Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“There were seven churches here,” the monk said cheerily over his shoulder as he strode on. “This is the place of Saint Senan,” he called out. “It is an ancient site, from before the days of the Vikings,” he added. “Now, here. In here.”

They entered into the shadows of the stone building of one room where a table and stools stood. In the corner lay a bed of straw.

“It need only be the beginning,” the monk said. The Foleys stood with slow comprehension. They looked at the stools as if to see the figures of themselves sitting there, but it lay beyond their imagining. The monk allowed them their bewilderment but added, “There are many stones, there can be other houses. And here, come, look.” He stepped outside again and this time Francis Foley was near to him and the monk pulled on the old man’s ragged sleeve slightly and led him in through the doorway of the tower as the others crowded behind like visitors to the House of Miracles.

And there in the centre, all gleam and polish and impossible perfection, stood the stolen telescope.

And so in the story of our family is explained how the Foleys came to live on the island called Scattery in the estuary of the Shannon River. Sometimes the story goes no further. Sometimes you are left to surmise, to consider how these people became yours, how your great-grandfather moved out of the stuff of fable, and how the threads of the story unwound and brought it across the Atlantic Ocean. But if the teller is an old man maybe sitting in a diner in Mount Kisco, New York, or speaking quietly in a corner of a living room when the relations are gathered after a funeral, the story spins seamlessly on and those Foleys do not fade into the dark.

Within twelve hours the monk was gone. By some secret prearrangement the boatman came back and the holy man sailed from the island when all were sleeping in the small light of the dawn. He left without explanation or farewell. He did not tell them why he had come there or why leaving. He did not narrate how he had been waiting alone for years on the island and how he had reasoned it a kind of penance between God and himself for sins of avarice and covetousness. He did not tell how his sojourn was a kind of exile from the holy is-land farther up the river, and that the appearance of Francis Foley there was a sign from above that he was forgiven and could return home. All of this the Foleys would only gradually discover in time from the stories told of the monk in the town of Kilrush. There, in time, they would learn of his arrival with the telescope and his taking the confession of the landlord McKean and how he had bargained with him some portion of salvation for the rights to the island fields that were after all Saint Senan’s. They would hear of this and other stories, and in time all the stories would mingle and join tales of the monk’s cures and other miracles and they would come to think of him as a figure fallen from the skies. He would take on the same unreality and magic as had the saint himself and become like the whispering wind in the rushes.

In the dawn when they woke, he was gone. Francis stooped out the low door in the stone house and knew it. He did not need to walk down to the shore. He stood in the light drizzle with the birds of April flitting around him. He shielded his eyes from brightness that was new to him, for the island had its own light and lay softly sometimes in gleaming opalescence. The stillness was palpable. The simplicity of light and grass and birds and falling drizzle was all there was. And in that landscape the innocence of the world was recaptured for him and was a thing of stone and earth and water. It was the first time in a thousand mornings that Francis Foley did not feel the need to move onward. He stood and did nothing at all. He felt himself an old man and felt the regret and loss that he had caused and endured on his way to that moment wash through him like the tide beyond. He breathed the air of the island as if each breath were parcelled and gifted to him and might not long continue. He stood at the wall and opened his fingers upon it, the stones cold and damp. Briefly he thought to say a prayer but did not. His sons were still sleeping. He watched over the river and the fields for a long time and in that time saw that there was a white swan that seemed to linger there, paddling by the foreshore.

Later, when the drizzle had passed and the sky was creased in folds of light from under long sleeves of cloud, Teige and Tomas woke to the sound of metal hitting stone. When they went outside they saw their father digging the monk’s little garden. He turned over the ground with such ease, it seemed ground of no weight at all. Black furrows were opened in straight lines as though drawn from above. He worked and did not look up. Rooks rose and alighted there and the smaller birds came and went. The dog lay in the freshened earth and watched its new master. Tomas and Teige readied another of the cabins fit for living. They found a low stone cabin where hay and potatoes and cabbages and onions were stored, and another that may have been a stable in ages gone. They made a dry bed there, raised on timbers and facing the door. Outside it, where the wall faced south across the river, Tomas built a seat roughly hewn with the monk’s ax, and in the afternoon he carried Blath there wrapped in a blanket and she sat in the thin sunlight and looked out. She was weak and weighed less than a figure of sticks, but she smiled at him and called him her fool. Deirdre and Maeve were all times at her side. They brought her drinks of cool water from the well they had found. They combed her hair with their fingers and smoothed and brushed out her blanket as though it were some faery raiment. In turn she seemed to have upon them an effect of release, for by the end of that day their tongues were freed and they spoke and then chattered and sang.

So they began. Within two days they had begun to set the patterns of their life on that island. In one of the buildings Tomas had found the monk’s fishing pole and line and brought it to the southern shore and pulled a silvered salmon from the river. They cooked it over an open fire and the smells of the fish climbed the air. They set seed potatoes, the young girls bending in the furrows and pushing them into the ground and the brothers forking upon them the mulch of seaweed and sand and earth. Daily Teige and Tomas woke in the first thin wafer of light and like the boys of fairy tales hunted in the dawn fields for hares. They teased and chased and ran and tripped over burrows and tumbled and sighted hares running. At such times the brothers revisited some vanished or unlived part of their lives. The days of May climbed over them. There were high skies of blue with brown cloud. In her seat by the front wall, Blath coughed less often and, though her cheeks were strangely flushed with circles of red, in the evenings when Tomas came to her they could hear her laughter for the first time. He made her laugh. It was as though the evidence of his love for her were continually surprising. As she recovered a frail health, her language grew more robust. She strung curses and other assorted phrases of colour at the crows that fringed the garden plot. The two girls delighted in these and giggled and skipped about chanting in singsong the foul language while the birds lifted in the air. And perhaps it was by this same magic, the effect of words spoken to them like a spell, that soon there came more and more birds, crows, magpies, thrushes, starlings and tits, cormorants, oystercatchers, and such. And these flocked and flew over the island and darted and soared above the opened brown apron of ground and chorused in a nexus of trilling punctuated only by the flat, accented tones of gaily cried Limerick curses.