Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

By the fire Finan sat. His twin was gone to see the mer-girls that had come up from the town and were queuing now to learn of their lovers. Finan drank the sharp and bitter whiskey that burned the back of his throat. His eyes were glass. In the smoke and wavering of the heat he saw images of faces distorted. He thought he saw demons and blinked and screwed up his eyes and drank some more. A small fellow dared by others then announced he would attempt to dive face-first through the fire. He was wiry and thin and held up his arms that were like sticks. He was with another, a broad figure with scars on his face. Some tried weakly to dissuade him, but many others urged him on. His companion said he would take any bet that his friend could not do it. There ensued then a rapid and heated calling of wagers, and in bizarre fashion gypsies and men argued as to what would constitute a failed attempt. If the man was burned in the face, one said. If he was scarred, but not if he was singed. If his clothes were alight, it was all right. They considered this and other elements of the dive there amidst the crackling and spitting of the burning logs while the sea roared not far distant. The night sky turned its stars. Men swayed as if at sea and held aloft glimmering glass bottles. They cried out and drank toasts of little sense to the thin fellow who would face the fire.

In this wagering Finan took the side of the diver. He thought the attempt brave and foolish both and yet was touched with admiration for it. Then, when the gypsies and others there were ready, the thin man seemed to swallow a clarifying reality, for he stood back and said he had changed his mind. Bedlam broke loose. One pushed another, and accusations and sharp words flew out on the air. Then the companion of the thin fellow turned on his friend and cursed him for being a coward, and these two wrestled and fought by the fire. The other men and the gypsies watched them, for in their fighting seemed released some long and bitter enmity which had survived like an aged thorn beneath the skin. The thin man was small and young, and his manner of fighting was full of quick kicks and smacks, darts and shimmies. But he was worse for drink, and his blows flew wildly in the smoky air. He spun his arms about and was like loosened machinery coming asunder. He spat and said he didn’t have to jump if he didn’t want to. And it was clear to all that these were fellows who conspired to win money at gatherings such as this, and that in his way the thin man had reneged and his companion was shamed. Still on their feet, they grappled and wrestled. The young man swung at the older and missed. Then the man with the scars on his face reached back and shot the full of his fist onto the other’s nose. There was a crunch and stuff flew and the fellow fell backward. His hands came up to his face and caught the blood running there. The other stepped forward again and delivered into his stomach another blow. The fellow fell to his knees. Then the bigger man leaned down and with two hands picked up his victim and lifted him full into the air and said the wager was still on, for he would pitch the chicken face-first across the fire. He walked with the fellow in his arms and the blood dripping. He came to the edge of the fire and was so deciding the manner best suited to fling his companion when Finan Foley leapt at him and knocked him to the ground.

It was an action rapid and unconsidered. The man crashed into the side of the fire and sent aloft a scattering of sparks while his friend squirmed free. Finan hit the big man with his right fist, and the fellow’s neck snapped back. Then he hit him again. He felt the pain rush down the length of his own arm, and as he did he was shouting out words that none there understood, and seemed to be fighting a mortal enemy against whom he had many deep and long unspoken grievances. He struck another blow. He hit the man and did not know he was dead, and the fire made of his face a twisted mask of red and brassy orange. Then the thin fellow was wailing out something and knocking him over and pulling at his dead companion and the gypsies were coming forward to ensure that Finan was not harmed. He was dragged back through the crowd and brought quickly away and taken to a caravan where he went inside and lay down and the world thumped in his head and he realized with horror the monstrousness of what he had done.

In the days following, more tribes of gypsies arrived in the town of Kilkee. They brought their horses and ponies and made camps in random fashion on the grass that oversaw the sea. Soon there were scattered clusters of caravans dotted about the fields that ringed the town. The day of the races was not announced, and Teige could not discover when it would be. He did not see Finan or know where he was hiding, and when he saw Finbar it was always in the company of a group of gypsies and his manner did not invite conversation. Teige had already decided that the moment the races were over he would ride back into Limerick alone if necessary to find his brother, then go east to search for his mother. He wanted the race to take place at once, but when he asked the gypsies about it he always received the same reply, that it would happen when it was ready. There was no date set and time itself seemed an antiquated and overly formal invention so that days and nights rose and fell and the gypsies might sometime sleep until noon or after and sometimes be risen and walking about the town in the predawn like spectres come to visit. They showed no anxiety but rather now that they had camped by the ocean they took the arrival and gathering of tribes like a medicine of the spirit. Their hearts were lifted to see so many like themselves, and the buoyancy of their mood grew daily. It was the year’s end in the gypsy calendar, and the festive nights of ribaldry, of renewed friendships and fierce rivalries, revealed it as such. There were knifings and fistfights on the night strand. The constabulary adopted a policy of indifference and left the gypsies to their own affairs. Of the three officers in the town, two of them had previously booked annual leave.

So, the town became for a time a gypsy island. Men and women continued to visit the fortune-tellers and story makers by night. They paid for the gypsy whiskey and grew wild-eyed, watching men who could eat fire or swallow gold coins and find them again in the shells of their ears. They heard the stories of the animal called elephant and imagined him there on their own beach loaded with a mountain of seaweed, or miraculously unsinking tramping slowly across their bogs with the fuel for the winter. The children of the town suffered enlarged imaginations. They watched the exotic visitors with awe and dreamed of running away with them to far places that were not rainy and cold and poor and where kings and queens were glorious and beautiful and not the ones of which they had heard. They spread stories among themselves of the gypsies’ scars and magic, and these stories in turn grew other stories and became wilder and more ferocious with each telling, and the gypsies became pirates, vagabond thieves, or daring circus figures tumbled down from a high wire in the sky.

While the days passed, Teige rode the white pony on the strand of Doonbeg out of sight of the other gypsies. The pony ran well there, and Teige spoke to her and stood her on the sands and let them both look a long time at the breaking of the waves. The sea was slow mesmerism. The farther out he looked, the farther it seemed to go until it did not seem to be moving at all but was a steady line of grey without wave or wimple. He rode there in the nights too and liked the empty tumbling of the world beneath the stars.

“It’s like a rim of iron,” he told the silent pony, “where the world ends.”