Time of the Child: A Novel

by Niall Williams

The geography was without notable feature but for being on the furthermost edge of a fabled country, where Faha had not so much sprung up as seeped out when the ice retreated, and the Atlantic met the western coast of an island with a native weakness for the heroic.

Still, four nights later, when they would be standing at his door with Jude Quinlan and the child, he would recall this moment: the Talty brothers, loading their tractor with the same imperturbable quiet and compose the world employs when it pretends its plot is not turning.

Doctor Troy looked away as the two brothers turned to him, but he had a sense that, like ones with their finger in the book, they were holding their place in a story just starting.

In Faha, the hands of men and women had their world in them. They were hands swollen, sored, scarred, hands formed by weather and work, hands crooked, curved, with the one finger that couldn’t be straightened or the one that couldn’t be bent, the finger that was part-tobacco, the one with the thorn embedded or nail turned amber, purple or black, from a puck or a blow unrecalled but memorialised, hands with fingers clubbed, contracted, with joints that cracked loud like sundered timber, yellow knobs for knuckles, hands that wore assorted lumps and ganglia, ones with skin roughened, toughened, from contact with earth and animals, from the rubbing scrubbing and scouring that all the world needed, hands that wore history and geography, which was nothing more or less than the signature of place and your time in it.

Medicine was not nothing, from the anguish of spiritual meaninglessness there was reprieve in aiding another, though there remained the mystery why caring for the sick was easier than for the well, and for the stranger than your own blood. 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.

Laying his head, what was coming to him was the idea that if a body could exhaust itself in living, so could a heart. Could a human heart be filled to capacity, like any other vessel? Could you reach the point of being unable to take on more care?

With a kind of breathless fidelity to excellence, there were boys fleet and eternal, who ran barefoot, ran without strategy, know-how or training, ran for gold medals unsmelted and imaginary, but more, because when they ran they were free.

When her mother’s cancer came, it came swiftly, travelling from her pancreas into her other organs quicker than she could say I have had this pain. Without discussion of something that she considered natural, Ronnie took on Regina’s care. Neither of her sisters were candidates. And so, in one of those knots the world makes out of the human enterprise, the child who had been the mother became the mother to the mother who became a child.

‘We could call off the surgery for today?’ she said. ‘And tomorrow? And the day after?’ Father and daughter shared the look of ones whose plan has no second page. Then the doctor, who had a lifetime of emergencies behind him, said, ‘We do not get to live only the best parts of life. We will work out something.

Faha, for it recalled an Eden she felt the loss of, without any memory of being there.

He held her hand. It was small as a child’s, but ancient too, and, laid in his, frail as a nest. In it was her lifetime and its lines. Looking down, what moved him was the thought of all the days and nights it had handled, the purses of the fingertips polished.

With Doady in her last days, neighbours called to Crowe’s to do their bit. None were asked, and nothing was planned; they appeared in their own time and with their own agenda, the women bringing the baked goods or foodstuffs that fed the ones who would come next, the men attending to the jobs in the yard and with the animals. It was an arrangement old as the parish and with the unsaid mutuality that comes from close living in a place that had the air of last stop before eternity.

Living in a parish that had the character of the bottom of a pocket, with only one way out, meant that everyone knew who was where and doing what without being told, or, when told, came back with a dismissive, Sure I knew that. In this way there was no news that was new, because someone had it before you, and someone before him, and her too, anything that happened getting picked up by the wind and travelling on, and, a snap of the fingers later, at the back door of every other house, drawn in on boots and set steaming before the fire, to take on the cooked nature of story.

‘Because one day you or I may be in the same place that Tom is now, and at that time what we will be hoping, what we will be praying for is that there is still enough decency in the world to allow us every last chance to sleep in our own bed, until that is impossible and we need professional care. But until then, we will be hoping, we will be praying, there will be someone who still sees us as people not patients. That’s why.’

The morning after intimacy is its own country. You go softly there. That country has its own code, its own custom and language, which is more tender, shyer and kinder than the one that applies when people are in ordinary daylight.

access the genius of a Napoleonic strategy, and there may have been a moment when Father Coffey considered pretending that he was coming in not going out, that he was the first patient of the day, suffering from an ailment of walking backwards.