Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“Teige,” she said, “is it Teige?”

Her voice was cracked and whispery and frail and seemed like a thing left long in harsh weather.

“Mother.”

She reached out both her hands and they hung in the air slightly aflutter until her son leaned forward and put his face between them. She drew him to her then and they seemed to melt upon each other, and not the horses or the carts or the people that moved in the street mattered for them at all. Understanding this, the crowd of onlookers slowly stepped back and then dispersed down the street to speak of what they had seen and to console themselves of their own losses and the many of theirs that were missing or gone.

Teige and his mother embraced there in the thin wet afternoon light. They wept. They held to each other like ones rescued in a drowning. They said nothing at all. After a time Clancy came out to see where Teige had got to, and he came upon the scene and in his mood made buoyant by whiskey he called out loudly and clapped Teige on his back. Teige stood up then and told him this was his mother who had been long lost. And Clancy offered her his hand that she could not see and he said, Well, well, well, and Emer stood up from the street and was now a woman small and light and crooked, though she held her chin high.

“You’ll be coming back with us, then?” Clancy said. And when neither of them responded he nodded forcefully and answered himself. “Yes indeed. Indeed you will.” He waited a moment, his legs planted, as if unsure whether he could suggest to the others to come into the public house for a final drink before the journey. Then some torch of self-consciousness shone upon him, and one-handed he smoothed down the tuft of his hair and said: “Well, we’ll go now, then.”

They left there in the late part of the afternoon with the light poor and the mare hungry in the cart. Those who had been her company stood by the wayside and though she was blind raised their hands in farewell. They watched her go and stood out in the street after she had passed, taking solace from that reunion and studying the horizon upon which the travellers diminished. On the seatboard softly the mother rocked. Her head she kept at a slight angle away from Clancy and toward her son, and sometimes she freed her two hands from where they held each other and opened them in the air and Teige placed his right hand between them and they closed about it. Now in the easy drifts of his intoxication, Clancy said nothing. He was comfortable in himself and was as one who has suddenly discovered his spirit larger than he imagined. They moved on. The countryside passed in its ceaseless green unrolling. Carts and coaches and men on horseback journeyed across the dying of the light. Farmers and sons drove two or three cows with sticks, and these dunged the road and the last flies found them. As the day fell into twilight, those coming and going on that road took on the unreal form of things without substance. Riders appeared and faded in the gloaming. Soon they were travelling in the first darkness of night and it came to Teige that this was the world his mother saw, and he reached his arm about her and held her against him. On the outskirts of the town of Ennis, Clancy stopped the cart and palmed flat his hair and looked at the darkness and then reined the horses to the left and brought them to a large farmhouse. There he climbed down and went inside and came out to the Foleys some time after and told them they would stay there the night. Teige brought his mother down from the cart then, leading her upon his arm to where Clancy’s sister was standing at the open door. The woman welcomed them and brought them inside, where she said food would be ready for them shortly. Teige went outside and untied the mare and took her to a stable and fed and watered her and, crossing back, he moved beneath the stars, which were clear now and arrested him a moment. He looked at Orion and Pegasus. He thought of his father that night, studying those same constellations, and knew that he must tell his mother about him and about his brothers. And he thought too of Elizabeth and lingered there in the stillness of the yard and looked across at the yellow lamp glow of the house and stood and felt the existence of such a thing as grace.

Later that night, then, in a small room that was off the hearth, mother and son lay sleepless in a cover, their separate histories vast and unspoken in the dark above them. Slender stellar light fell. The sill of the small window shone and showed in the corner lacelike tracery of spiders. Mice worked. At last, though he did not know if she was awake or sleeping, Teige said: “Mother?”

It seemed strange to be sounded aloud. It seemed a word he had never heard himself say.

“Mother?”

“Yes, Teige.”

“They are all gone,” he said. “Finbar, Finan, and Tomas, too. I am the only one left.”

She did not say anything at once. He wondered in her dark world if shades or shadows fell. He wondered if there was blackness and then utter blackness. He reached his hand toward the shape of her and his fingers arrived at the softness of her face that was like a fallen fruit wet in the grass.

“I thought I had cried my last,” she said.

He told her quickly then that none of them may be dead. He told her of the river crossing with the telescope and the chase from Limerick and the gypsies and the races on the sands. He told her of Tomas and his love and how they had been lost to them for so long. He told her of the twins vanishing and how they had never returned but wandered in separate somewheres unknown. He paused and did not tell her then of his own searching or the years of solitude tramping the roads. He heard her sighs. He heard the new sorrows make room in the confines of her spirit. The night moved on a time. Clouds came from the west and darkened the window. Then rain began.

“I found him,” Teige said then. “Father, I found him on the road. He was looking for us. He was looking for you. He knew of an island.” He stopped himself a moment and did not know if she wanted to be told. But he felt compelled and said: “He is there now. He is sorry. He looks for you in the stars.”

There escaped from her the smallest cry, as if some great weight had been pressed against her chest and she could utter nothing more. Teige did not continue. Then out of the darkness his mother’s hand reached for him and touched his face and then her other joined it and she held his head between her fingers and kissed his forehead.

“I came back,” she said. “The day after. I came back.”

She paused and her breaths came in sharp gasps.

“We had a fight. He wanted to go, I wanted to stay. I went out the door. I only meant to be gone a day until he could see how he needed me. God forgive me. I came back the next morning, the house was on fire. They were hunting him. I thought you were burned. Oh God.” She cried out and she moaned as if torn and Teige drew her closer and they held to each other then, weeping in the darkness of the night. He stroked her silvered hair, he touched her blind eyes, and murmured to her shush-shush sounds while all about them in the fields of that countryside a bitter rain fell.

In the dawn the skies cleared. A buffeting wind like a busy housekeeper moved about and took down the first leaves of autumn. Sycamore trees around the farmhouse made whispers and shivers, sea sounds. Birds were sent about and arced and whirled on air that gleamed. Teige rose and went to see to the mare and then led his mother to the table which Clancy’s sister had lain. Clancy himself did not appear at first, and his sister knocked and called to him several times before his head came around the door. He would take no food. He would be ready shortly, he told them. They ate and rose and thanked the woman. Then Teige backed the mare once more onto its transport and they left there.