Such was their way. Although they did not follow the calendar, the gypsies knew the customs of their year. And on the morning they fished the Foleys from the Shannon River they were on their way to the last races of October held on the sands of the Atlantic. They had already been to the horse fairs that marked the end of grass and were leading a new pony. On that shoreline in the dawn there were thirty or so men, women, and small children gathered as the brothers were pulled ashore. They spoke their own language in quick, guttural phrases and cut the fishing lines with knives in their belts. The men had black curls and smoky eyes and wore tattered shirts of once bright colour now open to the rain. The fingers of their hands were aged by the endlessness of the earth they had travelled, the muddied rutted roads, trackless bog, and rock-strewn fields. Their women stood behind them with arms crossed. They were strangely beautiful in everything but their teeth, and made of their gaping, blackish smiles a sensual virtue, painting their lips in vivid reds and opening them wide in a way that suggested they could swallow the world. They wore jewels and chains and bangles and brooches that were not seen yet in that part of the country. They had combs of tortoiseshell in their hair and wore skirts over their skirts that filled out the lower half of their figures with bounty and made their movements slow and swaying as if walking in another time. The children were like the ghosts of children. They appeared in brown-and-grey rags, thin and wan and dirty, their grave doomed eyes like pools of ink in which no expression could be read save that of mistrust, for death had moved recently among them. Their long arms hung limply. The rain ran down their faces.
The brothers were unhooked. They lay on the mud banks and looked at the faces peering down at them. The rain fell into their mouths, tasting of blood. In the breaking light the storm rumbled and retreated begrudgingly. Then a large woman with a green shawl stepped forward and told the men to take the boys to shelter.
In three caravans they were laid on cot beds and undressed. The twins were kept together. Though they were living, they imagined they might be dreaming and did not protest when the gypsy women took off their clothes and laid them naked on coarse blankets that smelled of hazel and hawthorn. The Foleys’ senses were sharpened by the nearness of death. They came back to air like fish flapping in the bottom of a boat. They caught the deep and heady perfumes of the women in their nostrils, felt their heads swirl, and fell asleep once more.
While the four brothers slept, the women watched them to see the shape of their dreams and the men gathered and spoke excitedly of the catch the river had yielded. The gypsies read the adventures of every day for the secret code of the world and knew that the fish-men had come to them not by chance, but by design. For here was the answer to the question they had asked the universe.
For, you see, the gypsies had had sixteen horses. From one of the diminished northern tribes who had travelled to the fairs from Donegal for the last time, they had bought a white pony that was wild and fast. This they had watched and roped and lunged and groomed and fed the berries of the year and the stolen hay of those farms they passed. In the evenings by fires of fresh ash that cracked and spat, they had told each other stories of its future. They told the legends of the races not yet run but which had flashed before them all with the startling clarity of episodes of clairvoyance. They envisioned how Mario, their champion horse-boy, would ride the white pony bareback on the horseshoe bay of Kilkee in Corca Baiscinn, how he would cling to the mane and slice the air on his way to victory. The women had rocked in their places on the ground, swaying softly backward and forward to the words of their men as white ponies ran across their minds and won the fortunes that would make easy the winter. By the low burning of the end of the fire they had lain down to love in blankets that smelled of smoke and horses, caressing each other’s thighs as though they were the glistening flanks of the steeds of victory. Then, in the morning, the world spoke to them. Mario fell ill during the night. He ran a fever and could not get up from his bed. His breathing was thin with a disease they did not know. The diphtheria made his throat narrow as though a leather thong were wedged inside it. His eyes watered a yellowy mucus. The gypsy women had gone out and gathered the flowers of the hollyhock and leaves of coltsfoot and made him a tea. They had made a poultice and placed it on Mario’s throat and sat in the dead air of the caravan. They sung softly as was their custom, a singing that was neither song nor hymn but a wordless prayer that belonged to their own great-great-grandmothers. It was the low music of despair and sounded out from that caravan to the rest of them with the dread knowledge that the boy was dying. The women sang on through the night and watched the dim light of the boy’s life flicker around beneath the canvas. When, near daybreak, the light slipped away, the boy was dead. The women stopped singing. The hush travelled out across the camp and the men spilled their drinks into the fire. They sat with stones of silence hanging from their necks. On the long rope that linked them, the horses neighed and beat the muddy ground and twisted their necks about as if to see one who had passed. When the light had come up enough to force the men to see each other’s faces, they moved away. They suffered a double grief, for beyond the ordinary loss the boy had been their talisman. They felt the guilt of those who imagine they have tempted fate by dreaming too hopefully of the future; it was as though they had brought the illness upon him through the outrageous good fortune of their dreams. Four days later, three more of the gypsy boys had died. The low singing sounded each night then, and the gypsies wondered if they had ridden into a valley of bad spirits. When the fourth boy died, Elihah announced they must leave there. They marked the place by scorching the ground so that others might know it was the site of death; then, fearing the disease would not leave them but would chase their vanity, they had released the white pony.
No more of them had died. They had journeyed onward towards the races with no rider and no pony and no intention of entering the sports. They had gone there rather as a form of purgation, as though they bore witness to something larger than themselves, and the final act required of them was to watch the races Mario should have won.
Ahead of them the winter grew teeth. They felt it bite already in the cold rains that fell out of October. By the time they had arrived on the borders of Clare, they were bedraggled and weak.
Then, the previous evening, when they were camped near the Shannon River, the white pony had returned and brought with it three riderless horses.
The old man, Elihah, was asked if they were to fear them. Was it a portent of further deaths? they asked him. The storm was already moving in the sky. The wind whistled. The birds flew back into the trees. The old man said only the universe could answer. He said they should ask it and wait. He said death was not easily outrun.
Then the rain began. The skies fell in sheets. When the lightning crashed in the hour near dawn, the gypsies came from their beds and watched it like the ending of the world. The horses’ eyes rolled. Their wild whinnying was lost amid the fall of thunder. Then, with an unspoken accord that sometimes moved through their tribe and connected them with traditions of ancestors lost, the gypsies went out into the crashing electricity of the dawn and cast their hooks into the river.
Moments later, they had fished the Foleys onto the bank and believed they had received their answer from the universe.
10
The brothers did not discover this story for two days. Then they rose from their cots in the caravans and walked out around the camp in the still morning. Smoke was rising in thin curls and men were standing watching it. Some of them looked at the Foleys from beneath their eyebrows. They studied them for the immutable signs of some hidden destiny and then looked away into the ashes as though not daring to face it. When Tomas saw their horses he crossed to them and they smelled each other and the horses made a quick whinnying of greeting. Teige stroked his pony’s neck and blew in its nostrils and let its long face rub against his own, and his brothers did the same, making gestures old as time. The gypsies threw phrases to each other in the
ir language. One of them bent down and poured from the beaten blackened pot into four earthen bowls. He handed them up to one of the others, and the two of them carried the food to the brothers by the string of horses. None of them began yet the telling of their story. From the fire the other gypsies stood and watched the horses and the brothers eating. They looked for how the men ate their simple food and if it found favour. When they saw that it did, they felt the burden of their future ease a little and unbowed their shoulders. The Foleys ate. Birds sang minor notes in the crooked trees. After the deluge, the sky that emerged was clear with slow-moving white clouds that held no rain. A light breeze carried the air. When the Foleys had eaten they handed back the bowls.
“Go raibh maith agat,” Tomas said in thanks.
One of the gypsies took the bowls and nodded. He handed them away and then pointed to Teige.
“Him? Teige,” Tomas said.
“Teige,” said the gypsy.
“That’s right,” Tomas said, and named each of them. But though he did, he saw how the gypsies did not look from Teige to the twins. They looked at the youngest Foley and let their looking be seen now as though to allow it be translated and the desperation of their need be naked.
“Mario,” the gypsy said toward Teige, and watched to see if that name would mean anything to him.
“Teige,” Tomas said, as though there had been some confusion.
The gypsy who had pointed nodded and waved his arm for Teige to follow him, and they all walked down to where the white pony was tied on the raised ground by a stand of ash trees. When it sensed them coming, the pony turned its head and pulled on the rope and made fast its tethering. Its eyes opened and rolled as though at the approach of ghosts. Its left foreleg trod blindly at the broken ground. The gypsies murmured to it. They spoke more softly than they spoke to women. But they did not come any closer. They waited for the brothers.
“That’s the girl,” Tomas said. The brothers waited for the horses to smell them and smell their own horses off them. “It’s you they want to handle her,” Tomas said with his back to the gypsies and without turning to his youngest brother.
“Why?” Teige said.
“If you can explain gypsies, I’ll tell you.”
“Ride her, Teigey,” said Finan.
“Go on, Teigey.”
“Sos.… Sos.” Teige sounded the ease he wanted the horse to feel and stepped toward it. “Sos, sos, sos.” He soft-clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The pony turned her head and looked away from him and still watched him sidelong on the boundaries of her domain. Her pretend disregard did not mask her fear, and stray electric flickerings of it ran in the muscles of her shoulders and made them jump minutely.
“She’s a lively one,” Finbar said.
Teige raised his hand to let her smell it, but she mistook the gesture and swung around and the brothers had to pull back and Teige whispered shshsh sounds and put his hands out with palms raised as if he could touch and smooth down the irrational and make the animal feel the radiance of his respect for her. The gypsies watched him. The women had come from their chores and were standing not far distant in the small clearing. The pony was turned into the trees. The brothers sensed the expectation of the audience behind them, and when Tomas looked back the gypsy who had led them there pointed once again at Teige and made a small rising gesture with his hand.
“They want you to ride her,” Tomas said.
“She’s wild,” Teige said lowly, not taking his eyes from the eye of the pony and moving another half step closer.
“Of course she’s wild.”
“I won’t be able to.”
“If she’s a horse, you will.”
“Go on, Teigey boy. Get up. Go on.”
The three brothers watched then as Teige angled his head forward and raised and lowered it in an exaggerated slow nodding mime that the pony watched from the corner of her view. He made himself smaller and then raised his right hand slightly and proffered it to the air between them. The pony let a low whinnying down its long face and opened its nostrils as if to breathe in the message of the boy and discover for herself the veracity of his heart. Teige stepped forward and the pony did not move. Her feet were planted. He reached and held out his fingers inches from her face. He held them there proffered a long time. The pony did not turn away. She took hard short breaths and was as one growing slowly accustomed to something in which she did not believe. The company assembled may have been spirits to her eye and the boy the dead Mario. Her shoulders flickered. Quick, skittish movements of uncertain purpose passed through her. Then Teige moved the hand that hung in the air and placed it upon her and stroked the warm, hard length of her face. He ran his fingers under her chin and scrabbled softly while whispering not words but sounds. He moved inside her tethering then until his chest was against her. He pressed himself against the quickened breathing of her flank and ran his hand up and along her back. He stroked the length of her and kept the pressure of his fingers even upon her flesh as he moved across her back and down her haunches and round the hocks of each of her legs. Then he reached behind him with his left hand and untied the rope that held her and let it fall loosely across his fingers, moving her backward from that place with one hand on her side and the rope slack in the other. He took her a few paces and she moved easily for him, her step not full or graceful or true but marked by relief and the notion that she was free. The boy and the pony moved away from there into the trees, and the gypsies and the Foley brothers walked after them and the gypsy women did the same.
In a place where the ash trees thinned and the ground was softer and gave beneath each hoof, Teige swung himself onto the pony’s bare back and felt the hushed inhale of the gypsies watching. The pony did not flinch. She did not run or buck or stamp. She stood with feet planted like the statue of herself and waited and felt the presence of the boy. The rope was around her as a halter, but Teige held it loose and then squeezed her with his thighs as softly as he could and at once rode quickly away.
11
The morning rose grey and still and held the air of new creation. The fields looked unfolded fresh in the dawn. The grass was wet and caught whatever light fell and appeared more green and young than it was. Teige held the rough rope of the halter loosely and tried to allow the pony to race her frustration and confinement away. He sat on the broad working muscles of her back and felt her power and crouched low and put his head forward to hers and spoke to her as the wind rushed past them. They moved away from the river. They galloped out hard and fast away from the small trees and tangled bushes and into the broader light. The green of the land opened out before them and boy and pony raced into it, travelling with apparent fierce intent, so that to stray onlookers in that uncertain morning Teige Foley might have seemed a forsworn message bearer, a figure out of Old Testament times charging headlong upon a mission secret and imperative. Thin cattle in the fields lifted their heads to watch. The racing figure was there and then it was gone and the cattle lowered their heads to the poor grass once more. The road ran westward. They galloped on. They reached a small rise where again the river could be seen on the left, and suddenly, without the slightest slowing, from full speed the pony stopped short.
Teige flew over her head. Briefly he saw the country from the vantage of a ghost riding a ghost horse. He felt the airiness of his mount, and it was momentarily pleasant and easy. He rode the air an instant, then began to turn head over heels, and then the knowledge of oncoming pain arrived somewhere in the front of his head and he saw the hard brown road and crashed down onto it. He landed and cried out and was saved breaking his neck only by his youth. He lay in the road and the pony stood and watched him. She studied him with implacable eyes of no regret, nor did she turn and run away.
When he could speak Teige asked her what she was doing stopping like that. He looked around them to see if there was something that had startled her. But there was only the rolling green of that lumpy land. He said a curse in Irish an
d the pony lifted her nose as if to smell the words.
The pain shot down through Teige’s left arm. He lay as flat as he could on his back in the road. He cried out loud and the pony turned half away and Teige called out to her to come to him. He had to call only a second time and the pony walked slowly down the road and he was able to pull himself up first by holding her hock and then the loose reins-rope, and then he was sitting on her back once more. His left arm ached and sent crimson blooms of pain travelling toward his neck and spine. He sat there atop the pony sharply aslant and tried to will the hurt into subsiding. They did not move. As though contrite, the pony waited for him perfectly still. She watched the road where nothing visible was coming or going. Then Teige cried out for his mother.
He cried out to her in the vanished world where she was gone whether living or dead and whence he longed for her now to reappear and take him from the pony and hold him in her white arms on that empty roadside so that a kind of goodness might be restored. He cried for her a second time, and she did not come. The landscape ached with his longing. Blackbirds like small priests walked in the silent fields.
When he regained himself he slouched forward and patted the pony with the palm of his right hand. He whispered to her.
“It’s all right,” he said. “You are fine,” he told her, “fine, girl. Yes, you are.”
The Fall of Light Page 6
