Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

All this time Finbar had feared in secret for Cait’s pregnancy. He had suffered dreams where he saw her sex bleed a river. The blood was thick and gushed alarmingly and flowed across the floor and out the door to the sea, and all the time Cait was lain on her back and the gypsies were gathered about her, awaiting the birth. Then in the dream the child was born and its birth was a kind of fluidity or issuance without effort and the gypsies were amazed and applauded. Then they began to laugh. And the laughter took the shape of white gannets and these then were beating in the air above where Cait lay. And when Finbar looked down to see his child, the birds were swooping to attack it, and he had to wave his arms about and it was still moments before he looked down and saw the infant had been born with the lower body of a fish.

He woke then, lathered in a white film with his eyes wide. But the dream recurred on many nights through the pregnancy, and sometimes in the dark he had woken to find the air beneath the hoop of canvas heavy and putrid with the smell of fish and silvery scales upon his tongue.

So, on the Night of Labours, Finbar Foley passed into a kind of torment that, though not equal to that of his wife, wrung him like a cloth. The first of the children was born just after midnight to the sexagenarian mother, who made no cry at all but claimed the birth felt like a hairball dropping softly out of her insides. Her son, Primo, was borne out on the night by his ancient father, and the others who were still attendant on the arrival of their own offspring greeted it with half-glad nods and thin smiles. The child did indeed resemble a ball. Its head was very large and covered with a downy fur, and although the other fathers-to-be did not say anything, there passed through each of them the same painful vision, imagining how such a huge ball could pass out through the smallness of a woman’s sex. The births came on in waves then. The cries and excitements of the midwives passed along the caravans and flamed torches were held aloft and there were embraces among those who were uncles and cousins and bottles of a clear, fiery liquid flashed in the starlight. It was a wonder, the synchronicity of those births like some vast clock set in the heavens and chiming the beginning of a new gypsy age. Or so the fathers said. Hot-faced and exulting in their achievement that was nothing at all, they proclaimed, they made announcement, they sawed the air with their hands and predicted marvels. Moving from one to the other, and taking the congratulations he was given for bringing them there, Fin-bar secretly studied each child for oddities. Secundo was a big boy also, born without defect. As were all the others that were pressed into his arms as if for benediction during that long night. Finbar took them and held them an instant and tried to look pleased, but the truth was that with each perfect one, his soul was tormented further by the certainty that his own child would emerge a monster.

His fear was without reason. But as the night drew on and it became clear that Cait was to suffer the longest labour and her screams came piercingly out of the caravan where three women attended her, the fear grew to certainty. He went up to the caravan and dared to lift the flap of the canvas to look in and see the river of blood. But one of the women spun around at once and cursed at him and shook her whiskered chin and pulled the canvas closed again. He stood there and heard his wife cry and briefly he thought of his own mother and whatever world she had gone to. He threw back his head then and shouted out a sound, and the gypsies about him did not understand it, for it was in a language not theirs. And he shouted it again and added before it the name of his family, and shouted it out to the swirling stars of that night by the great lake in the country that was like none any Foley had ever seen before. He shouted the words, and boars in the woods unseen stopped, foxes froze. He shouted the words and in so doing echoed his own father years before when teaching the boys in games of hurling the cry of defiance that led to victory.

“Abu! O Fhogli abu!”

Finbar Foley shouted it out and then raised his fists and shook them in the air as if at the face of some celestial beast.

The other gypsies who were about him then were startled but saw the urgency of his cry and were moved to join him. They all raised their fists and shook them and were a chorus that would not be denied.

And like all swift and traceless epiphanies, it came to Finbar Foley then that he must catch a fish. He looked out across the dark, mutable waters of the lake. He heard the laps and slaps of soft collapse as the waves sighed, and then he was running out to the water’s edge and followed by the loud surge of the newly made fathers. None had any idea at first what he was about, but each had drunk the burning juniper-flavoured whiskey that was of that place. They splashed into the chill waves and yelled as the cold bit at their calves. But Finbar was farther out still and was waist-deep and then dove out of sight. The gypsies stopped and were like puppets suspended. Their faces were like things fixed in rigid pose, not knowing if he was to come back again. They knew the tales of whole lands hidden beneath the surfaces of lakes, they knew the lore of demons and water sprites and other faery enchantments and of the many who had disappeared without a trace. There was a long moment in the stillness and silvered dark of the lake. Then Finbar broke the surface again. He stood and shook a wide corona of lake water from his long hair and then dove again. This time the meaning of his actions translated itself to the fathers, and in a great rush then they too dove down into the lake. The scene if not beheld was one such as beggared imagination. Like strange nocturnal seabirds the gypsies plunged in the cold waters, some rising as some were vanishing. Bodiless heads appeared and bobbed and then flapped out winglike arms, while next to these were the disappearing legs and lower bodies of others. The lake was alive with them, diving and surfacing again, breaking the glittered reflection of sky and its scintilla of stars. They were like some that had drunk a potion or been charmed under a spell. As though their lives depended upon it, the gypsies dove for fishes. These, coming through the lake in vast schools of gentle fluttered motion, can only have been amazed as the men’s bodies crashed down and appeared bubbling before them, the faces wide-eyed and blind in the night water. The men’s hands reached and grasped, they made slow, broad arcs of attack, causing wild underwater currents and whirling eddies so that the fish themselves were spun about and swam flatly and sideways like ones demented. Still, the gypsies caught some of them. They made nets of their shirts, some of their trousers. Others managed the impossible and bare-handed the fishes into the air. They broke up through the surface with a cry and held aloft in the small light the flashing trophies. The gypsies bobbed there on the cold water and did not know what to do then until Finbar himself appeared with a great thrashing fish and shouted the same cry as before and stepped forward and waded out of the lake with the capture in his arms. The others followed then. They walked up the banks in the night with the fishes in their arms and were like an image out of some perished mythology, fathers cradling with bewilderment the changed forms of their sons. They came to the caravan where Cait was silent now and they stood around in a throng, the men with fishes and the others who held torches. Then Finbar knelt down and placed the one he had caught on the ground before the caravan. All of the gypsies followed suit until there was a small hill of fishes flapping and thrashing out of their element.

“Cait!”