Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

Then Finbar saw him. And in a moment recognized some trait of physiognomy or bearing and knew he was from that old country where he himself had been born. The ghost-man stopped and looked at him and said:

“Ta an domhain ag dul ar siar.”

And although Finbar had not heard that language spoken in a long time, he recognized what it was and knew that the man had told him the world was nearly over.

Finbar brought him inside then and sat him by the low oak table in their caravan. He brought the man cold smoked fish and water, and he and Cait sat there and watched while this same fellow took the food and drink in slow, small mouthfuls as if these were painful to him. The man’s jaws moved in a crosswise, crooked motion. He was without teeth and crushed the food on his palate with his tongue. He was bent over and rocked softly all the time. Then Finbar asked him in Irish where he was from and the ghost-man stopped and turned his ruined face to them and said his name was Malone and he was from the place that was the County Galway.

“Was?” Finbar asked.

Malone nodded. He said none were alive there now. He said a plague had come in that country and killed the people that had once lived there. He wet the lipless gap of his mouth with a little water and then he told them. He told how the potatoes had rotted in the ground and the people been unable to pay their rent and how they were driven to the roads. He told of some gone insane and others who leapt from cliffs into the sea. He told of those who ate the grass and the nettles and the green leaves of the hedgerows and how their bodies twisted in the ditches six days and more before they died. He told of bailiffs come to tear houses down lest the families think to lodge there without rent. He said how he saw a mother of ten children offer to tear her own house down for two pennies, and how she did, with terrible tears and lamentations, until there was nothing left but rocks in the road.

The night fell while he talked on. For once he began, the stories flowed from him like a river of grief and Cait nursed the new twins and rocked them in her arms with her eyes weeping and Finbar said nothing at all. The old man had lost his daughters first. These were twelve and fourteen years old. They had sickened on the road to Waterford and fallen into a fever with frightful visions and eyes white with terror. When they died he had not a spade to bury them and dug the ground with his hands and made a cross of ash and tied it with the cord of his trousers. His wife would not leave the spot, and though he begged her and tried to drag her along the road she would not go, and he was forced to let her stay, where she sang sad songs all day long to their daughters. They watched the thousands coming and going there, those doomed and futureless and travelling to nowhere. His wife died of hunger by her daughters and he buried her alongside them in the same grave where their bodies were not yet rotted. Then he himself walked on. For he could not bear to stay there and thought Death would find him quicker if he went to meet Him.

Malone paused and looked and saw that Cait was bedding the children, and then he whispered other terrors to Finbar that he did not wish her to hear. He told of death in all its forms, of some shot, some throat-slit, others hung and swinging in the trees of the fields of North Munster with crows eating their eyes. He told of a man in delirium who cut off his arm and cooked it in a fire to feed to his son. He told of roads where the smells of putrefaction rose and how he walked on through them to meet Death and could not find Him. Only ghosts. For that country had become peopled by these. They rose from where they lay unburied in weeds and thronged the roadways. He saw them himself. They wandered listless and wan and without purpose. There were families entire. There were small infants with encircled eyes. There were gaunt great-grandfathers, all ghosted and silent and grave and journeying as things without a home. Malone had walked to Waterford and still not met Death and then taken a boat, thinking he was to drown. He had arrived in France one day without knowing the name of which country he stepped out on. Then he walked southward and eastward and all the time attendant on Death. He had heard then that those who had survived the first year of the famine were killed the second, and any last remaining starved in the third, until there was none left in that country now but a multitude of phantoms.

He finished and lowered his eyes and looked at the timber flooring of the caravan. Finbar and Cait were seated about him. They did not speak. A long time passed and all three sat in still and mute contemplation of the horror that had been told. The candle burned out and they were shadowless shades there until at last in the small hours of the morning Malone spoke and asked them if in fact he was dead.

On the ocean the eldest of the Foley brothers sailed for seventy-one days. The journey was to have been forty, but the captain of that ship, Abraham Huxton, chose a course more northerly than usual and brought them into seas tall as trees. Almost all of those who sat in the gloom belowdecks had never been to sea before. The distance of the journey was unimaginable to them, and in the times they were allowed to climb the stairs and take air and see the ocean, they thought it endless. Within ten days there were many who chose to stay below rather than feel the fall of their hearts as they gazed out on the churning grey emptiness. They lived then in the small cramped quarters where the air was soon fouled and where cholera and typhus and dysentery were in their first stages. Many were ill with seasickness and lay groaning day and night as the ship swayed to and fro. The drinking water was too quickly drunk and was then rationed to two cups a day, and then one. The flour was infested. Children bawled and were hushed or beaten quiet and lay then on the damp timber floor with defeated brooding faces and horror at how the green world of fields had vanished. There were mothers and grandmothers who brought with them small trinkets or minor belongings that recalled the homes they had left. These they fingered, a brass ring, enamel spoon, braid of doll’s hair, small carved cross, such things, turning them over for hours on end long after any talk had fallen silent. They sailed on. Sometimes they kept the small candle of their hope burning by asking each other about where they would go in the New World. They did not speak of the farms and villages they had left behind, but tried to be forward looking whenever the terrors they had seen ghosted before them and made their throats rise. So, they spoke of places their imaginations could not yet begin to shape, of New York and Philadelphia and Boston. And these appeared in their minds like shining citadels in the Bible wherein all their travails would be ended and their families live in peace and plentitude. But then the sea grew rough and the filled chamber pots that lay in their laps spilled about the floor and the children cried again.

Huxton sailed them into storm after storm. He was a broad-chested man who walked the decks with clean-shaven jaw thrust forward and hands holding each other behind his back. Even as the seas rose and threw the ship sideways, he tried to keep his hands behind him. He stood in the gales and sweeps of rain that whipped across the decks and he kept his legs planted as though defying Neptune to throw a storm that would unbalance him. And so they came. The wind cracked in the sails and the decks were awash as waves broke in froth and spume and painted the boards in thin white foam that came and disappeared down through the deck into the quarters below. The ship was like a toy and within it the families of O’Connors, Barretts, Keoghs, Considines, Kirwins, Mulcahys, Moriartys, Doohans, and others were thrown from their seats and tumbled in the dripping darkness with white eyes and screams. The ship rolled them about. The barrels of drinking water came loose from their bindings and crashed. They clung to each other and awaited their death. But for most of them it did not come, and the storm began to ease. A junior accommodation officer appeared at the trap above and looked down at the bowed heads and counted them and went off to make his report of losses and sometimes arrange for bodies to be buried at sea. Within days there was another storm. And then another. Huxton kept his balance. He betrayed no signs of victory or pride, only the upward tilt of his chin as the ship sailed on. In time the passengers grew to read the wind in the creaking of the hull and know the signs of tempest before it arrived. They learned how to sit in braced positions and secure such things as would roll and cause breakage and injury. They drank empty the cloth-stoppered bottles of poitin they had brought with them.