Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

They travelled down the peninsula of Corca Baiscinn. When they stopped for food, the women fed Teige and his brothers a cold broth and rough bread whose crust was tougher than their teeth. They passed a knife among them. One of the women told Teige they had clothes for him and brought them out from the back of the hooped canvas. But Teige would not take them.

“I don’t want them,” he said.

The women stood about and said nothing.

“They are the clothes of their children,” Finbar said.

“I know.”

“They wouldn’t fit Finan and me. Take them.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Do.”

“No,” Teige said, “I won’t!” And he was suddenly a very young boy with tossed and dirty hair, freckles on his cheeks, furious, fearful of things he did not understand which threatened to rob him of even his name.

“They are yours, you can have,” one of the women said, and then they stepped away from him and got back into their caravans as the gypsies were readying to leave once more. The clothes lay there on the ground. Then the twins hurried to their horse, and the wagons moved, and there was an instant in which Teige might have relented and picked the bundle up, but he did not. He walked past it and climbed up the wheel into the caravan and sat in. Then the signal was made for the horse and they pulled away from there in mute and profound dismay, each sorrowing for separate reasons, while left in the mud of the road behind them, like bodies shed by souls departing, was the small, sad pile of children’s clothes.

Throughout that afternoon Teige thought Tomas might return. As they sojourned forward toward the sea, he listened into the noise of the wagons for the sound of two horses coming behind them. The strange, otherworldly air of the gypsies nearly made him lose sense of the world. Once, he noticed the caravans moving more and more along the verge of the road and threatening to topple. He called out and the line of wagons came right and he had the sudden insight that the gypsies were in fact asleep after their dinner and progressing in somnolent oblivion toward wherever the world tilted. Had they a destination at all? he wondered. They seemed to let the roads take them, and the farther west they went, the more the roads were broken and uneven, the hedgerows of fuchsia and woodbine and black-and-white thornbushes coming closer on either side and scratching against the coarse canvas of the wagons. Rocks sometimes jagged up in the middle of the way, and the horses steered around them. Sometimes the road softened and crossed boggy ground and the place was bare and treeless and the stones of the walls seemed placed by some that had long fled eastward. It was so dreamlike, and as he shook there on the seatboard Teige wondered how it was that he and his brothers were now part of it. He could not understand it except to recall the moment when he had felt that he was drowning, and that their rescue had been foreordained in some way, that the gypsies and the races in the west were already there awaiting them.

Still, he longed for his brother. Tomas would know what to do, he thought. He would not let them be lost.

They moved on. Sometimes a man watched them from his place in a field. He stood and was a feature in the landscape no different from a rock or bush, a still twist of brown shade in the flow of greens. The man would watch the caravans coming with grave circumspection. They were like some weirdly exotic elephantine creatures, their hooped shapes lumbering high above the hedgerows and carrying an indefinable threat to the world he knew. And he would curse them and wish for them to pass and wait and watch from under his cap until they did.

And pass on they did all that day. The weak and pale sun caught up to the gypsies and crossed over their heads and dropped into the sea the Foleys had not reached. When the light began to die, the caravans stopped and turned into a field. Teige thought that he could sense the nearness of the edge of the island. He thought that he could catch the sea in the air and opened his mouth wide and strained his eyes. He blinked at where the night was hemming the land with grey, where the fields stopped and were stitched into the sky and where green and blue became deeper shades of each other and were then the cloths of darkness. He stared but could not see the sea.

That evening the gypsies lit their fires and the twins sat with them and listened to the stories they told. They heard the tales of long ago and distant places, vanquished kings, of blind beggars become rich on the foolishness of men. They heard of strange and terrible plagues, of curses and blessings, the places now forgotten in the far world where once bejewelled princesses made the ground sweet as they passed upon it. Tales climbed on the smoke of the fire. There was devilry and laughter and many stories of how fate righted the wrongs of the poor and made fortunate the suffering in the end of time. The twins listened with rapt attention. The fire burnished them, and they sat cross-legged in that colourful company, like the newest princes of that tribe, narrowing their eyes with concentration and falling inside the spell of those old stories. They felt elated and proud both with a sense of their own belonging.

Teige did not join them. He stood at first on the edge of the campfires but suffered still a tight unease. He wanted Tomas to return, he wanted his mother, and with the fall of night felt as though something cold and viscous had filled inside him. For the first time in his life he saw himself, singular, in the darkness. His brothers were laughing with the others in the firelight, there was no sign of Tomas, and for a time Teige had a vision of a thin, transparent membrane separating him from the rest. In a matter of days, it seemed, he had all but lost his family. Where were the Foleys now? Without their father the boys seemed strangely disconnected, as though the notion of family itself were prefabricated upon the thinnest premise and the slightest breeze of chance blew it away. It dawned on Teige that Tomas was gone and might never return, and in that same moment he glimpsed a scene of his elder brother fallen to the ground and being savagely beaten by figures that wore the uniforms of Law. The instant his imagination saw it, he let a gasp out of him. It sounded like a cry strangled but was not heard in the raucous and crackling of the camp. Teige turned his head. He waited to spew sideways the sour grey white stuff of horror, but it would not rise off his stomach and he blinked and sucked the air and walked a little away. Again it was there before him like a picture: Tomas in the town of Limerick, tied and beaten onto death. What was he to do? He walked down along the dark to where the horses were tethered. He raised his hand palm first as though to press softly against something firm and feel the solidity of the universe support him and banish the phantasm. Then he curved his hand over and let the horses smell his knuckles. Their whinnying passed like a greeting down the rope. Teige went to the white pony and she raised her long head and lowered it and found the scent of him, and he stroked the sides of her and tried not to think.

“That’s the girl,” he said. He raised his arm up and over her shoulder, and he hung there against the hard skin of her, pressing his face against her flank while the spectre of his eldest brother in pain dwelled in his mind. What was he to do? He was twelve years old.

At last he undid the cord that held the pony there. He drew her back and away from the other horses and said words to quieten them, and then he seemed to slide upward onto her back like a blackness or a shadow. He rode her away from the caravans and the campfire and out across the heavy grass of the rough fields. He rode into the light-less night and trusted the surefootedness of the pony. He squeezed her into a lithe speed and she carried them out to the road that led eastward toward Limerick and westward toward the sea. There he reined her back and lowered his head until it was close to hers. He turned her about and she was like a dancing indecision, footing the air in all directions as if awaiting some prompt to fall from above into the cocked shells of her ears. None came. Teige looked down the road where Tomas was not coming, where his rescue must begin, and where the dark made a wall into the sky.