Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

When he told Emer, he thought there might be conjuring magic and it would return them to the early days of their life together.

“I have seen Andromeda,” he told her in the dark of their low bed. “Will you come and see tomorrow night?”

“You shouldn’t be in there,” she said.

“There are more stars than you can see with your eyes. They are like stars kept from everyone, like ones not for our viewing but only His Lordship.”

“Francis.”

“Don’t tell me we were not meant to see them.”

“You will be caught and we will be thrown out on the road.”

“Will you come with me tomorrow night and see them?” He leaned over and touched her arm in the dark. He brought his hand up to her hair.

She let the silence answer for her. She lay motionless and felt her life was about to come asunder. She thought of her father and his discipline and pride and how he had instilled in her a sense of who she was; they were not people who broke into the houses of landlords. There was nothing moving. Francis and Emer heard each other breathe and heard the breathing of the children in the vast stillness that fell out of the stars. At last, when he could bear no more the emptiness between them, Francis urged her again.

“Come tomorrow night. You’ll see then.”

She said nothing at first, for she was afraid. But he stroked her cheek then, and whether out of fear or frustration or the feeling of loss that was deep within her, she said angrily: “I don’t want to see them, my feet are cold. What do I want seeing stars for?”

She thought it would end there. He drew away his hand. She turned her back to him in the bed.

“You want to see them through the telescope.”

“I can see them from my own window,” she grumbled.

“It’s not—”

She sat up suddenly and turned to him. “You’re a foolish man. Oh God, you are. And what if you were found? What if you were seen there, then what? We’d be thrown back on the road, that’s what, think of that, will you? Or you’d be taken off to gaol, for what? For stars!”

Her words crossed the darkness like spiders and stung his heart.

“Forget that. Forget it,” she said, her voice breaking now with tears and disappointments that went deep into her past. She turned her back to him.

“You should not be going in there,” she said after a time. “It will bring trouble on us.”

He did not answer her. She could not understand. They lay sleepless and separate in the dark.

She wished he would sleep. But instead Francis sat upright.

“What gives him the right to have it? To have it locked in there night after night not even looking through it, the empty eye of it! Not even seeing!” He crashed the crude wooden headboard.

“Francis!”

“It is a marvelous thing, Emer. If you—”

“Stop!”

She would have none of it. It was not because the poetry of her soul was so earthbound, or that she could not imagine the beauty, it was because she feared the quality in Francis Foley that once she loved the most: his ability to be enraptured. She knew he would not stop, and knew that the fragile world they had built would fall apart.

The lord never came. The seasons rose and fell on the garden estate, and the children grew. They were not allowed to walk in the gardens their father made. They went instead up the rough fields and ran their horses and watched Teige gallop and let their giddy calls and cries in Irish fly across the wind. They were a country within a country and did not know it. Their father tried to make the boys feel like champions in the grassy spaces. He coached them in running and jumping and wrestling. He rolled with them on Sunday afternoons in the summer meadows and made his wife laugh when he pushed out his chest to show that he had still the cut of a warrior. He taught them the ancient game of hurling, and they played it with flat, hand-hewn wands of ash, pucking the leather sliothar ball high through the air like some antiquated weaponry for the downing of eagles. Still, he had a kind of fierceness with the children that came from love but could become terrible. When they could not jump the stream that he could, he insisted they try again. He showed his disappointment, and the boys leapt again and again until he walked off and left them leaping without audience and the vague stain of inadequacy spreading in their hearts. Nonetheless they grew strong and free-willed. They did not show their father their fear of him. And when he burst in anger at their carelessness or slowness, they hung their heads in a greater shame for knowing that they had failed some standard of excellence that was theirs.

And so it was. Francis worked the gardens by day and sometimes slipped by night into the big house and watched the stars and looked at the maps that were there, until at last the day arrived when his spirit broke free.

It was an October morning. He brought Tomas with him, leaving Emer with the others and going out across the dampness that hung visible over the lawns and made the songs of the hardy birds plaintive. There were leaves to be gathered. The evidence of the dying year must not be allowed to linger even for a moment on His Lordship’s lawns. So, father and son silently set about with wooden rakes the fallen black and brown leaves that fell even as they gathered them.

They worked through the still morning. Mounds of leaves were gathered and lay upon the grass, then these were lifted and barrowed away. When the scene was clean of even a single leaf, Francis stopped and told Tomas to stand and look with him. The lawn was like a carpet.

“Look at that,” he said. “We might as well get to look at our work, as no one else does.” They watched all that was tranquil and immaculate there and leaned on their rakes while from the oaks to the east walk late leaves unhinged and twirled down.

They did not hear the footsteps of the head gardener, Harrington, approaching. He came up on them while they were standing there, giving him opportunity to vent his resentment of the man who sometimes stole his praise.

“You’re not paid for looking,” he said.

Tomas jumped. His father did not move. When Harrington came from between the trees, their life there was already over. Softly he cursed at them for idleness, though he knew it was not true.

“Look,” Francis said, and pointed at the lawn.

Harrington was not interested. “Get on,” he said. “The kitchen garden.” He did not look at what they had done or give them that credit. He walked past them and said beneath his breath a muted comment in which Francis caught only the word laziness.

That evening he told Emer he had wanted to hit the man.

“To knock him down into a load of shite,” he said. “Christ almighty.” He drummed with his hand on the table.

“You have to forget about it. Just carry on. You can’t take up against the likes of him,” said Emer.

“Why not?”

“You know why not.”

“I’m bound every way I turn,” he said. “I can’t piss in a pot without someone’s say-so.”

“Francis.”

“Christ, I won’t.”

He stood up. Her hands were white with flour at the table. She watched him cross the room and take a bowl and smash it against the wall. Teige was sitting on the floor with a slate. Francis took down another bowl and threw it likewise through the air at the wall. Tomas and the twins came to the doorway. Their mother cried out to her husband to stop, but something had snapped within Francis Foley and he knocked over the chairs and took one and crashed it against the floor. He said this was no life for his sons. He said what was he raising them for, was he raising them to be the slaves of the likes of Harrington? He said though Jesus wept he wouldn’t. And then Emer was shouting at him and he was shouting in turn and knocking things over and picking up pots and pans and earthenware crockery and flinging all helter-skelter about. The room was like one hit by a storm. It was as if all the disappointments of their married life took form there and ran about and crashed and the air itself grew bitter and sharp. Francis railed and cried out. He said he would not stay there. He said they were not beasts in a field, they were not slaves. And Emer shouted that if they left there, they would die on the roads like beggars. And the boys moved from that room into the bedroom they shared and were like shamed and guilty things, sitting with their faces lowered in the dark. And still pots and plates crashed and banged as the marriage broke in the room next to them. They heard the screams and the arguments. They heard their father shout at Emer that she must obey him and that if he said to go, she was to go and that was that. But she was too proud. I have a mind of my own, she told him, I won’t take my family and make beggars of them.