He waited a long time and none came out or in. He waited longer still. He struggled with doubt and dark imaginings, and when he could wait there no more he stepped into the rain and walked across the street up to the front door and banged on it like a hopeless emissary of love. He banged again. Then he heard the noise of calling from within and footsteps coming on the stairs. He was asked his name through the door, and he said, “I am Tomas Foley, I am here for Blath.” And the door opened and there was a man there of small stature with bald pate and whiskers and the smell of tobacco.
“She’s not here,” he said. His eyes were screwed near shut. He rocked on the balls of his feet as though a long time used to the sea.
“Where is she?”
“There’s another Blath,” he told Tomas, “there’s as many Blaths as you want, eh?”
Tomas hit him then and the man fell back against the banister and his eyes opened wide for the first time and he rolled himself quickly to one side and stood with the swaying motion of a boxer, though Tomas was nearly twice his size. He fisted at the air and made short jabs of no import as Tomas advanced upon him.
“Where is she?” he asked again.
The man did not say, and Tomas reached across his fists and lifted him and flung him against the wall. He followed him across the hallway and pulled him like a sack upward until the man’s eyes were somewhere below his chin. He held him there and asked him again where she was. The man shook his head in quick motion as though his head were preparing to spin off. Then Tomas broke his arm. The man’s screams brought an old woman to the top of the stairs. She held a candle and peered down at them. Her eyes were painted. Her hair was loose and those strands she possessed at the sides of her head were brushed outward by intent or accident and lent to her the weird air of one grotesquely masked. She shouted for them to get out in the street. Tomas asked the man again as he held him against the wall, and this time he heard that she was gone, that all the girls were gone to the house of Lucius Stafford, cousin of the baronet. He heard the news but did not comprehend it. He stood a moment staring into the face of the man. The man, fearing for his other arm, said the name again and told him where the place was.
When Tomas left there it was the middle of the night. The rain was still falling. He found his horse and rode out into the darkness to the south. His progress was slow. The rain blew in his face and the moonlight was lost to him. He had been told where the house was and so went there with the single purpose of getting Blath back. He was not thinking of the other girls or who they might be or in what engaged. He was gifted the naive vision of the lovelorn and experienced such a simplified view whereby the only significant measure in the world was the straight line between lover and loved. He rode on, an absurd servant of forgotten chivalry or one bearing lit candelabra through the falling rain. He arrived at the house before dawn and saw its candlelit windows as he came upon the curve of the avenue. It was a tall house. Its chimneys smoked the scent of oak wood. Next to it, a smaller lodge nestled in the trees. Tomas tied off the horse and crept up across the lawns in the rain. When he reached the house, he knelt and looked in the window and thought he had arrived by some magic inside a painting.
“I could not believe it at first,” he told them. “I could not understand it.” For there inside the long room were naked statues of women. There were a dozen or so of them. They were as like real as could be imagined. Yet they did not move. They were set about on alabaster podia through the room in a series of poses, some bearing fruits, some holding a hand out in frozen invitation, some covering modestly with draped arm or fingers their bosom or sex. It was not until he saw Blath there with flowers in her arms in the pose of Persephone that Tomas knew for sure that they were not statues. Then he saw Lucius Stafford in the gown of a Roman emperor with a garland of leaves about his head and three others similarly attired. They moved among the goddesses. Lucius led a pair of fawn bullish dogs like mastiffs on a rope of red velvet. They passed down along the figures there. They laughed and made comments on each and restrained themselves to resume their performance and seem imperial. The goddess Diana holding a wooden bow wavered in her place, and one of the men whipped at her with a tasselled cord.
“I saw no more,” Tomas said. “I went down and broke the lock of the small lodge there. And I made a brand of a handle and cloth wrapped about it and I laid it in the ashes until it was alight. Then I came up the lawn to the big house and crashed in the glass and stepped in with the fire.”
Screams and glass shattering and the barking of the dogs and the astonished cry of Lucius Stafford announced him. The emperor raised his hand as though to call forth bolts of lightning. His companions held up theirs as if to hold firm the beautiful reality of the women in their power, but the goddesses had leapt down and were running naked in all directions. Tomas waved the firebrand in zigzag and briefly marked the air as he walked forward. The Romans backed away. They called out for him to stop. He struck the face of one of them with the burning wand and he fell writhing to the ground. Then he saw across the room that Blath had seen and recognized him and was standing there with her arms across herself, unsure of whether to stay or run. And the room was suddenly full of people and the firebrand was wrestled from him and fell on the carpet and spread flame. There were two men on his chest. There was another struck him in the ribs with a wooden baton. Smoke was thick. Flames ate up the curtains. Tomas could no longer see Blath or any of the women. He cried out her name. He kicked aside one who came at him low and saw the man’s head twist sharply back as though the neck were broken. Then from behind he was hit with the blow of a poker and the room spun sideways and he fell senseless to the floor.
“When I awoke I was in Limerick gaol,” he said.
He said it in a whisper to his father in the small hours when the others were sleeping and the sea sighed in rhythm as though rocking the world.
“They had me there as a robber.” He felt his wrists when he told it, and Francis Foley saw the marks of irons on them. “I was I don’t know how long in a place dark and wet no bigger than half the cart. It was a place of nothing. No bench, no bed, nothing. I stood in my own shit. I cold not see my hand. I was in a place like under the world. Once in the day they slid back the hatch and threw in what I was to eat and it landed in the dirt many times until I learned to listen for it coming. There was a silvery kind of light for a moment then. Then it was gone. That was how I knew it was another day passed. I counted them then. When I had counted a hundred I thought it was forever. I thought they would release me. They would come any minute. But they did not. I began to count again. I tried to count each minute of each day and fell asleep standing and fell down along the wall and woke with my face in muck and counted again.”
Tomas stopped. They gazed dimly at the night sky awhile.
“There were four hundred and thirty-seven days like that in that darkness and dirt,” he said when he started again.
“Oh God,” the old man said. “Oh God.” Teige awoke then and listened without stirring.
“I thought,” Tomas said, “they had forgotten me, and I hammered on the door until my fists were numb. I beat my head against it. Still none came. I think they took days away and did not come at all, for sometimes I counted the day longer than it could have been. Or it was that my mind was wandering. I thought of Teige and the twins then with the gypsies. I thought of the white pony racing on the sands and how Teige would surely win. I thought of Blath and where she could be and did she know if I was living or dead. I tried sometimes to see the patterns of the stars in the blackness, but my mind failed me. I could tell rough seasons by the cold in the floor or how the smells thickened and rose. But the darkness, the darkness,” he said, “that is…”
His head bowed then and his shoulders curved. His father placed a hand upon his back. The sea sighed. They said no more that night. Teige closed his eyes tight and drifted uneasily to sleep.
What he told them the next evening was how one day without warning the foot
steps approached and the hatch was not opened, the door was. Two men reached in and lifted him out of the cell.
“I did not seem myself to myself,” he said, “so weak was I. I could not walk. I was a flake of Tomas. I was bone with flesh fallen off it. They dragged me from under my armpits. My feet scraped and bled on the stones. They bore a lantern that burned my eyes and I hung my head and saw the nakedness and dirt of myself passing down that place that was like a sewer beneath the gaol. I tried but could not talk. My mouth was sores, my tongue like that in a leather boot. When I reached the stairs I felt the light on the crown of my head hurting. When I got to the top I discovered I was near blind in this eye,” he said, pointing his finger to it.
“As they took me down along the corridor, another in chains passed me going toward my cell below. He flinched when he saw me. I heard his irons shake and the sounds of struggle as they beat him forward. I was thrust on, dragged by my gaolers and brought at last to a large hall with barred gates and iron bars from floor to roof. Inside were maybe three hundred men and women. They clamoured toward the gate when the gaolers approached and were threatened back with lashings and the beating of batons on the bars. I was thrown in there then. The gates were locked and the gaolers went away.
“I lay on the ground. There were high, barred windows. The daylight hurt me. I curled there and did not know if I was to live or die. Then the people came about me. They were beggars and thieves and rebel men and ones caught without means. The women were to be in separate quarters, but all these were filled and so they were brought here to that large gaol instead and were to wait until such space became open to them. Some were there without trial or judgement other than the wishes and say-so of their landlords or some other one. They saw how I was and clothed me with abandoned rags. They carried me back toward the wall where the ground was driest, for the light passed there each day. The women sat me then on cloths they had made themselves of their own rags. One touched water on my lips. I thought I fell in dreams then. I thought I lost the world and slipped into imagining, for before me then I saw Blath.
“I thought one eye was blind and the other saw dreams. But she was small and bent down and was near to me and I smelled her and her fingers touched on the place on my forehead that was bruised and bloodied from beating on the door. And it was her.”
They were seated again by the low fire beside the cart on the west coast of Clare. When he said her name Tomas looked to where Blath was now sleeping. He had thought that if they did not move for some days, her health might recover, but as she lay her breaths came in broken parcels and her body still shivered beneath their blankets and coats.
“It was her,” Tomas said.
“She had been brought there after the fire in Stafford’s house. Some had told against her and said that I had come to kill him because of her, and so she was brought in without trial in the night and thrown in the gaol and forgotten there. For one year she did not know if I was living. She hungered, she grew ill, and her feet swelled. They had called for the surgeon of that place for her. Farley, his name was, a man big in the stomach. He came there sometimes and ate with the captain. I saw him. He passed the gates of our gaol with a cloth over his mouth. The guards took Blath to him. They laid her on a table there and he looked at her feet and he cut them then.”
The wind came up from the sea and was bitter at their eyes and lips.
“He bled her to release the swelling. They told me he swayed with the wine of his dinner. He cut too forcefully and severed the backs of her heels.”
Tomas cupped his hands before his face and bit on his two thumbs. He stayed like that until his voice was steadied.
“When I saw her, she could no longer walk. She had to drag herself on the ground.
“The fool, she called me. ‘There’s my fool for love.’ Those were her words. And she lay in against me and the others stepped away and left us so in that corner of the gaol where the light sometimes fell.
“She made me well. I wish with all my might I could have made her so, too. But Farley had destroyed her. She was in and out of fevers then, agues, her blood froze. Sometimes her teeth chattered so that I wedged my fingers in her mouth to hold her jaw. She recovered a day, then fell hysterical the next and kicked at night robbers she saw coming in dreams to cut off her feet. I thought to myself she would die there. I thought, She will die if she does not get outside this place again. And I thought of escape. As she could not walk, I carried her around the great room of our gaol on my back. I made myself strong. In the dark I dreamed of every way to get out of there. The walls were thick stone. The barred window was high, and even if the bars were gone, she could not climb to it. My mind knotted like a cord with it. I thought all the day and every day and still could not think of a way to get her out of there. I spoke with others who were there. Many were not guilty of more than small crimes. Some had come from the petty sessions in Ennis where they said the gaol was three times filled and the stench of shit and fever hung like a brown cloud. There was a father and son who had been convicted of killing a bullock out of hunger. They were being taken to Dublin and sent from there by ship to Australia.
“We lived four months on rye bread and water. Then the bread itself was rationed. We were given half of what we had been. We were told no reason. Some of the men grew wild and angry. Hunger made them fierce. Then, when the guards came to take a Mrs. Doherty who had died, the prisoners rushed at them. In that,” Tomas said, and clicked his fingers, “the guards’ necks were broken. Then we were all pushing forward like a wave and I lifted Blath and put her on my back and we raced forward down the stone hall and one of the men had the guards’ keys and opened the great gates and there was pistols fired behind us. Some fell. I did not look back. We made the wall. The daylight was soft to us and the air fresh and we were dizzy with it. We had forgotten what air smelled like. But we pushed on. Then the outer gates were opened and we were pouring out of there with the guards following. There were more shots and calls and screams. But I ran on and Blath crouched low on my back, like a jockey, Teige,” he said, “eh? And there were many recaptured. There were. But we were a great crowd and they could not take all of us and we scattered like insects do from beneath a lifted stone. I made it to the river and we stayed there among the bushes until dark.
“In the night then I carried her away. I thought of you, Teige. I thought, Teigey thinks I am dead now. I must find him. But Blath could not travel far and we were slow and had no food. The days passed us by. I could not go even to see if you were there. I sent prayers for you. I came on the workings then where the men were put making the roads and I took work there so as to have food. We slept in a cabin where the thatch was partial. I made the road above Newmarket, lifting stones and breaking more of them. Then I thought, Teige is not there anymore. He is gone from there. You will never find him. Stay here now and do this work and she might recover. I thought God might smile on me. And when that road was built there was another. And another. And we lived that way and had enough to keep death away. Until a week or so ago. Then the work was stopped and we were sent away. The hungry winter was over, the poor harvest of last year would not happen again, they said to us. Go back to your farms. And in the cabin where we were I looked at Blath and she was coughing a thick, clotted stuff and I said to her, ‘Now maybe we should go to the sea.’
” ‘The sea?’ she said. ‘My sweet fool.’
” ‘My father had wanted it long ago,’ I said to her, ‘and many say the air there cures the lungs.’ I did not tell her I wanted to be sure that you were gone from there, Teige. I did not tell her I was afraid that she would die.
” ‘The sea,’ she said. ‘I have never seen the sea. Let’s go there.’
“And so we left and were on this road where you found us.”
He finished his tale, and his father and his youngest brother sat hunched beside him. It was dark. The sky was immense with constellations and they glittered above them like things new. None of them spoke further. T
hey looked away at the stars and past the stars. Down at the end of the fields the sea turned softly, like a restless spirit come home at last.
11
The morning of the next day the Foleys left and crossed the narrow peninsula of the County Clare from the coast of the Atlantic to the estuary of the Shannon River. Blath travelled on the cart between the two girls and lay wrapped in blankets. The road was not smooth and they journeyed slowly now, conscious of each jarring motion from pothole and stone. With the presence of the ailing woman the young girls seemed to find new connection to the world. She was not their mother, but she resparked within them some filial response that had seemed perished. To soften the road, they took her head upon their laps in turns. Then, on the road beyond Moyasta where the estuary appeared in mud and sand, they began without announcement to sing her a song. It was a slow air and might have seemed more mournful if not for the sweetness of the girls’ voices, which Teige and his father heard with some astonishment. They slowed the pony even more then and travelled rapt and lost in that music and their own meditations and dreams. When the air ended the girls sang another. Rooks in the flat fields seemed to quieten. Beyond the hedgerows a few thin cattle waited for drovers and fodder and hung their heads once more when the Foleys were nothing but that passing song on the breeze. And so they went on, like a caravan of exhausted minstrels in motley browns and greys: Francis, Teige, and Tomas all walking ahead and trying each in his own way to imagine a future that might repair the past.
The Fall of Light Page 15