The Fall of Light

by Niall Williams

  “Was?” Finbar asked.

  Malone nodded. He said none were alive there now. He said a plague had come in that country and killed the people that had once lived there. He wet the lipless gap of his mouth with a little water and then he told them. He told how the potatoes had rotted in the ground and the people been unable to pay their rent and how they were driven to the roads. He told of some gone insane and others who leapt from cliffs into the sea. He told of those who ate the grass and the nettles and the green leaves of the hedgerows and how their bodies twisted in the ditches six days and more before they died. He told of bailiffs come to tear houses down lest the families think to lodge there without rent. He said how he saw a mother of ten children offer to tear her own house down for two pennies, and how she did, with terrible tears and lamentations, until there was nothing left but rocks in the road.

  The night fell while he talked on. For once he began, the stories flowed from him like a river of grief and Cait nursed the new twins and rocked them in her arms with her eyes weeping and Finbar said nothing at all. The old man had lost his daughters first. These were twelve and fourteen years old. They had sickened on the road to Waterford and fallen into a fever with frightful visions and eyes white with terror. When they died he had not a spade to bury them and dug the ground with his hands and made a cross of ash and tied it with the cord of his trousers. His wife would not leave the spot, and though he begged her and tried to drag her along the road she would not go, and he was forced to let her stay, where she sang sad songs all day long to their daughters. They watched the thousands coming and going there, those doomed and futureless and travelling to nowhere. His wife died of hunger by her daughters and he buried her alongside them in the same grave where their bodies were not yet rotted. Then he himself walked on. For he could not bear to stay there and thought Death would find him quicker if he went to meet Him.

  Malone paused and looked and saw that Cait was bedding the children, and then he whispered other terrors to Finbar that he did not wish her to hear. He told of death in all its forms, of some shot, some throat-slit, others hung and swinging in the trees of the fields of North Munster with crows eating their eyes. He told of a man in delirium who cut off his arm and cooked it in a fire to feed to his son. He told of roads where the smells of putrefaction rose and how he walked on through them to meet Death and could not find Him. Only ghosts. For that country had become peopled by these. They rose from where they lay unburied in weeds and thronged the roadways. He saw them himself. They wandered listless and wan and without purpose. There were families entire. There were small infants with encircled eyes. There were gaunt great-grandfathers, all ghosted and silent and grave and journeying as things without a home. Malone had walked to Waterford and still not met Death and then taken a boat, thinking he was to drown. He had arrived in France one day without knowing the name of which country he stepped out on. Then he walked southward and eastward and all the time attendant on Death. He had heard then that those who had survived the first year of the famine were killed the second, and any last remaining starved in the third, until there was none left in that country now but a multitude of phantoms.

  He finished and lowered his eyes and looked at the timber flooring of the caravan. Finbar and Cait were seated about him. They did not speak. A long time passed and all three sat in still and mute contemplation of the horror that had been told. The candle burned out and they were shadowless shades there until at last in the small hours of the morning Malone spoke and asked them if in fact he was dead.

  12

  On the ocean the eldest of the Foley brothers sailed for seventy-one days. The journey was to have been forty, but the captain of that ship, Abraham Huxton, chose a course more northerly than usual and brought them into seas tall as trees. Almost all of those who sat in the gloom belowdecks had never been to sea before. The distance of the journey was unimaginable to them, and in the times they were allowed to climb the stairs and take air and see the ocean, they thought it endless. Within ten days there were many who chose to stay below rather than feel the fall of their hearts as they gazed out on the churning grey emptiness. They lived then in the small cramped quarters where the air was soon fouled and where cholera and typhus and dysentery were in their first stages. Many were ill with seasickness and lay groaning day and night as the ship swayed to and fro. The drinking water was too quickly drunk and was then rationed to two cups a day, and then one. The flour was infested. Children bawled and were hushed or beaten quiet and lay then on the damp timber floor with defeated brooding faces and horror at how the green world of fields had vanished. There were mothers and grandmothers who brought with them small trinkets or minor belongings that recalled the homes they had left. These they fingered, a brass ring, enamel spoon, braid of doll’s hair, small carved cross, such things, turning them over for hours on end long after any talk had fallen silent. They sailed on. Sometimes they kept the small candle of their hope burning by asking each other about where they would go in the New World. They did not speak of the farms and villages they had left behind, but tried to be forward looking whenever the terrors they had seen ghosted before them and made their throats rise. So, they spoke of places their imaginations could not yet begin to shape, of New York and Philadelphia and Boston. And these appeared in their minds like shining citadels in the Bible wherein all their travails would be ended and their families live in peace and plentitude. But then the sea grew rough and the filled chamber pots that lay in their laps spilled about the floor and the children cried again.

  Huxton sailed them into storm after storm. He was a broad-chested man who walked the decks with clean-shaven jaw thrust forward and hands holding each other behind his back. Even as the seas rose and threw the ship sideways, he tried to keep his hands behind him. He stood in the gales and sweeps of rain that whipped across the decks and he kept his legs planted as though defying Neptune to throw a storm that would unbalance him. And so they came. The wind cracked in the sails and the decks were awash as waves broke in froth and spume and painted the boards in thin white foam that came and disappeared down through the deck into the quarters below. The ship was like a toy and within it the families of O’Connors, Barretts, Keoghs, Considines, Kirwins, Mulcahys, Moriartys, Doohans, and others were thrown from their seats and tumbled in the dripping darkness with white eyes and screams. The ship rolled them about. The barrels of drinking water came loose from their bindings and crashed. They clung to each other and awaited their death. But for most of them it did not come, and the storm began to ease. A junior accommodation officer appeared at the trap above and looked down at the bowed heads and counted them and went off to make his report of losses and sometimes arrange for bodies to be buried at sea. Within days there was another storm. And then another. Huxton kept his balance. He betrayed no signs of victory or pride, only the upward tilt of his chin as the ship sailed on. In time the passengers grew to read the wind in the creaking of the hull and know the signs of tempest before it arrived. They learned how to sit in braced positions and secure such things as would roll and cause breakage and injury. They drank empty the cloth-stoppered bottles of poitin they had brought with them.

  They endured.

  Then, when the shores of America should have been near, they sailed into deep fog. The ship slowed and then seemed to stop altogether. The passengers came up excitedly expecting to see land and stood silent, craning forward and narrowing their eyes into the soft grey blanket that surrounded them. The foghorn sounded. The day passed. The passengers grew accustomed to that sound. Some said it would summon whales and that these were gigantic in those waters and would stove in the ship and sink her. Others said the shore of New York was less than a few miles and the fog would rise in the morning and like a cloth lifted they would see the great buildings. Neither proved true. The fog hung on. Huxton stood on the bridge with his hands behind his back. There was an eerie silence there. In the absence of storm the water made small sounds now and the sailors did not speak.
The food supplies dwindled. The fog remained. The air was cold and windless and no seabirds flew.

  The fog lasted another week. It seemed to the families gathered below that they had been chosen for a special purgatory. It was as though they had entered some location whose coordinates were unknown and that after the long history of tragedy they had survived, they were now to be kept there enshrouded and apart from human contact, where the memory of their hardships would perish with them. They sat and waited. Days passed.

  Then the ship swayed.

  It swung into a breeze and the sails flapped with a kind of urgency and even there in their quarters below, the emigrants knew they had come through. They shouted out. Tomas climbed the stairs and looked out through the air slots of the trap, for it was not their hour to come on deck.

  “I can see the sky,” he called. “I can see a clear sky!”

  Two days later they reached land. Huxton stood and watched them enter America.

  It was not marvellous or beautiful. They did not feel the sense of welcome they had dreamed or the richness of opportunity they had been told was there. Instead there were small offices and papers and questions and waiting rooms and certification and cramped, huddled crowds moving from one place to the next without yet entering the country proper. They were in quarantine. There were medical examinations and bewildered faces and naked bodies standing in the cold. In all of this Tomas Foley moved indignant and restless. He felt like an animal trapped. He was reminded of his days in the gaol in Limerick and suffered sharp memories of the tenderness of Blath. Once when an officer gazed in his opened mouth at his teeth, he thought to lean forward and snap off the man’s nose. But he resisted and only blew his breath out and ended the examination.

  It occurred to Tomas that he had not fully expected to survive and arrive in America at all. He was to have died already and had no plans for any future there. On the long voyage he had heard the dreams and hopes of the others and wanted the ship to reach the far shores for their sake only. For himself there was nothing.

  But then he arrived in those cold examination halls and suffered the indignities of inspection and somewhere within him an anger fired. He stood in the long queues and saw about him the forlorn figures of the dispossessed, and the whole history of his country seemed etched in their faces. They shambled forward and gave their names, and these were Seamus and Sean and Aodhain and Brigid and Maire, and were given with quiet humility and sometimes had to be spelled out slowly, for they belonged in another world. And in those moments perhaps Tomas Foley resolved not to be defeated. He tensed like a coil. He stepped forward and had already resolved to make good there, to show all such inspectors and officials and others that he was a Foley. Determination burned in his eyes. His mouth took the firm straight line it was to wear for the rest of his days and his shoulders curved as though he lifted a burden.

  He would make good there. He would work at whatever work there was and then send the money for Teige to join him. For the image of his youngest brother left on the island remained with him and he knew he should not have abandoned him so. Guilt muddied all his thoughts. Of Teige’s shirt there remained only a rag, but this Tomas kept rolled as a keepsake in the small bundle of his things.

  At last he was free and walked into America. He moved out in the uncertain and innocent cluster of his fellow passengers, who looked about them with wide, dream-filled eyes and the fear of being out of place. They shambled into the streets with their few belongings. They stayed within ten feet of each other for a brief time, like a herd, and then the crowds of Polish and Germans and others intermingled among them and they were lost to each other and slipped away into the great teeming life of that city. Tomas had no money. He was arrived in New York, and the air was beginning to turn cold. He followed his oldest instinct and made his way through dusty streets down to a river whose name he did not know was Hudson and then lay down there as the stars appeared. But he could not sleep. He kept seeing figures moving about, shadows, the nameless multitude of the city’s doomed. They were like so many leaves, blown, and then blown away. When the dawn arrived he saw for the first time the silhouette of that city and walked to a street corner where men gathered and stood and waited as at a hiring fair. He was taken then in a wagon and worked on the docks, carrying crates of tea and other dry foodstuffs that had come from England and sailed around the shores of the country of famine. Those about him were from a dozen countries. Among them he found the faces of Mayo and Galway and Roscommon and acknowledged them with a small lift of his head but no more, working on until the darkness carrying boxes on his back.

  He found a place to live in a tall building that was little better than a workhouse. There were twenty-four iron frames for beds and upon these each night the exhausted fell for sleep. In the dawn Tomas Foley was back on the street corner. Soon those hiring grew accustomed to looking for his face. They chose him quickly and he sat in the wagon while others looked up and tried to broaden their shoulders and contain the coughs that jumped in their chests. The winter came. It stole in along the docks in chill winds and frozen fogs, and then made the streets bitter tunnels of gelid air where people hurried with heads low. Tomas had never felt anything like it. The skin of his face cracked. He had grown a beard by then and it froze hard upon him like an iron mask. Huge snowflakes fell. The city whitened in an hour and within two slowed to a standstill. Horses slid and neighed in alarm, hooves clopping and breath misting in dragonlike plumes. And the snow kept on falling. It fell at first like blossoms in Maytime but then thickened until the streets were blinded. It fell on the shoulders of the men as they worked and made them briefly blanched like incipient angels. But it did not stop them working. For a week the snow continued. The city stopped and became a frozen image of itself, beautiful but for the dirtied smudge of tramped footprints. In the boardinghouse men held up their feet and peeled bandages and bloodied bindings from them and made hushed inner groans at frostbite and sores. They were unable to pay and told to leave and come back when they could. The place emptied by half. Down at the docks Tomas was kept on. His value as a labourer was already known and he was employed by the firm of Joshua MacMaster, Shipping Merchant, for all that winter. When the snow stopped the ice sealed it hard, and the city of New York remained a dirtied white, stained with grit and grime, and was the image of innocence tarnished.

  On his first payday, it had been Tomas’s intention to take half of his money and put it aside for Teige. He planned to do this every week and put the notes under the heel of his boot until there were too many to allow him to walk. Then he would send them back to the island. But in the first weeks of the frozen winter, he had come to know an old man in the bed next to him. His name was Patrick O’Loughlin. He was a small, wiry figure without hair on his head and quick, flickering grey eyes. He had come from the County Galway years before and travelled up and down the eastern coast there in various jobs of uncertain honesty until rheumatism had made claws of his hands and curved his spine like a bow. That winter his money ran out and he could not find work. The day he was told to leave the boardinghouse he told Tomas, who took off his boot and gave him the money he was to save for Teige. He did not think of it beforehand. He did not consider that it would only last a time and that O’Loughlin would be again on the streets. He gave the money and waved away his hand at the thanks that began on the other man’s lips. That evening Tomas sipped from O’Loughlin’s whiskey bottle and felt the warmth of goodness flood up through him. It was the first decent thing he had done in America, he thought. It was his way of giving thanks for the good fortune that was his now at MacMaster’s. There would be more money for Teige.

  Ten days later, after ten nights of sharing the bottles of O’Loughlin, the man told him he was out of money once more. Tomas took off the boot he wore even in the bed and gave him another handful of notes.

  “You’re a great man,” O’Loughlin said. “If we had more of your kind of man, we’d never have lost our country.” He paused and watched th
e other’s face from the side. “I’ll surely have work when the ice is melted,” he said.

  And so, somehow, as simple as that and without exactly meaning it to happen, Tomas found himself in the position of sharing all his wages with Patrick O’Loughlin. He worked for two men. He grew stronger. His legs were thickly muscled, his shoulders huge, but the wad of notes in his boot stayed thin. Through the months of January and February the city remained frozen. There were spells of further snow. Tomas wore a heavy greatcoat that he found in the storeroom of one of the ships. It had belonged to a Russian general and still had the epaulets before he tore them off. He worked on. He heard from some arrived mention of the continued famine in his country and felt rage and impotency both and that evening told O’Loughlin to get him a bottle of his own. He drank himself unconscious but managed still to wake in the morning and trudge to the docks.

  The spring arrived. It arrived without any of the signals of the springs he had known. He did not see it in buds and birds and grass. On the long avenues and streets it arrived in the air itself and was there almost before he knew it. He left the coat open, then off, then worked in rolled shirtsleeves. It lifted his heart. He imagined seed settings in the island and the terrible year of famine put behind. He worked with the crates that seemed natural now to his hands and shoulders, but his mind was away in the other country. With the spring came blooms of violence. In the warm evenings hotheaded gangs marched with bats and clashed in street battles over territories unmapped. There were feuds and enmities that the spring fuelled, and men appeared on corners and alleyways like soldiers without armies but bound to continue in long, nameless wars that predated their grandfathers. They rampaged some nights and battered each other and cried old slogans and catch cries from campaigns long past. There were Italians and Slays and Irish and others and all that spring they clashed by night and released the restless turbulence of their disappointment in that new country by renewing hostilities of old. For his physique, Tomas was soon petitioned to join. O’Loughlin asked him one night as Tomas lay in his cot bed. He told Tomas they had to hang on to whatever they could or they would be run out of that country the same as they had been their own. The Irish had to stick up for themselves. He dressed it greenly so and watched across the semidarkness of the April night to gauge Tomas’s response.