The Fall of Light (20 page)

The dampness of the streets and the stone houses were like a cold purgatory and Francis Foley quickened his pace and passed
quickly on. He knew his son was not there. He jogged on in boots torn with soles flapping. The rags of his coat fluttered.
His long hair was plastered awry with sweat and rain and showed the bald places of his scalp like islands. Teige offered him
his place on the cart, but the old man declined. It was as if he imagined he were being guided now on the trail of Tomas,
as if he alone knew which turns on the road to take and knew not by logical reason but by an inner prompting that would reunite
him with his own flesh. Teige did not argue. He saw the look in his father’s face, the sunken hollows beneath his eyes and
the fixed, locked mouth, and knew the old man’s resolve was not to be questioned, that for him it was a kind of repentance
and a journeying toward forgiveness.

Rain fell and stopped and fell again, as if such weathers were features of the geography. They went northward from the town
and turned west at a crossroads and trekked through the wild open bogs and bleak land of Cill Maille. There by a place that
might have been called Misery or Desolation were the grey waters of Loch na Mine, the lake with no bottom where water sprites
lived. Frances stopped and held his right hand against his chest and was sucking at the air when the cart arrived up behind
him.

“We can stop here awhile,” he said, his breast rising and falling as if about to release something.

“Are you all right?” Teige asked him.

“Feed the girls, water the pony,” the old man said, and slumped to the ground.

They ate some of the goose then and the girls went to waterside for their privacy and returned and sat again mute upon the
cart. Teige brought the pony to drink. The dog moved in a low crouching manner closer to the smells of meat. Before they were
ready to leave she was eating from Teige’s hand.

“They cannot be far now,” the old man said. He looked through the rain at the emptiness of the road.

“You think they—”

“I do.” The old man raised his head so his thin neck was extended, then he scratched at it as if deliberating a distance.
“We will find them today, Teige,” he said, and did not say aloud, “Or never.”

There was a still pause then in that eerie brown place of bogland and drizzle. The emptiness of the road made small their
hearts. They said nothing. Waterfowl plashed in the lake and moved the time forward until the father finally stood and they
left once more.

They drove on down through the townlands of Barsaile and Glean Mor and Cluain I Gulane. When they arrived in the village of
Cill Mhicil it was late afternoon of the fair day there. Polyps of dung lay cooling in the street. Bootless boys in brown
rags stood herding groups of two or three cattle while their fathers had adjourned elsewhere. The cattle were watchful and
skittish and young, and when the Foleys passed them they made small, panicked movements and had their sides tapped by the
boys’ sally rods. There were curt cries and sharp commands. In the yards, horses were tethered and raised their heads, dripping
drinking water, when the Foleys passed. Farther down the village, carts with old horses stood and the men eyed the strangers
furtively from beneath their caps. They studied the white pony and chewed in the hollow of their cheeks and awaited what trouble
might brew. They did not let their eyes meet those of the Foleys. They did not show any sign of welcome or wonder or even
of noticing that they were there. Instead, as if out of some inherited sense of distrust of anything they did not know, they
leaned against one of the eating houses there and looked at each other’s shoulders and waited.

Francis Foley walked up to them.

One of them thought he was going to be struck and took two quick steps back. Francis Foley was ragged and worn thin and wild
looking. The dirt of the road was creased in his face. When he went to speak he felt his lips blistered along the insides.

“I am looking for a man,” he said.

The group of four men heard him but said nothing. One of them offered a hint of a noise and a small nod.

“I am looking for my son,” Francis said to them, this time in a louder voice and taking a step closer. Behind him Teige stopped
the cart in the street. The men looked past the old man as though suddenly he were invisible. None of them wanted to speak,
preferring the comfort of feigned ignorance, until one with a screwed eye called out:

“Will you sell the pony?”

“What’s the matter with ye? Are ye deaf or stupid?” Francis said.

One of them looked down at his boots, another made a quick grin and grinned it away down the road the strangers had come.

“We’re neither,” the screwed eye said. “I’ll give you a price for the pony.”

“Have you seen a man and a woman walking down this road today?”

“We’ve seen many.”

The men murmured a sound that was not quite laughter. Their shoulders swayed with the signs of the day’s drinking upon them.

“My son and a woman. That’s who I’m seeking.”

“For some trouble, is it?” said the screwed eye.

“For no trouble. For his good. The last he saw me I was drowned.”

“And a sight cleaner then,” the eye said to his companions, who laughed.

“If you give me the price of the pony there, I’ll tell you,” he said.

“The pony is not for sale,” Francis said.

“I have a fine few laying pullets there and a
banbh,”
said the eye, and touched the peak of his cap sideways to obscure his other.

“God bless you, but you’re thicker than the floor of the cart.” Francis stepped up and elbowed past them, entering the eating
house at their back while they followed him, grinning and nudging as if about to witness a performance.

In the obscure light he could make out shapes of men there and
sticks and the outward thrust of their legs on the mud floor. A noise of spoons rattling in earthenware bowls and the smell
of potatoes with butter and milk met him.

“I am looking for a man and a woman,” he announced. “It is my son, and I am certain he came through here. Has anyone seen
him? He is with a woman and she is ailing, I’m told.”

The spoons paused. Amid the smells of cooked food rose the heated stench of farmers and their drovers. Some scratched themselves
in wait and unleashed the scent of old urine from their trousers. Francis heard their breathing labouring in the dark, but
none answered.

Finally a woman at the counter said: “There was a man with a woman passed through here no more than a few hours ago.”

“West?”

“Toward the ocean,” she said.

He could not even see her face. “Thank you,” he said. Then he was gone from there and called to Teige that Tomas was indeed
ahead of them not far and that they would catch him before dark if they hurried. Teige clucked and snapped the reins, and
Francis jogged ahead of them out the end of that village and into the light that was falling into the sea. They took the road
west toward Crioch, meaning “End,” along the open country of no tree or bush where the fields themselves were winter combed
by Atlantic breeze. It was a road Teige had travelled with the gypsies once before. It was the road that ran through the village
of Doonbeg and on to the curved strand of Kilkee. The white pony seemed to recognize it and opened her stride on the road
as if just ahead of her were the figure of her first love, the vanished gypsy boy Mario. She galloped now and raced next to
the old man so that he reached out and held on to the leathers and was sped on like that. The pony’s eyes were wide and showed
their whites; her mane fluttered in the breeze. Upon the cart the two small girls, Deirdre and Maeve, clung to each other.
The road flashed past. Hares in the field stopped dead and listened. The seabirds circled. Then, there it was.

A figure on the road.

But it was not Tomas. It was too tall.

Even knowing this, the father shouted out. He let go of the pony, and Teige reined her to a walk as the old man ran on, calling
out and
waving his arms. The figure that was like the figure of a giant stopped. It turned slowly, then, the way one might in a dream,
and Francis Foley and Teige saw at once that there on the road to Kilkee was the aged and burdened figure of Tomas, carrying
on his back the skeletal, fevered body of the woman Blath.

Tomas Foley had aged and was thin and weakened. The woman he carried on his back had shortened and curved him,
and though he put her down carefully on the side of the road, he could not stand up straight to meet his family. He had been
carrying her for so long that the skin across his shoulders was callused. When he turned to look at Teige and his father,
he was not sure if they were phantoms. He blinked beneath his fair curls and passed a hand across his brow.

“Tomas,” his father said, and then said no more, for he had stepped forward and embraced his son and his heart broke to feel
the thinness of him in his arms. They held each other and were still and wordless there in the road. Teige watched them and
the girls in the cart watched too and the dog turned its head. Then Tomas stepped back and let out a groan, and he held out
his hand to Teige and then clung to him.

“Teigey,” he said into the side of his brother’s neck, “I’m sorry.” They held each other tightly and shook with emotion. “I
meant to come back to you,” Tomas said, but did not release his hold. The sea sang down the cliffs to the west. Gulls buckled
in flight in the sky. The three Foleys did not move, as if afraid that any step would separate them again and this time forever.
They stood in the road. In a fable they might have remained so, transformed through the release of all their regret and suffering
into stones or petrified trees. They might even have chosen such a fate, for in a family that had journeyed so
much already none could now think of moving. They were still as the fields.

At last Francis Foley broke the spell. He went over and introduced himself to the woman Blath lying on the ground.

“You are the famous father,” she said to him, and she smiled weakly and he could see that she was beautiful and that her beauty
was ravaged through illness and fatigue. “He has spoken of you often.”

“You are welcome among us,” Francis said. “I hope he has not told you what a fool he had for a father.”

“Indeed he did,” said Blath. “But that father was drowned, you must be a new one.” She smiled again and there was in her expression
such a tenderness that Francis saw at once how she loved his son.

“That’s just what I am,” he said, “a new one.” And he was stopped from further speech for she started coughing then, and in
a swift movement he bent and picked her up and carried her to the cart.

They did not tell their stories then. They embraced again and looked at each other and stood back, and then Teige shouted
out cries of victory and threw his hands in the air.

“Tomas is back! Tomas is back!” he cried, and made the others laugh at his manner as he jumped up and punched at the air.
Tomas went over and climbed upon the cart; he told the O’Connor girls his name and they nodded slightly and Teige told him
they were Deirdre and Maeve.

“And this is still your gypsy pony?” Tomas said.

“It is,” his brother told him. “It surely is.”

“Finan and Finbar?” Tomas asked, but knew the moment their names reached the air that there was an answer already in their
absence.

“Later,” the father said. His eyes were wet. He made motions with his mouth before speaking as if afraid to dare the words.
“We are going to see our new home now.”

And Teige handed Tomas the reins and went ahead and walked with his father leading the pony forward.

This is the story that Teige and his father heard of what happened to Tomas. They did not hear all of it at once.
But some of it they heard that first night when the Foley cart had arrived at the seashore and Francis Foley had walked down
to the edge of the country and stood alone a long time with his face to the sea. They heard it when he returned to the small
fire Teige had built of sticks of ash and thin faggots scavenged from the fields nearby. They heard it while the wind played
and they sat close to each other and even the two girls stayed awake with the dog taking turns in their laps. Tomas sat with
the woman Blath lying curled and small beside him. As he told it, his hand sometimes travelled down the twist of her hair.
She lay, her eyes open all the time, and her face like worn vellum shadow-creased and burnished in the movement of the flames.
Tomas told them some of it that night, and stopped when it seemed the woman grew distressed or the fever in her made her moan
and her teeth jabber though they piled their coats on her. He told some of his story that night and more the night after and
again over each of the four nights they stayed there on the edge of the town of Kilkee.