Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

The old man stood and he was appalled at them and felt a riot gather in his blood. The rain dripped off the priest’s hat. He sniffled.

“Are you Christians?” he snapped then. “Do you know this is a holy island?”

“We do,” Francis said at last, and stepped forward and was now not a yard from the priest and could smell his dinner off him.

“Do you know it is the island of Saint Senan, and that he decreed that no woman was to set foot on it? Do you know that?” He paused and looked and Francis Foley did not move an inch and the priest’s ire raised a purplish vein in his forehead. “And what kind of woman was she? Will you answer that?” he said. “Because I know. I know what she was. You see. Nothing is hidden, remember that, if you are Christians. Have you other women here?” The priest’s sharp features were raised and he let his righteousness and judgement be seen and felt by them and was awaiting some demeanour of reverence and contrition when Francis Foley stepped quickly forward and pushed him back in the chest.

“Go away!”

“What? Stop!”

He was pushed again and he staggered back two steps and a fringe of raindrops scattered from his hat.

“Are you defying the word of God?” he shouted. “What are you that you can face damnation?”

“Go away! Get back in the boat! We don’t want you!” Francis swung the stick now and came forward with it, and the priests retreated, the younger one hurrying back into the water and his superior raising up the Bible like a weapon or a shield.

“Have you other women here?” he cried out.

Then a stone flew through the air and splashed in the water beside him. Then another, and another. They hailed from the higher ground where Tomas was standing now, bending and lifting and firing. The priest retreated. The boatman was in his boat. The waves lapped at the priest’s shoes and he lifted his feet and put them back down again in the water, vainly trying to outstep the tide. The stones whizzed and plopped and the priest raised and brandished the Bible and his hat spun off and he reached for it and lost his nerve as the stones yet flew through the rain.

“You’ll be cursed,” he said. “You’ll all be cursed here. This is a holy island!” A stone clipped at his shoulder and he yelled out and waded quickly backward and climbed into the boat. The hat turned and tumbled in the waves. The boatman rowed them away then.

Teige turned to look up at Tomas. He was standing behind them on the small bluff, his arms out by his sides. His face ran with the rain, his shirt was marked with mud and blood, and he looked risen from some nether region where he had been wrestling with furies.

“Tomas,” Teige called out to him, but the brother did not respond or look at him and went off then running through the bushes.

“Come on. We must bury her now,” the father said.

The two of them returned up the island. The sky darkened further, the spillage of rain from the heavens a portent now and making vanish the mainland. They seemed sealed there and moved as if imprisoned in a dream of desperate business. They came to the cabin and took shovel and iron bar and then crossed over by the wiry craze of the blackthorn ditch and into the Field of the Dead. There were tombstones at every tilt and slant and others fallen and embedded now in grass the hares dunged and burrowed and made their own. There were sea captains and boat pilots and fishers and their wives, some from centuries since forgotten whose names if once carved were now erased by the sea wind. There were many children, doomed weak things who perished from every ailment and disease. All lay silent now in the falling rain as Francis and Teige uncovered a place in the brown earth for Blath. They worked without words. They did not try to blunt the sorrow with any meaning or purpose or to reconcile inequities. They dug the hole. Then they went back and Francis told the girls to step outside and wait, and he took two of the cloths they had and with Teige’s help wound them about the body of the dead. These he tied then with cords of hay rope. They had no timber for a coffin.

“I will go and tell Tomas,” Teige said.

“He knows. Leave him,” his father told him.

So the two of them came out then and ungainly bore the corpse to the graveside. The two girls followed with arms crossed and eyes far away, and behind them the dog. The rain fell. They trod anew the ancient path in the grass and made mud along it. The brown hole in the ground appeared shockingly, and was like a rent in a green garment otherwise perfect. When they were beside it, Francis took the body in his arms alone and bent down and knelt with her and then climbed down the side and was then in the hole itself, where he lowered her gently to the clay. He stood so a moment and looked upon her there. Then he climbed out and scanned about for sign of Tomas but could find none. He waited. There the girls sat in the dampness, their coughing soft and continual.

“God bless her,” Teige said.

But his father said nothing and after a moment bent and picked up the shovel and pitched the earth in upon her, and shovelled at the small mound faster and faster until the hole was made up to the level of the grass once more. Then he raised the shovel above his head and beat and beat on the grave with it, and tramped on the fresh earth and beat some more, and was still doing so when the others left him and walked away in the rain.

In the days following, the Foleys did not see Tomas at all. He did not visit the cabin or the grave. The weather was still broken and the island hung in mist and drizzle and the light was veiled. The girls, Deirdre and Maeve, mute and hollow-faced, went off about the fields and gathered flowering boughs and branches and wildflowers and brought these to the bare grave each day. Teige rode the white pony and looked for his brother but often imagined that, seeing him approach, Tomas had hidden down or run off and did not want to be seen again. And after a time Teige stopped and let the pony graze and let his own mind leave the island and travel across the river and up over the slates of the roof to find his way to the bedroom of Elizabeth. He sought for her image amidst the desolation and grief and loneliness that weighed there and wondered how long he must wait before he could return. For no reason he could name, he avoided his father then. And the old man seemed to do likewise. They were separate as stars, and as silent. The house that was almost built lay untouched down near the shore.

Then one night when Francis Foley had disappeared to the tower and his telescope, Tomas came into the cabin. The girls were sleeping a jagged sleep of sharp coughs. Teige was sitting in the corner, mending the fishing line. He started when he saw his older brother, for Tomas was returned to the figure they had met on the road. The ghost of dead love harboured in his eyes. A ragged beard climbed his cheeks. Teige stood and held out his hand to him, but Tomas was looking at the place empty now where last he had seen his wife.

“Tomas, sit down, you are wet through. Here, take my shirt.”

Tomas stepped softly past him and bent down and laid his hand on the shoulder of first one and then the other of the sleeping girls.

“They were good to her,” he said. He stayed bent low there and phantoms sojourned the while and he seemed to see them and watch the brief invisible happiness of his life take ephemeral form and then vanish anew.

He stood and looked at his brother.

“Maybe it’s true,” he said. “Maybe we are all cursed.”

“You know it’s not. Here, my shirt. I have another one.”

The shirt was pressed in Tomas’s fingers and he held it and smiled sadly.