The Fall of Light (16 page)

Now, in the sliver of light, the Foleys charged at them. The thieves, whether grown accustomed to near capture or out of natural
fecklessness, seemed unafraid of punishment and ran about and yelped in high voices and called names. They were giddy and
wild. Teige arrived first at the pony. He placed his head next to her shoulder and said some words and then ran his hand along
her back, before leaving her to stand snuffling anxiously and as he chased one of the thieves that had his boots. Francis
was by him. He was concerned not for the robbery but only for the safety of Teige, and that nothing separate them again. He
cried out to frighten the robbers off. But these would not let go of the boots they had and jumped about in weird dance. At
last Francis caught hold of the scruff of one of them and yanked the man toward him, and a piercing cry rang out. The others
froze. They stood watching, balanced on the moment between fight and flight. Francis held the man’s head locked within his
forearm. The boots fell to the ground. He looked for Teige and saw him turned to where the boy robber was holding the pony.

“We have no fight with ye,” said Francis. “Leave us something, and be gone along the road, and we’ll not think on it again.”

The man within his hold grimaced. He felt the nearness of his neck to snapping and called out to the others. One of them took
a coat then from three he wore and laid it on the ground. Francis released the thief and the fellow stepped away and twisted
his head about. There was a strange sense of clemency there and a moment without words as the thieves stood in shambling pose
with eyes downcast. Then the scene disbanded. The men scrambled away in the gloom, muttering and groaning, and the Foleys
did not chase them.

“God in heaven,” Francis said, “the people there are in the world, Teige, eh?”

The father looked at his son from the corner of his eye. He was not sure if he was to be struck down again, and balanced there
on that moment, testing gently the relationship between them. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

Teige was thin as a young ash. The curved branches of his ribs were plain even in that half-light.

“I am not,” he said. And then, without looking up and in a slender voice: “Are you?”

“God, no. No,” said Francis, and then added quietly, “Thank you.”

Francis bent down and picked up the coat and held it in the air. “Well, isn’t that fine style?” He smiled then and Teige saw
it and it was like an image abandoned in the farthest corner of the boy’s mind, a sweetness in that expression that belonged
in the days when he was much younger and the old man had carried him on his shoulders.

Teige did not say anything.

“Made of good stuff, too,” his father said. “Here, take it, Teige, it’ll be warm.” He offered it and his son took it and put
it on.

Teige lifted a handful of the hardened sleet-snow to the pony’s mouth, and she lipped at it and drew back her top lip and
showed her teeth and moved her head right and left like that as if soundlessly laughing. Teige bent down and began to push
the snow on the ditch away with his hands. When it was apparent what he was doing, his father knelt and together they cleared
the snow from the rough tufted grass that lay below. When it was so exposed the pony moved closer and, after nosing cautiously,
chomped the frozen grass with a tearing sound. Father and son watched. Francis tried to figure out what they would do and
how he would say it. They waited in the dawning light, and each felt its revelation with shyness. There they were, the mismatched
pair of Foleys, in the middle of the country of the lost. Their breath hawed. Blackbirds came and landed in the field over
the wall, attending the pony’s finishing the patch of grass.

In that tentative renewal between them, Francis did not know how to broach the subject of the boy’s mother. Then Teige said:

“I have looked for my mother.”

“I went back there, too,” said his father. “I searched every road. I asked any I met.” He had more to say but did not say
it. He looked at his son, then when he could not bear it he looked away. He did not say that he feared Emer was dead, and
Teige did not turn on him with recriminations or vent further his anger and loss. Instead each stood and the air between them
was filled with tangled memory and grief. Teige’s mother appeared there in form invisible and was a figure with
fair hair falling instructing him in the stories of the stars. She lingered a time in the silence of the undisturbed landscape
of field and hedgerow spread out before them. The two men tried in vain to hold her there, but she was like a star retreating
as the morning came on.

Francis felt the weight of his years, and the immense loneliness of the road passed over his face like a cloud. Later, he
thought, later he could go and look for her again, but he did not have the strength for it now. For now he had to be with
this boy. He had to take him somewhere. He had to make a home.

“Well, son,” he said at last. “Will we go toward the sea?”

As they crossed the country the snow melted. It was like a blanket of green being unfurled. The skies moved again
and rain fell. Cattle stood in the timeless mesmerism of drizzle, then crossed the fields in slow phalanxes, finding shelter
in the hedgerows as squalls blew the hard rain sideways. When the squalls passed, storms crashed. Thunder broke over February.
The stars in the night sky vanished. In the dawn, the light was pale and seemed a poor cheapened imitation, a grey murk that
drizzled. The countryside itself looked strangely sorry, like a place in tales where the king has been banished and every
plant, hill, and valley suffers in punishment awaiting renewal. So it was. And across this through the falling weathers of
the beginning of that year Francis Foley walked westward with Teige on the white pony at his side. They were not companionable,
they did not speak in the day as they moved along other than to announce rests or the place where the pony needed water. Still,
the presence of the boy consoled his father. He saw how Teige had aged, how loss had marked the expression of his eyes and
stolen their brightness, and yet despite the chastening of such knowledge he was still grateful.

They moved west over the curves of the road. Sometimes Teige dismounted and walked the pony. He never offered his father to
ride, and
Francis did not ask. They passed all and sundry on their way, a long and varied parade of vagabond unfortunates whose ills
and complaints formed the whole catalog of life’s undoing. There were infirm old widows, shawled and wrapped so as to lose
all shape of womanhood and seem instead accumulated bundles of cloth, browned by the road. The feet in their broken shoes
ached and they shuffled flatly with flawed ankles or tendons torn. There were all manner of mendicant and pauper, thin skeletal
figures who drifted along with doomed eyes. Few stopped on their way when they met the Foleys. They eyed the pony and then
turned their faces downward and shoulders sideways as if shamed by their homelessness. With such figures in their squalor,
Francis and Teige were already familiar. They had each seen many on their separate wanderings, yet in the passing of each
of them father and son nonetheless felt shivers of foreboding. Where had these come from? They were going nowhere. The road
for them was the last hope, and upon it they carried the impossible burden of their untold stories. Day and night they appeared
and disappeared. They were like a fairy folk or the infinite population of the dead. None seemed to know each other, none
said their name. Whatever their quest, it remained in its secret history and travelled away with them.

On one evening when an army of such passed them going eastward on the road, Teige broke the day’s silence and asked his father
why they were all going in the opposite direction.

Francis stroked his beard. They were stopped beneath three leafless trees and gnawing at raw potatoes.

“We are going to the sea, Teige,” he said. “They are going to Dublin.”

“But why? Why do they not stay?”

“Each one has their reasons. Our reason is to leave our name in that town of Kilkee for Tomas and the twins, and then we will
go to the monk’s island and make a place there. Then when the boys come back they will be able to find us. That is our reason.
You have seen the sea, is it so terrible?”

“No.”

“Tell me what it is like.”

Teige was squatting on the ground and the pony’s long neck was
grazing near him. The cold was coming in his shoulders as the heat of walking faded. “It’s like the end,” he said. “It’s wild,
though.”

“Wild?”

“Oh yes.”

“Good. That’s what we want, eh? Wild, wild sea. Did you go into it?”

“I did.”

“And were you afraid?” The old man had said it before he thought better of it. He remembered the disastrous scene in the Shannon
River and looked down and tightened his mouth.

“I was,” Teige said, and lifted his face. There was a moment then in which their still fresh reconciliation might have come
asunder, in which the father might have made a grunt of disapproval and shook his head, leaving his son to feel the isolation
of cowardice. But Francis Foley said:

“Good. That’s good. You were right, too.” He glanced at Teige from under his eyebrows. “There’s many drown in it, I suppose?”

“There is,” said Teige.

“And it’s fierce.”

“Yes.”

“You were right so,” said his father. “You were right to try it and then keep well out of it.”

Another pause, then Teige added: “I didn’t, though.”

“You didn’t?”

The pony flicked her head. Her tail swished. The boy looked at her a moment and felt his father’s eyes upon him.

“No,” he said, “I still went in, three times.”

The father said nothing then. He sat there and the emotions he held made his lips quiver. He blinked. Dark clouds moved across
the sky. The night fell and the stars came and went and wheeled above them and each lay down to the slender hope of their
dreams.

The following day when they were passing a cottage a cry stopped them. The cottage was not unlike others, a small building
of dark stone with crooked windows and door open to the road even in that February. The cry was that of a woman, it came from
the garden beyond. The Foleys stopped, the pony flicked her ears. Then Francis called out. There was no response and Francis
looked to Teige, who
slid down the pony. Together they walked in around the cottage and found in a small garden a woman of fifty years trying to
pull up from the earthen ridges the fallen body of her husband.

When she saw them she let go the man’s shoulders, and while he lay motionless with open eyes and mouth she slipped down onto
her knees at his back. Her black-and-silver hair was astray across her face. Her mouth twisted from effort. Her husband, a
figure older than she with a face locked in an expression of astonishment, did not move. She propped him against her breast
and though the Foleys were there kept making over and over strange sounds of endearment and something that might have been
a form of the man’s name,
Cathal.
Francis bent down to them and Teige stood behind him. He told the woman they would carry the man into the house, but she seemed
unable to grasp this, as though she were from another country or already taken from sanity by grief. The old man told her
again, but she still did not seem to understand, and at last Francis gestured Teige to him and together they picked the man
up and bore him out of the dirt and in through the open door. The woman followed them, her hands holding each other tightly
in a knot. In the gloom of the kitchen something stirred and was then two small girls pressed against the corner of the dresser.
The man was laid out on a settle bed. He was breathing but still frozen in that look of amazement, his left side locked in
an attitude of bracing. The woman stood looking at him and brought her hands to her mouth, making moaning sounds. The girls
came to her then and she enfolded each of them in one arm and the three stood there at the feet of the stricken man. Francis
got a bucket and traced the muddied track in the grass until he came to the spring well. He was back with the water before
Teige was sure where he had gone.

“He has been out there a while,” the father said. “Get the clothes off him. Make up the bed. Has he the fever?”

The woman did not turn to respond.

“Woman of the house,” he said again, and then one of the small girls stepped out of her mother’s side and told them not to
shout, that their mother could neither hear nor speak.

Francis Foley lifted the man up against his chest. The woman was made to understand and, helped by her small daughters, she
readied the bed. Teige took the man’s feet and hoisted him upon it. The stiff
figure was undressed and his clothes taken out the door by Teige, who was instructed by his father to burn them. In the freshness
of the day Teige felt relief outdoors and stayed awhile in the low corner of the garden. A black-and-white sheepdog met him
there. It looked up at him with blank, sad eyes. When the sod of turf Teige had carried from the hearth at last retook flame,
he dropped the clothes upon it and watched the thick smoke take the contagion and carry it into the sky. Back inside the cottage
he watched his father trying to get the man to drink. His hand was cupped beneath the man’s chin and the water spilled. The
woman was sitting, watching. There was understanding now in her face, a stilled knowing, and she did not weep. She looked
at her husband in the bed, seeing in his eyes the entire story of their relation, the history of their time together now come
to this.