The Fall of Light (4 page)

When at last she had surrendered and stopped in a wheezing breathlessness on the side of the bed, she heard with astonishment
the handsome Foley repeat his vow of love. He stood there naked by the window and told her.

“Stop it!” she said. “Stop it!” And she held her hands over her ears and looked for a time like a young girl again. “Don’t
even say that. Not you.” She turned away and looked at where the wall was flaked and cracked. “Do you know how many times
I’ve heard men say that?” she said.

“This is me,” said Tomas. “I love you.”

She sighed and rolled back over on the bed so that she was near him. She looked at the beauty of his body and weakened. She
looked at his softened sex and wanted to take it in her hands.

’’If you love me—”

“I do,” he blurted.

“If, I said”—she reached up a hand and touched his stomach and drew it away again—“if you love me, you will pay me,” she said,
and watched him for the dodge she knew would be coming. A bell in the town rang two o’clock. She should have been out on the
street again. She heard it and waited, then on the end of its second pealing heard Tomas Foley offer her his boots as payment.

“Here, I have no money. I will get some and bring it to you tomorrow,” he said. “These are good boots.”

She took them in her hands. “They are.”

“They show you,” Tomas said.

“I’d almost believe you,” she told him then, and with that he turned and walked to the door of that small room and picked
up his clothes and put them on.

“They show you I love you.” He stood in his ragged trousers and held his shirt in his hand. He looked at her a final time.
“What is your name?”

With his boots in her hands, the woman who through his eyes had seen herself again a girl in a time before the tarnishing
of all such notions as truth and love said her name was
Blath,
meaning flower.

With their eldest brother lost in the seas of love, Finbar and Finan woke in the dawn with hunger eating at their
insides. They opened their mouths on the damp air to see if the pangs might escape. They did not. They sat up and wondered
what to do. With Tomas sleeping they seemed grown in stature and got up and stood with legs apart and stern faces as if serious-minded
captains. They walked about
to the horses and back. In manner they were restless and impatient. They looked for something to command. Finbar went over
and pushed Teige roughly.

“What is it?”

“Wake up. We have to get food.”

Teige sat.

“Light a fire,” Finbar said.

“Yes, light a fire,” said his twin sharply. “We’ll catch some fish.”

They stood and watched him a moment, as if to see their command taking shape. Then they went and from the small collection
of their things that were salvaged from the river took a ball of line and a pin bent hook shape and walked away to the water’s
edge.

The morning opened with ponderous clouds of pewter coming eastward across the sky. Teige went to the horses and spoke to them
and then gathered sticks of ash and twigs and dried leaves. All of us are like in a dream, he thought. As if nothing has happened
and we are just here in this place by the woods. He went deeper within the trees then and walked across the softened brown
floor of fallen pine needles and leaves long decomposed. He stopped and listened for bird-song and heard such whistled in
the roof of branches above him. He stayed there with sticks in his arms and all seemed gone, for the place was so greenly
empty. He thought of how easily he might be lost there, and then he thought of his mother. Quietly into the screen of trees
he called to her. He said the name he had for her. He said it in such a manner as one might use to speak with ghosts or others
invisible. Then he stopped and stood and listened as if listening deep into the air for the slightest footstep or noise in
which might be traced her presence.

When he came out of the trees the twins were already waiting with two trout.

“Where were you? Come on, light the fire!”

They threw commands and showed off their catch and had an air of swagger.

When the fire was lit they cooked the fish. Tomas was sleeping. Teige went and threw the heads and tails to the swan that
had not sailed away. The morning in that place beside the river moved slowly
as the clouds came on and made dull the light. Thin smoke rose in furls. A veil of misted rain fell without seeming to be
falling.

When at last Tomas woke he arched his back like a cat and caught the afterscent of trout.

“I could eat a horse,” he said.

“We need to go back,” Teige told him. “We have to find our mother.”

Tomas flushed. He looked away in the woods. “We need to stay here, move into the woods for a few days until I get us somewhere
in the town,” he said.

“We’re supposed to be finding a place by the sea and then going back,” said Teige.

“Well, we’re not. We’re staying here.”

“It was Father’s plan.”

“And he’s dead. So…” Tomas paused and in the rippling of the river water heard the name Blath, meaning flower. “I have to
go. Make something there,” he said, and waved his arm at the edge of the wood. “I will be back later.” Then he went and took
his horse and rode back toward Limerick town.

His brothers did not know what had got into him, but they were too afraid to ask. Secretly the twins were pleased at his absence
and thought of things they could get Teige to do.

They sat there, abandoned again, then Finbar said, “We need to make a better camp by the woods.”

“Yes,” Finan agreed. “A good camp, a fort.”

“That’s what I said, a fort.”

They looked back at the trees. They knew stories of many that had disappeared in such forests, ones that had wandered off
trails and vanished into the kingdom of fairies.

“At any moment something could come out of there,” Finan said.

They watched where the trees and their shadows met and dissolved in dark.

“It could, and it will,” agreed Finbar at last, drawing his knees up to his chest and turning to wait for when his prediction
would come true.

While his brothers waited there that empty day, Tomas arrived back in Limerick. Along the route he had stopped
at a number of cottages and stolen from cabins and yards what he could. He had an ax and a shovel and a number of irons. He
had a blanket of coarse hair and wrapped in it a fire tongs and a number of empty blue glass bottles. For himself he had lifted
the eggs from hens and sucked them dry. He had eaten wild blackberries that grew in tangles in the hedgerows three miles outside
the town. By the time he had encountered the ragged traders who were camped on the edges of the market, he had the wild look
of one unstable with emotion. The traders were travellers from all corners of the country, and they recognized at once the
desperation in his bootless figure and the tainted air of stolen goods. Squint-eyed, fox-headed fellows, they poked with their
fingers at the little assemblage of things wrapped in the blanket and, while considering their value, measured it against
the value of betraying him to the law. Nevertheless it was with a handful of coins that Tomas rode on towards Limerick town.
He tied his horse outside an empty cabin with fallen thatch and washed his face with fingertips wetted in a trough. In the
daylight the town was less than beautiful. A dreary rain fell. In the side streets open sewers ran by broken footpaths and
fouled the air. Tomas decided at once that their father had been right, the town was not for them, they would go to the sea.
He hurried on, his feet cold and muddied. Small boys stopped baiting a rat and watched him pass.

He walked up the town to the place where he had met Blath the night before. But there were only two men worse for porter sitting
on the street. One of them looked up at him and then grinned with an empty mouth.

“You’re lookin for ’em?” he gummed. His companion shuddered alive and dropped a loop of bloodied drool in the street.

“A woman,” Tomas said.

The first man began a laugh that became a cough. He coughed until his eyes ran.

“D’ya hear tha?” he said to the other. “A woma.”

“No no no, you want to see de man,” Gums said. “He’s over dare, forty tee, up tairs on the lep. He pays ya for yer teet, look.”
The two men opened their mouths at the same moment and showed Tomas Foley their raw, inflamed gums empty of teeth. “Five pence
the la.” They smiled, as if they had passed on to him some extraordinary felicity.

“The women will be here tonigh, after dar,” said the drooling man.

Tomas did not want to wait until darkness. He went directly to the room where he had made love the previous night, but the
door was locked. He walked up the town and down again, and it was still not past noon. He weighed the coins in his pocket
and briefly considered whether to buy food or boots. But in the end he did neither. He decided that he would give all the
money to the woman called Blath because he had told her he would give her everything he had in the world, and she would give
him back his boots. Then he would rescue her and take her with him back to his brothers and onward to the place where they
were going to live by the sea. He did not include in the calculations that the rescue of Blath would in some way be the redeeming
of other losses, too, the empty space that was his mother. But such existed too in the depths of his mind.

He walked up and down Limerick town. He saw fine coaches arrive and depart. He heard the talking of men in English. He watched
a river rat run the length of the main street, chased by the small boys. He walked until his bootless feet ached. He walked
the way a man walks when he is walking to meet a woman who is already lodged in the space before his eyes. Then, when he had
reached the top of the town for the umpteenth time, had patted his horse, and spoken to it, he sat down and waited for darkness.

Years later, when life had hardened the last softness of him, when he was living in another country and those days would seem
to take on a fabled unreality, he would think of that afternoon. It would come back to him like the younger ghost of himself,
and he would be walking the streets of a town where none knew his history or name and suddenly that afternoon’s wait for the
darkness would arrive in his heart like a spear.

If he could, he would have given a year of his life to move the clock forward four hours.

But as it was, the time was much longer. It was long enough for all of his childhood, boyhood, and adolescence to revisit
him. All the battles of the small two-room house on the lord’s estate where his father had knocked him down to make him grow
up. Tomas sat and was revisited by them all while his feet froze.

When darkness fell at last, he moved quickly down the cold pathway of the street. When he arrived at the place he had met
Blath the night before, she was not there. There were other figures in the shadows. Tomas went up the steps of the house.
In the doorway there stood a woman. He thought at first that she was wearing a mask, for her eyes and lips were painted and
shone glossily beneath the lamplight.

“Love,” she greeted him.

But he was already past her. He was already bounding the stairs two at a time. He was already at the bedroom door itself and
turning the knob that was locked, making him knock at the cheap door with such fierce insistence that it was instantly clear
he was not going to turn away. He stood back and then thumped at it with his shoulder, and then again until it splintered
down the centre and two boards fell apart and he pushed his way on into the room of Love.

The smells were the first thing to strike him. They were the smells of the night before, the smells he had lost on the ride
back to his brothers and tried in vain to recover. Now the perfume assailed him. That there was another man in the bed with
Blath did not arrive in his consciousness for a moment. There was a brief pause, a frozen nothingness. Then all proceeded
as in bizarre phantasm and took the form of quickened nightmare, and Tomas Foley saw the arms of Blath lying by her sides
and saw the man on top
of
her in his shirt. And she was trying to get up and get him off of her, and he was making a low moaning and hurrying as if
in some desperation to finish even as he knew the other had crashed in the door. Then there was noise and cries of alarm and
more people coming from rooms down the hallway. There was sudden pandemonium, floorboards creaking and some hastening away
and others arriving down to where pieces of the door hung. But none of these mattered to Tomas Foley. “Stop stop,” he heard
Blath say. He saw her fists come up and hit the man on his sides, but then Tomas swung and cracked open his head with a plank
from the door. The crack was loud and sharp and the fellow fell sideways
and blood shot on the wall and there were cries and shrieks and the very air of the room itself seemed to pulse and beat.
Blath screamed and sat up and held to her the blanket, and she saw it was Tomas and was shaping some words to him when the
painted woman arrived in the doorway with a pistol. The woman aimed at the broad back of Tomas and Blath shouted to her to
stop and in the same instant still Tomas was dropping the plank and drawing from his pocket the money and spilling it on the
bed. His breath was heaving. The bloodstain dripped on the wall. He wore the look of a man mad without comprehension yet of
the violence and passion that had risen inside him.