Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

The old man walked the country in vain search for his wife and sons. He wore a long ragged coat of rough wool dirtied brown. He carried a willow wand. He crouched in the grass and caught pheasants in the dawn. He walked back to the lord’s estate and came into it by darkness and stood in the charred ruins. He saw the gardens left ragged and unkempt. He slipped away and asked of some that lived nearby if they had seen a woman looking for her family. He met with vacant stares. He moved off and searched all the roadways running west. Sometimes he was befriended by the poor and sat in small dark cottages listening to their grievances with the turfsmoke encircling the room. He dug the potato gardens of widows and carried small boys on his shoulders. Then he travelled on again, beating his way back and forth along the roads of that country, all the time looking for his family He encountered any number of constables, landlords, agents, and witnessed every kind of crookedness, cruelty, and oppression. He asked if any had seen boys that looked like him. He heard of four boys that had died in a fire in Gort in the country of Galway, and he went there with the ashes of grief and regret dry in his mouth. He stood with the mother and father of the dead boys. He worked for them in the little lump of a field they rented, pulling the rocks from it and bearing them over to make higher the walls. He left when the dream of his wife woke him one night in the stable there. He went out under the stars and thought they were different, that they were beckoning him as they did others in the fabled past. And so he journeyed again in darkness with his eyes heavenward like a figure blind or visionary, being led by a light aeons away.

He walked that way, eyes skyward, through the winters of three years. In time the stars themselves seemed to reassemble in the constellations above him and were then the unjoined puzzle of a woman’s face.

It was winter. In the plains of Tipperary snow fell thickly. It gathered in broad fields and rose high against walls. Cattle stood in stunned bewilderment and lowered their heads as though to look where the grass was gone. They did not move. They waited, dumbly. The snow slowed the world. It fell so thickly that roads filled and coaches stopped or slid into ditches. Horses crashed and broke their hips and were shot on the roadside. The distance across a valley was blurred to nothing and vanished altogether. It appeared as though the landscape itself were being erased and with it time and space and the whole history of man on that island.

The snow fell. Cottages smoked thin, windless plumes into the pale grey sky. Women looked out from doors and threw crumbs for hens while their children scurried about barefoot and in wet rags. Briefly there was the holiday of it, the countryside made beautiful and pristine in a god-willed immaculate creation. It was not itself. The country was like a country in dreams. Birds flew in short, inquisitive flights. They flickered onto the powdered tops of walls and settled for berries of the holly that were plentiful that year. The scene held. When the snow stopped the air froze hard and sealed the white country in ice. Skies were blue and cloudless, by night they were million-starred. No breeze blew. In God’s slumber the entire island might have slipped its moorings and floated northward into a colder climate, defying the fixed certainty of maps. Such was the difference between this and the green country of everyday. A still and iced Christmas passed, and the serenity of the season slipped away and was replaced by hardship. Ridges of cabbages perished and were like long, white-mounded graves in haggard little gardens. As fodder ran short the cattle in the fields began to starve. Their thin flanks showed the cages of their bones, their hides matted with mud in which they had rolled and now wore like crude clothing. At water holes and by the sides of drains and rivulets brown mucked patches of ground opened and spread as animals made slow crossings back and forth each day to dip their noses in the glacial waters.

And across this frozen scene in the January of that year, Francis Foley came. He was thin and bearded. He coughed hollow, raking coughs that echoed across the stillness of the fields. His eyes were worn from sleeplessness and sunken in rims of darker skin. His lips were flaked and broken, the hairs of his moustache overhung them in clumped straggles. He had walked the country back and forth, following rumour and the pattern of the stars, but in that time he had found neither his wife nor his sons. Sometimes, in the middle of an empty road in the County Galway or Roscommon, he had imagined he saw one of them coming toward him. He saw some figure down the road and stopped and waited. His chest opened with the inflation of hope. The figure on the road was walking slowly. Francis blinked his eyes to clarify it, but still he could not make it out. Was that not the way Tomas had of walking? Was that not his proud angle of head? The old man stood and was like a rock in the road. But his heart raced, imagining he had come to the beginning of the end of contrition, that here would begin the reunion of his family and that this time he would bring them all together to the monk’s island and start anew. He stood in the road, and the cold held his feet. Then there appeared before him the figure of one homeless and forlorn and wandering like him in the winter of his life. They passed with minor greeting or silence and went on. Other times, the figure seen on the road vanished entirely and was a figment of desire or something incorporeal, and Francis Foley at last moved from his stance and hobbled on.

Yet, as he travelled he did not lose hope entirely. His death and resurrection by the monk had given him a sense that his life was not to be without purpose, and he endured. His fear was not that he would not find his wife and sons, but that when he did they would have starved or fallen to disease without him. At first he had supposed his sons would still be by the riverbank in Limerick where he had last seen them, and he had gone there and looked at the Shannon waters that in that time were not rushing or wild and seemed a gentle mockery of his failures. He had walked into the County Clare and asked of them there but learned nothing and turned east again into the stars.

Yet all that was already long ago by the frozen January when he trudged not for the first time into Tipperary. The road was packed ice. He walked into the little brown cloud of his breath and kept his eyes ahead of him on the emptiness of the way. There was a small breeze scouring. It polished harshly the skin of his cheeks and left him with the sense that his face was being peeled. His eyes watered and in that way made uncertain the figure that appeared on the road not a hundred yards ahead of him. Francis saw the figure that he could not yet call a man or woman and screwed tight his eyes to release the tears. The figure was coming toward him. The old man stopped. He stood in against the stone wall ditch and laid his hand on the frozen stones. With an intuition that he did not understand but was a foreknowledge of sorts, he knew that this was not just another of all those wretches who had crossed his road. His fingers wrapped onto the top stone on the wall. He held it there readied like a weapon, for at first he imagined this one coming to be none other than the Fallen Angel himself come to take Francis Foley to Hell. He held the stone also out of the need to feel contact with the tangible world and for the reassurance it gave that he was not already dead. The figure moved slowly in the white scene. It was a man, he saw at last, a small man on a small horse. Still he did not lose any of his mistrust and prepared to throw the top of the wall. His heart was hammering now. Blood was awakening in his feet, and they were throbbing. The figure was thirty yards away now and Francis Foley was suddenly afraid of it there on the road in Tipperary. It wore a hat. Its face was unseen. Francis lifted the stone off the wall, and another rolled and clattered out onto the road. He shook and looked about in fright, but the landscape was placid and empty and blanched in the grip of that season.