History of the Rain by Williams Niall

Author:Williams, Niall [Williams, Niall]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING
Published: 2014-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

I’m an incurable romantic, according to Vincent Cunningham.

Incurable anyway, I said.

Then I told him that the Latin word for waiting is pretty much the same as suffering, and he went Wow, like I was the keeper of Cool Things and if he could he would have kissed my Knowledge.

My father started fishing. Right down by Shaughnessy’s he started. Mary saw him in the morning when she went to collect the eggs. She stalled in the pen, heard the softest whish wrinkling the air and turned to see his line floating its question mark over the river. ‘He’s fishing,’ she told the hens, who were not indifferent to the news because she spared a few eggs that day.

You and I know that Virgil Swain was not going anywhere. We know he had that same Swain certainty his father had in the candles in Oxford. This is what I am meant to do. And that was unshakeable iron in him.

Faith is the most peculiar thing. It’s Number One in human mysteries. Because how do you do it? Where do you learn it? For the Believers it doesn’t matter how outlandish or unlikely the thing you believe in, if you believe it, there’s no arguing. Pythagoras’s early life was spent as a cucumber. And after that he lived as a sardine. That’s in Heraclitus. That’s what he believed. Beside the east bank of the River Cong in Mayo was a Monks’ Fishing House and the monks laid a trap in the river so that when a salmon entered it a line was pulled and rang a little bell in the monks’ kitchen, and although there were strict laws forbidding any traps nobody ever stopped the monks because they knew the monks believed the salmon were Heaven-sent and even unbelievers don’t want to tax Heaven. Just in case. That’s in The Salmon in Ireland. Bridie Clohessy believes her weight is all water, Sean Conway believes the Germans are to blame for most things, Packy Nolan that it was the red M&Ms gave him the cancer. With faith there’s no arguing.

Virgil Swain believed this was the place he was meant to be. This was the place of which, when I imagine him lying fevered and delirious below decks in the West Indies, or landed in Cape Town and gone ashore with whoever were the real-life versions of Abraham Gray and John Hunter and Richard Joyce, he was dreaming.

It was not so much that it was Faha itself. It was this bend in the river.

River bends have their own potency. Ever since some hand wrote a river flows out of Eden rivers and Paradise are pretty much inseparable. If you’re reading this in Persian think Apirindaeza, in Hebrew Pardes. As far as I can make out there are rivers in every Paradise. Though not always fishermen. Bishop Epiphanius in 403 ad had an epiphany and decided Paradise had in fact two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, but whether these flowed into or out of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.