Authors: Niall Williams
Then one year the gypsies did not return in the summer.
The islanders watched for them. They invented reasons: how the gypsies might be delayed in mountains, or on sea crossings,
or in any manner of trouble that might be abroad. Into August they waited for
them to come before they began to accept the chill of autumn was arriving. The gypsies never came, only the winter with sleet
and ice.
Then, a day in the following June, a boy ran through the village calling, “They are here! They are here!”
The boats they came in were laden low. They had been in countries in the East and brought all manner of strange and exotic
goods, some of whose uses were unknown to themselves. They brought there too a form of early bicycle, an angular contraption
of iron rims and timber handles that looked in some ways like an assemblage of garden tools on large wheels. This one of the
gypsies demonstrated, wobbling out down a sloping field of grass, cheered and chased by the children until like a proof of
some laws of science he slowed to standstill, balanced an instant, and finally toppled. There were other such near inventions,
three-handed clocks with cuckoos that sang, sheets of carbon upon which faces could leave their imprint, socks that were soled
like shoes, thick-glassed spectacles that made all look far away, a pendulum that if hung over the expectant foretold the
sex of the unborn.
While all these were uncased and held out and shown to the islanders, Finbar went up the pathway to the tower. Even as he
approached it he felt some change had happened. It was as if there were a warp in the air, a rumple in the fabric of things
that was all but imperceptible. As he came past the last of the stone walls to the little opening there, his father and mother
were not sitting outside. A shiver passed up through him. His breath was caught. When he came to the doorway of the tower
itself, he stopped and called out to them. Birds were singing. Sunlight made light and grey the stones. That moment he noticed
such details and they entered him and adjoined his memories.
“Finbar?”
The voice of his father was softened. Finbar stepped inside the shadows and saw the two of them lying in each others arms
beside the telescope.
“Is it you?” his father said, and his hand rose white and slim and wavering until Finbar knelt and took it.
“She is gone,” the old man said. “I am waiting to go with her.” And his hand returned to stroke the grey hair of Emer and
then came to rest upon her once more. Finbar said nothing. He bowed his head and
held his hands together and from him like a river invisible ran his grief.
“You must let me take her,” Finbar said.
“No.”
“I must bury her.”
“Bury the two of us. She is waiting for me. I will be with her tomorrow”
“Father…”
“No.” The old man’s eyes flashed again as they had often done before, and he fixed them upon his son only a moment yet sufficient
to still all argument. “No, Finbar, please. Tomorrow.”
Finbar walked outside into the sunlight. He lifted his face to the warmth and the brightness of that June day and he heard
the birds singing anew and the sounds from the village travelling upward to where he stood. He watched the cloudless sky a
long time. The dog came and lay at his feet. Then he went back inside and told his father he would be back to him in a short
time. He ran down the pathway he had come and said to Cait and the Roses and the gypsies and the islanders that his mother
was dead and his father dying. Mary Boat-Mac put her hands to her face and wept.
“I am going to stay with him tonight,” Finbar told them. “Light no fireworks for this evening. I will see you all in the morning.”
He embraced his wife and children then and took some bread and smoked fish and from one of the canvas bags the latest charts
he had brought for his father.
He went back along the way to the tower. His father was as he had left him.
“I need no food, Finbar,” the old man said.
“Drink this.” From a bucket in the corner his son scooped water and brought it to his father’s lips and held it there while
it spilled and was some part taken.
Finbar sat then beside them both. The sunlight that fell did not reach inside the tower but lay only at its doorway like a
golden cloth that was slowly withdrawn throughout that quiet afternoon. The father and son said almost nothing. In the stillness
that assembled, Finbar listened for his father’s breaths and heard each one as if each were a thing singularly gifted and
counted and measured out in some accountancy
finite and exact. At times Finbar thought the breath that came was final and he would not get to give his father the last
charts. There seemed stalled moments in which the continuation of life paused and held and was uncertain of continuance, then
Francis Foley sucked in again. As the long daylight diminished and began to fade into night, Finbar told his father he had
another chart to show him. The old man opened his mouth but did not say more than a thin sound. Then Finbar brought it out
for him and unfurled that scroll that was long and yellowed and marked in ink of black. The writings upon it were in a fine
hand. But it was not upon these that the eyes of the old man fixed. For it was a map not of countries known, but of the heavens
above. Therein were scored all the constellations and the planets on what were called the First Plane, and then below these
was another diagram, called the Deeper Heavens, where stars were given that Francis Foley had never seen.
“Here,” Finbar said, “is explained how to see the future.”
The old man’s eyes read what they could, for the writing was in several languages, Latin and Greek and some English and other
scripts from lands in Arabia. He studied for a time the planetary cycles shown there, the cycles of Pluto, of Neptune and
Uranus. There were farther cycles shown, too, of Saturn and Jupiter, and lastly of Venus, Mercury, and the Moon. There was
more there that Finbar did not understand, the symbols of the zodiac, the patterns and repetitions of history that were constant,
the planetary clusters in Aries, Taurus, and Gemini. There were details of all manner of calculation and methods of interpretation,
birth signs, astromorphology, the Thebaic calendar, and a brief account of various cosmogonies.
Finbar held the scroll open, and his father looked at it a long time. He did not speak. When Finbar asked him if it wasn’t
a marvellous thing, the old man did not reply to him but smiled a weak smile and gestured to his son to bring the telescope
to him. He laid the chart aside then. The darkness had fallen. Finbar turned the great instrument and brought the eyepiece
close to his father, and when it was in position the old man brought his face to it.
Finbar sat there in the darkness. He listened to his father breathing. He mourned in silence for his mother.
The night was mild and the sky cloudless and the stars therein
shone. Francis Foley made only the slightest sound as he surveyed all above and studied there what galaxies were unveiled.
He did not cry out or exclaim or make otherwise known what he saw but while the hours passed one upon the next and the stars
turned, he seemed to slip through some portal in his understanding of the universe and enter a dimension of revelation. In
that sky then he saw Finan dead in Africa. He saw too his son Tomas, and saw him in a homestead in a territory of tall grass
and trees. He saw him with a wife called Mary Considine, who was kind and gentle and a mother to their three children. He
saw the farming they did there and the seasons harsh of snows and heat.
Teige too was in that sky revealed to him. Francis Foley paused when he saw him and lifted away his eye from the telescope
and blinked it twice, and Finbar brought him something moist to his lips. The old man swallowed and it seemed a labour. He
made a moaning sound in his throat, as if he would speak but knew he must not. Then he resumed his gaze and saw Teige with
the strange clarity of how one sees the unreal figures in a story. He saw him alone in the dark in a desert place. He saw
the dust there blow across the night and sands gather around the boy’s boots and cover them over while he hunkered there and
waited for the dawn. He was without his horse. In the breaking light he rose and walked and was a speck in the landscape of
desolation. Teige went on. He crossed that empty terrain that seemed endless, and about him skirted small animals that ran
and scavenged there. He walked through the blaze of sun. A hoop of red was burned about his neck, as if he had been in hot
irons or once held by thongs. His eyelids were caked. His brows wore the dust of that place in deep wrinkles. When he had
no water he stopped walking. He squatted down and broad-winged birds encircled black against the sky. For two days he lay
so. The birds came and landed nearby and stepped and pecked at nothings and looked sidelong and waited. The night came on.
Teige imagined he would die then. He said some words to his father and his mother and shut his eyes.
In the morning he was found by two riders heading south ahead of a herd of horses that were bound for the army in the war
that was threatened against the rebels. They came upon him and sat him upright and gave him water. They asked him his name.
One of the men was by the name of MacNamara. He took Teige on the back of his
horse and they brought him out of there. He joined with those herdsmen then and rode south with the herd. He showed in time
what knowledge he had of horses and moved through that land that was wide and majestic and various. He rode through canyons
and through the passes of mountains and by forests vast and serene. All that land he passed along and sat by night at campfires
where flames twisted and died. He grew accustomed to that life and its rhythms. They delivered the horses and went north for
more. Sometimes they encountered Indians that were hostile and there were rifle and pistol battles and some fell and died.
Other times the natives they came upon merely watched them from bluffs and grassy crests and kept them in long and grave scrutiny
but took no action, watching the herds of wild horses pass in clouds as if seeing the spirit of the land itself traversing
there. In such a life then years passed. And these were already in the future as Francis Foley saw them. And in that future
too he saw the day when Teige Foley would stop with a lame horse at a homestead in the Wyoming Territory, and the woman who
came out on the porch would silently remark on the familiarity of his face and ask him his name. And then she would send her
son running and Tom Foley would hurry back from the fields and brush the dirt from his hands on his pants and come into the
yard and see his brother Teige for the first time in many years.
And perhaps it was so.
And perhaps all was so revealed that night to Francis Foley as he lay with his wife, silently gazing beneath the stars. And
in that fall of light from heaven to earth perhaps all our stories were told, all actions of the living and dead explained,
and all time past present and future there revealed. In such eternal patterns perhaps the old man gleaned secrets and mysteries
hitherto undisclosed and saw there in the stars the future generations of his family, saw the children and grandchildren and
their grandchildren and theirs. Perhaps he saw in the sidereal light all the times to come. He saw those like me the great-great-grandson
of Teige Foley, who years hence would return to that island seeking his spirit, who would walk over the windy fields and watch
the river and think of the long story and that it should be written down. Perhaps he saw the others who would leave there
for America.
How in time the last family would go from that island and it would return to a place empty and green once more. Perhaps that
last night Francis Foley saw there the whole history of endeavour and understood as none can its meaning. And perhaps in so
doing, he found peace.
By the dawn he lay back on the straw bed. He placed his hand upon his wife’s back and breathed his last.
The sun rose palely and made vanish the stars. Birds of morning sang.
They stopped and slept beside their horses beneath the hidden moon of that October, their breaths misting on the darkness
like visions and their eyes in sleep seeing the home forever lost to them now.
Niall Williams, the acclaimed author of
Four Letters of Love
and As
It Is in Heaven,
has won accolades for his lush imagery and lyrical grace. Now comes his first epic, a sweeping tale of a family that captures
the spirit of the Irish people who even in their darkest hour hope for…
THE FALL of LIGHT
Teige Foley was only a boy when his mother vanished angrily into the Irish mist and the family’s great adventure began. His
father, Francis, a man of thwarted dreams, dared to steal a valuable telescope from the manor house where he worked. More
than a spyglass, it was his passage to the stars, to places he could not otherwise go. And its theft forced Francis Foley
and his four sons to flee the narrow life of poverty that imprisoned them.
But Ireland was a country “wilder than it is now.” Torn apart by the violent countryside, the young boys would lose sight
of their father, and each would have to find his own path…Tomas, the eldest, weak for the pleasures of the flesh…Finan, who
would chase his longings across the globe… Finbar, Finan’s twin, surrendering to other people’s magic…and Teige, the youngest,
the one who has a way with horses, the only one to truly return home. From boarding house to gypsy caravans, from the sere
fields where potatoes wither on their stalks to fertile new lands on the other side of the earth, apart and adrift, reunited
and reborn, they would learn about the callings of God, the power of love, and the meaning of family in a place where stars
look down—and men look up.