Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

They rattled down the long avenue then, Clancy leaning forward and making whipping sounds at the horse with his tongue, Teige sitting upright, mute and blind and impassive as a figure cut in stone. When they arrived in the town the haste of the cart turned the heads of those standing in the street. Some turned and looked and kept looking, following the two men with their eyes and enjoying in some way the sense of calamity and grief that was evident. When the cart passed the whispers began. Teige and Clancy paid them no heed. The horse raced on down the streets of the town and the island appeared green and low and tranquil in the grey waters of the river. They came to the jetty where the boatman was waiting. He looked at Teige and then looked sharply away over his shoulder as if at a perching blackbird.

Clancy offered his hand. “Sympathies,” he said.

“Who is dead?” Teige asked the boatman. But on the mention of the word the boatman shuddered and threw his shoulders and glanced quickly from side to side as if dodging the same dark bird as it sought to land upon him.

“Who is…,” Teige tried again, but the boatman had stepped down into his boat and lifted his oar. He splashed at the water with it and then sank it into the top surface, shuddering and throwing his shoulders, saying sounds that if words were lost to Teige and then vanished altogether as the boat slipped out into the estuary.

The dip and slap of the oars; the glitter of the water as it fell from the raised blades; the weak sunlight of that morning; grey clouds coming up the river like ghost galleons; the fish that moved beneath them; all such entered Teige and became part of memory. He stared across the river for signs and saw none. Where the river met the sea the boat lifted and fell and achieved a kind of jaunty precariousness, and the boatman stopped rowing altogether and allowed it for moments as though awaiting invitation or permission proper to cross those waters in that changing tide. He swayed there and felt the motion in his body and moved within it and waited until his boat did too and then dipped the oars and rowed once more. Seagulls flocked and beat hurriedly across the air. Then the rain came. It fell heavily almost at once and dimmed the light of day and made the waters murky. The boatman jabbered some curse and shook his head and let the drops scatter, then he curved his back and pulled harder to draw them to the island. Up from the shore Teige saw the cottage they had been building was now as high as the roof timbers, though these were not yet thatched and looked dark and skeletal in the rain. There was no sign of life. The boat reached the shallow waters and the boatman single-oared it about and waited then, and Teige stepped out and walked up onto the island. He went up along the beaten track that was shouldered with the yellow furze, heavy with the rain. The day seemed pressed down upon the land. He walked and felt the air of death and still did not know who had died. And while he walked the images of his father and brother were before him and he feared for both of them and tried to banish the fears and not bring himself to have to choose between them. And tangled in his mind too was the sense of an obscure guilt, a vine like a complex algebra that wove and entwined and at last related the x of illicit love and the y of death, binding cause and effect and turning improbabilities into fact.

He reached the doorway of the cabin and stood and looked into the dark. The dog came out to meet him. He could see a figure lying on a table, but he could not distinguish who it was. Then his father said his name.

“Teige, come in. It is Blath.”

She had died of typhoid fever, which was already in the close, damp air of that place. Francis Foley sat by her, and the girls, Maeve and Deirdre, looked up at Teige but did not speak. They looked away again. They had been returned to familiar Death like ones recaptured after brief freedom. Their faces were pale.

“Where is Tomas?”

“He’s gone off,” Francis said. “He was pitiful with her. He did all a man could do. He made her drinks and remedies and things he had heard and she could keep none of it in her. And we sent word for a doctor to come, and we waited and he did not come and she losing strength all the time so that she could not take even a drink of water. Tomas would go up and stand on the hill and watch for the doctor and still no sign of him.” The old man’s eyes watered in the shadows. He paused and held the anger in his chest. “Why would the doctor not come? What is the matter with us, are we beasts in the field?”

“He did not come at all?”

“He did not. She died in the afternoon. Tomas went out and I found him beating his two fists on the stones of the house over. He bloodied himself red-handed and when I came to him he threw up his fists at me and spun around and went off and would not be spoken to since.”

Teige stood there in the gloom of the cabin and he looked at the dead woman and saw the blue-and-purple shadows about her mouth and eyes.

“We must bury her,” he said.

“There is a place here on the island. Govt na marbh,” his father said. “It is where they bury some from over the water. They bring them here because of the old churches.”

Teige went out then to find Tomas. He went and whistled the white pony and she came to him and he let her smell the other horses on him and he nuzzled and stroked her and then rode off down the shore in the falling rain. He rode fast. He galloped her because of the urgency and because he found relief in that speed, racing away from many things. He rode and stopped and scanned about for his brother. Then he saw the boat coming across the water with the black figure of the priest sitting erect in the bow. He hurried back and told his father.

Francis Foley came out of the cabin into the spoiled daylight.

“Now he comes,” he said, and scowled and took from the doorside his stick and walked brusquely ahead of Teige toward the shore.

The rain muddied the way. Francis tramped along it and swung and beat at the furze randomly, scattering petals of yellow. At the place where the shore shelved off and there was a small drop to the sand, he stopped and watched the boat coming. The priest could be seen clearly now He was a thin figure with a wide-brimmed black hat. His nose was sharp and this combined with the prominent narrow edge of his chin to lend his face the appearance of having been pressed in from either side. Clutched at his chest was the Bible. Beside him in the boat sat another, a younger man also in black whose head was hatless and whose cheeks were polished a purplish hue by the rain. The boat bobbed in the shallow water. Then this boatman whom the Foleys had not seen before stepped out in the small waves and offered his back and the angular priest stood and climbed onto it and was carried so onto the sand. The younger priest did not wait for this transport but paddled across and kicked water from his shoes. They stood then and the Foleys walked down to meet them.

“I am Father Singleton,” said the priest. “Show me to the deceased.”

He raised the Bible slightly at his chest and made as if to hasten on with his business. But Francis Foley stood.

“Come on,” said the priest. “What is the matter? Do you understand me? The deceased. The dead.”

His tone was exasperated and sharp, and in his eyes was a silvery scorn.

“What is the matter with this man?” he said, and looked to Teige. “You. Do you understand? Lead us. We must hurry before the tide turns. We have other matters. Father Boland, can you?”

The younger priest looked at them and made quiver his lips as if uncertain whether to smile. When he spoke his voice was soft as a girl’s.

“We are here for the burial. There is a woman who died.”