The Fall of Light (22 page)

Tomas cupped his hands before his face and bit on his two thumbs. He stayed like that until his voice was steadied.

“When I saw her, she could no longer walk. She had to drag herself on the ground.

“The fool, she called me. ‘There’s my fool for love.’ Those were her words. And she lay in against me and the others stepped
away and left us so in that corner of the gaol where the light sometimes fell.

“She made me well. I wish with all my might I could have made
her so, too. But Farley had destroyed her. She was in and out of fevers then, agues, her blood froze. Sometimes her teeth
chattered so that I wedged my fingers in her mouth to hold her jaw. She recovered a day, then fell hysterical the next and
kicked at night robbers she saw coming in dreams to cut off her feet. I thought to myself she would die there. I thought,
She will die if she does not get outside this place again. And I thought of escape. As she could not walk, I carried her around
the great room of our gaol on my back. I made myself strong. In the dark I dreamed of every way to get out of there. The walls
were thick stone. The barred window was high, and even if the bars were gone, she could not climb to it. My mind knotted like
a cord with it. I thought all the day and every day and still could not think of a way to get her out of there. I spoke with
others who were there. Many were not guilty of more than small crimes. Some had come from the petty sessions in Ennis where
they said the gaol was three times filled and the stench of shit and fever hung like a brown cloud. There was a father and
son who had been convicted of killing a bullock out of hunger. They were being taken to Dublin and sent from there by ship
to Australia.

“We lived four months on rye bread and water. Then the bread itself was rationed. We were given half of what we had been.
We were told no reason. Some of the men grew wild and angry. Hunger made them fierce. Then, when the guards came to take a
Mrs. Doherty who had died, the prisoners rushed at them. In that,” Tomas said, and clicked his fingers, “the guards’ necks
were broken. Then we were all pushing forward like a wave and I lifted Blath and put her on my back and we raced forward down
the stone hall and one of the men had the guards’ keys and opened the great gates and there was pistols fired behind us. Some
fell. I did not look back. We made the wall. The daylight was soft to us and the air fresh and we were dizzy with it. We had
forgotten what air smelled like. But we pushed on. Then the outer gates were opened and we were pouring out of there with
the guards following. There were more shots and calls and screams. But I ran on and Blath crouched low on my back, like a
jockey, Teige,” he said, “eh? And there were many recaptured. There were. But we were a great crowd and they could not take
all of us and we scattered like insects
do from beneath a lifted stone. I made it to the river and we stayed there among the bushes until dark.

“In the night then I carried her away. I thought of you, Teige. I thought, Teigey thinks I am dead now. I must find him. But
Blath could not travel far and we were slow and had no food. The days passed us by. I could not go even to see if you were
there. I sent prayers for you. I came on the workings then where the men were put making the roads and I took work there so
as to have food. We slept in a cabin where the thatch was partial. I made the road above Newmarket, lifting stones and breaking
more of them. Then I thought, Teige is not there anymore. He is gone from there. You will never find him. Stay here now and
do this work and she might recover. I thought God might smile on me. And when that road was built there was another. And another.
And we lived that way and had enough to keep death away. Until a week or so ago. Then the work was stopped and we were sent
away. The hungry winter was over, the poor harvest of last year would not happen again, they said to us. Go back to your farms.
And in the cabin where we were I looked at Blath and she was coughing a thick, clotted stuff and I said to her, ‘Now maybe
we should go to the sea.’

” ‘The sea?’ she said. ‘My sweet fool.’

” ‘My father had wanted it long ago,’ I said to her, ‘and many say the air there cures the lungs.’ I did not tell her I wanted
to be sure that you were gone from there, Teige. I did not tell her I was afraid that she would die.

” ‘The sea,’ she said. ‘I have never seen the sea. Let’s go there.’

“And so we left and were on this road where you found us.”

He finished his tale, and his father and his youngest brother sat hunched beside him. It was dark. The sky was immense with
constellations and they glittered above them like things new. None of them spoke further. They looked away at the stars and
past the stars. Down at the end of the fields the sea turned softly, like a restless spirit come home at last.

The morning of the next day the Foleys left and crossed the narrow peninsula of the County Clare from the coast
of the Atlantic to the estuary of the Shannon River. Blath travelled on the cart between the two girls and lay wrapped in
blankets. The road was not smooth and they journeyed slowly now, conscious of each jarring motion from pothole and stone.
With the presence of the ailing woman the young girls seemed to find new connection to the world. She was not their mother,
but she resparked within them some filial response that had seemed perished. To soften the road, they took her head upon their
laps in turns. Then, on the road beyond Moyasta where the estuary appeared in mud and sand, they began without announcement
to sing her a song. It was a slow air and might have seemed more mournful if not for the sweetness of the girls’ voices, which
Teige and his father heard with some astonishment. They slowed the pony even more then and travelled rapt and lost in that
music and their own meditations and dreams. When the air ended the girls sang another. Rooks in the flat fields seemed to
quieten. Beyond the hedgerows a few thin cattle waited for drovers and fodder and hung their heads once more when the Foleys
were nothing but that passing song on the breeze. And so they went on, like a caravan of exhausted minstrels in motley browns
and greys: Francis, Teige, and Tomas all walking ahead and trying each in his own way to imagine a future that might repair
the past.

They arrived in the market town of Kilrush in the failing light. There had been a horse fair and the streets were filled with
its aftermath. Boys moved about with sticks and wore the air of men. Women disassembled wooden stalls on wheels and cried
out at cats, dogs, and children. A pony and trap came with speed and the flickering of a long whip as a youth of fifteen made
a show of recklessness and skill and galloped wildly past. Boys yahooed and ran after him. Some shabby genteel in ornate waistcoats
and ragged jackets posed like men deserving of their idleness and studied the crowd. Others, beggars of all description, moved
in broken file with hands out, offering prayers for
pennies or food. Those who had abandoned even this slumped by the roadside as the sun went down.

Francis Foley walked the pony and cart through them all. He walked with his head erect and his nostrils drawing hard on the
air as if to bolster a thin faith. It was over three years since he had left the monk. It was three years since he had seen
the map with the island sketched upon it, and in that time he had often wondered if he had imagined it or it had been a ruse
of the holy man’s to get him to leave the telescope. He wondered if the monk was dead. There were a dozen elements of chance
spinning like glass balls in his mind. He shook his head at them. He realized suddenly the full weight of hope that pressed
upon this moment. Here was to be their destination at last. Here was to be that home that would be theirs and for which he
had set out so long ago and all but destroyed the family for whom he wished it. He walked down the streets of Kilrush to see
if the future existed. He screwed his eyes tight and opened them again, and as he turned down Francis Street he kept his eyes
low on his opened and broken boots. He watched them take each step of the road. He watched how they swung up into the air
and fell again in that mindless way and how the soles flapped and the sores on his shins showed. He did not look up. He walked
down toward the banks of the river. The girls had stopped singing. His sons did not speak. If the island were not there, he
would will it into existence. He would rent the skies and call down new creation. He paced more slowly. He turned and brought
them along by the shoreline. He let go the reins of the pony and Teige took them. The old man did not look up. He drew in
the smell of that river that he knew now better than all the smells of his lifetime. The road beneath his feet turned to mud
and sand, and at last he stopped. His head was bowed as before God.

“Tell me what you see,” he said.

The heaving of his breath and a little river breeze made uncertain his words.

“Tell me what you can see, boys,” he said again.

They looked. The dog came from the cart and stood at their feet.

“There is an island,” Teige told his father. “There is a green island.”

They sailed to that island the next morning in a narrow, canoelike boat that was made of canvas and coated in
pitch. The boatman was a thin fellow with light gait who rode the rise and fall of the waves like a cork and kept his eyes
on the horizon as though it were the drawn limit of the world. They were such a scene. Blath had to be carried on, and her
boarding in the bobbing waters by the little jetty was itself an adventure. The two young girls had never been on the sea.
When they understood what was to happen, they shook like paper dolls in the breeze and had to be cajoled and lifted by the
brothers, during which they came more vividly alive and boarded the boat squealing and wriggling and kicking. It was only
when they were aboard and the dog jumped to join them that they calmed and looked about and marvelled at the water over the
side. Francis Foley had bartered with the boatman and left to him the pony and cart until such time as the old man could come
and pay for the ferrying and reclaim what was theirs. The boatman was not much inclined to conversation. He shook his head
at things he said only to himself. There were fragments muttered, disagreements, but to those listening there were only bits
of language, phrases clipped short and left like the scissored lines of disparate letters.

“Iniscathaig? Scattery?” he had said, and nodded. Then, as he stood back and watched them lift Blath aboard, he had added,
“Not that I believe it… oh no. Ha! Blessings and curses, says he, and that’s that.… Saint Senan himself never and—” He stopped
abruptly then and said no more, and they were no more enlightened as he dipped oars and pushed off.

So, in one canoe then, with Teige looking backward at where the white pony was tethered on the dock, they sailed out into
the swift current of the river. What had seemed flat slow murky water from the land soon became a slapping tide where the
sea met the Shannon. They tossed upon it like a thing of little substance, and the two brothers thought of the last time they
had seen that river with their father. Francis himself was standing in the bow. He knew that he was a man who would not drown.
The day was cold and a wind cut across them
as they pitched forward. For a time the island seemed to get no closer, though the boatman worked hard with his oars and kept
his eyes fixed on the destination ahead. Still the island lingered there before them. It appeared for a time as though the
current were uncrossable, that though they laboured they would never arrive and were held there in midwater in a vision at
once tantalizing and purgatorial. The canoe lay low in the river. Water splashed and wet the girls and they cried out with
glee and Blath held her arms around them. The boatman talked words to the fishes that sped beneath them and rowed on. Beyond
the island, the coastline of the County Kerry seemed like another country. None of them considered it, so bound were they
now on this small green place that Francis Foley had dreamed. Then, as though they had passed through an invisible portal
in the tide, suddenly they were near enough to see the gulls walking on the pebbles of the shore.