The Fall of Light (36 page)

One time on such an occasion they scrambled up the mountain only to meet a bear. The bear saw them before they saw it. It
had smelled them coming and laboured a time between curiosity and fear. Then when the men’s heads appeared the bear froze.
It watched them like creatures landed from the moon. Briefly it crouched and in those moments seemed to belie its own reputation
for ferocity. Brown’s head came up above the rock to the ledge. He saw the bear and let out a curse, and whether it was the
noise or the wide whites of his eyes or the sharp tang of fear that burned on the air then, the bear rose. Brown called back
to the others behind him. He tried to get them to retreat, but already the bear was coming forward. It was less than an instant,
then the noise of the bear and the size of the bear both achieved that aim and the men turned about and sought places below
them to jump. But there were none. The bear roared. It stood and made as yet no other action, as if such were not required
but that the demonstrated evidence of its own magnificence was sufficient to make surrender all enemies. The men pushed backward
and were close together and reached for weapons. The bear opened its jaws and roared again and slavered a whitish loop. It
moved forward in a massive lunge at the blond head of Lieutenant Brown. Then Tom Foley shot it. The bullet hit the bear in
the forehead. Its head twitched backward as if tugged by some wire or other attachment to something greater than itself. The
men saw the puzzlement register in the eyes of the bear and then this the bear dismissed and came forward again and Tom Foley
shot it
again and Cartwright shot it, too. The bear howled out and shuddered and twisted and its right leg gave beneath it and it
fell.

The silence regathered in the mountains.

“You saved our lives,” Brown said. Then they moved away from there and left the great corpse of the bear on that ledge and
were like men chastened or obscurely stained.

They went on. All through the rest of that summer and into the autumn that unit of the Topographical Engineers of the U.S.
Army travelled up and down the various ranges of the Rocky Mountains. They drew maps and charts and sent these sometimes by
rider back to Fort Laramie. But they did not find a way to bring the railroad through the mountains. The air turned cold in
the beginning of October. The rider brought back two mules laden with heavy blankets and other supplies for the winter. The
first snows fell. Mountain lions came down and prowled and Tom and Cartwright sat watch and fired rifle shots. At the campfire
Brown told the others they could go back. He said the winter would be harsh and long. He said he himself was going to stay
on, that he could not give up now, but that for any that wanted he could issue orders to return to the fort.

None of the men left him. They watched the way his eyes burned when he spoke of what they could achieve, and the candles lit
in their own eyes, too.

The winds became knives. The skin of their faces peeled off, then the new skin dried hard and cracked and in wrinkled lines
turned scarlet as though branded by the burning feet of crows. Their lips blistered and opened at the corners and the burst
skin puffed with pus. Their legs froze on the flanks of their horses. In their long boots their toes turned numb and they
had to jump down and fall over and pull off the boots and try to beat the blood back into their feet with their hands. Two
of the horses died overnight. They froze like things iced in fairy tale. From then on the men tethered the horses together
and blanketed them and made their own rests beneath their legs so the meagre heat of their bodies might rise to the animals.
They came on snows thick to the waist. They dug out small tunnels and made tiny progress and one time encountered the upright
body of a frozen man with bluish face and finger pointing as if at the way to eternity. The fierce season made even emptier
that empty place. They seemed the
only ones then and the rest of the world might have perished or been taken in judgement and they alone were overseen and endured
in that white and pure domain.

In those days, then, in that place where time seemed ceased and the very change of which they were to be the agent was nowhere
evident, Tom Foley’s mind wandered into the past. He thought often of his youngest brother. He lay beneath the wide magnificence
of the night skies there and tried to recall the stories of the stars Teige had told when they were younger. He looked for
the Great Bear and Cassiopeia and Cepheus and he remembered stories of winged horses and charioteers and deeds heroic and
fantastical. In his mind he heard Teige tell them the way he had learned them from their mother, and through those constellations
that hung there the family was then connected and the past and the present made one. For days then Tomas’s mind drifted. He
rode with visions. He passed a white day moving through the mountains but was in all but body thousands of miles away in the
green fields of the island of the saint. He was there with Teige and his father. And his mother, Emer, was there, too. And
the twins. And all were as they had once been and were not aged or changed, and his mother’s hair blew on the soft breeze
in that place she had never seen. They were walking over the way toward the tower. He saw the blossoms on the berry bushes.
He smelled the furze and the blooms of May and let his hand touch against them as he went. And all of that verdant loveliness
that had entered him once now rose and screened the other world. He sat his horse and let limp the reins and walked it forward
behind the others, rocking softly in the saddle and drifting back to that place where he last felt a sense of home. Snow flurried
and crowned his hat. The muffled clop of hooves made a rhythm slow and hypnotic, and Tom Foley’s eyes dulled into that look
that in his country was called away with the fairies. It endured for a certain time. But it stopped abruptly when he saw the
face of his wife, Blath. Then the grief rose through him. He saw the ghostly faces of those multitudes dying on the roadways
and their shrunken bodies and pulled himself upright on his horse and lifted his face into the wind that it might sear him.

They are dead now, he thought. All of them.

They did not find the route for the railroad that winter. Nor at any time in the year that followed. They
sent plans and drawings and their suggestions east but heard nothing in reply. They imagined themselves forgotten. Brown used
this then as his principal motivation. He told them the politicians were arguing among themselves. He said there was probably
no one who thought it could be done and that the finances of the country were being spent elsewhere. He said he believed the
gold in California had finished and so greed no longer fuelled the enterprise. He told the men this and they sat hunched and
worn and aged about a fire. And then he raised his voice and said that he was still going on. Who would continue with him?
After a time it became needless to ask. They rode on. They passed across the mountains and down into Fort Bridger but were
met there with looks curious and askance, full beards and tattered uniforms lending them the air of renegades. None felt welcomed.
For they were not engaged in the business of that army proper and might have been like some figments or ghosts travailing
in a shadow-world. They left then and rode back to the mountains and felt they were men grown intolerant of all but each other’s
company.

They travelled northward up into the lands of Montana. The seasons slipped past them. They crossed over the Rockies and down
past the Big Horn. They rode wide of the villages of the Indians. And not Crow or Blackfoot or Cheyenne or Arapaho did they
kill in that time.

But by then time itself was vanished for them. They existed outside of any history and knew only their horses and the land.
They did not know of wars and treaties and treaties broken. They did not know how the maps of that country were being redrawn
even as they rode over the land. They did not know that in Fort Laramie they themselves were reported murdered by Indians,
that their relatives had been informed, and that another troop had set off likewise to find the best rail route west. Brown’s
men rode on. No maps and charts and graphs were drawn anymore. The relentless immensity of the land itself made weary the
vision of the railroad, and at times they forgot what it was they were seeking. Days and weeks could pass then without mention
of it. In three years Tom Foley had written three letters to Dr. Brown about his son. But only the first of these had reached
other hands. The other two Tom had given to traders, and these had never been seen again.

So it was. They rode in the mountains.

Then one day in the April of the year, they came down to a clear-running stream and dismounted and ducked their faces and
shook the great hanks of their knife-cut beards and were in general ease when arrows landed in the chests of three of them.
They fell forward on their faces. The arrows had made such small noise that at first the others did not understand. They looked
along the stream at the fallen soldiers. Then arrows landed in the throats of two more of them and pierced them through. There
were Indians on horseback in the stream. The water plashed and made broad, translucent arcs either side of the horses as they
came, and such things seemed to be in slow motion or exist in fragments and shards where the mind’s perception shattered with
shock and fear. Another arrow flew, the sound a whir. Then Cartwright fell back as he ran to his horse and rifle. Then the
Indians were upon them. There were five or seven or maybe nine. Tom Foley could not be sure. He saw the one coming on a white
pony with tomahawk waving and saw the triple scars across his chest. He saw the feathers in his hair. Then he jumped up at
him and there was a moment and he was airborne and grappling the Indian about the midriff and the tomahawk was being raised
to sink in his skull. Then the two of them were crashed in the stream and went below the surface of the water, and Tom’s hands
found the neck of the other and closed upon it and drowned him there. Beneath the water he heard the sound of gunfire. When
he stood again Brown was aiming his pistol and pulling the trigger time and again without a bullet firing. There was a long
arrow in his thigh. Two of the Indians lay in the water. Another was running at him with knife drawn. Tom shouted out. He
saw the Indian sink the knife in Philip Brown and was then upon him. He pulled him down as Brown fell back, and they tumbled
onto the wet gravel of the riverbed and wrestled there. The Indian was younger and smaller than him and twisted and rolled
like one demented. He broke free and stood and pranced on the ground, as might a dancer. He had no weapon. Tom Foley stood
up and looked at him and they were so
some little time, the Indian jostling in the space and ready to leap and the other still and braced and looking him in the
eye. The moment held. There was the small noise of the stream and the groans of a man. The water ran red past them.

Then, the moment snapped, the Indian turned and ran and jumped onto the back of his pony and was gone.

Tom Foley stood there.

He watched where the other rode away. Then he walked past the fallen to Brown and knelt down and put his hand before that
man’s mouth and then placed his ear on his chest. He was living still. Tom reached down then and took the shaft of the arrow
low as he could and snapped it. Brown did not open his eyes. The blood from the knife wound pumped freely.

“Oh God,” Tom said. “Oh God in heaven.”

He went and took the shirt of one of the men and tore it lengthwise and came back and applied pressure to the wound with both
his hands until the blood stopped coming between his fingers. Then he bound the wound as best he could and crossed down to
his horse and brought up the canteen and poured the water over the lieutenant’s face.

Brown opened his eyes.

“You can’t die,” Tom Foley told him. “I promised your father.”

It took Tom Foley thirty-two days to get Lieutenant Philip James Brown back to Fort Laramie. And another five months before
the son was fit enough to take the stagecoach back east to meet his father.

When it was done, Tom decided to ride back up into the mountains. But before he did, there came into the fort a wagon train,
and among the homesteaders was a family whose name was Considine. He saw their freckled faces and he stood and asked them
how long it was they were in that country. They spoke with the accent of the County Clare and told him they had come over
only six months.

“Are they not all dead there?” Tom asked.

“No indeed. No,” said Mary Considine, who was the man’s sister and was struck by the sadness of the question.

That night, with her help, Tom Foley sat and wrote a letter to his brother Teige.

Dear Brother,

I do not know if you are living or dead. I do not know if our father is living or dead.

I am in America. I came here to make the railroad. I am in first rate health. My mind wanders some times to the days long
ago. I had your shirt a long time Teigey and I intended to send you money to come. Then I thought all were dead there on account
of the famine was in the potatoes.