“Indeed yes, says he,” he said, and moved from side to side on his narrow legs as though sailing the floor.
“God bless you,” Tomas said to him after waiting for his father to speak.
“Indeed and yes.” He looked at the walls they had made and grinned a slanted grin. He seemed to have nothing more to say.
“What news have you?” Tomas asked him.
The boatman scratched. His head was lumpish like a turnip and grizzled in patches of thin beard like scurf. His eyes rolled about in the motionlessness of the building. “No, but,” he said. “Only that, and not that… devil a care I give, but…”
“Yes?”
“I brought the pony.”
Teige dropped the stone he was holding and was out the doorway then before them. He ran down to the shore to where the horse was tethered to a large lump of wood. She had swum across the river behind the boat on a long line, and her mane was matted and her flanks dripping. As Teige ran the pony sensed that it was he and stirred and hoofed at the sand and turned about there. He freed her in a moment and she whinnied and was skittish and puzzled and briefly did not realize that she was no longer tied. He let her have the scent of him and ran his hand firmly along the side of her, and then, while the others had come out to see, Teige swung himself onto her back. The motion of it was so fluid and easy, it seemed almost as if some inverse gravity were in operation or the upward pull of his body were part of a magnetic dynamism between horse and man. He held to her mane and leaned down and seemed to the others to speak soft commands then, for without an apparent action of his heels or thighs, the pony took off. She galloped down the small rim of sand and then up across the bank and onto the uneven green of the low field there, and then pony and rider were gone off away around the grassy domain of that island. The others watched without a word until they were gone. The boatman swayed.
“Teige can ride her, eh?” Tomas said.
His father nodded and stood there and looked at the horizon empty now.
“We need more horses,” he said then.
The boatman did not seem to understand the words were addressed to him. He was still looking at the place where Teige had ridden away.
“We need other things, too,” Francis said. “Tools, seeds. We can have cattle here in time.” He turned to face the fellow, and the man’s eyes rolled and slipped from side to side like glass balls upon a tide. “We have no money.”
The boatman scratched himself hard.
“Ask if there is one who needs horses broken,” the old man said to him. “Teige can tame anything and make it run fast as wind. You have seen it. That pony was wild, now she would jump the cliffs for him. He can do it. If there is one who wants a horse for a race, tell them Teige Foley is over on the island. Will you do that?”
The man shook himself as though bestirring flies.
“If that, not that… ,” he muttered with low chin. “But Clancy, Clancy, Clancy there might says he and…” He stopped, unwound or overwound.
A pause grew.
“And?”
The man trembled as if some charge passed through him, then he said:
“I will.”
2
Evenings then, when the work was over and their arms ached and their shoulders were stretched and curved and tight with the effort of moving stones, Teige took the pony and rode her off about the island alone. He rode as the light fell into the water and a smudge of smoke hung above the town across the river and soon blended into the sky, crepuscular and dim with the appearance of a thing tarnished. He rode in no particular direction, trotting the pony along the shore or out across the fields they had not named yet. He rode as the stars came out in the heavens above him and glittered and made stars in the water too and silvered the grass and made soft, silken silhouettes of the rabbits that stood erect in surprise. The pony was become almost too small for him, but she still bore him nonetheless with ease and could stride out charging into the half-light, the thrumming of her hooves the only sound. They travelled back and forth that small territory then. Teige stopped her sometimes on the far shore and watched the hills of Kerry slip into the folds of the dark. Other times he turned her into the shelter of a hedgerow and she stood amidst the sweet breezes of blackberry blossom and lifted her head and her breath hawed and her sides steamed like one becoming vapour. And in that solitude and stillness, Teige studied the sky and thought of all that was and had been. He thought of his brothers gone and wondered in the vastness of space where. He thought of Finbar and his girl from the sea, how he had become almost a gypsy before Teige’s eyes. He thought too of Finan, who was more mysterious and dark and whose vanishing seemed a part of his character or a thing foreordained. To each he sent mute, wordless missives until the regret tangled in his chest and he had to dismount and squat down in the grass as though about to void himself. He lay then in the May night.
And he thought of his mother.
He had tried to bury her several times now. He had been caught too often by the suddenness of realization that she was gone. It always stole up on him. Time and again he had been on the road or engaged in some work and had stopped briefly to draw breath and then, suddenly, he would think of her and swiftly his spirit would collapse in his chest like a bird made of paper. He would feel the crush of it and gasp. It was as if each time then she died anew, as if by some trick of time and memory she had come alive again and was not with him but only elsewhere and their meeting again was not far distant. She grew near in his mind. The scent of her was in his nostrils. The warmth of her where his head had lain came over him. He heard her tell him stories beneath a darkening summer sky. He asked her always of Virgo, and as she spoke her eyes were proud and deep and lovely. Virgo lies on her back with her feet toward the east, she told him. There are stars scattered over her shoulders like jewels, she said.
At last then he had tried to build stone walls of coldness about his heart. He had said to himself out loud, “She’s gone, she’s dead, you’ll not see her again.” He had said it in darkness and light, in wind and rain, through all seasons. He had tried to consider it as a fact like winter and so move beyond the continuance of this rhythm of grief. He had chastised himself for a soft fool and cursed like his elder brother and told himself not to think of her again.
But she was still there.
He lay in the cool damp of the night grass and the pony stood attentive beside him. The stars swung westward and were like a map of man’s yearning. When at last Teige rose, the pony whinnied. She nodded her head thrice. He slipped up onto her and rode slowly back in a wide circle toward the round tower and the stone cabins where the others were sleeping. When he reached them, he dismounted and went and fetched a bucket of water for the pony and led her into the small paddock, where he bade her good night. Then, as he turned back to the little cluster of buildings behind him, he saw an eye of light glistening from the doorway of the tower. He stopped and waited. The eye moved and he saw the starlight play off it once again. Then he knew that it was his father, and that there while the others were sleeping, through the passing of time and while he should have been resting, Francis Foley was engaged in the one activity that to him made clear sense of the world. He was looking at the stars through the telescope and seeing in the heavens revealed, behind the myriad and seeming chaos of those specks of light, a shape full of meaning.
Teige watched a few minutes as the glass eye moved and reflected the sky. Then he slipped into the cabin and lay to sleep.
3
Some days later the boatman returned and brought the news that Clancy did indeed have horses for breaking. He took Teige with him then and rowed back across the river, and Tomas and his father stood upon the top of the wall of the cottage they were building and watched. The narrow black boat slipped away in soft rain and the men fell back to their work wordless and somehow burdened with apprehension. That river had already run so through the family’s life that they did not trust Teige’s crossing would lead to happiness. Still, F
rancis had decided he had to go. Gulls flew like ragged pieces of old cloth in the rainy sky. Then it poured down and screened the country from view and was as if some portion of the known world had been erased. The two Foleys stayed working, lifting stones up the narrow ladder while the mud floors of the cottage shell puddled below them.
When he reached Kilrush, Teige too felt the air of apprehension. Whether he had brought it with him or it existed like a thing tangible in the very atmosphere, he could not say. The town was more tired and lifeless than when he was last there. The rain stopped. Those in the streets had a worn and ragged deportment. Wan faces turned to watch him with eyes enlarged and red-rimmed. They were like heads that floated. A beggar boy of no more than ten scurried over to him. He had been the first of a small assemblage to spot Teige and came to him ahead of the others, who even then began to drift over.
“A penny, God bless you. A penny.”
The boy’s face was browned and stained about the mouth. His nostrils were yellow crusted.
“I have no money,” Teige said, and tried to walk past him, but the boy, accustomed to first refusals, trotted alongside, begging. By now the others, a mixture of young and old in shawls, wraps, tattered once scarlet petticoats, and apparel that had no name but made its owner resemble a rotund bundle on legs, had come around him. There was a blind woman without legs seated in a small cart, a man wheeling her. A flurry of prayers sounded. The beggars cried out a litany of ailments, and Teige felt his jacket tugged.
“I have nothing,” he said more loudly, still trying to move ahead of them. But the beggars were hardened to such and moved as in a promenade performance, their hands wavering and clutching, their brows furrowed and the urgency of their prayers and promises growing with each step. Paternosters and Ave Marias flew about and were strangely incongruous there like fine embroidery. Teige was not indisposed to the beggars. But the face of the boy troubled him and was like some piece of himself. He wanted to help him and run away from him at the same time. Over and again he told them that he had nothing, but the words carried no weight. The faces floated there before him until at last Teige tried to shake himself free and in so doing stepped out of his jacket and left them holding it as he hurried up the street.
Clancy, as it transpired, was not the owner of the horses to be broken. They belonged to one of the landlord Vandeleurs. Clancy was a man in their employ, a short, round fellow with whiskers and broad, curving eyebrows. When Teige met him in the store on Francis Street where the boatman had told him to go, Clancy spat on the ground and asked him if it was true he could make any horse run.
“Every horse can run without my making it,” Teige said.
Clancy nodded and narrowed his eyes in appreciation of the point and spat again.
“Run races,” he said, and widened his gait and rocked slightly back on his heels.
“Not all,” Teige told him. “Some horses are not for races, but I can pick the ones that are.”
“Fair enough answer,” Clancy said. “Come on so.”
They left there and boarded a wagon that had been laid with feeding stuffs and sacks of flour and oats and such. Teige had never seen such supplies bought. When he sat up on the seatboard, the beggars were clustered about and looked at him like one who had betrayed. The boy was wearing Teige’s jacket. The blind woman, small and crooked in her cart, was wearing the sleeves. Clancy whistled and the wagon moved away. They travelled down the end of the town and out the road a ways until they came to the gates of the domain and turned in there and journeyed in the avenue past the tall trees where cool green shadows covered the way. So long was the avenue, the house was not to be seen. The trees thickened to wood on either side of them. Midges and flies speckled the air and buzzed and were like patches of imperfect air as they rose from the underbranches in the warmth of after rain. Clancy whistled a sorrowful tune. The slow notes hung, a melancholy drapery in that verdant hush. They moved on.
“Nearly there,” Clancy said without looking at him, and he clicked his tongue and quickened the wagon. The woods were behind them then and the fields that opened on either side were lush and green and fenced with timber posts. They were the smoothest fields that Teige had seen and might have been drawn by a child and imagined into creation. The first of them held no animals at all, just a glossy sward moving in the small breeze. But before they had passed it, Teige could sense the nearness of horses. Then as they wheeled about on a long curve of that road he saw them, thirty or so mares and new foals and two- and three-year-olds, some standing, some grazing, some running to meet the breeze. The wagon slowed. Its horses whinnied and shook their heads in the harness and there was an answering of sorts in the field.
“Well,” Clancy said, “that’s about half of ’em.”
“Half?”
“He’s more money than brains,” he said, and spat forward and studied the spittle in flight. “You think you can make something of ’em? It’s eight pence a day.”
Teige climbed down. He moved very slowly under Clancy’s gaze and went over the fence and entered the field. The horses that were standing there lifted their heads high and raised their tails and then broke into sudden speed like things shocked. They went off away down the field, bringing others with them, including a number of the thin-legged foals that kicked two-footed at intervals at the air behind them. Teige watched them all and walked calmly out into the centre of the field. He had about him then a kind of ease that was broadcast by whatever means not known by science to the animals there. It was always so. It was a thing that happened. He came into the company of animals and felt at once a kind of connection. It was something with which he was already familiar, this serene and clear-sighted empathy, and he did not have to try to do anything, only wait for the animals to feel it. He stood and watched the horses that had arrived at the far end of the field as they trotted in the tightened space and turned about and cut backward across each other, cutting up the grass sod that was softened by rain. They trafficked there for moments, hot and blowing and swinging about, some rearing, some nipping, others, mares, looking for their foals. Then, a black colt with a white blaze on its face spun from the others and led them like a charge back up the field. Teige stood still as they came. He was smiling at them and was for a moment like one within a tide, islanded there by horses of all description, saying the sounds he said in greeting and holding out his hands waist-high as if proffering invisible oats.
Clancy watched him another few moments and then, satisfied that the fellow was indeed what the boatman had described, clucked his tongue and snapped the reins and took the wagon on up to the stables. Teige stayed in the field with the horses all that morning. Clancy sent a youth with ropes and collars and a long-tailed whip, but none of these did Teige want. He walked back and forth among the horses and ponies there. The day moved the rainclouds aside and the sky was then clear and blue overhead. In time the horses grew accustomed to the man in their midst and returned to grazing, standing with long necks craned and swishing their tails at the population of flies. Teige studied each of them. There were many not in good form. He saw the full range of temperament and kind, those already ailing in some manner, those whose hindquarters were stiffened, those in the early stages of colic who turned about and looked at their stomach and made small, jabbing kicks at it. There were some with redworm, roundworm, whipworm, early forms of spavin and wind galls. Teige did not know the names of all such but recognized in the horses the discomfort of their condition and from this intuited a remedy. By the midday the youth who had brought him the ropes returned with warm potatoes in a cloth and a jug of buttermilk. He asked Teige how he was progressing, and Teige told him that many of the horses were poor enough and asked how it was that such a wealthy man as Vandeleur had not better stock.
“’Tis Clancy buys ’em,” the fellow said. “’Tis he has promised there’ll be racers amongst ’em. There’s another forty in the fields beyond.”
The youth left then and Teige returned to the slow wor
k of the afternoon. Still he did not take the ropes into the field, but went out through the animals, his fingers greasy from the buttered potatoes. He looked for the black colt and moved in circumambient fashion toward him. The colt’s eye caught him at once and he flicked his ears back and forth thrice. His jaw stopped. Teige took another few steps. The colt retained the stance he held and was for moments statuesque and posed as a thing serene. The other horses raised their heads and looked and looked down again. Teige moved his buttered fingers together. He was now five paces from the colt. He could see a nerve quiver in its neck and how the sleek black sheen of its flanks showed condition. Slowly he moved his hand out. He let the scent of the butter travel to the horse and watched for the slightest reaction. But there was none. The horse was planted. Teige took another step and said very softly the Irish word for “come.”
“Chugainn!”
And within the smallest particle of time, before the words had finished sounding and travelled with the scent of butter across the space between the man and the animal, the colt bolted. He reared and spun and blew and charged and knocked Teige to the ground all in one moment and was gone then off down the field, black mane waving and hind hooves kicking backward in short, wild bucks. When Teige began to get up, he heard the sound of laughter like glass tinkling. There by the side of the fence were two young women walking the avenue. They looked away from him when he stood up, and one of them held her fingers to her mouth while the other nudged her, and both of their heads shook then. They did not move on. Their mirth carried and flew about like an exotic bird. They were ladies of the house and wore long dresses, one green, one blue. The girl in the green dress had hair of a light gold that fell about her shoulders. She could not stop herself laughing. Her friend elbowed her time and again, but it was as if this action merely released more of the birds of glee, and they crossed that field and flickered about Teige as he stood and pressed a hand on the small of his back. The friend took a glance sideways over her shoulder to see him and quickly turned back again and whispered something and then the girl in the green dress turned too and Teige saw her face for the first time. It was less than an instant. Then the friend was pulling on her arm and dragging her around and the two of them were off away in quick steps up the avenue.
The Fall of Light Page 17