The Fall of Light (42 page)

Later that night, then, in a small room that was off the hearth, mother and son lay sleepless in a cover, their separate histories
vast and unspoken in the dark above them. Slender stellar light fell. The sill of the small window shone and showed in the
corner lacelike tracery of spiders. Mice worked. At last, though he did not know if she was awake or sleeping, Teige said:
“Mother?”

It seemed strange to be sounded aloud. It seemed a word he had never heard himself say.

“Mother?”

“Yes, Teige.”

“They are all gone,” he said. “Finbar, Finan, and Tomas, too. I am the only one left.”

She did not say anything at once. He wondered in her dark world if shades or shadows fell. He wondered if there was blackness
and then utter blackness. He reached his hand toward the shape of her and his fingers arrived at the softness of her face
that was like a fallen fruit wet in the grass.

“I thought I had cried my last,” she said.

He told her quickly then that none of them may be dead. He told her of the river crossing with the telescope and the chase
from Limerick and the gypsies and the races on the sands. He told her of Tomas and his love and how they had been lost to
them for so long. He told her of the twins vanishing and how they had never returned but wandered in separate somewheres unknown.
He paused and did not tell her then of his own searching or the years of solitude tramping the roads. He heard her sighs.
He heard the new sorrows make room in the confines of her spirit. The night moved on a time. Clouds came from the west and
darkened the window. Then rain began.

“I found him,” Teige said then. “Father, I found him on the road. He was looking for us. He was looking for you. He knew of
an island.” He stopped himself a moment and did not know if she wanted to be told. But he felt compelled and said: “He is
there now. He is sorry. He looks for you in the stars.”

There escaped from her the smallest cry, as if some great weight had been pressed against her chest and she could utter nothing
more. Teige did not continue. Then out of the darkness his mother’s hand reached for him and touched his face and then her
other joined it and she held his head between her fingers and kissed his forehead.

“I came back,” she said. “The day after. I came back.”

She paused and her breaths came in sharp gasps.

“We had a fight. He wanted to go, I wanted to stay. I went out the door. I only meant to be gone a day until he could see
how he needed me. God forgive me. I came back the next morning, the house was on fire. They were hunting him. I thought you
were burned. Oh God.” She cried out and she moaned as if torn and Teige drew her closer and they held to each other then,
weeping in the darkness of the night. He stroked her silvered hair, he touched her blind eyes, and murmured to her
shush-shush
sounds while all about them in the fields of that countryside a bitter rain fell.

In the dawn the skies cleared. A buffeting wind like a busy housekeeper moved about and took down the first
leaves of autumn. Sycamore trees around the farmhouse made whispers and shivers, sea sounds. Birds were sent about and arced
and whirled on air that gleamed. Teige rose and went to see to the mare and then led his mother to the table which Clancy’s
sister had lain. Clancy himself did not appear at first, and his sister knocked and called to him several times before his
head came around the door. He would take no food. He would be ready shortly, he told them. They ate and rose and thanked the
woman. Then Teige backed the mare once more onto its transport and they left there.

The road west was already busy that morning with marketgoers. Drovers had been out moving with cattle since before light.
Now their customers followed in their wake. There was a stream of those buyers, hawkers, gawkers, and others on foot and cart,
travelling into Ennis. Wisps of straw and hay blew down the wind, the pungency of congregation of men and beasts leavened
in that blustering weather. All studied the mare as she passed, but Clancy, who was returned to his taciturn manner, did not
give them so much as the corner of his eye. He clucked at the horses and brought them through the town and out the farther
side on the road to Kilrush. They travelled on, the blind woman seated between the two men and her son sometimes saying to
her brief descriptions of what country they passed. She wore a shawl against the breeze. What visions of those she loved unrolled
as the landscape passed could not be said. She sat and was like one revenant from other worlds, burdened by what she had witnessed
and what could never be told. The horses clopped and beat down the road. Gusts of wind rose across the hedgerows and leaves
and smaller birds briefly dallied in the polished light. At cottages along the way some had bedding and blankets out and beat
at these and made thin clouds of dust in which hens scattered and flew. At others faces maybe men or women watched from just
within and gave scrutiny to all without show of emotion, as if they were themselves no more than milestones
and merely measured all that passed in the long continuum of human sorrow.

They went on. When they neared the town of Kilrush and the grey estuary waters could be seen, Clancy looked to Teige and gestured
with a motion of his head in the direction of the island. Teige nodded in response and Clancy turned again to face the road
with the woman between them none the wiser of their discourse. They came in about the town and there in its windy streets
were those familiars who had seen them go and saw them return now and saw the strange woman on the seatboard. They studied
her as the cart passed and asked aloud of one another who she might be and what trouble might be abrewing. Some moved along
the street then after the cart as if hooked.

Down at the water’s edge by the small pier, Clancy left the Foleys. He paid Teige and told him to come back to them when he
could, that there would be more work for him, and he bowed his head to the blind woman and seemed about to say something when
the words escaped him. So he turned away suddenly and climbed up and clicked with his tongue and was gone. Mother and son
stood there in the wind. The water slapped. Some of those who had followed down through the town stayed a short distance away
and watched surreptitiously.

“We are going to the island,” Teige told his mother, “we are going to Father.” He hesitated a moment, then said, “Some say
there is a curse against women there. They say—”

“We will go,” she said, and held up her head and was briefly the proud and headstrong image of her former self. She raised
her hand for him to take it, and he did. And she said nothing more. Clouds fast moving swept above them. The light there came
and went. Gulls and other seabirds hovered and plunged and rose again briefly dripping. The noon and afternoon passed as they
waited for a ferryman to take them across. The fishing boats were long gone and had not yet returned. Only small skiffs and
other canoelike boats of canvas moved on the water. One of these, piloted by a man of ragged beard and neck boils, at length
arrived at the pier and Teige asked him for their passage. The fellow shrugged, as if such were not his business but rather
some purgatorial labour, as if he were bound to ferry all until he died. He sat there and held the moor rope and waited while
Teige tried to
help his mother to board. The boat bobbed alongside them. Timbers creaked. The light was swiftly dying. The little crowd of
onlookers came down along the pier.

“Where are you taking her?” one of them called. “Are you taking her out there?”

But Teige did not reply. He stood in the boat himself at last and reached his arms and told his mother to step to him. And
she lifted a small blind foot and it wavered an instant before she stepped forward onto the air. Though the boat rocked, it
did not capsize. The ferryman dipped his oars. Teige and his mother sat. He hooped his arm about her. The wind that was moving
fast now fluttered her shawl, and soon they had left that shore that she would not walk upon again and they were out in the
twisting currents of the waters where the river met the sea.

The children saw them first. They came from the raft house and ran on the shore and peered in the gray light
and waved to Teige, and he called back. Before the boat had reached the shallow waters, the young girls were standing in the
waves. When they saw the figure of the blind woman they hushed with the mystery and stood with their arms hanging. The pilot
brought them in to where Teige stepped into the water. Then Teige reached and lifted his mother and walked in with her in
his arms until he was on the pebbles of the shore. The children came about him, for it seemed a thing of marvel. When he told
them this was his mother who had long been lost, the marvel seemed doubled, and some of the children laughed and spun instant
cartwheels as though giddy with the turning of the world. The old woman smiled. She said she was sorry she could not see them,
for they seemed so lovely, and some of them stood next to her so her hand could alight upon their heads. Their own mother
came out then and greeted the Foleys and asked if they were not hungry and would they come and eat.

They went on board that creaking home of salty logs and rope lashings and sat at a table and ate the fish and potatoes and
buttermilk as if in any inn. They took no notice of the breeze thrashing at the canvas and sacking coverings. The children
stood along the table. Mary BoatMac came and went about them with quiet solicitude. Her husband, she said to the old woman,
was gone up the river to Limerick and would be sorry to have missed her arrival. “But we’ll welcome you here any time, any
time at all,” she said, and looked and her eyes watered. “Your son, Teige,” she added, “he is, he is…” She seemed to lose
language adequate to her needs. “He is so good,” she said shortly then, and then said no more, for a flush of sentiment ran
through her and she turned about and went out to her sister.

They ate. The children teased and pushed and made jokes. Outside the evening fell and at last Teige looked across at his mother
and knew that they could delay no more.

“We must go,” he said.

“Yes.”

Then he took her hand and placed it on his arm and led her away out into the darkness and up from the shore along the stony
pathway toward the tower. The wind was blowing. Clouds raced before the coming stars. Late hares fleeted and vanished. Thornbushes
in their twists of growth whistled and did not move. Out in the waters nothing trafficked and the long black line of the river
was slick and cold and fast moving. Teige drew his mother closer to him. The way was uneven and she stumbled. He steadied
her and was moved again by the slightness of her and how the woman he had looked to as a boy was now this frailty on his arm.

“It is not much farther,” he said. “I will carry you.”

“No. You will not. I will walk to him.”

And she raised her chin and her blind eyes looked away at an angle and held so, as if seeing what he could not. She stood.
He took her arm. They moved on. When they came close enough, Teige could see the glass of the telescope and he told her: “He
is there. He is watching the sky.”

“Lead me right to him.”

“I should tell him.”

“No.” She clutched at his arm with her fingers. “No, Teige. Stay
here.” She stepped away from him then and was a shape in the dark against the darkness, holding her hands out and moving forward
in the night like a thing of flimsy sail. She walked toward the tower and Teige watched her and then, when she thought she
was close, she called out:

“Francis! Francis!”

And he must have heard her and not believed her voice part of the corporeal world, for he did not move then and she called
again and still he stayed there, lain on his back with his eye against the eyepiece. The wind took her words the third time
she called. It played them across the night and swept them into the tower. And Francis Foley heard his name said in her voice
and thought it a sweetness long gone out of the world and imagined he was near the precipice of this life and she calling
him to cross a bourn into the next. He took his eye from the stars. He looked at the stone walls as if in puzzlement that
he was still not transported. He touched the straw on the ground and then lifted his head to look outside, and he saw her
there. She stood some feet away, and behind her stood Teige and all about them the blowing darkness. He looked from one to
the other and back again and seemed to reach understanding slowly or slowly to overcome his fear that the moment was mere
vision. Then he said her name. He said it and stood and she opened her arms and something in him seemed to buckle then and
it seemed he would fall down. But he did not. And he came forward and said her name again and reached out his hands to her
face and knew that she was blind, and then he raised his head to the dark and swirling heavens and let out a cry long and
hard and pitiful and cried it again and voiced there the grief and regret and loss of all his days. Then he held that woman
to him and kissed her head and her face and did not let her go.