Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“You can feel the spring today,” Francis said.

“You can.”

And they stood so and said no more and were like the guardians of something greater than themselves whose majesty could be felt in simplicity. They went then and drank water from the spring, and the two girls came running and told them their father was able to stand. They hurried back and went in the door and saw Cathal O’Connor propped up on his feet with his arm over the shoulder of his wife.

“I am grateful to ye,” he said in thin words that could now be understood. His eyes were gentle and his face soft as linen.

” ‘Tis a thing of nothing,” Francis said. “Your potatoes’ll be in the ground tomorrow. Come.” And he looped the man’s arm over his and hoisted him in light and heavy steps out the doorway and was soon joined by the man’s wife and daughters. Then in a pose redolent with hope and faith in the constancy of the world, they stood and looked upon the garden with the dog scampering back and forth over the furrows chasing the birds.

That evening Cathal O’Connor died in his sleep. None saw or heard his passing in the night and it was not until the light was already breaking that Francis Foley woke and noticed the absence of his breathing. At first he did not believe it. Then he reached and lifted the man at an angle from where he lay next to his wife. Francis held his face close to the man’s mouth to sense the slightest air, and when he found none he pressed his ear against the chest and then laid the man down and pounded at his heart with his fist. He was doing this when the wife woke. Her eyes stared wide and frozen in their expression. The daughters woke and stood. Still Francis Foley hammered at the man’s heart. He was shouting to him now. He was crouched upon the bed with one knee on either side of the thin man, one instant beating away at him and the next bent low to listen. Then he was thumping at the heart again. Teige came beside him.

“Come on,” the father hissed. “Come on, come on, come on.” He whispered low curses and paused and looked above him into the mud beneath the thatched roof. He whispered further prayers or damnations then to spirits in worlds above or below. His voice grew urgent and his words came through his teeth. He shook the dead man for the last flicker of life until Teige said to him:

“Father, stop. He is gone.”

And so he stopped. There was silence. From outside the door the dog moaned.

Later then, in the garden that was to be for that spring, Francis and Teige Foley buried Cathal O’Connor.

Two mornings after, they found the body of the man’s wife drowned in the stream that was called abhainn mine. A voiceless scream was still in her eyes. Francis shut them with small pebbles and laid her in the ground alongside her husband. The following day they left there with the pony pulling the old cart and the two girls sitting mutely upon it.

And by that time in the caravan of gypsies far away, Finbar Foley was travelling south with a mer-girl called Cait. The gypsies, sensing some change in the stars, had not returned to the races on the sands. When the old man Elihah died, a younger voice had spoken and told that it was time to cross the water again. So they had left that country and journeyed by stages first into Wales, then through the Cambrian Mountains and across the Severn River and down onto Salisbury Plain. There they had camped some time until one night the stars or the unknown forces of the universe moved them and they woke and broke camp and crossed into the wider spaces of northern France. Others of their kind told them there was a new cruelty abroad among mankind, that gypsies had been killed for the look in their eyes, but that many now had foretold the end of the reign of those wealthy and privileged and the coming of the time of the poor.

These gypsies were not unlike those with whom Finbar travelled, though they spoke in a language he could not fully grasp. It was not French but contained it, too, as it contained in piecemeal the languages of all the other countries they had seen. But in a short time Finbar grew accustomed to it and, discovering a new gift, was soon so conversant in that strange hybrid of words that none could say he was not born to it. His manner and look now, three years after the races, were almost indistinguishable from those of the gypsies. He had let his hair and beard grow long and wore a ponytail of his golden curls. In the caravan at night he bedded his mer-girl with a passion that made the old axles of the wagon creak and caused the gypsies outside to cheer. He seemed gifted in sex. The truth was that from the moment he had first been kissed by Cait, his soul had been sucked out and he was left with an insatiable thirst for it. It was a craving that lived in him day and night and could be satisfied only in the moments when he was in her arms. Her kisses still tasted of oysters. Her tongue was a fish in his mouth. Though she was long gone from the days when she had strode the waves for seaweed, her flesh was imbrined and in the dark hoop of the canvas Finbar swam in it and practised each stroke onto perfection. She was a woman of ample hips and round breasts who laughed when the golden curls tossed about her. She liked to reach down and grab on to them as Finbar’s lips travelled up and down her legs and back and forth across her belly in the search to find his soul. Sometimes then she cried out in such sharp ecstasy that the canvas ripped above them and the stars glimmered. Mornings after such loving Finbar appeared with chafed mouth and the red-rimmed, puffy eyes of the long-distance swimmer and worked to patch the caravan. He was become a man. Since last seeing his twin, he had doubled the size of his chest. He did not show any regret for leaving his brothers, nor did he even tell Cait that he was a twin. All of that was like wreckage to him now, and he dove into her every night to forget it and leave it deep fathoms in the past. Many of the gypsies thought that he would quickly tire of her. They had seen incandescent passions before and watched them flare and burn in their own destruction like the extravagant tumult of Venetian fireworks. They expected it to be done by the end of the first winter and the woman to leave the caravan, curse the gypsies for the spell that had befallen her, and make her way back into the ordinary world. They thought too that Finbar must at last reach the end of passion, for he travelled through it so quickly that surely by the spring he would have arrived at its last unexplored corner, then thrown aside the map with the sexual disillusion visited on many. But it had not happened in that way. With indefatigable fervour Finbar continued to love her and rock the caravan through the night. In the warm days of the first French spring, the gypsy women had looked at Cait for signs of her carrying a child. They sought this as proof of some kind of fairness in the world, an inescapable truth of how the universe was balanced and beauty and pleasure to be paid for in the fullness of time. They had looked for it too as a means of dispelling their own secret mistrust of her, the stranger amongst them whose blue eyes and pale skin might steal their men. But as the seasons passed there was no sign of any child. By the second year rumours divided at the campfires. It was something she was doing to avoid conception and the risk of losing him. The women said that she was brewing odd potions and they narrowed their eyes and shook their heads at this defiance of nature. The gypsy men whispered among themselves that it was no such evil, that she was adept at strange positions of lovemaking that increased the man’s pleasure almost to madness and made childbearing impossible. They said she did so with Finbar’s full consent, and was right, too, for the fortune-teller had told her that from his loins only twins could spring.