Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

But by then time itself was vanished for them. They existed outside of any history and knew only their horses and the land. They did not know of wars and treaties and treaties broken. They did not know how the maps of that country were being redrawn even as they rode over the land. They did not know that in Fort Laramie they themselves were reported murdered by Indians, that their relatives had been informed, and that another troop had set off likewise to find the best rail route west. Brown’s men rode on. No maps and charts and graphs were drawn anymore. The relentless immensity of the land itself made weary the vision of the railroad, and at times they forgot what it was they were seeking. Days and weeks could pass then without mention of it. In three years Tom Foley had written three letters to Dr. Brown about his son. But only the first of these had reached other hands. The other two Tom had given to traders, and these had never been seen again.

So it was. They rode in the mountains.

Then one day in the April of the year, they came down to a clear-running stream and dismounted and ducked their faces and shook the great hanks of their knife-cut beards and were in general ease when arrows landed in the chests of three of them. They fell forward on their faces. The arrows had made such small noise that at first the others did not understand. They looked along the stream at the fallen soldiers. Then arrows landed in the throats of two more of them and pierced them through. There were Indians on horseback in the stream. The water plashed and made broad, translucent arcs either side of the horses as they came, and such things seemed to be in slow motion or exist in fragments and shards where the mind’s perception shattered with shock and fear. Another arrow flew, the sound a whir. Then Cartwright fell back as he ran to his horse and rifle. Then the Indians were upon them. There were five or seven or maybe nine. Tom Foley could not be sure. He saw the one coming on a white pony with tomahawk waving and saw the triple scars across his chest. He saw the feathers in his hair. Then he jumped up at him and there was a moment and he was airborne and grappling the Indian about the midriff and the tomahawk was being raised to sink in his skull. Then the two of them were crashed in the stream and went below the surface of the water, and Tom’s hands found the neck of the other and closed upon it and drowned him there. Beneath the water he heard the sound of gunfire. When he stood again Brown was aiming his pistol and pulling the trigger time and again without a bullet firing. There was a long arrow in his thigh. Two of the Indians lay in the water. Another was running at him with knife drawn. Tom shouted out. He saw the Indian sink the knife in Philip Brown and was then upon him. He pulled him down as Brown fell back, and they tumbled onto the wet gravel of the riverbed and wrestled there. The Indian was younger and smaller than him and twisted and rolled like one demented. He broke free and stood and pranced on the ground, as might a dancer. He had no weapon. Tom Foley stood up and looked at him and they were so some little time, the Indian jostling in the space and ready to leap and the other still and braced and looking him in the eye. The moment held. There was the small noise of the stream and the groans of a man. The water ran red past them.

Then, the moment snapped, the Indian turned and ran and jumped onto the back of his pony and was gone.

Tom Foley stood there.

He watched where the other rode away. Then he walked past the fallen to Brown and knelt down and put his hand before that man’s mouth and then placed his ear on his chest. He was living still. Tom reached down then and took the shaft of the arrow low as he could and snapped it. Brown did not open his eyes. The blood from the knife wound pumped freely.

“Oh God,” Tom said. “Oh God in heaven.”

He went and took the shirt of one of the men and tore it lengthwise and came back and applied pressure to the wound with both his hands until the blood stopped coming between his fingers. Then he bound the wound as best he could and crossed down to his horse and brought up the canteen and poured the water over the lieutenant’s face.

Brown opened his eyes.

“You can’t die,” Tom Foley told him. “I promised your father.”

It took Tom Foley thirty-two days to get Lieutenant Philip James Brown back to Fort Laramie. And another five months before the son was fit enough to take the stagecoach back east to meet his father.

When it was done, Tom decided to ride back up into the mountains. But before he did, there came into the fort a wagon train, and among the homesteaders was a family whose name was Considine. He saw their freckled faces and he stood and asked them how long it was they were in that country. They spoke with the accent of the County Clare and told him they had come over only six months.

“Are they not all dead there?” Tom asked.

“No indeed. No,” said Mary Considine, who was the man’s sister and was struck by the sadness of the question.

That night, with her help, Tom Foley sat and wrote a letter to his brother Teige.

Dear Brother,

I do not know if you are living or dead. I do not know if our father is living or dead.

I am in America. I came here to make the railroad. I am in first rate health. My mind wanders some times to the days long ago. I had your shirt a long time Teigey and I intended to send you money to come. Then I thought all were dead there on account of the famine was in the potatoes.

This is a big country. I have been in the mountains. And sometimes there I thought I saw the ghost of you passing. I miss those times we had. I have lost all feeling of people here. I’d like to see you coming over a green field on the white pony.

I remain,

Your devoted brother

Tom Foley

The story leaves him and returns to the island. Always the story returns there. The teller changes the lens and the green slope of the island reappears in focus. And it is as if the teller understands that the island is an image for all Foleys thereafter, that there was something passionate and impetuous in the character of the family that made each of its men islands in turn, and that this was a trait deeply fated and irreversible. It was their nature.

On the island of Francis Foley in time the telescope aged. The hundred seasons of the rain, of drizzle and mist, shower, sleet, spells sudden and violent of cloudburst and downpour, worked their way into its timbers. The wet winds that braced the river came inside the tower of the saint, where all that time the telescope lay propped at an angle to see the stars. Its timbers shrank. Fissures wormlike climbed with slow persistence toward the brass rims. The beeswax that had once been worked into its surface by the monks was long since desiccated and returned to the air. Now it grew more and more to resemble the man who grave and silent visited it each night like an eremite. The golden curls that had once been his were white now. The strength of his body that had one time been a vision of potency and inviolable faith in his place in the world was now vanished. As if wires had been cut, the musculature was slackened, and his was a figure wasted with the angles of his elbows and other joints in odd protuberance like some fallen tenting. His past was longer than his future now and haunted his eyes and gave to them an expression at one time vacant and deep as if seeing but not what lay before him. By that time Francis Foley’s manner was quieter than a whisper. In the daylight he slept in the corner of the stone cashel where he and Teige had survived the famine on fish and berries and the rabbits that lived there. When he woke Teige fed him. They sat either side of the low fire and the smoke travelled about them.