Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

And then she cried out, for Francis struck her.

She must have fallen down. Silence ripped like a tear in a garment that had once been precious.

The boys heard no more. They stayed in their room and after a long time lay and slept.

They did not see their mother walk away. Nor know that Francis went out with a lamp in the obscured moonlight and yoked the cart and rode it up the avenue to the big house and did not look back at her as she walked out the gates. They did not see their sundering apart like twin stars falling away into darkness and confusion. They did not know Francis let himself in through the window of the lord’s house and went to the library and in the lamplight looked at the map of the country there. And then, grappling his arms about the telescope, he lifted and dragged it down the hall and out the door, where he loaded it onto the cart. He went then to the house of Harrington, who was gone to the town, and into it he wheeled barrows of leaves and dung. Then he came back and took what things of theirs were not broken and he woke the boys and told them quickly to come. He lit the thatch even as they were coming out the door. Tomas jumped on his horse. The younger boys were too frightened to speak. Then they all rode from there, wordless and aghast in the dark.

The father stopped the cart as they passed the lawn that was surrounded by boxwood hedge. “Wait!” he said. Then he got down from the cart and took the lamp and walked up to the house, and moments later his large figure was running back and he was calling to the boys to go, go quickly, even as the flames were already rising from His Lordship’s library

Now, the four Foley brothers floated and swam down the river and held on to the swan and caught in their teeth the cries that the icy water shot through them. They did not speak. The deep darkness they travelled through was myriad with the secret sounds of night, the beasts and bushes, the noise of leaves in motion, the falling twisting sounds of the dying of the year as the wind rose and made the water slap in their faces with small chastisements. They knew that they had escaped their hunters, and though the water was cold and the current strong, it was almost soothing for Teige and Tomas and the twins to surrender to its ceaseless flowing. They did not know what lay ahead of them. The light was thin and weak and without hope. The animals that woke and moved in the green fields above the river smelled the rain coming in the wind and ate hurriedly while the brothers sailed past. Soon the river took the colours of the sky. The water and air were one tone, that implacable dull iron that screened the blue heavens from sight and made the world seem burdened by an impossible weight which now must fall. It fell before the brothers had floated past the rocks of Carraig na Ron in the middle of the Shannon River and where the low shore of Kerry on their left was now erased. It fell as arrows of rain, the hard cold rain that announced winter and told the animals in their hidden places that the season had turned. It did not pour down, but seemed a stuff of thin metal that fell piercingly and killed the light of morning. Thunder rolled. The swan flapped in alarm and was at once free of the Foleys. It caught the breeze, sailed head-low as if in grief, and within moments was thirty yards downriver. The twins cried out. They kicked and splashed the Shannon as the rain struck them. Lightning arrived in the falling sky. It rent the air like old cloths and let the pieces fly away. Teige made the strokes of swimming but made no progress. He saw the twins’ white faces flash in the waters and then lost them. Tomas was already being pulled away. Though he fought the river and arced his arms into it, trying to swim with his head swinging side to side in a thrashing motion, he seemed to go backward. The lightning lit the air again. The sky fell and rolled in booms. It was impossible to say in which direction the brothers swam. For none of them were swimmers. The jail of the rain held them from seeing where they were, but, despite the urgency of their kicks and cries, each imagined he was going down to where their father was waiting.

The rain struck Teige like a hook.

Then it struck Tomas, and Finbar and Finan.

It hooked Teige in the cloth of his shirt, and he felt himself caught by it and being pulled backward. He went below the water. He cried out gurgles, and bubbles dark flew past his face. Then he reached a hand up and knew that he was dead or dreaming, for he felt the rain like a wire running toward the shore of Clare. And he clutched on to the line and fainted beneath a white zag of lightning and did not see the excited faces of the gathered gypsies who fished the thunder in the antique belief of landing the electric spirit of the world.

The gypsies’ part in the story is long and intricate and fantastical. I think of it sometimes as a part invented by grandfathers later to explain the eccentricities and wanderings of other Foleys in years afterward. Oh, that was the gypsy side in him, they say, and sit back and look into the distance.

The gypsies had travelled south in the dying of the year. Once, they had come from abroad in Europe in the hidden compartments of ships and through the secret ports that were used by spies. They had travelled to this country not from need or flight, but simply because it was there, because it was marked on the outer edge of maps and looked the splintered part of some greater whole, and because they could not be still. Motion was natural, they believed. Nothing living stood still, and in their travels they had seen the variety of the world and accumulated its slow wisdom. Some of them had journeyed around the perimeter of the shore and then left once more. Others, drawn by the green mesmerism of the land, voyaged around it in covered caravans. They took to its crooked roads and found the circuitous routes that defied the usual measurement of progress to be an apt landscape for gypsies. These were roads that went nowhere. They were begun without concept of destination or, at best, no hurried sense of arrival. They were the grassy thoroughfares shouldered by hedgerows and stone walls along which the gypsies that remained lost all sense of time. Their lives, which had once been measured by the new places they discovered, now took on the dimension of a long somnambulant dream. They were not sure if the fields they passed were the ones they had passed only days before. And soon they did not care. The oldest among them, whom they called Elihah, told them that they could not even be certain that the rain that was falling had not fallen on them before, for sometimes they travelled into the past. One day’s weather became the next, and their ancient language was discovered short of enough words to describe the thousand different rains. The seasons were not the seasons of their childhood years before, the summer might have been the autumn and the winter was sometimes not over until the leaves appeared and fell again in one windy week. At last, they grew accustomed to such seamless time and rode their ragged caravans on through it, content in the simplicity of such living. Now, many unrecorded years later, their origins had almost vanished. Elihah remembered he had once been a child in a ship on the sea, but whether that was the journey that brought him there, or was a voyage even more distant in time, or simply one that he had dreamed in the seas of his mother’s womb, he could not tell. His grandchildren were already old men, many of them gone back across the water to the great shelf of the continent, wandering untraceable paths and lost to their greater families until by chance or design their roads might meet again at a campfire or fair in this life or another.