Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

One noon clouds heavy and black rose up in the western sky. They came quickly and gathered as they did so, crossing the land like a grim assemblage. Teige watched the shadow coming. Then he brought his horse to shelter in some rocks and waited. Thunder crashed. The horse’s ears went flat and then she let out a cry of alarm and stamped backward and he spoke to her and held up his palm and laid it on her nose. The thunder banged again and the rain fell. Lightning forked. It flew from the sky so close that Teige turned about, and at once the horse ran. She raced off out of the rocks and down into the prairie below. He saw her go and he called after her, but then she was gone. The rain came on. It fell in torrents. Again and again the thunder rolled, grave and declamatory. The air flashed electric. Teige turned his face to the sky and let it fall upon him. He wanted it to be the rain of home. But it fell too hard and was dark and stiff and urgent and seemed with its thunder crashing the antique locution of some god primitive and without other means of communication with his creation. It rained on. It made floods in the darkened ground. Night was made of the daytime as the clouds crossed. Still Teige stood. He thought for moments of the lightning falling through the sky and striking him. And if such had happened, he would not have regretted it, he told himself.

But it did not. The clouds rode on. The storm had made clear the air that in that aftermath was briefly cooled like a drink. Teige took his bedroll and walked on down into the prairie after his horse. He whistled for her and called out. He crossed the dampened ground where the dust clung to his boots and made upon them a reddish coat. The land all about was empty of man or beast or bird. The herds that had grazed there were all elsewhere and the scene entire was tranquil and vacant. He might have been the sole creation left extant.

Time passed. He walked on and the white eye of the sun reappeared overhead and the air wavered with heat once more. He crossed land where the hoofprints of the bison had left a trail wide and broken and there lay there bones of some fallen long ago. He called for the horse. He stopped and considered the endlessness of the terrain and the futility of his attempting to walk out of it. He sat down then. He had some few supplies enough for maybe two days. He had a canteen of water. He had a pistol. The night fell. He was aware of Indians and knew of tribes such as Sioux and Cheyenne, but he did not fear these, for he held his life lightly. A moon climbed above him. Her stars arrived. In the stillness of the dark of that prairie then Teige Foley lay down and after a time, as though to the company of his brothers, began to tell the stories of the constellations above. He spoke aloud. His voice carried a little in the windless night. And in such dark and beneath the canopy there he told of Pegasus the winged horse and Equuleus the foal, and he traced with his eyes the pattern of stars his father saw. He spoke until his lips dried and his voice became a whisper. The enormity of that landscape was spread out about him in the night and upon it he less than a speck of light or dust and with as little consequence it seemed to any in heaven. The moon slid down the dark.

Upon the island winters wet and cold came and were followed by wet and cold springs. Like time the river ran. Smoke climbed from the cottage of the little village and in the damp seasons did not ascend but barely, hanging in the air like a presence or a spirit without form. Gulls and other seabirds flew there. As if these knew the clock of human hunger, they assembled in the sky while the pilots and fishermen ate in the evenings and were there to swoop when the scrapings were thrown outside. Uncertain summers followed. A drift of light rain came up the estuary and drizzled in the windless air and this remained and the autumn was winter once more. All moved in a slow yet ceaseless falling. Upon a ledge in the stone building, Francis Foley kept the letter of Tomas. He awaited news of Teige, but none came. The letter like a thing returning to some former state had grown thinner, its single page read so often that it was light as a wing. When Francis took it from the ledge and lifted it in the candlelight, he saw the ink that was faded from black to grey and he did not tell his wife the words were vanishing. In the season that followed when the rain swept down and the dampness of the climate threatened to turn all rheumatic, the letter soaked up the watery air and in the brief warmth afterwards the ink evaporated altogether. This did not stop him from reading it to his wife. While he read it he watched her face and saw there how her blind eyes settled on some vista of her son and how imagination in some way redeemed the absence and loss.

They endured. The years passed over them. Then in the April of a year there came across the river a flotilla of boats and upon them a colourful crew of figures. The men were dressed in shirts of red and yellow and such and the women were long-haired and wore bracelets and golden hoops from their ears. They came ashore where the village women and children had gathered to meet them. The men stood with legs akimbo and hands on their waists. The women studied with brazen looks the clothes and manner of the females there. The island children held to their mothers’ skirts and stared. One among the arrivals, a man with hair to his shoulder and a white shirt, stepped forward. Behind him was a beautiful woman with about her an array of a half dozen figures in steady progression from girl to woman, each the twin of another and each more lovely than any there had seen before. The man spoke in an accent that made the words seem made of wood.

“We have come from the town of Kilkee yesterday,” he said. “They told us there that there was a man here with an eye on the heavens.” He paused and looked over them. Mild wind blew. None moved or showed recognition.

“A glass,” he said, and made with his hands the shape of a great telescope and aimed it at the sky. “A man who looks at the stars.”

“He is here.” It was a young boy of the BoatMacs. “He is here,” he said, “in the tower.”

They went then like a wave and passed all together up the path and past the hedgerows of thorn and bramble. The children ran ahead and made noise of high-hearted cries and excitement, and in the fields thereabouts rabbits paused in alarm and then darted away. They came within sight of the tower. The man in the white shirt strode to the front. His face was browned from climates not theirs, and his dark eyes contained deeps from scenes witnessed none there could imagine. Yet all could tell he was upon one of the moments of his life.

The crowd reached the tower and the clamour deflated and they stood thereabouts in a roughly drawn arc. Then Francis Foley came out into the daylight, and Finbar his son saw him for the first time since he had thought his father drowned in the river.

There was a moment in which they looked at each other like ones newly reencountered in the mists of the hereafter.

“Finbar?” the old man said then. “Finbar?” He raised his hand to pause the air and seemed as if he would fall down. Then he went back to the doorway of the tower where Emer stood and he led her out into the light and told her this was her son Finbar come back again.

She came to his arms, and at once the gypsies cheered. They cheered and clapped and some laughed and pushed each other about. Children embraced in giddy mock performance and ran off then with shrieks and wild yahoos. Finbar brought forward his wife, Cait, and the half dozen Roses.

“My lovely daughters,” he said, and then laughed himself with head back at the blue-and-white sky.