Time of the Child: A Novel

by Niall Williams

There might have been an invisible force pressing down on each day, but rain and religion had left the people a twinned philosophy of offering it up and getting on with it.

The wind’s marriage to the rain gave birth to a third weather that could quench the candles of whatever it was that kept you living and required countering.

They were mysteries he couldn’t solve, and under the grace of Nora Haugh’s good humour and sweet loaf he could let them be, sitting behind the steering wheel and not for the first or last time recalling his father’s adage that the central challenge of life was to accept that the world is a place of pain, And yet live. Yet live, Jack.

As he stood by the window, what filled Jack Troy then was the fantastical idea of grace as an actual thing. That it was something real, and at that moment the thing he suddenly longed for the most: for one last time, to make an act of grace, even if he was not sure he believed in it, or in the daylight could have explained why. Only that he wanted to feel a sense of grace, which, by what calculus of cause and effect too mysterious and human to say, he knew was bound up with freeing his daughter from him and pushing her gently, but surely, towards love. God wants us to love, was a saying of his father’s, despite the way he made us.

Acquaintances were mutual and threw a wide ambit; besides neighbours and relations immediate, there were cousins, cousins of cousins, cousins of neighbours, cousins of neighbours’ cousins, and their cousins, and their neighbours, all of which proved blood was a river without beginning or end.

Muirean Murphy had a new baby every June, so that when her aunt, the nun, came each August she had the impression it was the same one she saw last year, and that Faha was Tír na nÓg for infants.

The doctor had lived long enough to understand that, in an island country, sideways was the way all stories wanted to go, roundabouts the native way of getting anywhere, and that there was a good reason there was no straight road in the parish.

‘My father left the Church, or it left him, I can’t be sure which. He could not stay in an institution that had Father Kelly in it. But one evening after dinner he set me a question. “What if,” he said, “what if it’s the people that have a higher sense of what’s right and wrong than those conscripted to enforce it?”’ The doctor paused. He drew his forefinger across the spittle on his moustache, then asked: ‘To love the stranger, isn’t that what God wanted?’ ‘You can’t put yourself on God’s level.’ ‘That would be easy. God knows all the answers. I’m trying something more difficult, the human level.’

“What if,” he said, “what if it’s the people that have a higher sense of what’s right and wrong than those conscripted to enforce it?”’ The doctor paused. He drew his forefinger across the spittle on his moustache, then asked: ‘To love the stranger, isn’t that what God wanted?’ ‘You can’t put yourself on God’s level.’ ‘That would be easy. God knows all the answers. I’m trying something more difficult, the human level.’

Only through the birth of a child, he thought, is the lure of death conquered. It was a statement worthy of his father. And he recalled then the fantastical notion of the old man, who, in his last year, claimed that the purpose of ageing was to grow into your soul, the one you have been carrying all along. Yes, Jack Troy thought. The one you had as a child.