The Fall of Light (32 page)

“Two more roses.”

And he kissed his two forefingers and flew them down unto the infants’ heads.

“Roseleen and Rosario.”

“Is there nothing else that springs from your penis but roses?” Cait asked him, and she smiled and his heart grew large inside
him and might have taken the form of white birds with wide wings, for he felt then so light and full of hope.

The days thereafter were soft and warm. The street became a small village. But, without the constant journeying of the past,
the gypsies grew restless easily in the mild late-summer nights and took to sudden knife fights for little reason. They visited
the giant-bosomed whore, Cassandra, in the small hut she had erected at the end of the street, whose loose planks creaked
and sometimes fell outward as her customers’ heads banged against them. Not to be offput, in midcoitus she called out to those
who were queued outside to repair the damage unless they wanted their wives to see. While some ecstatic customer bobbed up
and down on her chest, she made above his head the gestures of hammering to the gaping others and told them to hurry up in
case she caught a cold and closed. After such loving then, the gypsies came out into the night with an empty dissatisfaction
they could not explain and took to flashing their knives without provocation and spilling the innards of each other in the
street. They did not fight to the death, but slashed at chests and midriffs and took a kind of perverse glee in how the blood
slowly emerged like dye on the fine white shirts their opponents wore to visit Cassandra. To arrive in that street in the
summer nights of that year, it might have seemed the gypsies were rivals for the love of a fabulous beauty and were engaged
in a fight for her honour. But it was in fact not hers but their own honour that they sought to recapture. They knifed each
other to be men, and whether you were the gypsy wounded or wounding did not really matter. In the daylight the scars were
bandaged and masked and the little village seemed as normal. The bloodstains in the street vanished under the traffic and
trade.

Now all of this Finbar Foley knew yet could do nothing to stop. He
grew more and more isolated from those he was supposed to lead, and when the gypsies saw him in the street it seemed to him
they lowered their eyes and busied themselves with merchandise. He said nothing to any of them now. In the evenings he did
not unfurl the map of Benardi or mention again the notion of Bohemia. Secretly he allowed the first seeds of returning to
his home country to settle in his mind, but he did not tell this to Cait, for he could not face the idea of such defeat. Then,
one morning in the month of October, there arrived in the village a ghost whose name was Malone. He was a figure ancient and
thin unto transparency, with baleful blue eyes and the bones of his cheeks like stumps polished and poking outward through
the flimsiness of his flesh. His head was bruised and scabbed. As he walked down the street he blinked incessantly, and when
the gypsy traders called to him of their wares he babbled words they did not understand and stepped on in his shoeless way.
They cursed after him then and disregarded him further, though he stopped in the middle of the street and said something back
to them which was again indecipherable and easily mistaken for ravings. Then he drifted on slow and ghostlike and without
baggage and in the dim brown light of that season seemed little different from the dead.

Then Finbar saw him. And in a moment recognized some trait of physiognomy or bearing and knew he was from that old country
where he himself had been born. The ghost-man stopped and looked at him and said:

“Ta an domhain ag dul ar siar.”

And although Finbar had not heard that language spoken in a long time, he recognized what it was and knew that the man had
told him the world was nearly over.

Finbar brought him inside then and sat him by the low oak table in their caravan. He brought the man cold smoked fish and
water, and he and Cait sat there and watched while this same fellow took the food and drink in slow, small mouthfuls as if
these were painful to him. The man’s jaws moved in a crosswise, crooked motion. He was without teeth and crushed the food
on his palate with his tongue. He was bent over and rocked softly all the time. Then Finbar asked him in Irish where he was
from and the ghost-man stopped and turned his ruined
face to them and said his name was Malone and he was from the place that was the County Galway.

“Was?” Finbar asked.

Malone nodded. He said none were alive there now. He said a plague had come in that country and killed the people that had
once lived there. He wet the lipless gap of his mouth with a little water and then he told them. He told how the potatoes
had rotted in the ground and the people been unable to pay their rent and how they were driven to the roads. He told of some
gone insane and others who leapt from cliffs into the sea. He told of those who ate the grass and the nettles and the green
leaves of the hedgerows and how their bodies twisted in the ditches six days and more before they died. He told of bailiffs
come to tear houses down lest the families think to lodge there without rent. He said how he saw a mother of ten children
offer to tear her own house down for two pennies, and how she did, with terrible tears and lamentations, until there was nothing
left but rocks in the road.

The night fell while he talked on. For once he began, the stories flowed from him like a river of grief and Cait nursed the
new twins and rocked them in her arms with her eyes weeping and Finbar said nothing at all. The old man had lost his daughters
first. These were twelve and fourteen years old. They had sickened on the road to Waterford and fallen into a fever with frightful
visions and eyes white with terror. When they died he had not a spade to bury them and dug the ground with his hands and made
a cross of ash and tied it with the cord of his trousers. His wife would not leave the spot, and though he begged her and
tried to drag her along the road she would not go, and he was forced to let her stay, where she sang sad songs all day long
to their daughters. They watched the thousands coming and going there, those doomed and futureless and travelling to nowhere.
His wife died of hunger by her daughters and he buried her alongside them in the same grave where their bodies were not yet
rotted. Then he himself walked on. For he could not bear to stay there and thought Death would find him quicker if he went
to meet Him.

Malone paused and looked and saw that Cait was bedding the children, and then he whispered other terrors to Finbar that he
did not wish her to hear. He told of death in all its forms, of some shot, some throat-slit, others hung and swinging in the
trees of the fields of North
Munster with crows eating their eyes. He told of a man in delirium who cut off his arm and cooked it in a fire to feed to
his son. He told of roads where the smells of putrefaction rose and how he walked on through them to meet Death and could
not find Him. Only ghosts. For that country had become peopled by these. They rose from where they lay unburied in weeds and
thronged the roadways. He saw them himself. They wandered listless and wan and without purpose. There were families entire.
There were small infants with encircled eyes. There were gaunt great-grandfathers, all ghosted and silent and grave and journeying
as things without a home. Malone had walked to Waterford and still not met Death and then taken a boat, thinking he was to
drown. He had arrived in France one day without knowing the name of which country he stepped out on. Then he walked southward
and eastward and all the time attendant on Death. He had heard then that those who had survived the first year of the famine
were killed the second, and any last remaining starved in the third, until there was none left in that country now but a multitude
of phantoms.

He finished and lowered his eyes and looked at the timber flooring of the caravan. Finbar and Cait were seated about him.
They did not speak. A long time passed and all three sat in still and mute contemplation of the horror that had been told.
The candle burned out and they were shadowless shades there until at last in the small hours of the morning Malone spoke and
asked them if in fact he was dead.

On the ocean the eldest of the Foley brothers sailed for seventy-one days. The journey was to have been forty,
but the captain of that ship, Abraham Huxton, chose a course more northerly than usual and brought them into seas tall as
trees. Almost all of those who sat in the gloom belowdecks had never been to sea before. The distance of the journey was unimaginable
to them, and in the times they were allowed to climb the stairs and take air and see the ocean, they thought
it endless. Within ten days there were many who chose to stay below rather than feel the fall of their hearts as they gazed
out on the churning grey emptiness. They lived then in the small cramped quarters where the air was soon fouled and where
cholera and typhus and dysentery were in their first stages. Many were ill with seasickness and lay groaning day and night
as the ship swayed to and fro. The drinking water was too quickly drunk and was then rationed to two cups a day, and then
one. The flour was infested. Children bawled and were hushed or beaten quiet and lay then on the damp timber floor with defeated
brooding faces and horror at how the green world of fields had vanished. There were mothers and grandmothers who brought with
them small trinkets or minor belongings that recalled the homes they had left. These they fingered, a brass ring, enamel spoon,
braid of doll’s hair, small carved cross, such things, turning them over for hours on end long after any talk had fallen silent.
They sailed on. Sometimes they kept the small candle of their hope burning by asking each other about where they would go
in the New World. They did not speak of the farms and villages they had left behind, but tried to be forward looking whenever
the terrors they had seen ghosted before them and made their throats rise. So, they spoke of places their imaginations could
not yet begin to shape, of New York and Philadelphia and Boston. And these appeared in their minds like shining citadels in
the Bible wherein all their travails would be ended and their families live in peace and plentitude. But then the sea grew
rough and the filled chamber pots that lay in their laps spilled about the floor and the children cried again.

Huxton sailed them into storm after storm. He was a broad-chested man who walked the decks with clean-shaven jaw thrust forward
and hands holding each other behind his back. Even as the seas rose and threw the ship sideways, he tried to keep his hands
behind him. He stood in the gales and sweeps of rain that whipped across the decks and he kept his legs planted as though
defying Neptune to throw a storm that would unbalance him. And so they came. The wind cracked in the sails and the decks were
awash as waves broke in froth and spume and painted the boards in thin white foam that came and disappeared down through the
deck into the quarters below. The ship was like a toy and within it the families of O’Connors, Barretts, Keoghs, Considines,
Kirwins, Mulcahys, Moriartys, Doohans, and others were thrown from their seats and tumbled in the dripping darkness with white
eyes and screams. The ship rolled them about. The barrels of drinking water came loose from their bindings and crashed. They
clung to each other and awaited their death. But for most of them it did not come, and the storm began to ease. A junior accommodation
officer appeared at the trap above and looked down at the bowed heads and counted them and went off to make his report of
losses and sometimes arrange for bodies to be buried at sea. Within days there was another storm. And then another. Huxton
kept his balance. He betrayed no signs of victory or pride, only the upward tilt of his chin as the ship sailed on. In time
the passengers grew to read the wind in the creaking of the hull and know the signs of tempest before it arrived. They learned
how to sit in braced positions and secure such things as would roll and cause breakage and injury. They drank empty the cloth-stoppered
bottles of poitin they had brought with them.

They endured.

Then, when the shores of America should have been near, they sailed into deep fog. The ship slowed and then seemed to stop
altogether. The passengers came up excitedly expecting to see land and stood silent, craning forward and narrowing their eyes
into the soft grey blanket that surrounded them. The foghorn sounded. The day passed. The passengers grew accustomed to that
sound. Some said it would summon whales and that these were gigantic in those waters and would stove in the ship and sink
her. Others said the shore of New York was less than a few miles and the fog would rise in the morning and like a cloth lifted
they would see the great buildings. Neither proved true. The fog hung on. Huxton stood on the bridge with his hands behind
his back. There was an eerie silence there. In the absence of storm the water made small sounds now and the sailors did not
speak. The food supplies dwindled. The fog remained. The air was cold and windless and no seabirds flew.