Because it was their custom, and not because the population did not already know it, some of the men walked down into the town to announce their arrival and advertise the various wonders and entertainments they could offer over the coming week. When they met a man or woman in the blustery street, they stopped them with a cry and told that there was one among them who could foretell all health, wealth, and happiness. The fortune-teller would be in her caravan that evening and would tell all, they said. And all this with a swaggering waving of arms and floating eyebrows and squinted eyes. When they had finished in the little streets, the gypsies gathered by the shoreline and watched some girls in the sea. These with various forms of basketry on their backs had waded out through the tide and with dresses tucked up above their waists were busy harvesting seaweed. They were a sight as old as man’s existence in that place, and to the twins and the gypsies there was something true and uplifting in it. The waves did not come evenly. At times they rose many feet above the girls’ heads and came at them in a back-combed wall of water crashing and foaming. Sometimes the girls lost their footing and were swept shoreward, their baskets bobbing in the distance and the seaweed spilling loose and slithering like so many snakes. Still the undrowned girl would get up, regain herself, and make a slow return out through the freezing waves. Renewed greetings were cried out to her along the ribboned line of workers. There was the appearance of gaiety, like that among those who travailing in underground darkness sing to assuage the terror. But there was no mistaking that the sea was a monster. For though the bay was sheltered, the water at the turning of the year came in capricious twists and currents. The girls struggled to keep their line but still worked on, hooking and gathering the seaweed that was valued as fertilizer for the potato gardens and could be sold or bartered in the morning market. There were not only girls in the sea that morning, but some older women too. Their hair was bound in bright headscarves, their hands moving in blind foam without any of the quickened excitement of the younger girls. They watched the waves coming at the girls with both the protective and the deeply furrowed suspicion of new mothers-in-law. They waved their arms at the gulls that hung above them like a necklace of the sky. They called warnings and worked steadily, aware that the sky was changing all the time above them.
The gypsies sat by the sea wall and studied the scene. As the morning came on, the tide withdrew and the line of the workers moved farther out with it into the waves. Seaweed was mounded on the shore. There two men with carts pulled by donkeys gathered it up and moved away, leaving wheel ruts across the smoothly hardened sand. They came and went while the women worked on. The sun passed behind a screen of cloud and the sea changed colour and was blue no more. It became the colour of gunmetal. The gypsies felt the cold and turned up their collars and pulled their kerchiefs tighter and moved as one man back towards their camp. Finbar might have stayed. He wanted to see what would happen, wanted to go on feeling the marvel of these sea-girls. He could imagine the cold in the white submerged limbs, the girl-skin that was beneath the surface for so long that it must not feel like skin of those who lived only in the air. The toes that were vanished under sand traversed by crabs, clams, sea urchins, and all assorted marine life. They were mer-creatures, these, he thought, and wanted to wait and see them reemerge on the land and see how they walked back up the town with steps like slow-motioned swimmers arrived in an element not their own. But when the gypsies and his twin moved, he did too, as if connected, though he walked up the roadway with his eyes turned sideways to the girls below.
15
That evening high fires were lit and wind dragged the flames in twisting tongues of wild unpredictability while the lanterns on the caravans marked a semicircle out of the darkness above Kilkee. From the little streets of the town, the place above on the hillside where the gypsies had camped was like a lightship landed. To there the people of the town made their way, scuttling up through the darkness to hear their fortunes and what their futures held. They lined up outside the caravans and made in their waiting a trail of mud. Some went to the bonfires where the gypsies drank and paid money and tilted back their heads to sample the fiery liquids that shone in bottles of green and blue glass. Matches of fistfighting and wrestling brewed up there. Tussles sudden and short-lived broke out, and there were cries and shouts and cheers, and then the gypsies gathered around again and one sang a song or made a remark that drew laughter. The scene grew loud with the night. More and more men and youths arrived from the town below. Some who were quiet and civil in the streets were here discovered wild and manic and leapt about and jostled against others and cursed loudly. The more these fellows drank of the gypsies’ whiskey, the darker their eyes grew. Smoke thick and heavy curled into the night. A man with reddened face and eyeballs wide took a run and jumped across the fire and was then flaming as his jacket caught. Momentarily he was unaware of this and stood looking back at the others with boastful gaze even as they waved and shouted at him. The flames seared him then and he fell to the ground, the vision of one combusted from within by sins limitless. He rolled in the mucky grass and screamed, and the others howled and laughed. But soon another attempted the same leap. He ran with bottle in hand and launched himself and flew flameward. His legs were out before him. He made the image of sitting in the air and yelled as the fire scorched him and he crashed smouldering on the far side of it. He stood and drank in celebration and spat back into the fire a stream that caught alight and made him seem one in a company of weird phantasmagoria. And so it went on, in strange and terrifying carnival. Fights erupted for reasons slight and soon forgotten, and the men knocked each other down and rolled about. The sea wind blew and smoke travelled sideways and enshrouded them. Down at the caravans Johnny McMahon came from visiting Diado the fortune-teller, his face made scarlet and his legs bandy. The crowd surged toward him and shouted to know what he had been told. But Johnny, who was for many years the comical innocent of the town, stared bewildered at them and when he tried to speak could say nothing at all. Men grabbed at his jacket sleeve. There was a flowing, pushing mob in the mud and faces caught and profiled in the lantern light. The gabble of voices swelled around the poor man, then some lewd joke was cracked and laughter flew and Johnny staggered away.
By the fire Finan sat. His twin was gone to see the mer-girls that had come up from the town and were queuing now to learn of their lovers. Finan drank the sharp and bitter whiskey that burned the back of his throat. His eyes were glass. In the smoke and wavering of the heat he saw images of faces distorted. He thought he saw demons and blinked and screwed up his eyes and drank some more. A small fellow dared by others then announced he would attempt to dive face-first through the fire. He was wiry and thin and held up his arms that were like sticks. He was with another, a broad figure with scars on his face. Some tried weakly to dissuade him, but many others urged him on. His companion said he would take any bet that his friend could not do it. There ensued then a rapid and heated calling of wagers, and in bizarre fashion gypsies and men argued as to what would constitute a failed attempt. If the man was burned in the face, one said. If he was scarred, but not if he was singed. If his clothes were alight, it was all right. They considered this and other elements of the dive there amidst the crackling and spitting of the burning logs while the sea roared not far distant. The night sky turned its stars. Men swayed as if at sea and held aloft glimmering glass bottles. They cried out and drank toasts of little sense to the thin fellow who would face the fire.
In this wagering Finan took the side of the diver. He thought the attempt brave and foolish both and yet was touched with admiration for it. Then, when the gypsies and others there were ready, the thin man seemed to swallow a clarifying reality, for he stood back and said he had changed his mind. Bedlam broke loose. One pushed another, and accusations and sharp words flew out on the air. Then the companion of the thin fellow turned on his friend and cursed him for being a coward, and these two wrestled and fought by the fire. The other men and the gypsies
watched them, for in their fighting seemed released some long and bitter enmity which had survived like an aged thorn beneath the skin. The thin man was small and young, and his manner of fighting was full of quick kicks and smacks, darts and shimmies. But he was worse for drink, and his blows flew wildly in the smoky air. He spun his arms about and was like loosened machinery coming asunder. He spat and said he didn’t have to jump if he didn’t want to. And it was clear to all that these were fellows who conspired to win money at gatherings such as this, and that in his way the thin man had reneged and his companion was shamed. Still on their feet, they grappled and wrestled. The young man swung at the older and missed. Then the man with the scars on his face reached back and shot the full of his fist onto the other’s nose. There was a crunch and stuff flew and the fellow fell backward. His hands came up to his face and caught the blood running there. The other stepped forward again and delivered into his stomach another blow. The fellow fell to his knees. Then the bigger man leaned down and with two hands picked up his victim and lifted him full into the air and said the wager was still on, for he would pitch the chicken face-first across the fire. He walked with the fellow in his arms and the blood dripping. He came to the edge of the fire and was so deciding the manner best suited to fling his companion when Finan Foley leapt at him and knocked him to the ground.
It was an action rapid and unconsidered. The man crashed into the side of the fire and sent aloft a scattering of sparks while his friend squirmed free. Finan hit the big man with his right fist, and the fellow’s neck snapped back. Then he hit him again. He felt the pain rush down the length of his own arm, and as he did he was shouting out words that none there understood, and seemed to be fighting a mortal enemy against whom he had many deep and long unspoken grievances. He struck another blow. He hit the man and did not know he was dead, and the fire made of his face a twisted mask of red and brassy orange. Then the thin fellow was wailing out something and knocking him over and pulling at his dead companion and the gypsies were coming forward to ensure that Finan was not harmed. He was dragged back through the crowd and brought quickly away and taken to a caravan where he went inside and lay down and the world thumped in his head and he realized with horror the monstrousness of what he had done.
16
In the days following, more tribes of gypsies arrived in the town of Kilkee. They brought their horses and ponies and made camps in random fashion on the grass that oversaw the sea. Soon there were scattered clusters of caravans dotted about the fields that ringed the town. The day of the races was not announced, and Teige could not discover when it would be. He did not see Finan or know where he was hiding, and when he saw Finbar it was always in the company of a group of gypsies and his manner did not invite conversation. Teige had already decided that the moment the races were over he would ride back into Limerick alone if necessary to find his brother, then go east to search for his mother. He wanted the race to take place at once, but when he asked the gypsies about it he always received the same reply, that it would happen when it was ready. There was no date set and time itself seemed an antiquated and overly formal invention so that days and nights rose and fell and the gypsies might sometime sleep until noon or after and sometimes be risen and walking about the town in the predawn like spectres come to visit. They showed no anxiety but rather now that they had camped by the ocean they took the arrival and gathering of tribes like a medicine of the spirit. Their hearts were lifted to see so many like themselves, and the buoyancy of their mood grew daily. It was the year’s end in the gypsy calendar, and the festive nights of ribaldry, of renewed friendships and fierce rivalries, revealed it as such. There were knifings and fistfights on the night strand. The constabulary adopted a policy of indifference and left the gypsies to their own affairs. Of the three officers in the town, two of them had previously booked annual leave.
So, the town became for a time a gypsy island. Men and women continued to visit the fortune-tellers and story makers by night. They paid for the gypsy whiskey and grew wild-eyed, watching men who could eat fire or swallow gold coins and find them again in the shells of their ears. They heard the stories of the animal called elephant and imagined him there on their own beach loaded with a mountain of seaweed, or miraculously unsinking tramping slowly across their bogs with the fuel for the winter. The children of the town suffered enlarged imaginations. They watched the exotic visitors with awe and dreamed of running away with them to far places that were not rainy and cold and poor and where kings and queens were glorious and beautiful and not the ones of which they had heard. They spread stories among themselves of the gypsies’ scars and magic, and these stories in turn grew other stories and became wilder and more ferocious with each telling, and the gypsies became pirates, vagabond thieves, or daring circus figures tumbled down from a high wire in the sky.
While the days passed, Teige rode the white pony on the strand of Doonbeg out of sight of the other gypsies. The pony ran well there, and Teige spoke to her and stood her on the sands and let them both look a long time at the breaking of the waves. The sea was slow mesmerism. The farther out he looked, the farther it seemed to go until it did not seem to be moving at all but was a steady line of grey without wave or wimple. He rode there in the nights too and liked the empty tumbling of the world beneath the stars.
“It’s like a rim of iron,” he told the silent pony, “where the world ends.”
In the darkness he watched it. The wind blew the sand in ribbons.
After a long time Teige spoke. “Once,” he said in a whisper, “Jason met a clever shipwright called Argus.”
The pony stood on the shore. It was an empty arc of pale light.
“And this shipwright had from Mount Pelion got tall pines, and of these built a fifty-oared ship so strong that it could stand all winds and waves, and so light that it could be carried on the shoulders of its crew.”
He stopped and thought of that magical craft and tried to think of nothing else.
“This ship was named the Argo. In it were assembled the best and the bravest, the sons of gods and men, who were known as the Argonauts.” He watched the sea and the night sky. The waves sighed.
“And all were bound on a far course,” he told the pony, “to the distant eastern shores, where they must tear free the Golden Fleece.”
Clouds moved and the stars came and went again. “On a far course,” he said again, then said no more, the story stopped, its words gone in the wind.
17
And in that night the horses sensed the turning of the year and whinnied along their ranks and dragged hooves against the packed mud like creatures pawing for freedom. It was the beginning of Samhain, the time of dying and resurrection in the antique spirit world of that place, and the ghosts of horses dead passed in along the seashore and made those living flick their ears and roll their eyes in the dark. Teige rose from his bed and walked out among them and ran his hand on the fevered flesh of the frightened animals. The night was cool and the sky charged with stars. The traffic of spirits was such that the horses would not quieten, though Teige spoke to them in a soft voice and tried to make the very nighttime calm with his presence. He knew it was the time of ghosts. He knew the tradition and belief of their coming from all graves on those nights and revelling in wild abandon before taking some back with them to the kingdom of the dead. He thought of his father’s spirit and wondered where it was, and in the still air of that night when he could not hush the horses he stood back and let them stamp and noise and grow accustomed to the strangeness. From caravans came the shadowy figures of gypsies drawn from their beds by the same presences that had disturbed the horses. Tousled, soft-shouldered figures, they ducked about in the dark as though expecting to encounter some flying debris, the blown souls of the vanished. Soon there was a small gathering. One of them began to hum and another took it up and then it was general, a kind of windy low notes in the pipes of their throats. They shambled around, crisscrossing in the darkness and humming like things w
ithout language. The sound was not unsettling, though, and Teige without reason or understanding joined in. And the horses stilled and listened. The small breaths of the wind carried the humming off into the fields about. The gypsies looked into the sky, and sometime here and there one of them made gestures in the air, waving their arms in a way that Teige could not interpret either as welcome or defence. Elihah, the oldest of them, came out and was brought across the grass by two of the younger gypsies bearing lanterns. When they stepped from his side he stood a moment by himself as though balancing one final time on the threshold between life and death. He then spoke words aloud that Teige did not understand and the gypsies brought him the lanterns and he threw them down in a pile of gathered branches and a fire sprang up. The Samhain had begun.
Within minutes the old man was gone and the other gypsies were about. Fires were lit and horses were released and ran wild off down the field into the dark. Across the bay other fires now burned with small tongues of light. From each camp around the town the same custom-worn and time-honoured gestures were taking place. It was as if a bell had tolled or a preternatural announcement had taken place. For though it was without clocks or even the rising of the sun, the moment of the spirits’ resurrection and return seemed unanimously agreed. The gypsies’ mood rose with the heat of the fire and soon they were singing and there were some who leapt in ragged trousers and bare chests by the flames and yahooed with wild ferocity. Women came out dressed in bright skirts with hoops in their ears, and though they had slept only a few hours, they danced flamboyantly with different partners. They held up their skirts to show their legs and stamped in the muddy grass, laughing full-mouthed in the dance of the dead. Teige was pulled in by one such woman and spun to music of drum and whistle. He flew about in her arms and watched his brother Finbar do the same. The place was swept into a festive mood. The stars turned in the sky and the sea fell in sighs, exhausted.
The Fall of Light Page 9
