene goodbye from the front door, said, ‘May God preserve them, at a distance.’)
Distance is something Swains do well.
Because I never made friends, because if you think about it
making
friends sounds fairly contrived and deliberate and sort of selfish,
making your friends
, and until the world taught me otherwise I’ll admit I always believed friends would somehow find me, would detect Ruth Swain-ness in the stratosphere and head out on their camels, I am used to being on my own. But now that I am imminently departing rounds of callers come to our house for A Last Look, or to Get Ahead of the Funeral, a local science.
The first was Baby Jesus.
He arrived unannounced at the front door. He did not ring the bell but lay just in out of the rain which by then was torrents. Mam found him when she was letting out Huck. Jesus was exactly the same as he’d been when he was kidnapped. There wasn’t a mark on him. He hadn’t aged a day. Mam let out a cry.
Well you would.
And she looked out the yard for who had brought Him. There was no one. Huck looked at Jesus and looked at Mam with dog puzzlement and then Mam said ‘Business Huck’ and he remembered what he had come out for and trotted diagonally to that bush Margaret Crowe calls the Anonymous to do the only Business being done in these parts now. Mam picked up the Baby Jesus. Then she saw how the river had risen. The lower edge of Ryan’s meadow was gone. The next five yards were a dull silver pocked with rain and pierced with rushes. All along our side the river had come up. She stood holding Jesus and looking at the rain.
Here in Faha, of rain we have known All Kinds, the rain that pretends it’s not rain, the rain that crosses the Atlantic and comes for its holidays, rain that laughs at the word
summer
, sniggers at the dry day in Ennis twenty kilometres away, hoots at what pours, streams, teems, lashes, pelts and buckets down. But this was different.
It had intent. That’s what Mam thought. And the intention was Flood.
Huck came back and looked at Mam and she said ‘Good Boy’ and let him back in to his place before the fire where he would lay his general ancientness and act as slipper-warmer to Nan. Mam brought Baby Jesus in.
‘Somebody’s left this,’ she said to Nan.
‘Give him to me.’ Nan took Jesus and dried his face, with biblical accuracy, only using a page of the
Clare Champion
.
‘There’s going to be a flood,’ Mam told her. But Nan was already saying her prayers. I could hear the murmurs rising as Mam came up to tell me.
When Jesus comes to your house there’s only one message: you’re doomed.
I hadn’t realised I was done for until that moment. That whoever had taken the Baby Jesus and kept Him ten years in what had to be pretty secret captivity for whatever Special Needs the kidnapper had, that they had decided that now I was the one who most needed His Presence was enough to give you the heebie-jeebies.
‘Hellooooo?’ came up the stairs.
‘Jesus!’
‘Ruth!’
‘Sorry.’
‘Just me,’ said Mrs Prendergast, who had not in my lifetime visited our house, but now entered my bedroom wearing the flushed look of Mrs Peniston in
The House of Mirth
(Book 1,905, Edith Wharton, Everyman Library, London) who cherished a vague fear of meeting a bull.
Mrs Prendergast came in the door and stopped, relieved and holding her hands together so that we might get a better look at her and get her portrait right. ‘What dreadful rain,’ she said. ‘Mary,’ she gave my mother a hand then turned to me a little pained smile. ‘And how are you, dear?’
I’m not sure she expected an answer. She patted my bed, then held her hands together in more or less the exact replica of how I realised I had written Mrs Cissley when her Oliver had died and she had come to visit Abraham.
‘Sit down, Mina,’ Mam told her.
‘I won’t stay,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to see poor Ruth, and offer my best wishes.’
‘Sit. Please.’ Mam turned the chair around.
‘I won’t.’
‘Please.’
‘Perhaps just for a minute then.’ Mrs Prendergast drew the tails of her long tweed coat forward and like Mrs Peniston sat on, not in, the chair. (
Thank you, Edith
.) The coat buttons were immense and green. Her hat was round and rimless, made of threaded rows of tiny beads and had a concertina effect, as if it had once been sat upon, which it seems is The Look in Limerick, if not Paris. To allow herself be taken in, and give gravity full play, she looked down, considered her tiny feet.
‘I’ll make tea.’
‘Oh no, not at all. Not at all, Mary. No no no.’
‘It’s no trouble.’
‘I wouldn’t hear of it. I just called to see poor Ruth.’
‘Hellooo?’ came up the stairs.
‘Come on up,’ Mam said.
‘Mary. Ruth. Mrs Prendergast,’ the Major Ryan said, entering and showering a fair bit of rain off his person. A big square man with a barrel-chest, he was a little bit Mr Hubble the wheelwright in
Great Expectations
, the one who had a sawdusty fragrance and always stood with his legs very wide apart, which in those trousers was disconcerting. Major Ryan had a boom voice he had to keep under restraint except during Lent when the plays were on. Now he went to whisper-power to ask, ‘How’s the little lady doing? All right?’
I was right there looking at him.
I was not and never have been The Little Lady.
‘Sorry now. I was just passing. Sorry,’ Mr Eustace said, coming in the door, stooping and craning, easing in past the Major. ‘Sorry now.’
‘Mr Eustace.’
His surname was an offence to him. ‘John Paul,
please
.’
I had only seen him in our house once before. You saw him that time you were first driving through the parish and he was standing in a doorway selling Life Assurance but noticed your car was not a Clare Reg. That time you probably didn’t realise his face was so
white
or that he was just perfect casting for Mr Sowerberry.
‘Sorry now. Sorry,’ he said, ‘just. Well.’ He looked at me like I’d already died. It was a Fondly Missed look, like I was The Departed and he was the Deeply Regretted By, setting his long black eyelashes to Down & Flutter and paying his respects with a letterbox mouth and palming his hands off each other. ‘Sorry.’
‘Can I come up?’ Monica Mac said. Monica has a quiet personality but compensates with loud lipstick.
My Last Day it rained visitors. It’s in the secret tactics of how to keep the patient from thinking of what lies ahead. But here it proves a country truth: it takes a parish to rear a storyteller.
And God bless them, they came. In No Particular Order, as they say on
X Factor
, Tommy and Breda, the Saints Murphy, who smelled of candles and left after Breda kissed my forehead and sneaked a set of opalescent rosary beads under my pillow, Finbar Griffin who I had never actually spoken to, who always wore the pained look of a man who had spent the day castrating bullocks, or was just the look of a man married to Mrs Griffin, Kathleen Quinn who had developed a gift for seeing personal insult everywhere and secretly thought she should have been offered the chair, Margaret Crowe who told Kathleen the weight suited her, big Jack Mannion who just came to the top of the stairs, gave me two thumbs-up, and went down again, because some things couldn’t be said in words, Seamus O’Shea who had been Customer Services in the bank before the economy took a haircut and who’d since opened a barber shop in his sitting room, Louis Marr who wore thin-legged bright-red trousers and Faha’s only flower-print shirt, was not gay, but just a bit fabulous, Charlotte, one of the Troy sisters, who brought impossibly beautiful flowers, Noeleen Fry, God Love Her, with the permanent scowl of a woman who couldn’t locate the bad smell in her kitchen, Eamon Dunne who had the original Bluetooth device, a Blue Tooth, which when he smiled communicated only one thing, awesome disregard for the opinion of others, the two thin Duffys who hadn’t a penny to their name now and survived mostly by watching afternoon cooking shows, the button-eyed Maurice Kerins who was innocent of everything except murder by accordion, Nora Cooney whose husband Jim, like Mr Skimpole in
Bleak House
, considered thoughts to be deeds, and that by thinking of paying a bill supposed it needed no further action, had in fact thought himself into enormous riches, pin-striped ownership of property in Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, none of which made material impact on Nora’s plain green coat and worn-out muddy ankle boots.
They kept coming.
There may have been a schedule nailed up on our front door.
The black-and-white Frank Morgan who played Professor Marvel then The Gatekeeper, The Carriage Driver, The Guard and finally the Wizard of Oz looked in the open window and said: ‘I just dropped by because I heard the little girl got caught in the big –’
Sorry. Fecund.
After a first general enquiry about my health, conversations ran over and back above me, unbounded. A universal truth is that in the company of an ill person people speak of illness. Hereabouts Illness-tennis is played by masters. No sooner did someone serve a burst gall bladder – A Tony Lyons in Upper Feeard, cousin to Eileen who was a McDermott and had the Hospital Bug – than they got a backhand pancreatic cancer, with topspin – Sean O’Grady of the O’Gradys beyond in Bealaha, not the one who was married to the one of the Kerry Spillanes who had the red hair and went off with the Latvian, the other one, who had the arm after the accident, was going out for it must have been on to ten years with that wonderful Marie of the O’Learys, had already survived a family so numerous that two of them were named Michael, and the father who went into Crotty’s pub in Kilrush and woke up in Paddington, him.
‘Is that right?’
‘That’s right.’
The true masters were all women. From what I could tell,
Bless-us-and-save-us, poor man
generally signalled the end of a set.
The men, because of their higher nature Vincent Cunningham says, were generally more squeamish, spoke of matters National, Meteorological and Agricultural, from which I learned that on Clare FM Saddam said Green Shoots of Recovery had been seen, to which Jimmy Mac added, coming out of his own backside, that the rain was biblical and had just officially Gone Beyond a Joke, that Father Tipp was going to say a Mass for Dry Weather, and that Nolan’s bull had sore back feet and so, much as he wanted to, he couldn’t
incline
himself to Do the Business.
But before they left, all of them, one way or another, told me that I would be grand just grand,
you wait and see
; some undercut their own statements of confidence, or supplied the grounds for it, by adding they would be lighting candles and praying for me.
They came and went the way Irish people do, like ones doing rounds on what they hope is Holy Island under the unknown chastisements of the rain.
When they went downstairs I expect they saw Nan holding Baby Jesus and had this inner
O shit
feeling but which in Mrs Prendergast came out as
O my goodness
.
By then Mam was too worried to have dialogue. The river was coming across the field.
Jimmy Mac stood in the kitchen; ‘Jesus,’ he said. But he was looking out the window. And when he turned back he told Mam, ‘We’ll get sandbags,’ and was gone out the back and wellying across the tongue of water coming in the drive before she could say thank you.
He came back in his tractor in fifteen minutes, a transport box of sand and cab full of empty 10-10-20 bags and any number of McInerneys, most of who were not believers in coats. By rain-telegraph Mickey Culligan and Finbar Griffin came too, my Gentleman Callers, sputter-roaring their tractors out into the river-field and using whatever you use to reopen the drain that never drained and to make these brown scars across the field to delay the progress of the flood, each of their tractors going bogging good-o, little Mickey Mac said with ten-year-old glee, eyes polished and nose dripping free and clear and unheeded when he came in to say they were going to sandbag our front door now. The first of the bags thumped down a minute later, then the next, as men and boys passed the windows, swinging over and laying in the bags, working tenacious and resolute, with a kind of uncomplaining Clare defiance and goodness, putting a pause on the river, and whether saving me or Jesus at that point immaterial.
