This Is Happiness

into a cloud of turf and tobacco smoke. That one has perished. And though some of its people, like Michael Donnelly, Delia Considine, Mary Egan and Marty Brogan, have postponed the graveyard and are in lonely old houses out the country that are home to rheumatism and damp and the battle of the long afternoons, its doors are shielded by caution and fear of the corrosive nature of nostalgia. And because I'm antique myself now, aware that by the mercy of creation the soonest thing to evaporate in memory is hardship and rain. I understand that between then and now, as between mystery and meaning, there's maybe too great a gap, and in the world you're living, this one, the one where it stopped raining in Faha on the Wednesday of Holy Week, might be too far, too remote in time and manner for you to enter. Bear with me a while. Grandfathers have few privileges, and the knowledge of your own redundancy has a keen tooth. A hundred books could not capture a single village. That's not a denigration, that's a testament. Faha was no more nor less than any other like place. If you could find it, you'd be on your way somewhere else. The country is filled with places of more blatant beauty. Good luck to them. Faha doesn't care. It long since accepted that by dint of personality and geography its destiny was to be a place passed over and gently wholly forgotten. To the Fahaians the rain then, both implausible and prehistoric in that valley where the fields were in love with the river, was a thing largely ignored. That it had once started was already a fable, as too now would become the stopping. The known world was not so circumscribed then, nor knowledge equated with facts. Story was a kind of human binding. I can't explain it any better than that. There was telling everywhere. Because there were fewer sources of where to find out anything, there was more listening. A few did still speak of the rain, stood at gates in a drizzle, looked into the sky, made predictions, inexact and individual, as if they were still versed in bird, berry, or water language, and, for the most part, people indulged them, listened as if to a story, nodded, said, is that so, and went away believing not a word but to pass the story like a human currency to someone else. The church at that time was not what it is or where it is now. Once Tom Joyce, sacristan, crossed the street in suit and waistcoat, climbed the twenty-seven steps of the belfry to ring what was still an actual bell, a bell blessed by the bishop and heard in the seven townlands of the parish, people just walked out of their houses and went, the sinners as well as the saints. All routes into the village ran busy with bicycles, horses, carts, tractors, and walkers. The roads out the country were not tarred yet, some not even graveled. The one outside my grandparents' house was mud, tramped hard and soft and hard and soft again. It was foot and wheel and hoof made, and bowed upwards in its centre, like a spine along which pulsed the townland, passing the open doors, and in that passing picking up and dropping off those pieces of news by which a place is made vital. And so, for an hour before mass, there was human traffic of all kinds. You stood outside the door and looked west, and what you saw were heads, scarfed, capped, or hatted, floating like hosts above the hedgerows. In the fields the cattle, made slow-witted by the rain, lifted their wrapped and empty faces, heavy loops of spittle hanging, as though they ate water.