The Fall of Light (48 page)

“We have come from the town of Kilkee yesterday,” he said. “They told us there that there was a man here with an eye on the
heavens.” He paused and looked over them. Mild wind blew. None moved or showed recognition.

“A glass,” he said, and made with his hands the shape of a great telescope and aimed it at the sky. “A man who looks at the
stars.”

“He is here.” It was a young boy of the BoatMacs. “He is here,” he said, “in the tower.”

They went then like a wave and passed all together up the path and past the hedgerows of thorn and bramble. The children ran
ahead and made noise of high-hearted cries and excitement, and in the fields thereabouts rabbits paused in alarm and then
darted away. They came within sight of the tower. The man in the white shirt strode to the
front. His face was browned from climates not theirs, and his dark eyes contained deeps from scenes witnessed none there could
imagine. Yet all could tell he was upon one of the moments of his life.

The crowd reached the tower and the clamour deflated and they stood thereabouts in a roughly drawn arc. Then Francis Foley
came out into the daylight, and Finbar his son saw him for the first time since he had thought his father drowned in the river.

There was a moment in which they looked at each other like ones newly reencountered in the mists of the hereafter.

“Finbar?” the old man said then. “Finbar?” He raised his hand to pause the air and seemed as if he would fall down. Then he
went back to the doorway of the tower where Emer stood and he led her out into the light and told her this was her son Finbar
come back again.

She came to his arms, and at once the gypsies cheered. They cheered and clapped and some laughed and pushed each other about.
Children embraced in giddy mock performance and ran off then with shrieks and wild yahoos. Finbar brought forward his wife,
Cait, and the half dozen Roses.

“My lovely daughters,” he said, and then laughed himself with head back at the blue-and-white sky.

As if this then were a latch released, the gypsies turned and went down the village and began the business of celebration
proper. Some of them were those originals who had left the lake with Finbar years before, who had wintered by the great forest
and crossed the mountains into France in the spring. Others were some they had met along the way, ashen figures dispossessed
and tramping the roads without direction. There were men and women of various nations, their look and language each their
own. All for reasons unsaid had taken up with those gypsies and journeyed westward toward the ocean. Their progress had been
stopped often. Sometimes in the softness of the season when crossing a river such as the Saone, they had found themselves
turned south and slowing to a languorous motion while the sun shone. They had drowsed and drunk the wines there and seemed
in a place Elysian. The perfumes of that landscape wafted and wound about them. Their journey westward then had been stalled.
Their horses grew fat on summer grass. Then, a morning of changed wind, and without announcement or discussion Finbar yoked
his caravan and the
others did likewise. Leaving the flattened imprint of their stay upon the grass and the blackened eyes of their fires, all
had turned about and headed north and west once more. They had little sense of time, only season. They followed roads that
led to others. They crossed up through France. They met a troupe of actors who performed in frayed and gaudy costumes the
plays of Moliere. They came upon some that were soldiers deserted from a war of which none had heard. At last they reached
the sea at Cherbourg and sailed from there to Plymouth. In England they did not stay long. Rain made grey that country and
they crossed up through it in the last days of winter and so wended onward toward the place Finbar imagined home. In the town
of Kilkee they had found none of Cait’s family living. Nor was there sign of the Foley brothers. Upon this discovery, Finbar
had led his wife down to the white strand with their daughters, and while the other gypsies camped on the high field that
overlooked the sea, he had walked with his family along the sand there and said little and watched the waves breaking. “Here
I saw your mother the first time,” he told the girls after a while, and they smiled widely and their eyes shone, for this
was a story they had often heard, of the mer-girl and the seaweed, and they giggled at this sudden proof of the actual. The
Roses ran off then into the tide, the younger ones only to their ankles and kicking high, cold splashes that glittered. Their
mother and father watched them and were in some fashion by this restored.

Two evenings following, Finbar heard of the man on the island with the glass.

Now to each gypsy of those originals the long journey there seemed as nothing. Though none were cousin or kin to any, the
instant the mother had embraced her son there had passed through them like a charge the sense of something right in the world.
They did not explain it to each other. But there the travail and effort, the long uncertainty of their shapeless lives, all
fell away. They clapped backs. They hung arms over shoulders. They went down to the village again and from there to their
boats wherein were stored all manner of items none there had seen before. The gypsies carried up onto the sand chests with
iron padlocks. While children ran about they opened these and brought out strange wood and paper goods. Others set up a yellow
tent on the sand. A gypsy with open shirt held his hands wide and
then clapped and clapped again a beat and then to this rhythm sang in what the islanders did not know was Italian. A fire
was lit there and flames crackled and twisted this way and that in the small breeze. The gypsy women showed jewels and hoops
and bangles. They proffered in their palms blue stones mined from countries in Asia and ran between their fingers Indian silks
they had gathered on their wanderings. None of these they tried to sell, but showed them like gathered evidence of the wonders
of the world and their part within it. By the fall of darkness the pilots had returned. They came ashore with some amazement
and passed up through the fires and singing and roasting meat like ones somnambulant in vivid dream. They went to their cottages
as if to confirm the island was the same they had left in the dawn and then came down sheepish and circumspect and stood on
the edge of the firelight where their children were dancing.

When the dark was deepest blue then a small assembly of the gypsies carried in bundles sticks with wads of cloth wound about
them. One other bore a firebrand. They went to the shore and the crowd murmured and the singer stopped, as did the one playing
the blue guitar. Then a touch-paper was lit. Into the sky streaked a trail of light. It blazed upward and turned the heads
of all below and upon a moment then exploded with a bang. Splintered light fell. Those watching ducked down their heads at
first and held them fearful so until the same fragments faded like things erased into the dark. Other fireworks were shot
into the night. All manner of trajectory was briefly there illumined and in all colours of the spectrum. Wheels of fire spun
above them. Blue balls of flame whirled. Now the gypsies did not await the decline of one to send another but flashed some
that fizzed fast and others that flew and climbed the dark in slow ascent and met there the falling tendrils of scintilla
yellow and gold. The night sky flared and was shred in ribbons. In the crowd below some held their arms up as if to reach
the sky blooms and cried out and shouted. More rockets were fired. Each rose in swift, short bursts of fury and released itself
high and bright above like things in glorious failure unable to reach some higher plane. The music began again then. The strings
of the guitar were plucked in dance time and the island women linked arms with each other while their men watched. The gypsy
men were less bashful. They clapped wide claps and threw back their heads and made
swaying body movements as if in time to some inner rhythm of the universe deep and secret and ancient.

That night they slept where they fell down. By the next the islanders were less unsure of their visitors. In the day they
shared with them food and their children played together and went off hunting about the island. When night fell the festivities
resumed. The Roses came and danced there. Some fellows from the town of Kilrush rowed the night river and came up on the shore
and saw those sisters and weakened to their knees at their loveliness. These same were then told by the pilots to be gone,
and they returned to their boat and rowed a small way and then sat in the tide and looked back upon the scene with yearning.
The Roses danced. Their mother and father came down from the tower and watched them.

“There will be boys to beat away every night now,” Finbar said.

“I hope so,” Cait replied.

The month of April passed. A warm and easy summer began. At times the pilots took with them some of the gypsies when they
rowed out to meet the ships. These delighted in the race and took off their shirts sometimes and held them flapping in the
wind like flags or banners. They saluted the victor with broad operatic gesture that threatened to capsize them and then called
out to each other gambles on who would win the next. In the night when the men returned, they took to predicting the races
of tomorrow. The gypsies turned over cards and made inexpert prophecies and pretended for a time that they had seen the unknown.
But in truth what future was yet before them none there knew. They did not ask Finbar how long they would stay, and neither
did he mention to any of them his intentions. The days rolled on. Bees and birds of summer flew. The buttery almond scent
of gorse was spread over the air and then sweetened further by honeysuckle and fuchsia. Sun dallied the day long. The river
ran blue as a southern sea. And in that season the island seemed a place from which none would ever leave. What clamour and
battle and bitterness was history seemed to exist in an elsewhere. The summer hung there, its weather like a gift.

Then, in the end of August, the old restlessness returned in the blood of Finbar. He woke and imagined he was moving. He went
out into the day and stood awhile and watched the water and the sky.

“We have to go,” he said to Cait when he came back.

“I know,” she surprised him by saying. “I have been waiting. There’s no home for the likes of us.”

“We will come back every year.”

“You need not worry. Your daughters will see to that,” she said.

Finbar went then and walked up to the tower to tell his father and his mother.

“We will go north to Ballinasloe to the horse fair in October,” he said. “We will go on but promise to come back.”

His father nodded and held Emer’s hand in his lap.

“Every man must live his own life,” he said. “You will come back?”

“Every year in the summertime.”

“God bless you, Finbar,” said the blind mother, and she raised her hands to feel his face.

The following morning the gypsies sailed from the island. Before they went, Finbar brought to his father the map of Benardi.
“Look at this and you will think of us,” he said. “We will be back when the blossoms are on the trees.”

They left then and the island women and children watched them go, and some youths swam alongside the boats a ways and then
stopped and gathered breath, their heads like dark blooms on the water. They swam back and came ashore and the boats receded
farther and bore off with them the imaginings of many. For the islanders had grown used to the gypsies and now in their absence
felt the silence fall like a heavy curtain. In the night there were no festivities or gatherings. Mists grey and wet enshrouded
the island, and the season turned. It was a place again hushed and alone and when the rain fell it seemed to make dreary and
dull the world and many there dreamed in secret of what adventures had befallen those gypsies now.

The islanders looked for them in the summer. And when they came, good as their word, they came with the same flourish of colour
and revelry, of song and music and dancing and fireworks. They came this time with canaries. They brought them in many cages
and hung these in the twisted trees, where the canaries sang to other birds there. They brought kites of stick and paper too
and flew them on long lines from the shore. Such flying was good for the spirit, one said, who did nothing else all day but
tug softly on the unwound spool and gaze up at
the distant fluttering as if at some furthermost extension of himself wild in the breeze. Their gifts were many and varied
and became like tokens of goodwill exchanged between those who arrived and those who welcomed them. They were the beginning
of what would become a custom. The things they brought carried within them stories of the greater world, and whether the islanders
laughed or raised their eyebrows at such as winding music boxes or hot peppers or slippers of silver with curved toes, they
enjoyed all and were grateful. In the beginning of autumn they left again and promised to return and did so. There were no
more than the half dozen Roses, but these with each visit became more beautiful still. And in time the gypsies’ caravan itself
would come to seem like a touring carousel crossing the earth back and forth, bound by some antique covenant, and sheltering
within it those beauties. They were like Grecian figures reincarnate and had dark eyes and pale skin that maddened many. No
sooner would they land on the island than the river would fill with night-boys crossing in boats for glimpses of them and
the pilots would run down and pitch stones and yell and wave their arms as if able to shoo away fate. Fin-bar himself did
not join the pilots. He knew his daughters’ beauty bore with it some seeded destiny and knew that one day too he would have
to meet it. He grew older and strangely wiser. He came to his father and brought him always a chart of some kind. He brought
maps and drawings of islands newly named. He brought the latest cartography of their own country and scrolls and parchments
inked with mountains and rivers and shorelines. The old man took these with grace and thanked him each time. He told Finbar
he studied them when he was gone away and placed them to one side. To his mother Finbar gave scented oils and powders and
such. He gave her candles, though he knew she could not see their light, for he said they could be lit for remembrance. Then
he sat with them in that old place of stone and none of them spoke, and the summer breeze blew and each of them thought of
the brothers gone.