Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

Language had slipped away from them. It passed in the first season after the disappearance of Tomas and did not fully return. It was as if the winds that blew then were a keening or requiem and father and son said nothing but sat and listened until in time they found they had passed beyond dialogue and were in a place now where such was impossible. In the place of words were sometime small gestures, the least lift of eyebrow, wrinkle of lip, or nod of head. But even these were barely required. In the afternoons the old man went out around the island. He walked away in a slow ramble and kept in his hand a hazel rod, always going around by the shoreline and doing so in all weathers as if it were a station of penance, and while he trod there he revisited sins of his past. Then, when the night fell, swift in winter, slow in summer, he returned and went to the tower. One night the noises of his efforts as he moved the telescope into place alarmed his son. The father’s chest made a soft soughing as if sycamores in full leaf rustled there. And Teige came to him and appeared in the doorway of the tower and then came inside and helped him get the telescope into position. His father made the half-smile of gratitude that always verged on weeping. Then Teige left him and crossed back beneath the stars and wondered for the millionth time at how nothing else in the visible world now seemed to matter for the old man. All nights then after that, Teige came and prepared the telescope. It made no difference if the night sky was occluded or rain fell. Francis Foley would still take his place there, lying down on a bed of hay and opening and closing his mouth as he brought his face to the eyepiece and fit it there as if crudely adjoined by such mechanics to the mysteries of creation. He lay there until the dawn gathered in the stars. He lay in what private perusal Teige could not for a long time imagine. For it seemed a practice cold and aloof and without purpose other than a fascination the father should have outgrown. Still it endured. And it was not until one night in October of the year after Tomas had left that it finally fell to Teige to discover what the old man was doing.

It was a night brilliant with constellations. And all the stars from Pisces to Pegasus to Hercules and on above to the Canes Venatici glittered like a diadem bejewelled. Teige could not sleep. He lay in the stone building where the air was cold and damp with the coming of winter. The mud floor, as if it received the season ahead of time, as if winter and summer and spring rose from below and did not fall from above, exhaled a chill, dark breath. It travelled inside the clothes on Teige’s back and made him shiver so that he rose and beat his hands against his arms. The plume of his effort came and went, visible on the pale starlit air. The dog raised its head and lowered it again. Teige looked to the bed of hay where his father never slept in the night, then he stepped outside beneath the sky and stood and watched all that was still and yet slowly moving there. The river was quiet. Across on the farther shore the town of Kilrush slept in an unlit huddle. Teige walked out and went to where the pony was standing. He stroked her neck and her flanks and laid his head against her. Then he went back across the wet grass to the wall where he saw the glass of the telescope glinting. He crossed then to the tower, but not in such a way that his father would see him. When he reached the wall he pressed in against it and came around the curve so until he was next to the doorway where the eye of the telescope peered out. Teige squatted down then and from that position aligned his naked eye to the view of the stars his father beheld. He found Cassiopeia and Ursa Major and Minor and the myriad others then that gradually revealed themselves the longer he stared. The night slipped on, the stars wheeled another fraction in their endless turning. The cold made Teige embrace himself, and he crouched there small and shivering and attendant to that ancient pattern above wherein his father’s mind roamed.

Then he heard the whisper.

At first he was not sure if it was his own dream speaking or if at such a time in the night sprites or other such came and whispered for mischief and devilment. He pressed his ear closer to the doorway. Then he heard his father say words in a tone barely audible. He could not know what they were. His father was lying on his back with the telescope to his eye, and the sounds travelled upward in the high acoustic of the tower and were all but lost to him. Teige heard them like the smallest noise; the footstep of fox or badger coming from some covert might have been louder. He leaned more forward still and turned his mouth back that his breath might not give him away. Then he heard them again. The old man was speaking. The words slipped off his lips and rose and faded, and still Teige could not make them out. Then he took the greater chance and leaned in below the angle of the telescope and was in the same space where he could see his father’s prone body and hear now what he was saying.

“… what sorrow is mine is mine. I am not asking for less,” he said. “Do you hear me?” he whispered. “Listen.” He paused. His breath was a sigh. At his feet Teige heard his heart thumping.

“I am asking for her. And for my sons.”

His voice then was thinner still. It seemed to Teige that he said some words that did not escape his mouth, that these were formed in the air like silent promises or prayers and ascended into the ether of space as so many credos must have in the centuries since that tower was constructed. Teige moved back and sat once more outside against the wall. He pressed back his head and felt his body shake. He looked up at the stars then and blinked, for they swam in water like swans.

Every night after that, Teige came and listened outside the tower where his father watched the sky. He understood then that the constellations had become for the old man the face of God and that while gazing upon it, Francis Foley confessed sins of pride and others that he hoped might redeem the souls of his wife and sons. To the pitch of his whispers Teige grew accustomed and soon could hear almost all his father said. There, he heard the old man tell God the name Teige. He heard him ask of Tomas and Finan and Finbar. Some nights he heard him say the name of Emer only, and whisper this over and over as if reminding the ear of a forgetful deity. Other times the whispers spoke of that country and the blight of the potatoes and the stories the boatman had brought of those thousands dying. Francis made appeals. He asked if all were suffering some sin that was beyond atonement and if He above might not consider the punishment only of some. He offered bargains of damnation eternal. He promised his soul. Then again on other winter nights he asked God for signs. He asked Him to show Francis in the heavens some small glimmering that he might know he was being heard. He turned the telescope slowly across the skies and seemed to Teige to aim it northerly at the Coma Berenices. These, that were the constellation named for the beautiful amber-coloured tresses of the Queen Berenice, obscured a thousand galaxies too distant to be seen and were the first astral story that Emer had told Francis.

Whether there was a sign in the sky or not, Teige could not know. Through all that autumn and winter, he came each night and listened to his father talk to God through the telescope, and always the same topics rose in whispers off his lips. And from this Teige was strangely comforted.

One day in the second year after Tomas left and when the blight was again in the potatoes, the boatman came. He came up from the shore and stood at a tilt before Teige. He was thin and grey about the cheek and swayed in the small wind-rain. He said nothing. He passed a hand up over the crown of his head where the hair was vanished and an oily dirt streaked. Then he muttered something that Teige did not catch and made a sudden shrugging which led to coughing. His body racked. He stopped and looked at the ground, then back over his shoulder where his boat lay near the shore. Teige looked beyond him and there saw sitting in the hull the sorriest assemblage of rag and bone that comprised the boatman’s family. There were twelve in all, his nine children, his wife, her sister, and his own mother. The children sat to the front, aged from four to fourteen, and were a mass of faces wan and doomed and obscurely contrite like ones condemned. Behind them huddled the three women. They had lost their house, the boatman mumbled to Teige. They had been evicted the night before. He turned about as he said it, as if something sharp and coiled twisted within him. He did not want them to take to the roads, he said, and then said no more, because Teige told him not to.