History of the Rain by Niall Williams Page A

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