History of the Rain (7 page)
You pass on and you think that’s the end of the houses. The road nearly touches the river.
Then look, a last house. You’re here.
According to Assumpta Elliott, our house is no great shakes. She was one of the Rural Resettled who came down from Dublin to populate us but then discovered what wind coming up the river off the Atlantic felt like, couldn’t get used to walking slantways or being rain-washed and, Great Shakes herself, Unsettled back again. I like our house. It’s a long low farmhouse with four windows looking over a small garden of Mam’s drowned flowers. Out back are the three muck fields where our cows paddle in the memory of actual grass.
The house faces south, as if its first MacCarroll builders had the stubborn optimism of my Mam and believed there would maybe be some sunlight sometime. Or maybe they wanted it to have its back to the village, which is about three miles away. Maybe they were making a point, or had that little distance in them that used get me into trouble in school when The Witches Mulvey made out I thought I was better than everyone, that I was Snoot Ruth, which to tell the truth I didn’t mind so much, and anyway it was only because I had vocabulary.
You come in the front door and within three feet you’re facing a wall – the MacCarrolls weren’t the best at planning. You have to turn right or left. Right brings you to The Parlour.
Once The Parlour was the Good Room, preserved for the possible visit of His Holiness or John Francis Kennedy, whoever made it first, complete with The Good Armchairs set at angles appropriate for polite conversation before the tiled fireplace, upon which sit Chester and Lester, china dogs that came one Christmas from my Swain aunts and which in my daydreams often scampered alongside me when I went off with The Famous Five for ginger beer – second-hand Enid Blytons were a speciality at Spellissey’s in Ennis, they were your First Books once and you were to graduate from Enid into Agatha, Blytons to Christies, because books were Mysteries, the whole of life a Whodunit, which is kind of MacCarroll Deep if you think about it.
But don’t, because Look, there’s a glass case with assorted other ceramics, tiny cream Belleek bell with tinier shamrocks, brass Celtic cross, miniature Virgin Mary who, First Miracle of Faha, transformed herself into a plastic bottle with blue cap-crown, a Waterford Crystal clock without battery, never had a battery because it was beautiful and didn’t need to also tell you that beauty and everything else passes – thank you, Mr Keats – and to the left of this a glass-topped table with embroidered doily and tile coaster of Lourdes should His Holiness wish to put down his pint. Once, this room was the sanctum saculorum, the fiddly-dee fiddly-dorum, the Havisham Headquarters of our house, the great untouched – and often undusted – that was kept for special occasions which, like good fortune, to our family never arrived. Then Nan Nonie moved in and a bed was put in one corner of the room – His Holiness would understand – and a belted trunk of her clothes which was always open and because she preferred Flung to Folded lent an air of lewd display that might have challenged His Holiness a little, to say nothing of her Po.
Eventually The Parlour became Nan’s Parlour then just Nan’s. There she keeps her Complete Collection of
Clare Champions
, an ever-expanding series of yellow mountains of newspaper in which is recorded the full entire life of the county, which means that if you had the time you could start upstairs here reading the exploits of some lads in Troy and work your way through all recorded civilisation right up to the savage blow-by-blow of the Saint Senan’s Under-14s two days ago. The
Champions
are an inexhaustible chronicle of everything that happened here in Nan’s lifetime. She never goes back to reread it, never does any old-style finger and blackened-wet-thumb googling, flicking the pages to find something. It’s enough that the papers passed through her hands once, that once she lived through that particular week. Now their physical presence filling up the room is a kind of testament to her enduring, to the River of Time and her unsinking through it. That’s how I’ve come to think of it anyhow. No one pays it any mind, or thinks it the least bit odd. That’s the thing about Faha. When Lizzie Frawley was pregnant with an imaginary child, and for fifteen months sat sideways in Mass to accommodate an invisible bulk which she’d sometimes tap gently, no one said a word.
Isn’t Odd nearly God, as Margaret Crowe says.
Because the house is four rooms, each the depth of the building, Mam and Dad had to cross Nan’s to get to their end room. Their room is basically a cave. The entrance is four feet thick by five feet high, a little stone passageway Dad had to duck through to get inside. It was years before he stopped banging his head.
I still call it Mam and Dad’s room.
We are not Well-Off, we’ve never been Well-To-Do, never Upwardly Mobile or Going Places. A poet is upwardly mobile in a different sense, but it doesn’t butter your bread as Tommy Devlin says. Without explanation, I’ve always understood there was a reason Dad never ever bought new clothes, why he wore shoes with oval-shaped holes in the soles, why Mam cut his hair, why she cut mine, why there was a jar on the kitchen window where coins were kept and why the stock of them went up and down depending. I understood that my father only bought second-hand books, that he could go to Ennis in a tweed jacket of Grandfather’s and come back without it but with the
Collected Poems
of Auden (Book 1,556, Vintage, London), Grandfather’s jacket now in the front window of the Ugandan Relief Shop on Parnell Street. I understood there was a story inside the story, understood that once Grandfather Swain’s money was gone there was literally nowhere else for money to come from. My father would never accept Government Grants, Headage payments for cattle, or Unemployment.
I am not unemployed
. So as you go forward it won’t be money you’ll be seeing. It’ll be the unsung genius of Mam who performed the Second Miracle of Faha and kept the family afloat and this roof over our heads.
Go back to the front door now, turn left, and enter The Room. The floor slopes down towards you to let the mop-water flow out the front door – a feature the MacCarrolls should have trademarked and sold to IKEA, the Crooked Floor, not only for the convenience of cleaning, ladies and gentlemen, but because once you stand up the tilt takes you towards the door; the house encourages you to leave, to go out in the world. There is the wide hearth on your right, maybe ten feet for those who need particulars, with the dresser across from it. The fire is on the grate on the floor and there’s turf burning. In our chimney there’s always smoke rising. Mam never lets it go out. When she goes to bed at night she lifts the last sods with the tongs and places them under the grate where the fire sleeps until she knocks it glowing awake in the morning. It’s an old MacCarroll tale I think. Some pisheog or lore I may have once been told. Something to do with spirit in the house and not letting the hearth cool completely. Mam is a horde of such things, wild bits of MacCarrollisms; for most of the time she has learned to keep them under cover, but if you stay long enough and watch her carefully, watch this beautiful Clarewoman with the brown eyes and the loose long tussle of her wavy brown hair, the indomitableness in her bearing, simple country pride and courage, you will see them sometimes, things about magpies, about blackbirds, about going in front doors and going out back doors, about May blossom or hearing the cuckoo out of which ear or picking foxgloves or cutting holly bushes.
Nan’s chair with cushion consisting of recent back issues of the
Clare Champion
is right inside the hearth. Nan waits for the
Champion
on Thursday and when the Simons aren’t in full swing she goes straight to Deaths and Planning, which is basically a super-condensed version of Life’s Plot, ‘Johnny Flanagan’s building’ and ‘Johnny Flanagan’s dead’ only breaths apart.
The Room uses the dresser as a bookcase. Top shelf has these leatherbound editions of classics that came gifted from the Aunts. I smelled them long before I read them. I think they must have been my first soothers, me raw-cheeked and teething and crying and Aeney teething too and not crying, Mam looking around the Room for something to quieten me, grabbing Marcus Aurelias and plunging him up to my red cheeks. Hardy, Dickens, Brontë, Austen, St Augustine, Lewis Carroll, Samuel Butler, I gummed and smelled my way into Literature.
Below this shelf are these big dinner plates on display, they’re wedding china that came from Aunts Penelope and Daphne some years before Lester and Chester. They were very china-giving aunts, which was of course secret warfare because the more they gave the more you had to find some place to display the stuff. We had china in boxes in the cabins that we couldn’t sell because it had to be taken out when The Aunts arrived. There isn’t much else in the room, a couple of armchairs and some wooden seats and what in Faha they call a form pronouncing it
fur-um
but which in the rest of the world is a bench.
At the back of The Room there’s the New Kitchen, just fridge and cooker and things all in the one small space with a galvanised-iron roof that is rusting orange on the inside and sings when it rains. It’s been New now for twenty years.
There’s a narrow stairs that rises from the front of The Room up and over the dresser. At the top is my room. You come in and the ceiling slants – MacCarrolls are all angles, angels if you’re dyslexic – so if you’re above five foot one and a half you stand at a tilt till you reach the skylight and then you can straighten a bit.
My bed and Aeney’s had to be built up here. One day Dad went out and came back with the timber. It had large dark holes in it where bolts had been removed. I think it came from Michael Honan who knew Dad didn’t have the money and to whom Dad promised to give Two Days when Michael was doing silage. That’s trade, Faha style. My father leased himself out and we got beds. He came home with these big heavy beams and brought them up the narrow stairs. Dad wasn’t a carpenter, but because of the Swain Philosophy he believed it shouldn’t be beyond him to make beds, and so he sawed and banged and sawed and banged for three days above our heads, letting little snows of sawdust down through the floorboards into our tea below. Aeney and I were forbidden to go see until the bed was done, but from the noise of the effort you could imagine that up there Dad was in mortal combat with his own limitations. It wouldn’t come right for him.
How hard could it be to join up four pieces of wood?
Well, if you didn’t want wobble, pretty hard it seemed.
He kept putting longer and longer screws in. The legs were the worst. Four legs wouldn’t support the weight evenly so he made two spare ones and added these but still the bed rocked and he was still falling short of Impossible Standard until Mam told him I was hoping it wasn’t going to be too solid but would still have a little give because I liked to rock myself to sleep.
This was always Mam’s role, to show Dad he was all right, to redeem him from the place he kept pawning himself into. So at last we went up the narrow stairs and saw: what he had made were more boats than beds, but I loved it, this big heavy sky-boat I still sail.
When I’m gone, when I’ve sailed away, it will have to be sawed apart to get it out. If you’ve been to Yeats Tower in Gort, restored by Mary Hanley (Hail Mary full of Yeats’s Martin McGrath said on our school tour), you’ll see his is the same, made at the top of the winding stair, too big to ever bring down again. They haven’t sawed it up. Not even the minister who’s driving the artists out of Ireland would dare saw up WBY’s bed, my father said. There’s no mattress though, just this big empty frame so it’s the best ghost-bed you’ve ever seen. WBY sleeps there sometimes still, probably September to May when the river rises and the tower is closed to poetry tourists and he needs a little more soul-polishing from the sleety winds of Gort.
Well, anyway, here you are, that’s the setting. That’s the way Balzac does it in
Eugénie Grandet
(Book 2,017, Penguin Classics, London).
Lands, a house, some money, Mrs Cissley said. She wore the cheapest perfume but compensated by wearing an enormous quantity.
Which, Dear Reader, is stifling.
There follows a small gap in our narrative.
Do a little work here yourself, I’m on medication. Pick up from that scene in Wheaton, ash on his trousers, grey light, cramped little setting for a resurrection. You go ahead.
Doctor Mahon is here to see me.
As they say on RTE, there may be interruptions to service due to Ongoing Works.
Abraham arrived in Ireland.
I think maybe it was because there were no Swains here. This was a tabula rasa. I think he came to Meath and took over the farm because he decided it was a calling of some kind and he had come around to believing in Out of the Blue. Impulsiveness and Swains are close cousins, not removed. We head off in a burst in some direction thinking
this is it
only to find ourselves nowhere.
Vision and blindness, that’s us in the Short Version.
Contrariness too. Grandfather came to Ireland just as anyone remotely Anglo went in the opposite direction.
That just raised the Standard. Grandfather decided that in Meath he would out-Wiltshire Wiltshire. He would make a better place to show his father and then one day invite the old Reverend over and say
Behold
. It’s a Paradise Complex. (I was going to do Psychology in college but then I read that Freud said Psychology was no use for Irish people, we’re either Too Deep or Not Deep at all.)