History of the Rain by Niall Williams Page B

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).

Chapter 7
    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