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.
“And why?” the man asked.
Teige said he had not noticed. He said he had come from the east.
The man rolled some nothing in his mouth and spat sideways. “Because something is at hand,” he said. “There is rottenness here. You will see. This is a cursed place. For your kindness I will give you this advice: Turn back. Leave the west before you can start to smell the rottenness of it. Go home. Home,” he said again, and then began to laugh in distraught and hideous manner once more.
And was still laughing on that word home when Teige reined the pony around and rode away back across that country to the camp of the gypsies, where the legends of his riding and songs about him were already shaping in the firesmoke.
12
When Teige returned he discovered that Tomas was gone. He rode down to where the caravans were encamped by the river and was greeted by the men with a waving of their hands and shapeless felt hats. They came to meet him and touched the warm flanks of the pony and patted Teige’s leg where it hung stirrupless. The boy did not know yet the significance of his return and the taming of the pony, but soon the twins told him. They came to him at once as he dismounted from the pony and as the men took her away to where the best of their hay was kept. They told him of Mario and the races. They told him the story the way it had been told to them with that strange fated quality that runs through tales old and unforgiving. They told it with quickened voices and flushed faces, for in their simplicity both Finan and Finbar were delighted. They had been given an air of importance that had not been theirs since birth. They had come from the river, see, they were the answer to the old man’s question. It was a kind of birth all over again. They told it all to Teige and watched his face and hoped to see there the reflection of their own excitement. But Teige did not share it. In a way that he could not explain, he felt afraid as one who has been told the story of his own death. He asked them what Tomas said of it.
The twins stared at him. They wanted him to talk about the pony. They wanted the fabulous story of how the Foleys would champion the world. But Teige asked again.
“What does Tomas say? Where is he?”
“He is gone to Limerick town.”
“Will he go to get our mother?”
The twins stared at him. They wanted to say their mother was gone from them, and that they were men now, but they did not.
“We are to go with the gypsies. He will come back and meet us on the road to the sea,” said Finbar, and turned away. “He has taken your pony with him.”
That night when the lamps were lit and the gypsies sang as they had not since the death of the children, Teige walked out by the banks of the river and sought for the swan. The sky cleared on a breeze from the west and the stars hung above him in vast and numberless panoply. He squatted by the small stones that made a thin crunching where the low waves of the waters collapsed upon them. The singing sounded in the night behind him. He reached and let the river run over his hand and thought of his father gone below the water.
In the morning before the dawn, the gypsies began packing. They woke and moved about the camp gathering their things. Thin, shadowy figures without speech in the moonlessness, they moved about the glowing embers of the campfire with slow care. They collected pots and tin cans and made small, doleful tympani as they threw these things together in cloth sacks strun
g with cord. Their horses knew this morning music and sensed the departure even before the gypsies went to them. They noised in the gloom. The gypsy men went to the river and brought their fill of it back in timber buckets and small barrels. They worked around the women without word or gesture of recognition, as though each were entirely separate races, or one the unseen shadow of the other. Coming from sleep into this grey, dreamlike traffic, Finan and Finbar held the horses while the old leathern harnesses were thrown over the backs of the animals and the buckles that were not brass but hand-shaped copper briefly jangled. Then, leaving a scattering of small potatoes and onions for the spirits of those who might be following them, the gypsies made a last reconnaissance around that ground. The place of their fire was like a black wound. They watched the sky for the dawn that was just then commencing, for it was their custom since time unknown to leave with the light. Then they sat up on horseback and seatboard and clucked their tongues and led the caravans out of that place and away toward the west.
Teige did not ride the white pony. She followed with others on a rope. He sat in a caravan and looked out on the dark road ahead. They left the riverbank and he felt the regret of losing the swan and felt the foolishness of that, too. The road was the road he had ridden the day before, and he watched it for the sight of the man with the broken head and the woeful laughter. But as the light came up behind them and followed them down that way, there was sign of no one. They rattled on. The great wooden wheels bumped and clattered on the unevenness of the ground. Each of the caravans sang its own song, a weird jumbling of sounds individual and inseparable as the contents toppled from shelves, clanked and dully clanged within. Finan and Finbar rode their horse. By the time the sky was bright enough to show them, Teige could make out the first signs of their becoming gypsies. They wore their shirts open to the October morning, and kerchiefs of cotton that had once been bright red were knotted at their necks. The complexion of their skin, even the fall of their hair, seemed to Teige indefinably altered. The twins seemed to live beyond any notion of regret. They rode with an easy silent gaiety, a lightness of heart, as though they were at last among their own and had discovered a fortunate destiny.
The day rose over them. They passed some small cottages that hung beneath the earthen roads where women heard them coming and stood in the doorways, watchful and cautious and eyeing their hens. All of that country wore the same unmistakable look of hardship. The smoke of the hovels hung about their leaky thatch in the still and damp air and smelled sourly. From some places they passed no man or woman came to the door, though it lay ajar. In the shadows of one such entranceway, Teige thought he saw the shape of a man stretched on the ground and the furtive flickering of rats. But he said nothing. For the picture was all the time moving, as was in the nature of that caravan of gypsies, and one place became the next easily and quickly and faded away like childish painting in the rain.
They travelled down the peninsula of Corca Baiscinn. When they stopped for food, the women fed Teige and his brothers a cold broth and rough bread whose crust was tougher than their teeth. They passed a knife among them. One of the women told Teige they had clothes for him and brought them out from the back of the hooped canvas. But Teige would not take them.
“I don’t want them,” he said.
The women stood about and said nothing.
“They are the clothes of their children,” Finbar said.
“I know.”
“They wouldn’t fit Finan and me. Take them.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Do.”
“No,” Teige said, “I won’t!” And he was suddenly a very young boy with tossed and dirty hair, freckles on his cheeks, furious, fearful of things he did not understand which threatened to rob him of even his name.
“They are yours, you can have,” one of the women said, and then they stepped away from him and got back into their caravans as the gypsies were readying to leave once more. The clothes lay there on the ground. Then the twins hurried to their horse, and the wagons moved, and there was an instant in which Teige might have relented and picked the bundle up, but he did not. He walked past it and climbed up the wheel into the caravan and sat in. Then the signal was made for the horse and they pulled away from there in mute and profound dismay, each sorrowing for separate reasons, while left in the mud of the road behind them, like bodies shed by souls departing, was the small, sad pile of children’s clothes.
Throughout that afternoon Teige thought Tomas might return. As they sojourned forward toward the sea, he listened into the noise of the wagons for the sound of two horses coming behind them. The strange, otherworldly air of the gypsies nearly made him lose sense of the world. Once, he noticed the caravans moving more and more along the verge of the road and threatening to topple. He called out and the line of wagons came right and he had the sudden insight that the gypsies were in fact asleep after their dinner and progressing in somnolent oblivion toward wherever the world tilted. Had they a destination at all? he wondered. They seemed to let the roads take them, and the farther west they went, the more the roads were broken and uneven, the hedgerows of fuchsia and woodbine and black-and-white thornbushes coming closer on either side and scratching against the coarse canvas of the wagons. Rocks sometimes jagged up in the middle of the way, and the horses steered around them. Sometimes the road softened and crossed boggy ground and the place was bare and treeless and the stones of the walls seemed placed by some that had long fled eastward. It was so dreamlike, and as he shook there on the seatboard Teige wondered how it was that he and his brothers were now part of it. He could not understand it except to recall the moment when he had felt that he was drowning, and that their rescue had been foreordained in some way, that the gypsies and the races in the west were already there awaiting them.
Still, he longed for his brother. Tomas would know what to do, he thought. He would not let them be lost.
They moved on. Sometimes a man watched them from his place in a field. He stood and was a feature in the landscape no different from a rock or bush, a still twist of brown shade in the flow of greens. The man would watch the caravans coming with grave circumspection. They were like some weirdly exotic elephantine creatures, their hooped shapes lumbering high above the hedgerows and carrying an indefinable threat to the world he knew. And he would curse them and wish for them to pass and wait and watch from under his cap until they did.
And pass on they did all that day. The weak and pale sun caught up to the gypsies and crossed over their heads and dropped into the sea the Foleys had not reached. When the light began to die, the caravans stopped and turned into a field. Teige thought that he could sense the nearness of the edge of the island. He thought that he could catch the sea in the air and opened his mouth wide and strained his eyes. He blinked at where the night was hemming the land with grey, where the fields stopped and were stitched into the sky and where green and blue became deeper shades of each other and were then the cloths of darkness. He stared but could not see the sea.
That evening the gypsies lit their fires and the twins sat with them and listened to the stories they told. They heard the tales of long ago and distant places, vanquished kings, of blind beggars become rich on the foolishness of men. They heard of strange and terrible plagues, of curses and blessings, the places now forgotten in the far world where once bejewelled princesses made the ground sweet as they passed upon it. Tales climbed on the smoke of the fire. There was devilry and laughter and many stories of how fate righted the wrongs of the poor and made fortunate the suffering in the end of time. The twins listened with rapt attention. The fire burnished them, and they sat cross-legged in that colourful company, like the newest princes of that tribe, narrowing their eyes with concentration and falling inside the spell of those old stories. They felt elated and proud both with a sense of their own belonging.
Teige did not join them. He stood at first on the edge of the campfires but suffered still a tight unease. He wanted Tomas to return, he w
anted his mother, and with the fall of night felt as though something cold and viscous had filled inside him. For the first time in his life he saw himself, singular, in the darkness. His brothers were laughing with the others in the firelight, there was no sign of Tomas, and for a time Teige had a vision of a thin, transparent membrane separating him from the rest. In a matter of days, it seemed, he had all but lost his family. Where were the Foleys now? Without their father the boys seemed strangely disconnected, as though the notion of family itself were prefabricated upon the thinnest premise and the slightest breeze of chance blew it away. It dawned on Teige that Tomas was gone and might never return, and in that same moment he glimpsed a scene of his elder brother fallen to the ground and being savagely beaten by figures that wore the uniforms of Law. The instant his imagination saw it, he let a gasp out of him. It sounded like a cry strangled but was not heard in the raucous and crackling of the camp. Teige turned his head. He waited to spew sideways the sour grey white stuff of horror, but it would not rise off his stomach and he blinked and sucked the air and walked a little away. Again it was there before him like a picture: Tomas in the town of Limerick, tied and beaten onto death. What was he to do? He walked down along the dark to where the horses were tethered. He raised his hand palm first as though to press softly against something firm and feel the solidity of the universe support him and banish the phantasm. Then he curved his hand over and let the horses smell his knuckles. Their whinnying passed like a greeting down the rope. Teige went to the white pony and she raised her long head and lowered it and found the scent of him, and he stroked the sides of her and tried not to think.
“That’s the girl,” he said. He raised his arm up and over her shoulder, and he hung there against the hard skin of her, pressing his face against her flank while the spectre of his eldest brother in pain dwelled in his mind. What was he to do? He was twelve years old.
The Fall of Light Page 7