Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

In May Mr. Clancy appeared. He was rowed across in a long skiff and stood up in the bow when the children of the BoatMacs gathered on the sand to greet him. He came onto the island and asked one of them to get Teige Foley. While the boy ran off, Clancy did not proceed further. Instead he stood with legs planted and examined without comment the extraordinary sight of the ramshackle home at anchorage some few yards distant. He held his hands behind his back. He moved his lips in a tight line from side to side, as though struggling to contain exclamations. The children of the BoatMacs clustered before him and stared. They looked at his green jacket and his long boots. When Teige at last appeared coming down the rutted roadway to the shore, Mr. Clancy strode swiftly up to meet him. He said some words the others could not hear. He gestured with his right hand a kind of onward motion. Then Teige left him and went back up the roadway, and the other man returned to his place on the shore and stood there and waited. The children looked at him. Under their scrutiny he tapped his pockets and found coins and drew some out and proffered these to the smallest of the girls standing near him. In his palm they sat like brown buttons. The girls did not move. Their eyes studied his face and he moved his hand farther out to them. Then the girls turned to see their mother, who stood up with arms on her hips from the clothes she was scrubbing.

“We have no need. Say thank you, girls,” she said.

“Thank you,” they said.

And Mr. Clancy pocketed the coins with a mixture of rue and shame and like a darkness passing felt what sufferings this family had survived. He stood and waited. One of the girls brought him an earthen jar of spring water. She watched him while he drank it back. Then Teige came and went to the BoatMac’s wife and told her he must go and would be gone some days, and he asked her if they would give care to his father until he returned. She told him he did not need to ask, and then Teige said goodbye to them and the children came to him and he embraced many of them and lifted high two of the girls and kissed their heads. Mr. Clancy stood nearby. Then he turned on his heel and led the way down to the boat, where the oarsman was waiting. Teige followed him and climbed in and then left that island for the first time in a long time. The boat pulled out into the river and Teige looked back and saw the congregation of the BoatMacs standing there, and the sky high and blue, the fields greening with the renewed hope of the turning world, and there, in the distance, the lone, long finger of the saint’s tower.

On that crossing neither man spoke. They arrived in the town of Kilrush, where at the dockside were the usual congress of petitioners, mendicants, ragged ones of mock genteel bearing, and others, hags, crones, aged-looking urchins, men toothless and head-bandaged in cloth filthy and frayed. Mr. Clancy waved all aside and Teige walked behind him and they reached a place where a boy minded the horse and cart. Mr. Clancy threw him a coin. Then they climbed up and passed on out through the streets of the town, where some paused and stared at them, gaping with a kind of naked inquisitiveness at the one who had come from the island. They reached the estate and passed in through the stone pillars and along the tree-lined avenue, where the new leaves rustled in tender breeze. Teige’s throat tightened. He thought of the girl Elizabeth and felt the weight and loss of time and was like one given a glimpse of his younger self. They travelled on. They came to the big field where Teige had worked the horses, and there were many there again that day, and some stopped grazing and raised their long necks and stood statuesque and beautiful and others equally so started and ran and traced a long arc through the fresh grass. Clancy slowed as they passed them. He let Teige watch and for the first time made comment to say some that Teige had broken were fine horses now

But it was not for these that he had been brought, and soon they were turning the wide bend and proceeding on up to the yard and the stables. The closer they got, the more Teige suffered a deep longing which took the form of visions almost palpable and of such a verisimilitude that he risked reaching out like the mad to touch them. He saw the figure of the girl standing and undressed. He saw how her hair fell. He saw her walk across a floor and keep her eyes fixed on his as he watched her. He saw the purse of her lips. Then Clancy was calling to him to get down and they were stopped in the yard before the stables.

Teige got down and felt the solidity of the cobbled ground restore him. He filled his lungs and drew in the smells of that place that were of horses and blacksmithing and woodsmoke and honeysuckle and ivy and all of which revisited him then.

“She’s in here,” Clancy said.

Teige went to the stable half-door. When he got near enough to see only the shadows, the mare inside turned and swung around away from him and snorted with her face to the wall. Teige placed his hands on the top of the door. He leaned there and looked in at her. She was a five-year-old, high and fine and white.

“She’s ready for him,” Clancy said. “But you bring her near and she won’t take him. We’ve brought her three times last year. He’s Bonaparte, lad. You’ve heard of him?” he asked, and at once knew it was foolish. “Well, he’s over East Clare. He’s the one himself wants for her.”

Teige opened the door and was inside the stable before Clancy could tell him not to. He was whispering the sounds he whispered in that language that was not language in any sense other than it existed between him and horses. He stood still and whispered and raised his hands very slowly until they were flat-palmed up to the air like one holding a most delicate and invisible wall. He breathed outward and let the presence of him establish and mix and become inextricable from the sunlit motes of straw dust and the fumes and odours of dung and urine and sweat that hung and made thick the air there. The mare whinnied. She did not turn back her head. Thrice she stamped her hind leg on the off side of him. The damp straw of the bedding was moved aside by that action and the hoof hit the stones of the floor under and made a retort sharp and angry.

“She knows her mind,” Clancy said.

Teige turned and looked at him, and Clancy understood and said he would leave him to it and they would take her to the stallion in the morning.

For the rest of that day, Teige and the mare became familiar each with each. Pyle, the youth that had before brought him his food, was now a redheaded fellow muscled but callow, who came and stood with a bowl of potatoes and a sullen expression. Teige thanked him for the food, but the fellow said nothing but stood and cracked each of his knuckles and then went off. The day was fine and warm. Flies travelled the sunbeams. They buzzed about the horse and felt her heat and she whisked her tail to little avail. The signs of thirst were on her, but she would not take water and was restless and nervy and seemed ill at ease in her own horseflesh. After a time Teige put on her a halter and brought her out and led her clopping across the yard and out down the avenue. He walked her with short lead firmly and said things and kept his head close to hers and allowed the softness of the day to ease her and let her feel her liberty from the stall. He took her on down the way but then turned at the fork and crossed to follow the main avenue so as not to bring her past the grazing horses. He was some way along this when he saw the carriage coming.

The mare flicked her ears, then locked and planted her feet and stood like the semblance of a horse cast in iron or bronze. The noise of the wheels and the beat of hooves and the sleek dark black colour of the rushing carriage all quickened the air there. Teige tried to coax the mare to the side out of the way, but she would not budge. And the carriage bore on toward them. Its dust rose in a cloud and hung pale and luminescent like the fore- or afterpresence of a deity. Teige could see the coachman in livery and see the fellow wave his free hand to clear the avenue, but the mare snorted then and snuffled and shook her head and turned about on the short lead and did not step out of the road. She sniffed the excitement out of the air, and though Teige shush-shushed her and reached his hand to pat the side of her neck, still she frisked and turned and tried to step about in a small circle. The coach was all but on them then. In moments the coachman cried out and stood upright and reined hard back to his chest, and at last the mare moved off the avenue onto the verge of grass. The coach stopped and the mare grew more anxious still. Teige released its lead to the full and let the animal sense it had its freedom. When she moved back so did he. He was in a small, scuffling, pulling, dragging scene then, with the mare moving this way and that and he following with the line fully extended, when the woman in the carriage looked out the window, and he saw in side view in the briefest instant that it was Elizabeth.