Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“There is,” said Teige.

“And it’s fierce.”

“Yes.”

“You were right so,” said his father. “You were right to try it and then keep well out of it.”

Another pause, then Teige added: “I didn’t, though.”

“You didn’t?”

The pony flicked her head. Her tail swished. The boy looked at her a moment and felt his father’s eyes upon him.

“No,” he said, “I still went in, three times.”

The father said nothing then. He sat there and the emotions he held made his lips quiver. He blinked. Dark clouds moved across the sky. The night fell and the stars came and went and wheeled above them and each lay down to the slender hope of their dreams.

The following day when they were passing a cottage a cry stopped them. The cottage was not unlike others, a small building of dark stone with crooked windows and door open to the road even in that February. The cry was that of a woman, it came from the garden beyond. The Foleys stopped, the pony flicked her ears. Then Francis called out. There was no response and Francis looked to Teige, who slid down the pony. Together they walked in around the cottage and found in a small garden a woman of fifty years trying to pull up from the earthen ridges the fallen body of her husband.

When she saw them she let go the man’s shoulders, and while he lay motionless with open eyes and mouth she slipped down onto her knees at his back. Her black-and-silver hair was astray across her face. Her mouth twisted from effort. Her husband, a figure older than she with a face locked in an expression of astonishment, did not move. She propped him against her breast and though the Foleys were there kept making over and over strange sounds of endearment and something that might have been a form of the man’s name, Cathal. Francis bent down to them and Teige stood behind him. He told the woman they would carry the man into the house, but she seemed unable to grasp this, as though she were from another country or already taken from sanity by grief. The old man told her again, but she still did not seem to understand, and at last Francis gestured Teige to him and together they picked the man up and bore him out of the dirt and in through the open door. The woman followed them, her hands holding each other tightly in a knot. In the gloom of the kitchen something stirred and was then two small girls pressed against the corner of the dresser. The man was laid out on a settle bed. He was breathing but still frozen in that look of amazement, his left side locked in an attitude of bracing. The woman stood looking at him and brought her hands to her mouth, making moaning sounds. The girls came to her then and she enfolded each of them in one arm and the three stood there at the feet of the stricken man. Francis got a bucket and traced the muddied track in the grass until he came to the spring well. He was back with the water before Teige was sure where he had gone.

“He has been out there a while,” the father said. “Get the clothes off him. Make up the bed. Has he the fever?”

The woman did not turn to respond.

“Woman of the house,” he said again, and then one of the small girls stepped out of her mother’s side and told them not to shout, that their mother could neither hear nor speak.

Francis Foley lifted the man up against his chest. The woman was made to understand and, helped by her small daughters, she readied the bed. Teige took the man’s feet and hoisted him upon it. The stiff figure was undressed and his clothes taken out the door by Teige, who was instructed by his father to burn them. In the freshness of the day Teige felt relief outdoors and stayed awhile in the low corner of the garden. A black-and-white sheepdog met him there. It looked up at him with blank, sad eyes. When the sod of turf Teige had carried from the hearth at last retook flame, he dropped the clothes upon it and watched the thick smoke take the contagion and carry it into the sky. Back inside the cottage he watched his father trying to get the man to drink. His hand was cupped beneath the man’s chin and the water spilled. The woman was sitting, watching. There was understanding now in her face, a stilled knowing, and she did not weep. She looked at her husband in the bed, seeing in his eyes the entire story of their relation, the history of their time together now come to this.

“Did you burn them?”

“Yes.”

“The poor man is nearly gone,” Francis said behind the woman. “I don’t know how long he was out there, fallen. The girls told her they heard him cry. She mistook their meaning.”

“If it’s the fever…,” Teige said.

“I don’t think it is.”

“But…”

“No. He’s like a clock stopped. That’s not the fever.”

That night the Foleys stayed in the house of the stopped man. Teige slept on the floor on blankets he was given and Francis sat in a chair of ash and sugan rope that the man himself had probably made. The mute woman dropped her head, and the two girls slept in the one narrow bed and did not move in their dreams. In the stillness of the cottage mice scurried, their sudden dartings in the shadowed corners like tiny erratic pulses of life. The night was long and cold. Wind gathered in the west and blew against the door. The dog whimpered where it lay. The sash of the window whistled like a punctured sigh. In his sitting Francis watched the stopped man and thought of his own time between worlds when he thought he had drowned. He thought of the long darkness, the terrible sense that light and touch and taste had been taken from him. He thought of it all and then reached over and rubbed the man’s feet between the palms of his hands.

The Foleys stayed on. The family’s name was O’Connor. The mute woman made them meals from the end of their winter storage of vegetables. Flour was beyond her means and they had no bread, but some days they ate a kind of potato cake that was coarse and lumpish yet sustaining. The two girls who were aged about eight and nine were called Maeve and Deirdre and seemed to know their mother’s will instantly. They spoke for her and told the father and son that they were welcome. Francis told them they would stay for a little time and help them until the man recovered. For already there were signs that he was not to die. The stopped quality of him had already begun to change, although ever so slightly. The fixed, lopsided twist of his mouth had softened and he spoke a kind of flattened speech whose words were not yet comprehensible. Still, his eyes were alive. He watched the father repair the half door where the boards had rotted. He watched Teige stand by him and hold the hammer and pieces of timber that had been salvaged from a broken cart. As the days passed on the Foleys fixed all about the house that they could find. There were windows that did not open, a thatch ladder with broken rungs, a broom without a handle, stone walls that had been knocked. Francis Foley went at each of them with quiet zeal. Though he was not gifted as a carpenter or mason, he set himself at these tasks like a man engaged on some complex and involved proving. It was as though he were to demonstrate in the house of the O’Connors that the world itself could be repaired, that no breakage was beyond remedy, and that soon all would be restored in the vision of the innocent. He hammered and banged. He whistled softly. The small girls skipped and danced steps to this rhythmic reparation, this making good of all that was damaged. For it was not unlike those cottages in fables that become for a time an island of their own and in which the laws of the world do not govern and the hardship of life is suspended.

Finally when all was done about the cottage and the weather lifted and the ground was crisp, Francis took Teige to the garden and showed him how to dig straight furrows. The two of them worked side by side, turning over the new ground as the birds flew about them and chirped and squawked in the hope of worms. At times the father stopped and leaned on the fork and sighed. He looked with satisfaction at the work they had done yet recalled the old pain that reminded him that this place was not their own. His great chest rattled, he had a wheeze that came like an afterbreath once he had exhaled. But he turned to the work again, moving over the brown earth and making it ready for seed potatoes. When they had finished, the patch of opened soil was a neat rectangle of promise. They stood at the head of it and leaned there and watched the birds alighting.