Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

Like Virgo, then, the independent and free, Emer grew more beautiful and fiery still. She sat at the classes her father held in an open cabin whose thatch leaked drowsily, and sometimes she taught the very youngest ones. Then her father died. The school like a figment or a thing of air vanished overnight, its students gone. Emer lived on with her mother and then for her living took work washing in the house of a landlord, Taylor. Her childhood and girlhood were like linen, taken up and folded away.

She was a young woman beautiful and proud and silent unless provoked. Then her anger would flash out in fierce indignation. Her mother caught fever in the wet autumn of Emer’s twentieth year and died before Christmas. She was alone. For the natural elegance of her bearing she was moved into the position of dining maid and given a small room in the attic. She lived there some years and attended the table of those genteel who ate lavish feasts served from silver tureens and platters and drank from goblets of crystal. There was a sorrow in her manner that beguiled the gentlemen. They spoke of her when she left the room. Some tried to draw her with remarks and soft flatteries, but always she turned them away.

In the April of a year, Francis Foley saw her in the market of Carlow town. She was standing at a stall. Her hair blew about her in the breeze. He did not speak to her. He studied her until she turned and took her purchases and went back through the town and out along the road to the big house. Briskly he was behind her. He left his horse and went on foot and was a short distance back, as if it were she leading him, like a tame pony, leading him out of one life into another.

As a young man Francis Foley had been outlaw and rebel for his country. His father had been hung for participating in plots treasonous and bloody. He had grown up hiding in woods, taking instruction from white-faced thin fellows who arranged attacks on magistrates and agents and spies. He had lived seemingly without life of his own, yet he was strong and powerful. He assisted at the assassination of plump men scented with cologne. In his youth, he had walked in the footsteps of his father, grandfather, and more great-grandfathers than he knew. He rode with his brother, Aengus, taking vengeance to be justice and thinking they were righting what was wrong in the history of the country. Then, on a failed raid on a barracks in Tipperary, Aengus was shot and died afterwards beneath a hedge in a field wet with rain. Francis Foley lost his spirit then. He grew silent and went off by himself and did not again meet with those who promised freedom was near. He took work for short term in season of harvest or spring. Anger still rose and bloomed within him sometimes. Sometimes he saw inequity and injustice and had to keep his chin set and knuckles deep in his pockets. Such times when he thought he should return to the life of a rebel, he thought of Aengus in the field, and the anger did not so much pass as turn into grief. So his life was, working itinerant and travelling between farms and estates, until the noon he saw Emer O’Suilleabhain at the market.

He followed her.

“Ailinn,” he called after her when she turned in at the gates of the house. Beauty.

She stopped in the road. She had known he was following her. She had already weighed the possibilities of the moment like pebbles in her palm and, with the intuition gifted her by a grandmother who spoke with fairies, knew that her life would roll from her fingers into those of this stranger.

“Is it me?” she said in Irish, turning her face into the fall of her fair hair.

When he came to her, Francis Foley fell into the first reverence of his adult life. He lost at once the hoop of words he had expected to throw over her. He said nothing. Emer smiled. The soft April noontime touched them both, then she said: “I suppose I shall see you tomorrow on this road.”

There was no reply, though the air between them was already eloquent. Emer walked on. Francis lay himself in against the weeds in the ditch. The following day he awaited her there. When she arrived a thin rain was drizzling and a scarlet headscarf covered her hair. Without slowing her walk, she passed along by where he stood and then felt the presence of him in her stride. It was as if she had collected him, and he her, and they were in each other’s air already. So, without words, they walked off the road to the town and into the damp new grass coming in the meadows.

From the first, Francis Foley gave her his dreams. The dreams he had once dreamed for his country now became the condensed but powerful dream of a perfect place for this woman to live and bear their children. He imagined it fiercely. He told Emer the home he would make for her. He described it as if it were its own republic, as if he hoped now to step outside the reality of history and find a place only theirs. Emer raised her eyebrows at him yet loved the way he made her feel again a queen. When she went out with him in the nighttimes after the dining was done and the ware washed, he made her forget the disappointments of her life.

She lay back on his coat in a field under the night sky.

“Do you know the stars?” she asked him.

“Some of them I know.”

“My father told me their names and stories,” she said, and then told him something of the old master and of the stars’ names in Latin.

He listened and loved her more still and the following days went and inquired of a schoolmaster thereabouts names of further constellations, and these he brought to Emer like the gifts of that courtship.

“I want a place for us,” he said to her.

“There are many places. Where will we go?”

“We’ll have a house of our own.”

“Yes,” she said. “A fine house. A house with a yard and garden and hens.”

“I will make it for you. I will make the finest house any man ever made.”

“You won’t be able to.”

“I will.”

She angled herself on her elbow and looked into his face, pale in the night.

“You are a man who thinks he can change the world.”

“Of course I can,” he told her, and took her in his arms.

They married in May. Emer ran to him at the end of the avenue when the sky was releasing its stars and the night sweetening with scent of almond from the furze. The May night was warm syrup. The tenderness of the air, the hushed green of the world that was luscious, sensual, primordial, the soft low light, the sighing breaths of beasts in the fields, all these entered their memories that night as if such things were themselves the guests at the wedding. They met the priest at the roofless ruined chapel of Saint Martin’s and were married with a twist of Latin over their heads like a cheap, invisible corona. When the priest had slipped batlike into the shadows, Francis Foley and Emer clung to each other. It was long moments before they moved. Then they ran down the road and across the nighttime fields to a stone cabin for cattle, empty now, and which was the first house of all those that fell short of Francis Foley’s vision of paradise.

They began a home there. She left her work. He would not have her going there, and she herself was glad to walk in with her head high and say she would not be back. Then there was a brief blue summer of three weeks before the weather turned around and came at them from the east. The wind burned the hay. Seeds did not come to proper fruition, trees lost their leaves in August, and by September a fierce winter had already arrived. Emer carried their unborn son like a promise of new spring and watched the dark days for signs of light. Her husband, who had dreamed so extravagantly, had to hire himself at fairs. He disappeared before dawn and did not return until the physical exhaustion of his body was brought about by those who paid him less than the cost of feeding their horses. Slowly, so slowly, a sour disappointment seeped into the cottage. Tomas was born in January, when the snow was lying thick on the fields and there was no work even at the fairs. They ate small birds and berries. In the deep silence of the one dim room their marriage staggered under the impossible weight of dreams. Words were a reminder of other words and went unsaid, but the vision of the place that had been conjured remained. It lingered like a shadow in the corner, and soon Francis Foley could not look at the leaking thatch, or a place where the mud floor puddled, without hearing the reproach and mockery of his own words. Years slipped past them. The twins were born. Francis lay in the low bed at night and listened to the scouring wind and then for the first time in his adult life said a prayer to God for guidance.