The Fall of Light (45 page)

And so another summer drew on. In the first light of each day and in all weathers the pilots launched their currachs into
the water and sailed out in a race against each other and were like so many water-borne beetles as they travelled out to meet
ships bound for Limerick. Whosoever reached the ship first drew the entitlement of piloting it in through the dangerous currents
and past the sandbanks. Others bobbed in the heavy waters and scanned the horizon and waited. They watched the sky for seabirds
to tell them if ships were coming. They lived all day on the water and in the falling dark returned and stepped with jaunty
gait up the street where children and dogs came to meet them.

These men had little contact with the Foleys. Their wives sometimes went with potato breads and griddlecakes and such up to
the house by the tower and they were welcomed and thanked by the old man. But he rarely came down among them. Michael and
Mary visited. They sent meals with the children and came themselves on many evenings and told them about the antics of the
Brennans or Behans or McNamaras or Scanlans or any of the families that lived there. They told of sea escapades and boats
overturned and news brought on the ships from the world outside. And these things the old man and his wife listened to politely
and nodded and made little comment, for it seemed news of a place fictive and unreal.

The seasons turned. Cousins of those living there came and built houses, too. A girl of the Griffins married and for her a
house was made in the half acre behind her father’s cottage. Winter and spring and summer and autumn chased each other across
the sky and the
constellations wheeled and the moon rose and fell like hope and still none of the sons of Francis Foley returned there. One
night as they sat outside in that silent and peaceful way that had become their custom before sleep, Emer asked Francis to
tell her what the stars were like now. She sat there in her darkness absolute and turned her face upward. She knew he had
not gone to the telescope once since she had been returned to him and knew him well enough to know that such may have been
a pact promised to be kept if indeed she came back.

“Tell me,” she said.

He did not think he should at first. At first he thought it risked her in some obscure way. He thought fortune and misfortune
so close to each other that there was the thinnest sliver between them and the slightest error could bring the latter.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I would like to hear you tell me about them. I will place them around my dark.”

And so he did. He looked up high into the sky at Cassiopeia and told her its form and then took her down through the sky to
the Bears Minor and Major and over to Castor and Pollux, too. These he named and she sat attentive and did not tilt her head
but seemed to be gazing nonetheless upon a panorama of inner stars.

“You love them so, don’t you?” she said one night when already such mapping of the dark had become their custom.

“I do. They are so pure,” he said to her. “They are like something perfect. From the time of Adam. And I cannot look at them
without thinking of you. Thinking of the days we met and the nights we went out roaming and you told me stories of them.”

She did not say any more. She held his arm. They sat there.

“I will think of them now as the boys,” she said.

The night was still. A moon gibbous and bare hung overhead.

Francis’s voice answered softly: “Yes.”

Five days later Michael McMahon came up to the tower and brought with him a letter that had been left in the town of Kilrush
he said for he didn’t know how long. It had lain in dirt in a corner, for none had wanted to bring it over. It was the letter
from Tom Foley to Teige. The old man read it aloud. He finished by saying the name Tom. Then he said it again.
Tom.
Then he started the letter from the beginning and read it over once more.

“We must send a letter to him,” Emer said. “And when Teige writes to us we will tell him where he is. And when the twins come
back we will tell them, too.”

That night when they sat for their stellar vigil the air had turned cold, and Emer Foley asked him then to take her to the
telescope. He led her there and laid her down alongside him and he blew on the eyepiece and cleared webwork and dust. She
placed her head upon his chest over his heart.

“Now,” she said, “I will tell you about my stars.”

And Teige and Elizabeth arrived off the coast of Canada just before ice forced the closure of the ports along
the Saint Lawrence River. They arrived after a long journey in which Elizabeth had suffered sickness and woke from fitful
sleeps crying out in fright. Her face grew paler and her cheekbones more prominent. Teige served her food and drink and brought
to her what comforts he could find. He urged her to come on deck and take exercise, but she had a horror of her fellow passengers.
They were walking dirt and disease, she told him, and she would not move from the narrow bed. When he came to her and tried
again to have her walk with him when briefly the ship found calm blue waters, she shouted at him:

“I don’t need exercise! I’m not one of your horses!”

For the remainder of that grey voyage then she lay belowdecks. She turned her face in her pillow and was like a rag twisted.
Her eyes took on a haunted look. The farther the distance travelled, the deeper she fell in despair. She berated Teige for
clumsiness and smacked away the plate when she saw his thumb above it against the pork. She despised how he befriended others
of the passengers and found in his very appearance faults she had not noticed before. Sometimes after she had screamed at
him, then she calmed and sobbed and opened her arms to
him and asked for forgiveness and said it was the wretched sea. It was the wretched boat, it wasn’t her at all. He was not
to mind.

And for the most part, he tried not to. He tried to imagine the life ahead of them. When he walked on the windy deck or held
to the rails in the sheets of rain, he looked at the blank horizon and tried to be emptied of his fears. He lifted his face
to the weather. He sought in his mind the image of the island and his father and his mother there. Long hours while Elizabeth
lay below he thought of them and thought of his brothers gone and wondered where in the vastness of the world was Tomas. He
stood and held on in that swaying ocean that was like a watery bridge between the old life and the new. He stood until his
loneliness weakened him. Then he came down the steps and along the passage to where Elizabeth lay and he took off his coat
and knelt beside her and caressed the top of her head. He lowered his forehead then to her until it rested against her shoulder
and he could stay so a long time and she would not move and no word would pass between them.

For reasons not explained to its passengers, the
Mary Anne
did not arrive in Halifax but came about Cape Sable and docked at Saint John, New Brunswick. When Teige and Elizabeth disembarked
they gave their names as Foley and were man and wife. Elizabeth told the officer they met that their luggage had been sent
ahead of them. They walked off down the gangway in the chill air of late autumn in a place where the air was pungent with
fish and gulls made raucous sounds overhead. Fishermen, bearded high onto their cheeks, worked with crates and barrels wherein
the silvered catch slapped in spasm. Some spoke, but not in words that Teige understood. Elizabeth laid her hand upon his
arm.

“This way,” she said, indicating that they should not follow the clump of their fellow passengers, those freckle-faced Galwegians
who moved like some slow, lumpish porridge all together up the street.

There were men in peaked caps and others in suits of black that studied the arrivals there. There were some that called out
offers of lodging and food and more still that cried out sailings on ships bound for Boston and points south. Past these Elizabeth
guided Teige and past those too who stared wide-eyed upon her beauty and followed her with their heads. They went along a
street of mud upon a walk of
loose boards. The heel of Elizabeth’s shoe caught and she slipped and cursed and stamped at the plank.

“We’re getting out of here tomorrow,” she said.

They took a room in a boardinghouse run by a woman red-faced and large. She was Mrs. Flump. She wore an apron tied about her
from neck to knee and within such lost all shape but was a great mound smelling variously of flour and carbolic. Her eyes
were bright blue like things lit. She asked where they were bound.

“We are not sure,” Teige said.

“Boston,” Elizabeth replied. “Our trunks are sent ahead.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Flump.

Their room was small but tidy. Elizabeth sniffed at the sheets and found them clean and then lay upon them in her dress. Teige
undid her boots.

“This is hell,” she said. “We are fallen into hell.” Her eyes stared at the ceiling boards where a web had recently been woven.

“I will take you to a better place,” Teige said. “This is only tonight. We have just arrived. There is a huge country here.
We will be happy.”

“Oh God, Teige.” She held out her arms to him and he came to her and they held each other and kissed and waited for the fall
of night while keeping mute their separate fears.

In the morning Mrs. Flump gave them a breakfast of eggs, but these Elizabeth could not stomach and she retreated to her room
at once.

“Is she expecting?” Mrs. Flump asked Teige. “I often find those expecting can’t eat the eggs.”

Teige’s face was blank, and Mrs. Flump saw his surprise and quickly added, “No, I suspect probably not. It’s probably just
the long journey.”

Still the thought remained with Teige, and when they left there and Mrs. Flump stood in her doorway and gave them a carbolic-scented
napkin of her scones, he thought her eye studied Elizabeth for some further sign.

“Good luck to ye,” she said. “I hope ye’ll be happy.”

They returned to the dockside. Men watched them. Some with knives bent over fish barrels stopped and looked at the woman in
the green dress. A wind blew her hair. She stood alone a time and waited while Teige made enquiries. Then he returned to her
with another man who was thickly whiskered and stood very close to her while he
told her of the schooner that would bring them to Boston. They sailed from there at noon. Some passengers of origins various
stood on the deck in frayed and sea-soiled finery and watched the coast pass. Trees dense and evergreen lay along the shore.
Impenetrable forest seemed the landscape and to the eyes of those come from the distant continent the whole seemed country
wild with as yet little mark of civilization. They imagined therein were the Indians they had heard of and that these were
even then watching the ship with arrows in bows aimed as she moved down the coastline. The voyage was without incident. Cold
wind made choppy the waters and slowed the progress of the schooner, but when she arrived in Boston none of the passengers
cared. For they were cheered by the elegance of the buildings and the sight of the streets. Elizabeth too smiled and stood
on the deck as the ship came in. She squeezed Teige’s arm, her face flushed and her eyes travelling over the thoroughfares.
When they disembarked a man stepped over to them and speaking to both but looking at Elizabeth said he could tell they would
be seeking fine accommodations and would they allow him to guide them to the best. He carried Elizabeth’s one bag. They went
to a hotel finer than any Teige had ever seen. The man tipped his hat and stood and waited and Elizabeth gave him some money
in their own currency and he thanked her and was gone. They took a room with flowered paper on the wall. Above the posts of
the bed was a canopy of cream-colored linen. Their breakfast was brought on a tray of silver.

They stayed there. In the daytime Elizabeth went out and bought new clothes and returned with these and tried them on before
a standing mirror. Teige told her she was beautiful. He searched for signs that she might be pregnant but did not know what
these were and if he found them or not.

“We should think of moving on from here,” he said to her one evening after they had dined in the grand room where the chandeliers
that had come from Milan glittered above them and let fall brilliant splinters of broken light.

“Why should we?”

“I have no work. We cannot stay here. We must be near the end of your money.”

Her expression turned cold.

“Money is vulgar, Teige. Please don’t speak of it.”

“But—”

“Please, Teige.”

He looked at his plate.

“Thank you,” she said. “You are so sweet. Always so sweet.”

The following morning she went and bought him a white shirt and black suit. He tried them on in the room. When he stood before
her she considered him a time and then told him to go to the barber’s and to buy new shoes. Then he would be perfect, she
said. He did. In that same afternoon returning, he crossed the lobby of the hotel and caught in a gilt-framed mirror the image
of himself and was almost another. He went around and came back to pass the mirror again. He looked then like none in his
family ever had and was the copy of others who sat with newspapers in the leather chairs there. That evening Elizabeth was
in light humour and sang as she dressed for dinner. Her hair was pinned above and about her neck she wore pearls he had never
seen.