Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

All the rest of that summer they did not move to finish the house. Teige fished in the river and watched the pilots and fishermen and sea captains and turfmen as they sailed past. Sometimes they passed close enough for him to call out to them, but he did not do so, as though such communication would be a betrayal of some kind and his father would disapprove. He sat there and watched and they watched him, the boy from the cursed family on the island of Saint Senan.

But later in the dark then Teige Foley sailed free of that place in his mind and found and reassembled his family. He lay and imagined them and they appeared before him. Beginning always with his mother, he made of them a story no different from all the others he had learned and told. To himself he told of them as if they were stars. In stories extravagant and magical he imagined his mother still living. He followed her through various narrow escapes, moments of outrageous hardship and fortuitous chance, always allowing her the slimmest hope so that she could survive and travel on down the winds and bends of the long road that was leading to him. He saw his brother Tomas slip through the city of Limerick and walk out the road to Cork, where there were crowds of those pale and skeletal moving. He imagined them, those gaunt figures with ghosthood already immanent, their long thin arms holding cradled the bundle of their world, their hunger and frailty, the mewling of their children, the ragged faded worn quality of their spirits as they journeyed homeless toward the impossible idea of home. Teige imagined them and cold sweats surfaced on his body and he feared for Tomas then and wished the story would turn him around and bring him back to the island. But the story continued on, nights and weeks and months after that, and was horrific and relentless. Tomas saw men and women and children fall by the roadside. He saw Death move across the fields like a summer shadow and bodies falling beneath it like ribs of hay at a scythe. He saw the wagons of corn escorted out of the country of the starving, and the same wagons attacked by some without weapons, whose shrill shrieks and yellowed eyes made of them fierce and pathetic clowns, waving their arms for food while they were shot to the ground. He saw mothers without milk press their babies to their breasts and wail then to the heavens and suck on plants and flowers and grasses and anything they could find in the futile hope of lactation. He saw children die and their fathers and mothers sit by them, waiting to join them while coaches passed. On the road to Cork Tomas witnessed it all and in each story grew thinner himself, and was more indifferent to his own survival. He tramped forward each night in Teige’s mind because he could not stop and because in some way the restless journeying toward some impossible end was part of that family’s inheritance and would not and could not finish this side of Death. And in truth this was what he was going to meet, for he could not knowingly bring it upon himself or sit still and wait for it to come. At a place above Mallow, he came upon a hellish scene reeking and smoking where wild-looking bloodied men scrambled about with knives, hacking and carving at the warm carcasses of three horses. These had been slain to stop them from bringing away the corn. The horses’ heads were cast in forlorn, twisted posture in the dirt. Their flanks were opened inexpertly in haste and their insides were spilled out and trod over as the men butchered and swayed in the foul air and sought to bring away steaks. Flies buzzed there. A hundred crows cawed and darkly opened their wings in the field nearby and were so many that they seemed like missals or Bibles unused and thrown from the sky. Tomas came upon the scene and voided the nothings in his stomach. Two of the men paused and glanced at him and held their knives and were momentarily frozen with shame, stunned like some caught in God’s eye. Then the moment passed, and they lowered their eyes from Tomas’s and bent and hacked at the horses once more.

In Teige’s story Tomas saw the dead horses and thought of his youngest brother. In Teige’s story, Tomas’s heart wept then as he remembered the times innocent ages since when he and his brothers had ridden horses and ponies in fields daisied and green. Tomas remembered all their days and nights and weakened there on the roadside and did not think he could continue, until sometime later a family came passing and the emaciated father asked him if he would carry one of their boys.

Tomas carried two. Without discourse, without nicety of introduction or comment of any kind, they left that scene where the horses were denuded of even their tails and the crows pecked with impunity the glassy eyes. They travelled silent and with graven, inconsolable expression and shouldered among many others of that kind into the city of Cork.

There Tomas walked along the dockside in scenes teeming with all humankind. The air was sharpened with men’s cries and commands as families stood and jostled and bargained and bought passage across the ocean. Women wore grim, stoic expressions. Their mouths were small and thin-lipped, as though food were a fading memory, and their children sat and lay curled on the ground and made a low wailing that issued without effort. In the story that Teige told himself in the long nights on the island, Tomas found work there on the docks loading chests and supplies on board tall ships that creaked on the changing tide. He worked and was paid pennies and stayed in a cramped and crowded boardinghouse with others waiting to escape. And in four weeks he bought passage for himself on a ship called Liberty. He stepped belowdecks for the first time in his life and as he went deeper down into the ship found the daylight fractured and then gone altogether. He stumbled and reached for his way while the bosun’s whistle sounded and men ran to and fro and commands were called out on the decks above him. He heard them hurrying about over his head. At last then Tomas arrived in the quarters of the poor and sat amidst the huddled hundreds who stared through the gloom and said nothing but coughed in the queer damp air of that place that was to be their home below the surface of the sea.

Of the twins, Teige’s stories were less sure. He imagined Finbar in extravagant worlds of myriad and mortal dangers. He dreamed pirates, raging armies, weird weathers of hurricane and typhoon, thick, suffocating snows of white goose feathers, huge floods red as roses, tigers sabre-toothed and snarling, snakes, elephants, a whole terrain crawling with spiders, strange exotic natives with pierced tongues who ate the skins of others. Mammoths, dragons, flocks of bloodsucking bats, mutilators, murderers, thieves, and bounty hunters with skulls dangling and knocking like coconuts by their saddle’s side. All of these and more populated Teige’s stories of Finbar and the gypsies. Of Finan the stories were less clear. He had killed a man and was gone off for contrition. He had become a healer, a layer-on of hands, or had joined up with a troupe of actors and performed in tragedies Shakespearean and made all weep with the deep and potent veracity of his grief. He wore greasepaint and his eyes were darkened hollows and nightly he was struck down and died and from such was his own soul briefly healed. Sometime when Teige could not bear the tale or the vision he saw of his brothers’ afflictions, he summoned a land of lovely women. He closed his eyes on the night and smelled and remembered scent of the room of Elizabeth and saw her multiplied a hundred times and standing naked and tender and beautiful like flowers in a field. And for the remainder of that night then he did not leave that imagined place but stayed with her and forgot the world of pain and allowed his brothers rest and peace.

And all this while, across the way, his father sat in Saint Senan’s tower and bowed his head and stared endlessly through the telescope at the sky. He placed his eye to the glass and for hours did not move it away, and this, though the clouds did not pass and there were no stars to be seen.