Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“Tell me,” she said.

He did not think he should at first. At first he thought it risked her in some obscure way. He thought fortune and misfortune so close to each other that there was the thinnest sliver between them and the slightest error could bring the latter.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I would like to hear you tell me about them. I will place them around my dark.”

And so he did. He looked up high into the sky at Cassiopeia and told her its form and then took her down through the sky to the Bears Minor and Major and over to Castor and Pollux, too. These he named and she sat attentive and did not tilt her head but seemed to be gazing nonetheless upon a panorama of inner stars.

“You love them so, don’t you?” she said one night when already such mapping of the dark had become their custom.

“I do. They are so pure,” he said to her. “They are like something perfect. From the time of Adam. And I cannot look at them without thinking of you. Thinking of the days we met and the nights we went out roaming and you told me stories of them.”

She did not say any more. She held his arm. They sat there.

“I will think of them now as the boys,” she said.

The night was still. A moon gibbous and bare hung overhead.

Francis’s voice answered softly: “Yes.”

Five days later Michael McMahon came up to the tower and brought with him a letter that had been left in the town of Kilrush he said for he didn’t know how long. It had lain in dirt in a corner, for none had wanted to bring it over. It was the letter from Tom Foley to Teige. The old man read it aloud. He finished by saying the name Tom. Then he said it again. Tom. Then he started the letter from the beginning and read it over once more.

“We must send a letter to him,” Emer said. “And when Teige writes to us we will tell him where he is. And when the twins come back we will tell them, too.”

That night when they sat for their stellar vigil the air had turned cold, and Emer Foley asked him then to take her to the telescope. He led her there and laid her down alongside him and he blew on the eyepiece and cleared webwork and dust. She placed her head upon his chest over his heart.

“Now,” she said, “I will tell you about my stars.”

And Teige and Elizabeth arrived off the coast of Canada just before ice forced the closure of the ports along the Saint Lawrence River. They arrived after a long journey in which Elizabeth had suffered sickness and woke from fitful sleeps crying out in fright. Her face grew paler and her cheekbones more prominent. Teige served her food and drink and brought to her what comforts he could find. He urged her to come on deck and take exercise, but she had a horror of her fellow passengers. They were walking dirt and disease, she told him, and she would not move from the narrow bed. When he came to her and tried again to have her walk with him when briefly the ship found calm blue waters, she shouted at him:

“I don’t need exercise! I’m not one of your horses!”

For the remainder of that grey voyage then she lay belowdecks. She turned her face in her pillow and was like a rag twisted. Her eyes took on a haunted look. The farther the distance travelled, the deeper she fell in despair. She berated Teige for clumsiness and smacked away the plate when she saw his thumb above it against the pork. She despised how he befriended others of the passengers and found in his very appearance faults she had not noticed before. Sometimes after she had screamed at him, then she calmed and sobbed and opened her arms to him and asked for forgiveness and said it was the wretched sea. It was the wretched boat, it wasn’t her at all. He was not to mind.

And for the most part, he tried not to. He tried to imagine the life ahead of them. When he walked on the windy deck or held to the rails in the sheets of rain, he looked at the blank horizon and tried to be emptied of his fears. He lifted his face to the weather. He sought in his mind the image of the island and his father and his mother there. Long hours while Elizabeth lay below he thought of them and thought of his brothers gone and wondered where in the vastness of the world was Tomas. He stood and held on in that swaying ocean that was like a watery bridge between the old life and the new. He stood until his loneliness weakened him. Then he came down the steps and along the passage to where Elizabeth lay and he took off his coat and knelt beside her and caressed the top of her head. He lowered his forehead then to her until it rested against her shoulder and he could stay so a long time and she would not move and no word would pass between them.

For reasons not explained to its passengers, the Mary Anne did not arrive in Halifax but came about Cape Sable and docked at Saint John, New Brunswick. When Teige and Elizabeth disembarked they gave their names as Foley and were man and wife. Elizabeth told the officer they met that their luggage had been sent ahead of them. They walked off down the gangway in the chill air of late autumn in a place where the air was pungent with fish and gulls made raucous sounds overhead. Fishermen, bearded high onto their cheeks, worked with crates and barrels wherein the silvered catch slapped in spasm. Some spoke, but not in words that Teige understood. Elizabeth laid her hand upon his arm.

“This way,” she said, indicating that they should not follow the clump of their fellow passengers, those freckle-faced Galwegians who moved like some slow, lumpish porridge all together up the street.

There were men in peaked caps and others in suits of black that studied the arrivals there. There were some that called out offers of lodging and food and more still that cried out sailings on ships bound for Boston and points south. Past these Elizabeth guided Teige and past those too who stared wide-eyed upon her beauty and followed her with their heads. They went along a street of mud upon a walk of loose boards. The heel of Elizabeth’s shoe caught and she slipped and cursed and stamped at the plank.

“We’re getting out of here tomorrow,” she said.

They took a room in a boardinghouse run by a woman red-faced and large. She was Mrs. Flump. She wore an apron tied about her from neck to knee and within such lost all shape but was a great mound smelling variously of flour and carbolic. Her eyes were bright blue like things lit. She asked where they were bound.

“We are not sure,” Teige said.

“Boston,” Elizabeth replied. “Our trunks are sent ahead.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Flump.

Their room was small but tidy. Elizabeth sniffed at the sheets and found them clean and then lay upon them in her dress. Teige undid her boots.

“This is hell,” she said. “We are fallen into hell.” Her eyes stared at the ceiling boards where a web had recently been woven.

“I will take you to a better place,” Teige said. “This is only tonight. We have just arrived. There is a huge country here. We will be happy.”

“Oh God, Teige.” She held out her arms to him and he came to her and they held each other and kissed and waited for the fall of night while keeping mute their separate fears.

In the morning Mrs. Flump gave them a breakfast of eggs, but these Elizabeth could not stomach and she retreated to her room at once.

“Is she expecting?” Mrs. Flump asked Teige. “I often find those expecting can’t eat the eggs.”

Teige’s face was blank, and Mrs. Flump saw his surprise and quickly added, “No, I suspect probably not. It’s probably just the long journey.”

Still the thought remained with Teige, and when they left there and Mrs. Flump stood in her doorway and gave them a carbolic-scented napkin of her scones, he thought her eye studied Elizabeth for some further sign.