Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“It was my son,” Francis said in a low whisper. “We are searching the country for him. Tell me.”

“I gave him bread and some grease of the goose and some small potatoes and a jar of buttermilk. He was thin. The woman beyond was coughing. I could hear her all the time he stood there. He took the things. He had a way of looking that said how sad he was to be begging there. I would have offered him a place for the night, but I knew himself didn’t like me to. He hates me thinking good of them as passes on the road, and I know it is only misfortune that separates them from us. So I didn’t offer and he went off and the woman coughing with him and I heard them like that some way down the road and I inside at the hearth. And when himself came in”—she nodded toward the farmer, who studied the ground—“we took to shouting at each other. I told him I would be gone the road and leave the children to him if he didn’t invite the next beggars he met to come and eat with us. And them was you and your other son today” She stopped and drew breath and looked at the calf. “And see what good you’ve done us.”

“He was thin?” Francis Foley asked her at last.

“He was.”

“But he was well?”

“I couldn’t say that. I thought after he might have signs on him of whatever the woman had in her chest. His eyes, they…” She paused and watched the effect of the news on the two strangers and then nodded. “I am sorry for ye.”

The farmer joined her. “Yes, we are sorry for ye.”

Francis stood absorbed in his grief. If, in some other world, his flesh had been laid out and examined for the evidence of loss and regret, there would be apparent at that instant the running and deepening of wrinkles. He aged as the knowledge twisted into him like thorns.

“How many days?” Teige said. “How many days ago that you saw him?”

“Three, maybe four.”

“Think!” Francis boomed, and the black cow shuddered a step away.

The woman pulled at her lip. “What day have we? Yes, it was the day after Sunday last, I’d say.”

“Three days so?”

“Yes.”

“Which way did they go on the road?”

“West,” she said. “Making slow progress now, I’d say.”

“Teige, get the girls ready,” Francis said. “We’ll go now.” He turned to the woman. “Thank you,” he said, and swiftly went out into the dark and began preparing the cart and the pony.

A half an hour later, with Deirdre and Maeve O’Connor sitting on the front of the cart and a portion of a killed goose and a bundle of potatoes and hens’ eggs and two winter cabbages on the back, the Foleys left. The farmer and his wife and children watched them under the held high lamp. They knew there was nothing to say and witnessed their departure as though such haste and desperation were familiar and had often been reenacted in the history of that country. Francis Foley nodded to them a final time and told Teige to cluck the pony, and they hurried westward, down the road under a thin light of few stars.

They went westward in the dark with the old man hastening ahead in a kind of soft-footed jogging that slowed and sped up continuously like a faltering engine of hope. The slap of his old boots on the road was a doleful music. Teige drove the cart and the dog followed some paces behind. The dawn opened before them and in the pale glow of its first light the father peered at all shapes and shadows that lay down the road as if each one might be the figure of his eldest son. They crossed the soft ground of the County Clare. They passed through the town of Ennis when it was still sleeping and its ghosted narrow streets echoed with the hoof clops of the white pony. The Foleys looked up at the curtained windows of the hotel, the shuttered boardinghouses and the open doorless entranceway of the poorhouse, but they did not stop or make enquiry. They heard low groans and whimperings that escaped in slumber through the crevices of old buildings.

The dampness of the streets and the stone houses were like a cold purgatory and Francis Foley quickened his pace and passed quickly on. He knew his son was not there. He jogged on in boots torn with soles flapping. The rags of his coat fluttered. His long hair was plastered awry with sweat and rain and showed the bald places of his scalp like islands. Teige offered him his place on the cart, but the old man declined. It was as if he imagined he were being guided now on the trail of Tomas, as if he alone knew which turns on the road to take and knew not by logical reason but by an inner prompting that would reunite him with his own flesh. Teige did not argue. He saw the look in his father’s face, the sunken hollows beneath his eyes and the fixed, locked mouth, and knew the old man’s resolve was not to be questioned, that for him it was a kind of repentance and a journeying toward forgiveness.

Rain fell and stopped and fell again, as if such weathers were features of the geography. They went northward from the town and turned west at a crossroads and trekked through the wild open bogs and bleak land of Cill Maille. There by a place that might have been called Misery or Desolation were the grey waters of Loch na Mine, the lake with no bottom where water sprites lived. Frances stopped and held his right hand against his chest and was sucking at the air when the cart arrived up behind him.

“We can stop here awhile,” he said, his breast rising and falling as if about to release something.

“Are you all right?” Teige asked him.

“Feed the girls, water the pony,” the old man said, and slumped to the ground.

They ate some of the goose then and the girls went to waterside for their privacy and returned and sat again mute upon the cart. Teige brought the pony to drink. The dog moved in a low crouching manner closer to the smells of meat. Before they were ready to leave she was eating from Teige’s hand.

“They cannot be far now,” the old man said. He looked through the rain at the emptiness of the road.

“You think they—”

“I do.” The old man raised his head so his thin neck was extended, then he scratched at it as if deliberating a distance. “We will find them today, Teige,” he said, and did not say aloud, “Or never.”

There was a still pause then in that eerie brown place of bogland and drizzle. The emptiness of the road made small their hearts. They said nothing. Waterfowl plashed in the lake and moved the time forward until the father finally stood and they left once more.

They drove on down through the townlands of Barsaile and Glean Mor and Cluain I Gulane. When they arrived in the village of Cill Mhicil it was late afternoon of the fair day there. Polyps of dung lay cooling in the street. Bootless boys in brown rags stood herding groups of two or three cattle while their fathers had adjourned elsewhere. The cattle were watchful and skittish and young, and when the Foleys passed them they made small, panicked movements and had their sides tapped by the boys’ sally rods. There were curt cries and sharp commands. In the yards, horses were tethered and raised their heads, dripping drinking water, when the Foleys passed. Farther down the village, carts with old horses stood and the men eyed the strangers furtively from beneath their caps. They studied the white pony and chewed in the hollow of their cheeks and awaited what trouble might brew. They did not let their eyes meet those of the Foleys. They did not show any sign of welcome or wonder or even of noticing that they were there. Instead, as if out of some inherited sense of distrust of anything they did not know, they leaned against one of the eating houses there and looked at each other’s shoulders and waited.