Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“Come,” he said, “now.”

The Foleys and the eldest boy followed the farmer to the cabin. There a lamp had been lit. On a damp bed of mucked rushes the exhausted black cow was labouring. The farmer held the light high and they each saw the shine of her, the gloss of effort leaking out through her hide. Her eyes were wild and the pull and blow of her breath uneven and rasping like some faulty mechanics. The farmer hung the lamp on the wall, then brought up from the ground a length of thick rope.

“She won’t do,” he said to none of them in particular. “You’ve pulled a calf?” he asked Francis Foley.

“I have, and many, but she’s not ready.”

“She’ll die.”

“She won’t,” Francis said.

“She’s older than that boy,” the farmer said, nodding toward Teige. “We’ll pull her now.”

He ran his hand along the back of the old cow, but in her terror and hunger and weakness she frighted and turned sharply in the byre and knocked the farmer sideways against the wall. He cursed her with a kind of exaggerated violence, then stepped forward again and this time thrashed at her with the rope like a whip. He made connection to her backside only twice and she bucked and moved in a quick-trot directly at them. The boy jumped in against the stone wall of the cabin. Teige was pushed by his father sideways and felt the side of the cow against him as she passed. She reached the far wall and moaned. Then she bellowed loudly and arched her great head and roared once more. Pig squeals came from the next cabin over. The farmer strode up and whipped at her again. He shouted at her to stop that and be quiet, but she was still not finished bellowing and had her face now against the old door.

“Don’t, she’ll push the door out. Wait!” Francis called, but the farmer was not to be deprived of his chance to whip her again. The rope flew back and was in midcurve high in the air when Francis stepped up and grasped the farmer and held him hooped in his arms. The man wriggled and cursed and tried to stamp on the other’s foot, but he could not break free, and the son, watching, allowed a crooked smile to slide over his mouth as though at a circus.

“Let me off!” the farmer shouted, but Francis Foley held him and kept him there imprisoned and told Teige to see to the cow.

Teige moved forward with his hands out wide and whispered sounds.

He said over and over words that sounded like a sea.

The cow had her back to him. The place where she had been whipped had welted in two clean lines. Still Teige whispered the sea until it was all about them and the farmer in Francis Foley’s arms quietened. Teige was next to her now, and the noise he made became instead a low moan that was almost unvoiced and sourced in some deeper part of his insides below his larynx. He came about until he was before her, then licked his fingers and held them out and touched them against her foamed mouth. And she did not back away. The old cow stood in the low light with Teige putting his fingers inside her mouth and moving them within her mucus. The boy gasped at it. The farmer remained quiet. He watched as though at a dream. Then Teige licked his other fingers and, after withdrawing one hand, slid the other there, and the cow puzzled on them and turned her tongue upon them. Then Teige withdrew his moist hand and brought it down her back and softly inside her. He was knelt on the rushes, his head against her steaming flank and a hand inside her. She stood still some moments, her mouth working as though at the memory of her mother’s udder. Then, very slowly, Teige moved his weight down along her and pressed his right hand deeper inside to feel for the calf. Sharp smacking sounds of suction and fluid escaped. She stood for him. His arm was lost inside her now and was vanished up to his elbow. The others watched his face in the lamplight for signs of what he found. But for a time they could not tell, and Teige said again the sound of the sea and the low moans which spoke only to the cow. Blood and a heavy blackish stuff leaked there. The cow groaned. The boy’s face was a white moon against the wall. Teige turned his hand inside her and twisted his elbow around until it was facing the thatch. Then back again. A spasm travelled through her. She lifted her left hind leg and made a tiny kicking flick at nothing. A foamy sweat rose in separate places on her black hide. Then Teige began to withdraw his arm from inside her. He did so in slow stages, waiting and then pulling, easing his way from the depth of her as his arm came back out into the lamplight with skeins of blood flecked upon it and a transparent film of membrane. His arm withdrew as far as his wrist and then stopped.

“How is she, Teige?” Francis asked him.

“Backward. But she’s here now.” And again he made the sound of the sea. And while he was making it he withdrew his hand another piece and the bone white tips of the calf’s hind hooves appeared where they had pierced through. The farmer went to step forward.

“No, wait.” Francis Foley’s hand was on his shoulder. “You’ll start her. Teige knows. Wait.”

Teige’s bloodied hand was free in the air and the calf’s legs were out as far as the shins.

“Now, quickly,” Teige said, “or the hip will lock and the calf will die.” And before another minute had passed his father and the farmer and the farmer’s son had come and the rope had been secured over the hooves and the calf pulled free onto the rushy floor. Teige bent to blow in its nostrils. The black cow turned her head and made a moaning. Francis moved his hand on her swollen udder until the beistings came and Teige and the farmer lifted the calf upright in the world for the first time. It stood and toppled like a thing of sticks. Now its forelegs were fixed solid and its hind buckled, and now the opposite. It tottered and was for a time like an imperfect creation. The men came and steadied it and held its mouth in place, where at first it would not suck. Milk squirted and oozed out over it. Driblets ran across the calf’s mouth but not into it. Teige had to slip his thumb in the side of the mouth and accustom the tongue and wait until the calf discovered sucking and could then have the hand-warmed teat wedged in its mouth.

The men stood back. In the yellowy light of the lamp they watched with the same mute reverence as was since time began. The calf milked at the mother and twice pushed its head quickly against the bulge of her udder for more.

“Tell your mother we have a heifer calf,” the farmer said. His son nodded and ran out. Still the two men and Teige stood. Teige’s clothes were wet and stained. His father looked at him and had to blink his eyes then for the power of pride that coursed through him. Then he looked up at the old timbers of the roof and the thatch as though seeing through them and beyond into the heavens and the stars.

When the cabin door opened, the woman of the house appeared and she looked at the calf and the black cow and said, “Well, ye did well and thanks due to these strangers.” She smiled briefly at her husband, and he made a timid return of the same. Then she looked at Francis and Teige, and in the stillness of the cabin the intake of her breath was audible. She saw them for the first time in the light.

“It’s yourself again,” she said.

Francis turned to her. Her face showed she was astonished.

“You,” she repeated.

“You have seen me before?”

“Yes. Only you were younger. Four days ago or so, wasn’t it? On the road.” She stopped suddenly and became thoughtful; her hands came to her mouth and pulled at her lower lip.

“Perhaps it was a man like me?” said Francis, and he came forward excitedly and took the lamp from the wall and held it next to his face.

“I’d swear it was you. You came along the road and you stopped at the door begging. You had that woman. She was out by the wall beyond.”