Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

As if this then were a latch released, the gypsies turned and went down the village and began the business of celebration proper. Some of them were those originals who had left the lake with Finbar years before, who had wintered by the great forest and crossed the mountains into France in the spring. Others were some they had met along the way, ashen figures dispossessed and tramping the roads without direction. There were men and women of various nations, their look and language each their own. All for reasons unsaid had taken up with those gypsies and journeyed westward toward the ocean. Their progress had been stopped often. Sometimes in the softness of the season when crossing a river such as the Saone, they had found themselves turned south and slowing to a languorous motion while the sun shone. They had drowsed and drunk the wines there and seemed in a place Elysian. The perfumes of that landscape wafted and wound about them. Their journey westward then had been stalled. Their horses grew fat on summer grass. Then, a morning of changed wind, and without announcement or discussion Finbar yoked his caravan and the others did likewise. Leaving the flattened imprint of their stay upon the grass and the blackened eyes of their fires, all had turned about and headed north and west once more. They had little sense of time, only season. They followed roads that led to others. They crossed up through France. They met a troupe of actors who performed in frayed and gaudy costumes the plays of Moliere. They came upon some that were soldiers deserted from a war of which none had heard. At last they reached the sea at Cherbourg and sailed from there to Plymouth. In England they did not stay long. Rain made grey that country and they crossed up through it in the last days of winter and so wended onward toward the place Finbar imagined home. In the town of Kilkee they had found none of Cait’s family living. Nor was there sign of the Foley brothers. Upon this discovery, Finbar had led his wife down to the white strand with their daughters, and while the other gypsies camped on the high field that overlooked the sea, he had walked with his family along the sand there and said little and watched the waves breaking. “Here I saw your mother the first time,” he told the girls after a while, and they smiled widely and their eyes shone, for this was a story they had often heard, of the mer-girl and the seaweed, and they giggled at this sudden proof of the actual. The Roses ran off then into the tide, the younger ones only to their ankles and kicking high, cold splashes that glittered. Their mother and father watched them and were in some fashion by this restored.

Two evenings following, Finbar heard of the man on the island with the glass.

Now to each gypsy of those originals the long journey there seemed as nothing. Though none were cousin or kin to any, the instant the mother had embraced her son there had passed through them like a charge the sense of something right in the world. They did not explain it to each other. But there the travail and effort, the long uncertainty of their shapeless lives, all fell away. They clapped backs. They hung arms over shoulders. They went down to the village again and from there to their boats wherein were stored all manner of items none there had seen before. The gypsies carried up onto the sand chests with iron padlocks. While children ran about they opened these and brought out strange wood and paper goods. Others set up a yellow tent on the sand. A gypsy with open shirt held his hands wide and then clapped and clapped again a beat and then to this rhythm sang in what the islanders did not know was Italian. A fire was lit there and flames crackled and twisted this way and that in the small breeze. The gypsy women showed jewels and hoops and bangles. They proffered in their palms blue stones mined from countries in Asia and ran between their fingers Indian silks they had gathered on their wanderings. None of these they tried to sell, but showed them like gathered evidence of the wonders of the world and their part within it. By the fall of darkness the pilots had returned. They came ashore with some amazement and passed up through the fires and singing and roasting meat like ones somnambulant in vivid dream. They went to their cottages as if to confirm the island was the same they had left in the dawn and then came down sheepish and circumspect and stood on the edge of the firelight where their children were dancing.

When the dark was deepest blue then a small assembly of the gypsies carried in bundles sticks with wads of cloth wound about them. One other bore a firebrand. They went to the shore and the crowd murmured and the singer stopped, as did the one playing the blue guitar. Then a touch-paper was lit. Into the sky streaked a trail of light. It blazed upward and turned the heads of all below and upon a moment then exploded with a bang. Splintered light fell. Those watching ducked down their heads at first and held them fearful so until the same fragments faded like things erased into the dark. Other fireworks were shot into the night. All manner of trajectory was briefly there illumined and in all colours of the spectrum. Wheels of fire spun above them. Blue balls of flame whirled. Now the gypsies did not await the decline of one to send another but flashed some that fizzed fast and others that flew and climbed the dark in slow ascent and met there the falling tendrils of scintilla yellow and gold. The night sky flared and was shred in ribbons. In the crowd below some held their arms up as if to reach the sky blooms and cried out and shouted. More rockets were fired. Each rose in swift, short bursts of fury and released itself high and bright above like things in glorious failure unable to reach some higher plane. The music began again then. The strings of the guitar were plucked in dance time and the island women linked arms with each other while their men watched. The gypsy men were less bashful. They clapped wide claps and threw back their heads and made swaying body movements as if in time to some inner rhythm of the universe deep and secret and ancient.

That night they slept where they fell down. By the next the islanders were less unsure of their visitors. In the day they shared with them food and their children played together and went off hunting about the island. When night fell the festivities resumed. The Roses came and danced there. Some fellows from the town of Kilrush rowed the night river and came up on the shore and saw those sisters and weakened to their knees at their loveliness. These same were then told by the pilots to be gone, and they returned to their boat and rowed a small way and then sat in the tide and looked back upon the scene with yearning. The Roses danced. Their mother and father came down from the tower and watched them.

“There will be boys to beat away every night now,” Finbar said.

“I hope so,” Cait replied.

The month of April passed. A warm and easy summer began. At times the pilots took with them some of the gypsies when they rowed out to meet the ships. These delighted in the race and took off their shirts sometimes and held them flapping in the wind like flags or banners. They saluted the victor with broad operatic gesture that threatened to capsize them and then called out to each other gambles on who would win the next. In the night when the men returned, they took to predicting the races of tomorrow. The gypsies turned over cards and made inexpert prophecies and pretended for a time that they had seen the unknown. But in truth what future was yet before them none there knew. They did not ask Finbar how long they would stay, and neither did he mention to any of them his intentions. The days rolled on. Bees and birds of summer flew. The buttery almond scent of gorse was spread over the air and then sweetened further by honeysuckle and fuchsia. Sun dallied the day long. The river ran blue as a southern sea. And in that season the island seemed a place from which none would ever leave. What clamour and battle and bitterness was history seemed to exist in an elsewhere. The summer hung there, its weather like a gift.