Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

In the uncertain dawn the gypsies moved at first light and arrived at the western coast with their caravans and carts and horses, the jangling of pots and dangling things of lesser metals announcing them to the waking of the small town of Kilkee. They gathered in the open field near the cliffs at the near end of the bay. The horses that pulled the caravans knew where they were going, there was no need for steerage, and the arc of their passage through the soft ground of the field was a clean, curving radiant of mud marks that were only barely recovered from the gypsies’ visit the year before. The caravans travelled in across the grass, and then the lead horse at no command from its drover stopped, stopping the one behind it and so on, as though some potency had been switched off and further travel impossible. The gypsies got down from their horses and walked in scattered patterns while their women began at once the business of making camp. Finan and Finbar saw the edge of the country for the first time and yelled in manic celebration. In the grey light they ran in wild zigzags across the tufted grass and let the big breeze blow in their hair and open up their chests like the valves of some long disused machinery of pneumatics.

Teige was in the caravan. He watched them from the seatboard and climbed down slowly and went to the white pony. Tomas had not rejoined them, and with the passing of every hour it seemed to his youngest brother that he would not now do so. He was vanished and his erasure was made all the more striking by the vastness of that tumbling ocean. For nothing in the world had seemed so big to Teige Foley, and to watch the sea for only a small time was to become aware of the enormity of creation and the lies of maps that made it seem within the compass of man’s understanding. When Teige had returned to the gypsies the previous night, he had gone to the caravan of Finan and Finbar and asked them if they should not ride back towards Limerick. But the twins had dismissed him. They had been drinking the raw smoky whiskey favoured by the gypsies which inspired in them lewd visions of round women, and they had looked up from their cots briefly with the shadowed downward eyes of boys discovered in misdemeanour. Then they had turned back to the canvas wall and the dreams therein and left their other brother in a lesser insubstantiality.

As the morning rose, the wind carried swift clouds of all shapes across the sky. They crossed quickly over the grass below in elaborate shadowplay like out-of-favour toys thrown from the heavens. Brilliant blue appeared and disappeared in the spaces between them. The light kept changing. A shower of rain fell down through piercing sunlight and then was vanished. From the edge of the field where the gypsies made their camp was a long view of the full strand and the line of low white cottages that faced the water. On that morning, the pristine surf of the Atlantic gleamed as it broke in frayed white chains that ran all the way to the pollock holes on the far shore.

Because it was their custom, and not because the population did not already know it, some of the men walked down into the town to announce their arrival and advertise the various wonders and entertainments they could offer over the coming week. When they met a man or woman in the blustery street, they stopped them with a cry and told that there was one among them who could foretell all health, wealth, and happiness. The fortune-teller would be in her caravan that evening and would tell all, they said. And all this with a swaggering waving of arms and floating eyebrows and squinted eyes. When they had finished in the little streets, the gypsies gathered by the shoreline and watched some girls in the sea. These with various forms of basketry on their backs had waded out through the tide and with dresses tucked up above their waists were busy harvesting seaweed. They were a sight as old as man’s existence in that place, and to the twins and the gypsies there was something true and uplifting in it. The waves did not come evenly. At times they rose many feet above the girls’ heads and came at them in a back-combed wall of water crashing and foaming. Sometimes the girls lost their footing and were swept shoreward, their baskets bobbing in the distance and the seaweed spilling loose and slithering like so many snakes. Still the undrowned girl would get up, regain herself, and make a slow return out through the freezing waves. Renewed greetings were cried out to her along the ribboned line of workers. There was the appearance of gaiety, like that among those who travailing in underground darkness sing to assuage the terror. But there was no mistaking that the sea was a monster. For though the bay was sheltered, the water at the turning of the year came in capricious twists and currents. The girls struggled to keep their line but still worked on, hooking and gathering the seaweed that was valued as fertilizer for the potato gardens and could be sold or bartered in the morning market. There were not only girls in the sea that morning, but some older women too. Their hair was bound in bright headscarves, their hands moving in blind foam without any of the quickened excitement of the younger girls. They watched the waves coming at the girls with both the protective and the deeply furrowed suspicion of new mothers-in-law. They waved their arms at the gulls that hung above them like a necklace of the sky. They called warnings and worked steadily, aware that the sky was changing all the time above them.

The gypsies sat by the sea wall and studied the scene. As the morning came on, the tide withdrew and the line of the workers moved farther out with it into the waves. Seaweed was mounded on the shore. There two men with carts pulled by donkeys gathered it up and moved away, leaving wheel ruts across the smoothly hardened sand. They came and went while the women worked on. The sun passed behind a screen of cloud and the sea changed colour and was blue no more. It became the colour of gunmetal. The gypsies felt the cold and turned up their collars and pulled their kerchiefs tighter and moved as one man back towards their camp. Finbar might have stayed. He wanted to see what would happen, wanted to go on feeling the marvel of these sea-girls. He could imagine the cold in the white submerged limbs, the girl-skin that was beneath the surface for so long that it must not feel like skin of those who lived only in the air. The toes that were vanished under sand traversed by crabs, clams, sea urchins, and all assorted marine life. They were mer-creatures, these, he thought, and wanted to wait and see them reemerge on the land and see how they walked back up the town with steps like slow-motioned swimmers arrived in an element not their own. But when the gypsies and his twin moved, he did too, as if connected, though he walked up the roadway with his eyes turned sideways to the girls below.

That evening high fires were lit and wind dragged the flames in twisting tongues of wild unpredictability while the lanterns on the caravans marked a semicircle out of the darkness above Kilkee. From the little streets of the town, the place above on the hillside where the gypsies had camped was like a lightship landed. To there the people of the town made their way, scuttling up through the darkness to hear their fortunes and what their futures held. They lined up outside the caravans and made in their waiting a trail of mud. Some went to the bonfires where the gypsies drank and paid money and tilted back their heads to sample the fiery liquids that shone in bottles of green and blue glass. Matches of fistfighting and wrestling brewed up there. Tussles sudden and short-lived broke out, and there were cries and shouts and cheers, and then the gypsies gathered around again and one sang a song or made a remark that drew laughter. The scene grew loud with the night. More and more men and youths arrived from the town below. Some who were quiet and civil in the streets were here discovered wild and manic and leapt about and jostled against others and cursed loudly. The more these fellows drank of the gypsies’ whiskey, the darker their eyes grew. Smoke thick and heavy curled into the night. A man with reddened face and eyeballs wide took a run and jumped across the fire and was then flaming as his jacket caught. Momentarily he was unaware of this and stood looking back at the others with boastful gaze even as they waved and shouted at him. The flames seared him then and he fell to the ground, the vision of one combusted from within by sins limitless. He rolled in the mucky grass and screamed, and the others howled and laughed. But soon another attempted the same leap. He ran with bottle in hand and launched himself and flew flameward. His legs were out before him. He made the image of sitting in the air and yelled as the fire scorched him and he crashed smouldering on the far side of it. He stood and drank in celebration and spat back into the fire a stream that caught alight and made him seem one in a company of weird phantasmagoria. And so it went on, in strange and terrifying carnival. Fights erupted for reasons slight and soon forgotten, and the men knocked each other down and rolled about. The sea wind blew and smoke travelled sideways and enshrouded them. Down at the caravans Johnny McMahon came from visiting Diado the fortune-teller, his face made scarlet and his legs bandy. The crowd surged toward him and shouted to know what he had been told. But Johnny, who was for many years the comical innocent of the town, stared bewildered at them and when he tried to speak could say nothing at all. Men grabbed at his jacket sleeve. There was a flowing, pushing mob in the mud and faces caught and profiled in the lantern light. The gabble of voices swelled around the poor man, then some lewd joke was cracked and laughter flew and Johnny staggered away.