Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“Teige,” he said. “Teige.” He said the name with slow weight, as though the sound of it were somehow entering him then, as if he were aware there was some conjuring in names themselves. It was as if he knew that by saying it so, he could both take the spirit of his brother inside him and at the same time express outward some of the love that lay all steeped and banked and inarticulate within him. He lifted his hand and held Teige by the shoulder. He gripped him like that and did not move and did not speak, and in both of them the moment sank deep like some aureate treasure, to be found and fingered years later.

Abruptly Tomas turned then and went out the door and Teige came out after him and called out to him to stay. They were in the muddied grass yard. Tomas was striding away. His brother called out to him, for Teige felt the purposefulness of Tomas’s stride and knew there was finality about it.

“Tomas, where are you going? Stop.”

The elder brother was already out by the track that led down toward the unfinished house and the shore. Teige ran behind him in the night.

“Where are you going?”

A voice flew back out of the dark.

“Leave me, Teige. Go back.”

“No.”

“Leave me!”

“I won’t.”

“Tomas? Tomas?” The father’s voice boomed then from the tower. Then Francis Foley had come out into the night, and as he approached, Teige had reached and grabbed the arm of his brother, who shook him roughly off and then ran off.

“Teige, Tomas?” The old man saw the back of his eldest son as he flew into the dark. He blew and sucked at the air. “Where is he going? What did he say?”

“I don’t know He’s going somewhere… he’s…”

“Tomas?” the old man shouted. “Tomas!” he shouted the name again, and then took off and trotted and ran after it and Teige after him. The father ran with ungainly stride. He bumped and swayed. He ran past the furze bushes that were speckled with gleam in the nothing of light. He ran and found uneven footing and plunged into briars and waved his arms at them and flayed the skin and felt blood rise and sting. He cursed the world and the darkness and the bushes. Then he called his son’s name again and got up and ran on and Teige beside him. They ran down the dark path and heard the sea grow louder and heard the noise of its breaking on the small stones. Teige shouted the name of his brother then, too. They stood there on the night shore and swung about and looked like ones that had lost their shadows. They glanced sharply right and left along the sand and the stones. They hurried a few paces along and arrested and came back again, and cried his name that the soft night swallowed and took within its deeps like the sea.

“What did he say? What did he say to you?”

Teige saw his father’s eyes wide and near and felt the sour desperation of his breath.

“He said nothing. He came and looked at the girls sleeping,” he said. “He said nothing else. Then he just turned and went off.”

The old man bowed his head, then he looked out at the water, and he and Teige stood there a long time, seeing nothing but the passing motion of the tide darkly hooded with unstarred sky.

They did not see Tomas again after that. Teige rode all corners of the island in the light of the next day but could find no trace of him. He rode and searched, although in some part of him he already knew that his brother was no longer there. His searching grew aimless and petered off in fields where the hares stood and watched him and then ran into cover where none appeared possible. It rained a soft rain that was neither one weather nor the other, but a malady of season that lingered without remedy. It did not seem summertime but for the long pale light of evening. A boat came to the island one afternoon and a river pilot stepped out and brought news of Tomas. He said he had come because he had given his word he would. He said it was the queerest thing. He said he had been sailing down to Limerick in the dawn light, leading in one of the cargo boats, and hadn’t he seen the man swimming. He had thought him a seal at first. He’d thought to bat him with the oar, he said. But he’d pulled him on board and the man told him his name was Tomas Foley and would he take him to Limerick because he was on his way to America. The river pilot said he took him to be one evicted or otherwise fugitive, but the man was not inclined to talk, he said, and they sailed on down to Limerick and arrived there as the morning came up. This Tomas got out, the pilot told them, and his clothes still wet and cold, and a second shirt tied skirtlike about his waist.

“He thanked me right well enough and asked me if I was passing back down the river to give ye word that he was not drowned. He made me promise it. And that’s why I came.”

The pilot stopped, and Teige and his father and the two girls were about him like stones standing in a field.

“America?” Teige said.

“That’s what he said. America,” the pilot replied.

“We can go and get him back,” Teige said at last.

“We cannot,” his father said. His voice was old and tired; his head was anchored on his palm. “He is gone.”

The girls turned mutely and went to the straw bed they shared. The rash that was on their bodies for weeks climbed that night into their cheeks. They cried and fretted and moaned in the dark, and Teige and Francis came to them and cooled their fevers with what means they had. And the girls called them Mother and other soft names out of long ago and looked at them as though they were from another world. Both girls were like one then and the fever rose in their bodies and they seemed to be burning up from within until all the tragedy and loss and regret of their lives perished in conflagration and they arrived in a place elsewhere and their eyes softened and they died.

This time the priest did not come at all. They buried the girls alongside Blath and left the shovels there and walked away while blackbirds flew and landed. They set ablaze all clothes and bedding. The dog barked at the sparks spinning in the air, where disease smoked and fumed and was vanquished. Francis folded into himself. He thought all endeavors now were futile. For Death came for everything.

“Somewhere your mother is buried,” he told Teige. “I am sure of it.” And seeing him deep in such grief and resignation, Teige did not dispute it and in his own heart partly believed it, too.

The spoiled summer passed on.

The boatman came and told them the potatoes had failed. The stalks had withered and the leaves blackened and the potatoes crumbled in the hand. There were thousands unable to pay rent. By the shore when he was leaving, Teige asked him if there were still visitors at the Van-deleur estate and the boatman shook his head and said they were all gone, there were none at the house and it was closed up now Only Clancy and some of the workers were there. Teige asked the boatman to come again, and to the man’s bashful mutter and sway he gave an armful of their own potatoes, which were then undamaged. These the boatman placed tenderly as if infants in the boat. Then he rowed out into the Shannon and was gone.

Teige and his father tended the potato field carefully then. They watched for signs of failure and rot. Francis stooped and crawled between the furrows and turned each leaf and rubbed softly with thumb and forefinger. Once Teige thought he heard him say prayers while he lay in the dirt. But he could not be sure, and his relation with his father now did not seem to allow much dialogue. They lived on then like ghosts in the ruins of the old man’s dream. Francis’s eyes became dull and his skin began to turn a papery white. He came and went from the tower at nights and seemed to age there faster than before. After long sessions in the stars he would reemerge into the thin light of morning like one dazed or newly arrived on the earth, fistfuls of his hair gone and his limbs weak and frail as a centenarian’s. Other than the words Teige thought he had heard him say amidst the furrows, the father did not speak at all. He seemed to have passed beyond language, and little by little it began to fade from him. He nodded and made small sounds when leaving the table and the food that Teige made for him, but he did not say his son’s name. The old dream of finding a home for his family mocked him now, for there was only Teige left and the island was suddenly large and empty and bare and the cries of the seabirds above it harsh and forlorn and beyond consolation.