Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

Ten days later, after ten nights of sharing the bottles of O’Loughlin, the man told him he was out of money once more. Tomas took off the boot he wore even in the bed and gave him another handful of notes.

“You’re a great man,” O’Loughlin said. “If we had more of your kind of man, we’d never have lost our country.” He paused and watched the other’s face from the side. “I’ll surely have work when the ice is melted,” he said.

And so, somehow, as simple as that and without exactly meaning it to happen, Tomas found himself in the position of sharing all his wages with Patrick O’Loughlin. He worked for two men. He grew stronger. His legs were thickly muscled, his shoulders huge, but the wad of notes in his boot stayed thin. Through the months of January and February the city remained frozen. There were spells of further snow. Tomas wore a heavy greatcoat that he found in the storeroom of one of the ships. It had belonged to a Russian general and still had the epaulets before he tore them off. He worked on. He heard from some arrived mention of the continued famine in his country and felt rage and impotency both and that evening told O’Loughlin to get him a bottle of his own. He drank himself unconscious but managed still to wake in the morning and trudge to the docks.

The spring arrived. It arrived without any of the signals of the springs he had known. He did not see it in buds and birds and grass. On the long avenues and streets it arrived in the air itself and was there almost before he knew it. He left the coat open, then off, then worked in rolled shirtsleeves. It lifted his heart. He imagined seed settings in the island and the terrible year of famine put behind. He worked with the crates that seemed natural now to his hands and shoulders, but his mind was away in the other country. With the spring came blooms of violence. In the warm evenings hotheaded gangs marched with bats and clashed in street battles over territories unmapped. There were feuds and enmities that the spring fuelled, and men appeared on corners and alleyways like soldiers without armies but bound to continue in long, nameless wars that predated their grandfathers. They rampaged some nights and battered each other and cried old slogans and catch cries from campaigns long past. There were Italians and Slays and Irish and others and all that spring they clashed by night and released the restless turbulence of their disappointment in that new country by renewing hostilities of old. For his physique, Tomas was soon petitioned to join. O’Loughlin asked him one night as Tomas lay in his cot bed. He told Tomas they had to hang on to whatever they could or they would be run out of that country the same as they had been their own. The Irish had to stick up for themselves. He dressed it greenly so and watched across the semidarkness of the April night to gauge Tomas’s response.

“I told Burke Tomas Foley would be like ten men,” he said.

Tomas lay with his great arms crossed behind his head. The small night noises of the street sounded.

O’Loughlin leaned over. His voice was a whispered laugh.

“You can bate the heads off ’em and the police won’t even come near. They’re afraid. They’re off in the next street and they don’t come over. One night Burke’s going to go over after them. Bate ’em, too.”

Three nights later Tomas went with O’Loughlin. He met Burke, who was a big, thick-bodied man with a top lip that sneered permanently upward as though balancing there some droplet of righteousness. He nodded at Tomas. His eyes were hooded. He had large pink hands that were like the skinned flesh of fatted fowl. He said something to one next to him and Tomas recognized the voice of Mayo. Then they were a crowd moving forward. There were cries and shouts and the men beat their sticks and bats into their hands and flowed down the street as one, though flagless and without even the knowledge of the face of their enemy. They erupted into a charge. Some shouted, “Up Ireland!” and others cried out the place names of their origins, towns and villages and townlands that they would never see again. These, though cries of war, revealed a sorry truth, for they betrayed the deep-down angers of men landless and adrift in the anonymous vastness of that continent. They were cries of belonging, and as the gangs crashed there on the streets they might have been engaged in some terrible act of reinvention whereby the blood spilled could make good the loss of home.

Or it might have been nothing but the running amok of hot, bloody-minded thugs. Tomas watched it happen. The ones they charged against were Italians. He did not know what feud they were engaged in or on which side lay right. He stood back, and though O’Loughlin urged at his elbow and pointed out fellows he should charge and throw into the river, he did not move. Burke was at the rear of the scene. He studied Tomas with a tight-lipped expression and turned away when O’Loughlin failed to get him engaged.

“You could kill a dozen of ’em,” O’Loughlin said. “You could take any of ’em you wanted.” His eyes were crazed and shallow, and Tomas turned from him and walked away up the street with men shouting and beating at each other at his back.

He did not go out again on the night streets for all the rest of that month. He worked overtime for free. He volunteered to stand await for ships in the night. He tried to exhaust his body and then shut down his mind with the whiskey O’Loughlin got for him. Still, sometimes the image of open fields came before him and he felt the closure of his life and its constraints and he wanted to strike out against these. He ran the crates then up and down the gangways, he worked the great mitts of his hands and the deep muscles of his shoulders until the sweat ran glistening off him and his eyes attained the faraway look of one beaten and whipped a long time.

Then one summer evening when he was still at the docks Burke came to see him. Two others who stood back attended him. Burke gestured Tomas to him with a fat pink finger. He told Tomas that famine had struck again in their country. He made a sneer of his lip and told him they were dying again in the fields and roadways and that this would only worsen as the harvesttime drew on. He said they could all be dead soon. He asked Tomas what he was going to do to help, and did not wait for an answer. He said he was sure Tomas would do what every good man of their country would do.

Tomas said nothing. He looked out at the Hudson River sleek and black and he thought of it flowing all the way across the world and into the mouth of the Shannon.

Burke put a hand on his shoulder.

“You have family there. We all have family there,” he said. “We have to help them. We need a rebellion, and for that we need funds.”

By the time Burke left there, Tomas Foley’s wages were to be halved. The money was to be his contribution towards helping overthrow the enemies of his country. He could think of it as money for Teige. It was what had to be done.

That summer the city boiled. Waves of heat floated and bent the streets and burnt off the shoulders and arms and faces of those unused to it. There was no air. Some, freckle-faced men of pale skin, fell at their work in spells and faints or drank the river water and felt their brains swell and make bulge the baked shells of their skulls. It was hotter than they had ever known. It seemed they breathed in the oven breath of a giant beast that towered over the city. Workers who had come from other countries were less afflicted and could be seen then in a kind of swaggering ease, their tanned bodies slick with oil and their smiles white.

Through it, Tomas Foley laboured on. He became nothing, another of the myriad emigrant workers in that city who lived without hope a thing too empty to call a life. He worked, he drank, he gave over his money to O’Loughlin and Burke.