The Fall of Light (33 page)

The fog lasted another week. It seemed to the families gathered below that they had been chosen for a special purgatory. It
was as though they had entered some location whose coordinates were unknown and that after the long history of tragedy they
had survived, they were now to be kept there enshrouded and apart from human
contact, where the memory of their hardships would perish with them. They sat and waited. Days passed.

Then the ship swayed.

It swung into a breeze and the sails flapped with a kind of urgency and even there in their quarters below, the emigrants
knew they had come through. They shouted out. Tomas climbed the stairs and looked out through the air slots of the trap, for
it was not their hour to come on deck.

“I can see the sky,” he called. “I can see a clear sky!”

Two days later they reached land. Huxton stood and watched them enter America.

It was not marvellous or beautiful. They did not feel the sense of welcome they had dreamed or the richness of opportunity
they had been told was there. Instead there were small offices and papers and questions and waiting rooms and certification
and cramped, huddled crowds moving from one place to the next without yet entering the country proper. They were in quarantine.
There were medical examinations and bewildered faces and naked bodies standing in the cold. In all of this Tomas Foley moved
indignant and restless. He felt like an animal trapped. He was reminded of his days in the gaol in Limerick and suffered sharp
memories of the tenderness of Blath. Once when an officer gazed in his opened mouth at his teeth, he thought to lean forward
and snap off the man’s nose. But he resisted and only blew his breath out and ended the examination.

It occurred to Tomas that he had not fully expected to survive and arrive in America at all. He was to have died already and
had no plans for any future there. On the long voyage he had heard the dreams and hopes of the others and wanted the ship
to reach the far shores for their sake only. For himself there was nothing.

But then he arrived in those cold examination halls and suffered the indignities of inspection and somewhere within him an
anger fired. He stood in the long queues and saw about him the forlorn figures of the dispossessed, and the whole history
of his country seemed etched in their faces. They shambled forward and gave their names, and these were Seamus and Sean and
Aodhain and Brigid and Maire, and were given with quiet humility and sometimes had to be spelled out slowly, for they belonged
in another world. And in those moments perhaps
Tomas Foley resolved not to be defeated. He tensed like a coil. He stepped forward and had already resolved to make good there,
to show all such inspectors and officials and others that he was a Foley. Determination burned in his eyes. His mouth took
the firm straight line it was to wear for the rest of his days and his shoulders curved as though he lifted a burden.

He would make good there. He would work at whatever work there was and then send the money for Teige to join him. For the
image of his youngest brother left on the island remained with him and he knew he should not have abandoned him so. Guilt
muddied all his thoughts. Of Teige’s shirt there remained only a rag, but this Tomas kept rolled as a keepsake in the small
bundle of his things.

At last he was free and walked into America. He moved out in the uncertain and innocent cluster of his fellow passengers,
who looked about them with wide, dream-filled eyes and the fear of being out of place. They shambled into the streets with
their few belongings. They stayed within ten feet of each other for a brief time, like a herd, and then the crowds of Polish
and Germans and others intermingled among them and they were lost to each other and slipped away into the great teeming life
of that city. Tomas had no money. He was arrived in New York, and the air was beginning to turn cold. He followed his oldest
instinct and made his way through dusty streets down to a river whose name he did not know was Hudson and then lay down there
as the stars appeared. But he could not sleep. He kept seeing figures moving about, shadows, the nameless multitude of the
city’s doomed. They were like so many leaves, blown, and then blown away. When the dawn arrived he saw for the first time
the silhouette of that city and walked to a street corner where men gathered and stood and waited as at a hiring fair. He
was taken then in a wagon and worked on the docks, carrying crates of tea and other dry foodstuffs that had come from England
and sailed around the shores of the country of famine. Those about him were from a dozen countries. Among them he found the
faces of Mayo and Galway and Roscommon and acknowledged them with a small lift of his head but no more, working on until the
darkness carrying boxes on his back.

He found a place to live in a tall building that was little better than a workhouse. There were twenty-four iron frames for
beds and upon
these each night the exhausted fell for sleep. In the dawn Tomas Foley was back on the street corner. Soon those hiring grew
accustomed to looking for his face. They chose him quickly and he sat in the wagon while others looked up and tried to broaden
their shoulders and contain the coughs that jumped in their chests. The winter came. It stole in along the docks in chill
winds and frozen fogs, and then made the streets bitter tunnels of gelid air where people hurried with heads low. Tomas had
never felt anything like it. The skin of his face cracked. He had grown a beard by then and it froze hard upon him like an
iron mask. Huge snowflakes fell. The city whitened in an hour and within two slowed to a standstill. Horses slid and neighed
in alarm, hooves clopping and breath misting in dragonlike plumes. And the snow kept on falling. It fell at first like blossoms
in Maytime but then thickened until the streets were blinded. It fell on the shoulders of the men as they worked and made
them briefly blanched like incipient angels. But it did not stop them working. For a week the snow continued. The city stopped
and became a frozen image of itself, beautiful but for the dirtied smudge of tramped footprints. In the boardinghouse men
held up their feet and peeled bandages and bloodied bindings from them and made hushed inner groans at frostbite and sores.
They were unable to pay and told to leave and come back when they could. The place emptied by half. Down at the docks Tomas
was kept on. His value as a labourer was already known and he was employed by the firm of Joshua MacMaster, Shipping Merchant,
for all that winter. When the snow stopped the ice sealed it hard, and the city of New York remained a dirtied white, stained
with grit and grime, and was the image of innocence tarnished.

On his first payday, it had been Tomas’s intention to take half of his money and put it aside for Teige. He planned to do
this every week and put the notes under the heel of his boot until there were too many to allow him to walk. Then he would
send them back to the island. But in the first weeks of the frozen winter, he had come to know an old man in the bed next
to him. His name was Patrick O’Loughlin. He was a small, wiry figure without hair on his head and quick, flickering grey eyes.
He had come from the County Galway years before and travelled up and down the eastern coast there in various jobs of uncertain
honesty until rheumatism had made claws of his hands and
curved his spine like a bow. That winter his money ran out and he could not find work. The day he was told to leave the boardinghouse
he told Tomas, who took off his boot and gave him the money he was to save for Teige. He did not think of it beforehand. He
did not consider that it would only last a time and that O’Loughlin would be again on the streets. He gave the money and waved
away his hand at the thanks that began on the other man’s lips. That evening Tomas sipped from O’Loughlin’s whiskey bottle
and felt the warmth of goodness flood up through him. It was the first decent thing he had done in America, he thought. It
was his way of giving thanks for the good fortune that was his now at MacMaster’s. There would be more money for Teige.

Ten days later, after ten nights of sharing the bottles of O’Loughlin, the man told him he was out of money once more. Tomas
took off the boot he wore even in the bed and gave him another handful of notes.

“You’re a great man,” O’Loughlin said. “If we had more of your kind of man, we’d never have lost our country.” He paused and
watched the other’s face from the side. “I’ll surely have work when the ice is melted,” he said.

And so, somehow, as simple as that and without exactly meaning it to happen, Tomas found himself in the position of sharing
all his wages with Patrick O’Loughlin. He worked for two men. He grew stronger. His legs were thickly muscled, his shoulders
huge, but the wad of notes in his boot stayed thin. Through the months of January and February the city remained frozen. There
were spells of further snow. Tomas wore a heavy greatcoat that he found in the storeroom of one of the ships. It had belonged
to a Russian general and still had the epaulets before he tore them off. He worked on. He heard from some arrived mention
of the continued famine in his country and felt rage and impotency both and that evening told O’Loughlin to get him a bottle
of his own. He drank himself unconscious but managed still to wake in the morning and trudge to the docks.

The spring arrived. It arrived without any of the signals of the springs he had known. He did not see it in buds and birds
and grass. On the long avenues and streets it arrived in the air itself and was there almost before he knew it. He left the
coat open, then off, then worked in rolled shirtsleeves. It lifted his heart. He imagined seed settings in
the island and the terrible year of famine put behind. He worked with the crates that seemed natural now to his hands and
shoulders, but his mind was away in the other country. With the spring came blooms of violence. In the warm evenings hotheaded
gangs marched with bats and clashed in street battles over territories unmapped. There were feuds and enmities that the spring
fuelled, and men appeared on corners and alleyways like soldiers without armies but bound to continue in long, nameless wars
that predated their grandfathers. They rampaged some nights and battered each other and cried old slogans and catch cries
from campaigns long past. There were Italians and Slays and Irish and others and all that spring they clashed by night and
released the restless turbulence of their disappointment in that new country by renewing hostilities of old. For his physique,
Tomas was soon petitioned to join. O’Loughlin asked him one night as Tomas lay in his cot bed. He told Tomas they had to hang
on to whatever they could or they would be run out of that country the same as they had been their own. The Irish had to stick
up for themselves. He dressed it greenly so and watched across the semidarkness of the April night to gauge Tomas’s response.

“I told Burke Tomas Foley would be like ten men,” he said.

Tomas lay with his great arms crossed behind his head. The small night noises of the street sounded.

O’Loughlin leaned over. His voice was a whispered laugh.

“You can bate the heads off ’em and the police won’t even come near. They’re afraid. They’re off in the next street and they
don’t come over. One night Burke’s going to go over after them. Bate ’em, too.”

Three nights later Tomas went with O’Loughlin. He met Burke, who was a big, thick-bodied man with a top lip that sneered permanently
upward as though balancing there some droplet of righteousness. He nodded at Tomas. His eyes were hooded. He had large pink
hands that were like the skinned flesh of fatted fowl. He said something to one next to him and Tomas recognized the voice
of Mayo. Then they were a crowd moving forward. There were cries and shouts and the men beat their sticks and bats into their
hands and flowed down the street as one, though flagless and without even the knowledge of the face of their enemy. They erupted
into a charge. Some shouted, “Up Ireland!” and others cried out the place names of their
origins, towns and villages and townlands that they would never see again. These, though cries of war, revealed a sorry truth,
for they betrayed the deep-down angers of men landless and adrift in the anonymous vastness of that continent. They were cries
of belonging, and as the gangs crashed there on the streets they might have been engaged in some terrible act of reinvention
whereby the blood spilled could make good the loss of home.

Or it might have been nothing but the running amok of hot, bloody-minded thugs. Tomas watched it happen. The ones they charged
against were Italians. He did not know what feud they were engaged in or on which side lay right. He stood back, and though
O’Loughlin urged at his elbow and pointed out fellows he should charge and throw into the river, he did not move. Burke was
at the rear of the scene. He studied Tomas with a tight-lipped expression and turned away when O’Loughlin failed to get him
engaged.

“You could kill a dozen of ’em,” O’Loughlin said. “You could take any of ’em you wanted.” His eyes were crazed and shallow,
and Tomas turned from him and walked away up the street with men shouting and beating at each other at his back.

He did not go out again on the night streets for all the rest of that month. He worked overtime for free. He volunteered to
stand await for ships in the night. He tried to exhaust his body and then shut down his mind with the whiskey O’Loughlin got
for him. Still, sometimes the image of open fields came before him and he felt the closure of his life and its constraints
and he wanted to strike out against these. He ran the crates then up and down the gangways, he worked the great mitts of his
hands and the deep muscles of his shoulders until the sweat ran glistening off him and his eyes attained the faraway look
of one beaten and whipped a long time.

Then one summer evening when he was still at the docks Burke came to see him. Two others who stood back attended him. Burke
gestured Tomas to him with a fat pink finger. He told Tomas that famine had struck again in their country. He made a sneer
of his lip and told him they were dying again in the fields and roadways and that this would only worsen as the harvesttime
drew on. He said they could all be dead soon. He asked Tomas what he was going to do to
help, and did not wait for an answer. He said he was sure Tomas would do what every good man of their country would do.