The Fall of Light (9 page)

“Go raibh maith agat,”
Tomas said in thanks.

One of the gypsies took the bowls and nodded. He handed them away and then pointed to Teige.

“Him? Teige,” Tomas said.

“Teige,” said the gypsy.

“That’s right,” Tomas said, and named each of them. But though he did, he saw how the gypsies did not look from Teige to the
twins. They looked at the youngest Foley and let their looking be seen now as though to allow it be translated and the desperation
of their need be naked.

“Mario,” the gypsy said toward Teige, and watched to see if that name would mean anything to him.

“Teige,” Tomas said, as though there had been some confusion.

The gypsy who had pointed nodded and waved his arm for Teige to follow him, and they all walked down to where the white pony
was tied on the raised ground by a stand of ash trees. When it sensed them coming, the pony turned its head and pulled on
the rope and made fast its tethering. Its eyes opened and rolled as though at the approach of ghosts. Its left foreleg trod
blindly at the broken ground. The gypsies murmured to it. They spoke more softly than they spoke to women. But they did not
come any closer. They waited for the brothers.

“That’s the girl,” Tomas said. The brothers waited for the horses to smell them and smell their own horses off them. “It’s
you they want to handle her,” Tomas said with his back to the gypsies and without turning to his youngest brother.

“Why?” Teige said.

“If you can explain gypsies, I’ll tell you.”

“Ride her, Teigey,” said Finan.

“Go on, Teigey.”

“Sos.… Sos.” Teige sounded the ease he wanted the horse to feel and stepped toward it. “Sos, sos, sos.” He soft-clicked his
tongue against the roof of his mouth. The pony turned her head and looked away from him and still watched him sidelong on
the boundaries of her domain. Her pretend disregard did not mask her fear, and stray electric flickerings of it ran in the
muscles
of
her shoulders and made them jump minutely.

“She’s a lively one,” Finbar said.

Teige raised his hand to let her smell it, but she mistook the gesture and swung around and the brothers had to pull back
and Teige whispered
shshsh
sounds and put his hands out with palms raised as if he could touch and smooth down the irrational and make the animal feel
the radiance of his respect for her. The gypsies watched him. The women had come from their chores and were standing not far
distant in the small clearing. The pony was turned into the trees. The brothers sensed the expectation of the audience behind
them, and when Tomas looked back the gypsy who had led them there pointed once again at Teige and made a small rising gesture
with his hand.

“They want you to ride her,” Tomas said.

“She’s wild,” Teige said lowly, not taking his eyes from the eye of the pony and moving another half step closer.

“Of course she’s wild.”

“I won’t be able to.”

“If she’s a horse, you will.”

“Go on, Teigey boy. Get up. Go on.”

The three brothers watched then as Teige angled his head forward and raised and lowered it in an exaggerated slow nodding
mime that the pony watched from the corner of her view. He made himself smaller and then raised his right hand slightly and
proffered it to the air between them. The pony let a low whinnying down its long face and opened its nostrils as if to breathe
in the message of the boy and discover for herself the veracity of his heart. Teige stepped forward and the pony did not move.
Her feet were planted. He reached and held out his fingers inches from her face. He held them there proffered a long time.
The pony did not turn away. She took hard short breaths and was as one growing slowly accustomed to something in which she
did not believe. The company assembled may have been spirits to her eye and the boy the dead Mario. Her
shoulders flickered. Quick, skittish movements of uncertain purpose passed through her. Then Teige moved the hand that hung
in the air and placed it upon her and stroked the warm, hard length of her face. He ran his fingers under her chin and scrabbled
softly while whispering not words but sounds. He moved inside her tethering then until his chest was against her. He pressed
himself against the quickened breathing of her flank and ran his hand up and along her back. He stroked the length of her
and kept the pressure of his fingers even upon her flesh as he moved across her back and down her haunches and round the hocks
of each of her legs. Then he reached behind him with his left hand and untied the rope that held her and let it fall loosely
across his fingers, moving her backward from that place with one hand on her side and the rope slack in the other. He took
her a few paces and she moved easily for him, her step not full or graceful or true but marked by relief and the notion that
she was free. The boy and the pony moved away from there into the trees, and the gypsies and the Foley brothers walked after
them and the gypsy women did the same.

In a place where the ash trees thinned and the ground was softer and gave beneath each hoof, Teige swung himself onto the
pony’s bare back and felt the hushed inhale of the gypsies watching. The pony did not flinch. She did not run or buck or stamp.
She stood with feet planted like the statue of herself and waited and felt the presence of the boy. The rope was around her
as a halter, but Teige held it loose and then squeezed her with his thighs as softly as he could and at once rode quickly
away.

The morning rose grey and still and held the air of new creation. The fields looked unfolded fresh in the dawn.
The grass was wet and caught whatever light fell and appeared more green and young than it was. Teige held the rough rope
of the halter loosely and tried to allow the pony to race her frustration and confinement away. He sat on the broad working
muscles of her back and felt her power and
crouched low and put his head forward to hers and spoke to her as the wind rushed past them. They moved away from the river.
They galloped out hard and fast away from the small trees and tangled bushes and into the broader light. The green of the
land opened out before them and boy and pony raced into it, travelling with apparent fierce intent, so that to stray onlookers
in that uncertain morning Teige Foley might have seemed a forsworn message bearer, a figure out of Old Testament times charging
headlong upon a mission secret and imperative. Thin cattle in the fields lifted their heads to watch. The racing figure was
there and then it was gone and the cattle lowered their heads to the poor grass once more. The road ran westward. They galloped
on. They reached a small rise where again the river could be seen on the left, and suddenly, without the slightest slowing,
from full speed the pony stopped short.

Teige flew over her head. Briefly he saw the country from the vantage of a ghost riding a ghost horse. He felt the airiness
of his mount, and it was momentarily pleasant and easy. He rode the air an instant, then began to turn head over heels, and
then the knowledge of oncoming pain arrived somewhere in the front of his head and he saw the hard brown road and crashed
down onto it. He landed and cried out and was saved breaking his neck only by his youth. He lay in the road and the pony stood
and watched him. She studied him with implacable eyes of no regret, nor did she turn and run away.

When he could speak Teige asked her what she was doing stopping like that. He looked around them to see if there was something
that had startled her. But there was only the rolling green of that lumpy land. He said a curse in Irish and the pony lifted
her nose as if to smell the words.

The pain shot down through Teige’s left arm. He lay as flat as he could on his back in the road. He cried out loud and the
pony turned half away and Teige called out to her to come to him. He had to call only a second time and the pony walked slowly
down the road and he was able to pull himself up first by holding her hock and then the loose reins-rope, and then he was
sitting on her back once more. His left arm ached and sent crimson blooms of pain travelling toward his neck and spine. He
sat there atop the pony sharply aslant and tried to will the hurt into subsiding. They did not move. As though contrite, the
pony waited for him perfectly
still. She watched the road where nothing visible was coming or going. Then Teige cried out for his mother.

He cried out to her in the vanished world where she was gone whether living or dead and whence he longed for her now to reappear
and take him from the pony and hold him in her white arms on that empty roadside so that a kind of goodness might be restored.
He cried for her a second time, and she did not come. The landscape ached with his longing. Blackbirds like small priests
walked in the silent fields.

When he regained himself he slouched forward and patted the pony with the palm of his right hand. He whispered to her.

“It’s all right,” he said. “You are fine,” he told her, “fine, girl. Yes, you are.”

He felt the pain localize and he grew more lopsided to accommodate it, then he raised the reins and tried to coax the pony
forward in a walk. They moved a short distance, then the pony snorted and twitched and he stopped her on the crest of the
road and looked out at the country. To the south he could no longer see the river but could see the blue shadows of the mountains
that he did not know were in Kerry. The clouds were heavy and slow and faintly purpled. He sat the pony and looked out for
what she had seen as the weak sun climbed the sky behind them in a screen of cloud. Then he saw it. It was a man’s legs. They
were trousered in brown cloth without shoes and lay angled out of the ditch not forty paces away.

“Come on,” Teige told the pony, “if I get down, I mightn’t be able to get up again. Come on, good girl. It’s all right.” He
clicked his tongue very softly at the pony’s ear and she walked forward with an uncertain gait, her step inclining to turn
sideways all the time and all the time Teige keeping her straight on. When they were ten yards from the legs, Teige stopped
the pony and called to the man. He called to him the greeting that was part blessing and did not know if he was speaking to
the living or the dead. The legs did not move. Teige was aware of the currency
of
outlaws and other rebels in that country and that the ruses and ways of robbers were not beyond feigning death in the road.
So he walked the pony forward another three steps but did not dismount. He had no weapon to defend himself, nor with his arm
injured had he hope
of
fighting. He kept the reins tight in his good hand and prepared to heel the pony quickly, then he called out again.

From his fallen place in the rushes of the ditch, the man moved. His toes twitched. They were dark and the blood of sores
was blackened on them and food for flies. The ankles appeared rude knobs on the thinness of the legs and did not seem they
could support a man. But a man it was. He raised himself with slow and inordinate difficulty on his right elbow, and Teige
saw the face of an old man. The centre of his crown was bare and wore a lump that rose purplish and yellow both and was both
sorry and comical and seemed to stare at the boy. The man lifted himself to an angle to see them and then attempted no further
levitation but raised out a thin and quivering hand in a gesture of begging. From his crooked mouth drooled thin yellow green
stuff into the grass. He did not look as though he could speak. The hand floated there in the air and Teige dismounted and
stood before it and the flies rose off the man and buzzed the air.

“I only have one good hand,” Teige said. Then he took the man’s fingers that were cold and yet firmly gripping, and steadying
his balance, he pulled the figure to his feet.

The man swayed in his return to the world of the upstanding. The eye-lump glared around at the sorry world. Then the man said:
“Give me drink.”

“I haven’t got anything,” Teige said. “There is the river, it’s—”

“Agh!” The man spat something of his disgust and clutched the shirt of the boy so his face floated up close to him, and Teige
cried out with the sharpness of the pain in his shoulder.

“Food?” the man said.

“No.”

The man sank back down in the grass of the roadside. Teige mounted the pony and rode away from him. He rode on down the way
until he came to a small stone cottage where a woman was milking an old black goat in the sour-smelling mud of its pen. There
he asked her for water and bread, and though she was poor she was used to the traffic of beggars which were many and various
there and she brought him some from the inside of her kitchen. Teige took them with gratitude. When he had said his thanks
to her, he got on the pony and rode back to where the old man was still lying in the ditch.

When the man had eaten and drank what of the water did not run and leak sideways from the poor closure of his mouth, Teige
asked him
where he had come from and where heading. Then he told Teige the country was full of bastards. He said to one of them he had
lost his farm. He had been turned out on the road and was now man of no abode but walked vagabond and desolate on the face
of the land. He laughed sourly as he told it and the hairless pate of his head tilted back and he opened his mouth full and
revealed a blackish hole toothless and caked about with the dried riverbed remains of old dribblings. The man laughed in a
high, mocking manner. He told Teige the world was more cruel than he could imagine, and that his act of bringing him food
and water was the lone act of kindness in that country turned barbarous and vicious as any
of
Sodom and Gomorrah. But more, he said, the time was turning. He had heard it told, he said, that in the autumn now beginning
was coming a bitterness. The birds had sensed it. The cuckoo had flown early without regard for calendar or custom. She had
left the ragged trees of the west after less than a month’s song.