The Fall of Light

by Niall Williams

  Teige said nothing and the air stilled and in the stillness there was only the beating of their hearts and the rain now falling. The pony’s tail whisked the morning, her foot stamped the ground. The old man swallowed hard on the emotion that rose in his gorge, and his fists trembled. He looked away at where the spirit of the boy’s mother was watching him. And he did not strike him again.

  And at last, without another word but with a grey look of shame, Teige stood up. He did not face his father, but in a flash the old man had spun him around by the shoulders and holding him there an instant shook him hard and tried to contain the desire to knock him down. In his great hands the thin boy was like a bag of things broken. He shook him and saw the boy’s spittle fly out of the twisting blur of his mouth. He saw the eyes flash past and lose their focus and sicken with fear and powerlessness. Then the vomit flew pink and curdled onto his shoulder, and he let the boy go and watched Teige fall like a rag version of himself at his feet. This was not how Francis Foley had wanted to treat his son, it was not what the old man meant or wanted to do. He told himself it was how a father had to behave, and he ignored the idea that his treatment of Teige was coloured by how much the boy resembled his mother.

  “How are you going to live in the world?” he asked his son. “Tell me that. How are you going to be a man and live in the world? If your father asks you to jump with him into the fires of hell, you jump. If he asks you to swim in the sea when he knows you cannot swim and he cannot and the waters are filled with devils, you swim. Do you understand me?”

  Teige did not answer. He stood up slowly, and his father pushed him ahead of him back to the pony. The telescope was wrapped in a blanket and tied on the top of all their things. There were pots and tools and wooden furniture and cloths and rugs already tattered and various sticks and irons of uncertain purpose.

  “Now!” said Francis Foley, and swiped the air above the animal with the reins. They rode into the water and the whole cart swayed downriver at once. It was as though the world had suddenly been turned on its side and everything fell. The father stood and shouted at the mule and slashed at him with the reins and a leather belt and cursed the universe and cried out to Teige to keep them between the ropes. The ties he had secured snapped like the river’s toys. The whole of their belongings and the stolen telescope swung away. The animals tried to keep their direction but were pulled backward and sideways. They jumped and thrashed at the water. Then the lines that held them gave, too.

  In a moment it happened. The harness to the mule broke, the cart sailed free and swung about and pressed against the rope of the bridge and snapped it. Francis cried out. In the river Teige looked over his shoulder and saw the old man falling back and clutching his precious cargo, the great telescope. Water spilled through the cart grey and fast, and the old man was kicking away at it, making a small white splashing. Teige was ahead of him then in the river. He tried to ride the pony back and over to his father but could not for the cart was floating away and was on the back of the current. And then the mule broke free of it and was swept forty yards then more and then was gone like a ghost dissolving from this world. Teige saw his father look with fury at the animal a last time, and then the telescope seemed to roll from its moorings and the old man pushed aside some of their things to keep room for it. Pots, shovels, bowls, sailed away downriver. He clung to the telescope. He saw that he was drifting from Teige and that he could not be reached and he did not jump from the raft of the cart. He defied the world to drown him. He cursed it and shook his head and shouted out something that Teige could not understand. Then Teige called to him, and his words too were lost in the rush of the river water and the deadness of that air enwrapped with scarves of mist. The father did not hear him ask where was his mother, or if he did, he did not answer. He looked back at the boy, and then the whole cart sailed down the river and into the mist and vanished out of sight.

  When Teige reached the far side, none of his brothers could speak. They seemed paralyzed. They did not greet his safe arrival or move from that spot on the bank. They looked into the foggy river at nothing. It was as if their father had been erased and, momentarily, they were unsure if this was good or bad.

  Teige looked back. “I knew someone would die,” he said.

  There was a pause, and the brothers watched the river. It seemed to run without sound now. The twins turned and looked at Tomas.

  “No one has died,” he said, “come on.”

  “Come on!” said Finbar in echo and perfect imitation, and in this was joined by his twin, each of them mirrors of the elder. They mounted and rode, and Teige came with them. They galloped along the grassy western banks of the Shannon River. They rode along the edge of the first light of that morning and found that no matter how quickly they moved, the river moved quicker. They could not catch sight of the old man. All day the Shannon was sleeved in a fine mist and they could see nothing. After a mile the river was no longer even a river but had become a great lake that at first they mistook for the sea.

  They rode the three horses all that day in search of their father. They scanned the grey waters where sometimes they thought they caught sight of him. At last they came to where they could ride no more and where the last sighting of Francis Foley turned out to be a singular lonesome swan riding the low waves.

  “He is gone,” Tomas said.

  The breath of the horses misted and faded. They sat crouched forward like ones beneath a burden. The landscape thereabouts was a green and rumpled stillness. The silence grew heavy. Then Finbar said, “He is gone to America,” and laughed a small laugh that faded away.

  Finan looked at Tomas to see what he would say, but he said nothing at all.

  They watched the waters.

  “He is not,” Teige said at last, “he is become a swan.”

  2

  Thin pale daylight fell out of the sky. Curlews flew over the water. The wind waved the reeds in a slow rustling where Tomas feared to find the body of their drowned father. But he was not there. He looked up at the bank where Teige and the twins were then making camp. He looked out at where the swan moved in the brown waters and the evening was falling. What was he to do now? Defeat was not in his nature. Yet in a few days he had lost almost everything. The vision of their home burning flared in his mind, and he knew they could not go back there. He did not understand what had happened between his parents but from it felt an obscure guilt, as if it were the boys’ fault. He wanted to go back and could not. He had to be the man now. He stood there a time and watched the river and the darkness coming. He wanted to be able to repair their losses. He wanted to right the crooked world, to go and bring back the dead. He wanted to rescue someone. He stood and then grew restless and came up to the others.

  “The place he wanted us to go was farther on,” he said. “It was at the sea that has waves. We’ll go on there tomorrow”

  “We have to go back,” Teige said.

  “We cannot. They will arrest us. We have to go on and find a place, and then I will go back myself,” said Tomas, looking away at the air above him as if to see how his words sounded.

  Finan groaned then and rubbed at his stomach. “We have nothing left, we have nothing to eat.”

  “We’ll eat the swan,” his twin answered, and grinned.

  “We’ll not!” Teige said, and raised his chin and seemed momentarily a pugnacious other.

  Tomas calmed them with the command to stay camped there by their horses while he went down the river to the town to get food.

  “Don’t be acting fools while I’m gone. There’s only us now,” he said.

  He left them in the darkness and rode away. The clouds blew eastward and the stars revealed themselves. In those days the night skies of that country were vast canopies of deepest blue, all the created stars glimmered there like the diadem of a king. There were none lost to surrounding light, for there was none, and the patterns of the constellations were each clear and perfect as though drawn by a great hand in the depths
of the heavens. As the cold of the nighttime came around them, the younger Foley brothers huddled together. They put the pony and the horse in the gap of the wind and gained a small shelter from the air that was blowing from Norway. They watched the stars.

  “Do you think our father is dead?” Finbar asked.

  But none of them answered him. They sat there in the night. Teige thought of his mother, Emer, and looked in the darkness for the image of her face.

  After a time Finan said: “Tell us one of the stories, Teige.”

  “Yes, tell us one,” said Finbar.

  And so, not to make the time move faster or slower, but to make it vanish altogether, to create the illusion that it did not exist and that all moments were the same, Teige told a story he had heard his mother tell. It told of the Queen Cassiopeia and her beautiful daughter, Andromeda. He spoke as they all spoke in Irish, and in that language the story seemed more ancient even than the versions of it first told in Mesopotamia or Greece.

  “Who could say which of them was the loveliest? Cassiopeia or Andromeda?” he began. “Queen Cassiopeia was full of pride in her daughter and in herself and announced that they were lovelier even than the sea-nymphs, the Nereids.”

  “The Nereids?” Finan had forgotten who they were.

  “The fifty daughters of Nereus, the wise old man of the sea.”

  “Fifty?” Finbar asked.

  “Fifty.”

  “O-ho!”

  They watched the stars and imagined.

  “The sea-nymphs were offended, they complained to Poseidon, god of the sea, who struck the waves with his trident and flooded the lands and called up the monster Cetus.”

  “I love Cetus,” Finbar said.

  “The king, the husband of Andromeda, was told that the only way he could save his queen was if he sacrificed his daughter to Cetus the monster. So Andromeda was chained to the rocks at Joppa.”

  “She was eaten.”

  “She was not,” Teige said.

  “She was!”

  “Stop it, Finbar!” shouted Finan, and punched the other, and the two of them fell to wrestling there and rolling over each other while Teige sat and waited. When they had stopped he told of how Perseus came and rescued Andromeda and took her for his wife, and made Cassiopeia jealous, and how Cassiopeia in her jealous fit helped arrange an attack on the married couple. How Perseus defeated the attack.

  “Then Poseidon, the sea-god, hearing how the queen had plotted against her daughter, cast her into the heavens for all time.”

  “Upside down,” Finbar said.

  “Upside down,” said Teige.

  The story ended, they huddled there beneath the stars that were the same stars since forever. And the longer they watched the skies, the clearer they could see the kings and queens and jealous lovers and sea-gods and drowned fathers and vanished mothers, and they forgot that they were cold. And after a while they could not tell whether they were in sleeping or waking dreams in that empty and merciless world where they were now alone.

  3

  Moments before dawn, Tomas returned without his boots from Limerick town. He dismounted his horse with a light jump, and when his brothers raised their heads and stared at him he swung his coat onto the ground and fell down upon it. His body was exhausted, but his spirit was elated.

  “God!” he said, and astonished the others by rolling with himself there on the ground.

  “Are you sick?” Finbar asked him.

  But Tomas did not reply. He shouted out a cry of no language, raised his bare feet, and banged them on the ground. He let out another and wriggled in the mud.

  His brothers did not dare to speak to him. They had never seen him in such an agitated state but erroneously supposed it was the loss of their father and the new responsibility of leading the family. They lay there beside the flowing river and watched hungrily while the dawn rose in ribbons pink and blue.

  In the dark Tomas had ridden his horse into Limerick town with the intention of stealing something for his brothers to eat. But from the moment he arrived on the hardened mud of the side streets, his resolve weakened. At that stage in his life, it was the biggest town he had ever seen. Dimly in the distance he saw the bridge named Wellesley with its elegant arches. The high steeple of the ancient cathedral appeared above the rooftops, and across the river were the neat plantations and well-made fences of the land of the marquis of Lansdowne. He tied his horse and brushed the dirt off his clothes and walked into the night town. The smells of the outer streets were the smells of stout and whiskey and urine and cow dung. Cats and ragged dogs ran and stopped and sniffed at dark, muddied pieces of nothing. He passed on into the town. From rooms above him he heard men’s laughter and music of the piano. He was not sure where he was going. He was walking in the world for the first time without the shadow of his father. He let his hand rub along the fine stone of the buildings. He stood against one of them to let his back feel its perpendicularity and then looked upward to see the straight line it cut in the dark sky. He paused there and gathered himself and thought for the first time that they did not have to follow now their father’s plans. They could go anywhere. It would be up to him. We could come here, he thought. We could go anywhere. The country was suddenly big with possibility. He moved out of the shadows and walked the full length of the street that ran parallel to the wide river. At the far end of the town when he was about to cross and walk back the far side of the street, he saw the woman in the yellow dress.

  She had bare arms in the cold night and a bracelet that glittered.

  She was lovely. Her hair was high and pinned.

  “Here I am,” she said. Her mouth was small and red, her eyes shining.

  Tomas Foley had not known the company of women. He looked behind him in the street when the woman spoke, and when he saw there was no other imagined that the woman had spoken to him out of some distress.

  “What is it?” he said.

  And she laughed and covered her laugh.

  “You’re a sweet one,” she said, and she moved to him and smiled.

  “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  She touched his face with fingers cool and soft, and his head spun.

  “Kiss me,” she said. Then her arms were around him and she was kissing and biting at his lips. She ran her hands along his chest. His eyes rolled. His head swirled within the cloud of cheap honeysuckle water that was her scent. She ate at his neck and then said, “Come on, love,” and led him up the worn boards of a stairs to a room that was not far away. In that same astonishment, the same dumb innocence with which he later interpreted that simple act of economics to be the rare and absolute majesty of Love itself, Tomas found his clothes taken off and his body admired in the yellow candlelight.

  The woman reversed the world he had imagined and told him he was a beauty. He stood there and she looked at him and saw the innocence that had once been hers and she asked him had he ever been with a woman.

  “I have not,” he said.

  She caught her lower lip in her teeth. Though she was not much older than he was, her eyes showed an aging sorrow as if she knew that she was always doomed to be the fakery of love, its manner and appearance, but not its heart.

  “You have a true love?” she asked him. Then quickly said, “No, don’t answer me, come here.”

  And he did then. And she reached and touched him, and in an instant he forgot everything but her. She drew him down on the narrow bed and caressed him with such a ferocity that her movements could not be called caresses and the air in the room grew damp and white sweat might have dripped from the walls and the cracked ceiling. She loved him for two hours, then collapsed back on the bed, where suddenly she turned her head to the side and wept. It was an ancient if underused strategem and came from her own need to see him again. She did not know such performance was unnecessary with him. Tomas said nothing. Then, at the time when she feared he would be rising and pulling on his trousers and leaving his money by the door, he turned and strok
ed her hair.

  She was a woman who did not believe anymore in the existence of tenderness. She had been a girl on the streets since she was fourteen years old. And when Tomas did not leave, when he lay there in the room that became cold as the night sky cleared, she asked him what he was doing.

  “I love you,” he said.

  She leaned up on her elbow. She drew the cover up across her breasts and shook stray hair from across her face to look more clearly at him.

  “There is no need to lie,” she said.

  “No. I am not.”

  “You are,” she said, her voice turning hard and cruel from hard and cruel experience. “You think saying that to me you won’t have to pay me. You think I am some stupid witch.”

  “I would give you everything I have in the world,” Tomas said.

  “Pay me, then.”

  “I have no money.”

  The woman shrieked and kicked out at him and kicked again until he came out the other side of the bed.

  “I knew it!” she screamed. “I knew it! A liar!”

  The fierceness of her was a measure not of the loss, but of her own anger in having however briefly believed in his innocence. She hated him then for having reminded her of a world she knew long ago.

  Tomas stood and told her that he had nothing, and she reached up and swung her right arm and caught him full in the face. His nose pumped a thick crimson.

  “I love you,” he said, and stood there bleeding.

  On this declaration, she let out a long wail and got up and beat him as if beating at the old lie of Love itself. Tomas did not move. He took her blows like proofs of something else and stood.

  When at last she had surrendered and stopped in a wheezing breathlessness on the side of the bed, she heard with astonishment the handsome Foley repeat his vow of love. He stood there naked by the window and told her.

  “Stop it!” she said. “Stop it!” And she held her hands over her ears and looked for a time like a young girl again. “Don’t even say that. Not you.” She turned away and looked at where the wall was flaked and cracked. “Do you know how many times I’ve heard men say that?” she said.