The Fall of Light (23 page)

Francis Foley cried out. He cried out and waved his arms and was in danger of falling overboard. His sons did not know what
to do. Tomas shouted to him, but the old man kept it up and the girls shouted then too and the gulls rose off the shore and
wheeled and screamed and beat their wings in the sky above them. Francis shouted out a long, wordless sound of no language
that was greeting and announcement and victory. Then to the astonishment of all, he stepped out of the boat and made as though
he could walk on the surface of the water.

Tomas reached forward to save him but was too late.

He stepped but was only up to his waist in the water, for they were in the shallows now. And then Francis walked up ahead
of them out of the sea and was in his own mind a fabled discoverer arriving on shores untrammelled by the history of bitterness
and betrayal that was his country’s. He walked up upon the pebbles and slowly turned around to look at those coming in the
boat. He waded out to meet them and carried Blath in his arms. Teige and Tomas took one of the girls each upon their backs
and went back again for the small bundles of their things. By the time they had laid the last of them on the coarse sand,
the boatman had already turned the canoe and was rowing back toward the town.

They stood with slow comprehension. They had at last arrived at the place where they could live in safety and peace, and as
this realization
dawned Teige looked at Tomas and then smiled and laughed and his brother laughed too and the young girls ran about and skipped
on the sand.

Then the old monk appeared.

He was there before any of them had seen him coming and seemed to have dropped from the sky. He did not look a day older than
the last time Francis had seen him. He wore his brown cassock and his hands were concealed where they held each other inside
the sleeves. In the moments when Francis first saw him, he thought the monk an apparition of his own conjuring. He stared
at the monk and said nothing. Then he looked at the others to see that they too saw him. He felt lighthearted with their celebrations.
His long body shivered without sensation of cold. The monk’s eyes were upon his and seemed of a piercing blue. His bare head
was hairless and what grew at the sides of his temples was grey. When he spoke his voice was a warm, deep honey.

“Here you are at last,” the monk said.

The sound of his words made him real. Francis Foley’s mouth was agape.

“Yes, I can speak to you here. I knew you would come, but I did not think it would take so long.” The monk smiled and came
forward among them, and his hands appeared. “These are your family,” he said, arriving before the astonished old man and holding
out his hand to him in welcome. “I am very pleased to see you at last.” He stood smaller than all but the girls and reached
and took the hand of the man in his and shook it firmly. “Welcome,” he said to Francis, “you are all very welcome.”

The brothers stood with the girls where Blath lay supported against a rock on the shore. They were speechless. The small waves
lapped and dragged some pebbles back and forth in watery dance. Gulls arced overhead.

“Come,” the monk said then. “Let me help you. The place is not very much, but it is dry.”

And he gestured with his hand the way forward, and when they did not move he motioned again and led them himself up from the
shoreline and along a track in the grass. For a small and older man he was nimble on his feet and sprang forward at times
like one hurrying to
show a rainbow. And the Foleys followed him, the girls skipping in the windy exposure of the sloping island, Tomas carrying
as best he could the woman on his back, and Teige and his father loping behind. Happiness lit their faces. They passed up
across the island, taking the green track and startling hares that darted and zigzagged away. The whole of the island could
be seen then and the Shannon waters about it now grey, now blue, as the sun came and went in high, scudding cloud. The way
took them through a stile in a stone wall, past tangles of hedgerow and briar and entwined woodbine in early leaf and led
them to a tall, round tower of stone. Beside it were other small buildings, too.

“There were seven churches here,” the monk said cheerily over his shoulder as he strode on. “This is the place of Saint Senan,”
he called out. “It is an ancient site, from before the days of the Vikings,” he added. “Now, here. In here.”

They entered into the shadows of the stone building of one room where a table and stools stood. In the corner lay a bed of
straw.

“It need only be the beginning,” the monk said. The Foleys stood with slow comprehension. They looked at the stools as if
to see the figures of themselves sitting there, but it lay beyond their imagining. The monk allowed them their bewilderment
but added, “There are many stones, there can be other houses. And here, come, look.” He stepped outside again and this time
Francis Foley was near to him and the monk pulled on the old man’s ragged sleeve slightly and led him in through the doorway
of the tower as the others crowded behind like visitors to the House of Miracles.

And there in the centre, all gleam and polish and impossible perfection, stood the stolen telescope.

THREE

And so in the story of our family is explained how the Foleys came to live on the island called Scattery
in the estuary of the Shannon River. Sometimes the story goes no further. Sometimes you are left to surmise, to consider how
these people became yours, how your great-grandfather moved out of the stuff of fable, and how the threads of the story unwound
and brought it across the Atlantic Ocean. But if the teller is an old man maybe sitting in a diner in Mount Kisco, New York,
or speaking quietly in a corner of a living room when the relations are gathered after a funeral, the story spins seamlessly
on and those Foleys do not fade into the dark.

Within twelve hours the monk was gone. By some secret prearrangement the boatman came back and the holy man sailed from the
island when all were sleeping in the small light of the dawn. He left without explanation or farewell. He did not tell them
why he had come there or why leaving. He did not narrate how he had been waiting alone for years on the island and how he
had reasoned it a kind of penance between God and himself for sins of avarice and covetousness. He did not tell how his sojourn
was a kind of exile from the holy is-land
farther up the river, and that the appearance of Francis Foley there was a sign from above that he was forgiven and could
return home. All of this the Foleys would only gradually discover in time from the stories told of the monk in the town of
Kilrush. There, in time, they would learn of his arrival with the telescope and his taking the confession of the landlord
McKean and how he had bargained with him some portion of salvation for the rights to the island fields that were after all
Saint Senan’s. They would hear of this and other stories, and in time all the stories would mingle and join tales of the monk’s
cures and other miracles and they would come to think of him as a figure fallen from the skies. He would take on the same
unreality and magic as had the saint himself and become like the whispering wind in the rushes.

In the dawn when they woke, he was gone. Francis stooped out the low door in the stone house and knew it. He did not need
to walk down to the shore. He stood in the light drizzle with the birds of April flitting around him. He shielded his eyes
from brightness that was new to him, for the island had its own light and lay softly sometimes in gleaming opalescence. The
stillness was palpable. The simplicity of light and grass and birds and falling drizzle was all there was. And in that landscape
the innocence of the world was recaptured for him and was a thing
of
stone and earth and water. It was the first time in a thousand mornings that Francis Foley did not feel the need to move
onward. He stood and did nothing at all. He felt himself an old man and felt the regret and loss that he had caused and endured
on his way to that moment wash through him like the tide beyond. He breathed the air of the island as if each breath were
parcelled and gifted to him and might not long continue. He stood at the wall and opened his fingers upon it, the stones cold
and damp. Briefly he thought to say a prayer but did not. His sons were still sleeping. He watched over the river and the
fields for a long time and in that time saw that there was a white swan that seemed to linger there, paddling by the foreshore.

Later, when the drizzle had passed and the sky was creased in folds of light from under long sleeves of cloud, Teige and Tomas
woke to the sound of metal hitting stone. When they went outside they saw their father digging the monk’s little garden. He
turned over the ground with such ease, it seemed ground of no weight at all. Black
furrows were opened in straight lines as though drawn from above. He worked and did not look up. Rooks rose and alighted there
and the smaller birds came and went. The dog lay in the freshened earth and watched its new master. Tomas and Teige readied
another of the cabins fit for living. They found a low stone cabin where hay and potatoes and cabbages and onions were stored,
and another that may have been a stable in ages gone. They made a dry bed there, raised on timbers and facing the door. Outside
it, where the wall faced south across the river, Tomas built a seat roughly hewn with the monk’s ax, and in the afternoon
he carried Blath there wrapped in a blanket and she sat in the thin sunlight and looked out. She was weak and weighed less
than a figure of sticks, but she smiled at him and called him her fool. Deirdre and Maeve were all times at her side. They
brought her drinks of cool water from the well they had found. They combed her hair with their fingers and smoothed and brushed
out her blanket as though it were some faery raiment. In turn she seemed to have upon them an effect of release, for by the
end of that day their tongues were freed and they spoke and then chattered and sang.

So they began. Within two days they had begun to set the patterns of their life on that island. In one of the buildings Tomas
had found the monk’s fishing pole and line and brought it to the southern shore and pulled a silvered salmon from the river.
They cooked it over an open fire and the smells of the fish climbed the air. They set seed potatoes, the young girls bending
in the furrows and pushing them into the ground and the brothers forking upon them the mulch of seaweed and sand and earth.
Daily Teige and Tomas woke in the first thin wafer of light and like the boys of fairy tales hunted in the dawn fields for
hares. They teased and chased and ran and tripped over burrows and tumbled and sighted hares running. At such times the brothers
revisited some vanished or unlived part of their lives. The days of May climbed over them. There were high skies of blue with
brown cloud. In her seat by the front wall, Blath coughed less often and, though her cheeks were strangely flushed with circles
of red, in the evenings when Tomas came to her they could hear her laughter for the first time. He made her laugh. It was
as though the evidence of his love for her were continually surprising. As she recovered a frail health, her language grew
more robust. She strung curses and other assorted phrases of
colour at the crows that fringed the garden plot. The two girls delighted in these and giggled and skipped about chanting
in singsong the foul language while the birds lifted in the air. And perhaps it was by this same magic, the effect of words
spoken to them like a spell, that soon there came more and more birds, crows, magpies, thrushes, starlings and tits, cormorants,
oystercatchers, and such. And these flocked and flew over the island and darted and soared above the opened brown apron of
ground and chorused in a nexus of trilling punctuated only by the flat, accented tones of gaily cried Limerick curses.