The Fall of Light (15 page)

He walked that way, eyes skyward, through the winters of three years. In time the stars themselves seemed to reassemble in
the constellations above him and were then the unjoined puzzle of a woman’s face.

It was winter. In the plains of Tipperary snow fell thickly. It gathered in broad fields and rose high against
walls. Cattle stood in stunned bewilderment and lowered their heads as though to look where the grass was gone. They did not
move. They waited, dumbly. The snow slowed the world. It fell so thickly that roads filled and coaches stopped or slid into
ditches. Horses crashed and broke their hips and were shot on the roadside. The distance across a valley was blurred to nothing
and vanished altogether. It appeared as though the landscape itself were being erased and with it time and space and the whole
history of man on that island.

The snow fell. Cottages smoked thin, windless plumes into the pale grey sky. Women looked out from doors and threw crumbs
for hens while their children scurried about barefoot and in wet rags. Briefly
there was the holiday of it, the countryside made beautiful and pristine in a god-willed immaculate creation. It was not itself.
The country was like a country in dreams. Birds flew in short, inquisitive flights. They flickered onto the powdered tops
of walls and settled for berries of the holly that were plentiful that year. The scene held. When the snow stopped the air
froze hard and sealed the white country in ice. Skies were blue and cloudless, by night they were million-starred. No breeze
blew. In God’s slumber the entire island might have slipped its moorings and floated northward into a colder climate, defying
the fixed certainty of maps. Such was the difference between this and the green country of everyday. A still and iced Christmas
passed, and the serenity of the season slipped away and was replaced by hardship. Ridges of cabbages perished and were like
long, white-mounded graves in haggard little gardens. As fodder ran short the cattle in the fields began to starve. Their
thin flanks showed the cages of their bones, their hides matted with mud in which they had rolled and now wore like crude
clothing. At water holes and by the sides of drains and rivulets brown mucked patches of ground opened and spread as animals
made slow crossings back and forth each day to dip their noses in the glacial waters.

And across this frozen scene in the January of that year, Francis Foley came. He was thin and bearded. He coughed hollow,
raking coughs that echoed across the stillness of the fields. His eyes were worn from sleeplessness and sunken in rims of
darker skin. His lips were flaked and broken, the hairs of his moustache overhung them in clumped straggles. He had walked
the country back and forth, following rumour and the pattern of the stars, but in that time he had found neither his wife
nor his sons. Sometimes, in the middle of an empty road in the County Galway or Roscommon, he had imagined he saw one of them
coming toward him. He saw some figure down the road and stopped and waited. His chest opened with the inflation of hope. The
figure on the road was walking slowly. Francis blinked his eyes to clarify it, but still he could not make it out. Was that
not the way Tomas had of walking? Was that not his proud angle of head? The old man stood and was like a rock in the road.
But his heart raced, imagining he had come to the beginning of the end of contrition, that here would begin the reunion of
his family and that this time he would
bring them all together to the monk’s island and start anew. He stood in the road, and the cold held his feet. Then there
appeared before him the figure of one homeless and forlorn and wandering like him in the winter of his life. They passed with
minor greeting or silence and went on. Other times, the figure seen on the road vanished entirely and was a figment of desire
or something incorporeal, and Francis Foley at last moved from his stance and hobbled on.

Yet, as he travelled he did not lose hope entirely. His death and resurrection by the monk had given him a sense that his
life was not to be without purpose, and he endured. His fear was not that he would not find his wife and sons, but that when
he did they would have starved or fallen to disease without him. At first he had supposed his sons would still be by the riverbank
in Limerick where he had last seen them, and he had gone there and looked at the Shannon waters that in that time were not
rushing or wild and seemed a gentle mockery of his failures. He had walked into the County Clare and asked of them there but
learned nothing and turned east again into the stars.

Yet all that was already long ago by the frozen January when he trudged not for the first time into Tipperary. The road was
packed ice. He walked into the little brown cloud of his breath and kept his eyes ahead of him on the emptiness of the way.
There was a small breeze scouring. It polished harshly the skin of his cheeks and left him with the sense that his face was
being peeled. His eyes watered and in that way made uncertain the figure that appeared on the road not a hundred yards ahead
of him. Francis saw the figure that he could not yet call a man or woman and screwed tight his eyes to release the tears.
The figure was coming toward him. The old man stopped. He stood in against the stone wall ditch and laid his hand on the frozen
stones. With an intuition that he did not understand but was a foreknowledge of sorts, he knew that this was not just another
of all those wretches who had crossed his road. His fingers wrapped onto the top stone on the wall. He held it there readied
like a weapon, for at first he imagined this one coming to be none other than the Fallen Angel himself come to take Francis
Foley to Hell. He held the stone also out of the need to feel contact with the tangible world and for the reassurance it gave
that he was not already dead. The figure moved slowly in the white scene. It was a man, he saw at last, a small man on a small
horse.
Still he did not lose any of his mistrust and prepared to throw the top of the wall. His heart was hammering now. Blood was
awakening in his feet, and they were throbbing. The figure was thirty yards away now and Francis Foley was suddenly afraid
of it there on the road in Tipperary. It wore a hat. Its face was unseen. Francis lifted the stone off the wall, and another
rolled and clattered out onto the road. He shook and looked about in fright, but the landscape was placid and empty and blanched
in the grip of that season.

“Dia duit,”
he called out, for he knew the name of God was abhorrent to the Devil and reasoned that he needed to know at once if such
was his adversary.

The figure on the road stopped and slowly raised its head in such a manner as to suggest that the man had been riding the
horse in sleep and now lifted his face into the breeze to see if he was waking or in dreams.

And it was Teige. Father and son saw each other and did not move. There was a stalled moment of disbelief, puzzlement at the
work of fairies or madness that threw such a likeness on the snow road. For Teige had long supposed that his father was dead
and similarly imagined this to be only the most recent of a long catalog of his family’s ghosts, although the one with the
most verisimilitude. Francis Foley was no more certain that this was Teige, and the beating of his heart raced up the side
of his neck and into his right temple, where he could hear it like a drum. He touched his tongue to the crisped edge of his
lips and tasted the sting. He looked at the boy now grown almost into an old-looking young man and there flashed before him
the last moments they had seen each other in the flooded river. Then he said the boy’s name.

“Teige.”

He heard how old and thin his own voice had become since he had last said the name and could not imagine what he looked like,
as it was so long since he had seen himself. The stone fell from his hand.

“Teige, it’s me.”

And his son stopped and looked and blinked his eyes and then climbed down off the white pony and walked directly across the
slippery road to the old man. And in the moment when his father thought that he was about to embrace him, Teige struck him
with both hands
in the hollow of his chest and sent Francis Foley flying backward onto the snow.

He lay there for some time. He lay there and Teige stood over him and kicked at the snow about him and cursed
and then shouted. The loneliness and anger of those three years came from him now sharp and heavy as stones. He yelled out
curses and was weeping as he did so. Birds crossing the noontime in the daily hope of a thaw and the emergence of worms wheeled
about and flew elsewhere. Cattle in the rumpled fields turned their heads to listen. Teige spat and coughed and spewed the
words out. He told his father that once he had had brothers. He told him once he had had a mother and a family. He told the
old man that he had ruined everything, that he had torn up the world and thrown it away. He told him everything was gone now,
that Finan was gone, that Tomas had vanished, that Finbar had stolen a girl from the sea and ridden off with her and the gypsies
and had not returned the following year. He told the old man there was no point in their even looking for them, that the Foleys
were gone into the wind and it was all the father’s fault, all his own stupidity and recklessness and stubbornness. The stones
of his anger kept coming, and soon they were piled there all about Francis Foley where he lay on the ground being buried alive
in the evidence of his vanity and error.

Time passed and still Teige stood there on the road over his father. The glitter of the ice began to melt around the fallen
figure of the old man while his beard strangely thawed and his eyes watered. He offered no resistance. His mouth was agape.
His hands were thrown to the side palms upward, as though attempting to hold the unbearable weight off his chest. And they
were still so a long time, the father on his back and the son standing over him. The winter night drew on. At last, Teige
stopped. He stood over his father with his mouth open and no further accusation came out. His jaw ached. In the bluish light
of
the crescent moon he could not tell for sure if the old man was still living, and he got to his knees beside him in the snow.
Then he lowered his head until it lay on the other’s chest.

“Teige son,” said Francis with his hollowed eyes staring at nothing. “Teige son, ‘tisn’t all over. We’ll find them, we will.
I found you, didn’t I? And I have been drowned and in a place where none or few have come back and yet here I am. Teige son,”
he said, and raised one hand out of the wet and melted ground and lifted it to touch the boy’s head.

They lay so a while. Then they rose and moved into the shelter of a roofless cabin, and Teige tethered the pony and they slept.

It was the pony and not the thieves that woke them. Dawn was rising with silvered streaks when they opened their eyes. There
were figures there. At first they could not separate them from the gloom and they seemed like insubstantial fragments or velvet
shapes come alive as the light thinly cracked the morning open. There were three or four of them. Francis sat upright and
called out. The pony was being led away on its rope and was resisting and turning about in the road and making a long whinnying
of dismay. One of the thieves smacked it hard across the face and shouted and pulled down on its rein as the pony’s fright
worsened and it tried in vain to rear on its hind legs. Teige was up and running then. He was a flicker of light and then
shadow, and his father was behind him. They hurried on the slippery road, crying out and making such sounds as they hoped
might ward off the thieves. These last, vagabond and itinerant, had come on the two figures lying on the road and had at first
supposed them dropped dead from exhaustion and hunger and the ways of the road. They had approached them the way men approach
blessings that have fallen from the sky. They had quickened their step and moved around the fallen, examining their clothes
and small belongings and beginning whispered argument about possessing the pony. There were three and a boy, they were blackened,
their heads hatless. One with the toothless and sunken expression not uncommon then shook his head and held a stub of finger
to his lips when he had discovered the father and son were alive. In the obscurity they had moved with the infinite care of
those engaged in detailed work of jewellery or silversmithing. They had fingered the rags of the sleeping in absolute silence
like some flimsy wraiths or strange angels elected to divest and prepare the mortal
for the hereafter. The dirty garments of the Foleys could not be removed without waking them, and the fellows had taken only
the boots and the pony.