The Fall of Light (10 page)

“And why?” the man asked.

Teige said he had not noticed. He said he had come from the east.

The man rolled some nothing in his mouth and spat sideways. “Because something is at hand,” he said. “There is rottenness
here. You will see. This is a cursed place. For your kindness I will give you this advice: Turn back. Leave the west before
you can start to smell the rottenness of it. Go home. Home,” he said again, and then began to laugh in distraught and hideous
manner once more.

And was still laughing on that word
home
when Teige reined the pony around and rode away back across that country to the camp of the gypsies, where the legends of
his riding and songs about him were already shaping in the firesmoke.

When Teige returned he discovered that Tomas was gone. He rode down to where the caravans were encamped by the
river and was greeted by the men with a waving of their hands and shapeless
felt hats. They came to meet him and touched the warm flanks of the pony and patted Teige’s leg where it hung stirrupless.
The boy did not know yet the significance of his return and the taming of the pony, but soon the twins told him. They came
to him at once as he dismounted from the pony and as the men took her away to where the best of their hay was kept. They told
him of Mario and the races. They told him the story the way it had been told to them with that strange fated quality that
runs through tales old and unforgiving. They told it with quickened voices and flushed faces, for in their simplicity both
Finan and Finbar were delighted. They had been given an air of importance that had not been theirs since birth. They had come
from the river, see, they were the answer to the old man’s question. It was a kind of birth all over again. They told it all
to Teige and watched his face and hoped to see there the reflection of their own excitement. But Teige did not share it. In
a way that he could not explain, he felt afraid as one who has been told the story of his own death. He asked them what Tomas
said of it.

The twins stared at him. They wanted him to talk about the pony. They wanted the fabulous story of how the Foleys would champion
the world. But Teige asked again.

“What does Tomas say? Where is he?”

“He is gone to Limerick town.”

“Will he go to get our mother?”

The twins stared at him. They wanted to say their mother was gone from them, and that they were men now, but they did not.

“We are to go with the gypsies. He will come back and meet us on the road to the sea,” said Finbar, and turned away. “He has
taken your pony with him.”

That night when the lamps were lit and the gypsies sang as they had not since the death of the children, Teige walked out
by the banks of the river and sought for the swan. The sky cleared on a breeze from the west and the stars hung above him
in vast and numberless panoply. He squatted by the small stones that made a thin crunching where the low waves of the waters
collapsed upon them. The singing sounded in the night behind him. He reached and let the river run over his hand and thought
of his father gone below the water.

In the morning before the dawn, the gypsies began packing. They
woke and moved about the camp gathering their things. Thin, shadowy figures without speech in the moonlessness, they moved
about the glowing embers of the campfire with slow care. They collected pots and tin cans and made small, doleful tympani
as they threw these things together in cloth sacks strung with cord. Their horses knew this morning music and sensed the departure
even before the gypsies went to them. They noised in the gloom. The gypsy men went to the river and brought their fill of
it back in timber buckets and small barrels. They worked around the women without word or gesture of recognition, as though
each were entirely separate races, or one the unseen shadow of the other. Coming from sleep into this grey, dreamlike traffic,
Finan and Finbar held the horses while the old leathern harnesses were thrown over the backs of the animals and the buckles
that were not brass but hand-shaped copper briefly jangled. Then, leaving a scattering of small potatoes and onions for the
spirits of those who might be following them, the gypsies made a last reconnaissance around that ground. The place of their
fire was like a black wound. They watched the sky for the dawn that was just then commencing, for it was their custom since
time unknown to leave with the light. Then they sat up on horseback and seatboard and clucked their tongues and led the caravans
out of that place and away toward the west.

Teige did not ride the white pony. She followed with others on a rope. He sat in a caravan and looked out on the dark road
ahead. They left the riverbank and he felt the regret of losing the swan and felt the foolishness of that, too. The road was
the road he had ridden the day before, and he watched it for the sight of the man with the broken head and the woeful laughter.
But as the light came up behind them and followed them down that way, there was sign of no one. They rattled on. The great
wooden wheels bumped and clattered on the unevenness of the ground. Each of the caravans sang its own song, a weird jumbling
of sounds individual and inseparable as the contents toppled from shelves, clanked and dully clanged within. Finan and Finbar
rode their horse. By the time the sky was bright enough to show them, Teige could make out the first signs of their becoming
gypsies. They wore their shirts open to the October morning, and kerchiefs of cotton that had once been bright red were knotted
at their necks. The complexion of their skin, even the fall of their hair, seemed
to Teige indefinably altered. The twins seemed to live beyond any notion of regret. They rode with an easy silent gaiety,
a lightness of heart, as though they were at last among their own and had discovered a fortunate destiny.

The day rose over them. They passed some small cottages that hung beneath the earthen roads where women heard them coming
and stood in the doorways, watchful and cautious and eyeing their hens. All of that country wore the same unmistakable look
of hardship. The smoke of the hovels hung about their leaky thatch in the still and damp air and smelled sourly. From some
places they passed no man or woman came to the door, though it lay ajar. In the shadows of one such entranceway, Teige thought
he saw the shape of a man stretched on the ground and the furtive flickering of rats. But he said nothing. For the picture
was all the time moving, as was in the nature of that caravan of gypsies, and one place became the next easily and quickly
and faded away like childish painting in the rain.

They travelled down the peninsula of Corca Baiscinn. When they stopped for food, the women fed Teige and his brothers a cold
broth and rough bread whose crust was tougher than their teeth. They passed a knife among them. One of the women told Teige
they had clothes for him and brought them out from the back of the hooped canvas. But Teige would not take them.

“I don’t want them,” he said.

The women stood about and said nothing.

“They are the clothes of their children,” Finbar said.

“I know.”

“They wouldn’t fit Finan and me. Take them.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Do.”

“No,” Teige said, “I won’t!” And he was suddenly a very young boy with tossed and dirty hair, freckles on his cheeks, furious,
fearful of things he did not understand which threatened to rob him of even his name.

“They are yours, you can have,” one of the women said, and then they stepped away from him and got back into their caravans
as the gypsies were readying to leave once more. The clothes lay there on the ground. Then the twins hurried to their horse,
and the wagons
moved, and there was an instant in which Teige might have relented and picked the bundle up, but he did not. He walked past
it and climbed up the wheel into the caravan and sat in. Then the signal was made for the horse and they pulled away from
there in mute and profound dismay, each sorrowing for separate reasons, while left in the mud of the road behind them, like
bodies shed by souls departing, was the small, sad pile of children’s clothes.

Throughout that afternoon Teige thought Tomas might return. As they sojourned forward toward the sea, he listened into the
noise of the wagons for the sound of two horses coming behind them. The strange, otherworldly air of the gypsies nearly made
him lose sense of the world. Once, he noticed the caravans moving more and more along the verge of the road and threatening
to topple. He called out and the line of wagons came right and he had the sudden insight that the gypsies were in fact asleep
after their dinner and progressing in somnolent oblivion toward wherever the world tilted. Had they a destination at all?
he wondered. They seemed to let the roads take them, and the farther west they went, the more the roads were broken and uneven,
the hedgerows of fuchsia and woodbine and black-and-white thornbushes coming closer on either side and scratching against
the coarse canvas of the wagons. Rocks sometimes jagged up in the middle of the way, and the horses steered around them. Sometimes
the road softened and crossed boggy ground and the place was bare and treeless and the stones of the walls seemed placed by
some that had long fled eastward. It was so dreamlike, and as he shook there on the seatboard Teige wondered how it was that
he and his brothers were now part of it. He could not understand it except to recall the moment when he had felt that he was
drowning, and that their rescue had been foreordained in some way, that the gypsies and the races in the west were already
there awaiting them.

Still, he longed for his brother. Tomas would know what to do, he thought. He would not let them be lost.

They moved on. Sometimes a man watched them from his place in a field. He stood and was a feature in the landscape no different
from a rock or bush, a still twist of brown shade in the flow of greens. The man would watch the caravans coming with grave
circumspection. They were like some weirdly exotic elephantine creatures, their hooped
shapes lumbering high above the hedgerows and carrying an indefinable threat to the world he knew. And he would curse them
and wish for them to pass and wait and watch from under his cap until they did.

And pass on they did all that day. The weak and pale sun caught up to the gypsies and crossed over their heads and dropped
into the sea the Foleys had not reached. When the light began to die, the caravans stopped and turned into a field. Teige
thought that he could sense the nearness of the edge of the island. He thought that he could catch the sea in the air and
opened his mouth wide and strained his eyes. He blinked at where the night was hemming the land with grey, where the fields
stopped and were stitched into the sky and where green and blue became deeper shades of each other and were then the cloths
of darkness. He stared but could not see the sea.

That evening the gypsies lit their fires and the twins sat with them and listened to the stories they told. They heard the
tales of long ago and distant places, vanquished kings, of blind beggars become rich on the foolishness of men. They heard
of strange and terrible plagues, of curses and blessings, the places now forgotten in the far world where once bejewelled
princesses made the ground sweet as they passed upon it. Tales climbed on the smoke of the fire. There was devilry and laughter
and many stories of how fate righted the wrongs of the poor and made fortunate the suffering in the end of time. The twins
listened with rapt attention. The fire burnished them, and they sat cross-legged in that colourful company, like the newest
princes of that tribe, narrowing their eyes with concentration and falling inside the spell of those old stories. They felt
elated and proud both with a sense of their own belonging.

Teige did not join them. He stood at first on the edge of the campfires but suffered still a tight unease. He wanted Tomas
to return, he wanted his mother, and with the fall of night felt as though something cold and viscous had filled inside him.
For the first time in his life he saw himself, singular, in the darkness. His brothers were laughing with the others in the
firelight, there was no sign of Tomas, and for a time Teige had a vision of a thin, transparent membrane separating him from
the rest. In a matter of days, it seemed, he had all but lost his family. Where were the Foleys now? Without their father
the boys seemed strangely disconnected, as though the notion of family itself
were prefabricated upon the thinnest premise and the slightest breeze of chance blew it away. It dawned on Teige that Tomas
was gone and might never return, and in that same moment he glimpsed a scene of his elder brother fallen to the ground and
being savagely beaten by figures that wore the uniforms of Law. The instant his imagination saw it, he let a gasp out of him.
It sounded like a cry strangled but was not heard in the raucous and crackling of the camp. Teige turned his head. He waited
to spew sideways the sour grey white stuff of horror, but it would not rise off his stomach and he blinked and sucked the
air and walked a little away. Again it was there before him like a picture: Tomas in the town of Limerick, tied and beaten
onto death. What was he to do? He walked down along the dark to where the horses were tethered. He raised his hand palm first
as though to press softly against something firm and feel the solidity of the universe support him and banish the phantasm.
Then he curved his hand over and let the horses smell his knuckles. Their whinnying passed like a greeting down the rope.
Teige went to the white pony and she raised her long head and lowered it and found the scent of him, and he stroked the sides
of her and tried not to think.