Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

Then, in the end of August, the old restlessness returned in the blood of Finbar. He woke and imagined he was moving. He went out into the day and stood awhile and watched the water and the sky.

“We have to go,” he said to Cait when he came back.

“I know,” she surprised him by saying. “I have been waiting. There’s no home for the likes of us.”

“We will come back every year.”

“You need not worry. Your daughters will see to that,” she said.

Finbar went then and walked up to the tower to tell his father and his mother.

“We will go north to Ballinasloe to the horse fair in October,” he said. “We will go on but promise to come back.”

His father nodded and held Emer’s hand in his lap.

“Every man must live his own life,” he said. “You will come back?”

“Every year in the summertime.”

“God bless you, Finbar,” said the blind mother, and she raised her hands to feel his face.

The following morning the gypsies sailed from the island. Before they went, Finbar brought to his father the map of Benardi. “Look at this and you will think of us,” he said. “We will be back when the blossoms are on the trees.”

They left then and the island women and children watched them go, and some youths swam alongside the boats a ways and then stopped and gathered breath, their heads like dark blooms on the water. They swam back and came ashore and the boats receded farther and bore off with them the imaginings of many. For the islanders had grown used to the gypsies and now in their absence felt the silence fall like a heavy curtain. In the night there were no festivities or gatherings. Mists grey and wet enshrouded the island, and the season turned. It was a place again hushed and alone and when the rain fell it seemed to make dreary and dull the world and many there dreamed in secret of what adventures had befallen those gypsies now.

The islanders looked for them in the summer. And when they came, good as their word, they came with the same flourish of colour and revelry, of song and music and dancing and fireworks. They came this time with canaries. They brought them in many cages and hung these in the twisted trees, where the canaries sang to other birds there. They brought kites of stick and paper too and flew them on long lines from the shore. Such flying was good for the spirit, one said, who did nothing else all day but tug softly on the unwound spool and gaze up at the distant fluttering as if at some furthermost extension of himself wild in the breeze. Their gifts were many and varied and became like tokens of goodwill exchanged between those who arrived and those who welcomed them. They were the beginning of what would become a custom. The things they brought carried within them stories of the greater world, and whether the islanders laughed or raised their eyebrows at such as winding music boxes or hot peppers or slippers of silver with curved toes, they enjoyed all and were grateful. In the beginning of autumn they left again and promised to return and did so. There were no more than the half dozen Roses, but these with each visit became more beautiful still. And in time the gypsies’ caravan itself would come to seem like a touring carousel crossing the earth back and forth, bound by some antique covenant, and sheltering within it those beauties. They were like Grecian figures reincarnate and had dark eyes and pale skin that maddened many. No sooner would they land on the island than the river would fill with night-boys crossing in boats for glimpses of them and the pilots would run down and pitch stones and yell and wave their arms as if able to shoo away fate. Fin-bar himself did not join the pilots. He knew his daughters’ beauty bore with it some seeded destiny and knew that one day too he would have to meet it. He grew older and strangely wiser. He came to his father and brought him always a chart of some kind. He brought maps and drawings of islands newly named. He brought the latest cartography of their own country and scrolls and parchments inked with mountains and rivers and shorelines. The old man took these with grace and thanked him each time. He told Finbar he studied them when he was gone away and placed them to one side. To his mother Finbar gave scented oils and powders and such. He gave her candles, though he knew she could not see their light, for he said they could be lit for remembrance. Then he sat with them in that old place of stone and none of them spoke, and the summer breeze blew and each of them thought of the brothers gone.

Then one year the gypsies did not return in the summer.

The islanders watched for them. They invented reasons: how the gypsies might be delayed in mountains, or on sea crossings, or in any manner of trouble that might be abroad. Into August they waited for them to come before they began to accept the chill of autumn was arriving. The gypsies never came, only the winter with sleet and ice.

Then, a day in the following June, a boy ran through the village calling, “They are here! They are here!”

The boats they came in were laden low. They had been in countries in the East and brought all manner of strange and exotic goods, some of whose uses were unknown to themselves. They brought there too a form of early bicycle, an angular contraption of iron rims and timber handles that looked in some ways like an assemblage of garden tools on large wheels. This one of the gypsies demonstrated, wobbling out down a sloping field of grass, cheered and chased by the children until like a proof of some laws of science he slowed to standstill, balanced an instant, and finally toppled. There were other such near inventions, three-handed clocks with cuckoos that sang, sheets of carbon upon which faces could leave their imprint, socks that were soled like shoes, thick-glassed spectacles that made all look far away, a pendulum that if hung over the expectant foretold the sex of the unborn.

While all these were uncased and held out and shown to the islanders, Finbar went up the pathway to the tower. Even as he approached it he felt some change had happened. It was as if there were a warp in the air, a rumple in the fabric of things that was all but imperceptible. As he came past the last of the stone walls to the little opening there, his father and mother were not sitting outside. A shiver passed up through him. His breath was caught. When he came to the doorway of the tower itself, he stopped and called out to them. Birds were singing. Sunlight made light and grey the stones. That moment he noticed such details and they entered him and adjoined his memories.

“Finbar?”

The voice of his father was softened. Finbar stepped inside the shadows and saw the two of them lying in each others arms beside the telescope.

“Is it you?” his father said, and his hand rose white and slim and wavering until Finbar knelt and took it.

“She is gone,” the old man said. “I am waiting to go with her.” And his hand returned to stroke the grey hair of Emer and then came to rest upon her once more. Finbar said nothing. He bowed his head and held his hands together and from him like a river invisible ran his grief.

“You must let me take her,” Finbar said.

“No.”

“I must bury her.”

“Bury the two of us. She is waiting for me. I will be with her tomorrow”

“Father…”

“No.” The old man’s eyes flashed again as they had often done before, and he fixed them upon his son only a moment yet sufficient to still all argument. “No, Finbar, please. Tomorrow.”

Finbar walked outside into the sunlight. He lifted his face to the warmth and the brightness of that June day and he heard the birds singing anew and the sounds from the village travelling upward to where he stood. He watched the cloudless sky a long time. The dog came and lay at his feet. Then he went back inside and told his father he would be back to him in a short time. He ran down the pathway he had come and said to Cait and the Roses and the gypsies and the islanders that his mother was dead and his father dying. Mary Boat-Mac put her hands to her face and wept.