The Fall of Light

by Niall Williams

  At last he arrived at the Mississippi River. He was south of the fort and travelled along the muddied banks where rains made swift the flow. When he came into the fort he asked to see the general and was told by a soldier in blue uniform that this was not possible and was asked what was his business. Tom told him he had a personal message for the general and it was to be delivered by hand. Ten minutes later he was standing at a table in the log-built quarters of Stephens. He was a stocky man with heavy sideburns of brown hair. He wore his hat. He looked above the pages of the letter at Tom.

  “You ride?” he said.

  Tom Foley said he did.

  “You can shoot a rifle?”

  Tom Foley lied that he could.

  Three days later, he left the fort with Unit 49 of the corps of the so-called Topogs Division of the United States Army. Lieutenant Philip J. Brown was the commanding officer of their number of eight men. Stephens himself had decided not to ride. He had already been on various expeditions through Minnesota and North Dakota and Montana, and whether fatigued or otherwise commanded, he this time left Brown the job of reconnoitring the lands through Nebraska and beyond the Wyoming Territory.

  There were only eight of them. The general had told them that Tom Foley was scout, cook, rifleman, water diviner, and horse doctor. They led pack mules with supplies for six months and rode out of the fort with the pale March sun at their backs. They had all manner of maps, accurate to a degree, some sketched by trackers, crusty pioneers, and Indian hunters. Of the eight men, seven of them knew intimately the paper geography of the country ahead. They had studied it at length, could name gullies and canyons and mountain passes that were eighteen hundred miles farther than they themselves had ever been. They rode that morning with the confidence of such knowledge and were tall in their saddles. Some of the men were younger than Tom. They had been at schools in the east and joined the army not to fight, but to be part of that other enterprise of the advancement of law and justice and civilization westward. They were to be part of Manifest Destiny. When they had first heard heady talk of the railroad that would shrink the continent, a railroad that when completed would make possible the circumnavigation of the globe in ninety-three days, their heads caught fire. It was a fire that was easily fed, for it burned on the stuff of young men’s dreams, of voyaging into the unknown and leaving there a mark inviolable and absolute. They saw the railroad in their sleep. They saw the iron tracks running on and on across untrammelled terrain of prairie and desert and were drawn to the dream of tracing a line on that vast emptiness. In rooms in cool evenings by fireside they fingered ways across the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, deserts west of Missouri.

  And now there they were. They rode out those fine spring mornings with the air soft and the world like a thing newborn. The broad sky was before them. They rode in single file without discourse and assumed the manner of such men who knew that the way was to be long and tongues would tire before horses. They rode from the Mississippi westward and crossed the Missouri River above St. Joseph and were as yet on lands already well surveyed for rails. They crossed then into Nebraska and soon their progress slowed as the engineers stopped and studied and charted the land. They opened maps and knelt on them in winds swift and capricious. They marked coordinates and spoke among themselves and did not say more than two words to Tom Foley but to ask him to fetch something or ride out and see what danger lay beyond the next canyon. He did so without pause. It was bigger country than he had ever dreamed, and when riding alone across the prairies and open spaces, he felt himself vanished from the world of men and achieved a kind of serenity there. Still, his rifle was at his side. He had seen those Indians that were at the fort and wore buckskin and blue coats and he had thought them peaceable and proud. But he had not as yet encountered what the engineers referred to as hostiles.

  Brown, he found to be energetic and earnest. He was blue-eyed, had a peak of thinning blond hair and a way of addressing the others that made his statements seem urgent. When he spoke at the fireside about the railroad, his eyes glittered. He gestured with his hand and waved it like a wing. He told them to think how it would be if they were the ones to find the true route. He told them then that the way they would chart the rails would endure for all time afterward.

  “It will be like this,” he said, and reached and marked with the blade of his knife a straight line in the sand. “That. Done. See? Marked out on the ground. Once. And never changed.” He looked across the fire and they looked at the line in the sand. For some time the men retained their gaze there and mutely considered it, and as the firesmoke wavered to and fro it was as if they could then imagine the great iron engine moving along ever closer until it was beating down through the very darkness behind them. It was as if the future itself were but an instant in their rear. As if, while the men each day moved on, behind them sprang up stations and telegraph offices and saloons and smithies and all manner of lean-to clapboard premises to fulfill the needs of man and become the cities of tomorrow.

  Then Brown scuffed at the line with his heel and made it vanish. But his eyes glittered yet. The night passed.

  They rode on. They crossed lands that had once been covered by glaciers and later by beasts unnumbered whose names were unknown and which lands were later still part of Indian country from which all white men were excluded. And all that vast and empty landscape seemed to Tom Foley to echo still with a chimerical afterpresence. They passed over a plain where a great herd of bison moved before them like a brown tide. As the animals ran, their dust hung in the breezeless air and was a cloud low and sad and slow fading. None of the men had ever seen such a herd and they stood upright in their saddles and pushed back their hats. Then one of them who was young and whose name was Cartwright let out a cry and spurred his horse and galloped in pursuit. He pulled a rifle as he rode and the others sat and watched as he tore into the dust and let off a shot at the blue sky. The bison charged. Their noise travelled over the plain and was the noise of hoof and bellow and fear. Still Cartwright raced on. The rifle he raised to his shoulder, but the motion of the horse and his own lack of expertise at such caused the weapon to waver right to left like the upturned rod of some demented diviner. He fired. The report of the bullet was a sharp and hard crack. The shot would have missed all but the widest target, but as the herd thundered on, a beast lay fallen in the dust. Cartwright rode past it. He fired again at the air and then again before he reined the horse and turned about a small circle in the passing cloud. The bison passed on. Slowly as the dust settled there resumed the air of tranquillity over the plain, but it was like a thing fractured and repaired and ever fragile now. The troop rode on to where the animal lay and Cartwright next to it, still astride his horse.

  “This is the U.S. Army, Cartwright, do you hear me?” Brown asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This is not some band of renegades, or wild men or hunters.”

  “No, sir.”

  “We have orders.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Brown studied the distance. “If I want you to shoot an animal, I will say so.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A pair of birds, dark shapes high in the blue, glided toward them.

  “Very well,” Brown said, “You shot it, you skin and carve it. We’ll be at camp down there.”

  He squeezed his thighs and they moved off then and left the soldier there, and Tom Foley stayed with him to help. Later, when his and Cartwright’s arms were stained to the elbow with blood and they looked like perpetrators of some foul savagery, they sat exhausted on the plain. The sun beat down. Scavenger birds cut arcs in the blue. After a time the soldier thanked the other for his help.

  “Do you know writing?” Tom asked him.

  “What kind of writing?”

  “Letters. I’m long out of practice.”

  “I suppose I do.”

  That night Cartwright wrote a short letter for Tom Foley. Because Tom did not want the soldier to know his business, he
asked him the words in jumbled order and later copied these in his own hand. When it was done his letter read:

  Dear Doctor, He is out in country big and grand. He is right well. He is finding a route. I am watching out for him.

  Yours, Tom Foley.

  They journeyed on. They did not see the Indians that saw them. They camped by the many lakes in the sand hills there and ate grouse and quail and waterfowl. Summer thunderstorms crashed over them. Coyotes and foxes and badgers ran across the evening light. The men passed up over the grasslands and sheltered betimes in forests of oak and hickory and cottonwood where the shade was welcome but harboured thin clouds of insects that ate at their faces. These trees would be felled, Brown told them.

  “These are our sleepers,” he said.

  They traversed the North Platte River into Wyoming Territory and came to Fort Laramie and refreshed supplies. Tom left his letter there and after four days they travelled on again. They rode north to the pale red horizon of mountains. They came to desolate lands where alkali dust was deep to the knee and the water had to be rationed to drops and the horses and mules lifted up their lips to suck in vain for moisture in the air. The men’s faces burned and tanned like leather hides. They followed the routes of fur traders and gold seekers and those who had sought to make homes in the far land of Oregon. The days stayed dry. A high wind blew without cease and made move the sagebrush and buffalo grass. Whitened skulls and brittle rib cages of beasts long slain lay in disassembled poses like things struck and shattered by time. Sunlight dazzled there. The small troop passed along the boundaries of forests of pine and spruce and fir and sometimes saw moose step quickly away. They rode all the time with the knowledge of the great barrier that lay before them, for in the high-ceiling rooms where men had dreamed the railroad the Rocky Mountains always lay like God’s defiance in the way. To bring the rails through the mountains would be a kind of ultimate proclamation, a statement sent heavenward of all that man could attempt and master.

  This is all the engineer soldiers knew. They rode with their gaze fixed on the peaks ahead. Slowly then they ascended through narrow passes and dry gullies. They wound their way upward beneath the blue sky and found themselves in the stillness and silence there that seemed of another world. The sun burned its relentless fire. The men dismounted and led their animals and were a thin, ragged line of blue coats and might have been the last remnants of a tribe vanquished and forgotten and wandering there until they thinly fell and the sun blanched their bones. The harsh majesty of that place assailed them. They progressed almost not at all yet all day moved about trying to find routes that were not impossible. Sometimes they tethered the horses and then Tom and Cartwright and Brown made their way up through the mountains on foot, scrabbling over the warm rocks, to find viewpoints for surveillance.

  One time on such an occasion they scrambled up the mountain only to meet a bear. The bear saw them before they saw it. It had smelled them coming and laboured a time between curiosity and fear. Then when the men’s heads appeared the bear froze. It watched them like creatures landed from the moon. Briefly it crouched and in those moments seemed to belie its own reputation for ferocity. Brown’s head came up above the rock to the ledge. He saw the bear and let out a curse, and whether it was the noise or the wide whites of his eyes or the sharp tang of fear that burned on the air then, the bear rose. Brown called back to the others behind him. He tried to get them to retreat, but already the bear was coming forward. It was less than an instant, then the noise of the bear and the size of the bear both achieved that aim and the men turned about and sought places below them to jump. But there were none. The bear roared. It stood and made as yet no other action, as if such were not required but that the demonstrated evidence of its own magnificence was sufficient to make surrender all enemies. The men pushed backward and were close together and reached for weapons. The bear opened its jaws and roared again and slavered a whitish loop. It moved forward in a massive lunge at the blond head of Lieutenant Brown. Then Tom Foley shot it. The bullet hit the bear in the forehead. Its head twitched backward as if tugged by some wire or other attachment to something greater than itself. The men saw the puzzlement register in the eyes of the bear and then this the bear dismissed and came forward again and Tom Foley shot it again and Cartwright shot it, too. The bear howled out and shuddered and twisted and its right leg gave beneath it and it fell.

  The silence regathered in the mountains.

  “You saved our lives,” Brown said. Then they moved away from there and left the great corpse of the bear on that ledge and were like men chastened or obscurely stained.

  They went on. All through the rest of that summer and into the autumn that unit of the Topographical Engineers of the U.S. Army travelled up and down the various ranges of the Rocky Mountains. They drew maps and charts and sent these sometimes by rider back to Fort Laramie. But they did not find a way to bring the railroad through the mountains. The air turned cold in the beginning of October. The rider brought back two mules laden with heavy blankets and other supplies for the winter. The first snows fell. Mountain lions came down and prowled and Tom and Cartwright sat watch and fired rifle shots. At the campfire Brown told the others they could go back. He said the winter would be harsh and long. He said he himself was going to stay on, that he could not give up now, but that for any that wanted he could issue orders to return to the fort.

  None of the men left him. They watched the way his eyes burned when he spoke of what they could achieve, and the candles lit in their own eyes, too.

  The winds became knives. The skin of their faces peeled off, then the new skin dried hard and cracked and in wrinkled lines turned scarlet as though branded by the burning feet of crows. Their lips blistered and opened at the corners and the burst skin puffed with pus. Their legs froze on the flanks of their horses. In their long boots their toes turned numb and they had to jump down and fall over and pull off the boots and try to beat the blood back into their feet with their hands. Two of the horses died overnight. They froze like things iced in fairy tale. From then on the men tethered the horses together and blanketed them and made their own rests beneath their legs so the meagre heat of their bodies might rise to the animals. They came on snows thick to the waist. They dug out small tunnels and made tiny progress and one time encountered the upright body of a frozen man with bluish face and finger pointing as if at the way to eternity. The fierce season made even emptier that empty place. They seemed the only ones then and the rest of the world might have perished or been taken in judgement and they alone were overseen and endured in that white and pure domain.

  In those days, then, in that place where time seemed ceased and the very change of which they were to be the agent was nowhere evident, Tom Foley’s mind wandered into the past. He thought often of his youngest brother. He lay beneath the wide magnificence of the night skies there and tried to recall the stories of the stars Teige had told when they were younger. He looked for the Great Bear and Cassiopeia and Cepheus and he remembered stories of winged horses and charioteers and deeds heroic and fantastical. In his mind he heard Teige tell them the way he had learned them from their mother, and through those constellations that hung there the family was then connected and the past and the present made one. For days then Tomas’s mind drifted. He rode with visions. He passed a white day moving through the mountains but was in all but body thousands of miles away in the green fields of the island of the saint. He was there with Teige and his father. And his mother, Emer, was there, too. And the twins. And all were as they had once been and were not aged or changed, and his mother’s hair blew on the soft breeze in that place she had never seen. They were walking over the way toward the tower. He saw the blossoms on the berry bushes. He smelled the furze and the blooms of May and let his hand touch against them as he went. And all of that verdant loveliness that had entered him once now rose and screened the other world. He sat his horse and let limp the reins and walked it forward behind the others, rocking softly i
n the saddle and drifting back to that place where he last felt a sense of home. Snow flurried and crowned his hat. The muffled clop of hooves made a rhythm slow and hypnotic, and Tom Foley’s eyes dulled into that look that in his country was called away with the fairies. It endured for a certain time. But it stopped abruptly when he saw the face of his wife, Blath. Then the grief rose through him. He saw the ghostly faces of those multitudes dying on the roadways and their shrunken bodies and pulled himself upright on his horse and lifted his face into the wind that it might sear him.

  They are dead now, he thought. All of them.

  16

  They did not find the route for the railroad that winter. Nor at any time in the year that followed. They sent plans and drawings and their suggestions east but heard nothing in reply. They imagined themselves forgotten. Brown used this then as his principal motivation. He told them the politicians were arguing among themselves. He said there was probably no one who thought it could be done and that the finances of the country were being spent elsewhere. He said he believed the gold in California had finished and so greed no longer fuelled the enterprise. He told the men this and they sat hunched and worn and aged about a fire. And then he raised his voice and said that he was still going on. Who would continue with him? After a time it became needless to ask. They rode on. They passed across the mountains and down into Fort Bridger but were met there with looks curious and askance, full beards and tattered uniforms lending them the air of renegades. None felt welcomed. For they were not engaged in the business of that army proper and might have been like some figments or ghosts travailing in a shadow-world. They left then and rode back to the mountains and felt they were men grown intolerant of all but each other’s company.