Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

In a place where the ash trees thinned and the ground was softer and gave beneath each hoof, Teige swung himself onto the pony’s bare back and felt the hushed inhale of the gypsies watching. The pony did not flinch. She did not run or buck or stamp. She stood with feet planted like the statue of herself and waited and felt the presence of the boy. The rope was around her as a halter, but Teige held it loose and then squeezed her with his thighs as softly as he could and at once rode quickly away.

The morning rose grey and still and held the air of new creation. The fields looked unfolded fresh in the dawn. The grass was wet and caught whatever light fell and appeared more green and young than it was. Teige held the rough rope of the halter loosely and tried to allow the pony to race her frustration and confinement away. He sat on the broad working muscles of her back and felt her power and crouched low and put his head forward to hers and spoke to her as the wind rushed past them. They moved away from the river. They galloped out hard and fast away from the small trees and tangled bushes and into the broader light. The green of the land opened out before them and boy and pony raced into it, travelling with apparent fierce intent, so that to stray onlookers in that uncertain morning Teige Foley might have seemed a forsworn message bearer, a figure out of Old Testament times charging headlong upon a mission secret and imperative. Thin cattle in the fields lifted their heads to watch. The racing figure was there and then it was gone and the cattle lowered their heads to the poor grass once more. The road ran westward. They galloped on. They reached a small rise where again the river could be seen on the left, and suddenly, without the slightest slowing, from full speed the pony stopped short.

Teige flew over her head. Briefly he saw the country from the vantage of a ghost riding a ghost horse. He felt the airiness of his mount, and it was momentarily pleasant and easy. He rode the air an instant, then began to turn head over heels, and then the knowledge of oncoming pain arrived somewhere in the front of his head and he saw the hard brown road and crashed down onto it. He landed and cried out and was saved breaking his neck only by his youth. He lay in the road and the pony stood and watched him. She studied him with implacable eyes of no regret, nor did she turn and run away.

When he could speak Teige asked her what she was doing stopping like that. He looked around them to see if there was something that had startled her. But there was only the rolling green of that lumpy land. He said a curse in Irish and the pony lifted her nose as if to smell the words.

The pain shot down through Teige’s left arm. He lay as flat as he could on his back in the road. He cried out loud and the pony turned half away and Teige called out to her to come to him. He had to call only a second time and the pony walked slowly down the road and he was able to pull himself up first by holding her hock and then the loose reins-rope, and then he was sitting on her back once more. His left arm ached and sent crimson blooms of pain travelling toward his neck and spine. He sat there atop the pony sharply aslant and tried to will the hurt into subsiding. They did not move. As though contrite, the pony waited for him perfectly still. She watched the road where nothing visible was coming or going. Then Teige cried out for his mother.

He cried out to her in the vanished world where she was gone whether living or dead and whence he longed for her now to reappear and take him from the pony and hold him in her white arms on that empty roadside so that a kind of goodness might be restored. He cried for her a second time, and she did not come. The landscape ached with his longing. Blackbirds like small priests walked in the silent fields.

When he regained himself he slouched forward and patted the pony with the palm of his right hand. He whispered to her.

“It’s all right,” he said. “You are fine,” he told her, “fine, girl. Yes, you are.”

He felt the pain localize and he grew more lopsided to accommodate it, then he raised the reins and tried to coax the pony forward in a walk. They moved a short distance, then the pony snorted and twitched and he stopped her on the crest of the road and looked out at the country. To the south he could no longer see the river but could see the blue shadows of the mountains that he did not know were in Kerry. The clouds were heavy and slow and faintly purpled. He sat the pony and looked out for what she had seen as the weak sun climbed the sky behind them in a screen of cloud. Then he saw it. It was a man’s legs. They were trousered in brown cloth without shoes and lay angled out of the ditch not forty paces away.

“Come on,” Teige told the pony, “if I get down, I mightn’t be able to get up again. Come on, good girl. It’s all right.” He clicked his tongue very softly at the pony’s ear and she walked forward with an uncertain gait, her step inclining to turn sideways all the time and all the time Teige keeping her straight on. When they were ten yards from the legs, Teige stopped the pony and called to the man. He called to him the greeting that was part blessing and did not know if he was speaking to the living or the dead. The legs did not move. Teige was aware of the currency of outlaws and other rebels in that country and that the ruses and ways of robbers were not beyond feigning death in the road. So he walked the pony forward another three steps but did not dismount. He had no weapon to defend himself, nor with his arm injured had he hope of fighting. He kept the reins tight in his good hand and prepared to heel the pony quickly, then he called out again.

From his fallen place in the rushes of the ditch, the man moved. His toes twitched. They were dark and the blood of sores was blackened on them and food for flies. The ankles appeared rude knobs on the thinness of the legs and did not seem they could support a man. But a man it was. He raised himself with slow and inordinate difficulty on his right elbow, and Teige saw the face of an old man. The centre of his crown was bare and wore a lump that rose purplish and yellow both and was both sorry and comical and seemed to stare at the boy. The man lifted himself to an angle to see them and then attempted no further levitation but raised out a thin and quivering hand in a gesture of begging. From his crooked mouth drooled thin yellow green stuff into the grass. He did not look as though he could speak. The hand floated there in the air and Teige dismounted and stood before it and the flies rose off the man and buzzed the air.

“I only have one good hand,” Teige said. Then he took the man’s fingers that were cold and yet firmly gripping, and steadying his balance, he pulled the figure to his feet.

The man swayed in his return to the world of the upstanding. The eye-lump glared around at the sorry world. Then the man said: “Give me drink.”

“I haven’t got anything,” Teige said. “There is the river, it’s—”

“Agh!” The man spat something of his disgust and clutched the shirt of the boy so his face floated up close to him, and Teige cried out with the sharpness of the pain in his shoulder.

“Food?” the man said.

“No.”

The man sank back down in the grass of the roadside. Teige mounted the pony and rode away from him. He rode on down the way until he came to a small stone cottage where a woman was milking an old black goat in the sour-smelling mud of its pen. There he asked her for water and bread, and though she was poor she was used to the traffic of beggars which were many and various there and she brought him some from the inside of her kitchen. Teige took them with gratitude. When he had said his thanks to her, he got on the pony and rode back to where the old man was still lying in the ditch.