The Fall of Light (14 page)

From the town came those who knew what to expect. They had watched for the fires on the hill and slipped from the beds of
husbands and wives to steal into that place where the spirits of the dead guaranteed the time of licentiousness and free pleasure
against which the priests and pastors had vainly preached. For the townspeople were even wilder than the gypsies. Girls pulled
their skirts high and dragged and pushed the men about, throwing off lovers and taking others in a giddy and mad rush, as
though each had to be touched and tasted before that time of freedom was past and manner and decorum returned for another
year.

In this way Finbar was pulled aside by one of the mer-girls of the sea and kissed hungrily on his lips. He tasted the salty
girl almost before he saw her. In the firelight she flew him around so that she and he were one side golden and one side dark.
Then she spun him away and out into the greater darkness and the tufted grass that grew by the cliffs. She held his hand and
he climbed up into the fall of her hair and kissed her neck as they ran along. Then she slipped away in the dark. Finbar hurried
after her. There was nowhere to go in the rising and falling undulations of the field that were like a calm sea. They chased
and tumbled and she called him gypsy in Irish and laughed and threw her bare feet in the air and kicked as though treading
deep water in the sea of the sky. Finbar held the calf of her leg and touched the skin and marvelled, and the girl turned
into a fish there before him. She glimmered in the starlight and was slippery in his hands. She twisted about and was free
of clothes and Finbar imagined her a salmon in the grass and he grappled her in his arms and she wriggled silvery and marvellous
and beautiful.

The
Samhain
burned on. Cattle stolen or bartered in exchange for whispered prophecies to farmers desperate for love or fortune were slaughtered
there. Though its blood was not fully drained, a beast was
dragged heavily across the grass, spilling gore and scenting the night with fresh death as its head tilted with uprolled eyes
of blind horror. A trail was left. Then the gypsies endeavoured to mount the animal on a crude and massive spit, and many
attempts were in vain with the spiked end bursting and tearing through the flank of the beast with cries and jeers and curses
and men falling about.

Teige left and went to the white pony. He told her the races would be tomorrow, for he knew that the gypsies would bring all
the animals down to the sands to meet the ancestors who had raced there. Then the sports would begin.

“We won’t win,” Teige said, and stroked the pony.

The fires did not die out that night but were kept burning into the dawn. As the light rose, the sea seemed quickened and
a white floor of surf lay all across the bay. Remnants of the night were scattered in the grass, wood and bones and fragments
of clothing torn or discarded. When the gypsies stood into the morning, there was a strange communal shyness among them. They
blinked at the light and studied the ground. When they heard that two of their horses had plunged over the cliff into the
sea, their natural superstition caused them to suppose the white pony must be gone. Then Teige found her waiting beneath the
wiry and back-combed shelter of hawthorn bushes and the men knew the day was to be theirs.

There was suddenly a renewed urgency. The camp came alive with the business of preparing for the races. A group of the gypsies
came to Teige and stood about him and nodded. They smiled brown, gap-toothed smiles at him and said nothing. Then when he
walked across the field leading the pony, they followed like designated escorts of Fate. There were other races and other
horses for the gypsies to run, but it was upon the white pony they would gamble the wealth they had gathered over the previous
year. They moved down to the beach, where the wind blew the sand against their ankles and made powdery falls of each hoofstep.
The sky was full of quick-moving cloud, the sea brilliant. Soon there were more than two hundred gypsies and their number
swelled with the population of Kilkee spilling down toward the beach to watch. Dogs galloped in crazy circles with lolling
tongues and flapping ears. Boys ran along the sand before the event and mimed horses they rode in ghost races. Girls looked
for the ones that they had
danced with in secret the night before and blushed when they could not tell which one or ones they were. All knew it was the
beginning of the end, that when the exotic visitors left, winter would be upon them with the colour and excitement of those
days and nights passing into memory.

A way was cleared across the white strand. The gypsies had sticks they stuck into the sand. These were topped with ties of
red and yellow cloth and made a start and finish. In the clarity of the daylight then all the gypsy tribes were revealed,
some one-eyed, some crippled, misshapen, round-shouldered, black, toothless, grin-faced, narrow-eyed, lipless, and handsome.
Teige looked about at them as though looking at company kept in dreams. He saw his brother Finbar draw aside the mer-girl
called Cait and take her away from the races down to the shore. He did not see Finan and did not know that that brother was
already on his way out of the town, that he had suffered deeply pangs of remorse and guilt, faced the violence that had arisen
within him, and experienced a grim revelation that he must give his soul for the one that was perished. Teige did not know
Finan was already gone, was already fissured from the family and lost to the obscured and traceless domain of zealots, that
he was heading for the port of Cork and thence to the continent of Africa to begin work in the service of God. Out of some
desperation, Teige imagined that perhaps at last Tomas might arrive, that the road that wound down to the shore would shortly
be dusted with the charge of his horse. But it was not to be, and soon Teige could look nowhere but at the pony. He stood
beside her and kept her calm while the noise and excitement grew around them. The first races happened, accompanied by wild
frenzy. The gypsies had the habit of spitting, jeering, throwing small handfuls of sand at the horses of other riders. They
made sudden large gestures, flinging both hands upward like pantomime salutes to a rash, inexorable deity, startling the horses
and making the whole scene skitter sideways.

The white pony threw her head up and down, and Teige laid his arm over her and made a matching nodding motion and then blew
his scent once more across her nostrils. He had a rope halter but did not pull on it. When the pony moved about to evade the
scene, he stepped to meet her chest and was there in her view. He did not look at the
men or ponies he was to race against. Instead he made the world small until within it there was nothing but his eyes and those
of the pony. And he was standing so, his head upon the long white nose, when those gypsies that were self-appointed his guardians
came and told him it was his turn.

Teige walked the pony through the crowd. They were a blur of colour as though his eyes were teared or blinding, and he saw
no face he recognized. Then there was a gypsy standing by him with hands cupped for his foot, but Teige did not need him and
swung up and onto the pony’s back. Still he did not look at the other horses. He leaned forward and patted the pony’s neck
and spoke gently. There was a rope held raggedly across the way. Then a roar. The rope fell. There seemed a long pause, like
a rip occurring in the fabric of time, and though the gypsies screamed and the riders crouched in a forward lurch, the horses
did not race away. There was a fractured instant in which nothing happened and the horses intuited the race that had arrived
before them and were in the very motion of the first leap forward. It was as if the whole crowd inhaled at once and the poor
and tattered, the small farmers and fisherfolk gathered there, were stilled momentarily and framed so as in a picture. Teige
would recall the scene for his lifetime. He would recall the snapped moment, though he was not even aware of seeing it at
the time. He was sensing the way across the broken sand. He was breathing over the pony’s ears, and then somehow he knew that
the race was on and the rhythm of it flowed through him like second nature. He became that strange oneness with the animal
that was at once apparent to all there. He rode as though he were part of the horse. He was crouched and low, and his face
was pressed forward and white where he galloped in the flying sand and spray. They were in the lead before the halfway turn
and already the gypsies of his caravans were screaming and jumping along the inner edge of the course. There was a brown gelding
at his side, and a sleek black animal foaming just behind it. But in the flash that was the race, Teige barely saw them. The
pony plashed the shallow seawater into a fine whiteness that rose majestic and ephemeral. The splash and speed made the scene
shimmer and perhaps was part of the reason why suddenly the gypsies saw the ghosts. At first they were the figures of the
other horses in the race, and then behind them, and
coming in a horde from the deeper sea, the charging shapes of a thousand more. They galloped out of the ocean and thundered
down the bay. The gypsies all saw them at once and thought to run for they would not survive the stampede. Then they saw their
own grandfathers as young boys with shiny black hair and flashing teeth and how they clung to the manes of the ghost horses
and rode wildly along next to the boy Teige at the front of the race. They all came forward in one great mass, splashing high
the water and getting closer and closer. Then, the moment the pony crossed the finish line, to the gypsies’ eyes it became
two. Without breaking stride, the ghost of itself parted to the left and was ridden out into the sea with the boy Mario on
its back and all the other grandfathers and spirit horses following behind until vanishing into the waves. The gypsies shouted
and surged. Teige felt their hands grasp his legs, and then he was toppled over into their arms and borne shoulder-high over
the throng. He saw the sky and the white clouds in swaying, bumping motion like the world coming to an end. Hands flew up
and touched him. They patted against him and fell away, and more pushed forward and did the same. He thought to get down and
set off at once, but his will was not his own and he was carried along down the beach at Kilkee and the sky spun about and
his heart raced with victory. He was caught up in it, and as the gypsies raced him along on their shoulders and threw him
skyward and caught him and threw him up again, he did not know whether to laugh or cry.

TWO

And three years passed.

The stars rose and fell across the sky and told their timeless stories. But of Francis Foley and his sons in this time there
is little recounted. They are like ones that have slipped inside a pause in the story. As if nothing good can be told and
it is better for the silence to enfold them.

The old man walked the country in vain search for his wife and sons. He wore a long ragged coat of rough wool dirtied brown.
He carried a willow wand. He crouched in the grass and caught pheasants in the dawn. He walked back to the lord’s estate and
came into it by darkness and stood in the charred ruins. He saw the gardens left ragged and unkempt. He slipped away and asked
of some that lived nearby if they had seen a woman looking for her family. He met with vacant stares. He moved off and searched
all the roadways running west. Sometimes he was befriended by the poor and sat in small dark cottages listening to their grievances
with the turfsmoke encircling the room. He dug the potato gardens of widows and carried small boys on his shoulders. Then
he travelled on again, beating his way back and forth along the roads of that country, all the time looking for his family
He encountered any number of constables, landlords, agents, and witnessed every kind of crookedness, cruelty, and oppression.
He asked if any had seen boys that looked like him. He heard of four boys that had died in a fire in Gort in the country of
Galway, and he went there with the ashes of grief and regret dry in his mouth. He stood with the mother and father of the
dead boys. He worked for them in the little lump of a field they rented, pulling the rocks from it and bearing them over to
make higher the walls. He left when the dream of his wife woke him one night in the stable there. He went out under the stars
and thought they were different, that they were beckoning him as they did others in the fabled past. And so he journeyed again
in darkness with his eyes heavenward like a figure blind or visionary, being led by a light aeons away.