The Fall of Light (29 page)

“He thanked me right well enough and asked me if I was passing back down the river to give ye word that he was not drowned.
He made me promise it. And that’s why I came.”

The pilot stopped, and Teige and his father and the two girls were about him like stones standing in a field.

“America?” Teige said.

“That’s what he said. America,” the pilot replied.

“We can go and get him back,” Teige said at last.

“We cannot,” his father said. His voice was old and tired; his head was anchored on his palm. “He is gone.”

The girls turned mutely and went to the straw bed they shared. The rash that was on their bodies for weeks climbed that night
into their cheeks. They cried and fretted and moaned in the dark, and Teige and Francis came to them and cooled their fevers
with what means they had. And the girls called them Mother and other soft names out of long ago and looked at them as though
they were from another world. Both girls were like one then and the fever rose in their bodies and they seemed to be burning
up from within until all the tragedy and loss and regret of their lives perished in conflagration and they arrived in a place
elsewhere and their eyes softened and they died.

This time the priest did not come at all. They buried the girls alongside Blath and left the shovels there
and walked away while blackbirds flew and landed. They set ablaze all clothes and bedding. The dog barked at the sparks spinning
in the air, where disease smoked and fumed and was vanquished. Francis folded into himself. He thought all endeavors now were
futile. For Death came for everything.

“Somewhere your mother is buried,” he told Teige. “I am sure of it.” And seeing him deep in such grief and resignation, Teige
did not dispute it and in his own heart partly believed it, too.

The spoiled summer passed on.

The boatman came and told them the potatoes had failed. The stalks had withered and the leaves blackened and the potatoes
crumbled in the hand. There were thousands unable to pay rent. By the shore when he was leaving, Teige asked him if there
were still visitors at the Van-deleur estate and the boatman shook his head and said they were all gone, there were none at
the house and it was closed up now Only Clancy and some of the workers were there. Teige asked the boatman to come again,
and to the man’s bashful mutter and sway he gave an
armful of their own potatoes, which were then undamaged. These the boatman placed tenderly as if infants in the boat. Then
he rowed out into the Shannon and was gone.

Teige and his father tended the potato field carefully then. They watched for signs of failure and rot. Francis stooped and
crawled between the furrows and turned each leaf and rubbed softly with thumb and forefinger. Once Teige thought he heard
him say prayers while he lay in the dirt. But he could not be sure, and his relation with his father now did not seem to allow
much dialogue. They lived on then like ghosts in the ruins of the old man’s dream. Francis’s eyes became dull and his skin
began to turn a papery white. He came and went from the tower at nights and seemed to age there faster than before. After
long sessions in the stars he would reemerge into the thin light of morning like one dazed or newly arrived on the earth,
fistfuls of his hair gone and his limbs weak and frail as a centenarian’s. Other than the words Teige thought he had heard
him say amidst the furrows, the father did not speak at all. He seemed to have passed beyond language, and little by little
it began to fade from him. He nodded and made small sounds when leaving the table and the food that Teige made for him, but
he did not say his son’s name. The old dream of finding a home for his family mocked him now, for there was only Teige left
and the island was suddenly large and empty and bare and the cries of the seabirds above it harsh and forlorn and beyond consolation.

All the rest of that summer they did not move to finish the house. Teige fished in the river and watched the pilots and fishermen
and sea captains and turfmen as they sailed past. Sometimes they passed close enough for him to call out to them, but he did
not do so, as though such communication would be a betrayal of some kind and his father would disapprove. He sat there and
watched and they watched him, the boy from the cursed family on the island of Saint Senan.

But later in the dark then Teige Foley sailed free of that place in his mind and found and reassembled his family. He lay
and imagined them and they appeared before him. Beginning always with his mother, he made of them a story no different from
all the others he had learned and told. To himself he told of them as if they were stars. In stories extravagant and magical
he imagined his mother still living. He followed her through various narrow escapes, moments of outrageous
hardship and fortuitous chance, always allowing her the slimmest hope so that she could survive and travel on down the winds
and bends of the long road that was leading to him. He saw his brother Tomas slip through the city of Limerick and walk out
the road to Cork, where there were crowds of those pale and skeletal moving. He imagined them, those gaunt figures with ghosthood
already immanent, their long thin arms holding cradled the bundle of their world, their hunger and frailty, the mewling of
their children, the ragged faded worn quality of their spirits as they journeyed homeless toward the impossible idea of home.
Teige imagined them and cold sweats surfaced on his body and he feared for Tomas then and wished the story would turn him
around and bring him back to the island. But the story continued on, nights and weeks and months after that, and was horrific
and relentless. Tomas saw men and women and children fall by the roadside. He saw Death move across the fields like a summer
shadow and bodies falling beneath it like ribs of hay at a scythe. He saw the wagons of corn escorted out of the country of
the starving, and the same wagons attacked by some without weapons, whose shrill shrieks and yellowed eyes made of them fierce
and pathetic clowns, waving their arms for food while they were shot to the ground. He saw mothers without milk press their
babies to their breasts and wail then to the heavens and suck on plants and flowers and grasses and anything they could find
in the futile hope of lactation. He saw children die and their fathers and mothers sit by them, waiting to join them while
coaches passed. On the road to Cork Tomas witnessed it all and in each story grew thinner himself, and was more indifferent
to his own survival. He tramped forward each night in Teige’s mind because he could not stop and because in some way the restless
journeying toward some impossible end was part of that family’s inheritance and would not and could not finish this side of
Death. And in truth this was what he was going to meet, for he could not knowingly bring it upon himself or sit still and
wait for it to come. At a place above Mallow, he came upon a hellish scene reeking and smoking where wild-looking bloodied
men scrambled about with knives, hacking and carving at the warm carcasses of three horses. These had been slain to stop them
from bringing away the corn. The horses’ heads were cast in forlorn, twisted posture in the dirt. Their flanks were
opened inexpertly in haste and their insides were spilled out and trod over as the men butchered and swayed in the foul air
and sought to bring away steaks. Flies buzzed there. A hundred crows cawed and darkly opened their wings in the field nearby
and were so many that they seemed like missals or Bibles unused and thrown from the sky. Tomas came upon the scene and voided
the nothings in his stomach. Two of the men paused and glanced at him and held their knives and were momentarily frozen with
shame, stunned like some caught in God’s eye. Then the moment passed, and they lowered their eyes from Tomas’s and bent and
hacked at the horses once more.

In Teige’s story Tomas saw the dead horses and thought of his youngest brother. In Teige’s story, Tomas’s heart wept then
as he remembered the times innocent ages since when he and his brothers had ridden horses and ponies in fields daisied and
green. Tomas remembered all their days and nights and weakened there on the roadside and did not think he could continue,
until sometime later a family came passing and the emaciated father asked him if he would carry one of their boys.

Tomas carried two. Without discourse, without nicety of introduction or comment of any kind, they left that scene where the
horses were denuded of even their tails and the crows pecked with impunity the glassy eyes. They travelled silent and with
graven, inconsolable expression and shouldered among many others of that kind into the city of Cork.

There Tomas walked along the dockside in scenes teeming with all humankind. The air was sharpened with men’s cries and commands
as families stood and jostled and bargained and bought passage across the ocean. Women wore grim, stoic expressions. Their
mouths were small and thin-lipped, as though food were a fading memory, and their children sat and lay curled on the ground
and made a low wailing that issued without effort. In the story that Teige told himself in the long nights on the island,
Tomas found work there on the docks loading chests and supplies on board tall ships that creaked on the changing tide. He
worked and was paid pennies and stayed in a cramped and crowded boardinghouse with others waiting to escape. And in four weeks
he bought passage for himself on a ship called
Liberty.
He stepped belowdecks for the first time in his life and as he went deeper
down into the ship found the daylight fractured and then gone altogether. He stumbled and reached for his way while the bosun’s
whistle sounded and men ran to and fro and commands were called out on the decks above him. He heard them hurrying about over
his head. At last then Tomas arrived in the quarters of the poor and sat amidst the huddled hundreds who stared through the
gloom and said nothing but coughed in the queer damp air of that place that was to be their home below the surface of the
sea.

Of the twins, Teige’s stories were less sure. He imagined Finbar in extravagant worlds of myriad and mortal dangers. He dreamed
pirates, raging armies, weird weathers of hurricane and typhoon, thick, suffocating snows of white goose feathers, huge floods
red as roses, tigers sabre-toothed and snarling, snakes, elephants, a whole terrain crawling with spiders, strange exotic
natives with pierced tongues who ate the skins of others. Mammoths, dragons, flocks of bloodsucking bats, mutilators, murderers,
thieves, and bounty hunters with skulls dangling and knocking like coconuts by their saddle’s side. All of these and more
populated Teige’s stories of Finbar and the gypsies. Of Finan the stories were less clear. He had killed a man and was gone
off
for contrition. He had become a healer, a layer-on of hands, or had joined up with a troupe of actors and performed in tragedies
Shakespearean and made all weep with the deep and potent veracity of his grief. He wore greasepaint and his eyes were darkened
hollows and nightly he was struck down and died and from such was his own soul briefly healed. Sometime when Teige could not
bear the tale or the vision he saw of his brothers’ afflictions, he summoned a land of lovely women. He closed his eyes on
the night and smelled and remembered scent of the room of Elizabeth and saw her multiplied a hundred times and standing naked
and tender and beautiful like flowers in a field. And for the remainder of that night then he did not leave that imagined
place but stayed with her and forgot the world of pain and allowed his brothers rest and peace.

And all this while, across the way, his father sat in Saint Senan’s tower and bowed his head and stared endlessly through
the telescope at the sky. He placed his eye to the glass and for hours did not move it away, and this, though the clouds did
not pass and there were no stars to be seen.

In truth by that time Finbar Foley had led the gypsies on the long walk south out of the snowy mountains
and bartered with what things they had and those they found for the timber that made new caravans. It took some time before
they were again ready and equipped to travel, but the pause was welcome to all.