The Fall of Light

by Niall Williams

  On many evenings the Frenchman joined them for dinner. Such was his frequency that Elizabeth and Teige were customarily seated at a table for three and sat in attendance until he arrived. Evenings when he did not come they sat muted over the noise of their knife and fork. When he did he came with many apologies and kissed Elizabeth’s hand and ordered champagne. He made jokes about extravagant heiresses with triple chins. He told stories of the glamour of New York and the fine houses he had stayed in and told too of his favoured place in that country that was called New Orleans where the ladies wore jewelled garters sent from Paris.

  When they came upstairs after one such night, Elizabeth told Teige he should ask the Frenchman for a job.

  “You cannot sit around forever.”

  He came to her and held her about the shoulders. “Elizabeth,” he said, “I want us to leave. You know that. I want us to go west. There is—

  “No.”

  She spun away. She went to the dressing room. He came there and opened the door, where she was taking down her dress. When she saw him there she stopped.

  “Once you wanted me to see you,” he said.

  She held her hands across herself. “Please, Teige,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

  She closed over the door.

  The day following, he rose before her and went out across the frozen morning to visit the smith and the horses. One that had recovered from lameness he took for a ride and went out at a gallop across thinly crisp and whitened grass. The plumes of his breath and the horse’s breath were like signals of some release. The land they crossed was fresh and unspoiled and open and the sky above clear and bluer than any he had seen. He took the horse down the steep of a valley and journeyed along this until he came to a stream. He paused there and dismounted and let the horse drink and he squatted and scooped palmfuls of icy water for himself. He doused his head. He shook the wide ring of drops and then shouted out. He shouted again and the horse startled and went a few paces in the stream but intuited there was no call for fear and stood then looking sidelong. Teige stood and opened his arms and shouted again, and the shout travelled up that valley and was heard by what birds and beasts dwelled there and perhaps by these alone was comprehended.

  Teige whistled and the horse came to him. He stroked its flank. He laid his forehead upon its shoulder. In fields at the north of the valley some cattle stood. A hawk high in the blue travelled a wide arc. Teige climbed on the horse and rode on. He rode all that day and afternoon. He rode along the edge of woods and stopped to smell the trees and to recall that smell from a time long ago when he and the twins waited for Tomas with a swan. He rode across the fast fading light of that winter’s day and stopped sometimes to let the horse graze and rest and to consider the world in which he found himself. Then he went on. He went in an arc no different from the hawk’s, as if upon a long invisible tethering, and by the coming of the darkness he was back at the smith’s. He returned the horse. The smith worked at a fire, hammering. He told Teige he could have the horse for little money for the work he had done. Teige said he had worked for the horses and not for payment and the man said he understood this and this was why he offered.

  Teige told the smith he was unsure if he could take the horse but would return. He went back to the city on foot and his suit was soiled and worn looking, and about him was the smell of the land. He came in the doorway of the hotel and from what signals he could not say knew at once that something was awry. It was as though all were canted slightly, or a glass opaque had been placed between him and what he saw. He went past the desk, where the clerk at that moment spun to study the keys. He went up the stairs and into the room and saw at once that she was gone. Her clothes, her bag, his eyes looked for these, though he did not move. There was only her scent. Upon the bed he saw the note she had written him.

  Dear Teige,

  I am gone. Please do not try and find me.

  It will only embarrass both of us. We are finished. It was my fault.

  I have paid the hotel bill.

  I wish you every happiness,

  Elizabeth.

  16

  He stood and held the note and looked it over again. Then he crumpled it and threw it across the room. He went to the chest of drawers where his old clothes lay and he stripped off the black suit and put them on. With the suit bundled under his arm he left that room then and went down the stairs quickly and caught the eye of the desk clerk, who looked askance at him in that old apparel. He crossed the marbled lobby beneath the chandeliers and out to the street. There was snow trafficking in the air. Those moving in that thoroughfare were thickly coated in furs, and other heavy materials, and at once Teige had a glimpse of what the winter would be like there. He went out the way he had come. The snow fell but did not seem to land. It crossed the air and vanished when it touched the ground. Yet still more fell, spiralling in windless descent out of the evening dark. Teige turned his face to it. The stars were gone. His breath rose briefly and then passed into nothing. He went on. He walked out the end of the streets into the utter dark. The road was softened beneath him. The snow falling was visible only barely when it passed his eyes. He tramped into the night and went on out to the blacksmith’s. He found that man’s low house by the roadside and went and knocked on the door.

  The smith came out in a vest and trousers.

  “I need the horse,” Teige said. “I could work for you for a week.”

  The smith blinked as if there were something he was just seeing. “Have you nothing you can trade?” he asked.

  “Only these.” Teige held out the black suit.

  The smith took the suit that was too small for him and turned it over in the half-light. “For funerals,” he said, and smiled, and Teige smiled, too.

  “You have already done the work. The horse is yours,” said the smith. He told Teige to wait a moment and went back inside, where the figure of a woman moved, and then he came out with a lantern. They crossed the yard where the snow fell across the amber light and the smith held the lantern aloft while Teige unbolted the door. The horse neighed and Teige went and calmed her.

  “You have no saddle,” said the smith.

  “No.”

  “Take the bridle.”

  The smith watched while Teige brought her outside and he held the lantern and considered what tale untold underlay this scene, and of it he did not ask. Teige turned and offered him his hand.

  “It is a cold night,” the smith said. “You should wait.” He indicated with his left hand the stables.

  “I cannot,” Teige said. They shook hands. “Thank you.”

  Then he slipped up onto the horse’s back that was already starred with scintilla of melting snowflakes. He said some words to the animal and then he turned her out of there and they went out of the lantern light and down the dark.

  Teige rode out the road in a direction south of the city. Of the geography of that country he had only the vaguest semblance and even prior to that moment had not exactly considered where it was he was to start his life with Elizabeth. He had heard men speak of the west as if it were more than a compass point, as if captured in that appellation were a territory majestic and free and without parallel. But he did not know where it was, nor did he comprehend the vastness of that continent. That night as he rode he rode for distance only, to be farther away than it was possible to be. The road wound away from the coast. He went down through woodlands where the snow stopped and a small chill wind tunnelled. He passed on and met none coming or going and found in his very bones the sad familiarity of such lone travel, as if reencountering there a truth about his own condition. In the hours yet before dawn he slowed the horse and walked her and then drew her to the side of tall trees, where he bowed his head and for some short time slept.

  He woke with birdsong. Light was breaking and the country thereabouts was revealed in verdant and purple colour. He rode on. South of there he came upon two boys and a man hunting cattle in the dawn. The gate to a field was open, but th
e cattle in their own peculiarity broke and ran past it and the boys ran after them with the man shouting. Teige turned the horse and headed the cattle off and turned them back. The drover boys joined him and they returned the cattle to the field proper. Then the man indicated the farmhouse not distant and said breakfast would be readying now.

  Teige stayed there a week. The boys called him Ty. The woman of the house caught the melancholy of his demeanour and fed him double portions of eggs and meat as remedy for such sadness. He helped with the cattle and winter fencing. The days were cold and bright and the sky like a sheet of blue pulled taut over the world. When the man tried to pay him for his work, Teige would take none. The man offered him an old saddle then and said he would not be refused.

  He went off south and west again and crossed the valley of a great river whose name he did not know. He saw mountains ahead and kept these to his right shoulder then. He stopped sometimes at places and worked a few days and was sometimes paid and sometimes given food. He stayed always briefly and made attachments to none. What history was his and how he had come to be there, he kept like a parchment folded inside him. As he rode the horse his mind was sometimes erased of all and he achieved in the rhythmic motion a state akin to innocence absolute. But in the evenings when he had to rest the horse and sat on a stone in the grass, he was often assailed by the memory of what he had left behind. He saw the woman’s face as he had first seen it. He returned to the old country and saw himself there in scenes as if from the life of another. He thought of his father and mother on the island and he looked at the big sky there and considered what stars he could see. He knew he should attempt a letter, but in the ruins of his dreams felt a vague uncertain shame and could not begin.

  All that winter he rode south. Then when the spring came and the waters ran in clear streams everywhere, he turned the horse west and headed up through a pass in the Appalachian Mountains. By the summer of that year he had reached the Ohio River. He had thought when he reached it he must be nearly most ways across the country. The heat of the day scorched his forehead and he took to wearing a hat. The horse took lame and he had to rest her awhile on the outskirts of a town where in that season all was dust. He went and found a smith’s there and from short exchanges learned of those multitudes who considered that merely the starting point for their own sojourns west. The country was vast beyond imagining, he understood then. And from that knowledge he took solace, for destination was not what he sought and there was in endlessness a certain comfort born of the recognition that there would be no turning back.

  He went due west then and came upon many wagons and riders and walkers, too, all as if under some heliocentric influence following the falling trajectory of the sun. Such were the numbers moving on the roads that it appeared as though the earth herself were flat and had been tipped on the side and all manner of men and women were then propelled to travel westward. Teige rode at times among them. All had their own tales and without exception had left their lives behind on the basis of stories they had heard of the land that lay ahead. They were a long, loose caravan of faith. Their countries were many. By the time he had crossed the Mississippi River, Teige had heard described the gold of California that some believed was plentiful yet. He had heard of similar riches at the end of the Oregon Trail and of untouched land there said to be only waiting for farming. But to none such was he drawn. He could not envision himself a farmer, could not now imagine being in a house fixed and still. He went south. His skin crisped in the sun. His forearms where he held all day the reins blistered in a line of watery moons. His horse suffered and whole days he spent then only seeking for water. He had come into Nebraska. On prairies there he saw herds of bison for the first time and paused his horse upon a crest and sat and watched over them a long time. He slept on a bedroll beneath the huge sky. In dreams he saw the face of his brother Tomas and saw him on the night he had last seen his face as he left the island and woke and wondered if he were living or dead.

  For days he went nowhere at all. He rested the horse and spoke to her and brought her to water. If she died, he thought, I would too. For such was the empty vista he beheld that travellers there seemed less than sporadic and his bones would have whitened before he was found. Nonetheless this same emptiness soothed him too and there was in his silent and solitary state a kind of peace. He stayed in that country awhile. He watched the birds of prey high against the heavens like smallest flaws in the blue. He heard the prairie dogs in the night. When the ashes of love gathered in his mouth he stood and went off across the dark, sending badgers and foxes and coyotes alike in scattered retreat. He walked and sometimes howled out and sometimes stopped and bent over and wept. He felt like a disease in the blood the shame of failed love and could not explain to himself how it had happened. After a time he returned to his horse and his bedroll and lay until the dawn.

  One noon clouds heavy and black rose up in the western sky. They came quickly and gathered as they did so, crossing the land like a grim assemblage. Teige watched the shadow coming. Then he brought his horse to shelter in some rocks and waited. Thunder crashed. The horse’s ears went flat and then she let out a cry of alarm and stamped backward and he spoke to her and held up his palm and laid it on her nose. The thunder banged again and the rain fell. Lightning forked. It flew from the sky so close that Teige turned about, and at once the horse ran. She raced off out of the rocks and down into the prairie below. He saw her go and he called after her, but then she was gone. The rain came on. It fell in torrents. Again and again the thunder rolled, grave and declamatory. The air flashed electric. Teige turned his face to the sky and let it fall upon him. He wanted it to be the rain of home. But it fell too hard and was dark and stiff and urgent and seemed with its thunder crashing the antique locution of some god primitive and without other means of communication with his creation. It rained on. It made floods in the darkened ground. Night was made of the daytime as the clouds crossed. Still Teige stood. He thought for moments of the lightning falling through the sky and striking him. And if such had happened, he would not have regretted it, he told himself.

  But it did not. The clouds rode on. The storm had made clear the air that in that aftermath was briefly cooled like a drink. Teige took his bedroll and walked on down into the prairie after his horse. He whistled for her and called out. He crossed the dampened ground where the dust clung to his boots and made upon them a reddish coat. The land all about was empty of man or beast or bird. The herds that had grazed there were all elsewhere and the scene entire was tranquil and vacant. He might have been the sole creation left extant.

  Time passed. He walked on and the white eye of the sun reappeared overhead and the air wavered with heat once more. He crossed land where the hoofprints of the bison had left a trail wide and broken and there lay there bones of some fallen long ago. He called for the horse. He stopped and considered the endlessness of the terrain and the futility of his attempting to walk out of it. He sat down then. He had some few supplies enough for maybe two days. He had a canteen of water. He had a pistol. The night fell. He was aware of Indians and knew of tribes such as Sioux and Cheyenne, but he did not fear these, for he held his life lightly. A moon climbed above him. Her stars arrived. In the stillness of the dark of that prairie then Teige Foley lay down and after a time, as though to the company of his brothers, began to tell the stories of the constellations above. He spoke aloud. His voice carried a little in the windless night. And in such dark and beneath the canopy there he told of Pegasus the winged horse and Equuleus the foal, and he traced with his eyes the pattern of stars his father saw. He spoke until his lips dried and his voice became a whisper. The enormity of that landscape was spread out about him in the night and upon it he less than a speck of light or dust and with as little consequence it seemed to any in heaven. The moon slid down the dark.

  17

  Upon the island winters wet and cold came and were followed by wet and cold springs. Like time the river ran. Smoke climbed from the cottag
e of the little village and in the damp seasons did not ascend but barely, hanging in the air like a presence or a spirit without form. Gulls and other seabirds flew there. As if these knew the clock of human hunger, they assembled in the sky while the pilots and fishermen ate in the evenings and were there to swoop when the scrapings were thrown outside. Uncertain summers followed. A drift of light rain came up the estuary and drizzled in the windless air and this remained and the autumn was winter once more. All moved in a slow yet ceaseless falling. Upon a ledge in the stone building, Francis Foley kept the letter of Tomas. He awaited news of Teige, but none came. The letter like a thing returning to some former state had grown thinner, its single page read so often that it was light as a wing. When Francis took it from the ledge and lifted it in the candlelight, he saw the ink that was faded from black to grey and he did not tell his wife the words were vanishing. In the season that followed when the rain swept down and the dampness of the climate threatened to turn all rheumatic, the letter soaked up the watery air and in the brief warmth afterwards the ink evaporated altogether. This did not stop him from reading it to his wife. While he read it he watched her face and saw there how her blind eyes settled on some vista of her son and how imagination in some way redeemed the absence and loss.

  They endured. The years passed over them. Then in the April of a year there came across the river a flotilla of boats and upon them a colourful crew of figures. The men were dressed in shirts of red and yellow and such and the women were long-haired and wore bracelets and golden hoops from their ears. They came ashore where the village women and children had gathered to meet them. The men stood with legs akimbo and hands on their waists. The women studied with brazen looks the clothes and manner of the females there. The island children held to their mothers’ skirts and stared. One among the arrivals, a man with hair to his shoulder and a white shirt, stepped forward. Behind him was a beautiful woman with about her an array of a half dozen figures in steady progression from girl to woman, each the twin of another and each more lovely than any there had seen before. The man spoke in an accent that made the words seem made of wood.