The Fall of Light (18 page)

As ever, the gypsies had no destination or fixed itinerary. They wandered down through Normandy and found themselves crossing
the Maine and into Anjou and then farther south still into the country called Limousin. They travelled down the map of France
like ink dribbling down a page. Had they considered it, had they seen a map, they might have chosen a more southeasterly route,
but they had not, and the leader now among them was too young and raw in the manner of command to show his inexperience and
ask for opinion. His name was Masso. While the roads were easy and the weather clement, he waved them daily forward. He did
not show his own fright or uncertainty, or the reality that he had no idea where he was leading them. There were green fields.
There were animals they stole and killed and others they hunted. There were tranquil farmhouses where the gypsies could barter
tin spoons and ladles and other assorted oddments of their own manufacture. There were broad valleys where in the summertime
they came to a somnolent stop and where in the buzzing of bees and flies they told stories and drank sweet wine. Sometimes
armies passed them on the road. Men in blue and scarlet and black boots to the knee marched past heading off to some field
of blood, doomed figures already called by Death. They looked at the gypsies with leering expressions, then looked at their
women with a kind of hopeless lust, passing on all the time. Thirty, forty cannon rattled past and cavalrymen too with bridles
of supple and polished leather and spurs that jangled in the afterdust. So the world passed by those gypsies, and it was as
if they were living in a parallel domain or had escaped into an undiscovered
dimension where none saw or cared for them and where the history of the world was not known.

Then, at the end of summer, when lassitude had almost overcome them all and their faces were dark with sun, Masso announced
that they must leave the soft valleys and go east once more. He made the announcement with no fixed idea of the geography
of that country but was secretly thinking that his position as their leader would be made secure if he brought them into Bohemia.
So, they had set out just as the mistral was blowing. Under their breaths many of the gypsies cursed. Their eyelids were heavy
and their eyes narrow and small. They had grown soft in the summer and now the journey into winter made each of them age rapidly.
Within two weeks they were in the mountains and the wind blew knives past their ears. Then there fell upon them the infamous
snow that was widespread throughout Europe that year. It fell in those mountains in large, thick flakes. Each was like a piece
of paper, torn fragments of some broken treaty between heaven and earth. It fell from the sky so quickly that the caravans
had to stop in the narrow passes. The drop to the valley below vanished, the peaks above likewise, and the gypsies were held
there with frozen faces, amazed. They looked to Masso for enlightenment and were told to go back and sit in their caravans.
The following day the snow was rising above the wheel axles. Men dug as the snow drifted upon them and made of their shoulders
white epaulets or poor wings. Food was thinned. Battered buckets of snow were melted and the water added to thimble measures
of soup stock. As the hunger became first a sound and then a loud noise like a beast among them, Cait opened the barrel of
salted fish that she had stored and Finbar carried some along the stalled line of the caravans. Still the snow fell. The mountains
that they did not know were the Alps mocked them with their white peaks. In his caravan Masso stared at the canvas wall and
slowly rocked. It came so that he could not bear to look outside, and instead in the unearthly silence of that place he listened
to the soft pounding and slide of the snow as it began to bury his caravan. Then, when Finbar came with others of the gypsies
to ask him how they were not to starve, Masso stopped his rocking and looked them straight in the face.

“You must eat me,” he said, and stabbed a thin iron spike clean through his heart.

They did not eat him but took all of his clothes, his blankets and scarves. Under Finbar’s direction they distributed these
to the very young and old gypsies until they were like deeply padded polar creatures and not even their faces could be seen.
The starving horses they released and watched as they made slow, terrified progress away down the road. Then they pushed Masso’s
caravan over the edge of the road and it crashed and splintered and echoed as the only sound of man in those mountains.

They endured another seven days and nights. Finbar Foley became their leader without election or discussion. He told them
to gather six in a caravan and embrace each other’s bodies as if in the strongest grip of passion. He told them to lock their
lips and breathe into each other and seal there the energy of life in one long and continuous circuitry of warm air.

The caravans lay in the snowy pass, and within each of them the gypsies embraced. Young and old clung to each other and worked
an elaborate puzzle of connection so that no part of man or woman was left untouched. Giggles, groans, moans, and other sounds
travelled the length of the caravans and into the white air like the ghosts of pleasure. And then there was silence.

Years later, when the grandchildren of those gypsies told it, the snow would fall faster and faster. Each flake would become
larger, they would spread their arms to show, and the snowflakes would transform until they were wide as sheets unpacked and
tossed from some chest in the heavens. The gypsies would hear them fall upon them. In the darkness of their caravans they
would sense the weight of whiteness thump as though it were landing on their spirits. Then by the magic of such memories,
and the inheritance of the inexplicable that was theirs, the gypsy grandchildren would tell how the snow sheets defied science
and were not cold but warm. The heat inside the hoops of canvas grew. Those who had prepared themselves for death and were
starved and frozen into stilled pose as in some collapsed mosaic of byzantine intricacy now moved their limbs. They stretched
as the blood warmed and ran into their toes. Their faces felt the breath of those next to them. Their eyes dribbled a rheumy
warm fluid and then their noses, too. Sweat flowed off them and the heat was such that in their delirium or fever they rose
and threw off the layers of clothes
they were wearing and fell to the most passionate and sexual loving that surpassed even their own dreams. The caravans steamed.
The young writhed upon each other. The leathery skin of those gypsies old and long travelled softened like apples in October
and filled the air with the fruitful scent of remembered Indian summer. Whether the gypsies were dead or dying, they could
not be sure. Whether this was the hereafter or they were being granted a final night of loving on the farthermost edge of
life seemed equally likely, and they did not question it.

Their grandchildren would pause there to allow the story its own room in the minds of those who listened. And then, at last,
they would tell its outcome, how the sheets of snow over the gypsies’ heads had been melted by body heat. The sweat that dropped
through the floorboards of the caravans made a river in that mountain pass and carried the snow away upon it. Then when the
temperature inside the caravans grew too great, the canvas had been thrown back and the green world revealed. They had survived,
and when their bodies cooled and they put on their clothes and looked away from each other with low abashment, there remained
the feeling that Finbar Foley had saved them. He walked along the line of them and shook each by hand and kissed them. Then
he told them that without horses they could take only the best caravan and that each should put within it what was most precious
and the men would take turns pulling it back down the mountain into France.

So they left there, walking out of the blizzard in the cold of dawn, a ramshackle collection of gypsies pulling a single caravan
toward the dream of spring. At their head was Finbar Foley, and on the seatboard of the caravan sat the mer-girl Cait, pregnant
at last with Foley twins.

Francis Foley and Teige and the young girls Deirdre and Maeve were similarly journeying. They crossed the open
green land of
Tipperary in the mild weather that followed the snow. The girls sat mute and impassive on the cart, and behind them at a small
remove followed the O’Connor dog. When the cart slowed, so did the dog. When it stopped, the dog stood in arrested pose and
watched from a short distance and then sat upon the grass verge of the ditch to wait. The young girls did not pay it any heed
and seemed themselves, whether by sympathy, grief, or chance, to have acquired their mother’s dumbness. They stared at the
road. They ate their food in a trance and were like creatures fallen from another world. Their eyes could not be met. When
Teige brought them the bowl of their dinner and was careful to kneel to their level to speak in his softest voice, the girls’
eyes looked elsewhere. In the night Francis told Teige in whispers that they must expect it would take time. They were lying
in a field on the blankets they had brought from the O’Connor house. The night sky was starless and the darkness falling in
a fine mist. For an hour each had lain there awaiting sleep, listening to the small noises of the night and hearing the dog
sneaking closer in the dark.

“It will be a while,” Francis said.

Teige lay and did not move. He was trying to understand how his father knew in the dark that he was not sleeping.

“Yes,” he said at last.

It was a conversation like that, fragments of speech and response separated in the dark sometimes by pauses so long as to
make each statement seem the end or beginning, or the inconsequential ramblings of the last awake.

“Those girls will come through it, though.”

The old man paused. His voice was low and edged with desperation. Teige heard him swallow nothing. The soft rain fell on them.
In the dark the dog arrived at the cart where the girls were sleeping.

“They seem like birds,” Teige said, “stunned and fallen down in the grass. Why will they not say anything?”

The sky was moonless and the world seemed lost and without light.

“They will,” Francis said after a time. “They will come through.

“They will,” he said after another moment.

Teige said nothing. He knew his father was speaking not only of the girls, but of the terrible plight of orphans that weighed
on him, filling the space about him with memories. Where were his other sons?
Where was Finan gone? Had he really killed that man? Where were Finbar and the gypsies? What corner was Tomas vanished into,
and why had he not returned? Where, oh where was Emer?

“We will give care to them,” the old man said when he had recovered. “We will bring those girls with us to this island, Teige.
Yes. We will.”

If he said more, Teige did not hear him, for he fell asleep even as the dog claimed its place on the cart between the two
girls and lay with low moans, hunting in its dreams the ghosted scent of its vanished master.

In the morning they moved on again and the dog resumed its place a little ways behind. Teige drove the pony and cart and the
two O’Connor girls sat upon it still like the daughters of Lot. The Foleys crossed the Shannon at a bridge and made their
way across the County Limerick and into Clare. Sometimes the road they travelled gave way to such mud that the pony could
not pull through it and Teige and Francis both had to pull and push, making slow progress with the girls useless to help and
the dog watching from the ditch. The farther west they travelled, the higher the mud on the axle of the wheels.

In the late afternoon they came upon a farmer with a black cow in the road. In that season before the beginning of new grass,
he was allowing her the poor grazing of the ditch outside his fields. Francis called to him a greeting, and the man acknowledged
him with the kind of low-voiced circumspection that seemed habitual there. When he could no longer avoid conversation the
farmer asked them where they were going. The old man told him they were heading to the town of Kilkee in the west to see if
there was news of his eldest son. The farmer nodded. He placed his hand on the backside of his cow. The cow did not move.
She was thin and pregnant and exhausted. The farmer moved his mouth about as if trying to find some difficult word there.
He looked over the ditch at the wet fields. He said a sound that was not a word, and then at last brought himself to ask them
if they wanted food that night.

They ate in a small cottage that was unlit by any lamp even after darkness fell. There was a shadowy gloom there to which
their eyes became accustomed. The woman of the house was robust looking with greying curls that fell down her cheeks. There
were the shapes of
a half dozen children standing. The O’Connor girls sat amongst them on a bench and ate the potatoes and potato bread and winter
cabbage and drank the buttermilk but did not speak. The farmer did not speak either and only made low, guttural noises of
response when Francis addressed him. His wife answered instead. She seemed lightened by their company, and it was apparent
that the dour farmer had invited the Foleys there as a peace offering against some earlier argument with his wife. He had
brought them to disprove his meanness, though he would not burn a lamp.