Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“You can stay on the island,” he said, and when the man said nothing, Teige touched him briefly on the shoulder and walked down before him to where the boat lay on the water.

Their name was MacMahon but had through use and familiarity become Mac, and then, to distinguish them from the multitudes thereabouts with that appellation, the BoatMacs. They were a mute congregation of souls and seemed sundered from the world, with only the strange music of their name to recall their origin. Nanna BoatMac, Livy BoatMac, Tibby, Tabby, Oonee, Aggee, Gra, Bu, Prun, and the others that their father, BoatMac himself, had christened. Now they looked at Teige with that same expression of mistrust and guilt and shame that had become habitual in that time. They did not speak out. They slumped and endeavoured to make themselves seem a burden smaller than they were. One of the children shivered. They were cold and wet, and the cold wetness of them translated itself into the morning and lent them the air of travellers from the Country of the Drowned. Their hair was matted, their eyes stinging. Sores had opened at the corners of the lips of two of the girls, and these they had torn with their nails until they looked the awful image of some caricature of down-mouthed Desolation. Teige stood before them and did not know what to say. He reached out his hand to one of the small girls, and she pulled back. Gulls that had followed the boat screamed in the air. The dog that stood on the bluff waited. Slow rain began.

Teige turned to BoatMac.

“You are all welcome,” he said. “Tell them to come.”

The man nodded and shook in himself and swayed. Then he stepped down into the water and took the first of his daughters in his arms and bore her over and placed her like a proven treasure on the sand. While he did this with each of the girls, his sons tumbled out. Slim splashers, freckle-faces, weedy-armed fellows in torn shirts and rags of trouser, they came onto the island and variously spat and kicked at the sand and looked as if considering its worth. When they were all ashore — the grandmother borne on the boatman’s back in a vision that crumpled Teige’s heart like paper — they stood about in a little cluster and did not move as the rain mizzled upon them. They were like climbers arrived on the thin ledge of hope and dared not budge. The boatman coughed. Gulls rose and fell again. Waves broke. At last Teige told them to come with him and see the places where they could stay. He walked off a few paces, but the BoatMacs remained behind.

“Hereabouts,” the father called, “hereabouts is fine.”

“What do you mean?”

The man twisted. His shoulders turned like a sail.

“Hereabouts,” he said.

“There are ruins up here, there is the house we were making. It is not finished, but—”

“Hereabouts,” was all BoatMac said. Then he made a sudden nodding and raised the palm of his hand and turned and told some of the boys to go off and find timber and they ran like hares and were gone. By night there was a mound of materials gathered on the shore. When the darkness fell, the girls and the two sisters and the grandmother got back aboard the boat. While the boys and their father slept on the shore, the women slept on the water, believing the island still held a curse for any woman that spent the night there. The following morning the boatman and his sons set about building a long platform along the shore. It was a crude, raftlike structure loosely moored with rope lashings. But it sufficed. The sisters and the tiny grandmother and the daughters all came onto the island by day. The little old woman set herself on the rocks and stitched at a shirt. The boatman’s short, sturdy wife helped like a man, while her sister sat disconsolate with empty eyes and hands limp in her lap. The younger girls recovered their energies quickly. They ran about and went searching for mussels and periwinkles beneath the swooping and crying of the seabirds. They gathered mounds of seaweed. When boats passed up the Shannon River, the two youngest of them yahooed and waved their arms like the happily shipwrecked, heedless of loss and tragedy. By the second evening the women and the girls slept on the platform. By the third it had already begun to resemble a home. Teige worked with the boatman to make three-legged stools, and a hunk of driftwood became their salty table. The women thanked him graciously. The grandmother, shrunken and curved like one rescued from depths, worked without end at her stitching. She rocked as she did so and did not stop even when she told Teige he was their saviour. Her eyes followed him a long moment, but she said no more.

In the week that followed, the house raft was roofed with stitchings of canvas and other cloths the BoatMacs had with them. The seaweed the girls gathered was mounded at a place nearby where they would dig a garden. Soon the home was done and was a weird raggle-taggle assemblage of blankets and sacking and twisted sticks of blackthorn and sally bush and rods of hazel and bags of goose and gannet and other feathers, and all adorned with thrown clusters of wildflowers the girls gathered. It made an image at once homely and desperate and could seem a place inventive and bohemian, or what it was, the frail, decrepit, and tumbledown remnant of a family ruined.

Francis Foley did not come down to meet the MacMahons. On the first evening Teige told him they had arrived. The old man paused briefly and studied the steam that rose off his broth. Swirls of vapour ascended and vanished. Then he made an all but imperceptible nod and ate on.

The season turned. Rains fell all day and night and made swollen the tide. The Shannon waters ran more swiftly and in the starless, moonless dark the home of the BoatMacs creaked and moaned and threatened to break loose. But it did not. The father and his sons would not let it, plunging in the river, hanging on to the raft house, making new lashings with knotted ropes while on the platform the girls huddled against their mother and grandmother and attended their doom like those fabled in the antique times of the Flood. Still they survived. Then in the winter of that year, gales came down from Iceland and carried within their force fierce, flintlike showers of hail. These streaked out of white grey skies and were multitudinous as arrows flighted from above. They pierced the flesh with ice. No man could raise his face. Borne on the power of the frozen winds, they seemed to foretell the end of all season and be precursors of some new age, boreal and quiescent. In such weathers the raft house of the BoatMacs was daily destroyed and rebuilt. The rough tenting of their shelter took off and flew across the water. Stones were brought from farther down the shoreline and built like walls along the wooden flooring. The family sat and hung on to what they possessed and still would not move up to the safety of the island buildings. The gales continued. Teige came and went and offered what help he could, and through the continued inclemency of weather all that winter, the family of the boatman’s became his. For though the gales and hails and sleets and storms remained brutal through February and on into the month of March, the BoatMacs did not despair. They did not curse their misfortune or decide to return to the mainland. Even the sister of the boatman’s wife, who had buried her husband and her children, remained stoic and crouched in the bitter season as if in quiet assent, as if such were a kind of purgation.

And so they endured.

A spring arrived. Birds, starlings, sparrows, golden orioles, thrushes, chats, swallows, corncrakes, and cuckoos flew and sung. The skies were a light blue and the breeze a mild and soft gentling. On those days the boatman took by turn one of his sons and went off and ferried passengers from the town of Kilrush down the river, or acted as pilot for the bigger boats that sought to navigate the waters called the Scattery Roads on their way to dock at Limerick. He returned in the evenings and brought a basket of fish, some of which were always carried to the table of Teige and his father. So the Boat-Macs lived on there, and their moored raft house became more secure still, and in the daytimes any number of the children could be seen going about the island, chasing birds and hares, skipping in dance step, hunting fairies, and gathering the assorted sundries that are the treasures of childhood.