“This is me,” said Tomas. “I love you.”
She sighed and rolled back over on the bed so that she was near him. She looked at the beauty of his body and weakened. She looked at his softened sex and wanted to take it in her hands.
’’If you love me—”
“I do,” he blurted.
“If, I said”—she reached up a hand and touched his stomach and drew it away again—“if you love me, you will pay me,” she said, and watched him for the dodge she knew would be coming. A bell in the town rang two o’clock. She should have been out on the street again. She heard it and waited, then on the end of its second pealing heard Tomas Foley offer her his boots as payment.
“Here, I have no money. I will get some and bring it to you tomorrow,” he said. “These are good boots.”
She took them in her hands. “They are.”
“They show you,” Tomas said.
“I’d almost believe you,” she told him then, and with that he turned and walked to the door of that small room and picked up his clothes and put them on.
“They show you I love you.” He stood in his ragged trousers and held his shirt in his hand. He looked at her a final time. “What is your name?”
With his boots in her hands, the woman who through his eyes had seen herself again a girl in a time before the tarnishing of all such notions as truth and love said her name was Blath, meaning flower.
4
With their eldest brother lost in the seas of love, Finbar and Finan woke in the dawn with hunger eating at their insides. They opened their mouths on the damp air to see if the pangs might escape. They did not. They sat up and wondered what to do. With Tomas sleeping they seemed grown in stature and got up and stood with legs apart and stern faces as if serious-minded captains. They walked about to the horses and back. In manner they were restless and impatient. They looked for something to command. Finbar went over and pushed Teige roughly.
“What is it?”
“Wake up. We have to get food.”
Teige sat.
“Light a fire,” Finbar said.
“Yes, light a fire,” said his twin sharply. “We’ll catch some fish.”
They stood and watched him a moment, as if to see their command taking shape. Then they went and from the small collection of their things that were salvaged from the river took a ball of line and a pin bent hook shape and walked away to the water’s edge.
The morning opened with ponderous clouds of pewter coming eastward across the sky. Teige went to the horses and spoke to them and then gathered sticks of ash and twigs and dried leaves. All of us are like in a dream, he thought. As if nothing has happened and we are just here in this place by the woods. He went deeper within the trees then and walked across the softened brown floor of fallen pine needles and leaves long decomposed. He stopped and listened for bird-song and heard such whistled in the roof of branches above him. He stayed there with sticks in his arms and all seemed gone, for the place was so greenly empty. He thought of how easily he might be lost there, and then he thought of his mother. Quietly into the screen of trees he called to her. He said the name he had for her. He said it in such a manner as one might use to speak with ghosts or others invisible. Then he stopped and stood and listened as if listening deep into the air for the slightest footstep or noise in which might be traced her presence.
When he came out of the trees the twins were already waiting with two trout.
“Where were you? Come on, light the fire!”
They threw commands and showed off their catch and had an air of swagger.
When the fire was lit they cooked the fish. Tomas was sleeping. Teige went and threw the heads and tails to the swan that had not sailed away. The morning in that place beside the river moved slowly as the clouds came on and made dull the light. Thin smoke rose in furls. A veil of misted rain fell without seeming to be falling.
When at last Tomas woke he arched his back like a cat and caught the afterscent of trout.
“I could eat a horse,” he said.
“We need to go back,” Teige told him. “We have to find our mother.”
Tomas flushed. He looked away in the woods. “We need to stay here, move into the woods for a few days until I get us somewhere in the town,” he said.
“We’re supposed to be finding a place by the sea and then going back,” said Teige.
“Well, we’re not. We’re staying here.”
“It was Father’s plan.”
“And he’s dead. So…” Tomas paused and in the rippling of the river water heard the name Blath, meaning flower. “I have to go. Make something there,” he said, and waved his arm at the edge of the wood. “I will be back later.” Then he went and took his horse and rode back toward Limerick town.
His brothers did not know what had got into him, but they were too afraid to ask. Secretly the twins were pleased at his absence and thought of things they could get Teige to do.
They sat there, abandoned again, then Finbar said, “We need to make a better camp by the woods.”
“Yes,” Finan agreed. “A good camp, a fort.”
“That’s what I said, a fort.”
They looked back at the trees. They knew stories of many that had disappeared in such forests, ones that had wandered off trails and vanished into the kingdom of fairies.
“At any moment something could come out of there,” Finan said.
They watched where the trees and their shadows met and dissolved in dark.
“It could, and it will,” agreed Finbar at last, drawing his knees up to his chest and turning to wait for when his prediction would come true.
5
While his brothers waited there that empty day, Tomas arrived back in Limerick. Along the route he had stopped at a number of cottages and stolen from cabins and yards what he could. He had an ax and a shovel and a number of irons. He had a blanket of coarse hair and wrapped in it a fire tongs and a number of empty blue glass bottles. For himself he had lifted the eggs from hens and sucked them dry. He had eaten wild blackberries that grew in tangles in the hedgerows three miles outside the town. By the time he had encountered the ragged traders who were camped on the edges of the market, he had the wild look of one unstable with emotion. The traders were travellers from all corners of the country, and they recognized at once the desperation in his bootless figure and the tainted air of stolen goods. Squint-eyed, fox-headed fellows, they poked with their fingers at the little assemblage of things wrapped in the blanket and, while considering their value, measured it against the value of betraying him to the law. Nevertheless it was with a handful of coins that Tomas rode on towards Limerick town. He tied his horse outside an empty cabin with fallen thatch and washed his face with fingertips wetted in a trough. In the daylight the town was less than beautiful. A dreary rain fell. In the side streets open sewers ran by broken footpaths and fouled the air. Tomas decided at once that their father had been right, the town was not for them, they would go to the sea. He hurried on, his feet cold and muddied. Small boys stopped baiting a rat and watched him pass.
He walked up the town to the place where he had met Blath the night before. But there were only two men worse for porter sitting on the street. One of them looked up at him and then grinned with an empty mouth.
“You’re lookin for ’em?” he gummed. His companion shuddered alive and dropped a loop of bloodied drool in the street.
“A woman,” Tomas said.
The first man began a laugh that became a cough. He coughed until his eyes ran.
“D’ya hear tha?” he said to the other. “A woma.”
“No no no, you want to see de man,” Gums said. “He’s over dare, forty tee, up tairs on the lep. He pays ya for yer teet, look.” The two men opened their mouths at the same moment and showed Tomas Foley their raw, inflamed gums empty of teeth. “Five pence the la.” They smiled, as if they had passed on to him some extraordinary felicity.
“The women will be here tonigh, after dar
,” said the drooling man.
Tomas did not want to wait until darkness. He went directly to the room where he had made love the previous night, but the door was locked. He walked up the town and down again, and it was still not past noon. He weighed the coins in his pocket and briefly considered whether to buy food or boots. But in the end he did neither. He decided that he would give all the money to the woman called Blath because he had told her he would give her everything he had in the world, and she would give him back his boots. Then he would rescue her and take her with him back to his brothers and onward to the place where they were going to live by the sea. He did not include in the calculations that the rescue of Blath would in some way be the redeeming of other losses, too, the empty space that was his mother. But such existed too in the depths of his mind.
He walked up and down Limerick town. He saw fine coaches arrive and depart. He heard the talking of men in English. He watched a river rat run the length of the main street, chased by the small boys. He walked until his bootless feet ached. He walked the way a man walks when he is walking to meet a woman who is already lodged in the space before his eyes. Then, when he had reached the top of the town for the umpteenth time, had patted his horse, and spoken to it, he sat down and waited for darkness.
Years later, when life had hardened the last softness of him, when he was living in another country and those days would seem to take on a fabled unreality, he would think of that afternoon. It would come back to him like the younger ghost of himself, and he would be walking the streets of a town where none knew his history or name and suddenly that afternoon’s wait for the darkness would arrive in his heart like a spear.
If he could, he would have given a year of his life to move the clock forward four hours.
But as it was, the time was much longer. It was long enough for all of his childhood, boyhood, and adolescence to revisit him. All the battles of the small two-room house on the lord’s estate where his father had knocked him down to make him grow up. Tomas sat and was revisited by them all while his feet froze.
When darkness fell at last, he moved quickly down the cold pathway of the street. When he arrived at the place he had met Blath the night before, she was not there. There were other figures in the shadows. Tomas went up the steps of the house. In the doorway there stood a woman. He thought at first that she was wearing a mask, for her eyes and lips were painted and shone glossily beneath the lamplight.
“Love,” she greeted him.
But he was already past her. He was already bounding the stairs two at a time. He was already at the bedroom door itself and turning the knob that was locked, making him knock at the cheap door with such fierce insistence that it was instantly clear he was not going to turn away. He stood back and then thumped at it with his shoulder, and then again until it splintered down the centre and two boards fell apart and he pushed his way on into the room of Love.
The smells were the first thing to strike him. They were the smells of the night before, the smells he had lost on the ride back to his brothers and tried in vain to recover. Now the perfume assailed him. That there was another man in the bed with Blath did not arrive in his consciousness for a moment. There was a brief pause, a frozen nothingness. Then all proceeded as in bizarre phantasm and took the form of quickened nightmare, and Tomas Foley saw the arms of Blath lying by her sides and saw the man on top of her in his shirt. And she was trying to get up and get him off of her, and he was making a low moaning and hurrying as if in some desperation to finish even as he knew the other had crashed in the door. Then there was noise and cries of alarm and more people coming from rooms down the hallway. There was sudden pandemonium, floorboards creaking and some hastening away and others arriving down to where pieces of the door hung. But none of these mattered to Tomas Foley. “Stop stop,” he heard Blath say. He saw her fists come up and hit the man on his sides, but then Tomas swung and cracked open his head with a plank from the door. The crack was loud and sharp and the fellow fell sideways and blood shot on the wall and there were cries and shrieks and the very air of the room itself seemed to pulse and beat. Blath screamed and sat up and held to her the blanket, and she saw it was Tomas and was shaping some words to him when the painted woman arrived in the doorway with a pistol. The woman aimed at the broad back of Tomas and Blath shouted to her to stop and in the same instant still Tomas was dropping the plank and drawing from his pocket the money and spilling it on the bed. His breath was heaving. The bloodstain dripped on the wall. He wore the look of a man mad without comprehension yet of the violence and passion that had risen inside him.
“All I have, I said I would give it you.”
He said the words and may have imagined from them would follow the rescue, and may even have thought they could both walk from there. But then through the door came a man called Maunsell with bald head and wide reddish sideburns who saw the dead man and the coins and called stop and grabbed the pistol from the woman in the door and fired it just as Tomas Foley dived sideways. There were screams, there were yells from down the hall and men and women running. The room surged with people, and then Tomas Foley leapt through the window and shattered the glass and arrived bleeding in the street.
6
In the emptiness of that same day, Teige conversed with the swan. He knew the various mythologies of the swan that had been passed to him in the form of stories told by his mother. He knew of the daughters of Lir who had been banished into swanhood on Lough Ern for nine hundred years. He knew the tale of Leda and the swan that was Zeus, and the sons of God, the twins who were stars, Castor and Polydeuces. So he realized that the transformation of his father into the white bird that sailed by the shore of the river was neither unique nor fearful. It was almost fitting, he thought. For his father would have taken a kind of natural pride in at last becoming part of legend. So, while the twins hunted for sloeberries in the woods, Teige came down to the riverside and told the swan in plain Irish that he was sorry for what had happened to him.
“I knew we should not have crossed the river,” he said. “I was not afraid of it, but I knew. As you know now,” he added. “Let that be the end of it between us.”
Wind made the river into waves that lapped softly. The swan did not sail away. It stayed while Teige fed it the heads and tails of trout.
“Where is my mother?” he asked, but heard only the slow soft lapping of the waters.
“I suppose there are advantages in being a swan,” Finan said when they had returned with berries.
“Indeed there are,” his twin agreed, but could not think of any until Teige told them.
“For him there’s no time now. He’s in the everlasting.”
“Here?”
“Yes, here, and anywhere he chooses to go. He can swim into the past or the future and be a swan there.”
“But not a man again?”
“No,” Teige said, and they three sat and pondered this and watched the inscrutable eye of the swan and the way its feathers ruffled sometimes when there seemed no breeze.
The darkness that night was deep and damp and starless. It painted the woods at their back into the sky and made the river before them into a black slickness that licked the air. The brothers waited for Tomas in the half-sleep of those who know trouble is on its way. The world turned with them lying but not sleeping beside their horses in the wetness of the night. They listened to Teige tell them the story of Orpheus and the Underworld. Then afterwards they listened to the wind in the woods and heard there the voices of ghosts and fairies and other spirits who had nowhere else to be. They heard them and shuddered in the fear that a hand might reach out and arrive on their shoulders at any moment, and that it would be not the hand of agent or landlord, but the inviting gesture into the Underworld of the dreamless Dead.
So, when they heard the first hoofbeats they did not move. They were huddled together in a grey blanket. Their eyes were wide. Though their horses neighed and moved about and beat at the ground with the smell of terror tha
t was coming, and though soon the rider shouted out to them, still they did not move from the paralysis of fear. It was not until Tomas had ridden to within twenty feet of the bank of the river that Teige knew they were in reality.
The eldest brother’s arm was dangling limply from his shoulder socket. He was slumped forward and his face was bloodied.
“Quickly, now,” he said, “we have a few moments, no more. They are behind me.”
The Foleys were used to flight. It was a family habit from the time before their great-grandfather. The twins were on their horses the moment they stood up. Teige ran to the river’s edge. He called some words to the swan, then came back and he too was on his pony and they were racing into the darkness.
They stayed ahead of their pursuers, riding with the abandon of the lawless. The younger brothers did not even know why they were being chased but supposed that whatever the reason it was unjust and deadly and was another in the long catalog of inequitable grief that was the family’s history. The twins, riding together bareback on the gray gelding, became wild in the chase. Rather than seek the silent protection of the darkness, they yahooed in the air and shrieked loudly enough to rouse the birds from the tops of the trees in the great wood. Soon there were blackbirds flying, scattering the last dead leaves from the oaks and filling the air with a fluttering falling that in the darkness traversed like flakes of feeling, wild and ungathered. The twins yelled out. Finbar rode on the rear of the horse and waved his arms wide like a demented bird. Tomas was tilted forward on the chestnut, his arm like a rag and eyes glittering with the broken pieces of Love as he led the way into the nowhere that the Foleys sought for new beginning.
They rode forever. The pursuit was dogged, fueled with whiskey and the twisted righteousness of those who know themselves equally guilty. The bald figure of the law squeezed the flanks of his horse until white foam fell from its mouth. His men chased on, riding on a hotbed of lust, seeing in the capturing and killing of Tomas Foley a way to release what was twisting and burning inside of them. How many of them there were the Foleys did not know. The brothers surged on through the darkness, racing blindly through screes where the gorse and hawthorn prickled and clawed and made scarlet ribbons of blood across their cheeks and arms. They rode down to the river’s side and found at once their progress slowed by mud. Teige’s pony began to tire. Then in the water he saw the white gleam of the swan.
The Fall of Light Page 3
