Rain on the Wind, page 32
He burst up the placid peace of Mico’s home, standing in the door dripping, with the bit of sticking-plaster on his face where the bottle had cut him, and the look of pain in his eyes and the rain falling from him in streams. Big Micil with his feet and only socks on them held out to the blaze and the Galway Observer in his hand, looking up at him in amazement; Gran holding his pipe out from his mouth, the mouthpiece of it wet; Mico’s mother looking up from darning a sock, looking at him with her dark eyes from the thin face.
‘Mico is gone mad!’ says Twacky in a sort of a shout. ‘ He’s gone out. He’s taken out the boat. He’ll be kilt. What’ll we do?’
‘God!’ Big Micil reaching for his boots. Gran running back to the pegs behind the door and stretching for the oilskins. Automatic. Delia rising to her feet, fear in her eyes, and something else inside her too. Mico in a boat on a night like this.
‘What happened to him, Twacky?’ she asks. ‘ What’s wrong with me son?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Twacky. ‘He comes raving down and then he lepps into the boat. I tried to stop him but he got away.’ Not even to himself could he say that Mico had hit him. He’d forget that. He’d put that out of his mind now as if it had never happened at all.
‘Women are bees,’ said Gran. ‘I knew it. I knew it. I knew it.’ Struggling into his oilskins.
‘Where’s me shawl?’ she asks, going over to the door.
‘Don’t come out, you, I say,’ says Big Micil, rising to his feet, ‘What’s the use of you comin’ out?’
‘Where’s me shawl?’ she asks, reaching for it and throwing it over her white hair and brushing past Twacky.
‘Here!’ says Big Micil, struggling into an oilskin. ‘Come back! Come back!’
They left the house. The door was wide open. The sheets of rain were shown up brightly from the rectangle of night that was illuminated by the yellow light of the oil lamp.
They ran, a thin line of figures, down to the quay. They scanned the river. In the reflected flash of lightning from Clare they saw the tossing sail of the boat just clearing the river.
They ran down by the Nimmo’s Pier, and halfway they went over the stile into the Swamp and they stumbled on the grass and ran ’towards the seashore. A line of people, oilskins gleaming, breaths panting, only Gran staying behind to help up the woman as she stumbled and fell, moaning. ‘Mico! Mico!’ she was saying as she reached a hand to help herself from the ground, her hand red as if it was stained with blood from the red chemical gravel they poured on top of the banked refuse.
Mico felt the sea and its power when he cleared the Nimmo’s Pier. It took the cap from his head and snatched it away and sent it on the scream of wind. Jeeringly, as if to say, ‘ Take off your cap, you unmannerly fellow, when you come into the wind.’ He had to lean hard on the tiller as the boat took its beating from the right. But she weathered it and stormed ahead, jolting like a young horse. An undignified jolting for a boat of her years. What did the creaking timbers think of it? Timbers that had been lovingly planed and shaped and joined by the rough horned hands of delicate craftsmen years and years before Mico was born.
She weathered the estuary and headed for the Clare Hills, across the mountains that the wind was tossing in her path. Mico had been wet before, but now the waves lashed over the side of the boat and drenched him to the skin. He felt it all over him and he rejoiced in it. It was heaven. It hit him across the face, and lashed at his body and pricked at his hands, but it couldn’t get inside him at all to quench the fire that was in him.
I wanted nothing at all out of life but the little simple things that other men don’t want at all. I can see that Peter would not live in the world as he saw it and see the things that were wrong, and sometimes not sleep at night because they were so wrong and there was nothing you could do except wear yourself out talking about them. Mico was content enough with things as they were. He could have cheered from the sidelines, if Peter or someone like him had won a victory for the common people. But just cheer. He was one of the people they could despise because he was content to let things go on as they are. Because he was content with the things that his father and grandfather had before him. He liked the leaping fish and he liked the labour and torment of their catching. He liked the sea and hated it as all men did, but he was content enough to carry on the eternal struggle against it. He didn’t want meat every day for his dinner. All he wanted was what he had with a roof over his head and children and the woman. That was all. It was simple enough, what he wanted. Why couldn’t he have got it?
Because he was too simple? Because he wasn’t willing to fight for it? Was that it?
Because he who had learned to brave tempests was driven to die by the sight of his brother’s hand falling from the breast of the woman he loved, was that it?
Where was he going now?
He rubbed his bands across his eyes, to wipe the streaming rain and sea from them, and he saw the waves on all sides of him, gigantic and green and white, and they glittering sometimes in the light of the reflected lightning, and he knew well where he was going, when his eyes cleared. He was going to his death because no man or no boat could live in a sea like this. He looked up at the brown sail. It was being strained to within an inch of its taut life. The boat was heeling over like a pleasure yacht in a middling gale. It was bucking so that sometimes he could nearly see the black keel of her as he bent over to gain his equilibrium. Very well. I’m going to die. He didn’t turn his head to the right, where along the bleak shore the small figures of waving people were spread despairingly. He might have looked. It would have maybe meant something to him. He might have imagined the face of his father, with the imminent tears on it as he saw the sea swallowing the only son that was left to him, a helpless, gigantic figure, that would have jumped into the sea and swum to his son if he could. As it was, he was standing in the lashing waves up to his thighs, futilely shouting and waving and calling to the hard-to-see, vanishing dot on the bosom of the incredibly turbulent ocean. He might have seen his mother, with her white hair unloosened and pitifully thin and waving in the wind, and her thin hands starting out. And Gran, standing bent and small, his hands by his side, his lips moving, whether cursing or praying no man could know, and he waiting with all the patience that the long years and his calmly awaited death had brought to him. He might have seen Twacky, standing there shifting from foot to foot, like he was a little boy and somebody was asking him a question he couldn’t answer. He might have seen all those and the other figures hurrying to join them across the wet grass and the discarded refuse of a town, stumbling and falling and rising and hurrying to where the figures were silhouetted against the lightning in the sky.
If he had turned and seen those, he might have been surprised, because he might have thought, Well, yes, people do mind if I die after all. They don’t think I’m just a simple ignorant fisherman with a terrible mark that no eyes can bear to look on calmly. They just think I’m Mico, and that I’m a nice fellow and they like me just because I’m Mico and they wouldn’t give a damn if I had a tail like an ape and ten fingers on each hand.
His head was clearing as he fought the tossing boat. Power to control her was almost being taken from his hands, but he fought her with all the great strength in his body. And he held her nose to the wind and felt that he was pitting his strength against something that was stronger than himself and holding his own. As he felt his head clearing and the power flowing into his body, he thought, What am I doing?
And the storm answered jeeringly, You are running away. You ran away, it said, and it’s too late now. You ran into your own death, like all cowards.
And then he thought.
What am I doing to my poor black boat?
And the poor black boat, groaning and tumbling and suffering, answered him, You are killing me, Mico. What have I done that you should do this to me? Haven’t I been a good boat all your life and all your father’s life and all your grandfather’s life and all his father’s life too, and is this how you are going to reward me, to have my old body smashed and beaten and thrown up on a strange Clare shore across the Bay? Am I after all my toil to end up driftwood on a strange rocky shore?
What am I doing at all? What will happen to my father and my mother and my grandfather if I take away their livelihood with my own poor body? How long will it be until they can have a new boat to sail under them? Where will they buy it? How will they build it? What will happen to them while they are doing that? Will my father have to go and get a pickaxe and a shovel and dig ditches for a few shillings under the eye of a County Council ganger. My father!
What should I have done?
I know! I know now when it is too late!
I should have hit my brother a puck in the kisser and I should have taken her by the arm out of that place, and said, ‘What kind of going-on is this? What do you think you are doing at all? Aren’t you bloody ashamed of yourself to be doing things like that?’
That’s what I should have done. And that’s what I’m going to do!
And he leaned on the tiller and turned her about.
Now, you old black boat, he said to her as he strained, if ever you served let you serve now. It’s all on in this. We either go or we come. He even reached a free hand and patted her, as she paused, was left static to become the play-thing of the incredulous waves. He thought his heart would burst; that his arms would be pulled from their sockets; that the old boat would be taken apart like a biscuit in the hands of a child.
She groaned and she groaned and she creaked and her sail flapped and he ducked low as the boom swung over his head. He caught the strain of the sail-rope wound tight around his arm, and he nearly screamed as it bit deeply into his tendons. But he held the tiller and he held the rope and slowly, painstakingly, pantingly, the old boat turned, and the waves poured into her and tried to grasp her and drag her under, but she turned slowly and slowly and then she bounded away like a greyhound released from a leash.
The people on the shore couldn’t believe it. They only saw the struggle in flashes, taking place about half a mile away from their petrified and rain-soaked eyes.
They’ll never do it, Micil thought, linking the man and the boat.
They’ll never do it, Gran thought, shaking his head, thinking of the timbers older than himself.
And then they saw her rising out of the waves and coming back the way she had gone, and they stood there for a moment and then they turned and ran back the way they had come, waving and shouting, the shouts whipped from their mouths by the wind.
It was Gran who reached the girl.
She was on her knees looking at the sea, the hair plastered to her face by the rain. She wore nothing but a blouse and a skirt. A white blouse that was sticking to her body as if she was naked. Her skirt was wet and ruined and torn. Silk stockings hung from her legs in shreds and her high-heeled shoes had been sucked from her feet in the grip of the green mud.
‘Get up, get up,’ said Gran, ‘he’s coming back.’
Big Micil paused by them and looked and whipped off his oilskin coat and flung it around her, and then ran on.
Gran helped her to her feet.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Run like hell. He’s all right now.’
She looked at him, and then she turned and followed the others along the shore.
When Mico neared the mouth of the river he turned his head and saw them. He saw them waving. He saw them shouting. He saw the slim figure in the rain and the wind and the lightning flashing. He saw them all. The coat had fallen from her shoulders and she stood there. White and black, white and black, the hair plastered to her face.
He saw Twacky.
Oh God, I hit Twacky!
I love Twacky! I’ll marry Twacky!
And he leaned over and patted the leaping boat on her rough side.
‘You’re a great oul bitch!’ he said aloud. ‘You’re a great oul beautiful black bitch!’
Copyright
First published in 1950 by Macmillan
This edition published 2014 by Bello
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Copyright © Walter Macken, 1950
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Walter Macken, Rain on the Wind
