The Fall of Light (19 page)

“You’re like people who’ve seen a lot,” the woman said. “I’ve seen no place but this parish and not even the farthest ends
of that.” She glared down the table at her husband, who did not raise his eyes to her.

“We’ve seen enough,” Francis said. “But few places with the charity and welcome of your house.” He looked over at where she
was standing by the deal dresser in the darkness. He nodded to her his thanks and was not sure if she saw him or not. The
children who were standing along the length of the table had finished eating and were waiting to see what their father might
leave on his tin plate. The youngest of them was aged about four. Teige watched as the man sopped milk in a semicircle with
the butt of his potato bread. There was a half of it left. He sopped the milk thrice and ate it. Then he took the second half
of the butt and circled the hollow of the plate again, although it seemed already dried. This too he mouthed. Then he stood
up, stepped back, and went from the cottage. The children scrambled forward amidst the shouts of their mother and found of
the nothing he had left crumbs and flakes of food not enough to nourish mice but small trophies to them as they fell at each
other and toppled noisily onto the ground. The O’Connor girls watched this in some alarm at first, and Teige saw their faces
and motioned them not to be worried. Then the mother of all those children assured the girls too and watched not without glee
or pride as that mob of hers, boys and girls alike, tussled and squirmed and cursed and were general entertainment. A short
time after, the farmer came to the door. His face was twisted like a rag.

“Come,” he said, “now.”

The Foleys and the eldest boy followed the farmer to the cabin. There a lamp had been lit. On a damp bed of mucked rushes
the exhausted black cow was labouring. The farmer held the light high and
they each saw the shine of her, the gloss of effort leaking out through her hide. Her eyes were wild and the pull and blow
of her breath uneven and rasping like some faulty mechanics. The farmer hung the lamp on the wall, then brought up from the
ground a length of thick rope.

“She won’t do,” he said to none of them in particular. “You’ve pulled a calf?” he asked Francis Foley.

“I have, and many, but she’s not ready.”

“She’ll die.”

“She won’t,” Francis said.

“She’s older than that boy,” the farmer said, nodding toward Teige. “We’ll pull her now.”

He ran his hand along the back of the old cow, but in her terror and hunger and weakness she frighted and turned sharply in
the byre and knocked the farmer sideways against the wall. He cursed her with a kind of exaggerated violence, then stepped
forward again and this time thrashed at her with the rope like a whip. He made connection to her backside only twice and she
bucked and moved in a quick-trot directly at them. The boy jumped in against the stone wall of the cabin. Teige was pushed
by his father sideways and felt the side of the cow against him as she passed. She reached the far wall and moaned. Then she
bellowed loudly and arched her great head and roared once more. Pig squeals came from the next cabin over. The farmer strode
up and whipped at her again. He shouted at her to stop that and be quiet, but she was still not finished bellowing and had
her face now against the old door.

“Don’t, she’ll push the door out. Wait!” Francis called, but the farmer was not to be deprived of his chance to whip her again.
The rope flew back and was in midcurve high in the air when Francis stepped up and grasped the farmer and held him hooped
in his arms. The man wriggled and cursed and tried to stamp on the other’s foot, but he could not break free, and the son,
watching, allowed a crooked smile to slide over his mouth as though at a circus.

“Let me off!” the farmer shouted, but Francis Foley held him and kept him there imprisoned and told Teige to see to the cow.

Teige moved forward with his hands out wide and whispered sounds.

He said over and over words that sounded like a sea.

The cow had her back to him. The place where she had been whipped had welted in two clean lines. Still Teige whispered the
sea until it was all about them and the farmer in Francis Foley’s arms quietened. Teige was next to her now, and the noise
he made became instead a low moan that was almost unvoiced and sourced in some deeper part of his insides below his larynx.
He came about until he was before her, then licked his fingers and held them out and touched them against her foamed mouth.
And she did not back away. The old cow stood in the low light with Teige putting his fingers inside her mouth and moving them
within her mucus. The boy gasped at it. The farmer remained quiet. He watched as though at a dream. Then Teige licked his
other fingers and, after withdrawing one hand, slid the other there, and the cow puzzled on them and turned her tongue upon
them. Then Teige withdrew his moist hand and brought it down her back and softly inside her. He was knelt on the rushes, his
head against her steaming flank and a hand inside her. She stood still some moments, her mouth working as though at the memory
of her mother’s udder. Then, very slowly, Teige moved his weight down along her and pressed his right hand deeper inside to
feel for the calf. Sharp smacking sounds of suction and fluid escaped. She stood for him. His arm was lost inside her now
and was vanished up to his elbow. The others watched his face in the lamplight for signs of what he found. But for a time
they could not tell, and Teige said again the sound of the sea and the low moans which spoke only to the cow. Blood and a
heavy blackish stuff leaked there. The cow groaned. The boy’s face was a white moon against the wall. Teige turned his hand
inside her and twisted his elbow around until it was facing the thatch. Then back again. A spasm travelled through her. She
lifted her left hind leg and made a tiny kicking flick at nothing. A foamy sweat rose in separate places on her black hide.
Then Teige began to withdraw his arm from inside her. He did so in slow stages, waiting and then pulling, easing his way from
the depth of her as his arm came back out into the lamplight with skeins of blood flecked upon it and a transparent film of
membrane. His arm withdrew as far as his wrist and then stopped.

“How is she, Teige?” Francis asked him.

“Backward. But she’s here now.” And again he made the sound of
the sea. And while he was making it he withdrew his hand another piece and the bone white tips of the calf’s hind hooves appeared
where they had pierced through. The farmer went to step forward.

“No, wait.” Francis Foley’s hand was on his shoulder. “You’ll start her. Teige knows. Wait.”

Teige’s bloodied hand was free in the air and the calf’s legs were out as far as the shins.

“Now, quickly,” Teige said, “or the hip will lock and the calf will die.” And before another minute had passed his father
and the farmer and the farmer’s son had come and the rope had been secured over the hooves and the calf pulled free onto the
rushy floor. Teige bent to blow in its nostrils. The black cow turned her head and made a moaning. Francis moved his hand
on her swollen udder until the beistings came and Teige and the farmer lifted the calf upright in the world for the first
time. It stood and toppled like a thing of sticks. Now its forelegs were fixed solid and its hind buckled, and now the opposite.
It tottered and was for a time like an imperfect creation. The men came and steadied it and held its mouth in place, where
at first it would not suck. Milk squirted and oozed out over it. Driblets ran across the calf’s mouth but not into it. Teige
had to slip his thumb in the side of the mouth and accustom the tongue and wait until the calf discovered sucking and could
then have the hand-warmed teat wedged in its mouth.

The men stood back. In the yellowy light of the lamp they watched with the same mute reverence as was since time began. The
calf milked at the mother and twice pushed its head quickly against the bulge of her udder for more.

“Tell your mother we have a heifer calf,” the farmer said. His son nodded and ran out. Still the two men and Teige stood.
Teige’s clothes were wet and stained. His father looked at him and had to blink his eyes then for the power of pride that
coursed through him. Then he looked up at the old timbers of the roof and the thatch as though seeing through them and beyond
into the heavens and the stars.

When the cabin door opened, the woman of the house appeared and she looked at the calf and the black cow and said, “Well,
ye did well and thanks due to these strangers.” She smiled briefly at her husband, and he made a timid return of the same.
Then she looked at
Francis and Teige, and in the stillness of the cabin the intake of her breath was audible. She saw them for the first time
in the light.

“It’s yourself again,” she said.

Francis turned to her. Her face showed she was astonished.

“You,” she repeated.

“You have seen me before?”

“Yes. Only you were younger. Four days ago or so, wasn’t it? On the road.” She stopped suddenly and became thoughtful; her
hands came to her mouth and pulled at her lower lip.

“Perhaps it was a man like me?” said Francis, and he came forward excitedly and took the lamp from the wall and held it next
to his face.

“I’d swear it was you. You came along the road and you stopped at the door begging. You had that woman. She was out by the
wall beyond.”

“It was my son,” Francis said in a low whisper. “We are searching the country for him. Tell me.”

“I gave him bread and some grease of the goose and some small potatoes and a jar of buttermilk. He was thin. The woman beyond
was coughing. I could hear her all the time he stood there. He took the things. He had a way of looking that said how sad
he was to be begging there. I would have offered him a place for the night, but I knew himself didn’t like me to. He hates
me thinking good of them as passes on the road, and I know it is only misfortune that separates them from us. So I didn’t
offer and he went off and the woman coughing with him and I heard them like that some way down the road and I inside at the
hearth. And when himself came in”—she nodded toward the farmer, who studied the ground—“we took to shouting at each other.
I told him I would be gone the road and leave the children to him if he didn’t invite the next beggars he met to come and
eat with us. And them was you and your other son today” She stopped and drew breath and looked at the calf. “And see what
good you’ve done us.”

“He was thin?” Francis Foley asked her at last.

“He was.”

“But he was well?”

“I couldn’t say that. I thought after he might have signs on him of whatever the woman had in her chest. His eyes, they…”
She paused and watched the effect of the news on the two strangers and then nodded. “I am sorry for ye.”

The farmer joined her. “Yes, we are sorry for ye.”

Francis stood absorbed in his grief. If, in some other world, his flesh had been laid out and examined for the evidence of
loss and regret, there would be apparent at that instant the running and deepening of wrinkles. He aged as the knowledge twisted
into him like thorns.

“How many days?” Teige said. “How many days ago that you saw him?”

“Three, maybe four.”

“Think!” Francis boomed, and the black cow shuddered a step away.

The woman pulled at her lip. “What day have we? Yes, it was the day after Sunday last, I’d say.”

“Three days so?”

“Yes.”

“Which way did they go on the road?”

“West,” she said. “Making slow progress now, I’d say.”

“Teige, get the girls ready,” Francis said. “We’ll go now.” He turned to the woman. “Thank you,” he said, and swiftly went
out into the dark and began preparing the cart and the pony.

A half an hour later, with Deirdre and Maeve O’Connor sitting on the front of the cart and a portion of a killed goose and
a bundle of potatoes and hens’ eggs and two winter cabbages on the back, the Foleys left. The farmer and his wife and children
watched them under the held high lamp. They knew there was nothing to say and witnessed their departure as though such haste
and desperation were familiar and had often been reenacted in the history of that country. Francis Foley nodded to them a
final time and told Teige to cluck the pony, and they hurried westward, down the road under a thin light of few stars.

They went westward in the dark with the old man hastening ahead in a kind of soft-footed jogging that slowed and
sped up continuously like a faltering engine of hope. The slap of his old boots
on the road was a doleful music. Teige drove the cart and the dog followed some paces behind. The dawn opened before them
and in the pale glow of its first light the father peered at all shapes and shadows that lay down the road as if each one
might be the figure of his eldest son. They crossed the soft ground of the County Clare. They passed through the town of Ennis
when it was still sleeping and its ghosted narrow streets echoed with the hoof clops of the white pony. The Foleys looked
up at the curtained windows of the hotel, the shuttered boardinghouses and the open doorless entranceway of the poorhouse,
but they did not stop or make enquiry. They heard low groans and whimperings that escaped in slumber through the crevices
of old buildings.