They travelled northward up into the lands of Montana. The seasons slipped past them. They crossed over the Rockies and down past the Big Horn. They rode wide of the villages of the Indians. And not Crow or Blackfoot or Cheyenne or Arapaho did they kill in that time.
But by then time itself was vanished for them. They existed outside of any history and knew only their horses and the land. They did not know of wars and treaties and treaties broken. They did not know how the maps of that country were being redrawn even as they rode over the land. They did not know that in Fort Laramie they themselves were reported murdered by Indians, that their relatives had been informed, and that another troop had set off likewise to find the best rail route west. Brown’s men rode on. No maps and charts and graphs were drawn anymore. The relentless immensity of the land itself made weary the vision of the railroad, and at times they forgot what it was they were seeking. Days and weeks could pass then without mention of it. In three years Tom Foley had written three letters to Dr. Brown about his son. But only the first of these had reached other hands. The other two Tom had given to traders, and these had never been seen again.
So it was. They rode in the mountains.
Then one day in the April of the year, they came down to a clear-running stream and dismounted and ducked their faces and shook the great hanks of their knife-cut beards and were in general ease when arrows landed in the chests of three of them. They fell forward on their faces. The arrows had made such small noise that at first the others did not understand. They looked along the stream at the fallen soldiers. Then arrows landed in the throats of two more of them and pierced them through. There were Indians on horseback in the stream. The water plashed and made broad, translucent arcs either side of the horses as they came, and such things seemed to be in slow motion or exist in fragments and shards where the mind’s perception shattered with shock and fear. Another arrow flew, the sound a whir. Then Cartwright fell back as he ran to his horse and rifle. Then the Indians were upon them. There were five or seven or maybe nine. Tom Foley could not be sure. He saw the one coming on a white pony with tomahawk waving and saw the triple scars across his chest. He saw the feathers in his hair. Then he jumped up at him and there was a moment and he was airborne and grappling the Indian about the midriff and the tomahawk was being raised to sink in his skull. Then the two of them were crashed in the stream and went below the surface of the water, and Tom’s hands found the neck of the other and closed upon it and drowned him there. Beneath the water he heard the sound of gunfire. When he stood again Brown was aiming his pistol and pulling the trigger time and again without a bullet firing. There was a long arrow in his thigh. Two of the Indians lay in the water. Another was running at him with knife drawn. Tom shouted out. He saw the Indian sink the knife in Philip Brown and was then upon him. He pulled him down as Brown fell back, and they tumbled onto the wet gravel of the riverbed and wrestled there. The Indian was younger and smaller than him and twisted and rolled like one demented. He broke free and stood and pranced on the ground, as might a dancer. He had no weapon. Tom Foley stood up and looked at him and they were so some little time, the Indian jostling in the space and ready to leap and the other still and braced and looking him in the eye. The moment held. There was the small noise of the stream and the groans of a man. The water ran red past them.
Then, the moment snapped, the Indian turned and ran and jumped onto the back of his pony and was gone.
Tom Foley stood there.
He watched where the other rode away. Then he walked past the fallen to Brown and knelt down and put his hand before that man’s mouth and then placed his ear on his chest. He was living still. Tom reached down then and took the shaft of the arrow low as he could and snapped it. Brown did not open his eyes. The blood from the knife wound pumped freely.
“Oh God,” Tom said. “Oh God in heaven.”
He went and took the shirt of one of the men and tore it lengthwise and came back and applied pressure to the wound with both his hands until the blood stopped coming between his fingers. Then he bound the wound as best he could and crossed down to his horse and brought up the canteen and poured the water over the lieutenant’s face.
Brown opened his eyes.
“You can’t die,” Tom Foley told him. “I promised your father.”
It took Tom Foley thirty-two days to get Lieutenant Philip James Brown back to Fort Laramie. And another five months before the son was fit enough to take the stagecoach back east to meet his father.
When it was done, Tom decided to ride back up into the mountains. But before he did, there came into the fort a wagon train, and among the homesteaders was a family whose name was Considine. He saw their freckled faces and he stood and asked them how long it was they were in that country. They spoke with the accent of the County Clare and told him they had come over only six months.
“Are they not all dead there?” Tom asked.
“No indeed. No,” said Mary Considine, who was the man’s sister and was struck by the sadness of the question.
That night, with her help, Tom Foley sat and wrote a letter to his brother Teige.
Dear Brother,
I do not know if you are living or dead. I do not know if our father is living or dead.
I am in America. I came here to make the railroad. I am in first rate health. My mind wanders some times to the days long ago. I had your shirt a long time Teigey and I intended to send you money to come. Then I thought all were dead there on account of the famine was in the potatoes.
This is a big country. I have been in the mountains. And sometimes there I thought I saw the ghost of you passing. I miss those times we had. I have lost all feeling of people here. I’d like to see you coming over a green field on the white pony.
I remain,
Your devoted brother
Tom Foley
FOUR
1
The story leaves him and returns to the island. Always the story returns there. The teller changes the lens and the green slope of the island reappears in focus. And it is as if the teller understands that the island is an image for all Foleys thereafter, that there was something passionate and impetuous in the character of the family that made each of its men islands in turn, and that this was a trait deeply fated and irreversible. It was their nature.
On the island of Francis Foley in time the telescope aged. The hundred seasons of the rain, of drizzle and mist, shower, sleet, spells sudden and violent of cloudburst and downpour, worked their way into its timbers. The wet winds that braced the river came inside the tower of the saint, where all that time the telescope lay propped at an angle to see the stars. Its timbers shrank. Fissures wormlike climbed with slow persistence toward the brass rims. The beeswax that had once been worked into its surface by the monks was long since desiccated and returned to the air. Now it grew more and more to resemble the man who grave and silent visited it each night like an eremite. The golden curls that had once been his were white now. The strength of his body that had one time been a vision of potency and inviolable faith in his place in the world was now vanished. As if wires had been cut, the musculature was slackened, and his was a figure wasted with the angles of his elbows and other joints in odd protuberance like some fallen tenting. His past was longer than his future now and haunted his eyes and gave to them an expression at one time vacant and deep as if seeing but not what lay before him. By that time Francis Foley’s manner was quieter than a whisper. In the daylight he slept in the corner of the stone cashel where he and Teige had survived the famine on fish and berries and the rabbits that lived there. When he woke Teige fed him. They sat either side of the low fire and the smoke travelled about them.
Language had slipped away from them. It passed in the first season after the disappearance of Tomas and did not fully return. It was as if the winds that blew then were a keening or requiem and father and son said nothing but sat and listened until in time they found they had passed beyond dialogue and were in a place now whe
re such was impossible. In the place of words were sometime small gestures, the least lift of eyebrow, wrinkle of lip, or nod of head. But even these were barely required. In the afternoons the old man went out around the island. He walked away in a slow ramble and kept in his hand a hazel rod, always going around by the shoreline and doing so in all weathers as if it were a station of penance, and while he trod there he revisited sins of his past. Then, when the night fell, swift in winter, slow in summer, he returned and went to the tower. One night the noises of his efforts as he moved the telescope into place alarmed his son. The father’s chest made a soft soughing as if sycamores in full leaf rustled there. And Teige came to him and appeared in the doorway of the tower and then came inside and helped him get the telescope into position. His father made the half-smile of gratitude that always verged on weeping. Then Teige left him and crossed back beneath the stars and wondered for the millionth time at how nothing else in the visible world now seemed to matter for the old man. All nights then after that, Teige came and prepared the telescope. It made no difference if the night sky was occluded or rain fell. Francis Foley would still take his place there, lying down on a bed of hay and opening and closing his mouth as he brought his face to the eyepiece and fit it there as if crudely adjoined by such mechanics to the mysteries of creation. He lay there until the dawn gathered in the stars. He lay in what private perusal Teige could not for a long time imagine. For it seemed a practice cold and aloof and without purpose other than a fascination the father should have outgrown. Still it endured. And it was not until one night in October of the year after Tomas had left that it finally fell to Teige to discover what the old man was doing.
It was a night brilliant with constellations. And all the stars from Pisces to Pegasus to Hercules and on above to the Canes Venatici glittered like a diadem bejewelled. Teige could not sleep. He lay in the stone building where the air was cold and damp with the coming of winter. The mud floor, as if it received the season ahead of time, as if winter and summer and spring rose from below and did not fall from above, exhaled a chill, dark breath. It travelled inside the clothes on Teige’s back and made him shiver so that he rose and beat his hands against his arms. The plume of his effort came and went, visible on the pale starlit air. The dog raised its head and lowered it again. Teige looked to the bed of hay where his father never slept in the night, then he stepped outside beneath the sky and stood and watched all that was still and yet slowly moving there. The river was quiet. Across on the farther shore the town of Kilrush slept in an unlit huddle. Teige walked out and went to where the pony was standing. He stroked her neck and her flanks and laid his head against her. Then he went back across the wet grass to the wall where he saw the glass of the telescope glinting. He crossed then to the tower, but not in such a way that his father would see him. When he reached the wall he pressed in against it and came around the curve so until he was next to the doorway where the eye of the telescope peered out. Teige squatted down then and from that position aligned his naked eye to the view of the stars his father beheld. He found Cassiopeia and Ursa Major and Minor and the myriad others then that gradually revealed themselves the longer he stared. The night slipped on, the stars wheeled another fraction in their endless turning. The cold made Teige embrace himself, and he crouched there small and shivering and attendant to that ancient pattern above wherein his father’s mind roamed.
Then he heard the whisper.
At first he was not sure if it was his own dream speaking or if at such a time in the night sprites or other such came and whispered for mischief and devilment. He pressed his ear closer to the doorway. Then he heard his father say words in a tone barely audible. He could not know what they were. His father was lying on his back with the telescope to his eye, and the sounds travelled upward in the high acoustic of the tower and were all but lost to him. Teige heard them like the smallest noise; the footstep of fox or badger coming from some covert might have been louder. He leaned more forward still and turned his mouth back that his breath might not give him away. Then he heard them again. The old man was speaking. The words slipped off his lips and rose and faded, and still Teige could not make them out. Then he took the greater chance and leaned in below the angle of the telescope and was in the same space where he could see his father’s prone body and hear now what he was saying.
“… what sorrow is mine is mine. I am not asking for less,” he said. “Do you hear me?” he whispered. “Listen.” He paused. His breath was a sigh. At his feet Teige heard his heart thumping.
“I am asking for her. And for my sons.”
His voice then was thinner still. It seemed to Teige that he said some words that did not escape his mouth, that these were formed in the air like silent promises or prayers and ascended into the ether of space as so many credos must have in the centuries since that tower was constructed. Teige moved back and sat once more outside against the wall. He pressed back his head and felt his body shake. He looked up at the stars then and blinked, for they swam in water like swans.
2
Every night after that, Teige came and listened outside the tower where his father watched the sky. He understood then that the constellations had become for the old man the face of God and that while gazing upon it, Francis Foley confessed sins of pride and others that he hoped might redeem the souls of his wife and sons. To the pitch of his whispers Teige grew accustomed and soon could hear almost all his father said. There, he heard the old man tell God the name Teige. He heard him ask of Tomas and Finan and Finbar. Some nights he heard him say the name of Emer only, and whisper this over and over as if reminding the ear of a forgetful deity. Other times the whispers spoke of that country and the blight of the potatoes and the stories the boatman had brought of those thousands dying. Francis made appeals. He asked if all were suffering some sin that was beyond atonement and if He above might not consider the punishment only of some. He offered bargains of damnation eternal. He promised his soul. Then again on other winter nights he asked God for signs. He asked Him to show Francis in the heavens some small glimmering that he might know he was being heard. He turned the telescope slowly across the skies and seemed to Teige to aim it northerly at the Coma Berenices. These, that were the constellation named for the beautiful amber-coloured tresses of the Queen Berenice, obscured a thousand galaxies too distant to be seen and were the first astral story that Emer had told Francis.
Whether there was a sign in the sky or not, Teige could not know. Through all that autumn and winter, he came each night and listened to his father talk to God through the telescope, and always the same topics rose in whispers off his lips. And from this Teige was strangely comforted.
One day in the second year after Tomas left and when the blight was again in the potatoes, the boatman came. He came up from the shore and stood at a tilt before Teige. He was thin and grey about the cheek and swayed in the small wind-rain. He said nothing. He passed a hand up over the crown of his head where the hair was vanished and an oily dirt streaked. Then he muttered something that Teige did not catch and made a sudden shrugging which led to coughing. His body racked. He stopped and looked at the ground, then back over his shoulder where his boat lay near the shore. Teige looked beyond him and there saw sitting in the hull the sorriest assemblage of rag and bone that comprised the boatman’s family. There were twelve in all, his nine children, his wife, her sister, and his own mother. The children sat to the front, aged from four to fourteen, and were a mass of faces wan and doomed and obscurely contrite like ones condemned. Behind them huddled the three women. They had lost their house, the boatman mumbled to Teige. They had been evicted the night before. He turned about as he said it, as if something sharp and coiled twisted within him. He did not want them to take to the roads, he said, and then said no more, because Teige told him not to.
“You can stay on the island,” he said, and when the man said nothing, Teige touched him briefly on the shoulder and walked down before him to where the boat lay on the water.
Their name was MacMahon but had through use and familiarity become Mac, and then, to distinguish them from the multitudes thereabouts with that appellation, the BoatMacs. They were a mute congregation of souls and seemed sundered from the world, with only the strange music of their name to recall their origin. Nanna BoatMac, Livy BoatMac, Tibby, Tabby, Oonee, Aggee, Gra, Bu, Prun, and the others that their father, BoatMac himself, had christened. Now they looked at Teige with that same expression of mistrust and guilt and shame that had become habitual in that time. They did not speak out. They slumped and endeavoured to make themselves seem a burden smaller than they were. One of the children shivered. They were cold and wet, and the cold wetness of them translated itself into the morning and lent them the air of travellers from the Country of the Drowned. Their hair was matted, their eyes stinging. Sores had opened at the corners of the lips of two of the girls, and these they had torn with their nails until they looked the awful image of some caricature of down-mouthed Desolation. Teige stood before them and did not know what to say. He reached out his hand to one of the small girls, and she pulled back. Gulls that had followed the boat screamed in the air. The dog that stood on the bluff waited. Slow rain began.
Teige turned to BoatMac.
“You are all welcome,” he said. “Tell them to come.”
The man nodded and shook in himself and swayed. Then he stepped down into the water and took the first of his daughters in his arms and bore her over and placed her like a proven treasure on the sand. While he did this with each of the girls, his sons tumbled out. Slim splashers, freckle-faces, weedy-armed fellows in torn shirts and rags of trouser, they came onto the island and variously spat and kicked at the sand and looked as if considering its worth. When they were all ashore—the grandmother borne on the boatman’s back in a vision that crumpled Teige’s heart like paper—they stood about in a little cluster and did not move as the rain mizzled upon them. They were like climbers arrived on the thin ledge of hope and dared not budge. The boatman coughed. Gulls rose and fell again. Waves broke. At last Teige told them to come with him and see the places where they could stay. He walked off a few paces, but the BoatMacs remained behind.
The Fall of Light Page 26