Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

Francis Foley walked up to them.

One of them thought he was going to be struck and took two quick steps back. Francis Foley was ragged and worn thin and wild looking. The dirt of the road was creased in his face. When he went to speak he felt his lips blistered along the insides.

“I am looking for a man,” he said.

The group of four men heard him but said nothing. One of them offered a hint of a noise and a small nod.

“I am looking for my son,” Francis said to them, this time in a louder voice and taking a step closer. Behind him Teige stopped the cart in the street. The men looked past the old man as though suddenly he were invisible. None of them wanted to speak, preferring the comfort of feigned ignorance, until one with a screwed eye called out:

“Will you sell the pony?”

“What’s the matter with ye? Are ye deaf or stupid?” Francis said.

One of them looked down at his boots, another made a quick grin and grinned it away down the road the strangers had come.

“We’re neither,” the screwed eye said. “I’ll give you a price for the pony.”

“Have you seen a man and a woman walking down this road today?”

“We’ve seen many.”

The men murmured a sound that was not quite laughter. Their shoulders swayed with the signs of the day’s drinking upon them.

“My son and a woman. That’s who I’m seeking.”

“For some trouble, is it?” said the screwed eye.

“For no trouble. For his good. The last he saw me I was drowned.”

“And a sight cleaner then,” the eye said to his companions, who laughed.

“If you give me the price of the pony there, I’ll tell you,” he said.

“The pony is not for sale,” Francis said.

“I have a fine few laying pullets there and a banbh,” said the eye, and touched the peak of his cap sideways to obscure his other.

“God bless you, but you’re thicker than the floor of the cart.” Francis stepped up and elbowed past them, entering the eating house at their back while they followed him, grinning and nudging as if about to witness a performance.

In the obscure light he could make out shapes of men there and sticks and the outward thrust of their legs on the mud floor. A noise of spoons rattling in earthenware bowls and the smell of potatoes with butter and milk met him.

“I am looking for a man and a woman,” he announced. “It is my son, and I am certain he came through here. Has anyone seen him? He is with a woman and she is ailing, I’m told.”

The spoons paused. Amid the smells of cooked food rose the heated stench of farmers and their drovers. Some scratched themselves in wait and unleashed the scent of old urine from their trousers. Francis heard their breathing labouring in the dark, but none answered.

Finally a woman at the counter said: “There was a man with a woman passed through here no more than a few hours ago.”

“West?”

“Toward the ocean,” she said.

He could not even see her face. “Thank you,” he said. Then he was gone from there and called to Teige that Tomas was indeed ahead of them not far and that they would catch him before dark if they hurried. Teige clucked and snapped the reins, and Francis jogged ahead of them out the end of that village and into the light that was falling into the sea. They took the road west toward Crioch, meaning “End,” along the open country of no tree or bush where the fields themselves were winter combed by Atlantic breeze. It was a road Teige had travelled with the gypsies once before. It was the road that ran through the village of Doonbeg and on to the curved strand of Kilkee. The white pony seemed to recognize it and opened her stride on the road as if just ahead of her were the figure of her first love, the vanished gypsy boy Mario. She galloped now and raced next to the old man so that he reached out and held on to the leathers and was sped on like that. The pony’s eyes were wide and showed their whites; her mane fluttered in the breeze. Upon the cart the two small girls, Deirdre and Maeve, clung to each other. The road flashed past. Hares in the field stopped dead and listened. The seabirds circled. Then, there it was.

A figure on the road.

But it was not Tomas. It was too tall.

Even knowing this, the father shouted out. He let go of the pony, and Teige reined her to a walk as the old man ran on, calling out and waving his arms. The figure that was like the figure of a giant stopped. It turned slowly, then, the way one might in a dream, and Francis Foley and Teige saw at once that there on the road to Kilkee was the aged and burdened figure of Tomas, carrying on his back the skeletal, fevered body of the woman Blath.

Tomas Foley had aged and was thin and weakened. The woman he carried on his back had shortened and curved him, and though he put her down carefully on the side of the road, he could not stand up straight to meet his family. He had been carrying her for so long that the skin across his shoulders was callused. When he turned to look at Teige and his father, he was not sure if they were phantoms. He blinked beneath his fair curls and passed a hand across his brow.

“Tomas,” his father said, and then said no more, for he had stepped forward and embraced his son and his heart broke to feel the thinness of him in his arms. They held each other and were still and wordless there in the road. Teige watched them and the girls in the cart watched too and the dog turned its head. Then Tomas stepped back and let out a groan, and he held out his hand to Teige and then clung to him.

“Teigey,” he said into the side of his brother’s neck, “I’m sorry.” They held each other tightly and shook with emotion. “I meant to come back to you,” Tomas said, but did not release his hold. The sea sang down the cliffs to the west. Gulls buckled in flight in the sky. The three Foleys did not move, as if afraid that any step would separate them again and this time forever. They stood in the road. In a fable they might have remained so, transformed through the release of all their regret and suffering into stones or petrified trees. They might even have chosen such a fate, for in a family that had journeyed so much already none could now think of moving. They were still as the fields.

At last Francis Foley broke the spell. He went over and introduced himself to the woman Blath lying on the ground.

“You are the famous father,” she said to him, and she smiled weakly and he could see that she was beautiful and that her beauty was ravaged through illness and fatigue. “He has spoken of you often.”

“You are welcome among us,” Francis said. “I hope he has not told you what a fool he had for a father.”

“Indeed he did,” said Blath. “But that father was drowned, you must be a new one.” She smiled again and there was in her expression such a tenderness that Francis saw at once how she loved his son.

“That’s just what I am,” he said, “a new one.” And he was stopped from further speech for she started coughing then, and in a swift movement he bent and picked her up and carried her to the cart.

They did not tell their stories then. They embraced again and looked at each other and stood back, and then Teige shouted out cries of victory and threw his hands in the air.

“Tomas is back! Tomas is back!” he cried, and made the others laugh at his manner as he jumped up and punched at the air. Tomas went over and climbed upon the cart; he told the O’Connor girls his name and they nodded slightly and Teige told him they were Deirdre and Maeve.

“And this is still your gypsy pony?” Tomas said.

“It is,” his brother told him. “It surely is.”