The Fall of Light (11 page)

“That’s the girl,” he said. He raised his arm up and over her shoulder, and he hung there against the hard skin of her, pressing
his face against her flank while the spectre of his eldest brother in pain dwelled in his mind. What was he to do? He was
twelve years old.

At last he undid the cord that held the pony there. He drew her back and away from the other horses and said words to quieten
them, and then he seemed to slide upward onto her back like a blackness or a shadow. He rode her away from the caravans and
the campfire and out across the heavy grass of the rough fields. He rode into the light-less night and trusted the surefootedness
of the pony. He squeezed her into a lithe speed and she carried them out to the road that led eastward toward Limerick and
westward toward the sea. There he reined her back and lowered his head until it was close to hers. He turned her about and
she was like a dancing indecision, footing the air in all directions as if awaiting some prompt to fall from above into the
cocked shells of her ears. None came. Teige looked down the road where Tomas was not coming, where his rescue must begin,
and where the dark made a wall into the sky.

Then he wheeled the pony about and galloped her down the blind road toward the sea.

Teige rode with the sickness of loneliness like bitter soup turning in his stomach. He rode with reckless abandon into the
dark and charged down the way he did not know and could not see. He was a boy escaping from the world of men and did not heed
the dangers of the road as it passed down along cliffs and sharp bends. He felt the sea before he could see it. His face was
wet with it. The lids of his eyes tingled with the salt and his hair matted. Then, over the noise of his and the horse’s breathing,
came the sighing collapse and crash of the waves. He rode down through dunes that gave beneath him and he had to lean backward
for balance and his moon shadow was like that of some stiff and proper gentleman descending onto the floor of sand. The Atlantic
was full and heavy. It seemed swollen beyond itself and appeared to the boy as though the shore could not contain it. The
flatness of the beach was strangely perplexing to him, as though just against it the sea itself could not be so deep nor the
country fall away like that into the surging waters. Teige trotted the pony on the edge of Ireland where the white surf was
combed out of the darkness like the frills of an elaborate gown. He trotted her the length of the soft sand horseshoe in the
splashing waves. Then he drew her in from the shoreline and slid down and stood there on that empty beach. He was at the place
his father dreamed, he thought. He was there on the western shore where they were to begin to realize Francis Foley’s vision.
But it was in ruins now. His family was lost, he thought. Now there was only Teige and the great emptiness of the watery horizon
where flashes of white appeared and disappeared in the far darkness of the sea. Teige stood there. He thought of the river
where his father had drowned and which was now in that sea. He thought of the old man’s boast that their country was bigger
than the mapmakers had drawn it, and he suddenly saw it so. He saw the vastness of the sea was itself part of that wild country
as was its great and million-starred sky, and he dropped to his knees there in the sand and felt the despair of loss. And
he put his hands together to pray and turned to the constellations that were cold and impassive and falling through the darkness
ages away, and, knowing no God who knew him, he looked to Pegasus in the south
and to it prayed the wordless prayers that rose off the bottom of his soul.

Francis Foley woke from the dream of being a swan. He opened his eyes and immediately reached his two hands to
pat his chest and feel there for his feathers. Even when he could find none, he was not reassured, for the reality of his
dream was more potent than the darkness to which he awoke. It was some time before his mind refound itself and he had left
his swanhood behind, wondering if it was possible to dream within dreams. He touched the hard pallet of his bed but did not
know where he was. He was in the stone building that was like a boat upside down and in which he seemed to sail in the world
of the drowned. The doorway was dark without a door. When his eyes were opened long enough, he could distinguish it and imagine
the space that lay beyond. He feared for devils. He feared for the twisted shapes of white wasted bodies cast around outside
in a sorry vision of the damned, and was no longer sure whether he had been saved or lingered in some netherworld awaiting
judgement. He was not sure his body existed. He had the sense of time not existing as he lay there in the dark. Sometimes
he imagined he was inside the stomach of something enormous. He saw in bizarre phantasm the thing that had swallowed him whose
scales were stonelike and shone blackly, and he wondered how he might get it to vomit him back into the river. Or else he
was in a womb and would be newly born into a distant world with other stars, where the earth itself would be the smallest
point of least significance and where all his travails and tarnished hopes would be forgotten and part only of the history
of dust. Francis Foley imagined all possibilities and burned with regret at each of them. Why had this happened to him? He
stared across the darkness at the doorway that led into the outer darkness. He watched it for sign
of anything, but there was only the nothingness of that empty space beyond.

So he sat up.

He held his hand out in front of him and brought it closer until he could see it just before his face. Then he put his hand
out and moved it from side to side as though expecting to brush against some resistance. There was none. He moved his legs
and stood on the ground, feeling the firmness of it and testing it with small jockeying actions of his knees. The ground did
not give beneath him and, coming from the aeons of his airy dreaming, was strangely reassuring. He could stand and walk. But
he could not see. Then, as though declaring himself undead, making the shape that had first announced his birth on paper,
he moved from there like an ambulant letter
f
with both arms outward high and low, going slowly forward against the wall of darkness. He made his way toward the door.
He did not know if when he stepped through it the world would end, if he would fall headlong, if the place where he had been
waiting were the last sanctuary before the wailing and fires of purgatory. Still he went on. He could not stay there while
he could still breathe. The image of his sons passed before him, and he imagined them waiting for him.

Then he walked through the doorway of the dark and he cried out.

For there was God.

God’s bald crown flashed like a lesser moon. Then God multiplied Himself and was a trinity of figures on a grassy hillock
at the back of which lay a stone chapel. Francis Foley walked with his hands out before him in the
f
, though now he could see. He looked as though he were feeling the world for a secret opening, or expecting to reach some
invisible wall that would be impenetrable and leave him trapped the other side of living. Still he stepped forward barefoot
across the wet grass. The stars shone more brightly with each step. His eyes grew accustomed to the light of the night and
revealed more clearly the strange trinity of identical bald figures in brown robes that were gathered on the small hill with
their backs to him. Francis thought to shout out to them. But he did not want to discover that he might be dead and that his
cry might be the soundless empty horror of screams in dreams. So he came forward in that odd manner and was with each step
brought a little farther back into life until the truth dawned on
him at last: He was not dead, and God was not God but a sinner like us all and He was in fact three monks on an island in
the middle of the river Shannon.

He realized this when he saw the telescope. The monks were clustered about it and taking turns to watch the skies for the
evidence of heaven.

“Leave that!” He was surprised by the power of his voice. And used it again when he saw how startled were the monks, turning
quickly to face him in the night.

“Leave that alone, it’s mine,” he shouted. He waved his arms wide as though measuring his anger, and the monks stepped back.
The telescope had been set on a wooden platform. It showed no sign of having drowned, and its long mahogany frame looked as
if it had been polished new. Its brass mouldings and fittings gleamed and gave back the scintilla of stars. Francis’s mouth
opened when he saw it. It was pointed at the southern sky. As he came forward, the monks stepped away like figures caught
and contrite. They said nothing. The old man went over to the instrument and ran his fingers along it as though it were the
final proof that he had returned to the world. He touched the telescope and he laughed.

“Oh God,” he said in Irish. Then he laughed until there was no sound but hard, aspirated sighs that rose off his stomach and
made him shut his eyes with effort.

The trinity stood and watched.

“Well,” said Francis at last, “you saved me and I thank you. It isn’t easy to kill a Foley. Now this is mine and I don’t mind
you having a look, but I’ll be taking it with me when I leave in the morning. Do you understand? And I’ll need some kind of
boat or someone to bring me across to the shore.”

The monks said nothing. He was not sure they had understood, so he gestured the same message to them and said it in pieces
of English. Still they did not respond. Then, in an action slight and simple and yet filled with untold ages of humility,
one of the monks raised his finger in the obscurity and ran it smoothly across his own lips like a sealant. Francis stared
at them.

“Ye’re mute?” he said.

The monk blinked his eyes yes.

“But you understand?”

There was the smallest nod, as if even that communication were in some way a compromise of their vows and betrayed them into
the domain of sin. The night air blew softly and carried the small noises that were the slaps of the river and the running
of the river rats in the blind dark.

“Ye have a boat?” Francis asked them at last.

They did not. They had sunk their boat years earlier and lived on that island on whatever the earth provided. When nothing
was provided, they took it as a direct epistle from above and remedied their souls with all-night confetiors, credos, and
a diet of insects.

The river ran through the dark. Snout-up, a badger arrived upon the four of them and stood striped and astonished before scuttling
away. The monks were like stone monks. They offered no gesture or expression when Francis told them they must make him a boat.
He listened to the water passing. The river was still between him and the home he had built in his mind. He could cross it
by himself right then, but he would have had to leave the telescope, and already it had become something fixed into the corner
of his brain like an obsession. He put his hand upon it and bent and lowered his head and met the eyepiece. Then he squeezed
shut his left eye and looked at the fixed constellations of the autumn night where the monks had been searching for the face
of God.

The monks stepped away from him and were gone then to mute prayers and adorations. Francis watched the night and then slept.
When he awoke, the light of the day startled his eyes and he remembered that he was not dead and lay on the wet grass of the
hillock and heard come back to him all the minute sounds of the earth alive. He heard the insects and the birds and the wind
that carried them. His eyes watered and he thought of his life to that moment and was burned with a sharp regret. He regretted
all that had happened, how he had lost his wife and sons to the rashness of his will. He thought of Emer, vagrant and alone.
He thought of the home he so desired and how the dream of it lay in ruins now. He cursed himself then and wished he could
undo the knots in his heart. He wished he was not who he was, and as he lay he suffered a kind of soul scouring in which there
was revealed to him sins of vanity and pride. He lay long and still
and was in his sackcloth garb and turned-white hair then like a saint descended and discovered in the grass. When he got up
he saw the one he took for the eldest of the monks waiting at the small stone church. The holy man beckoned to him and Francis
went down the hill and felt the pleasant coolness of the dew on his toes.

“Well?” he said to the monk. “What have you to say?”

The monk said nothing.

“I thank you for saving me,” Francis said, then added, “Even if it was really the telescope you were saving. It doesn’t matter
to me.” He paused. “I was on my way with my sons to try to find a place to live, a home.”

The monk’s face was impassive. He had once been a boy monk. Once his hair had been shaven off an unwrinkled crown that matched
the curve of his young cheeks. Once his brown eyes had looked fresh and nutlike and saw the beauty of his own devotion as
a natural offering to his Creator. Now, the face was old and the apple cheeks sinking, deflated with the hard weathers of
that life and the discovery that all of us are human. The boy monk was vanished, the nuts of his eyes like still shells. He
looked at the big man he had taken from the river. He looked at him and shuddered at the vanity of their thinking he had been
sent to them, that he had been a sign, or that the magnificent telescope was intended as a reward and means of communicating
with God. The old monk stood there and visited the sin and stood within its black centre and said nothing. He looked inward
at himself without flinching, and for a moment Francis Foley did not know if he was gone blind. His eyes did not move from
the pale air. Some who might have watched him very closely might have seen him face his own desperation, the long years of
his living there on the island with fading hope, his diminished faith, and the longing grown ulcerous and sore in his spirit
that the divine be revealed.