The river has continued to rise. It took the graveyard, left tombstones standing upright in the Shannon, then it came up Church Street for the church, and Mary Daly, who was still kneeling praying like in T.S. Eliot to the brown God, had to be ferried out just as she was starting to levitate or drown, depending on who was telling it. Our house, home to too many metaphors, had become metaphoric and needed a bailout. The McInerneys were at it.
‘You’ll only hear it from others so I might as well tell you,’ Mrs Quinty added, and pursed her lips and sat a little more erect to announce: ‘Mr Quinty has returned.’
The way she said it you knew she was still deciding what to do with him. Mam and I looked elsewhere.
‘Stomach ulcers,’ she said, with not entirely disguised pleasure, and left it at that.
Mrs Quinty is the only living person who read History of the Rain. When it was gone, and I asked her to remember it, she could not. Because of the haste, and the need to be undiscovered, the typing not the poems had taken her attention. She would touch her lip then put her hand out in front of her as if the words were coming, as if a speech bubble was forming, but no, she’d say, she would not do my father an injustice and give me a misremembered line.
In the white paperback of Yeats’s Selected Poems, beside ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, I read the two lines my father had written. Why did you take him? And Why does everything I do fail? And from those questions I understood Virgil Swain was applying the Impossible Standard to God.
I cannot say that my father had faith in God. The truth is that he had something more personal; he had a sense of Him, the Father of the Rain. The poems, the raptures and the despair I have come to think of as part of a dialogue; they were expressions of wonder and puzzlement, a longing for ascension and an attempt to make endure in this world a spirit of hope. So in my mind, day by day, the poems became greater for not existing.
This was the truth I clung to when the report into his death came back, when we were told my father had had a tumour curved like a hook in the parietal lobe of his brain. The tumour was embedded, and had been growing for some time, the Doctor said. The way he said it I knew he thought it explained the raptures, the ecstasies that produced the poems. The tumour explained everything. The tumour was the whole story. And right then I knew that that was the wrong story and that I would have to write the truth.
That Vincent Cunningham is unreal.
Who takes a bus from Faha to Ennis — that foul fumy rattling boneshaker Dennis Darmody, who has the look and personality of a corkscrew, drives kamikaze around Blind Faith bends — who takes that, and then stands waiting for the Ennis-to-Dublin, whose passengers are all Free-Pass pensioners who go up and back not because they have business in Dublin but because they have free-passes and wiped-out pensions, who buys the Day Return when the journey is four hours each way, when they haven’t ten euro to their name, when they should be studying for exams, and half the country is under water? Who brings Quality Street?
Vincent Cunningham comes squelching down the hospital corridor in wet sneakers and stands at the ward entrance with a general drowned look. If I said ‘Go away’ he would. He would take the bus back again, and, inconceivably but truly, he would not resent it.
‘Mrs Quinty says I will not die.’
It was not my best greeting, but time was short. This is my last Aisling. I was fasting and anxious and sounds were blurry and my style was breaking up.
Vincent Cunningham sits in my visitor seat. Mam is gone downstairs with Mrs Quinty. Across the way Jackie Fennell looks at him and raises her perfectly curved perfectly plucked eyebrows and passes me the most unsubtle of nods.
‘Of course you won’t,’ Vincent says.
‘I cannot, according to Mrs Quinty, because in my writing there is such life.’
I also cannot because Alice Munro says the whole grief of life will not do in fiction. You can’t have so much sorrow — readers will throw the book against the wall.
‘You won’t,’ Vincent says again. But the way he says it sends this deep furrow down between his eyebrows and I know he’s only saying it.
‘But if I do.’
‘You won’t.’
‘Vincent Cunningham.’
He swallows his objection. He is pleased and abashed to hear me say his name. ‘Yes?’
‘If I do, two things.’
‘Two things.’
‘First, you know what to do with all my pages?’ Have I said, his eyes are the kindest? He has shaved for the journey, plastic blue Gillette that makes his cheeks look quite polished. Really, there’s a shining in all of him. ‘You remember?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
‘What’s second?’
‘Second is actually first. Second, is that you should kiss me.’
I may have been floating. I had the feeling I was floating.
‘I do not think that if I am going to die,’ I said, ‘I should die without having been kissed.’
Only through story can we tolerate death.
How else can we forgive God?
I asked my father to write me a poem. He never quite did. But he left a handwritten will that was witnessed by John Paul Eustace and in it he gave the details of the life assurance he had been paying, and in it he said: ‘For Ruth, my books.’
Just that. For Ruth, my books.
On the day I could bring myself to go in and look at them, a library of books burned and drowned but undestroyed, I saw that on his desk was The Salmon in Ireland and folded inside it was a page in his handwriting. On the top it said: for Ruth Louise Swain. And underneath, at random angles, were words and phrases, some underlined, some overwritten, and others crossed out, a scattering trying to become a gathering.
Here: My father climbed the sky.
Here: from cinderway ascend.
Salmon-ascent, struck out then written again then crossed out again.
Spire/Aspire.
Leap leap the
On the right-hand side in a pencilled circle: Tommy okay. Beneath it: Morrow, Eacrett, Cheatley & Paul.
Leap
In a small rectangle: ‘We’re going fishing.’
Here: Fish/Fly and Water/Sky
Ever the light that lures and eludes/ ever the
On the left-hand side a gently curved question mark that could be a fishing line but is in fact a bend in the river
Leap
Only in love the light ascending/
And last, in the faintest leaden grey, his hand hardly pressing the words into the page: I will make things better.
And that’s all. In fragments for me, the impossible poem of him.
So in a way he kept his promise.
And here, in my way, I am keeping mine.
If I am dead my pages will be put with his page and pressed inside The Salmon in Ireland and Vincent Cunningham will bring them to the River Shannon and throw them in.
If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book did not and does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows.