The Fall of Light (2 page)

None of them could swim. There were three horses, the great chestnut that Tomas rode, the grey gelding upon whose back the
twins sat together, and the black pony of Teige. The cart was pulled by a long-haired mule. In the poor rain-light of that
dawn, the Foleys rode down to the water’s edge. The river ran past them, laughing. The horses caught the flash of the salmon
silvering beneath and flared their nostrils and stamped at the bank and were stilled but not calmed by Teige. He dismounted
and talked to each of them.

“It is not deep, it is only fast,” said the father, though he could not know and could not see the far bank. He had drawn
from the mound on the cart a collection of ropes.

“Tomas!” He called the boy without looking at him. His eldest son came quickly and took one end of the rope.

“There,” the father said, and pointed to one of the twisted trees that grew there.

Tomas secured the rope. Teige and the twins watched him in admiration. He had a kind of cool expertise, as if nothing in the
physical world daunted him. He pulled taut the rope then and quickly mounted again and without pause plunged his horse into
the river.

It took him in its swiftness and at once he was swept sidelong. But while his brothers watched with that mixture of horror
and awe in which they always beheld him, Tomas yelled and yahooed, his eyes wide and white and his body on the horse twisting
with the power of the river. His horse thrashed and flared and swam with its neck, pushing its nose upward into the air and
tilting its eyes as if afraid to see below it. The river swept them away, but not far. And still Tomas
worked the horse, riding it the way horses are ridden in dreams where the world is infirm and progress seems at the whim of
God. He rode the river and let the rope run away behind him. He rode it while the twins cried urgent cheers and Teige looked
away and felt only the terror of the crossing ahead of him. The old man stood mute and patient without the slightest evidence
of fear or pride. Tomas rode himself invisible. He crossed into the midriver waters where they could no longer see him and
passed as if through portals into some incorporeal world that existed beyond the midpoint of the Shannon River.

They did not see where he had gone. The mist hung between them. They did not hear him. His father stood like the ghost of
a father and did not move and did not show his sons the slightest uncertainty. The rope that Tomas rode did not move but lay
into the water. The sky had not brightened. The day was improperly born. The only sound was the sound of the old river running
in that green place where the family would come asunder. No birds sang.

“Tomas!” Finbar shouted.

Finan roared, “Tomas!”

“Stop it!” their father said. “He cannot hear you.”

They stood there and waited. The world aged in them another bit, each of the younger brothers feeling the impotency of their
roles in the drama of their family, mute witnesses to stubbornness and folly. They waited for their father to ride into the
river and save Tomas, but he did not move. The rope was loose in Shannon. The twins sank down on the ground. The old man’s
eyes stared at the wall of the mist as though he could burn it away, as though he didn’t need anyone or anything and that
the rescue of Tomas was in his gift and would happen without his moving from that place by the shore. They waited an impossible
time.

Then the rope stretched taut.

They saw it lift and watched the line of it rise and drop the dripping river water back into the river. The old man moved
quickly. He laid a hand on it and shook it and tested it for firmness. Then he tied another to the tree there and brought
it over to the twins. “Here. Go on, you,” he said. “By the rope. Bring this one.”

The twins looked at each other and half grinned, both at the danger and at the opportunity to imitate their eldest brother.
They pulled
back their shoulders and put out their chins and were like minor versions of the father.

“Go on, Tomas has made it easy for you,” said the old man. “By the rope, go.”

He stood and watched, and carrying the second rope, they rode down into the water, trailing behind them a line loose and wavering.
The gelding tried to swim with its head impossibly high. It angled its long nose upward and snorted and opened its eyes wide
and baleful and at first jumped at the current washing against it. Teige called to the horse. He said sounds in no language
until the twins and the horse were gone out of sight into the wet brume and the only sign of them was the second rope running
backward out of the unseen.

Then there was stillness on that bank once more. After a time the second rope was pulled taut. Now two parallel lines stretched,
bridge like, over the river.

Quickly the old man tied Teige’s black pony to the cart. Then, by ropes and a leather belt, he attached the pony and the mule
to one of the two ropes so the cart was linked on either side to the airy bridge that led into the mist. He called his son
to get up and ride the pony and calm the mule and coax them into the rushing river. But Teige did not want to move. He had
sat down on the ground and was turned away from the river. He was running a finger in the brown mud.

“Teige, come. Now.” The father’s voice was large and full and like a thing solid in the air. Teige sat.

“Teige?” the old man said again, and saw his son turn his face farther away as if to study some distant corner of the mist.

The father said nothing for a moment. He looked up in the air, then he cursed loudly.

“Get up!”

But Teige did not move. The river ran.

“I tell you now for the last time. Get up, come on.” The old man sat on the cart with the reins in his hands. He turned from
his youngest son and looked away at the grey river and the rope lines running across it.

Still Teige did not move.

“You are afraid. Have you not seen your brothers cross it?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Because you are a coward.”

“I am not. It won’t work. The pony knows it. Look.” He pointed to the black pony, whose ears were back and whose sides heaved.

“She is afraid because you are. It’s your fear, not hers. Did you see your brothers? They were not afraid. Get over here.
Now, I tell you.”

Teige sat on the mud and studied the patterns he drew with his finger. His brown hair fell forward over his brow. The drizzle
of rain made his cheeks glisten. His eyes were still, the world reduced to the two feet of mud about him. As if such were
a door in the world for his escape, he stared at it. Then a blow knocked him on his face.

“Get up.”

Teige did not cry out or weep. He lay with his eyes open and his mouth bleeding into the ground. His pony stamped and turned
and looked about with bewilderment.

“Get up,” his father said. “Get up now and get on that pony and lead it into the river.”

The old man turned away from him and studied the thin light in the air and cursed wordlessly. Teige did not get up. His father
went over and went to kick at him but stopped short.

“Get up,” he said again in Irish, a single word in a sharp whisper. He was looking away, looking at some place where he raged
against the world for not fitting his map of it. His blue eyes burned and his brow furrowed and his lips pressed against one
another in a thin line of resolve; he would make things fit.

“I want to stay here. Leave me here,” Teige said.

“Because you are a coward? I will not,” Francis Foley said. “I will knock you into the river if you don’t get up.”

“I will stay here and wait for my mother!” the boy shouted.

“Your mother is gone. She has left us.”

“She has not!”

“She doesn’t want to be with us,” he lied. “She has gone off and now there is only us. Now do what I tell you and get up!”
said the father. He waited a moment, and though it was brief it was long enough for him to consider going back to try to find
her and then for pride and the knowledge that the law was pursuing them to banish the thought. No, they would go on. They
would find a new home. He would make happen what he told her, then go and gather her up and
bring her there and she would see. None of this he said, for he could not reveal his own rashness. “Get up,
eirigh!”
was all he said.

Teige said nothing and the air stilled and in the stillness there was only the beating of their hearts and the rain now falling.
The pony’s tail whisked the morning, her foot stamped the ground. The old man swallowed hard on the emotion that rose in his
gorge, and his fists trembled. He looked away at where the spirit
of
the boy’s mother was watching him. And he did not strike him again.

And at last, without another word but with a grey look of shame, Teige stood up. He did not face his father, but in a flash
the old man had spun him around by the shoulders and holding him there an instant shook him hard and tried to contain the
desire to knock him down. In his great hands the thin boy was like a bag of things broken. He shook him and saw the boy’s
spittle fly out of the twisting blur of his mouth. He saw the eyes flash past and lose their focus and sicken with fear and
powerlessness. Then the vomit flew pink and curdled onto his shoulder, and he let the boy go and watched Teige fall like a
rag version of himself at his feet. This was not how Francis Foley had wanted to treat his son, it was not what the old man
meant or wanted to do. He told himself it was how a father had to behave, and he ignored the idea that his treatment of Teige
was coloured by how much the boy resembled his mother.

“How are you going to live in the world?” he asked his son. “Tell me that. How are you going to be a man and live in the world?
If your father asks you to jump with him into the fires of hell, you jump. If he asks you to swim in the sea when he knows
you cannot swim and he cannot and the waters are filled with devils, you swim. Do you understand me?”

Teige did not answer. He stood up slowly, and his father pushed him ahead of him back to the pony. The telescope was wrapped
in a blanket and tied on the top of all their things. There were pots and tools and wooden furniture and cloths and rugs already
tattered and various sticks and irons of uncertain purpose.

“Now!” said Francis Foley, and swiped the air above the animal with the reins. They rode into the water and the whole cart
swayed downriver at once. It was as though the world had suddenly been turned on its side and everything fell. The father
stood and shouted at
the mule and slashed at him with the reins and a leather belt and cursed the universe and cried out to Teige to keep them
between the ropes. The ties he had secured snapped like the river’s toys. The whole of their belongings and the stolen telescope
swung away. The animals tried to keep their direction but were pulled backward and sideways. They jumped and thrashed at the
water. Then the lines that held them gave, too.

In a moment it happened. The harness to the mule broke, the cart sailed free and swung about and pressed against the rope
of the bridge and snapped it. Francis cried out. In the river Teige looked over his shoulder and saw the old man falling back
and clutching his precious cargo, the great telescope. Water spilled through the cart grey and fast, and the old man was kicking
away at it, making a small white splashing. Teige was ahead of him then in the river. He tried to ride the pony back and over
to his father but could not for the cart was floating away and was on the back of the current. And then the mule broke free
of it and was swept forty yards then more and then was gone like a ghost dissolving from this world. Teige saw his father
look with fury at the animal a last time, and then the telescope seemed to roll from its moorings and the old man pushed aside
some of their things to keep room for it. Pots, shovels, bowls, sailed away downriver. He clung to the telescope. He saw that
he was drifting from Teige and that he could not be reached and he did not jump from the raft of the cart. He defied the world
to drown him. He cursed it and shook his head and shouted out something that Teige could not understand. Then Teige called
to him, and his words too were lost in the rush of the river water and the deadness of that air enwrapped with scarves of
mist. The father did not hear him ask where was his mother, or if he did, he did not answer. He looked back at the boy, and
then the whole cart sailed down the river and into the mist and vanished out of sight.

When Teige reached the far side, none of his brothers could speak. They seemed paralyzed. They did not greet his safe arrival
or move from that spot on the bank. They looked into the foggy river at nothing. It was as if their father had been erased
and, momentarily, they were unsure if this was good or bad.

Teige looked back. “I knew someone would die,” he said.

There was a pause, and the brothers watched the river. It seemed to run without sound now. The twins turned and looked at
Tomas.

“No one has died,” he said, “come on.”

“Come on!” said Finbar in echo and perfect imitation, and in this was joined by his twin, each of them mirrors of the elder.
They mounted and rode, and Teige came with them. They galloped along the grassy western banks of the Shannon River. They rode
along the edge of the first light of that morning and found that no matter how quickly they moved, the river moved quicker.
They could not catch sight of the old man. All day the Shannon was sleeved in a fine mist and they could see nothing. After
a mile the river was no longer even a river but had become a great lake that at first they mistook for the sea.

They rode the three horses all that day in search of their father. They scanned the grey waters where sometimes they thought
they caught sight of him. At last they came to where they could ride no more and where the last sighting of Francis Foley
turned out to be a singular lonesome swan riding the low waves.

“He is gone,” Tomas said.

The breath of the horses misted and faded. They sat crouched forward like ones beneath a burden. The landscape thereabouts
was a green and rumpled stillness. The silence grew heavy. Then Finbar said, “He is gone to America,” and laughed a small
laugh that faded away.