Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“Tell me what you see,” he said.

The heaving of his breath and a little river breeze made uncertain his words.

“Tell me what you can see, boys,” he said again.

They looked. The dog came from the cart and stood at their feet.

“There is an island,” Teige told his father. “There is a green island.”

They sailed to that island the next morning in a narrow, canoelike boat that was made of canvas and coated in pitch. The boatman was a thin fellow with light gait who rode the rise and fall of the waves like a cork and kept his eyes on the horizon as though it were the drawn limit of the world. They were such a scene. Blath had to be carried on, and her boarding in the bobbing waters by the little jetty was itself an adventure. The two young girls had never been on the sea. When they understood what was to happen, they shook like paper dolls in the breeze and had to be cajoled and lifted by the brothers, during which they came more vividly alive and boarded the boat squealing and wriggling and kicking. It was only when they were aboard and the dog jumped to join them that they calmed and looked about and marvelled at the water over the side. Francis Foley had bartered with the boatman and left to him the pony and cart until such time as the old man could come and pay for the ferrying and reclaim what was theirs. The boatman was not much inclined to conversation. He shook his head at things he said only to himself. There were fragments muttered, disagreements, but to those listening there were only bits of language, phrases clipped short and left like the scissored lines of disparate letters.

“Iniscathaig? Scattery?” he had said, and nodded. Then, as he stood back and watched them lift Blath aboard, he had added, “Not that I believe it… oh no. Ha! Blessings and curses, says he, and that’s that.… Saint Senan himself never and—” He stopped abruptly then and said no more, and they were no more enlightened as he dipped oars and pushed off.

So, in one canoe then, with Teige looking backward at where the white pony was tethered on the dock, they sailed out into the swift current of the river. What had seemed flat slow murky water from the land soon became a slapping tide where the sea met the Shannon. They tossed upon it like a thing of little substance, and the two brothers thought of the last time they had seen that river with their father. Francis himself was standing in the bow. He knew that he was a man who would not drown. The day was cold and a wind cut across them as they pitched forward. For a time the island seemed to get no closer, though the boatman worked hard with his oars and kept his eyes fixed on the destination ahead. Still the island lingered there before them. It appeared for a time as though the current were uncrossable, that though they laboured they would never arrive and were held there in midwater in a vision at once tantalizing and purgatorial. The canoe lay low in the river. Water splashed and wet the girls and they cried out with glee and Blath held her arms around them. The boatman talked words to the fishes that sped beneath them and rowed on. Beyond the island, the coastline of the County Kerry seemed like another country. None of them considered it, so bound were they now on this small green place that Francis Foley had dreamed. Then, as though they had passed through an invisible portal in the tide, suddenly they were near enough to see the gulls walking on the pebbles of the shore.

Francis Foley cried out. He cried out and waved his arms and was in danger of falling overboard. His sons did not know what to do. Tomas shouted to him, but the old man kept it up and the girls shouted then too and the gulls rose off the shore and wheeled and screamed and beat their wings in the sky above them. Francis shouted out a long, wordless sound of no language that was greeting and announcement and victory. Then to the astonishment of all, he stepped out of the boat and made as though he could walk on the surface of the water.

Tomas reached forward to save him but was too late.

He stepped but was only up to his waist in the water, for they were in the shallows now. And then Francis walked up ahead of them out of the sea and was in his own mind a fabled discoverer arriving on shores untrammelled by the history of bitterness and betrayal that was his country’s. He walked up upon the pebbles and slowly turned around to look at those coming in the boat. He waded out to meet them and carried Blath in his arms. Teige and Tomas took one of the girls each upon their backs and went back again for the small bundles of their things. By the time they had laid the last of them on the coarse sand, the boatman had already turned the canoe and was rowing back toward the town.

They stood with slow comprehension. They had at last arrived at the place where they could live in safety and peace, and as this realization dawned Teige looked at Tomas and then smiled and laughed and his brother laughed too and the young girls ran about and skipped on the sand.

Then the old monk appeared.

He was there before any of them had seen him coming and seemed to have dropped from the sky. He did not look a day older than the last time Francis had seen him. He wore his brown cassock and his hands were concealed where they held each other inside the sleeves. In the moments when Francis first saw him, he thought the monk an apparition of his own conjuring. He stared at the monk and said nothing. Then he looked at the others to see that they too saw him. He felt lighthearted with their celebrations. His long body shivered without sensation of cold. The monk’s eyes were upon his and seemed of a piercing blue. His bare head was hairless and what grew at the sides of his temples was grey. When he spoke his voice was a warm, deep honey.

“Here you are at last,” the monk said.

The sound of his words made him real. Francis Foley’s mouth was agape.

“Yes, I can speak to you here. I knew you would come, but I did not think it would take so long.” The monk smiled and came forward among them, and his hands appeared. “These are your family,” he said, arriving before the astonished old man and holding out his hand to him in welcome. “I am very pleased to see you at last.” He stood smaller than all but the girls and reached and took the hand of the man in his and shook it firmly. “Welcome,” he said to Francis, “you are all very welcome.”

The brothers stood with the girls where Blath lay supported against a rock on the shore. They were speechless. The small waves lapped and dragged some pebbles back and forth in watery dance. Gulls arced overhead.

“Come,” the monk said then. “Let me help you. The place is not very much, but it is dry.”

And he gestured with his hand the way forward, and when they did not move he motioned again and led them himself up from the shoreline and along a track in the grass. For a small and older man he was nimble on his feet and sprang forward at times like one hurrying to show a rainbow. And the Foleys followed him, the girls skipping in the windy exposure of the sloping island, Tomas carrying as best he could the woman on his back, and Teige and his father loping behind. Happiness lit their faces. They passed up across the island, taking the green track and startling hares that darted and zigzagged away. The whole of the island could be seen then and the Shannon waters about it now grey, now blue, as the sun came and went in high, scudding cloud. The way took them through a stile in a stone wall, past tangles of hedgerow and briar and entwined woodbine in early leaf and led them to a tall, round tower of stone. Beside it were other small buildings, too.