History of the Rain (24 page)

I’m not an expert, but when a man finds Meaning in a woman it seems to me you know two things. One, you know you’re going Deep, and Two, you know this is the most high-risk kind of love there is.

For Mam the risk is already clear. She knows there will be no other Virgil Swain coming through Faha. She knows she has to stay there and take care of Nan because Mam has that good big heart of Spencer Tracy in her and she will never let you down. She’ll sacrifice whatever she has to. Some people are just that good, they have this soldier-saint part of them intact and it takes your breath because you keep forgetting human beings can sometimes be paragons. So she’s caught because she knows this is it.
This is it
. And despite every caution that the Central Council of the Faha Branch of the Irish Countrywomen Association might have offered, that a man not born in the parish, a man not born in the county, or even in The West, a man with no soil on his hands or cattle in his blood, would find it impossible to be happy here, Mam wants to believe he will love her enough to stay, and that once he does everything will be all right.

But she won’t ask him. She won’t go any further in the Book of Stratagems. There’s no summer dresses or lipstick or hairdos or perfume, no invitation to tea, no
here’s a cake I baked
or
there’s a dance in Tubridy’s
or
I saw you fishing yesterday
.

Nothing.

She waits and she suffers and he waits and he suffers, both of them like characters in a cliffhanger at the end of a chapter.

Chapter 4

I’m an incurable romantic, according to Vincent Cunningham.

Incurable anyway, I said.

Then I told him that the Latin word for waiting is pretty much the same as suffering, and he went Wow, like I was the keeper of Cool Things and if he could he would have kissed my Knowledge.

My father started fishing. Right down by Shaughnessy’s he started. Mary saw him in the morning when she went to collect the eggs. She stalled in the pen, heard the softest
whish
wrinkling the air and turned to see his line floating its question mark over the river. ‘He’s fishing,’ she told the hens, who were not indifferent to the news because she spared a few eggs that day.

You and I know that Virgil Swain was not going anywhere. We know he had that same Swain certainty his father had in the candles in Oxford.
This is what I am meant to do
. And that was unshakeable iron in him.

Faith is the most peculiar thing. It’s Number One in human mysteries. Because how do you do it? Where do you learn it? For the Believers it doesn’t matter how outlandish or unlikely the thing you believe in, if you believe it, there’s no arguing. Pythagoras’s early life was spent as a cucumber. And after that he lived as a sardine. That’s in Heraclitus. That’s what he believed. Beside the east bank of the River Cong in Mayo was a Monks’ Fishing House and the monks laid a trap in the river so that when a salmon entered it a line was pulled and rang a little bell in the monks’ kitchen, and although there were strict laws forbidding any traps nobody ever stopped the monks because they knew the monks believed the salmon were Heaven-sent and even unbelievers don’t want to tax Heaven. Just in case. That’s in
The Salmon in Ireland
. Bridie Clohessy believes her weight is all water, Sean Conway believes the Germans are to blame for most things, Packy Nolan that it was the red M&Ms gave him the cancer. With faith there’s no arguing.

Virgil Swain believed this was the place he was meant to be. This was the place of which, when I imagine him lying fevered and delirious below decks in the West Indies, or landed in Cape Town and gone ashore with whoever were the real-life versions of Abraham Gray and John Hunter and Richard Joyce, he was dreaming.

It was not so much that it was Faha itself. It was this bend in the river.

River bends have their own potency. Ever since some hand wrote
a river flows out of Eden
rivers and Paradise are pretty much inseparable. If you’re reading this in Persian think
Apirindaeza
, in Hebrew
Pardes
. As far as I can make out there are rivers in every Paradise. Though not always fishermen. Bishop Epiphanius in 403
ad
had an epiphany and decided Paradise had in fact two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, but whether these flowed into or out of Paradise was not clear and Augustine made this even more confusing by saying a river flowed
out
of Paradise and watered Eden, which led to serious problems because according to all maps of Paradise that meant the water had to flow
upwards
. A conundrum until John Milton solved it by explaining that paradisiacal water defies gravity. We are all looking forward to that.

So, for my father it was this bend in the river.

It was probably only the land from here to McInerney’s and Fisher’s Step, the water thick and wide and the feeling of imminence that the river is about to meet the sea.

So the truth is he didn’t fall in love either, he fell into Faith, which was onetime maybe the Champions League of Love until the sponsors pulled out and now it doesn’t get coverage any more. It’s still in poetry though. That’s where you find faith. I’ll get to that later.

Virgil Swain stayed and fished. He out-waited the length of time it took for Mary MacCarroll to defeat her doubts and start thinking that maybe he was The One. Maybe he wouldn’t be going away.

The first time Dad stepped inside this house he had a salmon with him.

It wasn’t as odd as it sounds. Mam had seen him catch it. She’d seen the non-catching first, the days he spent casting the line and catching a large amount of nothing so that in the village the story was Your Man had nothing on the end of his line, no bait (or hook according to Old Brouder), that he was escaped from somewhere, or was Simple, and was hoping the salmon would catch him.

Mam had seen him and knew he
was
fishing. She’d seen the way he went about it, the rhythmic rituals he had, the musclework of back and forearm, the interplay of rod and line, pulling and unreeling, that little freeing of shoulder he did before casting into what was above him. She’d seen the fishing going on for days, the actual vigil it was as he stood there, remarkable both for persistence and patience, and the sort of trancelike state it seemed you could get into when you were a man hooked into a river.

But she didn’t know Virgil was trying to catch his father.

She didn’t know that once he stood on the mucky bank at Shaughnessy’s and the hook went into the water he had to plant his feet to stop the tide of regret pulling him in. He knew he was on the threshold of real life, that real life was just behind him up in our house and that here was an Impossible something he was going to do. And now he was stricken by the urging of some kind of basic human need: he wanted to tell his father. He wanted to say
Dad
because he wasn’t sure he’d ever actually said that to Abraham when he was alive.
Dad, I’ve found what I’m going to do. I’m going to do what you couldn’t do. I’m going to make happiness. And I’m going to make it here
.

Abraham didn’t reply. But maybe he looked down and saw the candles burning in his son’s eyes because right then and there Virgil caught a salmon.

To you, Dear Reader, this may not seem a Major Plot Point. But to those of us versed in Swaindom, we know it was a blessing.

If you’re like Mona Boyce, who has the narrowest nose in the parish and is permanently engaged in the science of hairsplitting, you’ll say it was a sea trout. But I know it was a salmon.

Nan looked at him in the doorway. He was a jumble of angles. If he wasn’t cradling the salmon his arms would be too long. His hair and face were wet and his eyes glossed with a dangerous amount of feeling. ‘Mary!’ she called over her shoulder, not taking her eyes from him. ‘Mary!’

Mam had come in only moments before him. She’d seen him lift the fish in the sky and had come home running. She’d come in and gone to the blurry grey-speckled mirror in the bathroom and had a fight with her hair. She tousled it loose and it laughed at her, then she tied it up too tight and it felt like a hand had grabbed her from above and was pulling the top of her head off, then she released it again and patted it like it needed reassurance and if it got enough it would
sit just right, for just this once, please
.

‘Mary!!’

When she came out Dad was still standing in the doorway with the salmon and Nan was still looking at him, like there was a language barrier, like between Swains and MacCarrolls there was this ocean, which of course was true because Swains were basically English and MacCarrolls Irish and I am the child of two languages and two religions, and the most male female and the oldest young person to boot.

‘Hello,’ she said. In my version she said it the Jane Austen way, like he was Captain Wentworth and they were in Lyme Regis and a covering of coolness was needed in case she just went over and grabbed him by the wet jacket and started kissing him, for although they’d Gone Walking, which was the first step on the road to intimacy, this was another step altogether, this was coming inside the house and meeting Nan.

‘I caught one.’

‘At last,’ she said.

He looked at her, but he didn’t move.

The thing that was moving was Nan’s mind. She was flicking the pages fast, like when you read every third paragraph to try and get ahead of the story. Nan stood looking at the two of them looking at each other. ‘I’ll cook it, so,’ she announced.

Sometimes when I’m lying here and the day outside is that warm mugginess we get in wet summertime, when you know the sun is shining somewhere high above the drizzle but all we have is this jungle-warm dampness thronged with midges, my mind goes a little García Márquez-meets-Finn MacCool and when Nan cooks the fish by the fire the whole house becomes imbued with salmon-ness and foreknowledge. The whole history of us fills the air.

Virgil is to sit at the table.

‘Sit at that table,’ Mary says. She’s all business. She has that no-nonsense practicality of a countrywoman and in a flash she’s back and across the kitchen with mugs, plates, cutlery. She’s filling the milk jug from the larger jug, sawing into a loaf, plating slices, feeding turf to the fire, and at no time looking at Virgil Swain.

He sits. In Spencer Tracy’s chair.

‘That was my husband’s chair,’ Nan says, taking the head off the fish.

‘I’m sorry.’ He shoots up like he’s been stung, stands in the perplex of the moment until Mary says, ‘It’s all right, go on, sit.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Sit.’

‘Will I take this . . . ?’

‘Sit.’

He sits back down but on the very edge of the chair. His trouser legs are dark flags to his thighs, boots leaking the river, and down the slope of the floor run two little streams of his arrival in their lives.

‘Not a bad fish,’ Nan says, head-down and doing serious industry with the knife.

It is in fact an incredible fish. It’s an Elizabeth Bishop fish and can be found in her
Collected Poems
(see Book 2,993), but Nan believes that praise is a forerunner of doom. The head and tail go in a pan with butter and salt. They spatter out the possibility of conversation. Then Mary carries them on a plate, calls ‘Sibby Sibby Sibby’ at the front door, and although I’ve never met a cat in Clare not called Sibby this one knows it’s her and comes from where all day she sits on the roof of the henhouse watching the Hens Channel. Virgil can see Mary through the window. He watches the way her hair falls as she bends to the Sibby, her dress holding the line of her knee, her fingers playing on the cat’s head and confusing it into choosing between two pleasures, wanting the caress and the salmon at the same time.

Mary comes back in. She doesn’t look at Virgil as she passes. She has the air of having so much to do. The air of Feeding the Guest. It’s a country thing. Maybe it’s an Irish thing. The Welcome is more important than anything else. You can be dying, you can have no money in the bank, your heart can be breaking from any number of aches, but still you have to lay the Welcome. Feed the Guest. Tomatoes have to be sliced, lettuce run under the tap and dabbed dry, three leaves on a plate. A scallion. Are there boiled eggs? There are. Bread, butter, salt. Whatever is happening in your life is of no consequence when you have to do the Welcome.

‘You sit,’ Nan says to Mary. She isn’t used to being Cupid. This is her first and only go and she’s that bit rough.

‘I’ll get napkins.’

Nan gives her the look that says
Napkins?
which is in subtitles only MacCarrolls can read.

Do they have napkins?

They do. They are paper Christmas ones. Mary puts one on each plate. Then she turns and presses her hands together and looks at the kitchen like there must be something more she could bring to the table. ‘You want something to drink,’ she says. It’s not a question. ‘We have Smithwick’s.’ She looks to Nan. ‘Don’t we?’

‘There’s a bottle of Guinness.’

‘Smithwick’s or Guinness?’

Her face turned to him makes his answer choke at the base of his throat. ‘Actually . . . just water would be fine.’