Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“You’ll take him out? And be able to hold him?” he asked the man.

The fellow widened his eyes. “I will.”

“Wait until I say. I’ll close over the gate.”

Teige went then and brought out the mare on a line and told Clancy to shut the gate between her and the stallion. And when this was done he called up to the other and told him to bring out the stallion, and soon both horses were frisking on lines either side of the shut gate. He backed the mare then to the gate and held her there and let the stallion approach and take the smell of her and raise his head as if savouring it and twist it about thrice in the heavy rain air. He came to her and his nostrils widened and his sex rose and he pressed and angered at the gate impatiently, and still the man held him. The mare did not kick back as was her won’t.

“Let her through to him now!” the man called. “I won’t be able to hold him.”

“No, hold him, wait. Wait.”

Teige took the mare then and turned her away and walked her in a small muddy circle there where she could see the stallion. He held her back when she would have stepped forward. The rain ran on his face.

“Now, now open the gate,” he called, and Clancy stepped across and did so and the stallion came forward, pulling the man with the wide eyes like some minor nuisance. Then the two horses passed alongside each other and the mare tried to bite and her teeth showed in the air and each neighed aloud and Teige called out for the ropes to be loosened. Then, with the men standing muted about them in the pouring rain, and holding the long lines limp, the stallion mounted the mare and became briefly a thing colossal, high and muscled and shuddering as if with the charged currency of the earth itself.

In moments it was over. The men came to and sharply reined the horses apart and with swift economy of movement brought each back to the places of their confinement. The mare was backed up the platform and it was raised with a clatter and shut. The stallion, subdued and dull-eyed, was led inside the stable and the door bolted. Clancy went off to the house with the other man and performed what matters of business were required. Teige waited. He looked at the mare, tranquil now, her coat damply matted, and the coupling already passed like some figment into the deeps of her memory. If there was such, Teige thought. If it’s not just of then, done, and then gone. The rain fell. He waited. No sound came from either horse.

When at last Clancy came out he had the flushed cheeks of strong whiskey and his eyes were brightened like glass polished. He climbed up on the cart and told Teige he was good, by God, he was good, and they would stop and get a drink to celebrate. They would, so they would. He clucked at the horses and they wheeled about and out of there. A short time later they came to the town of Killaloe on the banks of the river. The rain stopped then and the place hung in sorry wet aftermath like a child half-drowned. Clancy looked along the street for a place suitable to their needs. No sooner had he found one than there appeared a small boy ready to hold the horses and keep all safe while the men went inside. Teige and Clancy got down, and Clancy gave the boy something. Already there was a little cluster of some too proud to be called beggars who assembled to beg there. They stood in the men’s way with no menace, but urgent persistence. Their begrimed hands opened, palm upward like rough petals. Their clothes steamed a strong sour odour that was the perfume of rain and sweat and poverty. They offered prayers and blessings and intercession with saints of all name and manner and appeals to the Virgin herself for the cause of the good travellers. As if wading in murk, Clancy raised his arms above them and tried to move forward. He saw the doorway where he was headed and pushed toward it, parting the beggars and telling them he had nothing for them. He did not look back at Teige behind him. He did not see how they gathered about the younger man, and how Teige stopped there.

Teige stopped and his mouth opened and he felt himself weaken as though a surfeit of air had arrived in his lungs or he were suddenly out of his element. His hand outstretched was taken by one of the hands offered to him. Others joined this and took him gently. He near staggered but did not and yet seemed almost asway as he came forward. His expression was of one caught and transported in revelation even there on the grey wet street of that town. The look of his eyes must have bespoken something or resembled a beam, for the little crowd followed the gaze and turned and saw at whom he was staring.

It was a woman, one amongst them, who hung back and waited on the side of the street. She was wrapped in a shawl and stood with patience and a faraway look. She did not turn her face to see Teige coming to her. She did not lift her eyes from the scene infinite in distance upon which her mind gazed. He came to her and the little crowd of the others came with him. Some held his sleeve, others the hem of his jacket, but none said anything now. Dreamlike, as if the moment did not exist but must be lived anyway, Teige reached the woman and stood before her, and a cry escaped from deep in his throat and seemed to buckle him. For he fell down onto his knees and then reached up and touched the face of the blind woman who was his mother.

And some time then in the darkness of the night many miles away, Finbar Foley woke and felt the left side of his body was dead. Beneath the covers he reached across himself and with his right arm made short, tapping motions as if to gently awaken the part that was numb. When this failed his actions grew more urgent, and Cait woke in the bed beside him to find him beating at his left breast with his fist.

“God almighty, what are you doing?” she said.

“Half of me is dead,” Finbar told her, and no sooner had he uttered the words than their reality struck him and he let out a sharp cry and stopped still.

“What is it? Tell me, what?”

“It is Finan,” Finbar said. “My twin, he is dead.”

When the light dawned over the lake that morning, he went down the ramshackle street to the house of the fortune-teller. By then the feeling in his left side had returned, but an ache persisted as if he had been lanced and he walked crookedly, his right hand clutching at his left side. He did not wish to be noticed on such consultation and wore a green felt hat pulled low on his forehead. When the fortune-teller saw him at her door she nodded sagely, as though his future were already with her or she were already many pages ahead of him in the tale of his own life. She waved a pendulous arm and he entered. With his hat on he sat in a room that no longer resembled the caravan it once was. There were silks and other thin cloths draped and curtains of purple beads that swung and clacked minutely in the afterwards of his arrival. Candles burned and made the air dense as a soup of flowers. The fortune-teller sat on a kind of cushioned throne and raised her bejewelled fingers and made of these a gesture as if playing an invisible concertina. She remained so, feeling whatever vibrated there in the space between them, for some time. A large woman, she had passed her seventieth year but scorned all such measurement of time and was on that her fifth lifetime lipsticked and thickly painted and bewigged in a tousle of flame red hair. She watched Finbar with steady gaze while fingering the air. When at last she stopped, she asked him if he wished the cards as well.

“Do you need the cards before you can tell me?” he said.

“I do not. I can read the future like script on paper. It is there,” she said, and waved a heavy hand toward his face and stirred the soup so its scents swirled.