Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

They endured.

Then, when the shores of America should have been near, they sailed into deep fog. The ship slowed and then seemed to stop altogether. The passengers came up excitedly expecting to see land and stood silent, craning forward and narrowing their eyes into the soft grey blanket that surrounded them. The foghorn sounded. The day passed. The passengers grew accustomed to that sound. Some said it would summon whales and that these were gigantic in those waters and would stove in the ship and sink her. Others said the shore of New York was less than a few miles and the fog would rise in the morning and like a cloth lifted they would see the great buildings. Neither proved true. The fog hung on. Huxton stood on the bridge with his hands behind his back. There was an eerie silence there. In the absence of storm the water made small sounds now and the sailors did not speak. The food supplies dwindled. The fog remained. The air was cold and windless and no seabirds flew.

The fog lasted another week. It seemed to the families gathered below that they had been chosen for a special purgatory. It was as though they had entered some location whose coordinates were unknown and that after the long history of tragedy they had survived, they were now to be kept there enshrouded and apart from human contact, where the memory of their hardships would perish with them. They sat and waited. Days passed.

Then the ship swayed.

It swung into a breeze and the sails flapped with a kind of urgency and even there in their quarters below, the emigrants knew they had come through. They shouted out. Tomas climbed the stairs and looked out through the air slots of the trap, for it was not their hour to come on deck.

“I can see the sky,” he called. “I can see a clear sky!”

Two days later they reached land. Huxton stood and watched them enter America.

It was not marvellous or beautiful. They did not feel the sense of welcome they had dreamed or the richness of opportunity they had been told was there. Instead there were small offices and papers and questions and waiting rooms and certification and cramped, huddled crowds moving from one place to the next without yet entering the country proper. They were in quarantine. There were medical examinations and bewildered faces and naked bodies standing in the cold. In all of this Tomas Foley moved indignant and restless. He felt like an animal trapped. He was reminded of his days in the gaol in Limerick and suffered sharp memories of the tenderness of Blath. Once when an officer gazed in his opened mouth at his teeth, he thought to lean forward and snap off the man’s nose. But he resisted and only blew his breath out and ended the examination.

It occurred to Tomas that he had not fully expected to survive and arrive in America at all. He was to have died already and had no plans for any future there. On the long voyage he had heard the dreams and hopes of the others and wanted the ship to reach the far shores for their sake only. For himself there was nothing.

But then he arrived in those cold examination halls and suffered the indignities of inspection and somewhere within him an anger fired. He stood in the long queues and saw about him the forlorn figures of the dispossessed, and the whole history of his country seemed etched in their faces. They shambled forward and gave their names, and these were Seamus and Sean and Aodhain and Brigid and Maire, and were given with quiet humility and sometimes had to be spelled out slowly, for they belonged in another world. And in those moments perhaps Tomas Foley resolved not to be defeated. He tensed like a coil. He stepped forward and had already resolved to make good there, to show all such inspectors and officials and others that he was a Foley. Determination burned in his eyes. His mouth took the firm straight line it was to wear for the rest of his days and his shoulders curved as though he lifted a burden.

He would make good there. He would work at whatever work there was and then send the money for Teige to join him. For the image of his youngest brother left on the island remained with him and he knew he should not have abandoned him so. Guilt muddied all his thoughts. Of Teige’s shirt there remained only a rag, but this Tomas kept rolled as a keepsake in the small bundle of his things.

At last he was free and walked into America. He moved out in the uncertain and innocent cluster of his fellow passengers, who looked about them with wide, dream-filled eyes and the fear of being out of place. They shambled into the streets with their few belongings. They stayed within ten feet of each other for a brief time, like a herd, and then the crowds of Polish and Germans and others intermingled among them and they were lost to each other and slipped away into the great teeming life of that city. Tomas had no money. He was arrived in New York, and the air was beginning to turn cold. He followed his oldest instinct and made his way through dusty streets down to a river whose name he did not know was Hudson and then lay down there as the stars appeared. But he could not sleep. He kept seeing figures moving about, shadows, the nameless multitude of the city’s doomed. They were like so many leaves, blown, and then blown away. When the dawn arrived he saw for the first time the silhouette of that city and walked to a street corner where men gathered and stood and waited as at a hiring fair. He was taken then in a wagon and worked on the docks, carrying crates of tea and other dry foodstuffs that had come from England and sailed around the shores of the country of famine. Those about him were from a dozen countries. Among them he found the faces of Mayo and Galway and Roscommon and acknowledged them with a small lift of his head but no more, working on until the darkness carrying boxes on his back.

He found a place to live in a tall building that was little better than a workhouse. There were twenty-four iron frames for beds and upon these each night the exhausted fell for sleep. In the dawn Tomas Foley was back on the street corner. Soon those hiring grew accustomed to looking for his face. They chose him quickly and he sat in the wagon while others looked up and tried to broaden their shoulders and contain the coughs that jumped in their chests. The winter came. It stole in along the docks in chill winds and frozen fogs, and then made the streets bitter tunnels of gelid air where people hurried with heads low. Tomas had never felt anything like it. The skin of his face cracked. He had grown a beard by then and it froze hard upon him like an iron mask. Huge snowflakes fell. The city whitened in an hour and within two slowed to a standstill. Horses slid and neighed in alarm, hooves clopping and breath misting in dragonlike plumes. And the snow kept on falling. It fell at first like blossoms in Maytime but then thickened until the streets were blinded. It fell on the shoulders of the men as they worked and made them briefly blanched like incipient angels. But it did not stop them working. For a week the snow continued. The city stopped and became a frozen image of itself, beautiful but for the dirtied smudge of tramped footprints. In the boardinghouse men held up their feet and peeled bandages and bloodied bindings from them and made hushed inner groans at frostbite and sores. They were unable to pay and told to leave and come back when they could. The place emptied by half. Down at the docks Tomas was kept on. His value as a labourer was already known and he was employed by the firm of Joshua MacMaster, Shipping Merchant, for all that winter. When the snow stopped the ice sealed it hard, and the city of New York remained a dirtied white, stained with grit and grime, and was the image of innocence tarnished.

On his first payday, it had been Tomas’s intention to take half of his money and put it aside for Teige. He planned to do this every week and put the notes under the heel of his boot until there were too many to allow him to walk. Then he would send them back to the island. But in the first weeks of the frozen winter, he had come to know an old man in the bed next to him. His name was Patrick O’Loughlin. He was a small, wiry figure without hair on his head and quick, flickering grey eyes. He had come from the County Galway years before and travelled up and down the eastern coast there in various jobs of uncertain honesty until rheumatism had made claws of his hands and curved his spine like a bow. That winter his money ran out and he could not find work. The day he was told to leave the boardinghouse he told Tomas, who took off his boot and gave him the money he was to save for Teige. He did not think of it beforehand. He did not consider that it would only last a time and that O’Loughlin would be again on the streets. He gave the money and waved away his hand at the thanks that began on the other man’s lips. That evening Tomas sipped from O’Loughlin’s whiskey bottle and felt the warmth of goodness flood up through him. It was the first decent thing he had done in America, he thought. It was his way of giving thanks for the good fortune that was his now at MacMaster’s. There would be more money for Teige.