Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

None of them could swim. There were three horses, the great chestnut that Tomas rode, the grey gelding upon whose back the twins sat together, and the black pony of Teige. The cart was pulled by a long-haired mule. In the poor rain-light of that dawn, the Foleys rode down to the water’s edge. The river ran past them, laughing. The horses caught the flash of the salmon silvering beneath and flared their nostrils and stamped at the bank and were stilled but not calmed by Teige. He dismounted and talked to each of them.

“It is not deep, it is only fast,” said the father, though he could not know and could not see the far bank. He had drawn from the mound on the cart a collection of ropes.

“Tomas!” He called the boy without looking at him. His eldest son came quickly and took one end of the rope.

“There,” the father said, and pointed to one of the twisted trees that grew there.

Tomas secured the rope. Teige and the twins watched him in admiration. He had a kind of cool expertise, as if nothing in the physical world daunted him. He pulled taut the rope then and quickly mounted again and without pause plunged his horse into the river.

It took him in its swiftness and at once he was swept sidelong. But while his brothers watched with that mixture of horror and awe in which they always beheld him, Tomas yelled and yahooed, his eyes wide and white and his body on the horse twisting with the power of the river. His horse thrashed and flared and swam with its neck, pushing its nose upward into the air and tilting its eyes as if afraid to see below it. The river swept them away, but not far. And still Tomas worked the horse, riding it the way horses are ridden in dreams where the world is infirm and progress seems at the whim of God. He rode the river and let the rope run away behind him. He rode it while the twins cried urgent cheers and Teige looked away and felt only the terror of the crossing ahead of him. The old man stood mute and patient without the slightest evidence of fear or pride. Tomas rode himself invisible. He crossed into the midriver waters where they could no longer see him and passed as if through portals into some incorporeal world that existed beyond the midpoint of the Shannon River.

They did not see where he had gone. The mist hung between them. They did not hear him. His father stood like the ghost of a father and did not move and did not show his sons the slightest uncertainty. The rope that Tomas rode did not move but lay into the water. The sky had not brightened. The day was improperly born. The only sound was the sound of the old river running in that green place where the family would come asunder. No birds sang.

“Tomas!” Finbar shouted.

Finan roared, “Tomas!”

“Stop it!” their father said. “He cannot hear you.”

They stood there and waited. The world aged in them another bit, each of the younger brothers feeling the impotency of their roles in the drama of their family, mute witnesses to stubbornness and folly. They waited for their father to ride into the river and save Tomas, but he did not move. The rope was loose in Shannon. The twins sank down on the ground. The old man’s eyes stared at the wall of the mist as though he could burn it away, as though he didn’t need anyone or anything and that the rescue of Tomas was in his gift and would happen without his moving from that place by the shore. They waited an impossible time.

Then the rope stretched taut.

They saw it lift and watched the line of it rise and drop the dripping river water back into the river. The old man moved quickly. He laid a hand on it and shook it and tested it for firmness. Then he tied another to the tree there and brought it over to the twins. “Here. Go on, you,” he said. “By the rope. Bring this one.”

The twins looked at each other and half grinned, both at the danger and at the opportunity to imitate their eldest brother. They pulled back their shoulders and put out their chins and were like minor versions of the father.

“Go on, Tomas has made it easy for you,” said the old man. “By the rope, go.”

He stood and watched, and carrying the second rope, they rode down into the water, trailing behind them a line loose and wavering. The gelding tried to swim with its head impossibly high. It angled its long nose upward and snorted and opened its eyes wide and baleful and at first jumped at the current washing against it. Teige called to the horse. He said sounds in no language until the twins and the horse were gone out of sight into the wet brume and the only sign of them was the second rope running backward out of the unseen.

Then there was stillness on that bank once more. After a time the second rope was pulled taut. Now two parallel lines stretched, bridge like, over the river.

Quickly the old man tied Teige’s black pony to the cart. Then, by ropes and a leather belt, he attached the pony and the mule to one of the two ropes so the cart was linked on either side to the airy bridge that led into the mist. He called his son to get up and ride the pony and calm the mule and coax them into the rushing river. But Teige did not want to move. He had sat down on the ground and was turned away from the river. He was running a finger in the brown mud.

“Teige, come. Now.” The father’s voice was large and full and like a thing solid in the air. Teige sat.

“Teige?” the old man said again, and saw his son turn his face farther away as if to study some distant corner of the mist.

The father said nothing for a moment. He looked up in the air, then he cursed loudly.

“Get up!”

But Teige did not move. The river ran.

“I tell you now for the last time. Get up, come on.” The old man sat on the cart with the reins in his hands. He turned from his youngest son and looked away at the grey river and the rope lines running across it.

Still Teige did not move.

“You are afraid. Have you not seen your brothers cross it?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Because you are a coward.”

“I am not. It won’t work. The pony knows it. Look.” He pointed to the black pony, whose ears were back and whose sides heaved.

“She is afraid because you are. It’s your fear, not hers. Did you see your brothers? They were not afraid. Get over here. Now, I tell you.”

Teige sat on the mud and studied the patterns he drew with his finger. His brown hair fell forward over his brow. The drizzle of rain made his cheeks glisten. His eyes were still, the world reduced to the two feet of mud about him. As if such were a door in the world for his escape, he stared at it. Then a blow knocked him on his face.

“Get up.”

Teige did not cry out or weep. He lay with his eyes open and his mouth bleeding into the ground. His pony stamped and turned and looked about with bewilderment.

“Get up,” his father said. “Get up now and get on that pony and lead it into the river.”

The old man turned away from him and studied the thin light in the air and cursed wordlessly. Teige did not get up. His father went over and went to kick at him but stopped short.

“Get up,” he said again in Irish, a single word in a sharp whisper. He was looking away, looking at some place where he raged against the world for not fitting his map of it. His blue eyes burned and his brow furrowed and his lips pressed against one another in a thin line of resolve; he would make things fit.

“I want to stay here. Leave me here,” Teige said.

“Because you are a coward? I will not,” Francis Foley said. “I will knock you into the river if you don’t get up.”

“I will stay here and wait for my mother!” the boy shouted.

“Your mother is gone. She has left us.”

“She has not!”

“She doesn’t want to be with us,” he lied. “She has gone off and now there is only us. Now do what I tell you and get up!” said the father. He waited a moment, and though it was brief it was long enough for him to consider going back to try to find her and then for pride and the knowledge that the law was pursuing them to banish the thought. No, they would go on. They would find a new home. He would make happen what he told her, then go and gather her up and bring her there and she would see. None of this he said, for he could not reveal his own rashness. “Get up, eirigh!” was all he said.