The Fall of Light

by Niall Williams

  “Dia duit,” he called out, for he knew the name of God was abhorrent to the Devil and reasoned that he needed to know at once if such was his adversary.

  The figure on the road stopped and slowly raised its head in such a manner as to suggest that the man had been riding the horse in sleep and now lifted his face into the breeze to see if he was waking or in dreams.

  And it was Teige. Father and son saw each other and did not move. There was a stalled moment of disbelief, puzzlement at the work of fairies or madness that threw such a likeness on the snow road. For Teige had long supposed that his father was dead and similarly imagined this to be only the most recent of a long catalog of his family’s ghosts, although the one with the most verisimilitude. Francis Foley was no more certain that this was Teige, and the beating of his heart raced up the side of his neck and into his right temple, where he could hear it like a drum. He touched his tongue to the crisped edge of his lips and tasted the sting. He looked at the boy now grown almost into an old-looking young man and there flashed before him the last moments they had seen each other in the flooded river. Then he said the boy’s name.

  “Teige.”

  He heard how old and thin his own voice had become since he had last said the name and could not imagine what he looked like, as it was so long since he had seen himself. The stone fell from his hand.

  “Teige, it’s me.”

  And his son stopped and looked and blinked his eyes and then climbed down off the white pony and walked directly across the slippery road to the old man. And in the moment when his father thought that he was about to embrace him, Teige struck him with both hands in the hollow of his chest and sent Francis Foley flying backward onto the snow.

  3

  He lay there for some time. He lay there and Teige stood over him and kicked at the snow about him and cursed and then shouted. The loneliness and anger of those three years came from him now sharp and heavy as stones. He yelled out curses and was weeping as he did so. Birds crossing the noontime in the daily hope of a thaw and the emergence of worms wheeled about and flew elsewhere. Cattle in the rumpled fields turned their heads to listen. Teige spat and coughed and spewed the words out. He told his father that once he had had brothers. He told him once he had had a mother and a family. He told the old man that he had ruined everything, that he had torn up the world and thrown it away. He told him everything was gone now, that Finan was gone, that Tomas had vanished, that Finbar had stolen a girl from the sea and ridden off with her and the gypsies and had not returned the following year. He told the old man there was no point in their even looking for them, that the Foleys were gone into the wind and it was all the father’s fault, all his own stupidity and recklessness and stubbornness. The stones of his anger kept coming, and soon they were piled there all about Francis Foley where he lay on the ground being buried alive in the evidence of his vanity and error.

  Time passed and still Teige stood there on the road over his father. The glitter of the ice began to melt around the fallen figure of the old man while his beard strangely thawed and his eyes watered. He offered no resistance. His mouth was agape. His hands were thrown to the side palms upward, as though attempting to hold the unbearable weight off his chest. And they were still so a long time, the father on his back and the son standing over him. The winter night drew on. At last, Teige stopped. He stood over his father with his mouth open and no further accusation came out. His jaw ached. In the bluish light of the crescent moon he could not tell for sure if the old man was still living, and he got to his knees beside him in the snow. Then he lowered his head until it lay on the other’s chest.

  “Teige son,” said Francis with his hollowed eyes staring at nothing. “Teige son, ‘tisn’t all over. We’ll find them, we will. I found you, didn’t I? And I have been drowned and in a place where none or few have come back and yet here I am. Teige son,” he said, and raised one hand out of the wet and melted ground and lifted it to touch the boy’s head.

  They lay so a while. Then they rose and moved into the shelter of a roofless cabin, and Teige tethered the pony and they slept.

  It was the pony and not the thieves that woke them. Dawn was rising with silvered streaks when they opened their eyes. There were figures there. At first they could not separate them from the gloom and they seemed like insubstantial fragments or velvet shapes come alive as the light thinly cracked the morning open. There were three or four of them. Francis sat upright and called out. The pony was being led away on its rope and was resisting and turning about in the road and making a long whinnying of dismay. One of the thieves smacked it hard across the face and shouted and pulled down on its rein as the pony’s fright worsened and it tried in vain to rear on its hind legs. Teige was up and running then. He was a flicker of light and then shadow, and his father was behind him. They hurried on the slippery road, crying out and making such sounds as they hoped might ward off the thieves. These last, vagabond and itinerant, had come on the two figures lying on the road and had at first supposed them dropped dead from exhaustion and hunger and the ways of the road. They had approached them the way men approach blessings that have fallen from the sky. They had quickened their step and moved around the fallen, examining their clothes and small belongings and beginning whispered argument about possessing the pony. There were three and a boy, they were blackened, their heads hatless. One with the toothless and sunken expression not uncommon then shook his head and held a stub of finger to his lips when he had discovered the father and son were alive. In the obscurity they had moved with the infinite care of those engaged in detailed work of jewellery or silversmithing. They had fingered the rags of the sleeping in absolute silence like some flimsy wraiths or strange angels elected to divest and prepare the mortal for the hereafter. The dirty garments of the Foleys could not be removed without waking them, and the fellows had taken only the boots and the pony.

  Now, in the sliver of light, the Foleys charged at them. The thieves, whether grown accustomed to near capture or out of natural fecklessness, seemed unafraid of punishment and ran about and yelped in high voices and called names. They were giddy and wild. Teige arrived first at the pony. He placed his head next to her shoulder and said some words and then ran his hand along her back, before leaving her to stand snuffling anxiously and as he chased one of the thieves that had his boots. Francis was by him. He was concerned not for the robbery but only for the safety of Teige, and that nothing separate them again. He cried out to frighten the robbers off. But these would not let go of the boots they had and jumped about in weird dance. At last Francis caught hold of the scruff of one of them and yanked the man toward him, and a piercing cry rang out. The others froze. They stood watching, balanced on the moment between fight and flight. Francis held the man’s head locked within his forearm. The boots fell to the ground. He looked for Teige and saw him turned to where the boy robber was holding the pony.

  “We have no fight with ye,” said Francis. “Leave us something, and be gone along the road, and we’ll not think on it again.”

  The man within his hold grimaced. He felt the nearness of his neck to snapping and called out to the others. One of them took a coat then from three he wore and laid it on the ground. Francis released the thief and the fellow stepped away and twisted his head about. There was a strange sense of clemency there and a moment without words as the thieves stood in shambling pose with eyes downcast. Then the scene disbanded. The men scrambled away in the gloom, muttering and groaning, and the Foleys did not chase them.

  “God in heaven,” Francis said, “the people there are in the world, Teige, eh?”

  The father looked at his son from the corner of his eye. He was not sure if he was to be struck down again, and balanced there on that moment, testing gently the relationship between them. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  Teige was thin as a young ash. The curved branches of his ribs were plain even in that half-light.

  “I am not,” he said. And then, without looking up and i
n a slender voice: “Are you?”

  “God, no. No,” said Francis, and then added quietly, “Thank you.”

  Francis bent down and picked up the coat and held it in the air. “Well, isn’t that fine style?” He smiled then and Teige saw it and it was like an image abandoned in the farthest corner of the boy’s mind, a sweetness in that expression that belonged in the days when he was much younger and the old man had carried him on his shoulders.

  Teige did not say anything.

  “Made of good stuff, too,” his father said. “Here, take it, Teige, it’ll be warm.” He offered it and his son took it and put it on.

  Teige lifted a handful of the hardened sleet-snow to the pony’s mouth, and she lipped at it and drew back her top lip and showed her teeth and moved her head right and left like that as if soundlessly laughing. Teige bent down and began to push the snow on the ditch away with his hands. When it was apparent what he was doing, his father knelt and together they cleared the snow from the rough tufted grass that lay below. When it was so exposed the pony moved closer and, after nosing cautiously, chomped the frozen grass with a tearing sound. Father and son watched. Francis tried to figure out what they would do and how he would say it. They waited in the dawning light, and each felt its revelation with shyness. There they were, the mismatched pair of Foleys, in the middle of the country of the lost. Their breath hawed. Blackbirds came and landed in the field over the wall, attending the pony’s finishing the patch of grass.

  In that tentative renewal between them, Francis did not know how to broach the subject of the boy’s mother. Then Teige said:

  “I have looked for my mother.”

  “I went back there, too,” said his father. “I searched every road. I asked any I met.” He had more to say but did not say it. He looked at his son, then when he could not bear it he looked away. He did not say that he feared Emer was dead, and Teige did not turn on him with recriminations or vent further his anger and loss. Instead each stood and the air between them was filled with tangled memory and grief. Teige’s mother appeared there in form invisible and was a figure with fair hair falling instructing him in the stories of the stars. She lingered a time in the silence of the undisturbed landscape of field and hedgerow spread out before them. The two men tried in vain to hold her there, but she was like a star retreating as the morning came on.

  Francis felt the weight of his years, and the immense loneliness of the road passed over his face like a cloud. Later, he thought, later he could go and look for her again, but he did not have the strength for it now. For now he had to be with this boy. He had to take him somewhere. He had to make a home.

  “Well, son,” he said at last. “Will we go toward the sea?”

  4

  As they crossed the country the snow melted. It was like a blanket of green being unfurled. The skies moved again and rain fell. Cattle stood in the timeless mesmerism of drizzle, then crossed the fields in slow phalanxes, finding shelter in the hedgerows as squalls blew the hard rain sideways. When the squalls passed, storms crashed. Thunder broke over February. The stars in the night sky vanished. In the dawn, the light was pale and seemed a poor cheapened imitation, a grey murk that drizzled. The countryside itself looked strangely sorry, like a place in tales where the king has been banished and every plant, hill, and valley suffers in punishment awaiting renewal. So it was. And across this through the falling weathers of the beginning of that year Francis Foley walked westward with Teige on the white pony at his side. They were not companionable, they did not speak in the day as they moved along other than to announce rests or the place where the pony needed water. Still, the presence of the boy consoled his father. He saw how Teige had aged, how loss had marked the expression of his eyes and stolen their brightness, and yet despite the chastening of such knowledge he was still grateful.

  They moved west over the curves of the road. Sometimes Teige dismounted and walked the pony. He never offered his father to ride, and Francis did not ask. They passed all and sundry on their way, a long and varied parade of vagabond unfortunates whose ills and complaints formed the whole catalog of life’s undoing. There were infirm old widows, shawled and wrapped so as to lose all shape of womanhood and seem instead accumulated bundles of cloth, browned by the road. The feet in their broken shoes ached and they shuffled flatly with flawed ankles or tendons torn. There were all manner of mendicant and pauper, thin skeletal figures who drifted along with doomed eyes. Few stopped on their way when they met the Foleys. They eyed the pony and then turned their faces downward and shoulders sideways as if shamed by their homelessness. With such figures in their squalor, Francis and Teige were already familiar. They had each seen many on their separate wanderings, yet in the passing of each of them father and son nonetheless felt shivers of foreboding. Where had these come from? They were going nowhere. The road for them was the last hope, and upon it they carried the impossible burden of their untold stories. Day and night they appeared and disappeared. They were like a fairy folk or the infinite population of the dead. None seemed to know each other, none said their name. Whatever their quest, it remained in its secret history and travelled away with them.

  On one evening when an army of such passed them going eastward on the road, Teige broke the day’s silence and asked his father why they were all going in the opposite direction.

  Francis stroked his beard. They were stopped beneath three leafless trees and gnawing at raw potatoes.

  “We are going to the sea, Teige,” he said. “They are going to Dublin.”

  “But why? Why do they not stay?”

  “Each one has their reasons. Our reason is to leave our name in that town of Kilkee for Tomas and the twins, and then we will go to the monk’s island and make a place there. Then when the boys come back they will be able to find us. That is our reason. You have seen the sea, is it so terrible?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me what it is like.”

  Teige was squatting on the ground and the pony’s long neck was grazing near him. The cold was coming in his shoulders as the heat of walking faded. “It’s like the end,” he said. “It’s wild, though.”

  “Wild?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Good. That’s what we want, eh? Wild, wild sea. Did you go into it?”

  “I did.”

  “And were you afraid?” The old man had said it before he thought better of it. He remembered the disastrous scene in the Shannon River and looked down and tightened his mouth.

  “I was,” Teige said, and lifted his face. There was a moment then in which their still fresh reconciliation might have come asunder, in which the father might have made a grunt of disapproval and shook his head, leaving his son to feel the isolation of cowardice. But Francis Foley said:

  “Good. That’s good. You were right, too.” He glanced at Teige from under his eyebrows. “There’s many drown in it, I suppose?”

  “There is,” said Teige.

  “And it’s fierce.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were right so,” said his father. “You were right to try it and then keep well out of it.”

  Another pause, then Teige added: “I didn’t, though.”

  “You didn’t?”

  The pony flicked her head. Her tail swished. The boy looked at her a moment and felt his father’s eyes upon him.

  “No,” he said, “I still went in, three times.”

  The father said nothing then. He sat there and the emotions he held made his lips quiver. He blinked. Dark clouds moved across the sky. The night fell and the stars came and went and wheeled above them and each lay down to the slender hope of their dreams.

  The following day when they were passing a cottage a cry stopped them. The cottage was not unlike others, a small building of dark stone with crooked windows and door open to the road even in that February. The cry was that of a woman, it came from the garden beyond. The Foleys stopped, the pony flicked her ears. Then Francis called out. There was no response and Fr
ancis looked to Teige, who slid down the pony. Together they walked in around the cottage and found in a small garden a woman of fifty years trying to pull up from the earthen ridges the fallen body of her husband.

  When she saw them she let go the man’s shoulders, and while he lay motionless with open eyes and mouth she slipped down onto her knees at his back. Her black-and-silver hair was astray across her face. Her mouth twisted from effort. Her husband, a figure older than she with a face locked in an expression of astonishment, did not move. She propped him against her breast and though the Foleys were there kept making over and over strange sounds of endearment and something that might have been a form of the man’s name, Cathal.Francis bent down to them and Teige stood behind him. He told the woman they would carry the man into the house, but she seemed unable to grasp this, as though she were from another country or already taken from sanity by grief. The old man told her again, but she still did not seem to understand, and at last Francis gestured Teige to him and together they picked the man up and bore him out of the dirt and in through the open door. The woman followed them, her hands holding each other tightly in a knot. In the gloom of the kitchen something stirred and was then two small girls pressed against the corner of the dresser. The man was laid out on a settle bed. He was breathing but still frozen in that look of amazement, his left side locked in an attitude of bracing. The woman stood looking at him and brought her hands to her mouth, making moaning sounds. The girls came to her then and she enfolded each of them in one arm and the three stood there at the feet of the stricken man. Francis got a bucket and traced the muddied track in the grass until he came to the spring well. He was back with the water before Teige was sure where he had gone.