The Fall of Light (34 page)

Tomas said nothing. He looked out at the Hudson River sleek and black and he thought of it flowing all the way across the
world and into the mouth of the Shannon.

Burke put a hand on his shoulder.

“You have family there. We all have family there,” he said. “We have to help them. We need a rebellion, and for that we need
funds.”

By the time Burke left there, Tomas Foley’s wages were to be halved. The money was to be his contribution towards helping
overthrow the enemies of his country. He could think of it as money for Teige. It was what had to be done.

That summer the city boiled. Waves of heat floated and bent the streets and burnt off the shoulders and arms and faces of
those unused to it. There was no air. Some, freckle-faced men of pale skin, fell at their work in spells and faints or drank
the river water and felt their brains swell and make bulge the baked shells of their skulls. It was hotter than they had ever
known. It seemed they breathed in the oven breath of a giant beast that towered over the city. Workers who had come from other
countries were less afflicted and could be seen then in a kind of swaggering ease, their tanned bodies slick with oil and
their smiles white.

Through it, Tomas Foley laboured on. He became nothing, another of the myriad emigrant workers in that city who lived without
hope a thing too empty to call a life. He worked, he drank, he gave over his money to O’Loughlin and Burke.

He burned in summer, he froze in winter. It was only during the short springs or in early autumn that he felt any ease, and
in these he was tormented with memories of the country left behind.

And years slipped by.

He learned that the famine struck again. And then again. He saw the ships of the wretched come and knew well the wan and hollowed
look of those families who had survived starvation and sickness and the sea. They seemed to him to look in more desperation
than those of the year before and were like casualties in some long, horrific war. He could not bear to look in their faces.
They were grey figures, sunkencheeked, with ruined teeth and bloodied gums prominent, collarbones
poking outward, flesh dried and dead and flaking. There were forlorn grandmothers and mothers and children thin as sticks.
A hard wind might have snapped them. One day he saw four boys of eight and ten in dirtied shirts and the expressions of old
men, with coughs making water their eyes. Their father had been buried on the sea. Tomas’s throat rose at the sight of them.
He held his teeth tightly together to stop his jaw from shaking. He looked about at the sorry assembly arrived there and thought:
These must be the last left living in my country. And now they are here. He did not go and ask them. He did not go forward
and tell that he had been one of them, too. Instead he kept his head down and worked on that day and banged the crates and
spat angrily into the river whenever the vision of suffering assailed him. That night he came back to the boardinghouse soured
and bitter and told O’Loughlin to get him two bottles of whiskey. When the little man returned Tomas told him he would give
no more money to Burke. He told him it was useless, what had they done? O’Loughlin tried to say great progress had been made,
plans were afoot, but Tomas turned and grabbed him by the throat and held and shook him like that and then threw him back
on the bed with a curse. The small man said nothing more then.

In deep sleep that night Tomas dreamed his country was a woman who ran a knife across the surface of her womb. Her blood ran
out like a stream and he watched it, that awful emptying that flowed over the ground. And it took the form of ghostlike faces.
Tomas saw his father and his brother among them. He woke. There was a cold sweat over him.

My father and Teige are dead, he thought.

He blinked his eyes at the darkness of the long room. He lay there like that a time to steady himself. Then he leaned over
and reached in the canvas bag of his things that he kept beneath the bed and he took out the tattered rolled rag of his brother’s
shirt. He held it in his hands and sat so, and it was some time before he noticed that Patrick O’Loughlin was gone, along
with both of his boots and any money he had in the world.

He could not stay there after that. When he gathered his senses, Tomas Foley walked out of that place barefoot
into the streets and never returned to the dockside warehouse of Joshua MacMaster, Shipping Merchant. He just walked away.
He walked westward and was like one trying to increase with each footstep the distance between himself and his country.

He is lost then from any history. And so he wandered, and in such wandering vanished into the crowds of those nameless and
without domain until one winter’s night some years later in a small town not far from the city of Cincinnati.

It was snowing. The flakes whirled out of the dark. Tom Foley, for so he was now, walked out of a bar and a man came after
him and hit him across the back with a swung rifle. He fell face forward into the slush of the street. The man said nothing.
He raised the rifle by its barrel a second time. He wore a coat of furs and a hat of beaver skin. His face was blotched from
raw whiskey and he blinked his eyes as he swung again. The rifle arced through the snow air and on the ground Tom Foley rolled
to avoid it. He kicked out with his right leg and the fur man toppled and soon both were tumbling over in the mud of the street.
Men came and stood to watch in the yellow lamplight. The fur man was large and grunted and tried to make fist blows from the
side. But Tom paid them no heed. He rolled the man easily and then struck him hard in the midriff. Then he stood up.

He stepped two paces away in his Russian greatcoat and brushed at it with his hands. And in so doing, he did not hear the
man cock the rifle at his back. There was a moment upon which his life balanced. The snow, the mud, the yellow light, the
smoke that hung there, the horses, and the smells of sweat and dirt and whiskey, all were part of it. Somewhere in him he
sensed his own death. It was as if Death Himself suddenly appeared there as a grey phantasm in the street, and in that same
instant Tom Foley knew that He was come for him. He might have seen the strides He took toward him and how these were then
so swift and effortless that Death was almost upon him before he could take a last breath. For then the riflefired.
He saw his own blood spurt out through him and briefly rouge the snowy air. It shot out in fierce and sudden leakage and his
brain fuddled with incomprehension as to whence it came. He looked down. The coat was holed clean through below his ribs.
He fingered it and like a child then pressed the finger farther until it was inside the hole in himself. The bleeding ceased
and he fell on his knees. He was there in the street, unhanded by any and studied by a few as the snow fell upon him. The
fur man staggered to his feet. He swayed with the rifle that smoked thinly still. Some element of conscience fought within
him, for he turned to those watching and showed an expression of strange pride and bafflement both that he had shot a man
in the back.

Tom felt Death lay hands upon him. The snow touched his face, but he could not feel it. He wanted to close his eyes. His hand
upon his side was soaked in blood and it squelched when he lifted and replaced it. He was cold. He knelt there and did not
fall over and was like one faulty in performance of dying. The fur man behind him held the rifle another minute. None stepped
out from the sidewalk. They shuffled there and murmured and held their glasses and waited. The rifle passed along the line
of them as the fur man turned and gazed upon them as on a jury. Then he threw the rifle on the ground and hurried away through
the falling snow.

A man walked forward then and touched Tom Foley on the side of his neck and then called to others, and these came and carried
the wounded man from the street.

Three days later Tom Foley learned that the bullet had passed through him. The doctor that attended him was Philip James Brown.
He was a strongly built man of about sixty years with a round head and thin, reddish hair. His eyes were kind and his manner
assured. He had had Tom brought to a room at the side of his own house where men of various kind had lain to recover. There
he had dressed and wrapped the wound and doctored it in the method used. He had said little at first, the gravity of the situation
denying it; then, as Tom Foley sat propped on the bed, Philip Brown asked him where he was from. To the response he did not
say anything at first. He nodded his head and offered Tom a drink. He watched him while he took it. He asked him what his
plans were.

“I have given up making plans.”

“That a fact?”

“I plan to live until I die.”

“Glad to hear it. Hate to hear a man wanted to die after I stopped him bleeding all over my floor.”

“I’m grateful for what you did. I will repay you.”

“I didn’t do it for the money.”

“Why did you?” Tom Foley asked him.

“I’m a doctor,” Brown said, and he sat there in a chair by the bed and held his drink and the two of them dwelled in the amber
hush of twilight and said no more as the noises in the street came and went.

Less than a week later Tom was able to walk. The first thing he did was go outside of the house and around to the back, where
he managed one-handed to swing an ax and split the many logs that were assembled there. When the doctor returned he looked
at the timber and thought to admonish the patient but simply thanked him instead.

“I will be gone tomorrow,” Tom said.

“Gone where?” Brown said.

“On.”

“I see. Plans?”

“No.”

The doctor said no more then. He waited until the evening had drawn in and the street darkened and he and Tom Foley sat one
last time on the porch seats where the doctor liked to smoke in the chill winter air.

“How you going to repay me?” Brown said. He was looking away over the small fence that separated them from the street.

“You didn’t want me to.”

“Not money, I said.” The doctor kept his eyes far away. He seemed to be engaged in some study of the air in the middle distance.

Tom Foley looked at him. “What?”

“Well, let’s see here,” Brown said. “I saved your life, that’s for sure, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, there has to be some payment, otherwise every fool in
the street’ll be shooting down some other fella, saying Doc Brown will patch him up no charge. You see my point? Where would
that leave me? No, there has to be something,” he said, and drew on his cigarette and waited. A moon was rising through clouds
and suddenly the snowed street turned a dirty yellow.

“What?” Tom Foley asked him again.

“I have a lifelong interest in this country,” the doctor said then. “Had it since I was a small boy and my mama told me she
had come here on a ship from Scotland and that this country had been her saviour. That’s what she called it. Her saviour.
And I often got to thinking about that. How can a country be your saviour? And I didn’t know then about all she had suffered
and her sea voyage and all that. I didn’t know her father had been hunted down and hanged and that she had seen him swinging
from a tree. She told me that only when she was lying in a bed dying and raving with fever.”

The doctor paused and pushed his lower lip out and back a little, then he took his right hand and rubbed at his chin stubble
and waited a time.

“So, she had a good life after that beginning. That’s what struck me. That’s what it is about this country. You can begin
here. It can be your saviour. Long as you don’t get shot down in the street,” he added, and made a small smile in the corners
of his lips.

“There’s a man going to make this country better,” Brown said. His voice was soft but firm. “He’s going to find a way to bring
the railroad all the way to California.” He paused again and let the smoke drift on the cold and seem a measure of the vastness
of that distance in geography.

“I want you to go with him, Tom,” he said at last.

The night was still. The chairs creaked on the old porch.

“I want you to keep an eye on him. He’s been shot two times already.” The doctor rocked in his chair and the clouds came and
passed across the face of the moon.

“Who is he?” Tom Foley asked then.

The doctor did not turn to him, his features obscured in the poverty of clouded moonlight.

“He’s my son,” he said.

Tom Foley left the doctor’s house two days later and rode westward on a chestnut gelding that once belonged
to a man that had been gut shot in the street and cut and patched and sewn by Brown. That man was General Isaac Stephens,
under whose command a unit of the Corps of Topographical Engineers of the U.S. Army was engaged in surveying the land west
of the Mississippi River for a rail route that would join the two sides of the continent. In that unit was one Lieutenant
Philip J. Brown, engineer, draughtsman, and map reader.