The Fall of Light

by Niall Williams

  “Go away! Get back in the boat! We don’t want you!” Francis swung the stick now and came forward with it, and the priests retreated, the younger one hurrying back into the water and his superior raising up the Bible like a weapon or a shield.

  “Have you other women here?” he cried out.

  Then a stone flew through the air and splashed in the water beside him. Then another, and another. They hailed from the higher ground where Tomas was standing now, bending and lifting and firing. The priest retreated. The boatman was in his boat. The waves lapped at the priest’s shoes and he lifted his feet and put them back down again in the water, vainly trying to outstep the tide. The stones whizzed and plopped and the priest raised and brandished the Bible and his hat spun off and he reached for it and lost his nerve as the stones yet flew through the rain.

  “You’ll be cursed,” he said. “You’ll all be cursed here. This is a holy island!” A stone clipped at his shoulder and he yelled out and waded quickly backward and climbed into the boat. The hat turned and tumbled in the waves. The boatman rowed them away then.

  Teige turned to look up at Tomas. He was standing behind them on the small bluff, his arms out by his sides. His face ran with the rain, his shirt was marked with mud and blood, and he looked risen from some nether region where he had been wrestling with furies.

  “Tomas,” Teige called out to him, but the brother did not respond or look at him and went off then running through the bushes.

  “Come on. We must bury her now,” the father said.

  The two of them returned up the island. The sky darkened further, the spillage of rain from the heavens a portent now and making vanish the mainland. They seemed sealed there and moved as if imprisoned in a dream of desperate business. They came to the cabin and took shovel and iron bar and then crossed over by the wiry craze of the blackthorn ditch and into the Field of the Dead. There were tombstones at every tilt and slant and others fallen and embedded now in grass the hares dunged and burrowed and made their own. There were sea captains and boat pilots and fishers and their wives, some from centuries since forgotten whose names if once carved were now erased by the sea wind. There were many children, doomed weak things who perished from every ailment and disease. All lay silent now in the falling rain as Francis and Teige uncovered a place in the brown earth for Blath. They worked without words. They did not try to blunt the sorrow with any meaning or purpose or to reconcile inequities. They dug the hole. Then they went back and Francis told the girls to step outside and wait, and he took two of the cloths they had and with Teige’s help wound them about the body of the dead. These he tied then with cords of hay rope. They had no timber for a coffin.

  “I will go and tell Tomas,” Teige said.

  “He knows. Leave him,” his father told him.

  So the two of them came out then and ungainly bore the corpse to the graveside. The two girls followed with arms crossed and eyes far away, and behind them the dog. The rain fell. They trod anew the ancient path in the grass and made mud along it. The brown hole in the ground appeared shockingly, and was like a rent in a green garment otherwise perfect. When they were beside it, Francis took the body in his arms alone and bent down and knelt with her and then climbed down the side and was then in the hole itself, where he lowered her gently to the clay. He stood so a moment and looked upon her there. Then he climbed out and scanned about for sign of Tomas but could find none. He waited. There the girls sat in the dampness, their coughing soft and continual.

  “God bless her,” Teige said.

  But his father said nothing and after a moment bent and picked up the shovel and pitched the earth in upon her, and shovelled at the small mound faster and faster until the hole was made up to the level of the grass once more. Then he raised the shovel above his head and beat and beat on the grave with it, and tramped on the fresh earth and beat some more, and was still doing so when the others left him and walked away in the rain.

  8

  In the days following, the Foleys did not see Tomas at all. He did not visit the cabin or the grave. The weather was still broken and the island hung in mist and drizzle and the light was veiled. The girls, Deirdre and Maeve, mute and hollow-faced, went off about the fields and gathered flowering boughs and branches and wildflowers and brought these to the bare grave each day. Teige rode the white pony and looked for his brother but often imagined that, seeing him approach, Tomas had hidden down or run off and did not want to be seen again. And after a time Teige stopped and let the pony graze and let his own mind leave the island and travel across the river and up over the slates of the roof to find his way to the bedroom of Elizabeth. He sought for her image amidst the desolation and grief and loneliness that weighed there and wondered how long he must wait before he could return. For no reason he could name, he avoided his father then. And the old man seemed to do likewise. They were separate as stars, and as silent. The house that was almost built lay untouched down near the shore.

  Then one night when Francis Foley had disappeared to the tower and his telescope, Tomas came into the cabin. The girls were sleeping a jagged sleep of sharp coughs. Teige was sitting in the corner, mending the fishing line. He started when he saw his older brother, for Tomas was returned to the figure they had met on the road. The ghost of dead love harboured in his eyes. A ragged beard climbed his cheeks. Teige stood and held out his hand to him, but Tomas was looking at the place empty now where last he had seen his wife.

  “Tomas, sit down, you are wet through. Here, take my shirt.”

  Tomas stepped softly past him and bent down and laid his hand on the shoulder of first one and then the other of the sleeping girls.

  “They were good to her,” he said. He stayed bent low there and phantoms sojourned the while and he seemed to see them and watch the brief invisible happiness of his life take ephemeral form and then vanish anew.

  He stood and looked at his brother.

  “Maybe it’s true,” he said. “Maybe we are all cursed.”

  “You know it’s not. Here, my shirt. I have another one.”

  The shirt was pressed in Tomas’s fingers and he held it and smiled sadly.

  “Teige,” he said. “Teige.” He said the name with slow weight, as though the sound of it were somehow entering him then, as if he were aware there was some conjuring in names themselves. It was as if he knew that by saying it so, he could both take the spirit of his brother inside him and at the same time express outward some of the love that lay all steeped and banked and inarticulate within him. He lifted his hand and held Teige by the shoulder. He gripped him like that and did not move and did not speak, and in both of them the moment sank deep like some aureate treasure, to be found and fingered years later.

  Abruptly Tomas turned then and went out the door and Teige came out after him and called out to him to stay. They were in the muddied grass yard. Tomas was striding away. His brother called out to him, for Teige felt the purposefulness of Tomas’s stride and knew there was finality about it.

  “Tomas, where are you going? Stop.”

  The elder brother was already out by the track that led down toward the unfinished house and the shore. Teige ran behind him in the night.

  “Where are you going?”

  A voice flew back out of the dark.

  “Leave me, Teige. Go back.”

  “No.”

  “Leave me!”

  “I won’t.”

  “Tomas? Tomas?” The father’s voice boomed then from the tower. Then Francis Foley had come out into the night, and as he approached, Teige had reached and grabbed the arm of his brother, who shook him roughly off and then ran off.

  “Teige, Tomas?” The old man saw the back of his eldest son as he flew into the dark. He blew and sucked at the air. “Where is he going? What did he say?”

  “I don’t know He’s going somewhere… he’s…”

  “Tomas?” the old man shouted. “Tomas!” he shouted the name again, and then took off and trotted and ran after it a
nd Teige after him. The father ran with ungainly stride. He bumped and swayed. He ran past the furze bushes that were speckled with gleam in the nothing of light. He ran and found uneven footing and plunged into briars and waved his arms at them and flayed the skin and felt blood rise and sting. He cursed the world and the darkness and the bushes. Then he called his son’s name again and got up and ran on and Teige beside him. They ran down the dark path and heard the sea grow louder and heard the noise of its breaking on the small stones. Teige shouted the name of his brother then, too. They stood there on the night shore and swung about and looked like ones that had lost their shadows. They glanced sharply right and left along the sand and the stones. They hurried a few paces along and arrested and came back again, and cried his name that the soft night swallowed and took within its deeps like the sea.

  “What did he say? What did he say to you?”

  Teige saw his father’s eyes wide and near and felt the sour desperation of his breath.

  “He said nothing. He came and looked at the girls sleeping,” he said. “He said nothing else. Then he just turned and went off.”

  The old man bowed his head, then he looked out at the water, and he and Teige stood there a long time, seeing nothing but the passing motion of the tide darkly hooded with unstarred sky.

  They did not see Tomas again after that. Teige rode all corners of the island in the light of the next day but could find no trace of him. He rode and searched, although in some part of him he already knew that his brother was no longer there. His searching grew aimless and petered off in fields where the hares stood and watched him and then ran into cover where none appeared possible. It rained a soft rain that was neither one weather nor the other, but a malady of season that lingered without remedy. It did not seem summertime but for the long pale light of evening. A boat came to the island one afternoon and a river pilot stepped out and brought news of Tomas. He said he had come because he had given his word he would. He said it was the queerest thing. He said he had been sailing down to Limerick in the dawn light, leading in one of the cargo boats, and hadn’t he seen the man swimming. He had thought him a seal at first. He’d thought to bat him with the oar, he said. But he’d pulled him on board and the man told him his name was Tomas Foley and would he take him to Limerick because he was on his way to America. The river pilot said he took him to be one evicted or otherwise fugitive, but the man was not inclined to talk, he said, and they sailed on down to Limerick and arrived there as the morning came up. This Tomas got out, the pilot told them, and his clothes still wet and cold, and a second shirt tied skirtlike about his waist.

  “He thanked me right well enough and asked me if I was passing back down the river to give ye word that he was not drowned. He made me promise it. And that’s why I came.”

  The pilot stopped, and Teige and his father and the two girls were about him like stones standing in a field.

  “America?” Teige said.

  “That’s what he said. America,” the pilot replied.

  “We can go and get him back,” Teige said at last.

  “We cannot,” his father said. His voice was old and tired; his head was anchored on his palm. “He is gone.”

  The girls turned mutely and went to the straw bed they shared. The rash that was on their bodies for weeks climbed that night into their cheeks. They cried and fretted and moaned in the dark, and Teige and Francis came to them and cooled their fevers with what means they had. And the girls called them Mother and other soft names out of long ago and looked at them as though they were from another world. Both girls were like one then and the fever rose in their bodies and they seemed to be burning up from within until all the tragedy and loss and regret of their lives perished in conflagration and they arrived in a place elsewhere and their eyes softened and they died.

  9

  This time the priest did not come at all. They buried the girls alongside Blath and left the shovels there and walked away while blackbirds flew and landed. They set ablaze all clothes and bedding. The dog barked at the sparks spinning in the air, where disease smoked and fumed and was vanquished. Francis folded into himself. He thought all endeavors now were futile. For Death came for everything.

  “Somewhere your mother is buried,” he told Teige. “I am sure of it.” And seeing him deep in such grief and resignation, Teige did not dispute it and in his own heart partly believed it, too.

  The spoiled summer passed on.

  The boatman came and told them the potatoes had failed. The stalks had withered and the leaves blackened and the potatoes crumbled in the hand. There were thousands unable to pay rent. By the shore when he was leaving, Teige asked him if there were still visitors at the Van-deleur estate and the boatman shook his head and said they were all gone, there were none at the house and it was closed up now Only Clancy and some of the workers were there. Teige asked the boatman to come again, and to the man’s bashful mutter and sway he gave an armful of their own potatoes, which were then undamaged. These the boatman placed tenderly as if infants in the boat. Then he rowed out into the Shannon and was gone.

  Teige and his father tended the potato field carefully then. They watched for signs of failure and rot. Francis stooped and crawled between the furrows and turned each leaf and rubbed softly with thumb and forefinger. Once Teige thought he heard him say prayers while he lay in the dirt. But he could not be sure, and his relation with his father now did not seem to allow much dialogue. They lived on then like ghosts in the ruins of the old man’s dream. Francis’s eyes became dull and his skin began to turn a papery white. He came and went from the tower at nights and seemed to age there faster than before. After long sessions in the stars he would reemerge into the thin light of morning like one dazed or newly arrived on the earth, fistfuls of his hair gone and his limbs weak and frail as a centenarian’s. Other than the words Teige thought he had heard him say amidst the furrows, the father did not speak at all. He seemed to have passed beyond language, and little by little it began to fade from him. He nodded and made small sounds when leaving the table and the food that Teige made for him, but he did not say his son’s name. The old dream of finding a home for his family mocked him now, for there was only Teige left and the island was suddenly large and empty and bare and the cries of the seabirds above it harsh and forlorn and beyond consolation.

  All the rest of that summer they did not move to finish the house. Teige fished in the river and watched the pilots and fishermen and sea captains and turfmen as they sailed past. Sometimes they passed close enough for him to call out to them, but he did not do so, as though such communication would be a betrayal of some kind and his father would disapprove. He sat there and watched and they watched him, the boy from the cursed family on the island of Saint Senan.

  But later in the dark then Teige Foley sailed free of that place in his mind and found and reassembled his family. He lay and imagined them and they appeared before him. Beginning always with his mother, he made of them a story no different from all the others he had learned and told. To himself he told of them as if they were stars. In stories extravagant and magical he imagined his mother still living. He followed her through various narrow escapes, moments of outrageous hardship and fortuitous chance, always allowing her the slimmest hope so that she could survive and travel on down the winds and bends of the long road that was leading to him. He saw his brother Tomas slip through the city of Limerick and walk out the road to Cork, where there were crowds of those pale and skeletal moving. He imagined them, those gaunt figures with ghosthood already immanent, their long thin arms holding cradled the bundle of their world, their hunger and frailty, the mewling of their children, the ragged faded worn quality of their spirits as they journeyed homeless toward the impossible idea of home. Teige imagined them and cold sweats surfaced on his body and he feared for Tomas then and wished the story would turn him around and bring him back to the island. But the story continued on, nights and weeks and months after that, and was horrific and relentless.
Tomas saw men and women and children fall by the roadside. He saw Death move across the fields like a summer shadow and bodies falling beneath it like ribs of hay at a scythe. He saw the wagons of corn escorted out of the country of the starving, and the same wagons attacked by some without weapons, whose shrill shrieks and yellowed eyes made of them fierce and pathetic clowns, waving their arms for food while they were shot to the ground. He saw mothers without milk press their babies to their breasts and wail then to the heavens and suck on plants and flowers and grasses and anything they could find in the futile hope of lactation. He saw children die and their fathers and mothers sit by them, waiting to join them while coaches passed. On the road to Cork Tomas witnessed it all and in each story grew thinner himself, and was more indifferent to his own survival. He tramped forward each night in Teige’s mind because he could not stop and because in some way the restless journeying toward some impossible end was part of that family’s inheritance and would not and could not finish this side of Death. And in truth this was what he was going to meet, for he could not knowingly bring it upon himself or sit still and wait for it to come. At a place above Mallow, he came upon a hellish scene reeking and smoking where wild-looking bloodied men scrambled about with knives, hacking and carving at the warm carcasses of three horses. These had been slain to stop them from bringing away the corn. The horses’ heads were cast in forlorn, twisted posture in the dirt. Their flanks were opened inexpertly in haste and their insides were spilled out and trod over as the men butchered and swayed in the foul air and sought to bring away steaks. Flies buzzed there. A hundred crows cawed and darkly opened their wings in the field nearby and were so many that they seemed like missals or Bibles unused and thrown from the sky. Tomas came upon the scene and voided the nothings in his stomach. Two of the men paused and glanced at him and held their knives and were momentarily frozen with shame, stunned like some caught in God’s eye. Then the moment passed, and they lowered their eyes from Tomas’s and bent and hacked at the horses once more.