The Fall of Light (8 page)

The gypsies had travelled south in the dying of the year. Once, they had come from abroad in Europe in the hidden compartments
of ships and through the secret ports that were used by spies. They had travelled to this country not from need or flight,
but simply because it was there, because it was marked on the outer edge of maps and looked the splintered part of some greater
whole, and because they could not be still. Motion was natural, they believed. Nothing living stood still, and in their travels
they had seen the variety of the world and accumulated its slow wisdom. Some of them had journeyed around the perimeter of
the shore and then left once more. Others, drawn by the green mesmerism of the land, voyaged around it in covered caravans.
They took to its crooked roads and found the circuitous routes that defied the usual measurement of progress to be an apt
landscape for gypsies. These were roads that went nowhere. They were begun without concept of destination or, at best, no
hurried sense of arrival. They were the grassy thoroughfares shouldered by hedgerows and stone walls along which the gypsies
that remained lost all sense of time. Their
lives, which had once been measured by the new places they discovered, now took on the dimension of a long somnambulant dream.
They were not sure if the fields they passed were the ones they had passed only days before. And soon they did not care. The
oldest among them, whom they called Elihah, told them that they could not even be certain that the rain that was falling had
not fallen on them before, for sometimes they travelled into the past. One day’s weather became the next, and their ancient
language was discovered short of enough words to describe the thousand different rains. The seasons were not the seasons of
their childhood years before, the summer might have been the autumn and the winter was sometimes not over until the leaves
appeared and fell again in one windy week. At last, they grew accustomed to such seamless time and rode their ragged caravans
on through it, content in the simplicity of such living. Now, many unrecorded years later, their origins had almost vanished.
Elihah remembered he had once been a child in a ship on the sea, but whether that was the journey that brought him there,
or was a voyage even more distant in time, or simply one that he had dreamed in the seas of his mother’s womb, he could not
tell. His grandchildren were already old men, many of them gone back across the water to the great shelf of the continent,
wandering untraceable paths and lost to their greater families until by chance or design their roads might meet again at a
campfire or fair in this life or another.

The gypsies of Elihah had remained on in that rainy island for so long that they grew to know the ways of the natives. They
knew the sympathy for outlaws that endured there in the hearts of men, and the evergreen curiosity of people to know what
the rest of the world was like. And so they traded not only in tin and copper, but in stories too. They learned a version
of the native language. In it they told stories to those who would come to their caravans and peer in at Mara, the bearded
beauty, or at Petruk, a giant who ate the branches of elderberry, and in the conjuring of places far away they could retouch
their lost origins. They told of countries they knew but in truth had never seen, though they could describe them in such
vivid detail that the listeners walked away with the dazzling vision of places more strange than fairy tale. In all of their
tales the heroes suffered outrageously, there were wrongful rulers, and fierce oppression, exiled wanderings
in strange lands, floods and famine. These were the stories the natives enjoyed, and the gypsies could link one to the other
like threads in a fabric, making the tapestry longer and longer until it threatened a kind of madness. For only they knew
that the telling of stories could rob the world of life and make time vanish. And so, though the story might be yet in its
vast middle, an hour before sunrise the lamp was always turned down, the listeners sent away, and the curtains of the caravan
drawn.

Such was their way. Although they did not follow the calendar, the gypsies knew the customs of their year. And on the morning
they fished the Foleys from the Shannon River they were on their way to the last races
of
October held on the sands of the Atlantic. They had already been to the horse fairs that marked the end of grass and were
leading a new pony. On that shoreline in the dawn there were thirty or so men, women, and small children gathered as the brothers
were pulled ashore. They spoke their own language in quick, guttural phrases and cut the fishing lines with knives in their
belts. The men had black curls and smoky eyes and wore tattered shirts of once bright colour now open to the rain. The fingers
of their hands were aged by the endlessness of the earth they had travelled, the muddied rutted roads, trackless bog, and
rock-strewn fields. Their women stood behind them with arms crossed. They were strangely beautiful in everything but their
teeth, and made
of
their gaping, blackish smiles a sensual virtue, painting their lips in vivid reds and opening them wide in a way that suggested
they could swallow the world. They wore jewels and chains and bangles and brooches that were not seen yet in that part of
the country. They had combs of tortoiseshell in their hair and wore skirts over their skirts that filled out the lower half
of
their figures with bounty and made their movements slow and swaying as if walking in another time. The children were like
the ghosts of children. They appeared in brown-and-grey rags, thin and wan and dirty, their grave doomed eyes like pools of
ink in which no expression could be read save that of mistrust, for death had moved recently among them. Their long arms hung
limply. The rain ran down their faces.

The brothers were unhooked. They lay on the mud banks and looked at the faces peering down at them. The rain fell into their
mouths, tasting of blood. In the breaking light the storm rumbled and retreated begrudgingly. Then a large woman with a green
shawl stepped forward and told the men to take the boys to shelter.

In three caravans they were laid on cot beds and undressed. The twins were kept together. Though they were living, they imagined
they might be dreaming and did not protest when the gypsy women took off their clothes and laid them naked on coarse blankets
that smelled of hazel and hawthorn. The Foleys’ senses were sharpened by the nearness of death. They came back to air like
fish flapping in the bottom of a boat. They caught the deep and heady perfumes of the women in their nostrils, felt their
heads swirl, and fell asleep once more.

While the four brothers slept, the women watched them to see the shape of their dreams and the men gathered and spoke excitedly
of the catch the river had yielded. The gypsies read the adventures of every day for the secret code of the world and knew
that the fish-men had come to them not by chance, but by design. For here was the answer to the question they had asked the
universe.

For, you see, the gypsies had had sixteen horses. From one of the diminished northern tribes who had travelled to the fairs
from Donegal for the last time, they had bought a white pony that was wild and fast. This they had watched and roped and lunged
and groomed and fed the berries of the year and the stolen hay of those farms they passed. In the evenings by fires of fresh
ash that cracked and spat, they had told each other stories of its future. They told the legends of the races not yet run
but which had flashed before them all with the startling clarity of episodes of clairvoyance. They envisioned how Mario, their
champion horse-boy, would ride the white pony bareback on the horseshoe bay of Kilkee in Corca Baiscinn, how he would cling
to the mane and slice the air on his way to victory. The women had rocked in their places on the ground, swaying softly backward
and forward to the words of their men as white ponies ran across their minds and won the fortunes that would make easy the
winter. By the low burning of the end of the fire they had lain down to love in blankets that smelled of smoke and horses,
caressing each other’s thighs as though they were the glistening flanks of the steeds of victory. Then, in the morning, the
world spoke to them. Mario fell ill during the night. He ran a fever and could not get up from his bed. His breathing was
thin with a disease they did not know. The diphtheria made his
throat narrow as though a leather thong were wedged inside it. His eyes watered a yellowy mucus. The gypsy women had gone
out and gathered the flowers of the hollyhock and leaves of coltsfoot and made him a tea. They had made a poultice and placed
it on Mario’s throat and sat in the dead air of the caravan. They sung softly as was their custom, a singing that was neither
song nor hymn but a wordless prayer that belonged to their own great-great-grandmothers. It was the low music of despair and
sounded out from that caravan to the rest of them with the dread knowledge that the boy was dying. The women sang on through
the night and watched the dim light of the boy’s life flicker around beneath the canvas. When, near daybreak, the light slipped
away, the boy was dead. The women stopped singing. The hush travelled out across the camp and the men spilled their drinks
into the fire. They sat with stones of silence hanging from their necks. On the long rope that linked them, the horses neighed
and beat the muddy ground and twisted their necks about as if to see one who had passed. When the light had come up enough
to force the men to see each other’s faces, they moved away. They suffered a double grief, for beyond the ordinary loss the
boy had been their talisman. They felt the guilt of those who imagine they have tempted fate by dreaming too hopefully of
the future; it was as though they had brought the illness upon him through the outrageous good fortune of their dreams. Four
days later, three more of the gypsy boys had died. The low singing sounded each night then, and the gypsies wondered if they
had ridden into a valley of bad spirits. When the fourth boy died, Elihah announced they must leave there. They marked the
place by scorching the ground so that others might know it was the site of death; then, fearing the disease would not leave
them but would chase their vanity, they had released the white pony.

No more of them had died. They had journeyed onward towards the races with no rider and no pony and no intention of entering
the sports. They had gone there rather as a form of purgation, as though they bore witness to something larger than themselves,
and the final act required of them was to watch the races Mario should have won.

Ahead of them the winter grew teeth. They felt it bite already in the cold rains that fell out of October. By the time they
had arrived on the borders of Clare, they were bedraggled and weak.

Then, the previous evening, when they were camped near the
Shannon River, the white pony had returned and brought with it three riderless horses.

The old man, Elihah, was asked if they were to fear them. Was it a portent of further deaths? they asked him. The storm was
already moving in the sky. The wind whistled. The birds flew back into the trees. The old man said only the universe could
answer. He said they should ask it and wait. He said death was not easily outrun.

Then the rain began. The skies fell in sheets. When the lightning crashed in the hour near dawn, the gypsies came from their
beds and watched it like the ending of the world. The horses’ eyes rolled. Their wild whinnying was lost amid the fall of
thunder. Then, with an unspoken accord that sometimes moved through their tribe and connected them with traditions of ancestors
lost, the gypsies went out into the crashing electricity of the dawn and cast their hooks into the river.

Moments later, they had fished the Foleys onto the bank and believed they had received their answer from the universe.

The brothers did not discover this story for two days. Then they rose from their cots in the caravans and walked
out around the camp in the still morning. Smoke was rising in thin curls and men were standing watching it. Some of them looked
at the Foleys from beneath their eyebrows. They studied them for the immutable signs of some hidden destiny and then looked
away into the ashes as though not daring to face it. When Tomas saw their horses he crossed to them and they smelled each
other and the horses made a quick whinnying of greeting. Teige stroked his pony’s neck and blew in its nostrils and let its
long face rub against his own, and his brothers did the same, making gestures old as time. The gypsies threw phrases to each
other in their language. One of them bent down and poured from the beaten blackened pot into four earthen bowls. He handed
them up to one
of
the others, and the two
of
them carried the food to the brothers
by the string of horses. None of them began yet the telling of their story. From the fire the other gypsies stood and watched
the horses and the brothers eating. They looked for how the men ate their simple food and if it found favour. When they saw
that it did, they felt the burden of their future ease a little and unbowed their shoulders. The Foleys ate. Birds sang minor
notes in the crooked trees. After the deluge, the sky that emerged was clear with slow-moving white clouds that held no rain.
A light breeze carried the air. When the Foleys had eaten they handed back the bowls.