Niall Williams: The Fall of Light

“All I have, I said I would give it you.”

He said the words and may have imagined from them would follow the rescue, and may even have thought they could both walk from there. But then through the door came a man called Maunsell with bald head and wide reddish sideburns who saw the dead man and the coins and called stop and grabbed the pistol from the woman in the door and fired it just as Tomas Foley dived sideways. There were screams, there were yells from down the hall and men and women running. The room surged with people, and then Tomas Foley leapt through the window and shattered the glass and arrived bleeding in the street.

In the emptiness of that same day, Teige conversed with the swan. He knew the various mythologies of the swan that had been passed to him in the form of stories told by his mother. He knew of the daughters of Lir who had been banished into swanhood on Lough Ern for nine hundred years. He knew the tale of Leda and the swan that was Zeus, and the sons of God, the twins who were stars, Castor and Polydeuces. So he realized that the transformation of his father into the white bird that sailed by the shore of the river was neither unique nor fearful. It was almost fitting, he thought. For his father would have taken a kind of natural pride in at last becoming part of legend. So, while the twins hunted for sloeberries in the woods, Teige came down to the riverside and told the swan in plain Irish that he was sorry for what had happened to him.

“I knew we should not have crossed the river,” he said. “I was not afraid of it, but I knew. As you know now,” he added. “Let that be the end of it between us.”

Wind made the river into waves that lapped softly. The swan did not sail away. It stayed while Teige fed it the heads and tails of trout.

“Where is my mother?” he asked, but heard only the slow soft lapping of the waters.

“I suppose there are advantages in being a swan,” Finan said when they had returned with berries.

“Indeed there are,” his twin agreed, but could not think of any until Teige told them.

“For him there’s no time now. He’s in the everlasting.”

“Here?”

“Yes, here, and anywhere he chooses to go. He can swim into the past or the future and be a swan there.”

“But not a man again?”

“No,” Teige said, and they three sat and pondered this and watched the inscrutable eye of the swan and the way its feathers ruffled sometimes when there seemed no breeze.

The darkness that night was deep and damp and starless. It painted the woods at their back into the sky and made the river before them into a black slickness that licked the air. The brothers waited for Tomas in the half-sleep of those who know trouble is on its way. The world turned with them lying but not sleeping beside their horses in the wetness of the night. They listened to Teige tell them the story of Orpheus and the Underworld. Then afterwards they listened to the wind in the woods and heard there the voices of ghosts and fairies and other spirits who had nowhere else to be. They heard them and shuddered in the fear that a hand might reach out and arrive on their shoulders at any moment, and that it would be not the hand of agent or landlord, but the inviting gesture into the Underworld of the dreamless Dead.

So, when they heard the first hoofbeats they did not move. They were huddled together in a grey blanket. Their eyes were wide. Though their horses neighed and moved about and beat at the ground with the smell of terror that was coming, and though soon the rider shouted out to them, still they did not move from the paralysis of fear. It was not until Tomas had ridden to within twenty feet of the bank of the river that Teige knew they were in reality.

The eldest brother’s arm was dangling limply from his shoulder socket. He was slumped forward and his face was bloodied.

“Quickly, now,” he said, “we have a few moments, no more. They are behind me.”

The Foleys were used to flight. It was a family habit from the time before their great-grandfather. The twins were on their horses the moment they stood up. Teige ran to the river’s edge. He called some words to the swan, then came back and he too was on his pony and they were racing into the darkness.

They stayed ahead of their pursuers, riding with the abandon of the lawless. The younger brothers did not even know why they were being chased but supposed that whatever the reason it was unjust and deadly and was another in the long catalog of inequitable grief that was the family’s history. The twins, riding together bareback on the gray gelding, became wild in the chase. Rather than seek the silent protection of the darkness, they yahooed in the air and shrieked loudly enough to rouse the birds from the tops of the trees in the great wood. Soon there were blackbirds flying, scattering the last dead leaves from the oaks and filling the air with a fluttering falling that in the darkness traversed like flakes of feeling, wild and ungathered. The twins yelled out. Finbar rode on the rear of the horse and waved his arms wide like a demented bird. Tomas was tilted forward on the chestnut, his arm like a rag and eyes glittering with the broken pieces of Love as he led the way into the nowhere that the Foleys sought for new beginning.

They rode forever. The pursuit was dogged, fueled with whiskey and the twisted righteousness of those who know themselves equally guilty. The bald figure of the law squeezed the flanks of his horse until white foam fell from its mouth. His men chased on, riding on a hotbed of lust, seeing in the capturing and killing of Tomas Foley a way to release what was twisting and burning inside of them. How many of them there were the Foleys did not know. The brothers surged on through the darkness, racing blindly through screes where the gorse and hawthorn prickled and clawed and made scarlet ribbons of blood across their cheeks and arms. They rode down to the river’s side and found at once their progress slowed by mud. Teige’s pony began to tire. Then in the water he saw the white gleam of the swan.

“They’ll catch us,” Finbar said.

“Feck, they won’t,” Tomas told them. His face was twisted in a mask of fury and guilt and remorse.

They stopped in indecision.

Then Teige said, “I’m not afraid of the river.”

They tied the horses loosely to each other, and Teige spoke to them and told them they must fly like their horse ancestors into the darkness and lose the ones who were chasing them. Then he blew his scent into their quivering nostrils and smacked them free.

The brothers stepped into the Shannon. Teige floated on one side of the swan and Tomas on the other. Then, with the twins flanking them and holding on tight, they moved out into the river and at once were borne away on the current.

And we can leave them there a moment. The part of the story that is the courtship and marriage of Francis and Emer Foley is told on winter nights when stars flock into the sky. It is told by the old to the young in cautionary tones. Sometimes the courtship alone is told and seems a story out of arcadia. She was the daughter of a hedge-school master. His name was Marcus O’Suilleabhain. He was from the County Galway and had come eastward with his family when Emer was still a child. They lived in a place not far from Carlow. Sometimes there he taught her Latin and Greek and spoke in those languages with an ease and eloquence that made him seem a figure out of times antique. He was blue-eyed and wore a grey beard. His fingers were long and thin, as his daughter would tell, and by yellow candlelight he would sit in the evenings and dip ink and write words and say these out loud as he did so. He told his daughter stories in Irish and Latin both and made in this way obscure connection between times long distant and those of their living. He loved the fair-haired girl his only daughter for the semblance she was of her mother and for the high-spirited way she had and how she held her head back when she walked in the street as the daughter of the master. When she was not yet twelve years old, he first told her the legends of the stars. He sat with her and told her these, though her mother thought she should be at bread baking or other such things. Marcus O’Suilleabhain did not care. He had no sons. He had this beauty of a daughter. He sat by her bed and talked her into sleep. And just so, between her waking and her dreams there walked on the mud floors of their two-room cottage Apollo and Artemis, and Pallas Athene, Hermes, Dionysus, such figures. She had been born in Virgo, and when in the spring and summer her stars could be seen, Marcus recounted to her the legends of the winged virgin. She was the queen of the stars, he said, the goddess of the corn. She loved one who was cut down in his prime, and she had to travel through winter to the Underworld to bring him back. But she did. For, see, the winter ends and she returns with him every spring. The master told her there were many names for her, the lovers were Venus and Adonis, or Isis and Osiris, but whichever there was always the grief and the journey and the promised return.