“What is it? Tell me, what?”
“It is Finan,” Finbar said. “My twin, he is dead.”
When the light dawned over the lake that morning, he went down the ramshackle street to the house of the fortune-teller. By then the feeling in his left side had returned, but an ache persisted as if he had been lanced and he walked crookedly, his right hand clutching at his left side. He did not wish to be noticed on such consultation and wore a green felt hat pulled low on his forehead. When the fortune-teller saw him at her door she nodded sagely, as though his future were already with her or she were already many pages ahead of him in the tale of his own life. She waved a pendulous arm and he entered. With his hat on he sat in a room that no longer resembled the caravan it once was. There were silks and other thin cloths draped and curtains of purple beads that swung and clacked minutely in the afterwards of his arrival. Candles burned and made the air dense as a soup of flowers. The fortune-teller sat on a kind of cushioned throne and raised her bejewelled fingers and made of these a gesture as if playing an invisible concertina. She remained so, feeling whatever vibrated there in the space between them, for some time. A large woman, she had passed her seventieth year but scorned all such measurement of time and was on that her fifth lifetime lipsticked and thickly painted and bewigged in a tousle of flame red hair. She watched Finbar with steady gaze while fingering the air. When at last she stopped, she asked him if he wished the cards as well.
“Do you need the cards before you can tell me?” he said.
“I do not. I can read the future like script on paper. It is there,” she said, and waved a heavy hand toward his face and stirred the soup so its scents swirled.
“Well?”
“Men come for only two reasons. Love or death.” She paused. She watched him move as if in some discomfort in the seat. “You are not a man in love.”
“Is it true, then?” he asked her.
Yes,” she said.
“He is dead?”
“He is.”
For a moment Finbar did not react. He was like one transfixed before an altar. His face betrayed no expression. His eyes did not move from the eyes of the fortune-teller. And he stayed so.
“Tell me,” he said.
Then, as the air of that room grew steadily warmer, the fortuneteller told him the story of Finan, his twin. She told him Finan had sailed from his own country and gone south and arrived in a port in the country of France. His heart was heavy and his soul could find no ease in the world, she said. He met a priest there and confessed his sins, and though the priest did not understand his language he absolved these but told him he was one called by God. He kept Finan with him in a monastery for five years and then one day told Finan he must sail to the continent of Africa and do God’s work there.
“More?” said the fortune-teller.
“More.”
He boarded a ship then and was on the sea for many weeks, she said. He arrived in the port of Sierra Leone in the blaze of summertime. His head burned, his ears crisped. He moved among slavers and callous men and others who had come there to live outside the law and the rules of human decency. He wore the black clothes of a priest and in these suffered the heat like a further penance. He preached in vain, for none there would listen to him. He grabbed a man by the arm to stop him beating a slave and was himself knocked down and beaten in the dirt.
The fortune-teller paused. She asked Finbar again if he wished her to continue, for she knew the story that lay ahead.
“Tell me,” he said again.
“He did not know what good he could do there,” she said. “He asked God and got no answer and went from there eastward.”
He crossed scorched places in the dry interior of that country where there was none, or where passed figures silent and nomadic. The first signs of malaria were already in his eyes. He walked toward the foothills of the Wologisi Mountains. There was a tribe there that scattered when he came. He travelled open country past herds of elephants and came to swamps of stewed heat where herds of pigmy hippopotamus lay. At a place where caves opened in the ground he came upon a wretched tribe withered with the scabs of leprosy.
“Here he stayed awhile. He tended to them, for they were frightened and dying and had been long outcast and lost the trust of human contact.”
In the night he told them the word for God, she said, and he pointed at the heavens and they mistook God for the stars. But when God could not cure them, his faith weakened. He asked God many times to come and show a sign. But there was none. Then when his own sickness was worsening he left there and walked on.
“I see a forest of trees dripping. There are trees of fig and palm and rubber.”
“And he is there?” Finbar asked.
“Yes.”
He was in that forest where monkeys screeched and crashed above and where the bright wings of birds fluttered and vanished in the high branches. He was unable to walk now and sat down and tried to pray, but no prayers could form in his mind and he suffered delusions and saw in mirage the face of God. But it was the face of his father. His mind buckled then and he was not sure if there was a God or if he had had a vocation and if his devotion was not simply the expression of lost love. There was only the long figure of the father who had not seen Finan as a child in his own right and who had vanished in the river before the boy had become a man. There was only the boy’s longing for his father to acknowledge and know and love him and that this impossibility had become his yearning for God.
“And with that revelation he cried out there in the forest,” the fortuneteller said. “He cried out your name.”
She stopped and waited a moment and the heat in the room was such now that it was difficult for Finbar to breathe.
“He cried it out loud and then the other names of his brothers and then cried for his mother. He cried out and saw one coming to save him. He saw it as clear as if it were real and that was the one he had prayed to and was his own father, who in his vision then lifted him like a child in his arms and bore him away to a place distant and lovely as the stars.”
She stopped. Finbar held his face in his hands. Sweat glistened in the creases of his brow.
“He died alone there?” he asked her.
She nodded. “Yesterday,” she said.
Africa lingered in that room for a spell. Time passed, or did not. The heat of the room rose and rose then to such a degree that at last there appeared in translucent mirage the wavering, sunburned figure of the lost twin Finan Foley. He stood there before them, his face placid and his arms by his sides. Then Finbar could bear it no longer and let out a cry and reached his left hand to his brother and at once the image like a fever broke and was gone.
“Now” said the fortune-teller as the room cooled, “what will you do?”
Finbar touched his side where the ache had passed. “I will go home,” he said.
He got up then and paid the woman and went back down the street to Cait and his six children. He told her to get ready, they were going on the road.
Her hands flew to her mouth, as if she had to hold her hope a moment. “Where?” she asked him.
“To dip our daughters in the sea where I found you,” he said.
Then he went outside with a shovel and dug at the grass that had covered the wheels of the caravan. He dug for two hours, and some of the gypsies came outside to see what he was doing and some were glad and others vaguely ashamed. He told them he was going on the road and any were welcome. He was not going to seek their ancient home, he said, for a Magyar traveller had told him that it was not Romania but a place in the north of the country India from which they had long ago been banished and come across Asia Minor and Byzantium like seeds in the wind. He was going west and north, he said, to see the sea again. He unrolled for those that were gathered in curiosity the map of Benardi, and upon it he traced a route like one showing the way to the lost.
Then he went and bought two horses and hitched these and after some efforts moved the caravan
for the first time from the deep ruts in which it was foundered. And with the first great sway of motion in their cages, the canaries sang. Two other families of the gypsies joined them. Their caravans were beyond recovery and they came instead on foot with bundles tied. Then, without further announcement, in the warmth of the afternoon, they left there, Finbar Foley and Cait and, with the two youngest, the now half dozen Roses. The caravan creaked out the road past the lake, some following behind in slow file and the children of others skipping and hopping alongside for part of the way as if witnesses to some strange and fabulous carnival.
7
If the story of Emer Foley could be told, the telling would take the days and nights of the rest of her lifetime. The sorrow of the words themselves would weigh so upon her that her heart would crack, making weep the skies and blacking the stars. Such was Teige’s understanding the moment he knelt before her in the town of Killaloe, for so it seemed written in the lineaments of her face. He did not ask her where she had been. He touched her face and told her he was Teige. Those assembled murmured and pressed forward the better to witness the scene of annunciation, and to them Teige raised his right hand and said nothing and did not take his eyes from his mother. The beggars stopped. They clustered there as if at the edge of some invisible arc drawn about the man and woman, as if these were upon a stage and they the chorus. The mother’s face crinkled in a puzzle.
“Teige,” she said, “is it Teige?”
Her voice was cracked and whispery and frail and seemed like a thing left long in harsh weather.
“Mother.”
She reached out both her hands and they hung in the air slightly aflutter until her son leaned forward and put his face between them. She drew him to her then and they seemed to melt upon each other, and not the horses or the carts or the people that moved in the street mattered for them at all. Understanding this, the crowd of onlookers slowly stepped back and then dispersed down the street to speak of what they had seen and to console themselves of their own losses and the many of theirs that were missing or gone.
Teige and his mother embraced there in the thin wet afternoon light. They wept. They held to each other like ones rescued in a drowning. They said nothing at all. After a time Clancy came out to see where Teige had got to, and he came upon the scene and in his mood made buoyant by whiskey he called out loudly and clapped Teige on his back. Teige stood up then and told him this was his mother who had been long lost. And Clancy offered her his hand that she could not see and he said, Well, well, well, and Emer stood up from the street and was now a woman small and light and crooked, though she held her chin high.
“You’ll be coming back with us, then?” Clancy said. And when neither of them responded he nodded forcefully and answered himself. “Yes indeed. Indeed you will.” He waited a moment, his legs planted, as if unsure whether he could suggest to the others to come into the public house for a final drink before the journey. Then some torch of self-consciousness shone upon him, and one-handed he smoothed down the tuft of his hair and said: “Well, we’ll go now, then.”
They left there in the late part of the afternoon with the light poor and the mare hungry in the cart. Those who had been her company stood by the wayside and though she was blind raised their hands in farewell. They watched her go and stood out in the street after she had passed, taking solace from that reunion and studying the horizon upon which the travellers diminished. On the seatboard softly the mother rocked. Her head she kept at a slight angle away from Clancy and toward her son, and sometimes she freed her two hands from where they held each other and opened them in the air and Teige placed his right hand between them and they closed about it. Now in the easy drifts of his intoxication, Clancy said nothing. He was comfortable in himself and was as one who has suddenly discovered his spirit larger than he imagined. They moved on. The countryside passed in its ceaseless green unrolling. Carts and coaches and men on horseback journeyed across the dying of the light. Farmers and sons drove two or three cows with sticks, and these dunged the road and the last flies found them. As the day fell into twilight, those coming and going on that road took on the unreal form of things without substance. Riders appeared and faded in the gloaming. Soon they were travelling in the first darkness of night and it came to Teige that this was the world his mother saw, and he reached his arm about her and held her against him. On the outskirts of the town of Ennis, Clancy stopped the cart and palmed flat his hair and looked at the darkness and then reined the horses to the left and brought them to a large farmhouse. There he climbed down and went inside and came out to the Foleys some time after and told them they would stay there the night. Teige brought his mother down from the cart then, leading her upon his arm to where Clancy’s sister was standing at the open door. The woman welcomed them and brought them inside, where she said food would be ready for them shortly. Teige went outside and untied the mare and took her to a stable and fed and watered her and, crossing back, he moved beneath the stars, which were clear now and arrested him a moment. He looked at Orion and Pegasus. He thought of his father that night, studying those same constellations, and knew that he must tell his mother about him and about his brothers. And he thought too of Elizabeth and lingered there in the stillness of the yard and looked across at the yellow lamp glow of the house and stood and felt the existence of such a thing as grace.
Later that night, then, in a small room that was off the hearth, mother and son lay sleepless in a cover, their separate histories vast and unspoken in the dark above them. Slender stellar light fell. The sill of the small window shone and showed in the corner lacelike tracery of spiders. Mice worked. At last, though he did not know if she was awake or sleeping, Teige said: “Mother?”
It seemed strange to be sounded aloud. It seemed a word he had never heard himself say.
“Mother?”
“Yes, Teige.”
“They are all gone,” he said. “Finbar, Finan, and Tomas, too. I am the only one left.”
She did not say anything at once. He wondered in her dark world if shades or shadows fell. He wondered if there was blackness and then utter blackness. He reached his hand toward the shape of her and his fingers arrived at the softness of her face that was like a fallen fruit wet in the grass.
“I thought I had cried my last,” she said.
He told her quickly then that none of them may be dead. He told her of the river crossing with the telescope and the chase from Limerick and the gypsies and the races on the sands. He told her of Tomas and his love and how they had been lost to them for so long. He told her of the twins vanishing and how they had never returned but wandered in separate somewheres unknown. He paused and did not tell her then of his own searching or the years of solitude tramping the roads. He heard her sighs. He heard the new sorrows make room in the confines of her spirit. The night moved on a time. Clouds came from the west and darkened the window. Then rain began.
“I found him,” Teige said then. “Father, I found him on the road. He was looking for us. He was looking for you. He knew of an island.” He stopped himself a moment and did not know if she wanted to be told. But he felt compelled and said: “He is there now. He is sorry. He looks for you in the stars.”
There escaped from her the smallest cry, as if some great weight had been pressed against her chest and she could utter nothing more. Teige did not continue. Then out of the darkness his mother’s hand reached for him and touched his face and then her other joined it and she held his head between her fingers and kissed his forehead.
“I came back,” she said. “The day after. I came back.”
She paused and her breaths came in sharp gasps.
“We had a fight. He wanted to go, I wanted to stay. I went out the door. I only meant to be gone a day until he could see how he needed me. God forgive me. I came back the next morning, the house was on fire. They were hunting him. I thought you were burned. Oh God.” She cried out and she moaned as if torn and Teige drew her closer and they held to each oth
er then, weeping in the darkness of the night. He stroked her silvered hair, he touched her blind eyes, and murmured to her shush-shush sounds while all about them in the fields of that countryside a bitter rain fell.
8
In the dawn the skies cleared. A buffeting wind like a busy housekeeper moved about and took down the first leaves of autumn. Sycamore trees around the farmhouse made whispers and shivers, sea sounds. Birds were sent about and arced and whirled on air that gleamed. Teige rose and went to see to the mare and then led his mother to the table which Clancy’s sister had lain. Clancy himself did not appear at first, and his sister knocked and called to him several times before his head came around the door. He would take no food. He would be ready shortly, he told them. They ate and rose and thanked the woman. Then Teige backed the mare once more onto its transport and they left there.
The road west was already busy that morning with marketgoers. Drovers had been out moving with cattle since before light. Now their customers followed in their wake. There was a stream of those buyers, hawkers, gawkers, and others on foot and cart, travelling into Ennis. Wisps of straw and hay blew down the wind, the pungency of congregation of men and beasts leavened in that blustering weather. All studied the mare as she passed, but Clancy, who was returned to his taciturn manner, did not give them so much as the corner of his eye. He clucked at the horses and brought them through the town and out the farther side on the road to Kilrush. They travelled on, the blind woman seated between the two men and her son sometimes saying to her brief descriptions of what country they passed. She wore a shawl against the breeze. What visions of those she loved unrolled as the landscape passed could not be said. She sat and was like one revenant from other worlds, burdened by what she had witnessed and what could never be told. The horses clopped and beat down the road. Gusts of wind rose across the hedgerows and leaves and smaller birds briefly dallied in the polished light. At cottages along the way some had bedding and blankets out and beat at these and made thin clouds of dust in which hens scattered and flew. At others faces maybe men or women watched from just within and gave scrutiny to all without show of emotion, as if they were themselves no more than milestones and merely measured all that passed in the long continuum of human sorrow.
The Fall of Light Page 29