The Fall of Light (7 page)

“Will you come with me tomorrow night and see them?” He leaned over and touched her arm in the dark. He brought his hand up
to her hair.

She let the silence answer for her. She lay motionless and felt her life was about to come asunder. She thought of her father
and his discipline and pride and how he had instilled in her a sense of who she was; they were not people who broke into the
houses of landlords. There was nothing moving. Francis and Emer heard each other breathe and heard the breathing of the children
in the vast stillness that fell out of the stars. At last, when he could bear no more the emptiness between them, Francis
urged her again.

“Come tomorrow night. You’ll see then.”

She said nothing at first, for she was afraid. But he stroked her cheek then, and whether out of fear or frustration or the
feeling of loss that was deep within her, she said angrily: “I don’t want to see them, my feet are cold. What do I want seeing
stars for?”

She thought it would end there. He drew away his hand. She turned her back to him in the bed.

“You want to see them through the telescope.”

“I can see them from my own window,” she grumbled.

“It’s not—”

She sat up suddenly and turned to him. “You’re a foolish man. Oh God, you are. And what if you were found? What if you were
seen there, then what? We’d be thrown back on the road, that’s what, think of that, will you? Or you’d be taken off to gaol,
for what? For stars!”

Her words crossed the darkness like spiders and stung his heart.

“Forget that. Forget it,” she said, her voice breaking now with tears and disappointments that went deep into her past. She
turned her back to him.

“You should not be going in there,” she said after a time. “It will bring trouble on us.”

He did not answer her. She could not understand. They lay sleepless and separate in the dark.

She wished he would sleep. But instead Francis sat upright.

“What gives him the right to have it? To have it locked in there night after night not even looking through it, the empty
eye of it! Not even seeing!” He crashed the crude wooden headboard.

“Francis!”

“It is a marvelous thing, Emer. If you—”

“Stop!”

She would have none of it. It was not because the poetry of her soul was so earthbound, or that she could not imagine the
beauty, it was because she feared the quality in Francis Foley that once she loved the most: his ability to be enraptured.
She knew he would not stop, and knew that the fragile world they had built would fall apart.

The lord never came. The seasons rose and fell on the garden estate, and the children grew. They were not allowed to walk
in the gardens their father made. They went instead up the rough fields and ran their horses and watched Teige gallop and
let their giddy calls and cries in Irish fly across the wind. They were a country within a country and did not know it. Their
father tried to make the boys feel like champions in the grassy spaces. He coached them in running and jumping and wrestling.
He rolled with them
on
Sunday afternoons in the summer meadows and made his wife laugh when he pushed out his chest to show that he had still the
cut of a warrior. He taught them the ancient game of hurling, and they played it with flat, hand-hewn wands of ash, pucking
the leather
sliothar
ball high through the air like some antiquated weaponry for the downing of eagles. Still, he had a kind of fierceness with
the children that came from love but could become terrible. When they could not jump the stream that he could, he insisted
they try again. He showed his disappointment, and the boys leapt again and again until he walked off and left them leaping
without audience and the vague stain of inadequacy spreading in their hearts. Nonetheless they grew strong and free-willed.
They did not show their father their fear of him. And when he burst in anger at their carelessness or slowness, they hung
their heads in a greater shame for knowing that they had failed some standard of excellence that was theirs.

And so it was. Francis worked the gardens by day and sometimes slipped by night into the big house and watched the stars and
looked at the maps that were there, until at last the day arrived when his spirit broke free.

It was an October morning. He brought Tomas with him, leaving Emer with the others and going out across the dampness that
hung visible over the lawns and made the songs of the hardy birds plaintive. There were leaves to be gathered. The evidence
of the dying year must not be allowed to linger even for a moment on His Lordship’s lawns. So, father and son silently set
about with wooden rakes the fallen black and brown leaves that fell even as they gathered them.

They worked through the still morning. Mounds of leaves were gathered and lay upon the grass, then these were lifted and barrowed
away. When the scene was clean of even a single leaf, Francis stopped and told Tomas to stand and look with him. The lawn
was like a carpet.

“Look at that,” he said. “We might as well get to look at our work, as no one else does.” They watched all that was tranquil
and immaculate there and leaned on their rakes while from the oaks to the east walk late leaves unhinged and twirled down.

They did not hear the footsteps of the head gardener, Harrington, approaching. He came up on them while they were standing
there, giving him opportunity to vent his resentment of the man who sometimes stole his praise.

“You’re not paid for looking,” he said.

Tomas jumped. His father did not move. When Harrington came from between the trees, their life there was already over. Softly
he cursed at them for idleness, though he knew it was not true.

“Look,” Francis said, and pointed at the lawn.

Harrington was not interested. “Get on,” he said. “The kitchen garden.” He did not look at what they had done or give them
that credit. He walked past them and said beneath his breath a muted comment in which Francis caught only the word
laziness.

That evening he told Emer he had wanted to hit the man.

“To knock him down into a load of shite,” he said. “Christ almighty.” He drummed with his hand on the table.

“You have to forget about it. Just carry on. You can’t take up against the likes of him,” said Emer.

“Why not?”

“You know why not.”

“I’m bound every way I turn,” he said. “I can’t piss in a pot without someone’s say-so.”

“Francis.”

“Christ, I won’t.”

He stood up. Her hands were white with flour at the table. She watched him cross the room and take a bowl and smash it against
the wall. Teige was sitting on the floor with a slate. Francis took down another bowl and threw it likewise through the air
at the wall. Tomas and the twins came to the doorway. Their mother cried out to her husband to stop, but something had snapped
within Francis Foley and he knocked over the chairs and took one and crashed it against the floor. He said this was no life
for his sons. He said what was he raising them for, was he raising them to be the slaves of the likes of Harrington? He said
though Jesus wept he wouldn’t. And then Emer was shouting at him and he was shouting in turn and knocking things over and
picking up pots and pans and earthenware crockery and flinging all helter-skelter about. The room was like one hit by a storm.
It was as if all the disappointments of their married life took form there and ran about and crashed and the air itself grew
bitter and sharp. Francis railed and cried out. He said he would not stay there. He said they were not beasts in a field,
they were not slaves. And Emer shouted that if they left there, they would die on the roads like beggars. And the boys moved
from that room into the bedroom they shared and were like shamed and guilty things, sitting with their faces lowered in the
dark. And still pots and plates crashed and banged as the marriage broke in the room next to them. They heard the screams
and the arguments. They heard their father shout at Emer that she must obey him and that if he said to go, she was to go and
that was that. But she was too proud. I have a mind of my own, she told him, I won’t take my family and make beggars of them.

And then she cried out, for Francis struck her.

She must have fallen down. Silence ripped like a tear in a garment that had once been precious.

The boys heard no more. They stayed in their room and after a long time lay and slept.

They did not see their mother walk away. Nor know that Francis went out with a lamp in the obscured moonlight and yoked the
cart and rode it up the avenue to the big house and did not look back at her as she walked out the gates. They did not see
their sundering apart like twin stars falling away into darkness and confusion. They did not know Francis let himself in through
the window of the lord’s house and went to the library and in the lamplight looked at the map of the country there. And then,
grappling his arms about the telescope, he lifted and dragged it down the hall and out the door, where he loaded it onto the
cart. He went then to the house of Harrington, who was gone to the town, and into it he wheeled barrows of leaves and dung.
Then he came back and took what things of theirs were not broken and he woke the boys and told them quickly to come. He lit
the thatch even as they were coming out the door. Tomas jumped on his horse. The younger boys were too frightened to speak.
Then they all rode from there, wordless and aghast in the dark.

The father stopped the cart as they passed the lawn that was surrounded by boxwood hedge. “Wait!” he said. Then he got down
from the cart and took the lamp and walked up to the house, and moments later his large figure was running back and he was
calling to the boys to go, go quickly, even as the flames were already rising from His Lordship’s library

Now, the four Foley brothers floated and swam down the river and held on to the swan and caught in their teeth
the cries that the icy water shot through them. They did not speak. The deep darkness
they travelled through was myriad with the secret sounds of night, the beasts and bushes, the noise of leaves in motion, the
falling twisting sounds of the dying of the year as the wind rose and made the water slap in their faces with small chastisements.
They knew that they had escaped their hunters, and though the water was cold and the current strong, it was almost soothing
for Teige and Tomas and the twins to surrender to its ceaseless flowing. They did not know what lay ahead of them. The light
was thin and weak and without hope. The animals that woke and moved in the green fields above the river smelled the rain coming
in the wind and ate hurriedly while the brothers sailed past. Soon the river took the colours of the sky. The water and air
were one tone, that implacable dull iron that screened the blue heavens from sight and made the world seem burdened by an
impossible weight which now must fall. It fell before the brothers had floated past the rocks of Carraig na Ron in the middle
of
the Shannon River and where the low shore of Kerry on their left was now erased. It fell as arrows of rain, the hard cold
rain that announced winter and told the animals in their hidden places that the season had turned. It did not pour down, but
seemed a stuff of thin metal that fell piercingly and killed the light of morning. Thunder rolled. The swan flapped in alarm
and was at once free of the Foleys. It caught the breeze, sailed head-low as if in grief, and within moments was thirty yards
downriver. The twins cried out. They kicked and splashed the Shannon as the rain struck them. Lightning arrived in the falling
sky. It rent the air like old cloths and let the pieces fly away. Teige made the strokes of swimming but made no progress.
He saw the twins’ white faces flash in the waters and then lost them. Tomas was already being pulled away. Though he fought
the river and arced his arms into it, trying to swim with his head swinging side to side in a thrashing motion, he seemed
to go backward. The lightning lit the air again. The sky fell and rolled in booms. It was impossible to say in which direction
the brothers swam. For none of them were swimmers. The jail of the rain held them from seeing where they were, but, despite
the urgency of their kicks and cries, each imagined he was going down to where their father was waiting.

The rain struck Teige like a hook.

Then it struck Tomas, and Finbar and Finan.

It hooked Teige in the cloth of his shirt, and he felt himself caught by it and being pulled backward. He went below the water.
He cried out gurgles, and bubbles dark flew past his face. Then he reached a hand up and knew that he was dead or dreaming,
for he felt the rain like a wire running toward the shore of Clare. And he clutched on to the line and fainted beneath a white
zag of lightning and did not see the excited faces of the gathered gypsies who fished the thunder in the antique belief of
landing the electric spirit of the world.

The gypsies’ part in the story is long and intricate and fantastical. I think of it sometimes as a part invented
by grandfathers later to explain the eccentricities and wanderings of other Foleys in years afterward. Oh, that was the gypsy
side in him, they say, and sit back and look into the distance.