The Fall of Light (17 page)

“Did you burn them?”

“Yes.”

“The poor man is nearly gone,” Francis said behind the woman. “I don’t know how long he was out there, fallen. The girls told
her they heard him cry. She mistook their meaning.”

“If it’s the fever… ,” Teige said.

“I don’t think it is.”

“But…”

“No. He’s like a clock stopped. That’s not the fever.”

That night the Foleys stayed in the house of the stopped man. Teige slept on the floor on blankets he was given and Francis
sat in a chair of ash and sugan rope that the man himself had probably made. The mute woman dropped her head, and the two
girls slept in the one narrow bed and did not move in their dreams. In the stillness of the cottage mice scurried, their sudden
dartings in the shadowed corners like tiny erratic pulses of life. The night was long and cold. Wind gathered in the west
and blew against the door. The dog whimpered where it lay. The sash of the window whistled like a punctured sigh. In his sitting
Francis watched the stopped man and thought of his own time between worlds when he thought he had drowned. He thought of the
long darkness, the terrible sense that light and touch and taste had been taken from him. He thought of it all and then reached
over and rubbed the man’s feet between the palms of his hands.

The Foleys stayed on. The family’s name was O’Connor. The mute woman made them meals from the end of their winter
storage of vegetables. Flour was beyond her means and they had no bread, but some days they ate a kind of potato cake that
was coarse and lumpish yet sustaining. The two girls who were aged about eight and nine were called Maeve and Deirdre and
seemed to know their mother’s will instantly. They spoke for her and told the father and son that they were welcome. Francis
told them they would stay for a little time and help them until the man recovered. For already there were signs that he was
not to die. The stopped quality of him had already begun to change, although ever so slightly. The fixed, lopsided twist of
his mouth had softened and he spoke a kind of flattened speech whose words were not yet comprehensible. Still, his eyes were
alive. He watched the father repair the half door where the boards had rotted. He watched Teige stand by him and hold the
hammer and pieces of timber that had been salvaged from a broken cart. As the days passed on the Foleys fixed all about the
house that they could find. There were windows that did not open, a thatch ladder with broken rungs, a broom without a handle,
stone walls that had been knocked. Francis Foley went at each of them with quiet zeal. Though he was not gifted as a carpenter
or mason, he set himself at these tasks like a man engaged on some complex and involved proving. It was as though he were
to demonstrate in the house of the O’Connors that the world itself could be repaired, that no breakage was beyond remedy,
and that soon all would be restored in the vision of the innocent. He hammered and banged. He whistled softly. The small girls
skipped and danced steps to this rhythmic reparation, this making good of all that was damaged. For it was not unlike those
cottages in fables that become for a time an island of their own and in which the laws of the world do not govern and the
hardship of life is suspended.

Finally when all was done about the cottage and the weather lifted and the ground was crisp, Francis took Teige to the garden
and showed him how to dig straight furrows. The two of them worked side by side, turning over the new ground as the birds
flew about them and
chirped and squawked in the hope of worms. At times the father stopped and leaned on the fork and sighed. He looked with satisfaction
at the work they had done yet recalled the old pain that reminded him that this place was not their own. His great chest rattled,
he had a wheeze that came like an afterbreath once he had exhaled. But he turned to the work again, moving over the brown
earth and making it ready for seed potatoes. When they had finished, the patch of opened soil was a neat rectangle of promise.
They stood at the head of it and leaned there and watched the birds alighting.

“You can feel the spring today,” Francis said.

“You can.”

And they stood so and said no more and were like the guardians of something greater than themselves whose majesty could be
felt in simplicity. They went then and drank water from the spring, and the two girls came running and told them their father
was able to stand. They hurried back and went in the door and saw Cathal O’Connor propped up on his feet with his arm over
the shoulder of his wife.

“I am grateful to ye,” he said in thin words that could now be understood. His eyes were gentle and his face soft as linen.

” ‘Tis a thing of nothing,” Francis said. “Your potatoes’ll be in the ground tomorrow. Come.” And he looped the man’s arm
over his and hoisted him in light and heavy steps out the doorway and was soon joined by the man’s wife and daughters. Then
in a pose redolent with hope and faith in the constancy of the world, they stood and looked upon the garden with the dog scampering
back and forth over the furrows chasing the birds.

That evening Cathal O’Connor died in his sleep. None saw or heard his passing in the night and it was not until the light
was already breaking that Francis Foley woke and noticed the absence of his breathing. At first he did not believe it. Then
he reached and lifted the man at an angle from where he lay next to his wife. Francis held his face close to the man’s mouth
to sense the slightest air, and when he found none he pressed his ear against the chest and then laid the man down and pounded
at his heart with his fist. He was doing this when the wife woke. Her eyes stared wide and frozen in their expression. The
daughters woke and stood. Still Francis Foley hammered at the man’s heart. He was shouting to him now. He was crouched upon
the
bed with one knee on either side of the thin man, one instant beating away at him and the next bent low to listen. Then he
was thumping at the heart again. Teige came beside him.

“Come on,” the father hissed. “Come on, come on, come on.” He whispered low curses and paused and looked above him into the
mud beneath the thatched roof. He whispered further prayers or damnations then to spirits in worlds above or below. His voice
grew urgent and his words came through his teeth. He shook the dead man for the last flicker of life until Teige said to him:

“Father, stop. He is gone.”

And so he stopped. There was silence. From outside the door the dog moaned.

Later then, in the garden that was to be for that spring, Francis and Teige Foley buried Cathal O’Connor.

Two mornings after, they found the body of the man’s wife drowned in the stream that was called
abhainn mine.
A voiceless scream was still in her eyes. Francis shut them with small pebbles and laid her in the ground alongside her husband.
The following day they left there with the pony pulling the old cart and the two girls sitting mutely upon it.

And by that time in the caravan of gypsies far away, Finbar Foley was travelling south with a mer-girl called
Cait. The gypsies, sensing some change in the stars, had not returned to the races on the sands. When the old man Elihah died,
a younger voice had spoken and told that it was time to cross the water again. So they had left that country and journeyed
by stages first into Wales, then through the Cambrian Mountains and across the Severn River and down onto Salisbury Plain.
There they had camped some time until one night the stars or the unknown forces of the universe moved them and they woke and
broke camp and crossed into the wider spaces of northern
France. Others of their kind told them there was a new cruelty abroad among mankind, that gypsies had been killed for the
look in their eyes, but that many now had foretold the end of the reign of those wealthy and privileged and the coming of
the time of the poor.

These gypsies were not unlike those with whom Finbar travelled, though they spoke in a language he could not fully grasp.
It was not French but contained it, too, as it contained in piecemeal the languages of all the other countries they had seen.
But in a short time Finbar grew accustomed to it and, discovering a new gift, was soon so conversant in that strange hybrid
of words that none could say he was not born to it. His manner and look now, three years after the races, were almost indistinguishable
from those of the gypsies. He had let his hair and beard grow long and wore a ponytail of his golden curls. In the caravan
at night he bedded his mer-girl with a passion that made the old axles of the wagon creak and caused the gypsies outside to
cheer. He seemed gifted in sex. The truth was that from the moment he had first been kissed by Cait, his soul had been sucked
out and he was left with an insatiable thirst for it. It was a craving that lived in him day and night and could be satisfied
only in the moments when he was in her arms. Her kisses still tasted of oysters. Her tongue was a fish in his mouth. Though
she was long gone from the days when she had strode the waves for seaweed, her flesh was imbrined and in the dark hoop of
the canvas Finbar swam in it and practised each stroke onto perfection. She was a woman of ample hips and round breasts who
laughed when the golden curls tossed about her. She liked to reach down and grab on to them as Finbar’s lips travelled up
and down her legs and back and forth across her belly in the search to find his soul. Sometimes then she cried out in such
sharp ecstasy that the canvas ripped above them and the stars glimmered. Mornings after such loving Finbar appeared with chafed
mouth and the red-rimmed, puffy eyes of the long-distance swimmer and worked to patch the caravan. He was become a man. Since
last seeing his twin, he had doubled the size of his chest. He did not show any regret for leaving his brothers, nor did he
even tell Cait that he was a twin. All of that was like wreckage to him now, and he dove into her every night to forget it
and leave it deep fathoms in the past. Many of the gypsies thought that he would quickly tire of her. They had seen incandescent
passions before and
watched them flare and burn in their own destruction like the extravagant tumult of Venetian fireworks. They expected it to
be done by the end of the first winter and the woman to leave the caravan, curse the gypsies for the spell that had befallen
her, and make her way back into the ordinary world. They thought too that Finbar must at last reach the end of passion, for
he travelled through it so quickly that surely by the spring he would have arrived at its last unexplored corner, then thrown
aside the map with the sexual disillusion visited on many. But it had not happened in that way. With indefatigable fervour
Finbar continued to love her and rock the caravan through the night. In the warm days of the first French spring, the gypsy
women had looked at Cait for signs of her carrying a child. They sought this as proof of some kind of fairness in the world,
an inescapable truth of how the universe was balanced and beauty and pleasure to be paid for in the fullness of time. They
had looked for it too as a means of dispelling their own secret mistrust of her, the stranger amongst them whose blue eyes
and pale skin might steal their men. But as the seasons passed there was no sign of any child. By the second year rumours
divided at the campfires. It was something she was doing to avoid conception and the risk of losing him. The women said that
she was brewing odd potions and they narrowed their eyes and shook their heads at this defiance of nature. The gypsy men whispered
among themselves that it was no such evil, that she was adept at strange positions of lovemaking that increased the man’s
pleasure almost to madness and made childbearing impossible. They said she did so with Finbar’s full consent, and was right,
too, for the fortune-teller had told her that from his loins only twins could spring.

So, as the caravan journeyed down through the fields of France, the frantic loving continued and for both of them the old
country faded and was put away like the things of childhood. They did not speak to each other of the past. Cait was a capable
woman with a lively manner, and she bore no sentimental attachments. She sat on the timber seatboard and sometimes held the
reins and clucked forward the horse while Finbar sought for sleep in the back. She learned the spices of the gypsies and soon
cooked braised suckling pig and other assorted meats in such a savoury manner that the smoke itself was sustaining. Her only
weakness was an occasional longing for fish. When it arose she
could not abide meat of any kind and demanded that Finbar find her a river. He would set off then on the small grey horse
that was theirs and be gone until the evening or the following day, when he would return with a bucket of live trout. The
excitement would be immediately visible on Cait’s face and she would reach in and take some of the fish in her bare arms and
hold them slithering against her bosom. Although he knew what to do, she would still command Finbar to fill their zinc bathtub,
and he would do so, and later her cries would be heard like seagulls about the camp. For some nights after, the caravan would
groan and rock all the more and the gypsies at the fires would seem to see it as a ship sailing away across a dark sea.