The Fall of Light

by Niall Williams

  They went on. When they neared the town of Kilrush and the grey estuary waters could be seen, Clancy looked to Teige and gestured with a motion of his head in the direction of the island. Teige nodded in response and Clancy turned again to face the road with the woman between them none the wiser of their discourse. They came in about the town and there in its windy streets were those familiars who had seen them go and saw them return now and saw the strange woman on the seatboard. They studied her as the cart passed and asked aloud of one another who she might be and what trouble might be abrewing. Some moved along the street then after the cart as if hooked.

  Down at the water’s edge by the small pier, Clancy left the Foleys. He paid Teige and told him to come back to them when he could, that there would be more work for him, and he bowed his head to the blind woman and seemed about to say something when the words escaped him. So he turned away suddenly and climbed up and clicked with his tongue and was gone. Mother and son stood there in the wind. The water slapped. Some of those who had followed down through the town stayed a short distance away and watched surreptitiously.

  “We are going to the island,” Teige told his mother, “we are going to Father.” He hesitated a moment, then said, “Some say there is a curse against women there. They say—”

  “We will go,” she said, and held up her head and was briefly the proud and headstrong image of her former self. She raised her hand for him to take it, and he did. And she said nothing more. Clouds fast moving swept above them. The light there came and went. Gulls and other seabirds hovered and plunged and rose again briefly dripping. The noon and afternoon passed as they waited for a ferryman to take them across. The fishing boats were long gone and had not yet returned. Only small skiffs and other canoelike boats of canvas moved on the water. One of these, piloted by a man of ragged beard and neck boils, at length arrived at the pier and Teige asked him for their passage. The fellow shrugged, as if such were not his business but rather some purgatorial labour, as if he were bound to ferry all until he died. He sat there and held the moor rope and waited while Teige tried to help his mother to board. The boat bobbed alongside them. Timbers creaked. The light was swiftly dying. The little crowd of onlookers came down along the pier.

  “Where are you taking her?” one of them called. “Are you taking her out there?”

  But Teige did not reply. He stood in the boat himself at last and reached his arms and told his mother to step to him. And she lifted a small blind foot and it wavered an instant before she stepped forward onto the air. Though the boat rocked, it did not capsize. The ferryman dipped his oars. Teige and his mother sat. He hooped his arm about her. The wind that was moving fast now fluttered her shawl, and soon they had left that shore that she would not walk upon again and they were out in the twisting currents of the waters where the river met the sea.

  9

  The children saw them first. They came from the raft house and ran on the shore and peered in the gray light and waved to Teige, and he called back. Before the boat had reached the shallow waters, the young girls were standing in the waves. When they saw the figure of the blind woman they hushed with the mystery and stood with their arms hanging. The pilot brought them in to where Teige stepped into the water. Then Teige reached and lifted his mother and walked in with her in his arms until he was on the pebbles of the shore. The children came about him, for it seemed a thing of marvel. When he told them this was his mother who had long been lost, the marvel seemed doubled, and some of the children laughed and spun instant cartwheels as though giddy with the turning of the world. The old woman smiled. She said she was sorry she could not see them, for they seemed so lovely, and some of them stood next to her so her hand could alight upon their heads. Their own mother came out then and greeted the Foleys and asked if they were not hungry and would they come and eat.

  They went on board that creaking home of salty logs and rope lashings and sat at a table and ate the fish and potatoes and buttermilk as if in any inn. They took no notice of the breeze thrashing at the canvas and sacking coverings. The children stood along the table. Mary BoatMac came and went about them with quiet solicitude. Her husband, she said to the old woman, was gone up the river to Limerick and would be sorry to have missed her arrival. “But we’ll welcome you here any time, any time at all,” she said, and looked and her eyes watered. “Your son, Teige,” she added, “he is, he is…” She seemed to lose language adequate to her needs. “He is so good,” she said shortly then, and then said no more, for a flush of sentiment ran through her and she turned about and went out to her sister.

  They ate. The children teased and pushed and made jokes. Outside the evening fell and at last Teige looked across at his mother and knew that they could delay no more.

  “We must go,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  Then he took her hand and placed it on his arm and led her away out into the darkness and up from the shore along the stony pathway toward the tower. The wind was blowing. Clouds raced before the coming stars. Late hares fleeted and vanished. Thornbushes in their twists of growth whistled and did not move. Out in the waters nothing trafficked and the long black line of the river was slick and cold and fast moving. Teige drew his mother closer to him. The way was uneven and she stumbled. He steadied her and was moved again by the slightness of her and how the woman he had looked to as a boy was now this frailty on his arm.

  “It is not much farther,” he said. “I will carry you.”

  “No. You will not. I will walk to him.”

  And she raised her chin and her blind eyes looked away at an angle and held so, as if seeing what he could not. She stood. He took her arm. They moved on. When they came close enough, Teige could see the glass of the telescope and he told her: “He is there. He is watching the sky.”

  “Lead me right to him.”

  “I should tell him.”

  “No.” She clutched at his arm with her fingers. “No, Teige. Stay here.” She stepped away from him then and was a shape in the dark against the darkness, holding her hands out and moving forward in the night like a thing of flimsy sail. She walked toward the tower and Teige watched her and then, when she thought she was close, she called out:

  “Francis! Francis!”

  And he must have heard her and not believed her voice part of the corporeal world, for he did not move then and she called again and still he stayed there, lain on his back with his eye against the eyepiece. The wind took her words the third time she called. It played them across the night and swept them into the tower. And Francis Foley heard his name said in her voice and thought it a sweetness long gone out of the world and imagined he was near the precipice of this life and she calling him to cross a bourn into the next. He took his eye from the stars. He looked at the stone walls as if in puzzlement that he was still not transported. He touched the straw on the ground and then lifted his head to look outside, and he saw her there. She stood some feet away, and behind her stood Teige and all about them the blowing darkness. He looked from one to the other and back again and seemed to reach understanding slowly or slowly to overcome his fear that the moment was mere vision. Then he said her name. He said it and stood and she opened her arms and something in him seemed to buckle then and it seemed he would fall down. But he did not. And he came forward and said her name again and reached out his hands to her face and knew that she was blind, and then he raised his head to the dark and swirling heavens and let out a cry long and hard and pitiful and cried it again and voiced there the grief and regret and loss of all his days. Then he held that woman to him and kissed her head and her face and did not let her go.

  10

  Later, when his father sat beside the bed where his mother was sleeping, Teige left the stone cabin and went down to the shore. The night was wild now. The wind thrashed at hedge and tree and made moans in the gaps of the stones. The river and the sea surged. Waves broke on the shore and dragged the pebbles in an urgent music. Tethered on its moorings the raft house sung
, but the BoatMacs were sleeping soundly. Teige paused a moment to be sure, then he went on down to the boat and pushed it out into the water and climbed in. He rowed out into the crosscurrent but was inexpert and was soon marking a course westerly on the outgoing tide. He pulled on the oars. He tried to steer across the darkness for the few lights of the town. The wind threw rain slantwise down the night. The waves were capped with white and slapped and churned and his progress was slow. But he was not to be stopped, and he made his way into the centre of the river and across and arrived at the shore some ways from the pier. He drew the boat up there and turned her over upon the oars, and he left then and walked along the grassy shore to the town. All was dark and empty. Rain lashed and stopped and fell again. Buildings grey and cold and grim of disparate size with roofs tiled and mismatched and at levels up and down stood and took the weather and seemed things of some inhuman order that had no fear of time. As if such were the faces of that town and would stand there forbidding and severe forever. The wind howled. Teige walked up the street with head low. Rain stains saddled his shoulders. Cats in an alley mewed. A dog, lone and wolflike with coat forked with dirt and gutter water, passed down the centre of the town and gave no heed to any. It appeared to have journeyed a long distance and returned there perhaps in such metamorphose from another life, so grave and decided was its manner. It padded down the darkness and was gone. Teige walked on. He went out the end of the town and was soon in the blackness of the country road to the estate. The night starless, he saw not four feet in front of him. He shut his eyes and stood some moments blind. He heard his own blood racing in his ears. Then he opened his eyes and was accustomed and saw the way in the dimmest light that fell from sources obscured and years gone. He went on. Cold was inside his clothes now. He hurried then, running into the darkness as the storm that was not a storm yet gathered overhead. Trees on the roadside whooshed and let down their leaves. Teige knew his way in the darkness. He came to the gateway of the estate and went up the gravel. He passed the fields where the horses had grazed and where he had first seen Elizabeth. He took note of the fields and the fence and the places he had seen her, as if such were talisman’s and assured him of love. He came to the stable yard then and saw that the horses were fastened in and the doors bolted. Still some neighed and whinnied when he came there and he went to one and through the door said words, though these were gone in the wind.

  The night whirled. As he crossed the yard Teige turned and looked into the heavens as if some rent might appear there, and he thought of his mother sleeping on the island and the lore of the curse, and had he the time to make a prayer, he would have done so. He went as he had before around by the back kitchen. There he scrabbled at the wall for finger and toe holds and, finding these between the stones, he began to climb. The slates of the roof where he arrived were wet, and the soles of his feet slid upon them. He crouched and moved on all fours and found his way to the window. It was shut tight. The latch was turned over. He pulled at it hard as he could but could not open it. On the wind another shower of rain fell. Teige cursed it softly and looked along the dark of the house, but all windows were likewise latched against the storm and there was no way he could get in unless he broke the glass. He squatted there and the rain blew on him. What desire fired in his body flamed then. He would break the window. They might not hear. They might be so soundly asleep. They might think it the crash of thunder. There on the roof before the window he took off his shirt then and wrapped it around his fist. He looked at the glass. He knew the ruin that might await. He knew his life might all have come to this one moment, and that forever all happiness or sorrow might be traced back to this. And he did not care. He drew back his hand to break the glass and he saw her there framed in the window. He stopped. She was there in her nightgown. She had heard the noises at the window. She had been waiting.

  There was a time that froze and was held. There was a stilled moment that entered each of them, a moment in which Elizabeth did not open the window and Teige did not move. A time in which the meaning of that moment was only then becoming apparent. And then Elizabeth unlatched the window and the curtains blew inward and Teige climbed inside the house.

  He was wet and cold and half-naked. But she shut down the window and then turned and kissed him there in the corridor. They kissed as if hungry. They seemed like creatures whose condition was to be joined at the mouth. Then they stood and she touched his face and he tried to kiss the hand and she drew him along the corridor to a room that was her dressing room. He closed the door behind them and came to her and kissed her nape and she moaned out and pulled at his hair and then he bit into the shoulder of her nightgown. He lifted it high to reveal her. He stood and looked at her and she trembled and she said in a whisper his name. Then he laid her down on dresses of green and yellow brocade and silks of scarlet and black, and she said to him to take off his clothes and she watched him as he did so. And then there in that room while the storm thrashed the world outside and her husband slept not fifteen feet away in the next room, Teige Foley loved Elizabeth Price and changed his life forever.

  11

  When they came outside the night was in hurly-burly. Teige carried her small case. They came out the kitchen door and at once the wind whipped it from Elizabeth’s hand and banged it hard. They ran then. Leaves flew in circles in the yard as they crossed it. They went to the stables and Teige opened the door on a chestnut gelding that neighed and stamped in alarm and wall-eyed turned about in its narrow confines as if visited by nightmare. Teige approached it palms extended and spoke to it in what seemed tones of urgent beseeching. Then he laid his hands along the horse and moved beside it and so was able to fasten a bridle. He led the horse out then into the storm. He took Elizabeth’s hand and brought her closer and then cupped his fingers for her foot and helped her mount the horse, which sidestepped and made shivers of nervy reaction until he soothed it once more beneath his command. They set off then out of the yard and down the avenue, Elizabeth bareback on the horse and Teige carrying her bag and leading it at a quick trot alongside. The wind sang demented in the trees. The starless, moonless dark seemed itself a creature poor tormented by some flagellant merciless and huge. Noises crashed about. Branches snapped. Boughs moaned in long ache, and still the wind blew. Rain lanced sidelong and vanished and came again. Down the end of the avenue they went, the horse wild-eyed and on the point of frenzy and Teige mastering and coaxing it and taking rearward glances to see if their pursuit had begun.

  They reached the gates. He looked to Elizabeth. There was an instant in which they might have turned back at that threshold. She had discarded already her bonnet. It hung in the branches of an oak, where it would be found in the morning. Her face was wet and her hair was blown free of pins and came across her mouth and she moved it aside as he looked at her. Then he climbed up on that horse and she held to him, and they rode off down the road toward the town of Kilrush.

  They arrived there in darkness still hours before dawn. They came down the centre of the streets between those buildings where all lay in grim repose, clutched in fearful sleeps while the wind took the slates off the houses. Nothing moved. The air smelled of salt and squalor. Gutters and sewers ran sleek and black like festered wounds opened. The night howled. At the end of the town they came to the shoreline and rode along it to the grassy place where Teige had left the boat. There they got down and stood before the river that now was like the sea. Teige turned the horse about and waved his arms and slapped its back and it went off and was lost into the rent and velvet dark. There, he told Elizabeth, was where the island was. It was not far, he said when she looked and could make out nothing. She stood there while he overturned the boat and laid it on the water. She seemed in all manner one unsuited to such adventure. She seemed too fine and delicate in appearance, too long used to the broad, high-ceilinged drawing rooms and dining rooms of elegant china. She seemed of a different world and stood there on the brink of this in the thrashing of the storm like one not quite
awake but lingering in the vestiges of a dream. Her toed shoes were muddied. Spatters, muck splashes, painted her legs.

  “Come.”

  She stepped into the boat. It dipped and righted itself and dipped again and then Teige had pushed it off and they were fast in the current. The river took them. The tide that had been unruly before was wild and swollen now The boat crashed against waves and was taken without course. Elizabeth cried out and clung to the sides. She called Teige’s name. She cursed. They spun off into the dark and were like the smallest toy of the sea. Teige pulled and angled the oars and tried to steer about in that blackness, and the town came before them and then the mouth of the river and then the island and all seemed as if in some dark dioramic scene played for those watching from above. Teige rowed. He pulled and shouted at the storm as if it were a thing animate. He let out long, wordless cries and these were lost in the wind. Elizabeth’s face was white. She called to him that they must go back. Water slapped in the boat at her feet. She called to him again, and he shouted back to her that they could not. They were in the current fast and strong. Above and about them the storm thundered. It let down its rain in cold sheets and darkened the dawn.

  But some time at last, whether by chance or design, the small boat crossed the midpoint of those waters and Teige was able to row it to shore at the eastern end of the island. They came up on the stones and Elizabeth stood and retched and Teige held her about the waist. Then she took three steps and had to sit in a weakness and he let her back into his arms and held her there on the open ground where the rain fell upon them still.