Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“Oh God,” he said in Irish. Then he laughed until there was no sound but hard, aspirated sighs that rose off his stomach and made him shut his eyes with effort.

The trinity stood and watched.

“Well,” said Francis at last, “you saved me and I thank you. It isn’t easy to kill a Foley. Now this is mine and I don’t mind you having a look, but I’ll be taking it with me when I leave in the morning. Do you understand? And I’ll need some kind of boat or someone to bring me across to the shore.”

The monks said nothing. He was not sure they had understood, so he gestured the same message to them and said it in pieces of English. Still they did not respond. Then, in an action slight and simple and yet filled with untold ages of humility, one of the monks raised his finger in the obscurity and ran it smoothly across his own lips like a sealant. Francis stared at them.

“Ye’re mute?” he said.

The monk blinked his eyes yes.

“But you understand?”

There was the smallest nod, as if even that communication were in some way a compromise of their vows and betrayed them into the domain of sin. The night air blew softly and carried the small noises that were the slaps of the river and the running of the river rats in the blind dark.

“Ye have a boat?” Francis asked them at last.

They did not. They had sunk their boat years earlier and lived on that island on whatever the earth provided. When nothing was provided, they took it as a direct epistle from above and remedied their souls with all-night confetiors, credos, and a diet of insects.

The river ran through the dark. Snout-up, a badger arrived upon the four of them and stood striped and astonished before scuttling away. The monks were like stone monks. They offered no gesture or expression when Francis told them they must make him a boat. He listened to the water passing. The river was still between him and the home he had built in his mind. He could cross it by himself right then, but he would have had to leave the telescope, and already it had become something fixed into the corner of his brain like an obsession. He put his hand upon it and bent and lowered his head and met the eyepiece. Then he squeezed shut his left eye and looked at the fixed constellations of the autumn night where the monks had been searching for the face of God.

The monks stepped away from him and were gone then to mute prayers and adorations. Francis watched the night and then slept. When he awoke, the light of the day startled his eyes and he remembered that he was not dead and lay on the wet grass of the hillock and heard come back to him all the minute sounds of the earth alive. He heard the insects and the birds and the wind that carried them. His eyes watered and he thought of his life to that moment and was burned with a sharp regret. He regretted all that had happened, how he had lost his wife and sons to the rashness of his will. He thought of Emer, vagrant and alone. He thought of the home he so desired and how the dream of it lay in ruins now. He cursed himself then and wished he could undo the knots in his heart. He wished he was not who he was, and as he lay he suffered a kind of soul scouring in which there was revealed to him sins of vanity and pride. He lay long and still and was in his sackcloth garb and turned-white hair then like a saint descended and discovered in the grass. When he got up he saw the one he took for the eldest of the monks waiting at the small stone church. The holy man beckoned to him and Francis went down the hill and felt the pleasant coolness of the dew on his toes.

“Well?” he said to the monk. “What have you to say?”

The monk said nothing.

“I thank you for saving me,” Francis said, then added, “Even if it was really the telescope you were saving. It doesn’t matter to me.” He paused. “I was on my way with my sons to try to find a place to live, a home.”

The monk’s face was impassive. He had once been a boy monk. Once his hair had been shaven off an unwrinkled crown that matched the curve of his young cheeks. Once his brown eyes had looked fresh and nutlike and saw the beauty of his own devotion as a natural offering to his Creator. Now, the face was old and the apple cheeks sinking, deflated with the hard weathers of that life and the discovery that all of us are human. The boy monk was vanished, the nuts of his eyes like still shells. He looked at the big man he had taken from the river. He looked at him and shuddered at the vanity of their thinking he had been sent to them, that he had been a sign, or that the magnificent telescope was intended as a reward and means of communicating with God. The old monk stood there and visited the sin and stood within its black centre and said nothing. He looked inward at himself without flinching, and for a moment Francis Foley did not know if he was gone blind. His eyes did not move from the pale air. Some who might have watched him very closely might have seen him face his own desperation, the long years of his living there on the island with fading hope, his diminished faith, and the longing grown ulcerous and sore in his spirit that the divine be revealed.

Blackbirds like smudges of charcoal appeared on the morning above them. Then the monk’s eyes returned and he gestured Francis Foley into the small building beside the chapel. Without opening his mouth, and with slow, wearisome movement, he found a scrolled map. In the low light he opened it and showed Francis the island where they stood, and the river about it, and, in disconnected flecks of brown ink like the tracks of a creature long gone, an underwater pathway to the shore.

Then the holy man looked up at the man who had been drowned and considered a moment, and then he ran his finger down the river Shannon and followed its curve and stayed within the drawn banks like a salmon or trout until the finger arrived at another island. It lay in the mouth of the river, where it gaped like awe with the inrush of the sea. The finger tapped the island twice, and the monk turned his face to Francis and let him read the message that he should go there. It was wordless yet clear. And Francis knew from the look in the holy man’s veined and yellowed eyes that it was part of some contrition, that within the grave and absolute laws in which the monk had passed his life and by a pure cleansing mathematics, this was the given solution for his soul. He tapped the other island again and nodded toward the man he had once wished dead so that the monks might have kept the telescope.

Francis leaned over the table. “Go there?” he said. He looked at the map and saw the round tower drawn on it and the cross-shaped mark that was once another dwelling place of monks. He followed the mapped river with screwed-up eyes in the dimness there, and he leaned a long time without sign of any acknowledgment. And there arrived a moment of clarity, a purity in the air between them.

Then Francis said, “I will. I will go there.” The monk made a slight nodding. “I will leave you the telescope for a time. First I have to find my wife. And my sons.” Francis stood and looked as if at the things he had said and felt arise in his chest a strange lightness as of after purgation. “Yes,” he said. “Then we will go there—” He touched the island and left his finger upon it. “I will come back for the telescope, mind,” he told the old monk. “I will bring it there and set it up, and if you want, you can come and watch the stars with me.”

The monk’s face did not appear to change and in the gloom was sunken apples below the aged kernels of his eyes.

When they came outside, the other monks were waiting. And they walked together down to the shore, and mutely, like figures engaged in matters of secrecy absolute, they showed him the place where once a path of stones had been laid beneath the river. Then Francis Foley said his thanks and, promising to return, walked out across the water and back into the County Clare.