Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“God in heaven,” Francis said, “the people there are in the world, Teige, eh?”

The father looked at his son from the corner of his eye. He was not sure if he was to be struck down again, and balanced there on that moment, testing gently the relationship between them. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

Teige was thin as a young ash. The curved branches of his ribs were plain even in that half-light.

“I am not,” he said. And then, without looking up and in a slender voice: “Are you?”

“God, no. No,” said Francis, and then added quietly, “Thank you.”

Francis bent down and picked up the coat and held it in the air. “Well, isn’t that fine style?” He smiled then and Teige saw it and it was like an image abandoned in the farthest corner of the boy’s mind, a sweetness in that expression that belonged in the days when he was much younger and the old man had carried him on his shoulders.

Teige did not say anything.

“Made of good stuff, too,” his father said. “Here, take it, Teige, it’ll be warm.” He offered it and his son took it and put it on.

Teige lifted a handful of the hardened sleet-snow to the pony’s mouth, and she lipped at it and drew back her top lip and showed her teeth and moved her head right and left like that as if soundlessly laughing. Teige bent down and began to push the snow on the ditch away with his hands. When it was apparent what he was doing, his father knelt and together they cleared the snow from the rough tufted grass that lay below. When it was so exposed the pony moved closer and, after nosing cautiously, chomped the frozen grass with a tearing sound. Father and son watched. Francis tried to figure out what they would do and how he would say it. They waited in the dawning light, and each felt its revelation with shyness. There they were, the mismatched pair of Foleys, in the middle of the country of the lost. Their breath hawed. Blackbirds came and landed in the field over the wall, attending the pony’s finishing the patch of grass.

In that tentative renewal between them, Francis did not know how to broach the subject of the boy’s mother. Then Teige said:

“I have looked for my mother.”

“I went back there, too,” said his father. “I searched every road. I asked any I met.” He had more to say but did not say it. He looked at his son, then when he could not bear it he looked away. He did not say that he feared Emer was dead, and Teige did not turn on him with recriminations or vent further his anger and loss. Instead each stood and the air between them was filled with tangled memory and grief. Teige’s mother appeared there in form invisible and was a figure with fair hair falling instructing him in the stories of the stars. She lingered a time in the silence of the undisturbed landscape of field and hedgerow spread out before them. The two men tried in vain to hold her there, but she was like a star retreating as the morning came on.

Francis felt the weight of his years, and the immense loneliness of the road passed over his face like a cloud. Later, he thought, later he could go and look for her again, but he did not have the strength for it now. For now he had to be with this boy. He had to take him somewhere. He had to make a home.

“Well, son,” he said at last. “Will we go toward the sea?”

As they crossed the country the snow melted. It was like a blanket of green being unfurled. The skies moved again and rain fell. Cattle stood in the timeless mesmerism of drizzle, then crossed the fields in slow phalanxes, finding shelter in the hedgerows as squalls blew the hard rain sideways. When the squalls passed, storms crashed. Thunder broke over February. The stars in the night sky vanished. In the dawn, the light was pale and seemed a poor cheapened imitation, a grey murk that drizzled. The countryside itself looked strangely sorry, like a place in tales where the king has been banished and every plant, hill, and valley suffers in punishment awaiting renewal. So it was. And across this through the falling weathers of the beginning of that year Francis Foley walked westward with Teige on the white pony at his side. They were not companionable, they did not speak in the day as they moved along other than to announce rests or the place where the pony needed water. Still, the presence of the boy consoled his father. He saw how Teige had aged, how loss had marked the expression of his eyes and stolen their brightness, and yet despite the chastening of such knowledge he was still grateful.

They moved west over the curves of the road. Sometimes Teige dismounted and walked the pony. He never offered his father to ride, and Francis did not ask. They passed all and sundry on their way, a long and varied parade of vagabond unfortunates whose ills and complaints formed the whole catalog of life’s undoing. There were infirm old widows, shawled and wrapped so as to lose all shape of womanhood and seem instead accumulated bundles of cloth, browned by the road. The feet in their broken shoes ached and they shuffled flatly with flawed ankles or tendons torn. There were all manner of mendicant and pauper, thin skeletal figures who drifted along with doomed eyes. Few stopped on their way when they met the Foleys. They eyed the pony and then turned their faces downward and shoulders sideways as if shamed by their homelessness. With such figures in their squalor, Francis and Teige were already familiar. They had each seen many on their separate wanderings, yet in the passing of each of them father and son nonetheless felt shivers of foreboding. Where had these come from? They were going nowhere. The road for them was the last hope, and upon it they carried the impossible burden of their untold stories. Day and night they appeared and disappeared. They were like a fairy folk or the infinite population of the dead. None seemed to know each other, none said their name. Whatever their quest, it remained in its secret history and travelled away with them.

On one evening when an army of such passed them going eastward on the road, Teige broke the day’s silence and asked his father why they were all going in the opposite direction.

Francis stroked his beard. They were stopped beneath three leafless trees and gnawing at raw potatoes.

“We are going to the sea, Teige,” he said. “They are going to Dublin.”

“But why? Why do they not stay?”

“Each one has their reasons. Our reason is to leave our name in that town of Kilkee for Tomas and the twins, and then we will go to the monk’s island and make a place there. Then when the boys come back they will be able to find us. That is our reason. You have seen the sea, is it so terrible?”

“No.”

“Tell me what it is like.”

Teige was squatting on the ground and the pony’s long neck was grazing near him. The cold was coming in his shoulders as the heat of walking faded. “It’s like the end,” he said. “It’s wild, though.”

“Wild?”

“Oh yes.”

“Good. That’s what we want, eh? Wild, wild sea. Did you go into it?”

“I did.”

“And were you afraid?” The old man had said it before he thought better of it. He remembered the disastrous scene in the Shannon River and looked down and tightened his mouth.

“I was,” Teige said, and lifted his face. There was a moment then in which their still fresh reconciliation might have come asunder, in which the father might have made a grunt of disapproval and shook his head, leaving his son to feel the isolation of cowardice. But Francis Foley said:

“Good. That’s good. You were right, too.” He glanced at Teige from under his eyebrows. “There’s many drown in it, I suppose?”