Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

For his own part, in those early days, Francis Foley lived like a monk devoted to the making of their home. When the garden was dug, he turned to the building of a cottage. He walked the island and considered all possible sites, then settled on a ridge of ground on the northern shore near where the boatman had landed and where they could see the town of Kilrush across the river. One week he made a wooden barrow with rough wheels. The next he was carting stones in it. He did not tell his sons what he was doing, he did not ask for their help. He simply went ahead like one blinded by vision and they watched him and understood and were then there at his side. They made a cottage of dry stone walls three feet thick. The flesh of their hands dried and hardened in that handling and their fingers became crooked and locked in tight curvature like the limbs of the blackthorn. Their shoulders broadened, their arms hung out farther to the side so that even when free of stones the three Foleys seemed to bear burdens. The cottage rose off the ground slowly. Canoes carrying turf sailed past on the way to Limerick. Ferry boats and cargo ships trafficked in the estuary, but to them all Francis Foley turned his back. He did not want to deal with the outside world and for a time was able to ignore it. Then one afternoon when they were setting a flagstone as a lintel above the room door, the thin boatman appeared before them.

“Indeed yes, says he,” he said, and moved from side to side on his narrow legs as though sailing the floor.

“God bless you,” Tomas said to him after waiting for his father to speak.

“Indeed and yes.” He looked at the walls they had made and grinned a slanted grin. He seemed to have nothing more to say.

“What news have you?” Tomas asked him.

The boatman scratched. His head was lumpish like a turnip and grizzled in patches of thin beard like scurf. His eyes rolled about in the motionlessness of the building. “No, but,” he said. “Only that, and not that… devil a care I give, but…”

“Yes?”

“I brought the pony.”

Teige dropped the stone he was holding and was out the doorway then before them. He ran down to the shore to where the horse was tethered to a large lump of wood. She had swum across the river behind the boat on a long line, and her mane was matted and her flanks dripping. As Teige ran the pony sensed that it was he and stirred and hoofed at the sand and turned about there. He freed her in a moment and she whinnied and was skittish and puzzled and briefly did not realize that she was no longer tied. He let her have the scent of him and ran his hand firmly along the side of her, and then, while the others had come out to see, Teige swung himself onto her back. The motion of it was so fluid and easy, it seemed almost as if some inverse gravity were in operation or the upward pull of his body were part of a magnetic dynamism between horse and man. He held to her mane and leaned down and seemed to the others to speak soft commands then, for without an apparent action of his heels or thighs, the pony took off. She galloped down the small rim of sand and then up across the bank and onto the uneven green of the low field there, and then pony and rider were gone off away around the grassy domain of that island. The others watched without a word until they were gone. The boatman swayed.

“Teige can ride her, eh?” Tomas said.

His father nodded and stood there and looked at the horizon empty now.

“We need more horses,” he said then.

The boatman did not seem to understand the words were addressed to him. He was still looking at the place where Teige had ridden away.

“We need other things, too,” Francis said. “Tools, seeds. We can have cattle here in time.” He turned to face the fellow, and the man’s eyes rolled and slipped from side to side like glass balls upon a tide. “We have no money.”

The boatman scratched himself hard.

“Ask if there is one who needs horses broken,” the old man said to him. “Teige can tame anything and make it run fast as wind. You have seen it. That pony was wild, now she would jump the cliffs for him. He can do it. If there is one who wants a horse for a race, tell them Teige Foley is over on the island. Will you do that?”

The man shook himself as though bestirring flies.

“If that, not that…,” he muttered with low chin. “But Clancy, Clancy, Clancy there might says he and…” He stopped, unwound or overwound.

A pause grew.

“And?”

The man trembled as if some charge passed through him, then he said:

“I will.”

Evenings then, when the work was over and their arms ached and their shoulders were stretched and curved and tight with the effort of moving stones, Teige took the pony and rode her off about the island alone. He rode as the light fell into the water and a smudge of smoke hung above the town across the river and soon blended into the sky, crepuscular and dim with the appearance of a thing tarnished. He rode in no particular direction, trotting the pony along the shore or out across the fields they had not named yet. He rode as the stars came out in the heavens above him and glittered and made stars in the water too and silvered the grass and made soft, silken silhouettes of the rabbits that stood erect in surprise. The pony was become almost too small for him, but she still bore him nonetheless with ease and could stride out charging into the half-light, the thrumming of her hooves the only sound. They travelled back and forth that small territory then. Teige stopped her sometimes on the far shore and watched the hills of Kerry slip into the folds of the dark. Other times he turned her into the shelter of a hedgerow and she stood amidst the sweet breezes of blackberry blossom and lifted her head and her breath hawed and her sides steamed like one becoming vapour. And in that solitude and stillness, Teige studied the sky and thought of all that was and had been. He thought of his brothers gone and wondered in the vastness of space where. He thought of Finbar and his girl from the sea, how he had become almost a gypsy before Teige’s eyes. He thought too of Finan, who was more mysterious and dark and whose vanishing seemed a part of his character or a thing foreordained. To each he sent mute, wordless missives until the regret tangled in his chest and he had to dismount and squat down in the grass as though about to void himself. He lay then in the May night.

And he thought of his mother.

He had tried to bury her several times now. He had been caught too often by the suddenness of realization that she was gone. It always stole up on him. Time and again he had been on the road or engaged in some work and had stopped briefly to draw breath and then, suddenly, he would think of her and swiftly his spirit would collapse in his chest like a bird made of paper. He would feel the crush of it and gasp. It was as if each time then she died anew, as if by some trick of time and memory she had come alive again and was not with him but only elsewhere and their meeting again was not far distant. She grew near in his mind. The scent of her was in his nostrils. The warmth of her where his head had lain came over him. He heard her tell him stories beneath a darkening summer sky. He asked her always of Virgo, and as she spoke her eyes were proud and deep and lovely. Virgo lies on her back with her feet toward the east, she told him. There are stars scattered over her shoulders like jewels, she said.

At last then he had tried to build stone walls of coldness about his heart. He had said to himself out loud, “She’s gone, she’s dead, you’ll not see her again.” He had said it in darkness and light, in wind and rain, through all seasons. He had tried to consider it as a fact like winter and so move beyond the continuance of this rhythm of grief. He had chastised himself for a soft fool and cursed like his elder brother and told himself not to think of her again.