The Fall of Light (28 page)

Francis Foley came out of the cabin into the spoiled daylight.

“Now he comes,” he said, and scowled and took from the doorside his stick and walked brusquely ahead of Teige toward the shore.

The rain muddied the way. Francis tramped along it and swung and beat at the furze randomly, scattering petals of yellow.
At the place where the shore shelved off and there was a small drop to the sand, he stopped and watched the boat coming. The
priest could be seen clearly now He was a thin figure with a wide-brimmed black hat. His nose was sharp and this combined
with the prominent narrow edge of his chin to lend his face the appearance of having been pressed in from either side. Clutched
at his chest was the Bible. Beside him in the boat sat another, a younger man also in black whose head was hatless and whose
cheeks were polished a purplish hue by the rain. The boat bobbed in the shallow water. Then this boatman whom the Foleys had
not seen before stepped out in the small waves and offered his back and the angular priest stood and climbed onto it and was
carried so onto the sand. The younger priest did not wait for this transport but paddled across and kicked water from his
shoes. They stood then and the Foleys walked down to meet them.

“I am Father Singleton,” said the priest. “Show me to the deceased.”

He raised the Bible slightly at his chest and made as if to hasten on with his business. But Francis Foley stood.

“Come on,” said the priest. “What is the matter? Do you understand me? The deceased. The dead.”

His tone was exasperated and sharp, and in his eyes was a silvery scorn.

“What is the matter with this man?” he said, and looked to Teige. “You. Do you understand? Lead us. We must hurry before the
tide turns. We have other matters. Father Boland, can you?”

The younger priest looked at them and made quiver his lips as if uncertain whether to smile. When he spoke his voice was soft
as a girl’s.

“We are here for the burial. There is a woman who died.”

The old man stood and he was appalled at them and felt a riot gather in his blood. The rain dripped off the priest’s hat.
He sniffled.

“Are you Christians?” he snapped then. “Do you know this is a holy island?”

“We do,” Francis said at last, and stepped forward and was now not a yard from the priest and could smell his dinner off him.

“Do you know it is the island of Saint Senan, and that he decreed that no woman was to set foot on it? Do you know that?”
He paused and looked and Francis Foley did not move an inch and the priest’s ire raised a purplish vein in his forehead. “And
what kind of woman was she? Will you answer that?” he said. “Because I know. I know what she was. You see. Nothing is hidden,
remember that, if you are Christians. Have you other women here?” The priest’s sharp features were raised and he let his righteousness
and judgement be seen and felt by them and was awaiting some demeanour of reverence and contrition when Francis Foley stepped
quickly forward and pushed him back in the chest.

“Go away!”

“What? Stop!”

He was pushed again and he staggered back two steps and a fringe of raindrops scattered from his hat.

“Are you defying the word of God?” he shouted. “What are you that you can face damnation?”

“Go away! Get back in the boat! We don’t want you!” Francis swung the stick now and came forward with it, and the priests
retreated, the younger one hurrying back into the water and his superior raising up the Bible like a weapon or a shield.

“Have you other women here?” he cried out.

Then a stone flew through the air and splashed in the water beside him. Then another, and another. They hailed from the higher
ground where Tomas was standing now, bending and lifting and firing. The priest retreated. The boatman was in his boat. The
waves lapped at the priest’s shoes and he lifted his feet and put them back down again in the water, vainly trying to outstep
the tide. The stones whizzed and
plopped and the priest raised and brandished the Bible and his hat spun off and he reached for it and lost his nerve as the
stones yet flew through the rain.

“You’ll be cursed,” he said. “You’ll all be cursed here. This is a holy island!” A stone clipped at his shoulder and he yelled
out and waded quickly backward and climbed into the boat. The hat turned and tumbled in the waves. The boatman rowed them
away then.

Teige turned to look up at Tomas. He was standing behind them on the small bluff, his arms out by his sides. His face ran
with the rain, his shirt was marked with mud and blood, and he looked risen from some nether region where he had been wrestling
with furies.

“Tomas,” Teige called out to him, but the brother did not respond or look at him and went off then running through the bushes.

“Come on. We must bury her now,” the father said.

The two of them returned up the island. The sky darkened further, the spillage of rain from the heavens a portent now and
making vanish the mainland. They seemed sealed there and moved as if imprisoned in a dream of desperate business. They came
to the cabin and took shovel and iron bar and then crossed over by the wiry craze of the blackthorn ditch and into the Field
of the Dead. There were tombstones at every tilt and slant and others fallen and embedded now in grass the hares dunged and
burrowed and made their own. There were sea captains and boat pilots and fishers and their wives, some from centuries since
forgotten whose names if once carved were now erased by the sea wind. There were many children, doomed weak things who perished
from every ailment and disease. All lay silent now in the falling rain as Francis and Teige uncovered a place in the brown
earth for Blath. They worked without words. They did not try to blunt the sorrow with any meaning or purpose or to reconcile
inequities. They dug the hole. Then they went back and Francis told the girls to step outside and wait, and he took two of
the cloths they had and with Teige’s help wound them about the body of the dead. These he tied then with cords of hay rope.
They had no timber for a coffin.

“I will go and tell Tomas,” Teige said.

“He knows. Leave him,” his father told him.

So the two of them came out then and ungainly bore the corpse to the graveside. The two girls followed with arms crossed and
eyes far
away, and behind them the dog. The rain fell. They trod anew the ancient path in the grass and made mud along it. The brown
hole in the ground appeared shockingly, and was like a rent in a green garment otherwise perfect. When they were beside it,
Francis took the body in his arms alone and bent down and knelt with her and then climbed down the side and was then in the
hole itself, where he lowered her gently to the clay. He stood so a moment and looked upon her there. Then he climbed out
and scanned about for sign of Tomas but could find none. He waited. There the girls sat in the dampness, their coughing soft
and continual.

“God bless her,” Teige said.

But his father said nothing and after a moment bent and picked up the shovel and pitched the earth in upon her, and shovelled
at the small mound faster and faster until the hole was made up to the level of the grass once more. Then he raised the shovel
above his head and beat and beat on the grave with it, and tramped on the fresh earth and beat some more, and was still doing
so when the others left him and walked away in the rain.

In the days following, the Foleys did not see Tomas at all. He did not visit the cabin or the grave. The
weather was still broken and the island hung in mist and drizzle and the light was veiled. The girls, Deirdre and Maeve, mute
and hollow-faced, went off about the fields and gathered flowering boughs and branches and wildflowers and brought these to
the bare grave each day. Teige rode the white pony and looked for his brother but often imagined that, seeing him approach,
Tomas had hidden down or run off and did not want to be seen again. And after a time Teige stopped and let the pony graze
and let his own mind leave the island and travel across the river and up over the slates of the roof to find his way to the
bedroom of Elizabeth. He sought for her image amidst the desolation and grief and loneliness
that weighed there and wondered how long he must wait before he could return. For no reason he could name, he avoided his
father then. And the old man seemed to do likewise. They were separate as stars, and as silent. The house that was almost
built lay untouched down near the shore.

Then one night when Francis Foley had disappeared to the tower and his telescope, Tomas came into the cabin. The girls were
sleeping a jagged sleep of sharp coughs. Teige was sitting in the corner, mending the fishing line. He started when he saw
his older brother, for Tomas was returned to the figure they had met on the road. The ghost of dead love harboured in his
eyes. A ragged beard climbed his cheeks. Teige stood and held out his hand to him, but Tomas was looking at the place empty
now where last he had seen his wife.

“Tomas, sit down, you are wet through. Here, take my shirt.”

Tomas stepped softly past him and bent down and laid his hand on the shoulder of first one and then the other of the sleeping
girls.

“They were good to her,” he said. He stayed bent low there and phantoms sojourned the while and he seemed to see them and
watch the brief invisible happiness of his life take ephemeral form and then vanish anew.

He stood and looked at his brother.

“Maybe it’s true,” he said. “Maybe we are all cursed.”

“You know it’s not. Here, my shirt. I have another one.”

The shirt was pressed in Tomas’s fingers and he held it and smiled sadly.

“Teige,” he said. “Teige.” He said the name with slow weight, as though the sound of it were somehow entering him then, as
if he were aware there was some conjuring in names themselves. It was as if he knew that by saying it so, he could both take
the spirit of his brother inside him and at the same time express outward some of the love that lay all steeped and banked
and inarticulate within him. He lifted his hand and held Teige by the shoulder. He gripped him like that and did not move
and did not speak, and in both of them the moment sank deep like some aureate treasure, to be found and fingered years later.

Abruptly Tomas turned then and went out the door and Teige came out after him and called out to him to stay. They were in
the muddied grass yard. Tomas was striding away. His brother called out to him, for
Teige felt the purposefulness of Tomas’s stride and knew there was finality about it.

“Tomas, where are you going? Stop.”

The elder brother was already out by the track that led down toward the unfinished house and the shore. Teige ran behind him
in the night.

“Where are you going?”

A voice flew back out of the dark.

“Leave me, Teige. Go back.”

“No.”

“Leave me!”

“I won’t.”

“Tomas? Tomas?” The father’s voice boomed then from the tower. Then Francis Foley had come out into the night, and as he approached,
Teige had reached and grabbed the arm of his brother, who shook him roughly off and then ran off.

“Teige, Tomas?” The old man saw the back of his eldest son as he flew into the dark. He blew and sucked at the air. “Where
is he going? What did he say?”

“I don’t know He’s going somewhere… he’s…”

“Tomas?” the old man shouted. “Tomas!” he shouted the name again, and then took off and trotted and ran after it and Teige
after him. The father ran with ungainly stride. He bumped and swayed. He ran past the furze bushes that were speckled with
gleam in the nothing of light. He ran and found uneven footing and plunged into briars and waved his arms at them and flayed
the skin and felt blood rise and sting. He cursed the world and the darkness and the bushes. Then he called his son’s name
again and got up and ran on and Teige beside him. They ran down the dark path and heard the sea grow louder and heard the
noise of its breaking on the small stones. Teige shouted the name of his brother then, too. They stood there on the night
shore and swung about and looked like ones that had lost their shadows. They glanced sharply right and left along the sand
and the stones. They hurried a few paces along and arrested and came back again, and cried his name that the soft night swallowed
and took within its deeps like the sea.

“What did he say? What did he say to you?”

Teige saw his father’s eyes wide and near and felt the sour desperation of his breath.

“He said nothing. He came and looked at the girls sleeping,” he said. “He said nothing else. Then he just turned and went
off.”

The old man bowed his head, then he looked out at the water, and he and Teige stood there a long time, seeing nothing but
the passing motion of the tide darkly hooded with unstarred sky.

They did not see Tomas again after that. Teige rode all corners of the island in the light of the next day but could find
no trace of him. He rode and searched, although in some part of him he already knew that his brother was no longer there.
His searching grew aimless and petered off in fields where the hares stood and watched him and then ran into cover where none
appeared possible. It rained a soft rain that was neither one weather nor the other, but a malady of season that lingered
without remedy. It did not seem summertime but for the long pale light of evening. A boat came to the island one afternoon
and a river pilot stepped out and brought news of Tomas. He said he had come because he had given his word he would. He said
it was the queerest thing. He said he had been sailing down to Limerick in the dawn light, leading in one of the cargo boats,
and hadn’t he seen the man swimming. He had thought him a seal at first. He’d thought to bat him with the oar, he said. But
he’d pulled him on board and the man told him his name was Tomas Foley and would he take him to Limerick because he was on
his way to America. The river pilot said he took him to be one evicted or otherwise fugitive, but the man was not inclined
to talk, he said, and they sailed on down to Limerick and arrived there as the morning came up. This Tomas got out, the pilot
told them, and his clothes still wet and cold, and a second shirt tied skirtlike about his waist.