The Fall of Light (47 page)

The smith came out in a vest and trousers.

“I need the horse,” Teige said. “I could work for you for a week.”

The smith blinked as if there were something he was just seeing. “Have you nothing you can trade?” he asked.

“Only these.” Teige held out the black suit.

The smith took the suit that was too small for him and turned it over in the half-light. “For funerals,” he said, and smiled,
and Teige smiled, too.

“You have already done the work. The horse is yours,” said the smith. He told Teige to wait a moment and went back inside,
where the figure of a woman moved, and then he came out with a lantern. They crossed the yard where the snow fell across the
amber light and the smith held the lantern aloft while Teige unbolted the door. The horse neighed and Teige went and calmed
her.

“You have no saddle,” said the smith.

“No.”

“Take the bridle.”

The smith watched while Teige brought her outside and he held the lantern and considered what tale untold underlay this scene,
and of it he did not ask. Teige turned and offered him his hand.

“It is a cold night,” the smith said. “You should wait.” He indicated with his left hand the stables.

“I cannot,” Teige said. They shook hands. “Thank you.”

Then he slipped up onto the horse’s back that was already starred with scintilla of melting snowflakes. He said some words
to the animal and then he turned her out of there and they went out of the lantern light and down the dark.

Teige rode out the road in a direction south of the city. Of the geography of that country he had only the vaguest semblance
and even prior to that moment had not exactly considered where it was he was to start his life with Elizabeth. He had heard
men speak of the west as if it were more than a compass point, as if captured in that appellation were a territory majestic
and free and without parallel. But he did not know where it was, nor did he comprehend the vastness of that continent. That
night as he rode he rode for distance only, to be farther away than it was possible to be. The road wound away from the coast.
He went down through woodlands where the snow stopped and a small chill wind tunnelled. He passed on and met none coming or
going and found in his very bones the sad familiarity of such lone travel, as if reencountering there a truth about his own
condition. In the hours yet before dawn he slowed the horse and walked her and then drew her to the side of tall trees, where
he bowed his head and for some short time slept.

He woke with birdsong. Light was breaking and the country thereabouts was revealed in verdant and purple colour. He rode on.
South of there he came upon two boys and a man hunting cattle in the dawn. The gate to a field was open, but the cattle in
their own peculiarity broke and ran past it and the boys ran after them with the man shouting. Teige turned the horse and
headed the cattle off and turned them back. The drover boys joined him and they returned the cattle
to the field proper. Then the man indicated the farmhouse not distant and said breakfast would be readying now.

Teige stayed there a week. The boys called him Ty. The woman of the house caught the melancholy of his demeanour and fed him
double portions of eggs and meat as remedy for such sadness. He helped with the cattle and winter fencing. The days were cold
and bright and the sky like a sheet of blue pulled taut over the world. When the man tried to pay him for his work, Teige
would take none. The man offered him an old saddle then and said he would not be refused.

He went off south and west again and crossed the valley of a great river whose name he did not know. He saw mountains ahead
and kept these to his right shoulder then. He stopped sometimes at places and worked a few days and was sometimes paid and
sometimes given food. He stayed always briefly and made attachments to none. What history was his and how he had come to be
there, he kept like a parchment folded inside him. As he rode the horse his mind was sometimes erased of all and he achieved
in the rhythmic motion a state akin to innocence absolute. But in the evenings when he had to rest the horse and sat on a
stone in the grass, he was often assailed by the memory of what he had left behind. He saw the woman’s face as he had first
seen it. He returned to the old country and saw himself there in scenes as if from the life of another. He thought of his
father and mother on the island and he looked at the big sky there and considered what stars he could see. He knew he should
attempt a letter, but in the ruins of his dreams felt a vague uncertain shame and could not begin.

All that winter he rode south. Then when the spring came and the waters ran in clear streams everywhere, he turned the horse
west and headed up through a pass in the Appalachian Mountains. By the summer of that year he had reached the Ohio River.
He had thought when he reached it he must be nearly most ways across the country. The heat of the day scorched his forehead
and he took to wearing a hat. The horse took lame and he had to rest her awhile on the outskirts of a town where in that season
all was dust. He went and found a smith’s there and from short exchanges learned of those multitudes who considered that merely
the starting point for their own sojourns west. The country was vast beyond imagining, he understood then. And from that knowledge
he took solace, for destination was not what he sought
and there was in endlessness a certain comfort born of the recognition that there would be no turning back.

He went due west then and came upon many wagons and riders and walkers, too, all as if under some heliocentric influence following
the falling trajectory of the sun. Such were the numbers moving on the roads that it appeared as though the earth herself
were flat and had been tipped on the side and all manner of men and women were then propelled to travel westward. Teige rode
at times among them. All had their own tales and without exception had left their lives behind on the basis of stories they
had heard of the land that lay ahead. They were a long, loose caravan of faith. Their countries were many. By the time he
had crossed the Mississippi River, Teige had heard described the gold of California that some believed was plentiful yet.
He had heard of similar riches at the end of the Oregon Trail and of untouched land there said to be only waiting for farming.
But to none such was he drawn. He could not envision himself a farmer, could not now imagine being in a house fixed and still.
He went south. His skin crisped in the sun. His forearms where he held all day the reins blistered in a line of watery moons.
His horse suffered and whole days he spent then only seeking for water. He had come into Nebraska. On prairies there he saw
herds of bison for the first time and paused his horse upon a crest and sat and watched over them a long time. He slept on
a bedroll beneath the huge sky. In dreams he saw the face of his brother Tomas and saw him on the night he had last seen his
face as he left the island and woke and wondered if he were living or dead.

For days he went nowhere at all. He rested the horse and spoke to her and brought her to water. If she died, he thought, I
would too. For such was the empty vista he beheld that travellers there seemed less than sporadic and his bones would have
whitened before he was found. Nonetheless this same emptiness soothed him too and there was in his silent and solitary state
a kind of peace. He stayed in that country awhile. He watched the birds of prey high against the heavens like smallest flaws
in the blue. He heard the prairie dogs in the night. When the ashes of love gathered in his mouth he stood and went off across
the dark, sending badgers and foxes and coyotes alike in scattered retreat. He walked and sometimes howled out and sometimes
stopped and bent over and wept. He felt like a disease in the
blood the shame of failed love and could not explain to himself how it had happened. After a time he returned to his horse
and his bedroll and lay until the dawn.

One noon clouds heavy and black rose up in the western sky. They came quickly and gathered as they did so, crossing the land
like a grim assemblage. Teige watched the shadow coming. Then he brought his horse to shelter in some rocks and waited. Thunder
crashed. The horse’s ears went flat and then she let out a cry of alarm and stamped backward and he spoke to her and held
up his palm and laid it on her nose. The thunder banged again and the rain fell. Lightning forked. It flew from the sky so
close that Teige turned about, and at once the horse ran. She raced off out of the rocks and down into the prairie below.
He saw her go and he called after her, but then she was gone. The rain came on. It fell in torrents. Again and again the thunder
rolled, grave and declamatory. The air flashed electric. Teige turned his face to the sky and let it fall upon him. He wanted
it to be the rain of home. But it fell too hard and was dark and stiff and urgent and seemed with its thunder crashing the
antique locution of some god primitive and without other means of communication with his creation. It rained on. It made floods
in the darkened ground. Night was made of the daytime as the clouds crossed. Still Teige stood. He thought for moments of
the lightning falling through the sky and striking him. And if such had happened, he would not have regretted it, he told
himself.

But it did not. The clouds rode on. The storm had made clear the air that in that aftermath was briefly cooled like a drink.
Teige took his bedroll and walked on down into the prairie after his horse. He whistled for her and called out. He crossed
the dampened ground where the dust clung to his boots and made upon them a reddish coat. The land all about was empty of man
or beast or bird. The herds that had grazed there were all elsewhere and the scene entire was tranquil and vacant. He might
have been the sole creation left extant.

Time passed. He walked on and the white eye of the sun reappeared overhead and the air wavered with heat once more. He crossed
land where the hoofprints of the bison had left a trail wide and broken and there lay there bones of some fallen long ago.
He called for the horse. He stopped and considered the endlessness of the terrain and the futility
of his attempting to walk out of it. He sat down then. He had some few supplies enough for maybe two days. He had a canteen
of water. He had a pistol. The night fell. He was aware of Indians and knew of tribes such as Sioux and Cheyenne, but he did
not fear these, for he held his life lightly. A moon climbed above him. Her stars arrived. In the stillness of the dark of
that prairie then Teige Foley lay down and after a time, as though to the company of his brothers, began to tell the stories
of the constellations above. He spoke aloud. His voice carried a little in the windless night. And in such dark and beneath
the canopy there he told of Pegasus the winged horse and Equuleus the foal, and he traced with his eyes the pattern of stars
his father saw. He spoke until his lips dried and his voice became a whisper. The enormity of that landscape was spread out
about him in the night and upon it he less than a speck of light or dust and with as little consequence it seemed to any in
heaven. The moon slid down the dark.

Upon the island winters wet and cold came and were followed by wet and cold springs. Like time the river
ran. Smoke climbed from the cottage of the little village and in the damp seasons did not ascend but barely, hanging in the
air like a presence or a spirit without form. Gulls and other seabirds flew there. As if these knew the clock of human hunger,
they assembled in the sky while the pilots and fishermen ate in the evenings and were there to swoop when the scrapings were
thrown outside. Uncertain summers followed. A drift of light rain came up the estuary and drizzled in the windless air and
this remained and the autumn was winter once more. All moved in a slow yet ceaseless falling. Upon a ledge in the stone building,
Francis Foley kept the letter of Tomas. He awaited news of Teige, but none came. The letter like a thing returning to some
former state had grown thinner, its single page read so often that it was light as a wing. When
Francis took it from the ledge and lifted it in the candlelight, he saw the ink that was faded from black to grey and he did
not tell his wife the words were vanishing. In the season that followed when the rain swept down and the dampness of the climate
threatened to turn all rheumatic, the letter soaked up the watery air and in the brief warmth afterwards the ink evaporated
altogether. This did not stop him from reading it to his wife. While he read it he watched her face and saw there how her
blind eyes settled on some vista of her son and how imagination in some way redeemed the absence and loss.

They endured. The years passed over them. Then in the April of a year there came across the river a flotilla of boats and
upon them a colourful crew of figures. The men were dressed in shirts of red and yellow and such and the women were long-haired
and wore bracelets and golden hoops from their ears. They came ashore where the village women and children had gathered to
meet them. The men stood with legs akimbo and hands on their waists. The women studied with brazen looks the clothes and manner
of the females there. The island children held to their mothers’ skirts and stared. One among the arrivals, a man with hair
to his shoulder and a white shirt, stepped forward. Behind him was a beautiful woman with about her an array of a half dozen
figures in steady progression from girl to woman, each the twin of another and each more lovely than any there had seen before.
The man spoke in an accent that made the words seem made of wood.