The Fall of Light

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This is a story that has been passed on. It is a story that begins when my great-great-grandfather was a small boy. It has been told and retold over for a hundred and fifty years. It is not a history. As with all such telling, each has added his own colouring, imagined and created details that were otherwise perished. These same were then forgotten or elaborated upon and others still added until the story itself became a kind of airy bridgework linking the living and the dead, the teller and those of whom it told.

It is the story of a family that is mine. Although its figures have grown outlandish in the telling, and dates and times and places been lost to the inexactitude of memory and invention, I recognize them yet. They are the Foleys. They are the ones that lived in this country long ago.