History of the Rain by Niall Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

Barney Cussen said when the Councillor came into Ryan’s, if it isn’t Saddam. The Councillor didn’t object. A vote is a vote. And it was better than Leatherballs. He had a bald head by twenty-two which gave him a passing impression of intelligence and resulted in him being consulted on all manner of things. Some people become what others think of them, that’s what I’ve decided. So, once the Councillor started getting asked his opinion, fatally he became convinced of the existence of his own intelligence. You ask him a question you get a paragraph. He is focused intently on fulfilling his mandate, he’ll tell you, nodding slow and shrewd and narrowing his eyes to the distance behind you, as if his mandate is all the time trying to escape his focus.
    End of the village is the graveyard; it’s crooked and dark and slopes to the river which is always trying to rise and take it, but it’s convenient for the church and means that dead parishioners never have to leave the parish, can enter the next world without having to learn new customs.
    You’re out the end of the village now. Take a right and bear left at the Y and you’ll come to a cross. A right at the cross and a left that doesn’t look like a proper left but is more broken-down rough cut by the place Martin Neylon with six pints in him singing ‘Low lie the fields’ climbed the ditch in his Massey Ferguson the time of the ice, widening the road at no charge and leaving his own mark on history in the name Neylon’s Bend.
    You’ll feel lost, which is all right, and you’re the only car now which is good because the road is only that wide and you have to slow down anyway behind Mikey who in his turned-down wellies is walking his Ladies, eighteen milking cows, along in front of you. He’ll know you’re behind him and in a salute he’ll sort of raise the bit of black pipe he uses to welt the backsides of those same ladies but he doesn’t turn around or turn the cows in to the side because they’re walking bags of milk those girls and it’s their road too and they graze the bits of grass that grow along the ditches but on the dung-slathered sight of their hanging udders you’ll swear you’ll never drink milk again.
    So you travel along at cowspeed and you’ve time between the wipers coming and going to see the houses near the road and the ragged fields that fall down the valley to your left and because it’s summer when you come there’s the yellow gorse bushes that we call furze and when I was small used think was furs . It sort of glows in the fields and because you’re not a farmer you’ll think it’s lovely and not that it shows how poor the land is. You’ll think those patches of rushes are just shading or some other kind of grass they grow here and because you’re driving at cowspeed behind Mikey you’ll have time to look across and now you’ll see this gleam that is the River Shannon and you’ll feel the sense of an ending.
    But be careful, the river can take you. It has its own mesmerism, and Mikey is turning the cows into the shed ahead of you and he’s raising his black pipe again that is thanks and apology and acknowledgement that you’re here with us, in our time in our rain.
    Drive on a bit further now, stay with the river on your left and follow it towards the sea. Feel the quickening. Look across at the Kingdom looking over at you with a kind of Kerry contentment, and you’re in our townland now. Watch out for various figures bundled in coats and hats, ditch-trawlers in early senescence out trying to gather sticks for the range since the cutbacks came to pay the bankers.
    Pass the house of the Saints Murphy, Tommy and Breda, they do our praying for us. Both of them are in the Premier Division of praying and sometimes because we’re such heathens – well, except for Nan who’s a kind of Pagan-Catholic – Mam goes down to them and asks them to say a few Our Fathers or Glory Be’s for us and they do. Tommy and Breda are in