The Fall of Light (24 page)

For his own part, in those early days, Francis Foley lived like a monk devoted to the making of their home. When the garden
was dug, he turned to the building of a cottage. He walked the island and considered all possible sites, then settled on a
ridge of ground on the northern shore near where the boatman had landed and where they could see the town of Kilrush across
the river. One week he made a wooden barrow with rough wheels. The next he was carting stones in it. He did not tell his sons
what he was doing, he did not ask for their help. He simply went ahead like one blinded by vision and they watched him and
understood and were then there at his side. They made a cottage of dry stone walls three feet thick. The flesh of their hands
dried and hardened in that handling and their fingers became crooked and locked in tight curvature like the limbs of the blackthorn.
Their shoulders broadened, their arms hung out farther to the side so that even when free of stones the three Foleys seemed
to bear burdens. The cottage rose off the ground slowly. Canoes carrying turf sailed past on the way to Limerick. Ferry boats
and cargo ships trafficked in the estuary, but to them all Francis Foley turned his back. He did not want to deal with the
outside world and for a time was able to ignore it. Then one afternoon when they were setting a flagstone as a lintel above
the room door, the thin boatman appeared before them.

“Indeed yes, says he,” he said, and moved from side to side on his narrow legs as though sailing the floor.

“God bless you,” Tomas said to him after waiting for his father to speak.

“Indeed and yes.” He looked at the walls they had made and grinned a slanted grin. He seemed to have nothing more to say.

“What news have you?” Tomas asked him.

The boatman scratched. His head was lumpish like a turnip and grizzled in patches of thin beard like scurf. His eyes rolled
about in the motionlessness of the building. “No, but,” he said. “Only that, and not that… devil a care I give, but…”

“Yes?”

“I brought the pony.”

Teige dropped the stone he was holding and was out the doorway then before them. He ran down to the shore to where the horse
was tethered to a large lump of wood. She had swum across the river behind the boat on a long line, and her mane was matted
and her flanks dripping. As Teige ran the pony sensed that it was he and stirred and hoofed at the sand and turned about there.
He freed her in a moment and she whinnied and was skittish and puzzled and briefly did not realize that she was no longer
tied. He let her have the scent of him and ran his hand firmly along the side of her, and then, while the others had come
out to see, Teige swung himself onto her back. The motion of it was so fluid and easy, it seemed almost as if some inverse
gravity were in operation or the upward pull of his body were part of a magnetic dynamism between horse and man. He held to
her mane and leaned down and seemed to the others to speak soft commands then, for without an apparent action of his heels
or thighs, the pony took off. She galloped down the small rim of sand and then up across the bank and onto the uneven green
of the low field there, and then pony and rider were gone off away around the grassy domain of that island. The others watched
without a word until they were gone. The boatman swayed.

“Teige can ride her, eh?” Tomas said.

His father nodded and stood there and looked at the horizon empty now.

“We need more horses,” he said then.

The boatman did not seem to understand the words were addressed to him. He was still looking at the place where Teige had
ridden away.

“We need other things, too,” Francis said. “Tools, seeds. We can have cattle here in time.” He turned to face the fellow,
and the man’s eyes rolled and slipped from side to side like glass balls upon a tide. “We have no money.”

The boatman scratched himself hard.

“Ask if there is one who needs horses broken,” the old man said to him. “Teige can tame anything and make it run fast as wind.
You have seen it. That pony was wild, now she would jump the cliffs for him. He can do it. If there is one who wants a horse
for a race, tell them Teige Foley is over on the island. Will you do that?”

The man shook himself as though bestirring flies.

“If that, not that… ,” he muttered with low chin. “But Clancy, Clancy, Clancy there might says he and…” He stopped, unwound
or overwound.

A pause grew.

“And?”

The man trembled as if some charge passed through him, then he said:

“I will.”

Evenings then, when the work was over and their arms ached and their shoulders were stretched and curved
and tight with the effort of moving stones, Teige took the pony and rode her off about the island alone. He rode as the light
fell into the water and a smudge of smoke hung above the town across the river and soon blended into the sky, crepuscular
and dim with the appearance of a thing tarnished. He rode in no particular direction, trotting the pony along the shore or
out across the fields they had not named yet. He rode as the stars came out in the heavens above him and glittered and made
stars in the water too and silvered the grass and made soft, silken silhouettes of the rabbits that stood erect in surprise.
The pony was become almost too small for him, but she still bore him nonetheless with ease and could stride out charging into
the half-light, the thrumming of her hooves the only sound. They travelled back and forth that small territory then. Teige
stopped her sometimes on the far shore and watched the hills of Kerry slip into the folds of the dark. Other times he turned
her into
the shelter of a hedgerow and she stood amidst the sweet breezes of blackberry blossom and lifted her head and her breath
hawed and her sides steamed like one becoming vapour. And in that solitude and stillness, Teige studied the sky and thought
of all that was and had been. He thought of his brothers gone and wondered in the vastness of space where. He thought of Finbar
and his girl from the sea, how he had become almost a gypsy before Teige’s eyes. He thought too of Finan, who was more mysterious
and dark and whose vanishing seemed a part of his character or a thing foreordained. To each he sent mute, wordless missives
until the regret tangled in his chest and he had to dismount and squat down in the grass as though about to void himself.
He lay then in the May night.

And he thought of his mother.

He had tried to bury her several times now. He had been caught too often by the suddenness of realization that she was gone.
It always stole up on him. Time and again he had been on the road or engaged in some work and had stopped briefly to draw
breath and then, suddenly, he would think of her and swiftly his spirit would collapse in his chest like a bird made of paper.
He would feel the crush of it and gasp. It was as if each time then she died anew, as if by some trick of time and memory
she had come alive again and was not with him but only elsewhere and their meeting again was not far distant. She grew near
in his mind. The scent of her was in his nostrils. The warmth of her where his head had lain came over him. He heard her tell
him stories beneath a darkening summer sky. He asked her always of Virgo, and as she spoke her eyes were proud and deep and
lovely. Virgo lies on her back with her feet toward the east, she told him. There are stars scattered over her shoulders like
jewels, she said.

At last then he had tried to build stone walls of coldness about his heart. He had said to himself out loud, “She’s gone,
she’s dead, you’ll not see her again.” He had said it in darkness and light, in wind and rain, through all seasons. He had
tried to consider it as a fact like winter and so move beyond the continuance of this rhythm of grief. He had chastised himself
for a soft fool and cursed like his elder brother and told himself not to think of her again.

But she was still there.

He lay in the cool damp of the night grass and the pony stood attentive
beside him. The stars swung westward and were like a map of man’s yearning. When at last Teige rose, the pony whinnied. She
nodded her head thrice. He slipped up onto her and rode slowly back in a wide circle toward the round tower and the stone
cabins where the others were sleeping. When he reached them, he dismounted and went and fetched a bucket of water for the
pony and led her into the small paddock, where he bade her good night. Then, as he turned back to the little cluster of buildings
behind him, he saw an eye of light glistening from the doorway of the tower. He stopped and waited. The eye moved and he saw
the starlight play off it once again. Then he knew that it was his father, and that there while the others were sleeping,
through the passing of time and while he should have been resting, Francis Foley was engaged in the one activity that to him
made clear sense of the world. He was looking at the stars through the telescope and seeing in the heavens revealed, behind
the myriad and seeming chaos of those specks of light, a shape full of meaning.

Teige watched a few minutes as the glass eye moved and reflected the sky. Then he slipped into the cabin and lay to sleep.

Some days later the boatman returned and brought the news that Clancy did indeed have horses for breaking.
He took Teige with him then and rowed back across the river, and Tomas and his father stood upon the top of the wall of the
cottage they were building and watched. The narrow black boat slipped away in soft rain and the men fell back to their work
wordless and somehow burdened with apprehension. That river had already run so through the family’s life that they did not
trust Teige’s crossing would lead to happiness. Still, Francis had decided he had to go. Gulls flew like ragged pieces of
old cloth in the rainy sky. Then it poured down and screened the country from view and was as if some portion of the known
world had been erased.
The two Foleys stayed working, lifting stones up the narrow ladder while the mud floors of the cottage shell puddled below
them.

When he reached Kilrush, Teige too felt the air of apprehension. Whether he had brought it with him or it existed like a thing
tangible in the very atmosphere, he could not say. The town was more tired and lifeless than when he was last there. The rain
stopped. Those in the streets had a worn and ragged deportment. Wan faces turned to watch him with eyes enlarged and red-rimmed.
They were like heads that floated. A beggar boy of no more than ten scurried over to him. He had been the first of a small
assemblage to spot Teige and came to him ahead of the others, who even then began to drift over.

“A penny, God bless you. A penny.”

The boy’s face was browned and stained about the mouth. His nostrils were yellow crusted.

“I have no money,” Teige said, and tried to walk past him, but the boy, accustomed to first refusals, trotted alongside, begging.
By now the others, a mixture of young and old in shawls, wraps, tattered once scarlet petticoats, and apparel that had no
name but made its owner resemble a rotund bundle on legs, had come around him. There was a blind woman without legs seated
in a small cart, a man wheeling her. A flurry of prayers sounded. The beggars cried out a litany of ailments, and Teige felt
his jacket tugged.

“I have nothing,” he said more loudly, still trying to move ahead of them. But the beggars were hardened to such and moved
as in a promenade performance, their hands wavering and clutching, their brows furrowed and the urgency of their prayers and
promises growing with each step. Paternosters and Ave Marias flew about and were strangely incongruous there like fine embroidery.
Teige was not indisposed to the beggars. But the face of the boy troubled him and was like some piece of himself. He wanted
to help him and run away from him at the same time. Over and again he told them that he had nothing, but the words carried
no weight. The faces floated there before him until at last Teige tried to shake himself free and in so doing stepped out
of his jacket and left them holding it as he hurried up the street.

Clancy, as it transpired, was not the owner of the horses to be broken. They belonged to one of the landlord Vandeleurs. Clancy
was a man in their employ, a short, round fellow with whiskers and broad,
curving eyebrows. When Teige met him in the store on Francis Street where the boatman had told him to go, Clancy spat on the
ground and asked him if it was true he could make any horse run.