The Fall of Light

by Niall Williams

  “Hereabouts,” the father called, “hereabouts is fine.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The man twisted. His shoulders turned like a sail.

  “Hereabouts,” he said.

  “There are ruins up here, there is the house we were making. It is not finished, but—”

  “Hereabouts,” was all BoatMac said. Then he made a sudden nodding and raised the palm of his hand and turned and told some of the boys to go off and find timber and they ran like hares and were gone. By night there was a mound of materials gathered on the shore. When the darkness fell, the girls and the two sisters and the grandmother got back aboard the boat. While the boys and their father slept on the shore, the women slept on the water, believing the island still held a curse for any woman that spent the night there. The following morning the boatman and his sons set about building a long platform along the shore. It was a crude, raftlike structure loosely moored with rope lashings. But it sufficed. The sisters and the tiny grandmother and the daughters all came onto the island by day. The little old woman set herself on the rocks and stitched at a shirt. The boatman’s short, sturdy wife helped like a man, while her sister sat disconsolate with empty eyes and hands limp in her lap. The younger girls recovered their energies quickly. They ran about and went searching for mussels and periwinkles beneath the swooping and crying of the seabirds. They gathered mounds of seaweed. When boats passed up the Shannon River, the two youngest of them yahooed and waved their arms like the happily shipwrecked, heedless of loss and tragedy. By the second evening the women and the girls slept on the platform. By the third it had already begun to resemble a home. Teige worked with the boatman to make three-legged stools, and a hunk of driftwood became their salty table. The women thanked him graciously. The grandmother, shrunken and curved like one rescued from depths, worked without end at her stitching. She rocked as she did so and did not stop even when she told Teige he was their saviour. Her eyes followed him a long moment, but she said no more.

  In the week that followed, the house raft was roofed with stitchings of canvas and other cloths the BoatMacs had with them. The seaweed the girls gathered was mounded at a place nearby where they would dig a garden. Soon the home was done and was a weird raggle-taggle assemblage of blankets and sacking and twisted sticks of blackthorn and sally bush and rods of hazel and bags of goose and gannet and other feathers, and all adorned with thrown clusters of wildflowers the girls gathered. It made an image at once homely and desperate and could seem a place inventive and bohemian, or what it was, the frail, decrepit, and tumbledown remnant of a family ruined.

  Francis Foley did not come down to meet the MacMahons. On the first evening Teige told him they had arrived. The old man paused briefly and studied the steam that rose off his broth. Swirls of vapour ascended and vanished. Then he made an all but imperceptible nod and ate on.

  The season turned. Rains fell all day and night and made swollen the tide. The Shannon waters ran more swiftly and in the starless, moonless dark the home of the BoatMacs creaked and moaned and threatened to break loose. But it did not. The father and his sons would not let it, plunging in the river, hanging on to the raft house, making new lashings with knotted ropes while on the platform the girls huddled against their mother and grandmother and attended their doom like those fabled in the antique times of the Flood. Still they survived. Then in the winter of that year, gales came down from Iceland and carried within their force fierce, flintlike showers of hail. These streaked out of white grey skies and were multitudinous as arrows flighted from above. They pierced the flesh with ice. No man could raise his face. Borne on the power of the frozen winds, they seemed to foretell the end of all season and be precursors of some new age, boreal and quiescent. In such weathers the raft house of the BoatMacs was daily destroyed and rebuilt. The rough tenting of their shelter took off and flew across the water. Stones were brought from farther down the shoreline and built like walls along the wooden flooring. The family sat and hung on to what they possessed and still would not move up to the safety of the island buildings. The gales continued. Teige came and went and offered what help he could, and through the continued inclemency of weather all that winter, the family of the boatman’s became his. For though the gales and hails and sleets and storms remained brutal through February and on into the month of March, the BoatMacs did not despair. They did not curse their misfortune or decide to return to the mainland. Even the sister of the boatman’s wife, who had buried her husband and her children, remained stoic and crouched in the bitter season as if in quiet assent, as if such were a kind of purgation.

  And so they endured.

  A spring arrived. Birds, starlings, sparrows, golden orioles, thrushes, chats, swallows, corncrakes, and cuckoos flew and sung. The skies were a light blue and the breeze a mild and soft gentling. On those days the boatman took by turn one of his sons and went off and ferried passengers from the town of Kilrush down the river, or acted as pilot for the bigger boats that sought to navigate the waters called the Scattery Roads on their way to dock at Limerick. He returned in the evenings and brought a basket of fish, some of which were always carried to the table of Teige and his father. So the Boat-Macs lived on there, and their moored raft house became more secure still, and in the daytimes any number of the children could be seen going about the island, chasing birds and hares, skipping in dance step, hunting fairies, and gathering the assorted sundries that are the treasures of childhood.

  In May Mr. Clancy appeared. He was rowed across in a long skiff and stood up in the bow when the children of the BoatMacs gathered on the sand to greet him. He came onto the island and asked one of them to get Teige Foley. While the boy ran off, Clancy did not proceed further. Instead he stood with legs planted and examined without comment the extraordinary sight of the ramshackle home at anchorage some few yards distant. He held his hands behind his back. He moved his lips in a tight line from side to side, as though struggling to contain exclamations. The children of the BoatMacs clustered before him and stared. They looked at his green jacket and his long boots. When Teige at last appeared coming down the rutted roadway to the shore, Mr. Clancy strode swiftly up to meet him. He said some words the others could not hear. He gestured with his right hand a kind of onward motion. Then Teige left him and went back up the roadway, and the other man returned to his place on the shore and stood there and waited. The children looked at him. Under their scrutiny he tapped his pockets and found coins and drew some out and proffered these to the smallest of the girls standing near him. In his palm they sat like brown buttons. The girls did not move. Their eyes studied his face and he moved his hand farther out to them. Then the girls turned to see their mother, who stood up with arms on her hips from the clothes she was scrubbing.

  “We have no need. Say thank you, girls,” she said.

  “Thank you,” they said.

  And Mr. Clancy pocketed the coins with a mixture of rue and shame and like a darkness passing felt what sufferings this family had survived. He stood and waited. One of the girls brought him an earthen jar of spring water. She watched him while he drank it back. Then Teige came and went to the BoatMac’s wife and told her he must go and would be gone some days, and he asked her if they would give care to his father until he returned. She told him he did not need to ask, and then Teige said goodbye to them and the children came to him and he embraced many of them and lifted high two of the girls and kissed their heads. Mr. Clancy stood nearby. Then he turned on his heel and led the way down to the boat, where the oarsman was waiting. Teige followed him and climbed in and then left that island for the first time in a long time. The boat pulled out into the river and Teige looked back and saw the congregation of the BoatMacs standing there, and the sky high and blue, the fields greening with the renewed hope of the turning world, and there, in the distance, the lone, long finger of the saint’s tower.

  3

  On that crossing neither man spoke. They arrived in the town of Kilrush, where at the docks
ide were the usual congress of petitioners, mendicants, ragged ones of mock genteel bearing, and others, hags, crones, aged-looking urchins, men toothless and head-bandaged in cloth filthy and frayed. Mr. Clancy waved all aside and Teige walked behind him and they reached a place where a boy minded the horse and cart. Mr. Clancy threw him a coin. Then they climbed up and passed on out through the streets of the town, where some paused and stared at them, gaping with a kind of naked inquisitiveness at the one who had come from the island. They reached the estate and passed in through the stone pillars and along the tree-lined avenue, where the new leaves rustled in tender breeze. Teige’s throat tightened. He thought of the girl Elizabeth and felt the weight and loss of time and was like one given a glimpse of his younger self. They travelled on. They came to the big field where Teige had worked the horses, and there were many there again that day, and some stopped grazing and raised their long necks and stood statuesque and beautiful and others equally so started and ran and traced a long arc through the fresh grass. Clancy slowed as they passed them. He let Teige watch and for the first time made comment to say some that Teige had broken were fine horses now

  But it was not for these that he had been brought, and soon they were turning the wide bend and proceeding on up to the yard and the stables. The closer they got, the more Teige suffered a deep longing which took the form of visions almost palpable and of such a verisimilitude that he risked reaching out like the mad to touch them. He saw the figure of the girl standing and undressed. He saw how her hair fell. He saw her walk across a floor and keep her eyes fixed on his as he watched her. He saw the purse of her lips. Then Clancy was calling to him to get down and they were stopped in the yard before the stables.

  Teige got down and felt the solidity of the cobbled ground restore him. He filled his lungs and drew in the smells of that place that were of horses and blacksmithing and woodsmoke and honeysuckle and ivy and all of which revisited him then.

  “She’s in here,” Clancy said.

  Teige went to the stable half-door. When he got near enough to see only the shadows, the mare inside turned and swung around away from him and snorted with her face to the wall. Teige placed his hands on the top of the door. He leaned there and looked in at her. She was a five-year-old, high and fine and white.

  “She’s ready for him,” Clancy said. “But you bring her near and she won’t take him. We’ve brought her three times last year. He’s Bonaparte, lad. You’ve heard of him?” he asked, and at once knew it was foolish. “Well, he’s over East Clare. He’s the one himself wants for her.”

  Teige opened the door and was inside the stable before Clancy could tell him not to. He was whispering the sounds he whispered in that language that was not language in any sense other than it existed between him and horses. He stood still and whispered and raised his hands very slowly until they were flat-palmed up to the air like one holding a most delicate and invisible wall. He breathed outward and let the presence of him establish and mix and become inextricable from the sunlit motes of straw dust and the fumes and odours of dung and urine and sweat that hung and made thick the air there. The mare whinnied. She did not turn back her head. Thrice she stamped her hind leg on the off side of him. The damp straw of the bedding was moved aside by that action and the hoof hit the stones of the floor under and made a retort sharp and angry.

  “She knows her mind,” Clancy said.

  Teige turned and looked at him, and Clancy understood and said he would leave him to it and they would take her to the stallion in the morning.

  For the rest of that day, Teige and the mare became familiar each with each. Pyle, the youth that had before brought him his food, was now a redheaded fellow muscled but callow, who came and stood with a bowl of potatoes and a sullen expression. Teige thanked him for the food, but the fellow said nothing but stood and cracked each of his knuckles and then went off. The day was fine and warm. Flies travelled the sunbeams. They buzzed about the horse and felt her heat and she whisked her tail to little avail. The signs of thirst were on her, but she would not take water and was restless and nervy and seemed ill at ease in her own horseflesh. After a time Teige put on her a halter and brought her out and led her clopping across the yard and out down the avenue. He walked her with short lead firmly and said things and kept his head close to hers and allowed the softness of the day to ease her and let her feel her liberty from the stall. He took her on down the way but then turned at the fork and crossed to follow the main avenue so as not to bring her past the grazing horses. He was some way along this when he saw the carriage coming.

  The mare flicked her ears, then locked and planted her feet and stood like the semblance of a horse cast in iron or bronze. The noise of the wheels and the beat of hooves and the sleek dark black colour of the rushing carriage all quickened the air there. Teige tried to coax the mare to the side out of the way, but she would not budge. And the carriage bore on toward them. Its dust rose in a cloud and hung pale and luminescent like the fore- or afterpresence of a deity. Teige could see the coachman in livery and see the fellow wave his free hand to clear the avenue, but the mare snorted then and snuffled and shook her head and turned about on the short lead and did not step out of the road. She sniffed the excitement out of the air, and though Teige shush-shushed her and reached his hand to pat the side of her neck, still she frisked and turned and tried to step about in a small circle. The coach was all but on them then. In moments the coachman cried out and stood upright and reined hard back to his chest, and at last the mare moved off the avenue onto the verge of grass. The coach stopped and the mare grew more anxious still. Teige released its lead to the full and let the animal sense it had its freedom. When she moved back so did he. He was in a small, scuffling, pulling, dragging scene then, with the mare moving this way and that and he following with the line fully extended, when the woman in the carriage looked out the window, and he saw in side view in the briefest instant that it was Elizabeth.

  He saw her. Then he saw the other figure, a man in a black suit of clothes sitting close by her side.

  4

  The coach passed on. Teige tugged sharply on the mare’s lead and brought her closer to him and they stood then in the wake of dust and fading noise and the slow reassembling of the world. He could not breathe. He stood a time looking at only the soft curved line of the mare’s back and the fields beyond it, and all were tranquil and still like the changeless and unreal country of dreams. He did not look after the coach. He studied the green horizon of hedgerow and blossom as if such might secure him to the earth. He opened wide his mouth. Then the mare pulled up her head twice and he snap-tugged at the lead and admonished and turned her about and brought her back up that avenue to the stable, where that time she drank water. He left her there then and went across the yard and worked the pump hard and fast until it gurgled and a frayed water came. He stooped and doused his head and the water was first slightly sun-warmed and then cold and then colder still. He shook off the drops and then cupped his hands and drank some and looked across his dripping fingers to see the youth watching him. Teige walked over. Pyle’s eyes lowered and were gone then beneath a fringe of lank red hair. Teige stood next to him.

  “Busy at the house, are they?” he said.

  “I suppose they are.” The fellow cracked his knuckles.

  “Visitors?”

  “Feck all I care,” Pyle said, surly and short, his gaze fixed on the ground at his feet. “More logs, more water, more logs, feck,” he said.

  The afternoon sunlight beheld them. Flies and honeybees flew. The snout of the pump dripped a slow, heavy drip of aftermath.

  “Feck,” said Pyle again, daring beneath the blind cover of his hair. “What fires do you need and it fine as any summers day? But fires in every room it’s to be. More logs. And more. For the married ones. Feck.”

  Teige did not speak then. The blue sky seemed to pulse. He turned about and found it best to squat down against the wall a moment, as if to study the cobbles of the y
ard. Then the other fellow got up and went off and Teige stayed there and held back his face to the sun blaze.

  For the rest of that afternoon he did not take out the mare. He sat outside there and watched across the yard where the maids and butlers came and went briskly. From time to time he got up and went inside the stable and spoke to the horse and stroked her, but she was restless in the heat and the flies. The time passed slowly. He turned in his head the news that Elizabeth was married. He turned it this way and that, as if trying to find comfort while a stake was in his heart. He told himself it was to be expected. He told himself he must have known all along, that she was certain to be married as soon as she left there and went back to Cork. She would hardly even remember you, he said. You were nothing to her. You were how she tolerated the boredom of being here, nothing more. She probably told her friend and they laughed at you and how you came across the roof in the night to sit and see her naked. He told himself such things, as if bitterest medicine worked strongest. He made mocking images of himself and watched them portentous and comedie in the theatre of his mind. He derided all notions of love and made of them pathetic constructs of artifice and lies for innocents and fools. Anger roiled in him and came and subsided and came again. He saw his life like a story and one without great event or passion, but instead a long dwindling of days islanded with his father. He took from this the solace that such was meant to be, but soon this too was found frail and its comforts thin and chimerical. In the labyrinths of such considerations then the afternoon passed. The lustre of the sun was slowly diminished and the walls of the yard transformed from yellow to gold to an umbered brown. Red-combed hens walked about and pecked the straw stuff, scrabbled three-toed, stood one-footed, dunged a blanched dung, and made sharp head turns, quizzical and affrighted. To these Teige tossed powder of crushed oats that lay in the deeps of his pocket. The hens flurried and ran in startled, swooplike movement. They pecked fast and frantic and in the still emptiness the tiny tapping of their beaks on the cobbles sounded. When the ground was cleaned they stood attendant and Teige got up then and flapped his arms and they scattered in all direction with noise and feather and were in riot so when Elizabeth came into the yard.