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

their seventies and they have this lovely manner that’s Old Ireland, and you feel sort of quiet in their company like when the choir is singing at Christmas. Tommy is a gentle man and he loves Breda with a kind of folklore love. She’s losing her hair now and bits of it land in the dinners she cooks and the scones she bakes, but Tommy doesn’t object, he sees the hairs and eats away. He loves her too much to say a thing. They sit evenings sipping tea with their high-visibility vests on, kind of glowing neon yellow the way saints should. Tommy and Breda weren’t blessed with children but they have nine laying pullets and any amount of free-range eggs. They’ll give you half a dozen if you stop. But you can’t right now.
    Pass the Major Ryan’s and Sam his suicidal dog who’s running out and trying to get under your wheels. The Major’s name derives not from any military career but from the quantity of Majors cigarettes he smoked, right-hand fingers tuberous gold, chest a mazy fibrous mass, and his voice that low husk that caused every audience to crane forward as one in Faha the time of the amateur-drama productions. The dog has been trying to kill himself for seven years, hasn’t managed it yet.
    That figure ahead of you is Eamon Egan, fattest man in the parish and proud of it, wouldn’t walk the length of himself, Nan says. Posterboy for the anti-famine look, in the county’s largest navy suit he sits propped on his front wall. Give him a nod, he’ll scowl back because he doesn’t know you and for the rest of the evening he’ll be demented tracking around in his big head playing a game of: who’s the stranger?
    You’ll pass the young Maguires who were both in the bank and both lost their jobs in the Bust and are now living in Egan’s mother’s place trying to grow vegetables in puddles. Next door is McInerney’s, smiling Jimmy who’s no oil painting Nan says and never heard of dentistry but discovered the secret to successful marriage was not teeth but Quality Street because he’s fathered fourteen children on Moira and keeps the National School going. Like Matthew Bagnet in Bleak House , Jimmy will tell you he leaves control of everything to his wife. Where Mrs Bagnet was always washing greens, Moira McInerney is doing the same only with underpants. Those’ll be McInerneys under the hedge, or on the ditch, or kicking a ball over your car, some of them pushing the prams of others or flying around on buck-wheeled bikes, and not one of them with a care in the world or even noticing it’s raining.
    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