Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

Ahead of them the winter grew teeth. They felt it bite already in the cold rains that fell out of October. By the time they had arrived on the borders of Clare, they were bedraggled and weak.

Then, the previous evening, when they were camped near the Shannon River, the white pony had returned and brought with it three riderless horses.

The old man, Elihah, was asked if they were to fear them. Was it a portent of further deaths? they asked him. The storm was already moving in the sky. The wind whistled. The birds flew back into the trees. The old man said only the universe could answer. He said they should ask it and wait. He said death was not easily outrun.

Then the rain began. The skies fell in sheets. When the lightning crashed in the hour near dawn, the gypsies came from their beds and watched it like the ending of the world. The horses’ eyes rolled. Their wild whinnying was lost amid the fall of thunder. Then, with an unspoken accord that sometimes moved through their tribe and connected them with traditions of ancestors lost, the gypsies went out into the crashing electricity of the dawn and cast their hooks into the river.

Moments later, they had fished the Foleys onto the bank and believed they had received their answer from the universe.

The brothers did not discover this story for two days. Then they rose from their cots in the caravans and walked out around the camp in the still morning. Smoke was rising in thin curls and men were standing watching it. Some of them looked at the Foleys from beneath their eyebrows. They studied them for the immutable signs of some hidden destiny and then looked away into the ashes as though not daring to face it. When Tomas saw their horses he crossed to them and they smelled each other and the horses made a quick whinnying of greeting. Teige stroked his pony’s neck and blew in its nostrils and let its long face rub against his own, and his brothers did the same, making gestures old as time. The gypsies threw phrases to each other in their language. One of them bent down and poured from the beaten blackened pot into four earthen bowls. He handed them up to one of the others, and the two of them carried the food to the brothers by the string of horses. None of them began yet the telling of their story. From the fire the other gypsies stood and watched the horses and the brothers eating. They looked for how the men ate their simple food and if it found favour. When they saw that it did, they felt the burden of their future ease a little and unbowed their shoulders. The Foleys ate. Birds sang minor notes in the crooked trees. After the deluge, the sky that emerged was clear with slow-moving white clouds that held no rain. A light breeze carried the air. When the Foleys had eaten they handed back the bowls.

“Go raibh maith agat,” Tomas said in thanks.

One of the gypsies took the bowls and nodded. He handed them away and then pointed to Teige.

“Him? Teige,” Tomas said.

“Teige,” said the gypsy.

“That’s right,” Tomas said, and named each of them. But though he did, he saw how the gypsies did not look from Teige to the twins. They looked at the youngest Foley and let their looking be seen now as though to allow it be translated and the desperation of their need be naked.

“Mario,” the gypsy said toward Teige, and watched to see if that name would mean anything to him.

“Teige,” Tomas said, as though there had been some confusion.

The gypsy who had pointed nodded and waved his arm for Teige to follow him, and they all walked down to where the white pony was tied on the raised ground by a stand of ash trees. When it sensed them coming, the pony turned its head and pulled on the rope and made fast its tethering. Its eyes opened and rolled as though at the approach of ghosts. Its left foreleg trod blindly at the broken ground. The gypsies murmured to it. They spoke more softly than they spoke to women. But they did not come any closer. They waited for the brothers.

“That’s the girl,” Tomas said. The brothers waited for the horses to smell them and smell their own horses off them. “It’s you they want to handle her,” Tomas said with his back to the gypsies and without turning to his youngest brother.

“Why?” Teige said.

“If you can explain gypsies, I’ll tell you.”

“Ride her, Teigey,” said Finan.

“Go on, Teigey.”

“Sos.… Sos.” Teige sounded the ease he wanted the horse to feel and stepped toward it. “Sos, sos, sos.” He soft-clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The pony turned her head and looked away from him and still watched him sidelong on the boundaries of her domain. Her pretend disregard did not mask her fear, and stray electric flickerings of it ran in the muscles of her shoulders and made them jump minutely.

“She’s a lively one,” Finbar said.

Teige raised his hand to let her smell it, but she mistook the gesture and swung around and the brothers had to pull back and Teige whispered shshsh sounds and put his hands out with palms raised as if he could touch and smooth down the irrational and make the animal feel the radiance of his respect for her. The gypsies watched him. The women had come from their chores and were standing not far distant in the small clearing. The pony was turned into the trees. The brothers sensed the expectation of the audience behind them, and when Tomas looked back the gypsy who had led them there pointed once again at Teige and made a small rising gesture with his hand.

“They want you to ride her,” Tomas said.

“She’s wild,” Teige said lowly, not taking his eyes from the eye of the pony and moving another half step closer.

“Of course she’s wild.”

“I won’t be able to.”

“If she’s a horse, you will.”

“Go on, Teigey boy. Get up. Go on.”

The three brothers watched then as Teige angled his head forward and raised and lowered it in an exaggerated slow nodding mime that the pony watched from the corner of her view. He made himself smaller and then raised his right hand slightly and proffered it to the air between them. The pony let a low whinnying down its long face and opened its nostrils as if to breathe in the message of the boy and discover for herself the veracity of his heart. Teige stepped forward and the pony did not move. Her feet were planted. He reached and held out his fingers inches from her face. He held them there proffered a long time. The pony did not turn away. She took hard short breaths and was as one growing slowly accustomed to something in which she did not believe. The company assembled may have been spirits to her eye and the boy the dead Mario. Her shoulders flickered. Quick, skittish movements of uncertain purpose passed through her. Then Teige moved the hand that hung in the air and placed it upon her and stroked the warm, hard length of her face. He ran his fingers under her chin and scrabbled softly while whispering not words but sounds. He moved inside her tethering then until his chest was against her. He pressed himself against the quickened breathing of her flank and ran his hand up and along her back. He stroked the length of her and kept the pressure of his fingers even upon her flesh as he moved across her back and down her haunches and round the hocks of each of her legs. Then he reached behind him with his left hand and untied the rope that held her and let it fall loosely across his fingers, moving her backward from that place with one hand on her side and the rope slack in the other. He took her a few paces and she moved easily for him, her step not full or graceful or true but marked by relief and the notion that she was free. The boy and the pony moved away from there into the trees, and the gypsies and the Foley brothers walked after them and the gypsy women did the same.