Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

When the man had eaten and drank what of the water did not run and leak sideways from the poor closure of his mouth, Teige asked him where he had come from and where heading. Then he told Teige the country was full of bastards. He said to one of them he had lost his farm. He had been turned out on the road and was now man of no abode but walked vagabond and desolate on the face of the land. He laughed sourly as he told it and the hairless pate of his head tilted back and he opened his mouth full and revealed a blackish hole toothless and caked about with the dried riverbed remains of old dribblings. The man laughed in a high, mocking manner. He told Teige the world was more cruel than he could imagine, and that his act of bringing him food and water was the lone act of kindness in that country turned barbarous and vicious as any of Sodom and Gomorrah. But more, he said, the time was turning. He had heard it told, he said, that in the autumn now beginning was coming a bitterness. The birds had sensed it. The cuckoo had flown early without regard for calendar or custom. She had left the ragged trees of the west after less than a month’s song.

“And why?” the man asked.

Teige said he had not noticed. He said he had come from the east.

The man rolled some nothing in his mouth and spat sideways. “Because something is at hand,” he said. “There is rottenness here. You will see. This is a cursed place. For your kindness I will give you this advice: Turn back. Leave the west before you can start to smell the rottenness of it. Go home. Home,” he said again, and then began to laugh in distraught and hideous manner once more.

And was still laughing on that word home when Teige reined the pony around and rode away back across that country to the camp of the gypsies, where the legends of his riding and songs about him were already shaping in the firesmoke.

When Teige returned he discovered that Tomas was gone. He rode down to where the caravans were encamped by the river and was greeted by the men with a waving of their hands and shapeless felt hats. They came to meet him and touched the warm flanks of the pony and patted Teige’s leg where it hung stirrupless. The boy did not know yet the significance of his return and the taming of the pony, but soon the twins told him. They came to him at once as he dismounted from the pony and as the men took her away to where the best of their hay was kept. They told him of Mario and the races. They told him the story the way it had been told to them with that strange fated quality that runs through tales old and unforgiving. They told it with quickened voices and flushed faces, for in their simplicity both Finan and Finbar were delighted. They had been given an air of importance that had not been theirs since birth. They had come from the river, see, they were the answer to the old man’s question. It was a kind of birth all over again. They told it all to Teige and watched his face and hoped to see there the reflection of their own excitement. But Teige did not share it. In a way that he could not explain, he felt afraid as one who has been told the story of his own death. He asked them what Tomas said of it.

The twins stared at him. They wanted him to talk about the pony. They wanted the fabulous story of how the Foleys would champion the world. But Teige asked again.

“What does Tomas say? Where is he?”

“He is gone to Limerick town.”

“Will he go to get our mother?”

The twins stared at him. They wanted to say their mother was gone from them, and that they were men now, but they did not.

“We are to go with the gypsies. He will come back and meet us on the road to the sea,” said Finbar, and turned away. “He has taken your pony with him.”

That night when the lamps were lit and the gypsies sang as they had not since the death of the children, Teige walked out by the banks of the river and sought for the swan. The sky cleared on a breeze from the west and the stars hung above him in vast and numberless panoply. He squatted by the small stones that made a thin crunching where the low waves of the waters collapsed upon them. The singing sounded in the night behind him. He reached and let the river run over his hand and thought of his father gone below the water.

In the morning before the dawn, the gypsies began packing. They woke and moved about the camp gathering their things. Thin, shadowy figures without speech in the moonlessness, they moved about the glowing embers of the campfire with slow care. They collected pots and tin cans and made small, doleful tympani as they threw these things together in cloth sacks strung with cord. Their horses knew this morning music and sensed the departure even before the gypsies went to them. They noised in the gloom. The gypsy men went to the river and brought their fill of it back in timber buckets and small barrels. They worked around the women without word or gesture of recognition, as though each were entirely separate races, or one the unseen shadow of the other. Coming from sleep into this grey, dreamlike traffic, Finan and Finbar held the horses while the old leathern harnesses were thrown over the backs of the animals and the buckles that were not brass but hand-shaped copper briefly jangled. Then, leaving a scattering of small potatoes and onions for the spirits of those who might be following them, the gypsies made a last reconnaissance around that ground. The place of their fire was like a black wound. They watched the sky for the dawn that was just then commencing, for it was their custom since time unknown to leave with the light. Then they sat up on horseback and seatboard and clucked their tongues and led the caravans out of that place and away toward the west.

Teige did not ride the white pony. She followed with others on a rope. He sat in a caravan and looked out on the dark road ahead. They left the riverbank and he felt the regret of losing the swan and felt the foolishness of that, too. The road was the road he had ridden the day before, and he watched it for the sight of the man with the broken head and the woeful laughter. But as the light came up behind them and followed them down that way, there was sign of no one. They rattled on. The great wooden wheels bumped and clattered on the unevenness of the ground. Each of the caravans sang its own song, a weird jumbling of sounds individual and inseparable as the contents toppled from shelves, clanked and dully clanged within. Finan and Finbar rode their horse. By the time the sky was bright enough to show them, Teige could make out the first signs of their becoming gypsies. They wore their shirts open to the October morning, and kerchiefs of cotton that had once been bright red were knotted at their necks. The complexion of their skin, even the fall of their hair, seemed to Teige indefinably altered. The twins seemed to live beyond any notion of regret. They rode with an easy silent gaiety, a lightness of heart, as though they were at last among their own and had discovered a fortunate destiny.

The day rose over them. They passed some small cottages that hung beneath the earthen roads where women heard them coming and stood in the doorways, watchful and cautious and eyeing their hens. All of that country wore the same unmistakable look of hardship. The smoke of the hovels hung about their leaky thatch in the still and damp air and smelled sourly. From some places they passed no man or woman came to the door, though it lay ajar. In the shadows of one such entranceway, Teige thought he saw the shape of a man stretched on the ground and the furtive flickering of rats. But he said nothing. For the picture was all the time moving, as was in the nature of that caravan of gypsies, and one place became the next easily and quickly and faded away like childish painting in the rain.