The Fall of Light (38 page)

“You can stay on the island,” he said, and when the man said nothing, Teige touched him briefly on the shoulder and walked
down before him to where the boat lay on the water.

Their name was MacMahon but had through use and familiarity become Mac, and then, to distinguish them from the multitudes
thereabouts with that appellation, the BoatMacs. They were a mute congregation of souls and seemed sundered from the world,
with only the strange music of their name to recall their origin. Nanna BoatMac, Livy BoatMac, Tibby, Tabby, Oonee, Aggee,
Gra, Bu, Prun, and the others that their father, BoatMac himself, had christened. Now they looked at Teige with that same
expression of mistrust and guilt and shame that had become habitual in that time. They did not speak out. They slumped and
endeavoured to make themselves seem a burden smaller than they were. One of the children shivered. They were cold and wet,
and the cold wetness of them translated itself into the morning and lent them the air of travellers from the Country of the
Drowned. Their hair was matted, their eyes stinging. Sores had opened at the corners of the lips of two of the girls, and
these they had torn with their nails until they looked the awful image of some caricature of down-mouthed Desolation. Teige
stood before them and did not know what to say. He reached out his hand to one of the small girls, and she pulled back. Gulls
that had followed the boat screamed in the air. The dog that stood on the bluff waited. Slow rain began.

Teige turned to BoatMac.

“You are all welcome,” he said. “Tell them to come.”

The man nodded and shook in himself and swayed. Then he stepped down into the water and took the first of his daughters in
his arms and bore her over and placed her like a proven treasure on the sand. While he did this with each of the girls, his
sons tumbled out. Slim splashers, freckle-faces, weedy-armed fellows in torn shirts and rags of trouser, they came onto the
island and variously spat and
kicked at the sand and looked as if considering its worth. When they were all ashore—the grandmother borne on the boatman’s
back in a vision that crumpled Teige’s heart like paper—they stood about in a little cluster and did not move as the rain
mizzled upon them. They were like climbers arrived on the thin ledge of hope and dared not budge. The boatman coughed. Gulls
rose and fell again. Waves broke. At last Teige told them to come with him and see the places where they could stay. He walked
off a few paces, but the BoatMacs remained behind.

“Hereabouts,” the father called, “hereabouts is fine.”

“What do you mean?”

The man twisted. His shoulders turned like a sail.

“Hereabouts,” he said.

“There are ruins up here, there is the house we were making. It is not finished, but—”

“Hereabouts,” was all BoatMac said. Then he made a sudden nodding and raised the palm of his hand and turned and told some
of the boys to go off and find timber and they ran like hares and were gone. By night there was a mound of materials gathered
on the shore. When the darkness fell, the girls and the two sisters and the grandmother got back aboard the boat. While the
boys and their father slept on the shore, the women slept on the water, believing the island still held a curse for any woman
that spent the night there. The following morning the boatman and his sons set about building a long platform along the shore.
It was a crude, raftlike structure loosely moored with rope lashings. But it sufficed. The sisters and the tiny grandmother
and the daughters all came onto the island by day. The little old woman set herself on the rocks and stitched at a shirt.
The boatman’s short, sturdy wife helped like a man, while her sister sat disconsolate with empty eyes and hands limp in her
lap. The younger girls recovered their energies quickly. They ran about and went searching for mussels and periwinkles beneath
the swooping and crying of the seabirds. They gathered mounds of seaweed. When boats passed up the Shannon River, the two
youngest of them yahooed and waved their arms like the happily shipwrecked, heedless of loss and tragedy. By the second evening
the women and the girls slept on the platform. By the third it had already begun to resemble
a home. Teige worked with the boatman to make three-legged stools, and a hunk of driftwood became their salty table. The women
thanked him graciously. The grandmother, shrunken and curved like one rescued from depths, worked without end at her stitching.
She rocked as she did so and did not stop even when she told Teige he was their saviour. Her eyes followed him a long moment,
but she said no more.

In the week that followed, the house raft was roofed with stitchings of canvas and other cloths the BoatMacs had with them.
The seaweed the girls gathered was mounded at a place nearby where they would dig a garden. Soon the home was done and was
a weird raggle-taggle assemblage of blankets and sacking and twisted sticks of blackthorn and sally bush and rods of hazel
and bags of goose and gannet and other feathers, and all adorned with thrown clusters of wildflowers the girls gathered. It
made an image at once homely and desperate and could seem a place inventive and bohemian, or what it was, the frail, decrepit,
and tumbledown remnant of a family ruined.

Francis Foley did not come down to meet the MacMahons. On the first evening Teige told him they had arrived. The old man paused
briefly and studied the steam that rose off his broth. Swirls of vapour ascended and vanished. Then he made an all but imperceptible
nod and ate on.

The season turned. Rains fell all day and night and made swollen the tide. The Shannon waters ran more swiftly and in the
starless, moonless dark the home of the BoatMacs creaked and moaned and threatened to break loose. But it did not. The father
and his sons would not let it, plunging in the river, hanging on to the raft house, making new lashings with knotted ropes
while on the platform the girls huddled against their mother and grandmother and attended their doom like those fabled in
the antique times of the Flood. Still they survived. Then in the winter of that year, gales came down from Iceland and carried
within their force fierce, flintlike showers of hail. These streaked out of white grey skies and were multitudinous as arrows
flighted from above. They pierced the flesh with ice. No man could raise his face. Borne on the power of the frozen winds,
they seemed to foretell the end of all season and be precursors of some new age, boreal
and quiescent. In such weathers the raft house of the BoatMacs was daily destroyed and rebuilt. The rough tenting of their
shelter took off and flew across the water. Stones were brought from farther down the shoreline and built like walls along
the wooden flooring. The family sat and hung on to what they possessed and still would not move up to the safety of the island
buildings. The gales continued. Teige came and went and offered what help he could, and through the continued inclemency of
weather all that winter, the family of the boatman’s became his. For though the gales and hails and sleets and storms remained
brutal through February and on into the month of March, the BoatMacs did not despair. They did not curse their misfortune
or decide to return to the mainland. Even the sister of the boatman’s wife, who had buried her husband and her children, remained
stoic and crouched in the bitter season as if in quiet assent, as if such were a kind of purgation.

And so they endured.

A spring arrived. Birds, starlings, sparrows, golden orioles, thrushes, chats, swallows, corncrakes, and cuckoos flew and
sung. The skies were a light blue and the breeze a mild and soft gentling. On those days the boatman took by turn one of his
sons and went off and ferried passengers from the town of Kilrush down the river, or acted as pilot for the bigger boats that
sought to navigate the waters called the Scattery Roads on their way to dock at Limerick. He returned in the evenings and
brought a basket of fish, some of which were always carried to the table of Teige and his father. So the Boat-Macs lived on
there, and their moored raft house became more secure still, and in the daytimes any number of the children could be seen
going about the island, chasing birds and hares, skipping in dance step, hunting fairies, and gathering the assorted sundries
that are the treasures of childhood.

In May Mr. Clancy appeared. He was rowed across in a long skiff and stood up in the bow when the children of the BoatMacs
gathered on the sand to greet him. He came onto the island and asked one of them to get Teige Foley. While the boy ran off,
Clancy did not proceed further. Instead he stood with legs planted and examined without comment the extraordinary sight of
the ramshackle home at anchorage some few yards distant. He held his hands behind his back.
He moved his lips in a tight line from side to side, as though struggling to contain exclamations. The children of the BoatMacs
clustered before him and stared. They looked at his green jacket and his long boots. When Teige at last appeared coming down
the rutted roadway to the shore, Mr. Clancy strode swiftly up to meet him. He said some words the others could not hear. He
gestured with his right hand a kind of onward motion. Then Teige left him and went back up the roadway, and the other man
returned to his place on the shore and stood there and waited. The children looked at him. Under their scrutiny he tapped
his pockets and found coins and drew some out and proffered these to the smallest of the girls standing near him. In his palm
they sat like brown buttons. The girls did not move. Their eyes studied his face and he moved his hand farther out to them.
Then the girls turned to see their mother, who stood up with arms on her hips from the clothes she was scrubbing.

“We have no need. Say thank you, girls,” she said.

“Thank you,” they said.

And Mr. Clancy pocketed the coins with a mixture of rue and shame and like a darkness passing felt what sufferings this family
had survived. He stood and waited. One of the girls brought him an earthen jar of spring water. She watched him while he drank
it back. Then Teige came and went to the BoatMac’s wife and told her he must go and would be gone some days, and he asked
her if they would give care to his father until he returned. She told him he did not need to ask, and then Teige said goodbye
to them and the children came to him and he embraced many of them and lifted high two of the girls and kissed their heads.
Mr. Clancy stood nearby. Then he turned on his heel and led the way down to the boat, where the oarsman was waiting. Teige
followed him and climbed in and then left that island for the first time in a long time. The boat pulled out into the river
and Teige looked back and saw the congregation of the BoatMacs standing there, and the sky high and blue, the fields greening
with the renewed hope of the turning world, and there, in the distance, the lone, long finger of the saint’s tower.

On that crossing neither man spoke. They arrived in the town of Kilrush, where at the dockside were the usual
congress of petitioners, mendicants, ragged ones of mock genteel bearing, and others, hags, crones, aged-looking urchins,
men toothless and head-bandaged in cloth filthy and frayed. Mr. Clancy waved all aside and Teige walked behind him and they
reached a place where a boy minded the horse and cart. Mr. Clancy threw him a coin. Then they climbed up and passed on out
through the streets of the town, where some paused and stared at them, gaping with a kind of naked inquisitiveness at the
one who had come from the island. They reached the estate and passed in through the stone pillars and along the tree-lined
avenue, where the new leaves rustled in tender breeze. Teige’s throat tightened. He thought of the girl Elizabeth and felt
the weight and loss of time and was like one given a glimpse of his younger self. They travelled on. They came to the big
field where Teige had worked the horses, and there were many there again that day, and some stopped grazing and raised their
long necks and stood statuesque and beautiful and others equally so started and ran and traced a long arc through the fresh
grass. Clancy slowed as they passed them. He let Teige watch and for the first time made comment to say some that Teige had
broken were fine horses now

But it was not for these that he had been brought, and soon they were turning the wide bend and proceeding on up to the yard
and the stables. The closer they got, the more Teige suffered a deep longing which took the form of visions almost palpable
and of such a verisimilitude that he risked reaching out like the mad to touch them. He saw the figure of the girl standing
and undressed. He saw how her hair fell. He saw her walk across a floor and keep her eyes fixed on his as he watched her.
He saw the purse of her lips. Then Clancy was calling to him to get down and they were stopped in the yard before the stables.

Teige got down and felt the solidity of the cobbled ground restore him. He filled his lungs and drew in the smells of that
place that were
of horses and blacksmithing and woodsmoke and honeysuckle and ivy and all of which revisited him then.