After six Wednesdays, Mrs Quinty came down the stairs and said, ‘That’s the last of it.’ She stood and gave herself a little tightening tug. The poetry had kept a cold at bay for six weeks.
‘There’s a good-sized book,’ Mam said.
‘There is.’
Then Mrs Quinty wrinkled her nose to lift her glasses upward and asked, ‘What will you call it?’
Mam hadn’t got that far. ‘Poems?’
Mrs Quinty stood back, pressed her hands together, and allowed that suggestion to wilt in the daylight. ‘Perhaps something. . better?’ she said.
They stood in the kitchen either side of the perplexity. I was at the table with the Explorations anthology, the one that was used before the Department became afraid of being unpopular with fourteen-year-olds, the one that set the bar high, the one that had Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ in it, Hence loathed Melancholy, of Cerberus and blackest midnight born. I looked up. ‘Is there any poem longer than the others?’
‘There is,’ Mrs Quinty said. With her middle finger she pushed the glasses to full magnifying. ‘There is one. It’s about. .’
She didn’t need to say Aeney.
‘It’s called “History of the Rain”.’
Five minutes later the complete History of the Rain was stacked on a sheet of white tissue paper that had come inside a cardigan box from Monica Mac’s Drapery. It smelled of lilies or Monica Mac’s lily spray. Mam folded the tissue paper over the poems. You could see the title through it. I held the fold closed while Mam slipped a thin green ribbon underneath and brought it up and over and tied the bundle and pressed the bow flat so it would seem less pretty.
‘There now,’ she said. She looked at me and smiled the sad smile of our complicity and her eyes had that look of Please God in them. Maybe just because these were poems, or maybe the same way chocolate grows in your mind in Lent, now that they were there in front of us we had a kind of, I don’t know, reverence about them. We wrapped them again in brown paper and tied the package with string.
‘You have the handwriting, Ruthie,’ Mam said, showing me the publisher’s address that Mrs Quinty had found for her. ‘You do it.’
I wrote it careful as anything. I wrote it the way my father would have. Then Mam and I took our coats and walked to the village. I carried the poems inside my coat away from the rain.
Maureen Bowe was in Mina Prendergast’s. Maureen was a woman whose range of opinion and depth of pronouncement were not, as Edith Wharton might say, encumbered by illiteracy. But I liked her. She lived in a two-room house with three fly-cemeteries hanging from the ceiling, had left school at fourteen but had Yoda-Level understanding of the world, in particular her rights and the workings of social welfare. Maureen could be fun to listen to, but we were burdened with hope and did not enjoy the delay.
‘Mary. And Ruth,’ she said, turning her giant self around with one elbow still holding her place on the counter.
‘Maureen.’
She waited to see if we would offer anything for her to comment on.
‘Will it ever stop?’ she asked. The rain had almost exhausted comment. ‘I have a leak. Back kitchen. Tom Keogh that built it. A flat roof about as useful as wallpaper.’ For a moment she let the leak drip in her mind and then added: ‘I think there’s a grant out of flat roofs now.’
Mother and I said Really? How wonderful for you, only not in words.
Maureen swung around on the axis of her elbow. ‘That grant’s still on the go, is it, Mina?’
Mrs Prendergast preferred customers to conversation, and said the last post would be going shortly.
Once the door had closed and we were alone in the self-possessed but subdued majesty of Faha post office, Mam told Mina Prendergast we had a package for London.
Mrs Prendergast adhered to best practice and did not ask what it was. She took the package and weighed it. Being poetry it weighed almost nothing. That was the thing I thought of, the lightness, the non-mass of it, how the scales of the real world hardly registered it. Mam and I watched the package being ferried over, faintly regarded, and flipped back on to the counter.
Mrs Prendergast opened the stamp book, ran her fingers down the back of a sheaf before selecting The One. She tugged it free, dabbed it in the pink concave pad that looked like Aunt Daphne’s powder puff, affixed it with gravity. ‘To London,’ she said.
And that was all. She didn’t add a question mark. Mrs Prendergast wasn’t asking, just stating, she would be clear on that. It was none of the Post Office’s business. But because London was said, and because in a place like Faha in the dead middle of a wet afternoon just the fact of sending something to London had a certain gravity, and that gravity was something in which it was natural that Faha itself would like to share, because every place liked to feel it was a place that could have something important to send to London, and because the London, without the question mark, just sort of hung there invitational and alone and grammatically incomplete, Mam said, ‘It’s poetry.’
She didn’t mean to. She regretted it the moment the word poetry was out and dragonflying around the post office. I looked to make sure the door was closed.
‘I see.’
‘Actually, Mrs Prendergast, I wonder if I could ask a favour?’
‘Yes?’
‘When a letter comes. From London.’
‘Yes?’
‘Could I ask you to tell Pat to hold it here for us?’
We were Swains. We were already in the embossed paisley-print parish roll-book of Odd. Mrs Prendergast pursed her postbox lips but I think Aeney and Our Grief passed through.
‘I’d like it to be a surprise,’ Mam said.
In the background I gave Mrs Prendergast my Forlorn Ruth, my Child of Doom, my cheeks of hollow disport and madly magnified eyes.
‘I see.’
Then the door opened and Maureen Bowe was back. ‘There is a grant,’ she said, more or less exactly the way you’d say There is a God.
With model discretion Mrs Prendergast slid the package along the counter into Outgoing and to my mother made a nod that did not require movement of her head but happened in her eyes only.
The poems were gone.
Mam and I came out into the rain. To all appearances the world was as we had left it — in Church Street Martin Sheehan’s tractor pulled over ass-out and impassable while he spoke out the window with one of the Leahys, Old Tom standing with his bicycle in the crossroad, waiting to direct the no-traffic, Centra having Centra delivery, Nuala Casey squinting out at nothing, John Paul Eustace doing his door-to-door — but we knew it was not. We walked home breathing the thin air you breathe when your heart has moved up into your throat and you want to believe that maybe yes, Emily was right and Hope is a Thing with Feathers, and is flying up out of you right now. The feathers are coming out your mouth and your eyes are O’s watching it rise above the hedgerows and the dripping fuchsia, above the treetops and the electricity lines and the rain, crossing Ryan’s and the Major’s and ours, and making its way right now to London.
‘You won’t tell?’ Mam said. ‘I know you won’t,’ she answered, and she looked away, both of us small and quiet, and maybe as close as we could ever be in this life.
Mrs Prendergast intended to tell no one. She only told Father Tipp because poetry seemed in the realm of prayer, and, because his heart was already at capacity with secrets, Father Tipp only told his housekeeper Orla Egan, and Orla Egan only told Mrs Daly when she was doing her floors windows and etceteras on the Tuesday afternoons because she was helpless to resist revealing her privileges within the priest’s house and liked to have something to say that was not concerned with dirt Dettol Flash and Windowlene. So, because the marvellous is in short supply, because in sharing it a shine comes and reflects well on the ordinary, soon there was no one in Faha who didn’t know Virgil Swain’s poems had gone to London.