From the town came those who knew what to expect. They had watched for the fires on the hill and slipped from the beds of husbands and wives to steal into that place where the spirits of the dead guaranteed the time of licentiousness and free pleasure against which the priests and pastors had vainly preached. For the townspeople were even wilder than the gypsies. Girls pulled their skirts high and dragged and pushed the men about, throwing off lovers and taking others in a giddy and mad rush, as though each had to be touched and tasted before that time of freedom was past and manner and decorum returned for another year.
In this way Finbar was pulled aside by one of the mer-girls of the sea and kissed hungrily on his lips. He tasted the salty girl almost before he saw her. In the firelight she flew him around so that she and he were one side golden and one side dark. Then she spun him away and out into the greater darkness and the tufted grass that grew by the cliffs. She held his hand and he climbed up into the fall of her hair and kissed her neck as they ran along. Then she slipped away in the dark. Finbar hurried after her. There was nowhere to go in the rising and falling undulations of the field that were like a calm sea. They chased and tumbled and she called him gypsy in Irish and laughed and threw her bare feet in the air and kicked as though treading deep water in the sea of the sky. Finbar held the calf of her leg and touched the skin and marvelled, and the girl turned into a fish there before him. She glimmered in the starlight and was slippery in his hands. She twisted about and was free of clothes and Finbar imagined her a salmon in the grass and he grappled her in his arms and she wriggled silvery and marvellous and beautiful.
The Samhain burned on. Cattle stolen or bartered in exchange for whispered prophecies to farmers desperate for love or fortune were slaughtered there. Though its blood was not fully drained, a beast was dragged heavily across the grass, spilling gore and scenting the night with fresh death as its head tilted with uprolled eyes of blind horror. A trail was left. Then the gypsies endeavoured to mount the animal on a crude and massive spit, and many attempts were in vain with the spiked end bursting and tearing through the flank of the beast with cries and jeers and curses and men falling about.
Teige left and went to the white pony. He told her the races would be tomorrow, for he knew that the gypsies would bring all the animals down to the sands to meet the ancestors who had raced there. Then the sports would begin.
“We won’t win,” Teige said, and stroked the pony.
The fires did not die out that night but were kept burning into the dawn. As the light rose, the sea seemed quickened and a white floor of surf lay all across the bay. Remnants of the night were scattered in the grass, wood and bones and fragments of clothing torn or discarded. When the gypsies stood into the morning, there was a strange communal shyness among them. They blinked at the light and studied the ground. When they heard that two of their horses had plunged over the cliff into the sea, their natural superstition caused them to suppose the white pony must be gone. Then Teige found her waiting beneath the wiry and back-combed shelter of hawthorn bushes and the men knew the day was to be theirs.
There was suddenly a renewed urgency. The camp came alive with the business of preparing for the races. A group of the gypsies came to Teige and stood about him and nodded. They smiled brown, gap-toothed smiles at him and said nothing. Then when he walked across the field leading the pony, they followed like designated escorts of Fate. There were other races and other horses for the gypsies to run, but it was upon the white pony they would gamble the wealth they had gathered over the previous year. They moved down to the beach, where the wind blew the sand against their ankles and made powdery falls of each hoofstep. The sky was full of quick-moving cloud, the sea brilliant. Soon there were more than two hundred gypsies and their number swelled with the population of Kilkee spilling down toward the beach to watch. Dogs galloped in crazy circles with lolling tongues and flapping ears. Boys ran along the sand before the event and mimed horses they rode in ghost races. Girls looked for the ones that they had danced with in secret the night before and blushed when they could not tell which one or ones they were. All knew it was the beginning of the end, that when the exotic visitors left, winter would be upon them with the colour and excitement of those days and nights passing into memory.
A way was cleared across the white strand. The gypsies had sticks they stuck into the sand. These were topped with ties of red and yellow cloth and made a start and finish. In the clarity of the daylight then all the gypsy tribes were revealed, some one-eyed, some crippled, misshapen, round-shouldered, black, toothless, grin-faced, narrow-eyed, lipless, and handsome. Teige looked about at them as though looking at company kept in dreams. He saw his brother Finbar draw aside the mer-girl called Cait and take her away from the races down to the shore. He did not see Finan and did not know that that brother was already on his way out of the town, that he had suffered deeply pangs of remorse and guilt, faced the violence that had arisen within him, and experienced a grim revelation that he must give his soul for the one that was perished. Teige did not know Finan was already gone, was already fissured from the family and lost to the obscured and traceless domain of zealots, that he was heading for the port of Cork and thence to the continent of Africa to begin work in the service of God. Out of some desperation, Teige imagined that perhaps at last Tomas might arrive, that the road that wound down to the shore would shortly be dusted with the charge of his horse. But it was not to be, and soon Teige could look nowhere but at the pony. He stood beside her and kept her calm while the noise and excitement grew around them. The first races happened, accompanied by wild frenzy. The gypsies had the habit of spitting, jeering, throwing small handfuls of sand at the horses of other riders. They made sudden large gestures, flinging both hands upward like pantomime salutes to a rash, inexorable deity, startling the horses and making the whole scene skitter sideways.
The white pony threw her head up and down, and Teige laid his arm over her and made a matching nodding motion and then blew his scent once more across her nostrils. He had a rope halter but did not pull on it. When the pony moved about to evade the scene, he stepped to meet her chest and was there in her view. He did not look at the men or ponies he was to race against. Instead he made the world small until within it there was nothing but his eyes and those of the pony. And he was standing so, his head upon the long white nose, when those gypsies that were self-appointed his guardians came and told him it was his turn.
Teige walked the pony through the crowd. They were a blur of colour as though his eyes were teared or blinding, and he saw no face he recognized. Then there was a gypsy standing by him with hands cupped for his foot, but Teige did not need him and swung up and onto the pony’s back. Still he did not look at the other horses. He leaned forward and patted the pony’s neck and spoke gently. There was a rope held raggedly across the way. Then a roar. The rope fell. There seemed a long pause, like a rip occurring in the fabric of time, and though the gypsies screamed and the riders crouched in a forward lurch, the horses did not race away. There was a fractured instant in which nothing happened and the horses intuited the race that had arrived before them and were in the very motion of the first leap forward. It was as if the whole crowd inhaled at once and the poor and tattered, the small farmers and fisherfolk gathered there, were stilled momentarily and framed so as in a picture. Teige would recall the scene for his lifetime. He would recall the snapped moment, though he was not even aware of seeing it at the time. He was sensing the way across the broken sand. He was breathing over the pony’s ears, and then somehow he knew that the race was on and the rhythm of it flowed through him like second nature. He became that strange oneness with the animal that was at once apparent to all there. He rode as though he were part of the horse. He was crouched and low, and his face was pressed forward and white where he galloped in the flying sand and spray. They were in the lead before the halfway turn and already the gypsies of his caravans were screaming and jumping along the inner edge of the course. The
re was a brown gelding at his side, and a sleek black animal foaming just behind it. But in the flash that was the race, Teige barely saw them. The pony plashed the shallow seawater into a fine whiteness that rose majestic and ephemeral. The splash and speed made the scene shimmer and perhaps was part of the reason why suddenly the gypsies saw the ghosts. At first they were the figures of the other horses in the race, and then behind them, and coming in a horde from the deeper sea, the charging shapes of a thousand more. They galloped out of the ocean and thundered down the bay. The gypsies all saw them at once and thought to run for they would not survive the stampede. Then they saw their own grandfathers as young boys with shiny black hair and flashing teeth and how they clung to the manes of the ghost horses and rode wildly along next to the boy Teige at the front of the race. They all came forward in one great mass, splashing high the water and getting closer and closer. Then, the moment the pony crossed the finish line, to the gypsies’ eyes it became two. Without breaking stride, the ghost of itself parted to the left and was ridden out into the sea with the boy Mario on its back and all the other grandfathers and spirit horses following behind until vanishing into the waves. The gypsies shouted and surged. Teige felt their hands grasp his legs, and then he was toppled over into their arms and borne shoulder-high over the throng. He saw the sky and the white clouds in swaying, bumping motion like the world coming to an end. Hands flew up and touched him. They patted against him and fell away, and more pushed forward and did the same. He thought to get down and set off at once, but his will was not his own and he was carried along down the beach at Kilkee and the sky spun about and his heart raced with victory. He was caught up in it, and as the gypsies raced him along on their shoulders and threw him skyward and caught him and threw him up again, he did not know whether to laugh or cry.
TWO
1
And three years passed.
The stars rose and fell across the sky and told their timeless stories. But of Francis Foley and his sons in this time there is little recounted. They are like ones that have slipped inside a pause in the story. As if nothing good can be told and it is better for the silence to enfold them.
The old man walked the country in vain search for his wife and sons. He wore a long ragged coat of rough wool dirtied brown. He carried a willow wand. He crouched in the grass and caught pheasants in the dawn. He walked back to the lord’s estate and came into it by darkness and stood in the charred ruins. He saw the gardens left ragged and unkempt. He slipped away and asked of some that lived nearby if they had seen a woman looking for her family. He met with vacant stares. He moved off and searched all the roadways running west. Sometimes he was befriended by the poor and sat in small dark cottages listening to their grievances with the turfsmoke encircling the room. He dug the potato gardens of widows and carried small boys on his shoulders. Then he travelled on again, beating his way back and forth along the roads of that country, all the time looking for his family He encountered any number of constables, landlords, agents, and witnessed every kind of crookedness, cruelty, and oppression. He asked if any had seen boys that looked like him. He heard of four boys that had died in a fire in Gort in the country of Galway, and he went there with the ashes of grief and regret dry in his mouth. He stood with the mother and father of the dead boys. He worked for them in the little lump of a field they rented, pulling the rocks from it and bearing them over to make higher the walls. He left when the dream of his wife woke him one night in the stable there. He went out under the stars and thought they were different, that they were beckoning him as they did others in the fabled past. And so he journeyed again in darkness with his eyes heavenward like a figure blind or visionary, being led by a light aeons away.
He walked that way, eyes skyward, through the winters of three years. In time the stars themselves seemed to reassemble in the constellations above him and were then the unjoined puzzle of a woman’s face.
2
It was winter. In the plains of Tipperary snow fell thickly. It gathered in broad fields and rose high against walls. Cattle stood in stunned bewilderment and lowered their heads as though to look where the grass was gone. They did not move. They waited, dumbly. The snow slowed the world. It fell so thickly that roads filled and coaches stopped or slid into ditches. Horses crashed and broke their hips and were shot on the roadside. The distance across a valley was blurred to nothing and vanished altogether. It appeared as though the landscape itself were being erased and with it time and space and the whole history of man on that island.
The snow fell. Cottages smoked thin, windless plumes into the pale grey sky. Women looked out from doors and threw crumbs for hens while their children scurried about barefoot and in wet rags. Briefly there was the holiday of it, the countryside made beautiful and pristine in a god-willed immaculate creation. It was not itself. The country was like a country in dreams. Birds flew in short, inquisitive flights. They flickered onto the powdered tops of walls and settled for berries of the holly that were plentiful that year. The scene held. When the snow stopped the air froze hard and sealed the white country in ice. Skies were blue and cloudless, by night they were million-starred. No breeze blew. In God’s slumber the entire island might have slipped its moorings and floated northward into a colder climate, defying the fixed certainty of maps. Such was the difference between this and the green country of everyday. A still and iced Christmas passed, and the serenity of the season slipped away and was replaced by hardship. Ridges of cabbages perished and were like long, white-mounded graves in haggard little gardens. As fodder ran short the cattle in the fields began to starve. Their thin flanks showed the cages of their bones, their hides matted with mud in which they had rolled and now wore like crude clothing. At water holes and by the sides of drains and rivulets brown mucked patches of ground opened and spread as animals made slow crossings back and forth each day to dip their noses in the glacial waters.
And across this frozen scene in the January of that year, Francis Foley came. He was thin and bearded. He coughed hollow, raking coughs that echoed across the stillness of the fields. His eyes were worn from sleeplessness and sunken in rims of darker skin. His lips were flaked and broken, the hairs of his moustache overhung them in clumped straggles. He had walked the country back and forth, following rumour and the pattern of the stars, but in that time he had found neither his wife nor his sons. Sometimes, in the middle of an empty road in the County Galway or Roscommon, he had imagined he saw one of them coming toward him. He saw some figure down the road and stopped and waited. His chest opened with the inflation of hope. The figure on the road was walking slowly. Francis blinked his eyes to clarify it, but still he could not make it out. Was that not the way Tomas had of walking? Was that not his proud angle of head? The old man stood and was like a rock in the road. But his heart raced, imagining he had come to the beginning of the end of contrition, that here would begin the reunion of his family and that this time he would bring them all together to the monk’s island and start anew. He stood in the road, and the cold held his feet. Then there appeared before him the figure of one homeless and forlorn and wandering like him in the winter of his life. They passed with minor greeting or silence and went on. Other times, the figure seen on the road vanished entirely and was a figment of desire or something incorporeal, and Francis Foley at last moved from his stance and hobbled on.
Yet, as he travelled he did not lose hope entirely. His death and resurrection by the monk had given him a sense that his life was not to be without purpose, and he endured. His fear was not that he would not find his wife and sons, but that when he did they would have starved or fallen to disease without him. At first he had supposed his sons would still be by the riverbank in Limerick where he had last seen them, and he had gone there and looked at the Shannon waters that in that time were not rushing or wild and seemed a gentle mockery of his failures. He had walked into the County Clare and asked of them there but learned nothing and turned east again into the stars.
Yet all that was already long ago by the frozen January when he trudged not for the first time into Tipperary. The road was packed ice. He walked into the little brown cloud of his breath and kept his eyes ahead of him on the emptiness of the way. There was a small breeze scouring. It polished harshly the skin of his cheeks and left him with the sense that his face was being peeled. His eyes watered and in that way made uncertain the figure that appeared on the road not a hundred yards ahead of him. Francis saw the figure that he could not yet call a man or woman and screwed tight his eyes to release the tears. The figure was coming toward him. The old man stopped. He stood in against the stone wall ditch and laid his hand on the frozen stones. With an intuition that he did not understand but was a foreknowledge of sorts, he knew that this was not just another of all those wretches who had crossed his road. His fingers wrapped onto the top stone on the wall. He held it there readied like a weapon, for at first he imagined this one coming to be none other than the Fallen Angel himself come to take Francis Foley to Hell. He held the stone also out of the need to feel contact with the tangible world and for the reassurance it gave that he was not already dead. The figure moved slowly in the white scene. It was a man, he saw at last, a small man on a small horse. Still he did not lose any of his mistrust and prepared to throw the top of the wall. His heart was hammering now. Blood was awakening in his feet, and they were throbbing. The figure was thirty yards away now and Francis Foley was suddenly afraid of it there on the road in Tipperary. It wore a hat. Its face was unseen. Francis lifted the stone off the wall, and another rolled and clattered out onto the road. He shook and looked about in fright, but the landscape was placid and empty and blanched in the grip of that season.
The Fall of Light Page 10
