At first he did not even know how to look through it. He did not know about angles or focus, but he knew the stars he had learned for Emer. The moment he touched the telescope, his life had already begun to change. For he was at once reminded of his courtship, of the innocent nights beneath the sky when he and she had imagined the world spread before them. It was a memory made bitter now He turned his eye to the glass and looked up into the clouds.
It was three nights later before the skies were clear and Francis saw Venus from the library. He saw it and stared. He watched it with the kind of wonder children know and was still watching the stars when the light of the dawn thinned them into nothing.
When he told Emer, he thought there might be conjuring magic and it would return them to the early days of their life together.
“I have seen Andromeda,” he told her in the dark of their low bed. “Will you come and see tomorrow night?”
“You shouldn’t be in there,” she said.
“There are more stars than you can see with your eyes. They are like stars kept from everyone, like ones not for our viewing but only His Lordship.”
“Francis.”
“Don’t tell me we were not meant to see them.”
“You will be caught and we will be thrown out on the road.”
“Will you come with me tomorrow night and see them?” He leaned over and touched her arm in the dark. He brought his hand up to her hair.
She let the silence answer for her. She lay motionless and felt her life was about to come asunder. She thought of her father and his discipline and pride and how he had instilled in her a sense of who she was; they were not people who broke into the houses of landlords. There was nothing moving. Francis and Emer heard each other breathe and heard the breathing of the children in the vast stillness that fell out of the stars. At last, when he could bear no more the emptiness between them, Francis urged her again.
“Come tomorrow night. You’ll see then.”
She said nothing at first, for she was afraid. But he stroked her cheek then, and whether out of fear or frustration or the feeling of loss that was deep within her, she said angrily: “I don’t want to see them, my feet are cold. What do I want seeing stars for?”
She thought it would end there. He drew away his hand. She turned her back to him in the bed.
“You want to see them through the telescope.”
“I can see them from my own window,” she grumbled.
“It’s not—”
She sat up suddenly and turned to him. “You’re a foolish man. Oh God, you are. And what if you were found? What if you were seen there, then what? We’d be thrown back on the road, that’s what, think of that, will you? Or you’d be taken off to gaol, for what? For stars!”
Her words crossed the darkness like spiders and stung his heart.
“Forget that. Forget it,” she said, her voice breaking now with tears and disappointments that went deep into her past. She turned her back to him.
“You should not be going in there,” she said after a time. “It will bring trouble on us.”
He did not answer her. She could not understand. They lay sleepless and separate in the dark.
She wished he would sleep. But instead Francis sat upright.
“What gives him the right to have it? To have it locked in there night after night not even looking through it, the empty eye of it! Not even seeing!” He crashed the crude wooden headboard.
“Francis!”
“It is a marvelous thing, Emer. If you—”
“Stop!”
She would have none of it. It was not because the poetry of her soul was so earthbound, or that she could not imagine the beauty, it was because she feared the quality in Francis Foley that once she loved the most: his ability to be enraptured. She knew he would not stop, and knew that the fragile world they had built would fall apart.
The lord never came. The seasons rose and fell on the garden estate, and the children grew. They were not allowed to walk in the gardens their father made. They went instead up the rough fields and ran their horses and watched Teige gallop and let their giddy calls and cries in Irish fly across the wind. They were a country within a country and did not know it. Their father tried to make the boys feel like champions in the grassy spaces. He coached them in running and jumping and wrestling. He rolled with them on Sunday afternoons in the summer meadows and made his wife laugh when he pushed out his chest to show that he had still the cut of a warrior. He taught them the ancient game of hurling, and they played it with flat, hand-hewn wands of ash, pucking the leather sliothar ball high through the air like some antiquated weaponry for the downing of eagles. Still, he had a kind of fierceness with the children that came from love but could become terrible. When they could not jump the stream that he could, he insisted they try again. He showed his disappointment, and the boys leapt again and again until he walked off and left them leaping without audience and the vague stain of inadequacy spreading in their hearts. Nonetheless they grew strong and free-willed. They did not show their father their fear of him. And when he burst in anger at their carelessness or slowness, they hung their heads in a greater shame for knowing that they had failed some standard of excellence that was theirs.
And so it was. Francis worked the gardens by day and sometimes slipped by night into the big house and watched the stars and looked at the maps that were there, until at last the day arrived when his spirit broke free.
It was an October morning. He brought Tomas with him, leaving Emer with the others and going out across the dampness that hung visible over the lawns and made the songs of the hardy birds plaintive. There were leaves to be gathered. The evidence of the dying year must not be allowed to linger even for a moment on His Lordship’s lawns. So, father and son silently set about with wooden rakes the fallen black and brown leaves that fell even as they gathered them.
They worked through the still morning. Mounds of leaves were gathered and lay upon the grass, then these were lifted and barrowed away. When the scene was clean of even a single leaf, Francis stopped and told Tomas to stand and look with him. The lawn was like a carpet.
“Look at that,” he said. “We might as well get to look at our work, as no one else does.” They watched all that was tranquil and immaculate there and leaned on their rakes while from the oaks to the east walk late leaves unhinged and twirled down.
They did not hear the footsteps of the head gardener, Harrington, approaching. He came up on them while they were standing there, giving him opportunity to vent his resentment of the man who sometimes stole his praise.
“You’re not paid for looking,” he said.
Tomas jumped. His father did not move. When Harrington came from between the trees, their life there was already over. Softly he cursed at them for idleness, though he knew it was not true.
“Look,” Francis said, and pointed at the lawn.
Harrington was not interested. “Get on,” he said. “The kitchen garden.” He did not look at what they had done or give them that credit. He walked past them and said beneath his breath a muted comment in which Francis caught only the word laziness.
That evening he told Emer he had wanted to hit the man.
“To knock him down into a load of shite,” he said. “Christ almighty.” He drummed with his hand on the table.
“You have to forget about it. Just carry on. You can’t take up against the likes of him,” said Emer.
“Why not?”
“You know why not.”
“I’m bound every way I turn,” he said. “I can’t piss in a pot without someone’s say-so.”
“Francis.”
“Christ, I won’t.”
He stood up. Her hands were white with flour at the table. She watched him cross the room and take a bowl and smash it against the wall. Teige was sitting on the floor with a slate. Francis took down another bowl and threw it likewise through the air at the wall. Tomas and the twins came to the doorway. Their mother cried o
ut to her husband to stop, but something had snapped within Francis Foley and he knocked over the chairs and took one and crashed it against the floor. He said this was no life for his sons. He said what was he raising them for, was he raising them to be the slaves of the likes of Harrington? He said though Jesus wept he wouldn’t. And then Emer was shouting at him and he was shouting in turn and knocking things over and picking up pots and pans and earthenware crockery and flinging all helter-skelter about. The room was like one hit by a storm. It was as if all the disappointments of their married life took form there and ran about and crashed and the air itself grew bitter and sharp. Francis railed and cried out. He said he would not stay there. He said they were not beasts in a field, they were not slaves. And Emer shouted that if they left there, they would die on the roads like beggars. And the boys moved from that room into the bedroom they shared and were like shamed and guilty things, sitting with their faces lowered in the dark. And still pots and plates crashed and banged as the marriage broke in the room next to them. They heard the screams and the arguments. They heard their father shout at Emer that she must obey him and that if he said to go, she was to go and that was that. But she was too proud. I have a mind of my own, she told him, I won’t take my family and make beggars of them.
And then she cried out, for Francis struck her.
She must have fallen down. Silence ripped like a tear in a garment that had once been precious.
The boys heard no more. They stayed in their room and after a long time lay and slept.
They did not see their mother walk away. Nor know that Francis went out with a lamp in the obscured moonlight and yoked the cart and rode it up the avenue to the big house and did not look back at her as she walked out the gates. They did not see their sundering apart like twin stars falling away into darkness and confusion. They did not know Francis let himself in through the window of the lord’s house and went to the library and in the lamplight looked at the map of the country there. And then, grappling his arms about the telescope, he lifted and dragged it down the hall and out the door, where he loaded it onto the cart. He went then to the house of Harrington, who was gone to the town, and into it he wheeled barrows of leaves and dung. Then he came back and took what things of theirs were not broken and he woke the boys and told them quickly to come. He lit the thatch even as they were coming out the door. Tomas jumped on his horse. The younger boys were too frightened to speak. Then they all rode from there, wordless and aghast in the dark.
The father stopped the cart as they passed the lawn that was surrounded by boxwood hedge. “Wait!” he said. Then he got down from the cart and took the lamp and walked up to the house, and moments later his large figure was running back and he was calling to the boys to go, go quickly, even as the flames were already rising from His Lordship’s library
8
Now, the four Foley brothers floated and swam down the river and held on to the swan and caught in their teeth the cries that the icy water shot through them. They did not speak. The deep darkness they travelled through was myriad with the secret sounds of night, the beasts and bushes, the noise of leaves in motion, the falling twisting sounds of the dying of the year as the wind rose and made the water slap in their faces with small chastisements. They knew that they had escaped their hunters, and though the water was cold and the current strong, it was almost soothing for Teige and Tomas and the twins to surrender to its ceaseless flowing. They did not know what lay ahead of them. The light was thin and weak and without hope. The animals that woke and moved in the green fields above the river smelled the rain coming in the wind and ate hurriedly while the brothers sailed past. Soon the river took the colours of the sky. The water and air were one tone, that implacable dull iron that screened the blue heavens from sight and made the world seem burdened by an impossible weight which now must fall. It fell before the brothers had floated past the rocks of Carraig na Ron in the middle of the Shannon River and where the low shore of Kerry on their left was now erased. It fell as arrows of rain, the hard cold rain that announced winter and told the animals in their hidden places that the season had turned. It did not pour down, but seemed a stuff of thin metal that fell piercingly and killed the light of morning. Thunder rolled. The swan flapped in alarm and was at once free of the Foleys. It caught the breeze, sailed head-low as if in grief, and within moments was thirty yards downriver. The twins cried out. They kicked and splashed the Shannon as the rain struck them. Lightning arrived in the falling sky. It rent the air like old cloths and let the pieces fly away. Teige made the strokes of swimming but made no progress. He saw the twins’ white faces flash in the waters and then lost them. Tomas was already being pulled away. Though he fought the river and arced his arms into it, trying to swim with his head swinging side to side in a thrashing motion, he seemed to go backward. The lightning lit the air again. The sky fell and rolled in booms. It was impossible to say in which direction the brothers swam. For none of them were swimmers. The jail of the rain held them from seeing where they were, but, despite the urgency of their kicks and cries, each imagined he was going down to where their father was waiting.
The rain struck Teige like a hook.
Then it struck Tomas, and Finbar and Finan.
It hooked Teige in the cloth of his shirt, and he felt himself caught by it and being pulled backward. He went below the water. He cried out gurgles, and bubbles dark flew past his face. Then he reached a hand up and knew that he was dead or dreaming, for he felt the rain like a wire running toward the shore of Clare. And he clutched on to the line and fainted beneath a white zag of lightning and did not see the excited faces of the gathered gypsies who fished the thunder in the antique belief of landing the electric spirit of the world.
9
The gypsies’ part in the story is long and intricate and fantastical. I think of it sometimes as a part invented by grandfathers later to explain the eccentricities and wanderings of other Foleys in years afterward. Oh, that was the gypsy side in him, they say, and sit back and look into the distance.
The gypsies had travelled south in the dying of the year. Once, they had come from abroad in Europe in the hidden compartments of ships and through the secret ports that were used by spies. They had travelled to this country not from need or flight, but simply because it was there, because it was marked on the outer edge of maps and looked the splintered part of some greater whole, and because they could not be still. Motion was natural, they believed. Nothing living stood still, and in their travels they had seen the variety of the world and accumulated its slow wisdom. Some of them had journeyed around the perimeter of the shore and then left once more. Others, drawn by the green mesmerism of the land, voyaged around it in covered caravans. They took to its crooked roads and found the circuitous routes that defied the usual measurement of progress to be an apt landscape for gypsies. These were roads that went nowhere. They were begun without concept of destination or, at best, no hurried sense of arrival. They were the grassy thoroughfares shouldered by hedgerows and stone walls along which the gypsies that remained lost all sense of time. Their lives, which had once been measured by the new places they discovered, now took on the dimension of a long somnambulant dream. They were not sure if the fields they passed were the ones they had passed only days before. And soon they did not care. The oldest among them, whom they called Elihah, told them that they could not even be certain that the rain that was falling had not fallen on them before, for sometimes they travelled into the past. One day’s weather became the next, and their ancient language was discovered short of enough words to describe the thousand different rains. The seasons were not the seasons of their childhood years before, the summer might have been the autumn and the winter was sometimes not over until the leaves appeared and fell again in one windy week. At last, they grew accustomed to such seamless time and rode their ragged caravans on through it, content in the simplicity of such living. Now, many unrecorded years later, their origins had almost vanished. Elihah remembered
he had once been a child in a ship on the sea, but whether that was the journey that brought him there, or was a voyage even more distant in time, or simply one that he had dreamed in the seas of his mother’s womb, he could not tell. His grandchildren were already old men, many of them gone back across the water to the great shelf of the continent, wandering untraceable paths and lost to their greater families until by chance or design their roads might meet again at a campfire or fair in this life or another.
The gypsies of Elihah had remained on in that rainy island for so long that they grew to know the ways of the natives. They knew the sympathy for outlaws that endured there in the hearts of men, and the evergreen curiosity of people to know what the rest of the world was like. And so they traded not only in tin and copper, but in stories too. They learned a version of the native language. In it they told stories to those who would come to their caravans and peer in at Mara, the bearded beauty, or at Petruk, a giant who ate the branches of elderberry, and in the conjuring of places far away they could retouch their lost origins. They told of countries they knew but in truth had never seen, though they could describe them in such vivid detail that the listeners walked away with the dazzling vision of places more strange than fairy tale. In all of their tales the heroes suffered outrageously, there were wrongful rulers, and fierce oppression, exiled wanderings in strange lands, floods and famine. These were the stories the natives enjoyed, and the gypsies could link one to the other like threads in a fabric, making the tapestry longer and longer until it threatened a kind of madness. For only they knew that the telling of stories could rob the world of life and make time vanish. And so, though the story might be yet in its vast middle, an hour before sunrise the lamp was always turned down, the listeners sent away, and the curtains of the caravan drawn.
The Fall of Light Page 5
