Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

He burned in summer, he froze in winter. It was only during the short springs or in early autumn that he felt any ease, and in these he was tormented with memories of the country left behind.

And years slipped by.

He learned that the famine struck again. And then again. He saw the ships of the wretched come and knew well the wan and hollowed look of those families who had survived starvation and sickness and the sea. They seemed to him to look in more desperation than those of the year before and were like casualties in some long, horrific war. He could not bear to look in their faces. They were grey figures, sunkencheeked, with ruined teeth and bloodied gums prominent, collarbones poking outward, flesh dried and dead and flaking. There were forlorn grandmothers and mothers and children thin as sticks. A hard wind might have snapped them. One day he saw four boys of eight and ten in dirtied shirts and the expressions of old men, with coughs making water their eyes. Their father had been buried on the sea. Tomas’s throat rose at the sight of them. He held his teeth tightly together to stop his jaw from shaking. He looked about at the sorry assembly arrived there and thought: These must be the last left living in my country. And now they are here. He did not go and ask them. He did not go forward and tell that he had been one of them, too. Instead he kept his head down and worked on that day and banged the crates and spat angrily into the river whenever the vision of suffering assailed him. That night he came back to the boardinghouse soured and bitter and told O’Loughlin to get him two bottles of whiskey. When the little man returned Tomas told him he would give no more money to Burke. He told him it was useless, what had they done? O’Loughlin tried to say great progress had been made, plans were afoot, but Tomas turned and grabbed him by the throat and held and shook him like that and then threw him back on the bed with a curse. The small man said nothing more then.

In deep sleep that night Tomas dreamed his country was a woman who ran a knife across the surface of her womb. Her blood ran out like a stream and he watched it, that awful emptying that flowed over the ground. And it took the form of ghostlike faces. Tomas saw his father and his brother among them. He woke. There was a cold sweat over him.

My father and Teige are dead, he thought.

He blinked his eyes at the darkness of the long room. He lay there like that a time to steady himself. Then he leaned over and reached in the canvas bag of his things that he kept beneath the bed and he took out the tattered rolled rag of his brother’s shirt. He held it in his hands and sat so, and it was some time before he noticed that Patrick O’Loughlin was gone, along with both of his boots and any money he had in the world.

He could not stay there after that. When he gathered his senses, Tomas Foley walked out of that place barefoot into the streets and never returned to the dockside warehouse of Joshua MacMaster, Shipping Merchant. He just walked away. He walked westward and was like one trying to increase with each footstep the distance between himself and his country.

He is lost then from any history. And so he wandered, and in such wandering vanished into the crowds of those nameless and without domain until one winter’s night some years later in a small town not far from the city of Cincinnati.

It was snowing. The flakes whirled out of the dark. Tom Foley, for so he was now, walked out of a bar and a man came after him and hit him across the back with a swung rifle. He fell face forward into the slush of the street. The man said nothing. He raised the rifle by its barrel a second time. He wore a coat of furs and a hat of beaver skin. His face was blotched from raw whiskey and he blinked his eyes as he swung again. The rifle arced through the snow air and on the ground Tom Foley rolled to avoid it. He kicked out with his right leg and the fur man toppled and soon both were tumbling over in the mud of the street. Men came and stood to watch in the yellow lamplight. The fur man was large and grunted and tried to make fist blows from the side. But Tom paid them no heed. He rolled the man easily and then struck him hard in the midriff. Then he stood up.

He stepped two paces away in his Russian greatcoat and brushed at it with his hands. And in so doing, he did not hear the man cock the rifle at his back. There was a moment upon which his life balanced. The snow, the mud, the yellow light, the smoke that hung there, the horses, and the smells of sweat and dirt and whiskey, all were part of it. Somewhere in him he sensed his own death. It was as if Death Himself suddenly appeared there as a grey phantasm in the street, and in that same instant Tom Foley knew that He was come for him. He might have seen the strides He took toward him and how these were then so swift and effortless that Death was almost upon him before he could take a last breath. For then the riflefired. He saw his own blood spurt out through him and briefly rouge the snowy air. It shot out in fierce and sudden leakage and his brain fuddled with incomprehension as to whence it came. He looked down. The coat was holed clean through below his ribs. He fingered it and like a child then pressed the finger farther until it was inside the hole in himself. The bleeding ceased and he fell on his knees. He was there in the street, unhanded by any and studied by a few as the snow fell upon him. The fur man staggered to his feet. He swayed with the rifle that smoked thinly still. Some element of conscience fought within him, for he turned to those watching and showed an expression of strange pride and bafflement both that he had shot a man in the back.

Tom felt Death lay hands upon him. The snow touched his face, but he could not feel it. He wanted to close his eyes. His hand upon his side was soaked in blood and it squelched when he lifted and replaced it. He was cold. He knelt there and did not fall over and was like one faulty in performance of dying. The fur man behind him held the rifle another minute. None stepped out from the sidewalk. They shuffled there and murmured and held their glasses and waited. The rifle passed along the line of them as the fur man turned and gazed upon them as on a jury. Then he threw the rifle on the ground and hurried away through the falling snow.

A man walked forward then and touched Tom Foley on the side of his neck and then called to others, and these came and carried the wounded man from the street.

Three days later Tom Foley learned that the bullet had passed through him. The doctor that attended him was Philip James Brown. He was a strongly built man of about sixty years with a round head and thin, reddish hair. His eyes were kind and his manner assured. He had had Tom brought to a room at the side of his own house where men of various kind had lain to recover. There he had dressed and wrapped the wound and doctored it in the method used. He had said little at first, the gravity of the situation denying it; then, as Tom Foley sat propped on the bed, Philip Brown asked him where he was from. To the response he did not say anything at first. He nodded his head and offered Tom a drink. He watched him while he took it. He asked him what his plans were.

“I have given up making plans.”

“That a fact?”

“I plan to live until I die.”

“Glad to hear it. Hate to hear a man wanted to die after I stopped him bleeding all over my floor.”

“I’m grateful for what you did. I will repay you.”

“I didn’t do it for the money.”

“Why did you?” Tom Foley asked him.

“I’m a doctor,” Brown said, and he sat there in a chair by the bed and held his drink and the two of them dwelled in the amber hush of twilight and said no more as the noises in the street came and went.