The Fall of Light (44 page)

“It was a fierce storm,” he said.

“It was.”

“Bad night to go out in a boat.”

“It was. I am sorry,” Teige said, and did not know if he would tell more. Then the man’s wife appeared and was standing there
and saw him in his drenched clothes and must have read in his comportment some affliction or beneficence, for she asked him:

“Are all well?”

Teige looked at her. Her face was kind. Her eyes seemed to contain deeps he had not noticed.

“She is very wet,” he said.

“Your mother?” said the boatman.

“No,” said his wife.

A moment held. The water sighed.

“Gather her wet things,” she said then. “I will have food for you
both soon.” And she turned and went back to the house and left her husband standing there and studying the ground as if for
pieces of the story missing.

Sometime later she crossed up the pathway to the cabin and called in and Teige came to the doorway and welcomed her. She stood
inside then and saw Elizabeth and saw the beauty of her and seemed to understand at once that she was some man’s wife, for
she looked at Teige and took the wet clothes and asked him if he thought they would be going soon.

His judgment was impaired and he told her no.

“Eat and then sleep so,” she said, and took the clothes and went off back down the path.

And they did. They slept before the fire in that small stone cabin while the morning after the storm lightened outside. They
slept in fits of dreams and shuddered sometimes like things fearful. Their legs lay entwined.

They woke with the sounds of the children playing. Elizabeth turned in Teige’s arms and she studied his face. She put her
fingers in his hair and traced his brows and closed his eyes.

“He will come after me,” she whispered.

“He’ll never know where to find you.”

“He will,” she said.

They lay there. The yelps and cries of the children rang out. Smoke in slow ascension twirled inside the chimney. Neither
of them moved. They lay still and were as creatures white and bare and beautiful fallen from another dimension.

In the noon they rose and Elizabeth came out by Teige’s side and saw that ancient site of church and tower. She saw the town
across the water which seemed nearer than she had hoped and nearer than their night sailing had suggested. And she said to
Teige: “He could almost see us.”

“He will not look. He will think you are gone to Cork or Dublin or finer places than this.” And he smiled and put his arm
around her.

Outside the tower on a stone trestle sat Teige’s father and his mother. Francis Foley had awoken ten years younger than he’d
slept. His face had dropped from it weariness and doom, and his eyes were lit. He stood up when he saw the lady.

“This is Elizabeth,” Teige said.

“Elizabeth.” His father held out his hand.

“She is to be my wife.”

His mother took Elizabeth’s hand and then to her son opened her arms and he leaned over and she embraced him. “She is very
beautiful,” she whispered, “I know.”

“We’ll start on the cottage for you tomorrow,” the old man said, and smiled. Then he sat down again by his wife’s side and
took her hands as if as guarantee against the world sundering again.

It was the first day of the new. Storm cleansed, green, and tranquil, the island lay in the waters as an idyll or the vivid
dream of Francis Foley years before. Boats sailed again along the Shannon. The traffic of white sails or men at oars proved
the world moving, but to the two Foleys, father and son, it seemed to be moving only out there, away from the island. They
were each likewise gifted a pure innocence that morning and were like men under some enchantment in which time did not pass
and loveliness endured. Teige walked with Elizabeth about the island and the children of the BoatMac came along and they gathered
the red and orange wildflowers of montbretia and the feathered plumes of late purple loosestrife. They sang singsong chants.
They chased and ran away and Teige and Elizabeth sat down on the grass and kissed and then lay back and watched the vaulted
blue sky.

They were lying so when the children came running again.

“Come, come! Mommy says come! There is a boat coming.”

Teige took Elizabeth by the hand and they ran then across the fields down to the raft house by the shore. Mary BoatMac was
standing there with her husband. Approaching steadily across the estuary was a long boat and in it sitting grim and purposeful
were the sheriff and three constables, the wronged husband in a plum suit, and the red-haired youth Pyle.

There was a moment in which they all stood and watched, in which the slow and steady action of the oarsmen seemed in some
world not this wherein the laws of force and motion did not apply and the boat not coming closer. It was like a picture or
a scene posed, the little crowd on the headland and beneath the blue sky with white clouds the figures of Law approaching.

“Quickly, you must go quickly.” It was Mary who spoke. She turned
to Teige and shook him by the arm until he looked at her and broke from his disbelief that they could have found Elizabeth
so soon. “You have to go,” she said. “They’ll be here. Take them,” she told her husband, “Mac, take them across the island
to the boat. Go up to the tower with them and tell Mr. Foley. Go! Go on, go quick,” she said, and as they turned to go added,
“God bless ye.”

They ran up the beaten path that was soft and muddy after the rain. Teige took Elizabeth by the hand, and with the shambling
stride of one unused to dry ground, BoatMac hurried behind. They went up past the long grass and the jumbled bushes of blackberry
and the brambles wild and scented. Birds flew up. As if the world were freshened in the aftermath of the storm, all the natural
wonder of the island seemed like a thing charged, alive, emanate from some source secret and holy. There was a tang in the
breeze. Late blossoms of that season that had survived yet held the last bees, and these hummed the air. The beauty of that
landscape in all its detail, what sights and sounds and smells, all of these registered with Teige Foley as he ran and were
to be there in some part of him still years later, when he would recall running across the island a last time.

Francis Foley stood from the stone bench when he saw them coming.

“What is it?” he asked. “Teige, what is the matter?”

“There are constables coming. They will say I stole a horse. There will be a man who is Elizabeth’s husband.” He stopped and
drew his breath.

“Teige.” His mother held out her hands to him. He came to her and she embraced him. She held him a long time. “Go,” she said.
“Go and be happy.”

He stood and she gestured for Elizabeth and she held her, too. “Do you love my son?” she asked her in a whisper, and what
answer she received was not heard, but she embraced the young woman hard and then released her.

Teige faced his father. “I sent the horse back last night. They will find it. It’s—”

“Teige.” His father stopped him. “Teige,” he said again, and said it slowly and burdened the sound with such tenderness that
no single vocable seemed capable of carrying such or no word as dear to him then
as the sound of his son’s name. “I will beat the heads of any of them that walk up here,” he said. “I will let none stop you.
Go.” He reached his hand and laid it on Teige’s shoulder.

And then they were gone running. They ran across the island with BoatMac coming behind them. They ran to the place where the
boat lay upturned on the far shore, and this they righted and slid it down the weeds and mud into the water. And then BoatMac
held the boat while they climbed inside it and he pushed it farther into the water and then climbed in himself and took the
oars and pulled away. And they did not see Francis Foley stride down the path to the other shore and meet there the little
party of the wronged and the righteous. They did not hear his booming voice as he called out damnations against those who
trespassed there or accused his son in the wrong. They did not know that the sheriff would say the youth Pyle had given them
reason to suspect Teige and that Pyle would grin and the plum fellow alongside would scowl with pale effete manner and show
his distaste at this discourse with rabble such as these. Nor would they know that Francis Foley’s ire would burn then and
he would say he had answered all queries and that even had his son taken the horse and the woman, it was no more than God’s
own will, for any could see the kind of man this was. And the sheriff would perhaps in secret agree and stand back and instruct
the constables back into the boat and say they would return if the horse was not found. And the plum fellow would cry out
that the island must be searched for his wife, and his voice would be high and thin in a timbre that would be mocked in games
by the children later. His cries would go unanswered and at last he too would get on board and all would sail away, in gloom
and dismay as they had come, the youth Pyle with crooked grin looking back all the way.

None of this did Teige and Elizabeth know. Their boat carried them safely to the town of Limerick. There BoatMac left them
with subdued farewell after Teige had thanked him and offered in vain to pay from the money Elizabeth carried in her bag.
They took a ship that same afternoon and sailed from Limerick up to the town of Galway and spent that night there, where they
purchased passage in the morning on the
Mary Ann,
bound for the coast of Nova Scotia.

In the week after Teige was gone, the BoatMacs moved from the raft house into the unfinished cottage by the
shore. Francis Foley insisted on it. He came down with his wife on his arm and asked them please to move there and said he
would help finish the building and they would be the first true settlers on the island. It was what Teige would have wished,
he said, and was the least they were owed. He told them to take a field and grow what they wanted and take another for sheep
or cattle. By the beginning of the following spring, there were lambs born there. The cottage was thatched. Another was built
next to it by the boatman and his sons, but when they came to offer it to the old man, Francis said he would prefer to stay
where they were and that soon enough there would be takers for it, indicating the oldest of the daughters.

The season was mild and easy that year. The waters of the river ran smooth and blue grey. Swans that had not been seen in
some time sailed off the shore. Michael, which was discovered to be the name of BoatMac, came up to the tower one morning
and told Francis Foley he had been asked to enquire if other pilots could settle with their families on the island. The old
man studied the blue sky where high gannets flew. His wife sat by his side. His gorge rose and fell with some emotion unsaid
and he waited a time for it to pass.

“They want to live here?”

“They do.”

The old man nodded. “A village should be made down by the shore,” he said.

And by the early summer then there were seven more cottages under way. Seagoing men with short legs and stout chests and with
sons thin and wiry scattered over the stones, hauling and tapping and knocking edges. Walls rose. Thatch was mounded on the
sand. Buckets of mud and lime and water were borne along the shore, and soon such traffic made there a printed trail ankle-deep
that the tide took in the evenings. By night the pilots sailed away and the assemblage of their unfinished cottages appeared
like antique ruins of some earlier time. Doorways and windows looked like eyes upon the starry river.
In the silence soft and crepuscular hares, badgers, and foxes visited and moved as shades stealthy and inquisitive. Francis
Foley came down then too and walked along the way that would become the street. The dog followed him. He stood in each of
the roofless houses where none were there to see him and he touched sometimes details of masonry or joinery and let his fingers
rest there. He stood so for long moments, his hand upon a wall, as if such were a connection of profound necessity and it
restored him to do so. It did not escape him that these were to have been the homes for his sons, and he thought of them in
the world and looked upon the night sky and went up then along the path to hold his wife in her bed.

In the dawns the black currachs of the pilots returned weighted in the water with supplies. The boats were drawn up and turned
over on the shore and lay long and dark like strange insects warming in the sun. The cottages rose as in a race, their walls
three feet thick with broad sills and deep lintels of hewn oak. With lighter timbers the lattice of roofs were made and seemed
in broad day the bleached ribs of sea creatures once great. When they came to the thatching, the pilots were less expert and
brought from the town some tawny fellows with dark hair and long needles and hooks and other tools secured in their belts.
Bare-chested, these thatchers ran up and down light ladders and worked and sewed above and sometimes whistled and were like
brown birds nestled there. They ate and drank in those lofty perches and looked betimes out to the sea as if gauging what
weathers their work would have to withstand. When they were done and gone again, the pilots brought their families across.
A flotilla of figures wrapped and shawled and bearing bundles, they came from the district of Kilbaha to that island with
a quiet and humble gratitude. They moved up about the small village and saw for the first time their homes. Children ran along
and whooped and went in and out behind the houses. At once the women went about making their homes. They untied bundles of
blankets and put clay pots, earthenware, and tin canisters on sills. They hung crosses and some had other images of their
religion and they placed these like shields in corners or over doorways. The pilots meantime stood outside in a small gathering
and watched the Shannon. One made small comments on the tide or weather and others concurred in soft mutterings. Their eyes
were narrowed and their
faces crinkled, grown accustomed to long scrutiny of the horizon. In the evening one among them played a concertina and they
gathered outside the houses and smoked pipes and some sisters danced together. Others of the women joined. The men bashful
and slow sat or leaned against walls and watched. Only later were some cajoled to step out there, but when these did, their
movements light with the drink they had taken, the whole swayed and spilled over and broke with laughter. One sang a song
then, shut-eyed and sad. He sang for the drowned and those gone and these sounds travelled out across the mild night, plaintive
and grave. Then a hush fell and spread and all said their good-nights and went to sleep there for the first time.