Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

But she was still there.

He lay in the cool damp of the night grass and the pony stood attentive beside him. The stars swung westward and were like a map of man’s yearning. When at last Teige rose, the pony whinnied. She nodded her head thrice. He slipped up onto her and rode slowly back in a wide circle toward the round tower and the stone cabins where the others were sleeping. When he reached them, he dismounted and went and fetched a bucket of water for the pony and led her into the small paddock, where he bade her good night. Then, as he turned back to the little cluster of buildings behind him, he saw an eye of light glistening from the doorway of the tower. He stopped and waited. The eye moved and he saw the starlight play off it once again. Then he knew that it was his father, and that there while the others were sleeping, through the passing of time and while he should have been resting, Francis Foley was engaged in the one activity that to him made clear sense of the world. He was looking at the stars through the telescope and seeing in the heavens revealed, behind the myriad and seeming chaos of those specks of light, a shape full of meaning.

Teige watched a few minutes as the glass eye moved and reflected the sky. Then he slipped into the cabin and lay to sleep.

Some days later the boatman returned and brought the news that Clancy did indeed have horses for breaking. He took Teige with him then and rowed back across the river, and Tomas and his father stood upon the top of the wall of the cottage they were building and watched. The narrow black boat slipped away in soft rain and the men fell back to their work wordless and somehow burdened with apprehension. That river had already run so through the family’s life that they did not trust Teige’s crossing would lead to happiness. Still, Francis had decided he had to go. Gulls flew like ragged pieces of old cloth in the rainy sky. Then it poured down and screened the country from view and was as if some portion of the known world had been erased. The two Foleys stayed working, lifting stones up the narrow ladder while the mud floors of the cottage shell puddled below them.

When he reached Kilrush, Teige too felt the air of apprehension. Whether he had brought it with him or it existed like a thing tangible in the very atmosphere, he could not say. The town was more tired and lifeless than when he was last there. The rain stopped. Those in the streets had a worn and ragged deportment. Wan faces turned to watch him with eyes enlarged and red-rimmed. They were like heads that floated. A beggar boy of no more than ten scurried over to him. He had been the first of a small assemblage to spot Teige and came to him ahead of the others, who even then began to drift over.

“A penny, God bless you. A penny.”

The boy’s face was browned and stained about the mouth. His nostrils were yellow crusted.

“I have no money,” Teige said, and tried to walk past him, but the boy, accustomed to first refusals, trotted alongside, begging. By now the others, a mixture of young and old in shawls, wraps, tattered once scarlet petticoats, and apparel that had no name but made its owner resemble a rotund bundle on legs, had come around him. There was a blind woman without legs seated in a small cart, a man wheeling her. A flurry of prayers sounded. The beggars cried out a litany of ailments, and Teige felt his jacket tugged.

“I have nothing,” he said more loudly, still trying to move ahead of them. But the beggars were hardened to such and moved as in a promenade performance, their hands wavering and clutching, their brows furrowed and the urgency of their prayers and promises growing with each step. Paternosters and Ave Marias flew about and were strangely incongruous there like fine embroidery. Teige was not indisposed to the beggars. But the face of the boy troubled him and was like some piece of himself. He wanted to help him and run away from him at the same time. Over and again he told them that he had nothing, but the words carried no weight. The faces floated there before him until at last Teige tried to shake himself free and in so doing stepped out of his jacket and left them holding it as he hurried up the street.

Clancy, as it transpired, was not the owner of the horses to be broken. They belonged to one of the landlord Vandeleurs. Clancy was a man in their employ, a short, round fellow with whiskers and broad, curving eyebrows. When Teige met him in the store on Francis Street where the boatman had told him to go, Clancy spat on the ground and asked him if it was true he could make any horse run.

“Every horse can run without my making it,” Teige said.

Clancy nodded and narrowed his eyes in appreciation of the point and spat again.

“Run races,” he said, and widened his gait and rocked slightly back on his heels.

“Not all,” Teige told him. “Some horses are not for races, but I can pick the ones that are.”

“Fair enough answer,” Clancy said. “Come on so.”

They left there and boarded a wagon that had been laid with feeding stuffs and sacks of flour and oats and such. Teige had never seen such supplies bought. When he sat up on the seatboard, the beggars were clustered about and looked at him like one who had betrayed. The boy was wearing Teige’s jacket. The blind woman, small and crooked in her cart, was wearing the sleeves. Clancy whistled and the wagon moved away. They travelled down the end of the town and out the road a ways until they came to the gates of the domain and turned in there and journeyed in the avenue past the tall trees where cool green shadows covered the way. So long was the avenue, the house was not to be seen. The trees thickened to wood on either side of them. Midges and flies speckled the air and buzzed and were like patches of imperfect air as they rose from the underbranches in the warmth of after rain. Clancy whistled a sorrowful tune. The slow notes hung, a melancholy drapery in that verdant hush. They moved on.

“Nearly there,” Clancy said without looking at him, and he clicked his tongue and quickened the wagon. The woods were behind them then and the fields that opened on either side were lush and green and fenced with timber posts. They were the smoothest fields that Teige had seen and might have been drawn by a child and imagined into creation. The first of them held no animals at all, just a glossy sward moving in the small breeze. But before they had passed it, Teige could sense the nearness of horses. Then as they wheeled about on a long curve of that road he saw them, thirty or so mares and new foals and two- and three-year-olds, some standing, some grazing, some running to meet the breeze. The wagon slowed. Its horses whinnied and shook their heads in the harness and there was an answering of sorts in the field.

“Well,” Clancy said, “that’s about half of ’em.”

“Half?”

“He’s more money than brains,” he said, and spat forward and studied the spittle in flight. “You think you can make something of ’em? It’s eight pence a day.”

Teige climbed down. He moved very slowly under Clancy’s gaze and went over the fence and entered the field. The horses that were standing there lifted their heads high and raised their tails and then broke into sudden speed like things shocked. They went off away down the field, bringing others with them, including a number of the thin-legged foals that kicked two-footed at intervals at the air behind them. Teige watched them all and walked calmly out into the centre of the field. He had about him then a kind of ease that was broadcast by whatever means not known by science to the animals there. It was always so. It was a thing that happened. He came into the company of animals and felt at once a kind of connection. It was something with which he was already familiar, this serene and clear-sighted empathy, and he did not have to try to do anything, only wait for the animals to feel it. He stood and watched the horses that had arrived at the far end of the field as they trotted in the tightened space and turned about and cut backward across each other, cutting up the grass sod that was softened by rain. They trafficked there for moments, hot and blowing and swinging about, some rearing, some nipping, others, mares, looking for their foals. Then, a black colt with a white blaze on its face spun from the others and led them like a charge back up the field. Teige stood still as they came. He was smiling at them and was for a moment like one within a tide, islanded there by horses of all description, saying the sounds he said in greeting and holding out his hands waist-high as if proffering invisible oats.