The Fall of Light

by Niall Williams

  “I’d swear it was you. You came along the road and you stopped at the door begging. You had that woman. She was out by the wall beyond.”

  “It was my son,” Francis said in a low whisper. “We are searching the country for him. Tell me.”

  “I gave him bread and some grease of the goose and some small potatoes and a jar of buttermilk. He was thin. The woman beyond was coughing. I could hear her all the time he stood there. He took the things. He had a way of looking that said how sad he was to be begging there. I would have offered him a place for the night, but I knew himself didn’t like me to. He hates me thinking good of them as passes on the road, and I know it is only misfortune that separates them from us. So I didn’t offer and he went off and the woman coughing with him and I heard them like that some way down the road and I inside at the hearth. And when himself came in”—she nodded toward the farmer, who studied the ground—“we took to shouting at each other. I told him I would be gone the road and leave the children to him if he didn’t invite the next beggars he met to come and eat with us. And them was you and your other son today” She stopped and drew breath and looked at the calf. “And see what good you’ve done us.”

  “He was thin?” Francis Foley asked her at last.

  “He was.”

  “But he was well?”

  “I couldn’t say that. I thought after he might have signs on him of whatever the woman had in her chest. His eyes, they…” She paused and watched the effect of the news on the two strangers and then nodded. “I am sorry for ye.”

  The farmer joined her. “Yes, we are sorry for ye.”

  Francis stood absorbed in his grief. If, in some other world, his flesh had been laid out and examined for the evidence of loss and regret, there would be apparent at that instant the running and deepening of wrinkles. He aged as the knowledge twisted into him like thorns.

  “How many days?” Teige said. “How many days ago that you saw him?”

  “Three, maybe four.”

  “Think!” Francis boomed, and the black cow shuddered a step away.

  The woman pulled at her lip. “What day have we? Yes, it was the day after Sunday last, I’d say.”

  “Three days so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which way did they go on the road?”

  “West,” she said. “Making slow progress now, I’d say.”

  “Teige, get the girls ready,” Francis said. “We’ll go now.” He turned to the woman. “Thank you,” he said, and swiftly went out into the dark and began preparing the cart and the pony.

  A half an hour later, with Deirdre and Maeve O’Connor sitting on the front of the cart and a portion of a killed goose and a bundle of potatoes and hens’ eggs and two winter cabbages on the back, the Foleys left. The farmer and his wife and children watched them under the held high lamp. They knew there was nothing to say and witnessed their departure as though such haste and desperation were familiar and had often been reenacted in the history of that country. Francis Foley nodded to them a final time and told Teige to cluck the pony, and they hurried westward, down the road under a thin light of few stars.

  8

  They went westward in the dark with the old man hastening ahead in a kind of soft-footed jogging that slowed and sped up continuously like a faltering engine of hope. The slap of his old boots on the road was a doleful music. Teige drove the cart and the dog followed some paces behind. The dawn opened before them and in the pale glow of its first light the father peered at all shapes and shadows that lay down the road as if each one might be the figure of his eldest son. They crossed the soft ground of the County Clare. They passed through the town of Ennis when it was still sleeping and its ghosted narrow streets echoed with the hoof clops of the white pony. The Foleys looked up at the curtained windows of the hotel, the shuttered boardinghouses and the open doorless entranceway of the poorhouse, but they did not stop or make enquiry. They heard low groans and whimperings that escaped in slumber through the crevices of old buildings.

  The dampness of the streets and the stone houses were like a cold purgatory and Francis Foley quickened his pace and passed quickly on. He knew his son was not there. He jogged on in boots torn with soles flapping. The rags of his coat fluttered. His long hair was plastered awry with sweat and rain and showed the bald places of his scalp like islands. Teige offered him his place on the cart, but the old man declined. It was as if he imagined he were being guided now on the trail of Tomas, as if he alone knew which turns on the road to take and knew not by logical reason but by an inner prompting that would reunite him with his own flesh. Teige did not argue. He saw the look in his father’s face, the sunken hollows beneath his eyes and the fixed, locked mouth, and knew the old man’s resolve was not to be questioned, that for him it was a kind of repentance and a journeying toward forgiveness.

  Rain fell and stopped and fell again, as if such weathers were features of the geography. They went northward from the town and turned west at a crossroads and trekked through the wild open bogs and bleak land of Cill Maille. There by a place that might have been called Misery or Desolation were the grey waters of Loch na Mine, the lake with no bottom where water sprites lived. Frances stopped and held his right hand against his chest and was sucking at the air when the cart arrived up behind him.

  “We can stop here awhile,” he said, his breast rising and falling as if about to release something.

  “Are you all right?” Teige asked him.

  “Feed the girls, water the pony,” the old man said, and slumped to the ground.

  They ate some of the goose then and the girls went to waterside for their privacy and returned and sat again mute upon the cart. Teige brought the pony to drink. The dog moved in a low crouching manner closer to the smells of meat. Before they were ready to leave she was eating from Teige’s hand.

  “They cannot be far now,” the old man said. He looked through the rain at the emptiness of the road.

  “You think they—”

  “I do.” The old man raised his head so his thin neck was extended, then he scratched at it as if deliberating a distance. “We will find them today, Teige,” he said, and did not say aloud, “Or never.”

  There was a still pause then in that eerie brown place of bogland and drizzle. The emptiness of the road made small their hearts. They said nothing. Waterfowl plashed in the lake and moved the time forward until the father finally stood and they left once more.

  They drove on down through the townlands of Barsaile and Glean Mor and Cluain I Gulane. When they arrived in the village of Cill Mhicil it was late afternoon of the fair day there. Polyps of dung lay cooling in the street. Bootless boys in brown rags stood herding groups of two or three cattle while their fathers had adjourned elsewhere. The cattle were watchful and skittish and young, and when the Foleys passed them they made small, panicked movements and had their sides tapped by the boys’ sally rods. There were curt cries and sharp commands. In the yards, horses were tethered and raised their heads, dripping drinking water, when the Foleys passed. Farther down the village, carts with old horses stood and the men eyed the strangers furtively from beneath their caps. They studied the white pony and chewed in the hollow of their cheeks and awaited what trouble might brew. They did not let their eyes meet those of the Foleys. They did not show any sign of welcome or wonder or even of noticing that they were there. Instead, as if out of some inherited sense of distrust of anything they did not know, they leaned against one of the eating houses there and looked at each other’s shoulders and waited.

  Francis Foley walked up to them.

  One of them thought he was going to be struck and took two quick steps back. Francis Foley was ragged and worn thin and wild looking. The dirt of the road was creased in his face. When he went to speak he felt his lips blistered along the insides.

  “I am looking for a man,” he said.

  The group of four men heard him but said nothing. One of them offered a hint of a noise and a small nod.


  “I am looking for my son,” Francis said to them, this time in a louder voice and taking a step closer. Behind him Teige stopped the cart in the street. The men looked past the old man as though suddenly he were invisible. None of them wanted to speak, preferring the comfort of feigned ignorance, until one with a screwed eye called out:

  “Will you sell the pony?”

  “What’s the matter with ye? Are ye deaf or stupid?” Francis said.

  One of them looked down at his boots, another made a quick grin and grinned it away down the road the strangers had come.

  “We’re neither,” the screwed eye said. “I’ll give you a price for the pony.”

  “Have you seen a man and a woman walking down this road today?”

  “We’ve seen many.”

  The men murmured a sound that was not quite laughter. Their shoulders swayed with the signs of the day’s drinking upon them.

  “My son and a woman. That’s who I’m seeking.”

  “For some trouble, is it?” said the screwed eye.

  “For no trouble. For his good. The last he saw me I was drowned.”

  “And a sight cleaner then,” the eye said to his companions, who laughed.

  “If you give me the price of the pony there, I’ll tell you,” he said.

  “The pony is not for sale,” Francis said.

  “I have a fine few laying pullets there and a banbh,” said the eye, and touched the peak of his cap sideways to obscure his other.

  “God bless you, but you’re thicker than the floor of the cart.” Francis stepped up and elbowed past them, entering the eating house at their back while they followed him, grinning and nudging as if about to witness a performance.

  In the obscure light he could make out shapes of men there and sticks and the outward thrust of their legs on the mud floor. A noise of spoons rattling in earthenware bowls and the smell of potatoes with butter and milk met him.

  “I am looking for a man and a woman,” he announced. “It is my son, and I am certain he came through here. Has anyone seen him? He is with a woman and she is ailing, I’m told.”

  The spoons paused. Amid the smells of cooked food rose the heated stench of farmers and their drovers. Some scratched themselves in wait and unleashed the scent of old urine from their trousers. Francis heard their breathing labouring in the dark, but none answered.

  Finally a woman at the counter said: “There was a man with a woman passed through here no more than a few hours ago.”

  “West?”

  “Toward the ocean,” she said.

  He could not even see her face. “Thank you,” he said. Then he was gone from there and called to Teige that Tomas was indeed ahead of them not far and that they would catch him before dark if they hurried. Teige clucked and snapped the reins, and Francis jogged ahead of them out the end of that village and into the light that was falling into the sea. They took the road west toward Crioch, meaning “End,” along the open country of no tree or bush where the fields themselves were winter combed by Atlantic breeze. It was a road Teige had travelled with the gypsies once before. It was the road that ran through the village of Doonbeg and on to the curved strand of Kilkee. The white pony seemed to recognize it and opened her stride on the road as if just ahead of her were the figure of her first love, the vanished gypsy boy Mario. She galloped now and raced next to the old man so that he reached out and held on to the leathers and was sped on like that. The pony’s eyes were wide and showed their whites; her mane fluttered in the breeze. Upon the cart the two small girls, Deirdre and Maeve, clung to each other. The road flashed past. Hares in the field stopped dead and listened. The seabirds circled. Then, there it was.

  A figure on the road.

  But it was not Tomas. It was too tall.

  Even knowing this, the father shouted out. He let go of the pony, and Teige reined her to a walk as the old man ran on, calling out and waving his arms. The figure that was like the figure of a giant stopped. It turned slowly, then, the way one might in a dream, and Francis Foley and Teige saw at once that there on the road to Kilkee was the aged and burdened figure of Tomas, carrying on his back the skeletal, fevered body of the woman Blath.

  9

  Tomas Foley had aged and was thin and weakened. The woman he carried on his back had shortened and curved him, and though he put her down carefully on the side of the road, he could not stand up straight to meet his family. He had been carrying her for so long that the skin across his shoulders was callused. When he turned to look at Teige and his father, he was not sure if they were phantoms. He blinked beneath his fair curls and passed a hand across his brow.

  “Tomas,” his father said, and then said no more, for he had stepped forward and embraced his son and his heart broke to feel the thinness of him in his arms. They held each other and were still and wordless there in the road. Teige watched them and the girls in the cart watched too and the dog turned its head. Then Tomas stepped back and let out a groan, and he held out his hand to Teige and then clung to him.

  “Teigey,” he said into the side of his brother’s neck, “I’m sorry.” They held each other tightly and shook with emotion. “I meant to come back to you,” Tomas said, but did not release his hold. The sea sang down the cliffs to the west. Gulls buckled in flight in the sky. The three Foleys did not move, as if afraid that any step would separate them again and this time forever. They stood in the road. In a fable they might have remained so, transformed through the release of all their regret and suffering into stones or petrified trees. They might even have chosen such a fate, for in a family that had journeyed so much already none could now think of moving. They were still as the fields.

  At last Francis Foley broke the spell. He went over and introduced himself to the woman Blath lying on the ground.

  “You are the famous father,” she said to him, and she smiled weakly and he could see that she was beautiful and that her beauty was ravaged through illness and fatigue. “He has spoken of you often.”

  “You are welcome among us,” Francis said. “I hope he has not told you what a fool he had for a father.”

  “Indeed he did,” said Blath. “But that father was drowned, you must be a new one.” She smiled again and there was in her expression such a tenderness that Francis saw at once how she loved his son.

  “That’s just what I am,” he said, “a new one.” And he was stopped from further speech for she started coughing then, and in a swift movement he bent and picked her up and carried her to the cart.

  They did not tell their stories then. They embraced again and looked at each other and stood back, and then Teige shouted out cries of victory and threw his hands in the air.

  “Tomas is back! Tomas is back!” he cried, and made the others laugh at his manner as he jumped up and punched at the air. Tomas went over and climbed upon the cart; he told the O’Connor girls his name and they nodded slightly and Teige told him they were Deirdre and Maeve.

  “And this is still your gypsy pony?” Tomas said.

  “It is,” his brother told him. “It surely is.”

  “Finan and Finbar?” Tomas asked, but knew the moment their names reached the air that there was an answer already in their absence.

  “Later,” the father said. His eyes were wet. He made motions with his mouth before speaking as if afraid to dare the words. “We are going to see our new home now.”

  And Teige handed Tomas the reins and went ahead and walked with his father leading the pony forward.

  10

  This is the story that Teige and his father heard of what happened to Tomas. They did not hear all of it at once. But some of it they heard that first night when the Foley cart had arrived at the seashore and Francis Foley had walked down to the edge of the country and stood alone a long time with his face to the sea. They heard it when he returned to the small fire Teige had built of sticks of ash and thin faggots scavenged from the fields nearby. They heard it while the wind played and they sat close to each other and even the
two girls stayed awake with the dog taking turns in their laps. Tomas sat with the woman Blath lying curled and small beside him. As he told it, his hand sometimes travelled down the twist of her hair. She lay, her eyes open all the time, and her face like worn vellum shadow-creased and burnished in the movement of the flames. Tomas told them some of it that night, and stopped when it seemed the woman grew distressed or the fever in her made her moan and her teeth jabber though they piled their coats on her. He told some of his story that night and more the night after and again over each of the four nights they stayed there on the edge of the town of Kilkee.

  He had gone back to Limerick that day long ago. He had ridden in along the banks of the Shannon River with his head low on the horse and his eyes watchful for bailiff and agent and constable. He had considered the situation. He knew that she was waiting for him. He knew too the life that she was living and that her waiting was secret and silent and existed only in the thin, insubstantial way of hope or prayer. Still he remembered a look in her eyes. He told Teige this. He said it looking into the starless sky when she was sleeping. There was a look in her eyes when he had told her that he loved her, he said, and that was all he saw that day riding back into the town of Limerick. He had no plan.

  “No,” his father said, as though this were an inevitability of his birth.

  Tomas had arrived back in the town in the evening. Rain was pouring down and the streets were mucked and the sewers ran like dark streams. Rats traversed the streets and carried leftovers from the stalls of the market. Apple cores, plumstones, flecks of potato skin, passed into the shadows. Tomas tethered his horse in the narrow alley behind the building where he knew Blath was. The rain fell. In his wet shirt his chest hammered. He said he tried to swallow hard, for it seemed he had bitten a huge apple and the piece of it was wedged in his throat. But there was no apple, he said. He went around the alley. When he approached the front door, he saw it was locked. He wanted to bang on it. But for once he knew he shouldn’t and crossed the street and waited. The curtains of the rooms upstairs were drawn poorly and frayed amber light showed. The rain threaded across it. There was the traffic of late gentlemen in their coaches passing up the street, there were dragoons in uniform cursing and laughing and kicking a bottle they had emptied. There were dogs that meandered night-eyed and low-snouted. So many dogs, he told them, dogs and rats and figures scurrying in the dark.