The Fall of Light

1

In an autumn long ago, the Foleys crossed the country into the west like the wind that heralds winter. Where exactly they had come from is uncertain. The family’s origins vanish in the lost pages of the country’s history. It was in the County Wicklow, or perhaps Carlow. There was Francis Foley and his four sons. They rode horses through the night, travelling with all their possessions in raggle-taggle fashion, leading a small cart on which lay a large wooden telescope. The midnight creaking of the cartwheels and the clattering of the hooves on the road stirred those who slept on the edges of their beds in thin dreams. The Foleys fled through the fields of Tipperary and across the wide green of all that country until they reached the river. Then 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.

The father did not sleep. He lay back on the cart and unfurled the green blanket to look at the telescope they had stolen from the landlord’s house, and for which they were now fugitive. He ran his fingers down the polished mahogany and up to the brass rim that held the eyepiece. He did not know its history. He did not know it to be one of the treasures of that science. For Francis Foley it was simply the means by which to see the parts of the universe he would otherwise not see. It was something which he had taken in an act of revenge. Within it lay the limitlessness of space, the way to feel freed from the narrow confines of the history of that country. For amidst the stars there were no landlords.

Francis looked over at his sleeping sons. None of them were yet out of their teens. Teige, the youngest, was twelve years old. As a boy he had grown with a gift for horses. He knew them intuitively. He knew more than men five times his age and yet in sleep lay with the innocent posture of a child who curls beneath the canopy of the night, certain the skies watch over him with goodness. Finan and Finbar, the twins, were sixteen years, simple and distant and still sharing the one soul. While their father watched them they moved in the blanket of a sour dream, first one and then the other kicking at the same frightening vision as if it were a ball and could fly off across the dark. Tomas, at nineteen the eldest, was not quite sleeping. He was already the barrel-chested, flaxen-curled replica of his father. He had the same turn of lip, the same even curve of eyebrow, that gave him the handsome expression of one who knows he is invincible. There was nothing from which Tomas Foley would ever step back. He had his father’s recklessness, that stubborn, indefatigable belief inherited from grandfathers lost that a Foley was as good as anyone and better than most. He did not sleep, he lay and watched his horse sleeping, and when it stirred or a sudden quivering passed along the muscles of its neck, he spoke to it from where he lay on the wet grass until its ease returned and the strangeness of the place was forgotten.

Francis Foley turned from them. He angled himself up in the dark on the cart that held all their possessions in the world. He was a large man in a small time, or so he believed, and his frame made the wagon creak. A tin pot fell free to the ground, and the red fox that was circling through the copse of sallies skirted away. The old man did not pay it any attention. His mind was away. He had lifted and propped the telescope at an angle to the heavens and now stretched and lay sideways so he could tilt his head under the eyepiece. Then he looked up into the vastness of space, watching for the clouds to move and reveal the stars where some imagined all lives were explained.

When the boys woke they watched the dawn like a caress travelling the heavily misted veil of the river valley, and they supposed that they were near the landscape of their new home. Their father gestured them to breakfast, and they stood around the grassy space where they had passed the night and ate hunks of bread. A mist rain was falling softly. Softly the air was moving in opaque windblown patterns that the previous night Francis Foley had convinced himself tasted of the sea. He had never seen the Atlantic. His understanding of the country’s geography was that across the plains of Tipperary the land grew more rocky and wild and the population more sparse. He believed that in the west was a place beyond magistrates and bailiffs and agents, a landscape unruly, shaped by sea storms and where, like many a man whose soul was full, he would find a place to live in that was empty.

But he had not calculated correctly. When he squinted into the mist that obscured the width of the river that morning, he feared that they were not halfway across Ireland.

“The country is enormous,” he said. He spoke in Irish, his words dropped into the air around his silent sons. “The mapmakers have it wrong. It is a plot. They have drawn the country small to make us feel small.”

He looked at where he wanted the sky to brighten and urged it to do so with the set expression of his face. He wanted the mist to lift and tried to stare it away, then he asked his sons if they could smell the sea.

The twins sniffed the air and smelled the deer that were not far up the river. Teige looked at Tomas, who was angled forward on his horse, and like him he pressed his face outward to kiss the invisible. He paused a moment, then sat back.

“Is that the sea?” he said.

The old man did not know. The scent of the morning was not bitter as he had expected. There was no salt in the air, and although he told his sons this was a victory, that their discovery of the size of the country was heartening, his spirit fell with the awareness of his own ignorance. The river Shannon, which on the map in the landlord’s house where he had seen it was a thin blue line snaking southwest ward to the sea, was that October morning a wide grey swirling torrent whose width was unknown.

“If we follow it, we will be too far south. We will cross it,” said the father.

He said it and broke away from the breakfast, as if between words and action there was not the slightest room for hesitation or debate. Not the slightest room in which one of the sons might have said, “Father, shouldn’t we wait and find a bridge?” For they knew their father well and lived in the shadow of him like smaller animals. They could not take the bridge for the same reason that they did not cross the country by its main roads, for the telescope would be seen.

None of them could swim. There were three horses, the great chestnut that Tomas rode, the grey gelding upon whose back the twins sat together, and the black pony of Teige. The cart was pulled by a long-haired mule. In the poor rain-light of that dawn, the Foleys rode down to the water’s edge. The river ran past them, laughing. The horses caught the flash of the salmon silvering beneath and flared their nostrils and stamped at the bank and were stilled but not calmed by Teige. He dismounted and talked to each of them.

“It is not deep, it is only fast,” said the father, though he could not know and could not see the far bank. He had drawn from the mound on the cart a collection of ropes.

“Tomas!” He called the boy without looking at him. His eldest son came quickly and took one end of the rope.

“There,” the father said, and pointed to one of the twisted trees that grew there.

Tomas secured the rope. Teige and the twins watched him in admiration. He had a kind of cool expertise, as if nothing in the physical world daunted him. He pulled taut the rope then and quickly mounted again and without pause plunged his horse into the river.

It took him in its swiftness and at once he was swept sidelong. But while his brothers watched with that mixture of horror and awe in which they always beheld him, Tomas yelled and yahooed, his eyes wide and white and his body on the horse twisting with the power of the river. His horse thrashed and flared and swam with its neck, pushing its nose upward into the air and tilting its eyes as if afraid to see below it. The river swept them away, but not far. And still Tomas worked the horse, riding it the way horses are ridden in dreams where the world is infirm and progress seems at the whim of God. He rode the river and let the rope run away behind him. He rode it while the twins cried urgent cheers and Teige looked away and felt only the terror of the crossing ahead of him. The old man stood mute and patient without the slightest evidence of fear or pride. Tomas rode himself invisible. He crossed into the midriver waters where they could no longer see him and passed as if through portals into some incorporeal world that existed beyond the midpoint of the Shannon River.

They did not see where he had gone. The mist hung between them. They did not hear him. His father stood like the ghost of a father and did not move and did not show his sons the slightest uncertainty. The rope that Tomas rode did not move but lay into the water. The sky had not brightened. The day was improperly born. The only sound was the sound of the old river running in that green place where the family would come asunder. No birds sang.

“Tomas!” Finbar shouted.

Finan roared, “Tomas!”

“Stop it!” their father said. “He cannot hear you.”

They stood there and waited. The world aged in them another bit, each of the younger brothers feeling the impotency of their roles in the drama of their family, mute witnesses to stubbornness and folly. They waited for their father to ride into the river and save Tomas, but he did not move. The rope was loose in Shannon. The twins sank down on the ground. The old man’s eyes stared at the wall of the mist as though he could burn it away, as though he didn’t need anyone or anything and that the rescue of Tomas was in his gift and would happen without his moving from that place by the shore. They waited an impossible time.

Then the rope stretched taut.

They saw it lift and watched the line of it rise and drop the dripping river water back into the river. The old man moved quickly. He laid a hand on it and shook it and tested it for firmness. Then he tied another to the tree there and brought it over to the twins. “Here. Go on, you,” he said. “By the rope. Bring this one.”

The twins looked at each other and half grinned, both at the danger and at the opportunity to imitate their eldest brother. They pulled back their shoulders and put out their chins and were like minor versions of the father.

“Go on, Tomas has made it easy for you,” said the old man. “By the rope, go.”

He stood and watched, and carrying the second rope, they rode down into the water, trailing behind them a line loose and wavering. The gelding tried to swim with its head impossibly high. It angled its long nose upward and snorted and opened its eyes wide and baleful and at first jumped at the current washing against it. Teige called to the horse. He said sounds in no language until the twins and the horse were gone out of sight into the wet brume and the only sign of them was the second rope running backward out of the unseen.

Then there was stillness on that bank once more. After a time the second rope was pulled taut. Now two parallel lines stretched, bridge like, over the river.

Quickly the old man tied Teige’s black pony to the cart. Then, by ropes and a leather belt, he attached the pony and the mule to one of the two ropes so the cart was linked on either side to the airy bridge that led into the mist. He called his son to get up and ride the pony and calm the mule and coax them into the rushing river. But Teige did not want to move. He had sat down on the ground and was turned away from the river. He was running a finger in the brown mud.

“Teige, come. Now.” The father’s voice was large and full and like a thing solid in the air. Teige sat.

“Teige?” the old man said again, and saw his son turn his face farther away as if to study some distant corner of the mist.

The father said nothing for a moment. He looked up in the air, then he cursed loudly.

“Get up!”

But Teige did not move. The river ran.

“I tell you now for the last time. Get up, come on.” The old man sat on the cart with the reins in his hands. He turned from his youngest son and looked away at the grey river and the rope lines running across it.

Still Teige did not move.

“You are afraid. Have you not seen your brothers cross it?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Because you are a coward.”

“I am not. It won’t work. The pony knows it. Look.” He pointed to the black pony, whose ears were back and whose sides heaved.

“She is afraid because you are. It’s your fear, not hers. Did you see your brothers? They were not afraid. Get over here. Now, I tell you.”

Teige sat on the mud and studied the patterns he drew with his finger. His brown hair fell forward over his brow. The drizzle of rain made his cheeks glisten. His eyes were still, the world reduced to the two feet of mud about him. As if such were a door in the world for his escape, he stared at it. Then a blow knocked him on his face.

“Get up.”

Teige did not cry out or weep. He lay with his eyes open and his mouth bleeding into the ground. His pony stamped and turned and looked about with bewilderment.

“Get up,” his father said. “Get up now and get on that pony and lead it into the river.”

The old man turned away from him and studied the thin light in the air and cursed wordlessly. Teige did not get up. His father went over and went to kick at him but stopped short.

“Get up,” he said again in Irish, a single word in a sharp whisper. He was looking away, looking at some place where he raged against the world for not fitting his map of it. His blue eyes burned and his brow furrowed and his lips pressed against one another in a thin line of resolve; he would make things fit.

“I want to stay here. Leave me here,” Teige said.

“Because you are a coward? I will not,” Francis Foley said. “I will knock you into the river if you don’t get up.”

“I will stay here and wait for my mother!” the boy shouted.

“Your mother is gone. She has left us.”

“She has not!”

“She doesn’t want to be with us,” he lied. “She has gone off and now there is only us. Now do what I tell you and get up!” said the father. He waited a moment, and though it was brief it was long enough for him to consider going back to try to find her and then for pride and the knowledge that the law was pursuing them to banish the thought. No, they would go on. They would find a new home. He would make happen what he told her, then go and gather her up and bring her there and she would see. None of this he said, for he could not reveal his own rashness. “Get up, eirigh!” was all he said.

Teige said nothing and the air stilled and in the stillness there was only the beating of their hearts and the rain now falling. The pony’s tail whisked the morning, her foot stamped the ground. The old man swallowed hard on the emotion that rose in his gorge, and his fists trembled. He looked away at where the spirit of the boy’s mother was watching him. And he did not strike him again.

And at last, without another word but with a grey look of shame, Teige stood up. He did not face his father, but in a flash the old man had spun him around by the shoulders and holding him there an instant shook him hard and tried to contain the desire to knock him down. In his great hands the thin boy was like a bag of things broken. He shook him and saw the boy’s spittle fly out of the twisting blur of his mouth. He saw the eyes flash past and lose their focus and sicken with fear and powerlessness. Then the vomit flew pink and curdled onto his shoulder, and he let the boy go and watched Teige fall like a rag version of himself at his feet. This was not how Francis Foley had wanted to treat his son, it was not what the old man meant or wanted to do. He told himself it was how a father had to behave, and he ignored the idea that his treatment of Teige was coloured by how much the boy resembled his mother.

“How are you going to live in the world?” he asked his son. “Tell me that. How are you going to be a man and live in the world? If your father asks you to jump with him into the fires of hell, you jump. If he asks you to swim in the sea when he knows you cannot swim and he cannot and the waters are filled with devils, you swim. Do you understand me?”

Teige did not answer. He stood up slowly, and his father pushed him ahead of him back to the pony. The telescope was wrapped in a blanket and tied on the top of all their things. There were pots and tools and wooden furniture and cloths and rugs already tattered and various sticks and irons of uncertain purpose.

“Now!” said Francis Foley, and swiped the air above the animal with the reins. They rode into the water and the whole cart swayed downriver at once. It was as though the world had suddenly been turned on its side and everything fell. The father stood and shouted at the mule and slashed at him with the reins and a leather belt and cursed the universe and cried out to Teige to keep them between the ropes. The ties he had secured snapped like the river’s toys. The whole of their belongings and the stolen telescope swung away. The animals tried to keep their direction but were pulled backward and sideways. They jumped and thrashed at the water. Then the lines that held them gave, too.

In a moment it happened. The harness to the mule broke, the cart sailed free and swung about and pressed against the rope of the bridge and snapped it. Francis cried out. In the river Teige looked over his shoulder and saw the old man falling back and clutching his precious cargo, the great telescope. Water spilled through the cart grey and fast, and the old man was kicking away at it, making a small white splashing. Teige was ahead of him then in the river. He tried to ride the pony back and over to his father but could not for the cart was floating away and was on the back of the current. And then the mule broke free of it and was swept forty yards then more and then was gone like a ghost dissolving from this world. Teige saw his father look with fury at the animal a last time, and then the telescope seemed to roll from its moorings and the old man pushed aside some of their things to keep room for it. Pots, shovels, bowls, sailed away downriver. He clung to the telescope. He saw that he was drifting from Teige and that he could not be reached and he did not jump from the raft of the cart. He defied the world to drown him. He cursed it and shook his head and shouted out something that Teige could not understand. Then Teige called to him, and his words too were lost in the rush of the river water and the deadness of that air enwrapped with scarves of mist. The father did not hear him ask where was his mother, or if he did, he did not answer. He looked back at the boy, and then the whole cart sailed down the river and into the mist and vanished out of sight.

When Teige reached the far side, none of his brothers could speak. They seemed paralyzed. They did not greet his safe arrival or move from that spot on the bank. They looked into the foggy river at nothing. It was as if their father had been erased and, momentarily, they were unsure if this was good or bad.

Teige looked back. “I knew someone would die,” he said.

There was a pause, and the brothers watched the river. It seemed to run without sound now. The twins turned and looked at Tomas.

“No one has died,” he said, “come on.”

“Come on!” said Finbar in echo and perfect imitation, and in this was joined by his twin, each of them mirrors of the elder. They mounted and rode, and Teige came with them. They galloped along the grassy western banks of the Shannon River. They rode along the edge of the first light of that morning and found that no matter how quickly they moved, the river moved quicker. They could not catch sight of the old man. All day the Shannon was sleeved in a fine mist and they could see nothing. After a mile the river was no longer even a river but had become a great lake that at first they mistook for the sea.

They rode the three horses all that day in search of their father. They scanned the grey waters where sometimes they thought they caught sight of him. At last they came to where they could ride no more and where the last sighting of Francis Foley turned out to be a singular lonesome swan riding the low waves.

“He is gone,” Tomas said.

The breath of the horses misted and faded. They sat crouched forward like ones beneath a burden. The landscape thereabouts was a green and rumpled stillness. The silence grew heavy. Then Finbar said, “He is gone to America,” and laughed a small laugh that faded away.

Finan looked at Tomas to see what he would say, but he said nothing at all.

They watched the waters.

“He is not,” Teige said at last, “he is become a swan.”

2

Thin pale daylight fell out of the sky. Curlews flew over the water. The wind waved the reeds in a slow rustling where Tomas feared to find the body of their drowned father. But he was not there. He looked up at the bank where Teige and the twins were then making camp. He looked out at where the swan moved in the brown waters and the evening was falling. What was he to do now? Defeat was not in his nature. Yet in a few days he had lost almost everything. The vision of their home burning flared in his mind, and he knew they could not go back there. He did not understand what had happened between his parents but from it felt an obscure guilt, as if it were the boys’ fault. He wanted to go back and could not. He had to be the man now. He stood there a time and watched the river and the darkness coming. He wanted to be able to repair their losses. He wanted to right the crooked world, to go and bring back the dead. He wanted to rescue someone. He stood and then grew restless and came up to the others.

“The place he wanted us to go was farther on,” he said. “It was at the sea that has waves. We’ll go on there tomorrow”

“We have to go back,” Teige said.

“We cannot. They will arrest us. We have to go on and find a place, and then I will go back myself,” said Tomas, looking away at the air above him as if to see how his words sounded.

Finan groaned then and rubbed at his stomach. “We have nothing left, we have nothing to eat.”

“We’ll eat the swan,” his twin answered, and grinned.

“We’ll not!” Teige said, and raised his chin and seemed momentarily a pugnacious other.

Tomas calmed them with the command to stay camped there by their horses while he went down the river to the town to get food.

“Don’t be acting fools while I’m gone. There’s only us now,” he said.

He left them in the darkness and rode away. The clouds blew eastward and the stars revealed themselves. In those days the night skies of that country were vast canopies of deepest blue, all the created stars glimmered there like the diadem of a king. There were none lost to surrounding light, for there was none, and the patterns of the constellations were each clear and perfect as though drawn by a great hand in the depths of the heavens. As the cold of the nighttime came around them, the younger Foley brothers huddled together. They put the pony and the horse in the gap of the wind and gained a small shelter from the air that was blowing from Norway. They watched the stars.

“Do you think our father is dead?” Finbar asked.

But none of them answered him. They sat there in the night. Teige thought of his mother, Emer, and looked in the darkness for the image of her face.

After a time Finan said: “Tell us one of the stories, Teige.”

“Yes, tell us one,” said Finbar.

And so, not to make the time move faster or slower, but to make it vanish altogether, to create the illusion that it did not exist and that all moments were the same, Teige told a story he had heard his mother tell. It told of the Queen Cassiopeia and her beautiful daughter, Andromeda. He spoke as they all spoke in Irish, and in that language the story seemed more ancient even than the versions of it first told in Mesopotamia or Greece.

“Who could say which of them was the loveliest? Cassiopeia or Andromeda?” he began. “Queen Cassiopeia was full of pride in her daughter and in herself and announced that they were lovelier even than the sea-nymphs, the Nereids.”

“The Nereids?” Finan had forgotten who they were.

“The fifty daughters of Nereus, the wise old man of the sea.”

“Fifty?” Finbar asked.

“Fifty.”

“O-ho!”

They watched the stars and imagined.

“The sea-nymphs were offended, they complained to Poseidon, god of the sea, who struck the waves with his trident and flooded the lands and called up the monster Cetus.”

“I love Cetus,” Finbar said.

“The king, the husband of Andromeda, was told that the only way he could save his queen was if he sacrificed his daughter to Cetus the monster. So Andromeda was chained to the rocks at Joppa.”

“She was eaten.”

“She was not,” Teige said.

“She was!”

“Stop it, Finbar!” shouted Finan, and punched the other, and the two of them fell to wrestling there and rolling over each other while Teige sat and waited. When they had stopped he told of how Perseus came and rescued Andromeda and took her for his wife, and made Cassiopeia jealous, and how Cassiopeia in her jealous fit helped arrange an attack on the married couple. How Perseus defeated the attack.

“Then Poseidon, the sea-god, hearing how the queen had plotted against her daughter, cast her into the heavens for all time.”

“Upside down,” Finbar said.

“Upside down,” said Teige.

The story ended, they huddled there beneath the stars that were the same stars since forever. And the longer they watched the skies, the clearer they could see the kings and queens and jealous lovers and sea-gods and drowned fathers and vanished mothers, and they forgot that they were cold. And after a while they could not tell whether they were in sleeping or waking dreams in that empty and merciless world where they were now alone.

3

Moments before dawn, Tomas returned without his boots from Limerick town. He dismounted his horse with a light jump, and when his brothers raised their heads and stared at him he swung his coat onto the ground and fell down upon it. His body was exhausted, but his spirit was elated.

“God!” he said, and astonished the others by rolling with himself there on the ground.

“Are you sick?” Finbar asked him.

But Tomas did not reply. He shouted out a cry of no language, raised his bare feet, and banged them on the ground. He let out another and wriggled in the mud.

His brothers did not dare to speak to him. They had never seen him in such an agitated state but erroneously supposed it was the loss of their father and the new responsibility of leading the family. They lay there beside the flowing river and watched hungrily while the dawn rose in ribbons pink and blue.

In the dark Tomas had ridden his horse into Limerick town with the intention of stealing something for his brothers to eat. But from the moment he arrived on the hardened mud of the side streets, his resolve weakened. At that stage in his life, it was the biggest town he had ever seen. Dimly in the distance he saw the bridge named Wellesley with its elegant arches. The high steeple of the ancient cathedral appeared above the rooftops, and across the river were the neat plantations and well-made fences of the land of the marquis of Lansdowne. He tied his horse and brushed the dirt off his clothes and walked into the night town. The smells of the outer streets were the smells of stout and whiskey and urine and cow dung. Cats and ragged dogs ran and stopped and sniffed at dark, muddied pieces of nothing. He passed on into the town. From rooms above him he heard men’s laughter and music of the piano. He was not sure where he was going. He was walking in the world for the first time without the shadow of his father. He let his hand rub along the fine stone of the buildings. He stood against one of them to let his back feel its perpendicularity and then looked upward to see the straight line it cut in the dark sky. He paused there and gathered himself and thought for the first time that they did not have to follow now their father’s plans. They could go anywhere. It would be up to him. We could come here, he thought. We could go anywhere. The country was suddenly big with possibility. He moved out of the shadows and walked the full length of the street that ran parallel to the wide river. At the far end of the town when he was about to cross and walk back the far side of the street, he saw the woman in the yellow dress.

She had bare arms in the cold night and a bracelet that glittered.

She was lovely. Her hair was high and pinned.

“Here I am,” she said. Her mouth was small and red, her eyes shining.

Tomas Foley had not known the company of women. He looked behind him in the street when the woman spoke, and when he saw there was no other imagined that the woman had spoken to him out of some distress.

“What is it?” he said.

And she laughed and covered her laugh.

“You’re a sweet one,” she said, and she moved to him and smiled.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

She touched his face with fingers cool and soft, and his head spun.

“Kiss me,” she said. Then her arms were around him and she was kissing and biting at his lips. She ran her hands along his chest. His eyes rolled. His head swirled within the cloud of cheap honeysuckle water that was her scent. She ate at his neck and then said, “Come on, love,” and led him up the worn boards of a stairs to a room that was not far away. In that same astonishment, the same dumb innocence with which he later interpreted that simple act of economics to be the rare and absolute majesty of Love itself, Tomas found his clothes taken off and his body admired in the yellow candlelight.

The woman reversed the world he had imagined and told him he was a beauty. He stood there and she looked at him and saw the innocence that had once been hers and she asked him had he ever been with a woman.

“I have not,” he said.

She caught her lower lip in her teeth. Though she was not much older than he was, her eyes showed an aging sorrow as if she knew that she was always doomed to be the fakery of love, its manner and appearance, but not its heart.

“You have a true love?” she asked him. Then quickly said, “No, don’t answer me, come here.”

And he did then. And she reached and touched him, and in an instant he forgot everything but her. She drew him down on the narrow bed and caressed him with such a ferocity that her movements could not be called caresses and the air in the room grew damp and white sweat might have dripped from the walls and the cracked ceiling. She loved him for two hours, then collapsed back on the bed, where suddenly she turned her head to the side and wept. It was an ancient if underused strategem and came from her own need to see him again. She did not know such performance was unnecessary with him. Tomas said nothing. Then, at the time when she feared he would be rising and pulling on his trousers and leaving his money by the door, he turned and stroked her hair.

She was a woman who did not believe anymore in the existence of tenderness. She had been a girl on the streets since she was fourteen years old. And when Tomas did not leave, when he lay there in the room that became cold as the night sky cleared, she asked him what he was doing.

“I love you,” he said.

She leaned up on her elbow. She drew the cover up across her breasts and shook stray hair from across her face to look more clearly at him.

“There is no need to lie,” she said.

“No. I am not.”

“You are,” she said, her voice turning hard and cruel from hard and cruel experience. “You think saying that to me you won’t have to pay me. You think I am some stupid witch.”

“I would give you everything I have in the world,” Tomas said.

“Pay me, then.”

“I have no money.”

The woman shrieked and kicked out at him and kicked again until he came out the other side of the bed.

“I knew it!” she screamed. “I knew it! A liar!”

The fierceness of her was a measure not of the loss, but of her own anger in having however briefly believed in his innocence. She hated him then for having reminded her of a world she knew long ago.

Tomas stood and told her that he had nothing, and she reached up and swung her right arm and caught him full in the face. His nose pumped a thick crimson.

“I love you,” he said, and stood there bleeding.

On this declaration, she let out a long wail and got up and beat him as if beating at the old lie of Love itself. Tomas did not move. He took her blows like proofs of something else and stood.

When at last she had surrendered and stopped in a wheezing breathlessness on the side of the bed, she heard with astonishment the handsome Foley repeat his vow of love. He stood there naked by the window and told her.

“Stop it!” she said. “Stop it!” And she held her hands over her ears and looked for a time like a young girl again. “Don’t even say that. Not you.” She turned away and looked at where the wall was flaked and cracked. “Do you know how many times I’ve heard men say that?” she said.

“This is me,” said Tomas. “I love you.”

She sighed and rolled back over on the bed so that she was near him. She looked at the beauty of his body and weakened. She looked at his softened sex and wanted to take it in her hands.

’’If you love me—”

“I do,” he blurted.

“If, I said”—she reached up a hand and touched his stomach and drew it away again—“if you love me, you will pay me,” she said, and watched him for the dodge she knew would be coming. A bell in the town rang two o’clock. She should have been out on the street again. She heard it and waited, then on the end of its second pealing heard Tomas Foley offer her his boots as payment.

“Here, I have no money. I will get some and bring it to you tomorrow,” he said. “These are good boots.”

She took them in her hands. “They are.”

“They show you,” Tomas said.

“I’d almost believe you,” she told him then, and with that he turned and walked to the door of that small room and picked up his clothes and put them on.

“They show you I love you.” He stood in his ragged trousers and held his shirt in his hand. He looked at her a final time. “What is your name?”

With his boots in her hands, the woman who through his eyes had seen herself again a girl in a time before the tarnishing of all such notions as truth and love said her name was Blath, meaning flower.

4

With their eldest brother lost in the seas of love, Finbar and Finan woke in the dawn with hunger eating at their insides. They opened their mouths on the damp air to see if the pangs might escape. They did not. They sat up and wondered what to do. With Tomas sleeping they seemed grown in stature and got up and stood with legs apart and stern faces as if serious-minded captains. They walked about to the horses and back. In manner they were restless and impatient. They looked for something to command. Finbar went over and pushed Teige roughly.

“What is it?”

“Wake up. We have to get food.”

Teige sat.

“Light a fire,” Finbar said.

“Yes, light a fire,” said his twin sharply. “We’ll catch some fish.”

They stood and watched him a moment, as if to see their command taking shape. Then they went and from the small collection of their things that were salvaged from the river took a ball of line and a pin bent hook shape and walked away to the water’s edge.

The morning opened with ponderous clouds of pewter coming eastward across the sky. Teige went to the horses and spoke to them and then gathered sticks of ash and twigs and dried leaves. All of us are like in a dream, he thought. As if nothing has happened and we are just here in this place by the woods. He went deeper within the trees then and walked across the softened brown floor of fallen pine needles and leaves long decomposed. He stopped and listened for bird-song and heard such whistled in the roof of branches above him. He stayed there with sticks in his arms and all seemed gone, for the place was so greenly empty. He thought of how easily he might be lost there, and then he thought of his mother. Quietly into the screen of trees he called to her. He said the name he had for her. He said it in such a manner as one might use to speak with ghosts or others invisible. Then he stopped and stood and listened as if listening deep into the air for the slightest footstep or noise in which might be traced her presence.

When he came out of the trees the twins were already waiting with two trout.

“Where were you? Come on, light the fire!”

They threw commands and showed off their catch and had an air of swagger.

When the fire was lit they cooked the fish. Tomas was sleeping. Teige went and threw the heads and tails to the swan that had not sailed away. The morning in that place beside the river moved slowly as the clouds came on and made dull the light. Thin smoke rose in furls. A veil of misted rain fell without seeming to be falling.

When at last Tomas woke he arched his back like a cat and caught the afterscent of trout.

“I could eat a horse,” he said.

“We need to go back,” Teige told him. “We have to find our mother.”

Tomas flushed. He looked away in the woods. “We need to stay here, move into the woods for a few days until I get us somewhere in the town,” he said.

“We’re supposed to be finding a place by the sea and then going back,” said Teige.

“Well, we’re not. We’re staying here.”

“It was Father’s plan.”

“And he’s dead. So…” Tomas paused and in the rippling of the river water heard the name Blath, meaning flower. “I have to go. Make something there,” he said, and waved his arm at the edge of the wood. “I will be back later.” Then he went and took his horse and rode back toward Limerick town.

His brothers did not know what had got into him, but they were too afraid to ask. Secretly the twins were pleased at his absence and thought of things they could get Teige to do.

They sat there, abandoned again, then Finbar said, “We need to make a better camp by the woods.”

“Yes,” Finan agreed. “A good camp, a fort.”

“That’s what I said, a fort.”

They looked back at the trees. They knew stories of many that had disappeared in such forests, ones that had wandered off trails and vanished into the kingdom of fairies.

“At any moment something could come out of there,” Finan said.

They watched where the trees and their shadows met and dissolved in dark.

“It could, and it will,” agreed Finbar at last, drawing his knees up to his chest and turning to wait for when his prediction would come true.

5

While his brothers waited there that empty day, Tomas arrived back in Limerick. Along the route he had stopped at a number of cottages and stolen from cabins and yards what he could. He had an ax and a shovel and a number of irons. He had a blanket of coarse hair and wrapped in it a fire tongs and a number of empty blue glass bottles. For himself he had lifted the eggs from hens and sucked them dry. He had eaten wild blackberries that grew in tangles in the hedgerows three miles outside the town. By the time he had encountered the ragged traders who were camped on the edges of the market, he had the wild look of one unstable with emotion. The traders were travellers from all corners of the country, and they recognized at once the desperation in his bootless figure and the tainted air of stolen goods. Squint-eyed, fox-headed fellows, they poked with their fingers at the little assemblage of things wrapped in the blanket and, while considering their value, measured it against the value of betraying him to the law. Nevertheless it was with a handful of coins that Tomas rode on towards Limerick town. He tied his horse outside an empty cabin with fallen thatch and washed his face with fingertips wetted in a trough. In the daylight the town was less than beautiful. A dreary rain fell. In the side streets open sewers ran by broken footpaths and fouled the air. Tomas decided at once that their father had been right, the town was not for them, they would go to the sea. He hurried on, his feet cold and muddied. Small boys stopped baiting a rat and watched him pass.

He walked up the town to the place where he had met Blath the night before. But there were only two men worse for porter sitting on the street. One of them looked up at him and then grinned with an empty mouth.

“You’re lookin for ’em?” he gummed. His companion shuddered alive and dropped a loop of bloodied drool in the street.

“A woman,” Tomas said.

The first man began a laugh that became a cough. He coughed until his eyes ran.

“D’ya hear tha?” he said to the other. “A woma.”

“No no no, you want to see de man,” Gums said. “He’s over dare, forty tee, up tairs on the lep. He pays ya for yer teet, look.” The two men opened their mouths at the same moment and showed Tomas Foley their raw, inflamed gums empty of teeth. “Five pence the la.” They smiled, as if they had passed on to him some extraordinary felicity.

“The women will be here tonigh, after dar,” said the drooling man.

Tomas did not want to wait until darkness. He went directly to the room where he had made love the previous night, but the door was locked. He walked up the town and down again, and it was still not past noon. He weighed the coins in his pocket and briefly considered whether to buy food or boots. But in the end he did neither. He decided that he would give all the money to the woman called Blath because he had told her he would give her everything he had in the world, and she would give him back his boots. Then he would rescue her and take her with him back to his brothers and onward to the place where they were going to live by the sea. He did not include in the calculations that the rescue of Blath would in some way be the redeeming of other losses, too, the empty space that was his mother. But such existed too in the depths of his mind.

He walked up and down Limerick town. He saw fine coaches arrive and depart. He heard the talking of men in English. He watched a river rat run the length of the main street, chased by the small boys. He walked until his bootless feet ached. He walked the way a man walks when he is walking to meet a woman who is already lodged in the space before his eyes. Then, when he had reached the top of the town for the umpteenth time, had patted his horse, and spoken to it, he sat down and waited for darkness.

Years later, when life had hardened the last softness of him, when he was living in another country and those days would seem to take on a fabled unreality, he would think of that afternoon. It would come back to him like the younger ghost of himself, and he would be walking the streets of a town where none knew his history or name and suddenly that afternoon’s wait for the darkness would arrive in his heart like a spear.

If he could, he would have given a year of his life to move the clock forward four hours.

But as it was, the time was much longer. It was long enough for all of his childhood, boyhood, and adolescence to revisit him. All the battles of the small two-room house on the lord’s estate where his father had knocked him down to make him grow up. Tomas sat and was revisited by them all while his feet froze.

When darkness fell at last, he moved quickly down the cold pathway of the street. When he arrived at the place he had met Blath the night before, she was not there. There were other figures in the shadows. Tomas went up the steps of the house. In the doorway there stood a woman. He thought at first that she was wearing a mask, for her eyes and lips were painted and shone glossily beneath the lamplight.

“Love,” she greeted him.

But he was already past her. He was already bounding the stairs two at a time. He was already at the bedroom door itself and turning the knob that was locked, making him knock at the cheap door with such fierce insistence that it was instantly clear he was not going to turn away. He stood back and then thumped at it with his shoulder, and then again until it splintered down the centre and two boards fell apart and he pushed his way on into the room of Love.

The smells were the first thing to strike him. They were the smells of the night before, the smells he had lost on the ride back to his brothers and tried in vain to recover. Now the perfume assailed him. That there was another man in the bed with Blath did not arrive in his consciousness for a moment. There was a brief pause, a frozen nothingness. Then all proceeded as in bizarre phantasm and took the form of quickened nightmare, and Tomas Foley saw the arms of Blath lying by her sides and saw the man on top of her in his shirt. And she was trying to get up and get him off of her, and he was making a low moaning and hurrying as if in some desperation to finish even as he knew the other had crashed in the door. Then there was noise and cries of alarm and more people coming from rooms down the hallway. There was sudden pandemonium, floorboards creaking and some hastening away and others arriving down to where pieces of the door hung. But none of these mattered to Tomas Foley. “Stop stop,” he heard Blath say. He saw her fists come up and hit the man on his sides, but then Tomas swung and cracked open his head with a plank from the door. The crack was loud and sharp and the fellow fell sideways and blood shot on the wall and there were cries and shrieks and the very air of the room itself seemed to pulse and beat. Blath screamed and sat up and held to her the blanket, and she saw it was Tomas and was shaping some words to him when the painted woman arrived in the doorway with a pistol. The woman aimed at the broad back of Tomas and Blath shouted to her to stop and in the same instant still Tomas was dropping the plank and drawing from his pocket the money and spilling it on the bed. His breath was heaving. The bloodstain dripped on the wall. He wore the look of a man mad without comprehension yet of the violence and passion that had risen inside him.

“All I have, I said I would give it you.”

He said the words and may have imagined from them would follow the rescue, and may even have thought they could both walk from there. But then through the door came a man called Maunsell with bald head and wide reddish sideburns who saw the dead man and the coins and called stop and grabbed the pistol from the woman in the door and fired it just as Tomas Foley dived sideways. There were screams, there were yells from down the hall and men and women running. The room surged with people, and then Tomas Foley leapt through the window and shattered the glass and arrived bleeding in the street.

6

In the emptiness of that same day, Teige conversed with the swan. He knew the various mythologies of the swan that had been passed to him in the form of stories told by his mother. He knew of the daughters of Lir who had been banished into swanhood on Lough Ern for nine hundred years. He knew the tale of Leda and the swan that was Zeus, and the sons of God, the twins who were stars, Castor and Polydeuces. So he realized that the transformation of his father into the white bird that sailed by the shore of the river was neither unique nor fearful. It was almost fitting, he thought. For his father would have taken a kind of natural pride in at last becoming part of legend. So, while the twins hunted for sloeberries in the woods, Teige came down to the riverside and told the swan in plain Irish that he was sorry for what had happened to him.

“I knew we should not have crossed the river,” he said. “I was not afraid of it, but I knew. As you know now,” he added. “Let that be the end of it between us.”

Wind made the river into waves that lapped softly. The swan did not sail away. It stayed while Teige fed it the heads and tails of trout.

“Where is my mother?” he asked, but heard only the slow soft lapping of the waters.

“I suppose there are advantages in being a swan,” Finan said when they had returned with berries.

“Indeed there are,” his twin agreed, but could not think of any until Teige told them.

“For him there’s no time now. He’s in the everlasting.”

“Here?”

“Yes, here, and anywhere he chooses to go. He can swim into the past or the future and be a swan there.”

“But not a man again?”

“No,” Teige said, and they three sat and pondered this and watched the inscrutable eye of the swan and the way its feathers ruffled sometimes when there seemed no breeze.

The darkness that night was deep and damp and starless. It painted the woods at their back into the sky and made the river before them into a black slickness that licked the air. The brothers waited for Tomas in the half-sleep of those who know trouble is on its way. The world turned with them lying but not sleeping beside their horses in the wetness of the night. They listened to Teige tell them the story of Orpheus and the Underworld. Then afterwards they listened to the wind in the woods and heard there the voices of ghosts and fairies and other spirits who had nowhere else to be. They heard them and shuddered in the fear that a hand might reach out and arrive on their shoulders at any moment, and that it would be not the hand of agent or landlord, but the inviting gesture into the Underworld of the dreamless Dead.

So, when they heard the first hoofbeats they did not move. They were huddled together in a grey blanket. Their eyes were wide. Though their horses neighed and moved about and beat at the ground with the smell of terror that was coming, and though soon the rider shouted out to them, still they did not move from the paralysis of fear. It was not until Tomas had ridden to within twenty feet of the bank of the river that Teige knew they were in reality.

The eldest brother’s arm was dangling limply from his shoulder socket. He was slumped forward and his face was bloodied.

“Quickly, now,” he said, “we have a few moments, no more. They are behind me.”

The Foleys were used to flight. It was a family habit from the time before their great-grandfather. The twins were on their horses the moment they stood up. Teige ran to the river’s edge. He called some words to the swan, then came back and he too was on his pony and they were racing into the darkness.

They stayed ahead of their pursuers, riding with the abandon of the lawless. The younger brothers did not even know why they were being chased but supposed that whatever the reason it was unjust and deadly and was another in the long catalog of inequitable grief that was the family’s history. The twins, riding together bareback on the gray gelding, became wild in the chase. Rather than seek the silent protection of the darkness, they yahooed in the air and shrieked loudly enough to rouse the birds from the tops of the trees in the great wood. Soon there were blackbirds flying, scattering the last dead leaves from the oaks and filling the air with a fluttering falling that in the darkness traversed like flakes of feeling, wild and ungathered. The twins yelled out. Finbar rode on the rear of the horse and waved his arms wide like a demented bird. Tomas was tilted forward on the chestnut, his arm like a rag and eyes glittering with the broken pieces of Love as he led the way into the nowhere that the Foleys sought for new beginning.

They rode forever. The pursuit was dogged, fueled with whiskey and the twisted righteousness of those who know themselves equally guilty. The bald figure of the law squeezed the flanks of his horse until white foam fell from its mouth. His men chased on, riding on a hotbed of lust, seeing in the capturing and killing of Tomas Foley a way to release what was twisting and burning inside of them. How many of them there were the Foleys did not know. The brothers surged on through the darkness, racing blindly through screes where the gorse and hawthorn prickled and clawed and made scarlet ribbons of blood across their cheeks and arms. They rode down to the river’s side and found at once their progress slowed by mud. Teige’s pony began to tire. Then in the water he saw the white gleam of the swan.

“They’ll catch us,” Finbar said.

“Feck, they won’t,” Tomas told them. His face was twisted in a mask of fury and guilt and remorse.

They stopped in indecision.

Then Teige said, “I’m not afraid of the river.”

They tied the horses loosely to each other, and Teige spoke to them and told them they must fly like their horse ancestors into the darkness and lose the ones who were chasing them. Then he blew his scent into their quivering nostrils and smacked them free.

The brothers stepped into the Shannon. Teige floated on one side of the swan and Tomas on the other. Then, with the twins flanking them and holding on tight, they moved out into the river and at once were borne away on the current.

7

And we can leave them there a moment. The part of the story that is the courtship and marriage of Francis and Emer Foley is told on winter nights when stars flock into the sky. It is told by the old to the young in cautionary tones. Sometimes the courtship alone is told and seems a story out of arcadia. She was the daughter of a hedge-school master. His name was Marcus O’Suilleabhain. He was from the County Galway and had come eastward with his family when Emer was still a child. They lived in a place not far from Carlow. Sometimes there he taught her Latin and Greek and spoke in those languages with an ease and eloquence that made him seem a figure out of times antique. He was blue-eyed and wore a grey beard. His fingers were long and thin, as his daughter would tell, and by yellow candlelight he would sit in the evenings and dip ink and write words and say these out loud as he did so. He told his daughter stories in Irish and Latin both and made in this way obscure connection between times long distant and those of their living. He loved the fair-haired girl his only daughter for the semblance she was of her mother and for the high-spirited way she had and how she held her head back when she walked in the street as the daughter of the master. When she was not yet twelve years old, he first told her the legends of the stars. He sat with her and told her these, though her mother thought she should be at bread baking or other such things. Marcus O’Suilleabhain did not care. He had no sons. He had this beauty of a daughter. He sat by her bed and talked her into sleep. And just so, between her waking and her dreams there walked on the mud floors of their two-room cottage Apollo and Artemis, and Pallas Athene, Hermes, Dionysus, such figures. She had been born in Virgo, and when in the spring and summer her stars could be seen, Marcus recounted to her the legends of the winged virgin. She was the queen of the stars, he said, the goddess of the corn. She loved one who was cut down in his prime, and she had to travel through winter to the Underworld to bring him back. But she did. For, see, the winter ends and she returns with him every spring. The master told her there were many names for her, the lovers were Venus and Adonis, or Isis and Osiris, but whichever there was always the grief and the journey and the promised return.

Like Virgo, then, the independent and free, Emer grew more beautiful and fiery still. She sat at the classes her father held in an open cabin whose thatch leaked drowsily, and sometimes she taught the very youngest ones. Then her father died. The school like a figment or a thing of air vanished overnight, its students gone. Emer lived on with her mother and then for her living took work washing in the house of a landlord, Taylor. Her childhood and girlhood were like linen, taken up and folded away.

She was a young woman beautiful and proud and silent unless provoked. Then her anger would flash out in fierce indignation. Her mother caught fever in the wet autumn of Emer’s twentieth year and died before Christmas. She was alone. For the natural elegance of her bearing she was moved into the position of dining maid and given a small room in the attic. She lived there some years and attended the table of those genteel who ate lavish feasts served from silver tureens and platters and drank from goblets of crystal. There was a sorrow in her manner that beguiled the gentlemen. They spoke of her when she left the room. Some tried to draw her with remarks and soft flatteries, but always she turned them away.

In the April of a year, Francis Foley saw her in the market of Carlow town. She was standing at a stall. Her hair blew about her in the breeze. He did not speak to her. He studied her until she turned and took her purchases and went back through the town and out along the road to the big house. Briskly he was behind her. He left his horse and went on foot and was a short distance back, as if it were she leading him, like a tame pony, leading him out of one life into another.

As a young man Francis Foley had been outlaw and rebel for his country. His father had been hung for participating in plots treasonous and bloody. He had grown up hiding in woods, taking instruction from white-faced thin fellows who arranged attacks on magistrates and agents and spies. He had lived seemingly without life of his own, yet he was strong and powerful. He assisted at the assassination of plump men scented with cologne. In his youth, he had walked in the footsteps of his father, grandfather, and more great-grandfathers than he knew. He rode with his brother, Aengus, taking vengeance to be justice and thinking they were righting what was wrong in the history of the country. Then, on a failed raid on a barracks in Tipperary, Aengus was shot and died afterwards beneath a hedge in a field wet with rain. Francis Foley lost his spirit then. He grew silent and went off by himself and did not again meet with those who promised freedom was near. He took work for short term in season of harvest or spring. Anger still rose and bloomed within him sometimes. Sometimes he saw inequity and injustice and had to keep his chin set and knuckles deep in his pockets. Such times when he thought he should return to the life of a rebel, he thought of Aengus in the field, and the anger did not so much pass as turn into grief. So his life was, working itinerant and travelling between farms and estates, until the noon he saw Emer O’Suilleabhain at the market.

He followed her.

“Ailinn,” he called after her when she turned in at the gates of the house. Beauty.

She stopped in the road. She had known he was following her. She had already weighed the possibilities of the moment like pebbles in her palm and, with the intuition gifted her by a grandmother who spoke with fairies, knew that her life would roll from her fingers into those of this stranger.

“Is it me?” she said in Irish, turning her face into the fall of her fair hair.

When he came to her, Francis Foley fell into the first reverence of his adult life. He lost at once the hoop of words he had expected to throw over her. He said nothing. Emer smiled. The soft April noontime touched them both, then she said: “I suppose I shall see you tomorrow on this road.”

There was no reply, though the air between them was already eloquent. Emer walked on. Francis lay himself in against the weeds in the ditch. The following day he awaited her there. When she arrived a thin rain was drizzling and a scarlet headscarf covered her hair. Without slowing her walk, she passed along by where he stood and then felt the presence of him in her stride. It was as if she had collected him, and he her, and they were in each other’s air already. So, without words, they walked off the road to the town and into the damp new grass coming in the meadows.

From the first, Francis Foley gave her his dreams. The dreams he had once dreamed for his country now became the condensed but powerful dream of a perfect place for this woman to live and bear their children. He imagined it fiercely. He told Emer the home he would make for her. He described it as if it were its own republic, as if he hoped now to step outside the reality of history and find a place only theirs. Emer raised her eyebrows at him yet loved the way he made her feel again a queen. When she went out with him in the nighttimes after the dining was done and the ware washed, he made her forget the disappointments of her life.

She lay back on his coat in a field under the night sky.

“Do you know the stars?” she asked him.

“Some of them I know.”

“My father told me their names and stories,” she said, and then told him something of the old master and of the stars’ names in Latin.

He listened and loved her more still and the following days went and inquired of a schoolmaster thereabouts names of further constellations, and these he brought to Emer like the gifts of that courtship.

“I want a place for us,” he said to her.

“There are many places. Where will we go?”

“We’ll have a house of our own.”

“Yes,” she said. “A fine house. A house with a yard and garden and hens.”

“I will make it for you. I will make the finest house any man ever made.”

“You won’t be able to.”

“I will.”

She angled herself on her elbow and looked into his face, pale in the night.

“You are a man who thinks he can change the world.”

“Of course I can,” he told her, and took her in his arms.

They married in May. Emer ran to him at the end of the avenue when the sky was releasing its stars and the night sweetening with scent of almond from the furze. The May night was warm syrup. The tenderness of the air, the hushed green of the world that was luscious, sensual, primordial, the soft low light, the sighing breaths of beasts in the fields, all these entered their memories that night as if such things were themselves the guests at the wedding. They met the priest at the roofless ruined chapel of Saint Martin’s and were married with a twist of Latin over their heads like a cheap, invisible corona. When the priest had slipped batlike into the shadows, Francis Foley and Emer clung to each other. It was long moments before they moved. Then they ran down the road and across the nighttime fields to a stone cabin for cattle, empty now, and which was the first house of all those that fell short of Francis Foley’s vision of paradise.

They began a home there. She left her work. He would not have her going there, and she herself was glad to walk in with her head high and say she would not be back. Then there was a brief blue summer of three weeks before the weather turned around and came at them from the east. The wind burned the hay. Seeds did not come to proper fruition, trees lost their leaves in August, and by September a fierce winter had already arrived. Emer carried their unborn son like a promise of new spring and watched the dark days for signs of light. Her husband, who had dreamed so extravagantly, had to hire himself at fairs. He disappeared before dawn and did not return until the physical exhaustion of his body was brought about by those who paid him less than the cost of feeding their horses. Slowly, so slowly, a sour disappointment seeped into the cottage. Tomas was born in January, when the snow was lying thick on the fields and there was no work even at the fairs. They ate small birds and berries. In the deep silence of the one dim room their marriage staggered under the impossible weight of dreams. Words were a reminder of other words and went unsaid, but the vision of the place that had been conjured remained. It lingered like a shadow in the corner, and soon Francis Foley could not look at the leaking thatch, or a place where the mud floor puddled, without hearing the reproach and mockery of his own words. Years slipped past them. The twins were born. Francis lay in the low bed at night and listened to the scouring wind and then for the first time in his adult life said a prayer to God for guidance.

He was too rash and independent a man to wait long for reply, and the following morning when none had come, he loaded his wife and family on their small cart and moved them northeastward into the wind. Emer did not want to go.

“This is madness,” she said.

“Nothing is gained by sitting still,” he told her as the gale bit off his ears. “This is not our home.”

“It could be.”

“No, it couldn’t. Look at it. We are going. This is not what I promised you.”

“What if I said I didn’t care?”

“You’d be lying.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“This is not our home.”

They wandered like biblical travellers looking for a sign, and were met with blizzards. Gulls were blown out of the sky. To keep his family alive, Francis stole sheep and killed them with his hands. They slept under hedges of whitethorn, the father lying himself down and letting the others rest wrapped upon him as the cold rose into his bones and by the dawn made of his face a white, bloodless mask.

When at last they found a place to live, it was no better than the one they had left behind. They stayed a year and two months, then moved again.

And so on it went, that life of struggle and hardship that followed the innocent days of love so swiftly that soon they themselves were almost forgotten and survived only as the thinnest faded memories of a once upon a time sweetness. They did not find a home. They lived on for times in various cabins and ruined cottages, deeply mired in the disappointment of their dreams. They stayed awhile and then moved, each time at the insistence of Francis over the increasing resistance of his wife. At last, when Teige was born Francis found work as one of an army of gardeners on an estate. They had a small cottage. The country itself was lost too in disillusionment. Spies and betrayals were everyday, the air of towns was opaque with mistrust and the yellow scent of greed. Those who owned the land did not live on it, and those like Francis who worked it imagined they were little more than the beasts in the field. It was a long, hard kind of living. And though he heard the whispered news of rebels, the perennial plots and hot dreams of those who promised a new country of their own, Francis Foley resisted joining them. He bowed his head and stayed working, clucking the horse and leading the mower down the long lawns of the estate, trimming the hedges and tending the perfect gardens of Lord Edward James Fitzroy of the county of Essex.

Emer was by then almost contented. She was the mother of four boys. She tried to teach them classes in the Latin and Greek her father had taught her, but Tomas was impatient to be with his father and the twins rolled and knocked each other about and showed little interest. Only Teige sat and listened. His hair was first blond and then fair brown, and he had a way of sitting in close attention that was serene and knowing. His mother told him he would be a master. She ruffled his hair and touched his face with floury fingers.

But trouble was already gathering. Francis had no garden of his own and tended another man’s instead, clipping the laurel bushes that the lord himself never saw, grooming them into globes of green in case the lord should visit this year, and bringing home the clippings to add to the stew of their dinner. He planted potatoes, dug carrots and turnips and parsnips that were marshalled in such straight lines that they mocked the crooked stonewalled boundaries of the fields outside the garden. His hands grew black with earth. When the old angers rose in his chest, he reached down and tore at the weeds with fury. And shortly he was noticed by the head gardener, Harrington, for none rooted at the ground like him or pulled up the stumps of dead trees or turned over the soil with the same fury.

The garden was a kind of paradise. It was made to defy the typical view of that country in the drawing rooms of London. From there, the neighboring island was a place unruly and wild where everything rioted in nature and a straight line was not to be seen. But in that garden was a proof of empire, a living evidence that in the hands of the educated and well-bred even the most inauspicious place, the damp, dreary ground of that estate, could become transformed into an elegant country residence that would not offend a visiting lord. It would both reflect and inspire. It would show the natives the advantages of dominion, of what could be done, mirroring in its majesty the glory of its owner while subduing them to it at the same time.

Within it, Francis worked silently from grey dawn until the gloaming. The years ran into his hands and lined his skin like the knots in trees. The lord never came. The house was prepared several times, fires lit, woodsmoke hanging in the trees, and every plant and bush in the garden balanced on the instant of its best display. Rain was prayed away. Maids ran about in black dresses with white aprons and caps and polished the dishes that had never been used. The world waited and was disappointed once more.

It was the evening after one of those false visits, when all day eyes had watched the avenue for His Lordship’s arrival and the gardeners had looked at their garden as though it were the painting of a garden, a masterpiece in which every detail had been painted just so, that Francis Foley came home angrily to Emer. He sat at the table and placed upon it his hands brown with mud.

“What are we doing?” he said to her.

“We are living our life. Get yourself cleaned,” she told him.

“We have nothing.”

“Stop. Don’t. I know what you are going to say and I don’t want to hear it, Francis,” she said, and went to get the food for the dinner. The boys stood about and watched silently to see calamity coming. But that evening it did not.

Later that night Francis left the cottage in the falling darkness and broke into the big house. He felt he had been scorned by the lord and that this was only the latest of all those assaults life had made on his dreams. He opened a window and stepped inside that mute and perfect world. He walked through its ordered elegance, down the polished oak floors that reflected the stars, and into rooms that offered themselves like nervous debutantes, hoping for approval. He stood in the bay window and saw in the stellar light the long view down the garden. He saw it the way it was meant to be seen, and in those moments, hearing his own breath sighing in the empty house, he was struck with a cruel knowing of how completely he had surrendered his soul. Bulbs of anger exploded inside him. He was in the middle of his life and realized how much of it was lost. He touched the smooth painted sill with his fingertips, then he crossed the dark room and looked out at the western view of the rosebed, the eastern view of the boxwood. He moved from room to room to see out through each of the windows, and as he did, his rude boots making creaking noises on the floors, he felt a tightening in his heart. The whole country is a jail, he thought. They have us prettying it up for their visits, and they never even come. He was in the library looking outward, and when he turned away from the garden view in anger, he saw behind him the great brass-and-wooden contraption that was the telescope.

At first he did not even know how to look through it. He did not know about angles or focus, but he knew the stars he had learned for Emer. The moment he touched the telescope, his life had already begun to change. For he was at once reminded of his courtship, of the innocent nights beneath the sky when he and she had imagined the world spread before them. It was a memory made bitter now He turned his eye to the glass and looked up into the clouds.

It was three nights later before the skies were clear and Francis saw Venus from the library. He saw it and stared. He watched it with the kind of wonder children know and was still watching the stars when the light of the dawn thinned them into nothing.

When he told Emer, he thought there might be conjuring magic and it would return them to the early days of their life together.

“I have seen Andromeda,” he told her in the dark of their low bed. “Will you come and see tomorrow night?”

“You shouldn’t be in there,” she said.

“There are more stars than you can see with your eyes. They are like stars kept from everyone, like ones not for our viewing but only His Lordship.”

“Francis.”

“Don’t tell me we were not meant to see them.”

“You will be caught and we will be thrown out on the road.”

“Will you come with me tomorrow night and see them?” He leaned over and touched her arm in the dark. He brought his hand up to her hair.

She let the silence answer for her. She lay motionless and felt her life was about to come asunder. She thought of her father and his discipline and pride and how he had instilled in her a sense of who she was; they were not people who broke into the houses of landlords. There was nothing moving. Francis and Emer heard each other breathe and heard the breathing of the children in the vast stillness that fell out of the stars. At last, when he could bear no more the emptiness between them, Francis urged her again.

“Come tomorrow night. You’ll see then.”

She said nothing at first, for she was afraid. But he stroked her cheek then, and whether out of fear or frustration or the feeling of loss that was deep within her, she said angrily: “I don’t want to see them, my feet are cold. What do I want seeing stars for?”

She thought it would end there. He drew away his hand. She turned her back to him in the bed.

“You want to see them through the telescope.”

“I can see them from my own window,” she grumbled.

“It’s not—”

She sat up suddenly and turned to him. “You’re a foolish man. Oh God, you are. And what if you were found? What if you were seen there, then what? We’d be thrown back on the road, that’s what, think of that, will you? Or you’d be taken off to gaol, for what? For stars!”

Her words crossed the darkness like spiders and stung his heart.

“Forget that. Forget it,” she said, her voice breaking now with tears and disappointments that went deep into her past. She turned her back to him.

“You should not be going in there,” she said after a time. “It will bring trouble on us.”

He did not answer her. She could not understand. They lay sleepless and separate in the dark.

She wished he would sleep. But instead Francis sat upright.

“What gives him the right to have it? To have it locked in there night after night not even looking through it, the empty eye of it! Not even seeing!” He crashed the crude wooden headboard.

“Francis!”

“It is a marvelous thing, Emer. If you—”

“Stop!”

She would have none of it. It was not because the poetry of her soul was so earthbound, or that she could not imagine the beauty, it was because she feared the quality in Francis Foley that once she loved the most: his ability to be enraptured. She knew he would not stop, and knew that the fragile world they had built would fall apart.

The lord never came. The seasons rose and fell on the garden estate, and the children grew. They were not allowed to walk in the gardens their father made. They went instead up the rough fields and ran their horses and watched Teige gallop and let their giddy calls and cries in Irish fly across the wind. They were a country within a country and did not know it. Their father tried to make the boys feel like champions in the grassy spaces. He coached them in running and jumping and wrestling. He rolled with them on Sunday afternoons in the summer meadows and made his wife laugh when he pushed out his chest to show that he had still the cut of a warrior. He taught them the ancient game of hurling, and they played it with flat, hand-hewn wands of ash, pucking the leather sliothar ball high through the air like some antiquated weaponry for the downing of eagles. Still, he had a kind of fierceness with the children that came from love but could become terrible. When they could not jump the stream that he could, he insisted they try again. He showed his disappointment, and the boys leapt again and again until he walked off and left them leaping without audience and the vague stain of inadequacy spreading in their hearts. Nonetheless they grew strong and free-willed. They did not show their father their fear of him. And when he burst in anger at their carelessness or slowness, they hung their heads in a greater shame for knowing that they had failed some standard of excellence that was theirs.

And so it was. Francis worked the gardens by day and sometimes slipped by night into the big house and watched the stars and looked at the maps that were there, until at last the day arrived when his spirit broke free.

It was an October morning. He brought Tomas with him, leaving Emer with the others and going out across the dampness that hung visible over the lawns and made the songs of the hardy birds plaintive. There were leaves to be gathered. The evidence of the dying year must not be allowed to linger even for a moment on His Lordship’s lawns. So, father and son silently set about with wooden rakes the fallen black and brown leaves that fell even as they gathered them.

They worked through the still morning. Mounds of leaves were gathered and lay upon the grass, then these were lifted and barrowed away. When the scene was clean of even a single leaf, Francis stopped and told Tomas to stand and look with him. The lawn was like a carpet.

“Look at that,” he said. “We might as well get to look at our work, as no one else does.” They watched all that was tranquil and immaculate there and leaned on their rakes while from the oaks to the east walk late leaves unhinged and twirled down.

They did not hear the footsteps of the head gardener, Harrington, approaching. He came up on them while they were standing there, giving him opportunity to vent his resentment of the man who sometimes stole his praise.

“You’re not paid for looking,” he said.

Tomas jumped. His father did not move. When Harrington came from between the trees, their life there was already over. Softly he cursed at them for idleness, though he knew it was not true.

“Look,” Francis said, and pointed at the lawn.

Harrington was not interested. “Get on,” he said. “The kitchen garden.” He did not look at what they had done or give them that credit. He walked past them and said beneath his breath a muted comment in which Francis caught only the word laziness.

That evening he told Emer he had wanted to hit the man.

“To knock him down into a load of shite,” he said. “Christ almighty.” He drummed with his hand on the table.

“You have to forget about it. Just carry on. You can’t take up against the likes of him,” said Emer.

“Why not?”

“You know why not.”

“I’m bound every way I turn,” he said. “I can’t piss in a pot without someone’s say-so.”

“Francis.”

“Christ, I won’t.”

He stood up. Her hands were white with flour at the table. She watched him cross the room and take a bowl and smash it against the wall. Teige was sitting on the floor with a slate. Francis took down another bowl and threw it likewise through the air at the wall. Tomas and the twins came to the doorway. Their mother cried out to her husband to stop, but something had snapped within Francis Foley and he knocked over the chairs and took one and crashed it against the floor. He said this was no life for his sons. He said what was he raising them for, was he raising them to be the slaves of the likes of Harrington? He said though Jesus wept he wouldn’t. And then Emer was shouting at him and he was shouting in turn and knocking things over and picking up pots and pans and earthenware crockery and flinging all helter-skelter about. The room was like one hit by a storm. It was as if all the disappointments of their married life took form there and ran about and crashed and the air itself grew bitter and sharp. Francis railed and cried out. He said he would not stay there. He said they were not beasts in a field, they were not slaves. And Emer shouted that if they left there, they would die on the roads like beggars. And the boys moved from that room into the bedroom they shared and were like shamed and guilty things, sitting with their faces lowered in the dark. And still pots and plates crashed and banged as the marriage broke in the room next to them. They heard the screams and the arguments. They heard their father shout at Emer that she must obey him and that if he said to go, she was to go and that was that. But she was too proud. I have a mind of my own, she told him, I won’t take my family and make beggars of them.

And then she cried out, for Francis struck her.

She must have fallen down. Silence ripped like a tear in a garment that had once been precious.

The boys heard no more. They stayed in their room and after a long time lay and slept.

They did not see their mother walk away. Nor know that Francis went out with a lamp in the obscured moonlight and yoked the cart and rode it up the avenue to the big house and did not look back at her as she walked out the gates. They did not see their sundering apart like twin stars falling away into darkness and confusion. They did not know Francis let himself in through the window of the lord’s house and went to the library and in the lamplight looked at the map of the country there. And then, grappling his arms about the telescope, he lifted and dragged it down the hall and out the door, where he loaded it onto the cart. He went then to the house of Harrington, who was gone to the town, and into it he wheeled barrows of leaves and dung. Then he came back and took what things of theirs were not broken and he woke the boys and told them quickly to come. He lit the thatch even as they were coming out the door. Tomas jumped on his horse. The younger boys were too frightened to speak. Then they all rode from there, wordless and aghast in the dark.

The father stopped the cart as they passed the lawn that was surrounded by boxwood hedge. “Wait!” he said. Then he got down from the cart and took the lamp and walked up to the house, and moments later his large figure was running back and he was calling to the boys to go, go quickly, even as the flames were already rising from His Lordship’s library

8

Now, the four Foley brothers floated and swam down the river and held on to the swan and caught in their teeth the cries that the icy water shot through them. They did not speak. The deep darkness they travelled through was myriad with the secret sounds of night, the beasts and bushes, the noise of leaves in motion, the falling twisting sounds of the dying of the year as the wind rose and made the water slap in their faces with small chastisements. They knew that they had escaped their hunters, and though the water was cold and the current strong, it was almost soothing for Teige and Tomas and the twins to surrender to its ceaseless flowing. They did not know what lay ahead of them. The light was thin and weak and without hope. The animals that woke and moved in the green fields above the river smelled the rain coming in the wind and ate hurriedly while the brothers sailed past. Soon the river took the colours of the sky. The water and air were one tone, that implacable dull iron that screened the blue heavens from sight and made the world seem burdened by an impossible weight which now must fall. It fell before the brothers had floated past the rocks of Carraig na Ron in the middle of the Shannon River and where the low shore of Kerry on their left was now erased. It fell as arrows of rain, the hard cold rain that announced winter and told the animals in their hidden places that the season had turned. It did not pour down, but seemed a stuff of thin metal that fell piercingly and killed the light of morning. Thunder rolled. The swan flapped in alarm and was at once free of the Foleys. It caught the breeze, sailed head-low as if in grief, and within moments was thirty yards downriver. The twins cried out. They kicked and splashed the Shannon as the rain struck them. Lightning arrived in the falling sky. It rent the air like old cloths and let the pieces fly away. Teige made the strokes of swimming but made no progress. He saw the twins’ white faces flash in the waters and then lost them. Tomas was already being pulled away. Though he fought the river and arced his arms into it, trying to swim with his head swinging side to side in a thrashing motion, he seemed to go backward. The lightning lit the air again. The sky fell and rolled in booms. It was impossible to say in which direction the brothers swam. For none of them were swimmers. The jail of the rain held them from seeing where they were, but, despite the urgency of their kicks and cries, each imagined he was going down to where their father was waiting.

The rain struck Teige like a hook.

Then it struck Tomas, and Finbar and Finan.

It hooked Teige in the cloth of his shirt, and he felt himself caught by it and being pulled backward. He went below the water. He cried out gurgles, and bubbles dark flew past his face. Then he reached a hand up and knew that he was dead or dreaming, for he felt the rain like a wire running toward the shore of Clare. And he clutched on to the line and fainted beneath a white zag of lightning and did not see the excited faces of the gathered gypsies who fished the thunder in the antique belief of landing the electric spirit of the world.

9

The gypsies’ part in the story is long and intricate and fantastical. I think of it sometimes as a part invented by grandfathers later to explain the eccentricities and wanderings of other Foleys in years afterward. Oh, that was the gypsy side in him, they say, and sit back and look into the distance.

The gypsies had travelled south in the dying of the year. Once, they had come from abroad in Europe in the hidden compartments of ships and through the secret ports that were used by spies. They had travelled to this country not from need or flight, but simply because it was there, because it was marked on the outer edge of maps and looked the splintered part of some greater whole, and because they could not be still. Motion was natural, they believed. Nothing living stood still, and in their travels they had seen the variety of the world and accumulated its slow wisdom. Some of them had journeyed around the perimeter of the shore and then left once more. Others, drawn by the green mesmerism of the land, voyaged around it in covered caravans. They took to its crooked roads and found the circuitous routes that defied the usual measurement of progress to be an apt landscape for gypsies. These were roads that went nowhere. They were begun without concept of destination or, at best, no hurried sense of arrival. They were the grassy thoroughfares shouldered by hedgerows and stone walls along which the gypsies that remained lost all sense of time. Their lives, which had once been measured by the new places they discovered, now took on the dimension of a long somnambulant dream. They were not sure if the fields they passed were the ones they had passed only days before. And soon they did not care. The oldest among them, whom they called Elihah, told them that they could not even be certain that the rain that was falling had not fallen on them before, for sometimes they travelled into the past. One day’s weather became the next, and their ancient language was discovered short of enough words to describe the thousand different rains. The seasons were not the seasons of their childhood years before, the summer might have been the autumn and the winter was sometimes not over until the leaves appeared and fell again in one windy week. At last, they grew accustomed to such seamless time and rode their ragged caravans on through it, content in the simplicity of such living. Now, many unrecorded years later, their origins had almost vanished. Elihah remembered he had once been a child in a ship on the sea, but whether that was the journey that brought him there, or was a voyage even more distant in time, or simply one that he had dreamed in the seas of his mother’s womb, he could not tell. His grandchildren were already old men, many of them gone back across the water to the great shelf of the continent, wandering untraceable paths and lost to their greater families until by chance or design their roads might meet again at a campfire or fair in this life or another.

The gypsies of Elihah had remained on in that rainy island for so long that they grew to know the ways of the natives. They knew the sympathy for outlaws that endured there in the hearts of men, and the evergreen curiosity of people to know what the rest of the world was like. And so they traded not only in tin and copper, but in stories too. They learned a version of the native language. In it they told stories to those who would come to their caravans and peer in at Mara, the bearded beauty, or at Petruk, a giant who ate the branches of elderberry, and in the conjuring of places far away they could retouch their lost origins. They told of countries they knew but in truth had never seen, though they could describe them in such vivid detail that the listeners walked away with the dazzling vision of places more strange than fairy tale. In all of their tales the heroes suffered outrageously, there were wrongful rulers, and fierce oppression, exiled wanderings in strange lands, floods and famine. These were the stories the natives enjoyed, and the gypsies could link one to the other like threads in a fabric, making the tapestry longer and longer until it threatened a kind of madness. For only they knew that the telling of stories could rob the world of life and make time vanish. And so, though the story might be yet in its vast middle, an hour before sunrise the lamp was always turned down, the listeners sent away, and the curtains of the caravan drawn.

Such was their way. Although they did not follow the calendar, the gypsies knew the customs of their year. And on the morning they fished the Foleys from the Shannon River they were on their way to the last races of October held on the sands of the Atlantic. They had already been to the horse fairs that marked the end of grass and were leading a new pony. On that shoreline in the dawn there were thirty or so men, women, and small children gathered as the brothers were pulled ashore. They spoke their own language in quick, guttural phrases and cut the fishing lines with knives in their belts. The men had black curls and smoky eyes and wore tattered shirts of once bright colour now open to the rain. The fingers of their hands were aged by the endlessness of the earth they had travelled, the muddied rutted roads, trackless bog, and rock-strewn fields. Their women stood behind them with arms crossed. They were strangely beautiful in everything but their teeth, and made of their gaping, blackish smiles a sensual virtue, painting their lips in vivid reds and opening them wide in a way that suggested they could swallow the world. They wore jewels and chains and bangles and brooches that were not seen yet in that part of the country. They had combs of tortoiseshell in their hair and wore skirts over their skirts that filled out the lower half of their figures with bounty and made their movements slow and swaying as if walking in another time. The children were like the ghosts of children. They appeared in brown-and-grey rags, thin and wan and dirty, their grave doomed eyes like pools of ink in which no expression could be read save that of mistrust, for death had moved recently among them. Their long arms hung limply. The rain ran down their faces.

The brothers were unhooked. They lay on the mud banks and looked at the faces peering down at them. The rain fell into their mouths, tasting of blood. In the breaking light the storm rumbled and retreated begrudgingly. Then a large woman with a green shawl stepped forward and told the men to take the boys to shelter.

In three caravans they were laid on cot beds and undressed. The twins were kept together. Though they were living, they imagined they might be dreaming and did not protest when the gypsy women took off their clothes and laid them naked on coarse blankets that smelled of hazel and hawthorn. The Foleys’ senses were sharpened by the nearness of death. They came back to air like fish flapping in the bottom of a boat. They caught the deep and heady perfumes of the women in their nostrils, felt their heads swirl, and fell asleep once more.

While the four brothers slept, the women watched them to see the shape of their dreams and the men gathered and spoke excitedly of the catch the river had yielded. The gypsies read the adventures of every day for the secret code of the world and knew that the fish-men had come to them not by chance, but by design. For here was the answer to the question they had asked the universe.

For, you see, the gypsies had had sixteen horses. From one of the diminished northern tribes who had travelled to the fairs from Donegal for the last time, they had bought a white pony that was wild and fast. This they had watched and roped and lunged and groomed and fed the berries of the year and the stolen hay of those farms they passed. In the evenings by fires of fresh ash that cracked and spat, they had told each other stories of its future. They told the legends of the races not yet run but which had flashed before them all with the startling clarity of episodes of clairvoyance. They envisioned how Mario, their champion horse-boy, would ride the white pony bareback on the horseshoe bay of Kilkee in Corca Baiscinn, how he would cling to the mane and slice the air on his way to victory. The women had rocked in their places on the ground, swaying softly backward and forward to the words of their men as white ponies ran across their minds and won the fortunes that would make easy the winter. By the low burning of the end of the fire they had lain down to love in blankets that smelled of smoke and horses, caressing each other’s thighs as though they were the glistening flanks of the steeds of victory. Then, in the morning, the world spoke to them. Mario fell ill during the night. He ran a fever and could not get up from his bed. His breathing was thin with a disease they did not know. The diphtheria made his throat narrow as though a leather thong were wedged inside it. His eyes watered a yellowy mucus. The gypsy women had gone out and gathered the flowers of the hollyhock and leaves of coltsfoot and made him a tea. They had made a poultice and placed it on Mario’s throat and sat in the dead air of the caravan. They sung softly as was their custom, a singing that was neither song nor hymn but a wordless prayer that belonged to their own great-great-grandmothers. It was the low music of despair and sounded out from that caravan to the rest of them with the dread knowledge that the boy was dying. The women sang on through the night and watched the dim light of the boy’s life flicker around beneath the canvas. When, near daybreak, the light slipped away, the boy was dead. The women stopped singing. The hush travelled out across the camp and the men spilled their drinks into the fire. They sat with stones of silence hanging from their necks. On the long rope that linked them, the horses neighed and beat the muddy ground and twisted their necks about as if to see one who had passed. When the light had come up enough to force the men to see each other’s faces, they moved away. They suffered a double grief, for beyond the ordinary loss the boy had been their talisman. They felt the guilt of those who imagine they have tempted fate by dreaming too hopefully of the future; it was as though they had brought the illness upon him through the outrageous good fortune of their dreams. Four days later, three more of the gypsy boys had died. The low singing sounded each night then, and the gypsies wondered if they had ridden into a valley of bad spirits. When the fourth boy died, Elihah announced they must leave there. They marked the place by scorching the ground so that others might know it was the site of death; then, fearing the disease would not leave them but would chase their vanity, they had released the white pony.

No more of them had died. They had journeyed onward towards the races with no rider and no pony and no intention of entering the sports. They had gone there rather as a form of purgation, as though they bore witness to something larger than themselves, and the final act required of them was to watch the races Mario should have won.

Ahead of them the winter grew teeth. They felt it bite already in the cold rains that fell out of October. By the time they had arrived on the borders of Clare, they were bedraggled and weak.

Then, the previous evening, when they were camped near the Shannon River, the white pony had returned and brought with it three riderless horses.

The old man, Elihah, was asked if they were to fear them. Was it a portent of further deaths? they asked him. The storm was already moving in the sky. The wind whistled. The birds flew back into the trees. The old man said only the universe could answer. He said they should ask it and wait. He said death was not easily outrun.

Then the rain began. The skies fell in sheets. When the lightning crashed in the hour near dawn, the gypsies came from their beds and watched it like the ending of the world. The horses’ eyes rolled. Their wild whinnying was lost amid the fall of thunder. Then, with an unspoken accord that sometimes moved through their tribe and connected them with traditions of ancestors lost, the gypsies went out into the crashing electricity of the dawn and cast their hooks into the river.

Moments later, they had fished the Foleys onto the bank and believed they had received their answer from the universe.

10

The brothers did not discover this story for two days. Then they rose from their cots in the caravans and walked out around the camp in the still morning. Smoke was rising in thin curls and men were standing watching it. Some of them looked at the Foleys from beneath their eyebrows. They studied them for the immutable signs of some hidden destiny and then looked away into the ashes as though not daring to face it. When Tomas saw their horses he crossed to them and they smelled each other and the horses made a quick whinnying of greeting. Teige stroked his pony’s neck and blew in its nostrils and let its long face rub against his own, and his brothers did the same, making gestures old as time. The gypsies threw phrases to each other in their language. One of them bent down and poured from the beaten blackened pot into four earthen bowls. He handed them up to one of the others, and the two of them carried the food to the brothers by the string of horses. None of them began yet the telling of their story. From the fire the other gypsies stood and watched the horses and the brothers eating. They looked for how the men ate their simple food and if it found favour. When they saw that it did, they felt the burden of their future ease a little and unbowed their shoulders. The Foleys ate. Birds sang minor notes in the crooked trees. After the deluge, the sky that emerged was clear with slow-moving white clouds that held no rain. A light breeze carried the air. When the Foleys had eaten they handed back the bowls.

“Go raibh maith agat,” Tomas said in thanks.

One of the gypsies took the bowls and nodded. He handed them away and then pointed to Teige.

“Him? Teige,” Tomas said.

“Teige,” said the gypsy.

“That’s right,” Tomas said, and named each of them. But though he did, he saw how the gypsies did not look from Teige to the twins. They looked at the youngest Foley and let their looking be seen now as though to allow it be translated and the desperation of their need be naked.

“Mario,” the gypsy said toward Teige, and watched to see if that name would mean anything to him.

“Teige,” Tomas said, as though there had been some confusion.

The gypsy who had pointed nodded and waved his arm for Teige to follow him, and they all walked down to where the white pony was tied on the raised ground by a stand of ash trees. When it sensed them coming, the pony turned its head and pulled on the rope and made fast its tethering. Its eyes opened and rolled as though at the approach of ghosts. Its left foreleg trod blindly at the broken ground. The gypsies murmured to it. They spoke more softly than they spoke to women. But they did not come any closer. They waited for the brothers.

“That’s the girl,” Tomas said. The brothers waited for the horses to smell them and smell their own horses off them. “It’s you they want to handle her,” Tomas said with his back to the gypsies and without turning to his youngest brother.

“Why?” Teige said.

“If you can explain gypsies, I’ll tell you.”

“Ride her, Teigey,” said Finan.

“Go on, Teigey.”

“Sos.… Sos.” Teige sounded the ease he wanted the horse to feel and stepped toward it. “Sos, sos, sos.” He soft-clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The pony turned her head and looked away from him and still watched him sidelong on the boundaries of her domain. Her pretend disregard did not mask her fear, and stray electric flickerings of it ran in the muscles of her shoulders and made them jump minutely.

“She’s a lively one,” Finbar said.

Teige raised his hand to let her smell it, but she mistook the gesture and swung around and the brothers had to pull back and Teige whispered shshsh sounds and put his hands out with palms raised as if he could touch and smooth down the irrational and make the animal feel the radiance of his respect for her. The gypsies watched him. The women had come from their chores and were standing not far distant in the small clearing. The pony was turned into the trees. The brothers sensed the expectation of the audience behind them, and when Tomas looked back the gypsy who had led them there pointed once again at Teige and made a small rising gesture with his hand.

“They want you to ride her,” Tomas said.

“She’s wild,” Teige said lowly, not taking his eyes from the eye of the pony and moving another half step closer.

“Of course she’s wild.”

“I won’t be able to.”

“If she’s a horse, you will.”

“Go on, Teigey boy. Get up. Go on.”

The three brothers watched then as Teige angled his head forward and raised and lowered it in an exaggerated slow nodding mime that the pony watched from the corner of her view. He made himself smaller and then raised his right hand slightly and proffered it to the air between them. The pony let a low whinnying down its long face and opened its nostrils as if to breathe in the message of the boy and discover for herself the veracity of his heart. Teige stepped forward and the pony did not move. Her feet were planted. He reached and held out his fingers inches from her face. He held them there proffered a long time. The pony did not turn away. She took hard short breaths and was as one growing slowly accustomed to something in which she did not believe. The company assembled may have been spirits to her eye and the boy the dead Mario. Her shoulders flickered. Quick, skittish movements of uncertain purpose passed through her. Then Teige moved the hand that hung in the air and placed it upon her and stroked the warm, hard length of her face. He ran his fingers under her chin and scrabbled softly while whispering not words but sounds. He moved inside her tethering then until his chest was against her. He pressed himself against the quickened breathing of her flank and ran his hand up and along her back. He stroked the length of her and kept the pressure of his fingers even upon her flesh as he moved across her back and down her haunches and round the hocks of each of her legs. Then he reached behind him with his left hand and untied the rope that held her and let it fall loosely across his fingers, moving her backward from that place with one hand on her side and the rope slack in the other. He took her a few paces and she moved easily for him, her step not full or graceful or true but marked by relief and the notion that she was free. The boy and the pony moved away from there into the trees, and the gypsies and the Foley brothers walked after them and the gypsy women did the same.

In a place where the ash trees thinned and the ground was softer and gave beneath each hoof, Teige swung himself onto the pony’s bare back and felt the hushed inhale of the gypsies watching. The pony did not flinch. She did not run or buck or stamp. She stood with feet planted like the statue of herself and waited and felt the presence of the boy. The rope was around her as a halter, but Teige held it loose and then squeezed her with his thighs as softly as he could and at once rode quickly away.

11

The morning rose grey and still and held the air of new creation. The fields looked unfolded fresh in the dawn. The grass was wet and caught whatever light fell and appeared more green and young than it was. Teige held the rough rope of the halter loosely and tried to allow the pony to race her frustration and confinement away. He sat on the broad working muscles of her back and felt her power and crouched low and put his head forward to hers and spoke to her as the wind rushed past them. They moved away from the river. They galloped out hard and fast away from the small trees and tangled bushes and into the broader light. The green of the land opened out before them and boy and pony raced into it, travelling with apparent fierce intent, so that to stray onlookers in that uncertain morning Teige Foley might have seemed a forsworn message bearer, a figure out of Old Testament times charging headlong upon a mission secret and imperative. Thin cattle in the fields lifted their heads to watch. The racing figure was there and then it was gone and the cattle lowered their heads to the poor grass once more. The road ran westward. They galloped on. They reached a small rise where again the river could be seen on the left, and suddenly, without the slightest slowing, from full speed the pony stopped short.

Teige flew over her head. Briefly he saw the country from the vantage of a ghost riding a ghost horse. He felt the airiness of his mount, and it was momentarily pleasant and easy. He rode the air an instant, then began to turn head over heels, and then the knowledge of oncoming pain arrived somewhere in the front of his head and he saw the hard brown road and crashed down onto it. He landed and cried out and was saved breaking his neck only by his youth. He lay in the road and the pony stood and watched him. She studied him with implacable eyes of no regret, nor did she turn and run away.

When he could speak Teige asked her what she was doing stopping like that. He looked around them to see if there was something that had startled her. But there was only the rolling green of that lumpy land. He said a curse in Irish and the pony lifted her nose as if to smell the words.

The pain shot down through Teige’s left arm. He lay as flat as he could on his back in the road. He cried out loud and the pony turned half away and Teige called out to her to come to him. He had to call only a second time and the pony walked slowly down the road and he was able to pull himself up first by holding her hock and then the loose reins-rope, and then he was sitting on her back once more. His left arm ached and sent crimson blooms of pain travelling toward his neck and spine. He sat there atop the pony sharply aslant and tried to will the hurt into subsiding. They did not move. As though contrite, the pony waited for him perfectly still. She watched the road where nothing visible was coming or going. Then Teige cried out for his mother.

He cried out to her in the vanished world where she was gone whether living or dead and whence he longed for her now to reappear and take him from the pony and hold him in her white arms on that empty roadside so that a kind of goodness might be restored. He cried for her a second time, and she did not come. The landscape ached with his longing. Blackbirds like small priests walked in the silent fields.

When he regained himself he slouched forward and patted the pony with the palm of his right hand. He whispered to her.

“It’s all right,” he said. “You are fine,” he told her, “fine, girl. Yes, you are.”

He felt the pain localize and he grew more lopsided to accommodate it, then he raised the reins and tried to coax the pony forward in a walk. They moved a short distance, then the pony snorted and twitched and he stopped her on the crest of the road and looked out at the country. To the south he could no longer see the river but could see the blue shadows of the mountains that he did not know were in Kerry. The clouds were heavy and slow and faintly purpled. He sat the pony and looked out for what she had seen as the weak sun climbed the sky behind them in a screen of cloud. Then he saw it. It was a man’s legs. They were trousered in brown cloth without shoes and lay angled out of the ditch not forty paces away.

“Come on,” Teige told the pony, “if I get down, I mightn’t be able to get up again. Come on, good girl. It’s all right.” He clicked his tongue very softly at the pony’s ear and she walked forward with an uncertain gait, her step inclining to turn sideways all the time and all the time Teige keeping her straight on. When they were ten yards from the legs, Teige stopped the pony and called to the man. He called to him the greeting that was part blessing and did not know if he was speaking to the living or the dead. The legs did not move. Teige was aware of the currency of outlaws and other rebels in that country and that the ruses and ways of robbers were not beyond feigning death in the road. So he walked the pony forward another three steps but did not dismount. He had no weapon to defend himself, nor with his arm injured had he hope of fighting. He kept the reins tight in his good hand and prepared to heel the pony quickly, then he called out again.

From his fallen place in the rushes of the ditch, the man moved. His toes twitched. They were dark and the blood of sores was blackened on them and food for flies. The ankles appeared rude knobs on the thinness of the legs and did not seem they could support a man. But a man it was. He raised himself with slow and inordinate difficulty on his right elbow, and Teige saw the face of an old man. The centre of his crown was bare and wore a lump that rose purplish and yellow both and was both sorry and comical and seemed to stare at the boy. The man lifted himself to an angle to see them and then attempted no further levitation but raised out a thin and quivering hand in a gesture of begging. From his crooked mouth drooled thin yellow green stuff into the grass. He did not look as though he could speak. The hand floated there in the air and Teige dismounted and stood before it and the flies rose off the man and buzzed the air.

“I only have one good hand,” Teige said. Then he took the man’s fingers that were cold and yet firmly gripping, and steadying his balance, he pulled the figure to his feet.

The man swayed in his return to the world of the upstanding. The eye-lump glared around at the sorry world. Then the man said: “Give me drink.”

“I haven’t got anything,” Teige said. “There is the river, it’s—”

“Agh!” The man spat something of his disgust and clutched the shirt of the boy so his face floated up close to him, and Teige cried out with the sharpness of the pain in his shoulder.

“Food?” the man said.

“No.”

The man sank back down in the grass of the roadside. Teige mounted the pony and rode away from him. He rode on down the way until he came to a small stone cottage where a woman was milking an old black goat in the sour-smelling mud of its pen. There he asked her for water and bread, and though she was poor she was used to the traffic of beggars which were many and various there and she brought him some from the inside of her kitchen. Teige took them with gratitude. When he had said his thanks to her, he got on the pony and rode back to where the old man was still lying in the ditch.

When the man had eaten and drank what of the water did not run and leak sideways from the poor closure of his mouth, Teige asked him where he had come from and where heading. Then he told Teige the country was full of bastards. He said to one of them he had lost his farm. He had been turned out on the road and was now man of no abode but walked vagabond and desolate on the face of the land. He laughed sourly as he told it and the hairless pate of his head tilted back and he opened his mouth full and revealed a blackish hole toothless and caked about with the dried riverbed remains of old dribblings. The man laughed in a high, mocking manner. He told Teige the world was more cruel than he could imagine, and that his act of bringing him food and water was the lone act of kindness in that country turned barbarous and vicious as any of Sodom and Gomorrah. But more, he said, the time was turning. He had heard it told, he said, that in the autumn now beginning was coming a bitterness. The birds had sensed it. The cuckoo had flown early without regard for calendar or custom. She had left the ragged trees of the west after less than a month’s song.

“And why?” the man asked.

Teige said he had not noticed. He said he had come from the east.

The man rolled some nothing in his mouth and spat sideways. “Because something is at hand,” he said. “There is rottenness here. You will see. This is a cursed place. For your kindness I will give you this advice: Turn back. Leave the west before you can start to smell the rottenness of it. Go home. Home,” he said again, and then began to laugh in distraught and hideous manner once more.

And was still laughing on that word home when Teige reined the pony around and rode away back across that country to the camp of the gypsies, where the legends of his riding and songs about him were already shaping in the firesmoke.

12

When Teige returned he discovered that Tomas was gone. He rode down to where the caravans were encamped by the river and was greeted by the men with a waving of their hands and shapeless felt hats. They came to meet him and touched the warm flanks of the pony and patted Teige’s leg where it hung stirrupless. The boy did not know yet the significance of his return and the taming of the pony, but soon the twins told him. They came to him at once as he dismounted from the pony and as the men took her away to where the best of their hay was kept. They told him of Mario and the races. They told him the story the way it had been told to them with that strange fated quality that runs through tales old and unforgiving. They told it with quickened voices and flushed faces, for in their simplicity both Finan and Finbar were delighted. They had been given an air of importance that had not been theirs since birth. They had come from the river, see, they were the answer to the old man’s question. It was a kind of birth all over again. They told it all to Teige and watched his face and hoped to see there the reflection of their own excitement. But Teige did not share it. In a way that he could not explain, he felt afraid as one who has been told the story of his own death. He asked them what Tomas said of it.

The twins stared at him. They wanted him to talk about the pony. They wanted the fabulous story of how the Foleys would champion the world. But Teige asked again.

“What does Tomas say? Where is he?”

“He is gone to Limerick town.”

“Will he go to get our mother?”

The twins stared at him. They wanted to say their mother was gone from them, and that they were men now, but they did not.

“We are to go with the gypsies. He will come back and meet us on the road to the sea,” said Finbar, and turned away. “He has taken your pony with him.”

That night when the lamps were lit and the gypsies sang as they had not since the death of the children, Teige walked out by the banks of the river and sought for the swan. The sky cleared on a breeze from the west and the stars hung above him in vast and numberless panoply. He squatted by the small stones that made a thin crunching where the low waves of the waters collapsed upon them. The singing sounded in the night behind him. He reached and let the river run over his hand and thought of his father gone below the water.

In the morning before the dawn, the gypsies began packing. They woke and moved about the camp gathering their things. Thin, shadowy figures without speech in the moonlessness, they moved about the glowing embers of the campfire with slow care. They collected pots and tin cans and made small, doleful tympani as they threw these things together in cloth sacks strung with cord. Their horses knew this morning music and sensed the departure even before the gypsies went to them. They noised in the gloom. The gypsy men went to the river and brought their fill of it back in timber buckets and small barrels. They worked around the women without word or gesture of recognition, as though each were entirely separate races, or one the unseen shadow of the other. Coming from sleep into this grey, dreamlike traffic, Finan and Finbar held the horses while the old leathern harnesses were thrown over the backs of the animals and the buckles that were not brass but hand-shaped copper briefly jangled. Then, leaving a scattering of small potatoes and onions for the spirits of those who might be following them, the gypsies made a last reconnaissance around that ground. The place of their fire was like a black wound. They watched the sky for the dawn that was just then commencing, for it was their custom since time unknown to leave with the light. Then they sat up on horseback and seatboard and clucked their tongues and led the caravans out of that place and away toward the west.

Teige did not ride the white pony. She followed with others on a rope. He sat in a caravan and looked out on the dark road ahead. They left the riverbank and he felt the regret of losing the swan and felt the foolishness of that, too. The road was the road he had ridden the day before, and he watched it for the sight of the man with the broken head and the woeful laughter. But as the light came up behind them and followed them down that way, there was sign of no one. They rattled on. The great wooden wheels bumped and clattered on the unevenness of the ground. Each of the caravans sang its own song, a weird jumbling of sounds individual and inseparable as the contents toppled from shelves, clanked and dully clanged within. Finan and Finbar rode their horse. By the time the sky was bright enough to show them, Teige could make out the first signs of their becoming gypsies. They wore their shirts open to the October morning, and kerchiefs of cotton that had once been bright red were knotted at their necks. The complexion of their skin, even the fall of their hair, seemed to Teige indefinably altered. The twins seemed to live beyond any notion of regret. They rode with an easy silent gaiety, a lightness of heart, as though they were at last among their own and had discovered a fortunate destiny.

The day rose over them. They passed some small cottages that hung beneath the earthen roads where women heard them coming and stood in the doorways, watchful and cautious and eyeing their hens. All of that country wore the same unmistakable look of hardship. The smoke of the hovels hung about their leaky thatch in the still and damp air and smelled sourly. From some places they passed no man or woman came to the door, though it lay ajar. In the shadows of one such entranceway, Teige thought he saw the shape of a man stretched on the ground and the furtive flickering of rats. But he said nothing. For the picture was all the time moving, as was in the nature of that caravan of gypsies, and one place became the next easily and quickly and faded away like childish painting in the rain.

They travelled down the peninsula of Corca Baiscinn. When they stopped for food, the women fed Teige and his brothers a cold broth and rough bread whose crust was tougher than their teeth. They passed a knife among them. One of the women told Teige they had clothes for him and brought them out from the back of the hooped canvas. But Teige would not take them.

“I don’t want them,” he said.

The women stood about and said nothing.

“They are the clothes of their children,” Finbar said.

“I know.”

“They wouldn’t fit Finan and me. Take them.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Do.”

“No,” Teige said, “I won’t!” And he was suddenly a very young boy with tossed and dirty hair, freckles on his cheeks, furious, fearful of things he did not understand which threatened to rob him of even his name.

“They are yours, you can have,” one of the women said, and then they stepped away from him and got back into their caravans as the gypsies were readying to leave once more. The clothes lay there on the ground. Then the twins hurried to their horse, and the wagons moved, and there was an instant in which Teige might have relented and picked the bundle up, but he did not. He walked past it and climbed up the wheel into the caravan and sat in. Then the signal was made for the horse and they pulled away from there in mute and profound dismay, each sorrowing for separate reasons, while left in the mud of the road behind them, like bodies shed by souls departing, was the small, sad pile of children’s clothes.

Throughout that afternoon Teige thought Tomas might return. As they sojourned forward toward the sea, he listened into the noise of the wagons for the sound of two horses coming behind them. The strange, otherworldly air of the gypsies nearly made him lose sense of the world. Once, he noticed the caravans moving more and more along the verge of the road and threatening to topple. He called out and the line of wagons came right and he had the sudden insight that the gypsies were in fact asleep after their dinner and progressing in somnolent oblivion toward wherever the world tilted. Had they a destination at all? he wondered. They seemed to let the roads take them, and the farther west they went, the more the roads were broken and uneven, the hedgerows of fuchsia and woodbine and black-and-white thornbushes coming closer on either side and scratching against the coarse canvas of the wagons. Rocks sometimes jagged up in the middle of the way, and the horses steered around them. Sometimes the road softened and crossed boggy ground and the place was bare and treeless and the stones of the walls seemed placed by some that had long fled eastward. It was so dreamlike, and as he shook there on the seatboard Teige wondered how it was that he and his brothers were now part of it. He could not understand it except to recall the moment when he had felt that he was drowning, and that their rescue had been foreordained in some way, that the gypsies and the races in the west were already there awaiting them.

Still, he longed for his brother. Tomas would know what to do, he thought. He would not let them be lost.

They moved on. Sometimes a man watched them from his place in a field. He stood and was a feature in the landscape no different from a rock or bush, a still twist of brown shade in the flow of greens. The man would watch the caravans coming with grave circumspection. They were like some weirdly exotic elephantine creatures, their hooped shapes lumbering high above the hedgerows and carrying an indefinable threat to the world he knew. And he would curse them and wish for them to pass and wait and watch from under his cap until they did.

And pass on they did all that day. The weak and pale sun caught up to the gypsies and crossed over their heads and dropped into the sea the Foleys had not reached. When the light began to die, the caravans stopped and turned into a field. Teige thought that he could sense the nearness of the edge of the island. He thought that he could catch the sea in the air and opened his mouth wide and strained his eyes. He blinked at where the night was hemming the land with grey, where the fields stopped and were stitched into the sky and where green and blue became deeper shades of each other and were then the cloths of darkness. He stared but could not see the sea.

That evening the gypsies lit their fires and the twins sat with them and listened to the stories they told. They heard the tales of long ago and distant places, vanquished kings, of blind beggars become rich on the foolishness of men. They heard of strange and terrible plagues, of curses and blessings, the places now forgotten in the far world where once bejewelled princesses made the ground sweet as they passed upon it. Tales climbed on the smoke of the fire. There was devilry and laughter and many stories of how fate righted the wrongs of the poor and made fortunate the suffering in the end of time. The twins listened with rapt attention. The fire burnished them, and they sat cross-legged in that colourful company, like the newest princes of that tribe, narrowing their eyes with concentration and falling inside the spell of those old stories. They felt elated and proud both with a sense of their own belonging.

Teige did not join them. He stood at first on the edge of the campfires but suffered still a tight unease. He wanted Tomas to return, he wanted his mother, and with the fall of night felt as though something cold and viscous had filled inside him. For the first time in his life he saw himself, singular, in the darkness. His brothers were laughing with the others in the firelight, there was no sign of Tomas, and for a time Teige had a vision of a thin, transparent membrane separating him from the rest. In a matter of days, it seemed, he had all but lost his family. Where were the Foleys now? Without their father the boys seemed strangely disconnected, as though the notion of family itself were prefabricated upon the thinnest premise and the slightest breeze of chance blew it away. It dawned on Teige that Tomas was gone and might never return, and in that same moment he glimpsed a scene of his elder brother fallen to the ground and being savagely beaten by figures that wore the uniforms of Law. The instant his imagination saw it, he let a gasp out of him. It sounded like a cry strangled but was not heard in the raucous and crackling of the camp. Teige turned his head. He waited to spew sideways the sour grey white stuff of horror, but it would not rise off his stomach and he blinked and sucked the air and walked a little away. Again it was there before him like a picture: Tomas in the town of Limerick, tied and beaten onto death. What was he to do? He walked down along the dark to where the horses were tethered. He raised his hand palm first as though to press softly against something firm and feel the solidity of the universe support him and banish the phantasm. Then he curved his hand over and let the horses smell his knuckles. Their whinnying passed like a greeting down the rope. Teige went to the white pony and she raised her long head and lowered it and found the scent of him, and he stroked the sides of her and tried not to think.

“That’s the girl,” he said. He raised his arm up and over her shoulder, and he hung there against the hard skin of her, pressing his face against her flank while the spectre of his eldest brother in pain dwelled in his mind. What was he to do? He was twelve years old.

At last he undid the cord that held the pony there. He drew her back and away from the other horses and said words to quieten them, and then he seemed to slide upward onto her back like a blackness or a shadow. He rode her away from the caravans and the campfire and out across the heavy grass of the rough fields. He rode into the light-less night and trusted the surefootedness of the pony. He squeezed her into a lithe speed and she carried them out to the road that led eastward toward Limerick and westward toward the sea. There he reined her back and lowered his head until it was close to hers. He turned her about and she was like a dancing indecision, footing the air in all directions as if awaiting some prompt to fall from above into the cocked shells of her ears. None came. Teige looked down the road where Tomas was not coming, where his rescue must begin, and where the dark made a wall into the sky.

Then he wheeled the pony about and galloped her down the blind road toward the sea.

Teige rode with the sickness of loneliness like bitter soup turning in his stomach. He rode with reckless abandon into the dark and charged down the way he did not know and could not see. He was a boy escaping from the world of men and did not heed the dangers of the road as it passed down along cliffs and sharp bends. He felt the sea before he could see it. His face was wet with it. The lids of his eyes tingled with the salt and his hair matted. Then, over the noise of his and the horse’s breathing, came the sighing collapse and crash of the waves. He rode down through dunes that gave beneath him and he had to lean backward for balance and his moon shadow was like that of some stiff and proper gentleman descending onto the floor of sand. The Atlantic was full and heavy. It seemed swollen beyond itself and appeared to the boy as though the shore could not contain it. The flatness of the beach was strangely perplexing to him, as though just against it the sea itself could not be so deep nor the country fall away like that into the surging waters. Teige trotted the pony on the edge of Ireland where the white surf was combed out of the darkness like the frills of an elaborate gown. He trotted her the length of the soft sand horseshoe in the splashing waves. Then he drew her in from the shoreline and slid down and stood there on that empty beach. He was at the place his father dreamed, he thought. He was there on the western shore where they were to begin to realize Francis Foley’s vision. But it was in ruins now. His family was lost, he thought. Now there was only Teige and the great emptiness of the watery horizon where flashes of white appeared and disappeared in the far darkness of the sea. Teige stood there. He thought of the river where his father had drowned and which was now in that sea. He thought of the old man’s boast that their country was bigger than the mapmakers had drawn it, and he suddenly saw it so. He saw the vastness of the sea was itself part of that wild country as was its great and million-starred sky, and he dropped to his knees there in the sand and felt the despair of loss. And he put his hands together to pray and turned to the constellations that were cold and impassive and falling through the darkness ages away, and, knowing no God who knew him, he looked to Pegasus in the south and to it prayed the wordless prayers that rose off the bottom of his soul.

13

Francis Foley woke from the dream of being a swan. He opened his eyes and immediately reached his two hands to pat his chest and feel there for his feathers. Even when he could find none, he was not reassured, for the reality of his dream was more potent than the darkness to which he awoke. It was some time before his mind refound itself and he had left his swanhood behind, wondering if it was possible to dream within dreams. He touched the hard pallet of his bed but did not know where he was. He was in the stone building that was like a boat upside down and in which he seemed to sail in the world of the drowned. The doorway was dark without a door. When his eyes were opened long enough, he could distinguish it and imagine the space that lay beyond. He feared for devils. He feared for the twisted shapes of white wasted bodies cast around outside in a sorry vision of the damned, and was no longer sure whether he had been saved or lingered in some netherworld awaiting judgement. He was not sure his body existed. He had the sense of time not existing as he lay there in the dark. Sometimes he imagined he was inside the stomach of something enormous. He saw in bizarre phantasm the thing that had swallowed him whose scales were stonelike and shone blackly, and he wondered how he might get it to vomit him back into the river. Or else he was in a womb and would be newly born into a distant world with other stars, where the earth itself would be the smallest point of least significance and where all his travails and tarnished hopes would be forgotten and part only of the history of dust. Francis Foley imagined all possibilities and burned with regret at each of them. Why had this happened to him? He stared across the darkness at the doorway that led into the outer darkness. He watched it for sign of anything, but there was only the nothingness of that empty space beyond.

So he sat up.

He held his hand out in front of him and brought it closer until he could see it just before his face. Then he put his hand out and moved it from side to side as though expecting to brush against some resistance. There was none. He moved his legs and stood on the ground, feeling the firmness of it and testing it with small jockeying actions of his knees. The ground did not give beneath him and, coming from the aeons of his airy dreaming, was strangely reassuring. He could stand and walk. But he could not see. Then, as though declaring himself undead, making the shape that had first announced his birth on paper, he moved from there like an ambulant letter f with both arms outward high and low, going slowly forward against the wall of darkness. He made his way toward the door. He did not know if when he stepped through it the world would end, if he would fall headlong, if the place where he had been waiting were the last sanctuary before the wailing and fires of purgatory. Still he went on. He could not stay there while he could still breathe. The image of his sons passed before him, and he imagined them waiting for him.

Then he walked through the doorway of the dark and he cried out.

For there was God.

God’s bald crown flashed like a lesser moon. Then God multiplied Himself and was a trinity of figures on a grassy hillock at the back of which lay a stone chapel. Francis Foley walked with his hands out before him in the f, though now he could see. He looked as though he were feeling the world for a secret opening, or expecting to reach some invisible wall that would be impenetrable and leave him trapped the other side of living. Still he stepped forward barefoot across the wet grass. The stars shone more brightly with each step. His eyes grew accustomed to the light of the night and revealed more clearly the strange trinity of identical bald figures in brown robes that were gathered on the small hill with their backs to him. Francis thought to shout out to them. But he did not want to discover that he might be dead and that his cry might be the soundless empty horror of screams in dreams. So he came forward in that odd manner and was with each step brought a little farther back into life until the truth dawned on him at last: He was not dead, and God was not God but a sinner like us all and He was in fact three monks on an island in the middle of the river Shannon.

He realized this when he saw the telescope. The monks were clustered about it and taking turns to watch the skies for the evidence of heaven.

“Leave that!” He was surprised by the power of his voice. And used it again when he saw how startled were the monks, turning quickly to face him in the night.

“Leave that alone, it’s mine,” he shouted. He waved his arms wide as though measuring his anger, and the monks stepped back. The telescope had been set on a wooden platform. It showed no sign of having drowned, and its long mahogany frame looked as if it had been polished new. Its brass mouldings and fittings gleamed and gave back the scintilla of stars. Francis’s mouth opened when he saw it. It was pointed at the southern sky. As he came forward, the monks stepped away like figures caught and contrite. They said nothing. The old man went over to the instrument and ran his fingers along it as though it were the final proof that he had returned to the world. He touched the telescope and he laughed.

“Oh God,” he said in Irish. Then he laughed until there was no sound but hard, aspirated sighs that rose off his stomach and made him shut his eyes with effort.

The trinity stood and watched.

“Well,” said Francis at last, “you saved me and I thank you. It isn’t easy to kill a Foley. Now this is mine and I don’t mind you having a look, but I’ll be taking it with me when I leave in the morning. Do you understand? And I’ll need some kind of boat or someone to bring me across to the shore.”

The monks said nothing. He was not sure they had understood, so he gestured the same message to them and said it in pieces of English. Still they did not respond. Then, in an action slight and simple and yet filled with untold ages of humility, one of the monks raised his finger in the obscurity and ran it smoothly across his own lips like a sealant. Francis stared at them.

“Ye’re mute?” he said.

The monk blinked his eyes yes.

“But you understand?”

There was the smallest nod, as if even that communication were in some way a compromise of their vows and betrayed them into the domain of sin. The night air blew softly and carried the small noises that were the slaps of the river and the running of the river rats in the blind dark.

“Ye have a boat?” Francis asked them at last.

They did not. They had sunk their boat years earlier and lived on that island on whatever the earth provided. When nothing was provided, they took it as a direct epistle from above and remedied their souls with all-night confetiors, credos, and a diet of insects.

The river ran through the dark. Snout-up, a badger arrived upon the four of them and stood striped and astonished before scuttling away. The monks were like stone monks. They offered no gesture or expression when Francis told them they must make him a boat. He listened to the water passing. The river was still between him and the home he had built in his mind. He could cross it by himself right then, but he would have had to leave the telescope, and already it had become something fixed into the corner of his brain like an obsession. He put his hand upon it and bent and lowered his head and met the eyepiece. Then he squeezed shut his left eye and looked at the fixed constellations of the autumn night where the monks had been searching for the face of God.

The monks stepped away from him and were gone then to mute prayers and adorations. Francis watched the night and then slept. When he awoke, the light of the day startled his eyes and he remembered that he was not dead and lay on the wet grass of the hillock and heard come back to him all the minute sounds of the earth alive. He heard the insects and the birds and the wind that carried them. His eyes watered and he thought of his life to that moment and was burned with a sharp regret. He regretted all that had happened, how he had lost his wife and sons to the rashness of his will. He thought of Emer, vagrant and alone. He thought of the home he so desired and how the dream of it lay in ruins now. He cursed himself then and wished he could undo the knots in his heart. He wished he was not who he was, and as he lay he suffered a kind of soul scouring in which there was revealed to him sins of vanity and pride. He lay long and still and was in his sackcloth garb and turned-white hair then like a saint descended and discovered in the grass. When he got up he saw the one he took for the eldest of the monks waiting at the small stone church. The holy man beckoned to him and Francis went down the hill and felt the pleasant coolness of the dew on his toes.

“Well?” he said to the monk. “What have you to say?”

The monk said nothing.

“I thank you for saving me,” Francis said, then added, “Even if it was really the telescope you were saving. It doesn’t matter to me.” He paused. “I was on my way with my sons to try to find a place to live, a home.”

The monk’s face was impassive. He had once been a boy monk. Once his hair had been shaven off an unwrinkled crown that matched the curve of his young cheeks. Once his brown eyes had looked fresh and nutlike and saw the beauty of his own devotion as a natural offering to his Creator. Now, the face was old and the apple cheeks sinking, deflated with the hard weathers of that life and the discovery that all of us are human. The boy monk was vanished, the nuts of his eyes like still shells. He looked at the big man he had taken from the river. He looked at him and shuddered at the vanity of their thinking he had been sent to them, that he had been a sign, or that the magnificent telescope was intended as a reward and means of communicating with God. The old monk stood there and visited the sin and stood within its black centre and said nothing. He looked inward at himself without flinching, and for a moment Francis Foley did not know if he was gone blind. His eyes did not move from the pale air. Some who might have watched him very closely might have seen him face his own desperation, the long years of his living there on the island with fading hope, his diminished faith, and the longing grown ulcerous and sore in his spirit that the divine be revealed.

Blackbirds like smudges of charcoal appeared on the morning above them. Then the monk’s eyes returned and he gestured Francis Foley into the small building beside the chapel. Without opening his mouth, and with slow, wearisome movement, he found a scrolled map. In the low light he opened it and showed Francis the island where they stood, and the river about it, and, in disconnected flecks of brown ink like the tracks of a creature long gone, an underwater pathway to the shore.

Then the holy man looked up at the man who had been drowned and considered a moment, and then he ran his finger down the river Shannon and followed its curve and stayed within the drawn banks like a salmon or trout until the finger arrived at another island. It lay in the mouth of the river, where it gaped like awe with the inrush of the sea. The finger tapped the island twice, and the monk turned his face to Francis and let him read the message that he should go there. It was wordless yet clear. And Francis knew from the look in the holy man’s veined and yellowed eyes that it was part of some contrition, that within the grave and absolute laws in which the monk had passed his life and by a pure cleansing mathematics, this was the given solution for his soul. He tapped the other island again and nodded toward the man he had once wished dead so that the monks might have kept the telescope.

Francis leaned over the table. “Go there?” he said. He looked at the map and saw the round tower drawn on it and the cross-shaped mark that was once another dwelling place of monks. He followed the mapped river with screwed-up eyes in the dimness there, and he leaned a long time without sign of any acknowledgment. And there arrived a moment of clarity, a purity in the air between them.

Then Francis said, “I will. I will go there.” The monk made a slight nodding. “I will leave you the telescope for a time. First I have to find my wife. And my sons.” Francis stood and looked as if at the things he had said and felt arise in his chest a strange lightness as of after purgation. “Yes,” he said. “Then we will go there—” He touched the island and left his finger upon it. “I will come back for the telescope, mind,” he told the old monk. “I will bring it there and set it up, and if you want, you can come and watch the stars with me.”

The monk’s face did not appear to change and in the gloom was sunken apples below the aged kernels of his eyes.

When they came outside, the other monks were waiting. And they walked together down to the shore, and mutely, like figures engaged in matters of secrecy absolute, they showed him the place where once a path of stones had been laid beneath the river. Then Francis Foley said his thanks and, promising to return, walked out across the water and back into the County Clare.

14

In the uncertain dawn the gypsies moved at first light and arrived at the western coast with their caravans and carts and horses, the jangling of pots and dangling things of lesser metals announcing them to the waking of the small town of Kilkee. They gathered in the open field near the cliffs at the near end of the bay. The horses that pulled the caravans knew where they were going, there was no need for steerage, and the arc of their passage through the soft ground of the field was a clean, curving radiant of mud marks that were only barely recovered from the gypsies’ visit the year before. The caravans travelled in across the grass, and then the lead horse at no command from its drover stopped, stopping the one behind it and so on, as though some potency had been switched off and further travel impossible. The gypsies got down from their horses and walked in scattered patterns while their women began at once the business of making camp. Finan and Finbar saw the edge of the country for the first time and yelled in manic celebration. In the grey light they ran in wild zigzags across the tufted grass and let the big breeze blow in their hair and open up their chests like the valves of some long disused machinery of pneumatics.

Teige was in the caravan. He watched them from the seatboard and climbed down slowly and went to the white pony. Tomas had not rejoined them, and with the passing of every hour it seemed to his youngest brother that he would not now do so. He was vanished and his erasure was made all the more striking by the vastness of that tumbling ocean. For nothing in the world had seemed so big to Teige Foley, and to watch the sea for only a small time was to become aware of the enormity of creation and the lies of maps that made it seem within the compass of man’s understanding. When Teige had returned to the gypsies the previous night, he had gone to the caravan of Finan and Finbar and asked them if they should not ride back towards Limerick. But the twins had dismissed him. They had been drinking the raw smoky whiskey favoured by the gypsies which inspired in them lewd visions of round women, and they had looked up from their cots briefly with the shadowed downward eyes of boys discovered in misdemeanour. Then they had turned back to the canvas wall and the dreams therein and left their other brother in a lesser insubstantiality.

As the morning rose, the wind carried swift clouds of all shapes across the sky. They crossed quickly over the grass below in elaborate shadowplay like out-of-favour toys thrown from the heavens. Brilliant blue appeared and disappeared in the spaces between them. The light kept changing. A shower of rain fell down through piercing sunlight and then was vanished. From the edge of the field where the gypsies made their camp was a long view of the full strand and the line of low white cottages that faced the water. On that morning, the pristine surf of the Atlantic gleamed as it broke in frayed white chains that ran all the way to the pollock holes on the far shore.

Because it was their custom, and not because the population did not already know it, some of the men walked down into the town to announce their arrival and advertise the various wonders and entertainments they could offer over the coming week. When they met a man or woman in the blustery street, they stopped them with a cry and told that there was one among them who could foretell all health, wealth, and happiness. The fortune-teller would be in her caravan that evening and would tell all, they said. And all this with a swaggering waving of arms and floating eyebrows and squinted eyes. When they had finished in the little streets, the gypsies gathered by the shoreline and watched some girls in the sea. These with various forms of basketry on their backs had waded out through the tide and with dresses tucked up above their waists were busy harvesting seaweed. They were a sight as old as man’s existence in that place, and to the twins and the gypsies there was something true and uplifting in it. The waves did not come evenly. At times they rose many feet above the girls’ heads and came at them in a back-combed wall of water crashing and foaming. Sometimes the girls lost their footing and were swept shoreward, their baskets bobbing in the distance and the seaweed spilling loose and slithering like so many snakes. Still the undrowned girl would get up, regain herself, and make a slow return out through the freezing waves. Renewed greetings were cried out to her along the ribboned line of workers. There was the appearance of gaiety, like that among those who travailing in underground darkness sing to assuage the terror. But there was no mistaking that the sea was a monster. For though the bay was sheltered, the water at the turning of the year came in capricious twists and currents. The girls struggled to keep their line but still worked on, hooking and gathering the seaweed that was valued as fertilizer for the potato gardens and could be sold or bartered in the morning market. There were not only girls in the sea that morning, but some older women too. Their hair was bound in bright headscarves, their hands moving in blind foam without any of the quickened excitement of the younger girls. They watched the waves coming at the girls with both the protective and the deeply furrowed suspicion of new mothers-in-law. They waved their arms at the gulls that hung above them like a necklace of the sky. They called warnings and worked steadily, aware that the sky was changing all the time above them.

The gypsies sat by the sea wall and studied the scene. As the morning came on, the tide withdrew and the line of the workers moved farther out with it into the waves. Seaweed was mounded on the shore. There two men with carts pulled by donkeys gathered it up and moved away, leaving wheel ruts across the smoothly hardened sand. They came and went while the women worked on. The sun passed behind a screen of cloud and the sea changed colour and was blue no more. It became the colour of gunmetal. The gypsies felt the cold and turned up their collars and pulled their kerchiefs tighter and moved as one man back towards their camp. Finbar might have stayed. He wanted to see what would happen, wanted to go on feeling the marvel of these sea-girls. He could imagine the cold in the white submerged limbs, the girl-skin that was beneath the surface for so long that it must not feel like skin of those who lived only in the air. The toes that were vanished under sand traversed by crabs, clams, sea urchins, and all assorted marine life. They were mer-creatures, these, he thought, and wanted to wait and see them reemerge on the land and see how they walked back up the town with steps like slow-motioned swimmers arrived in an element not their own. But when the gypsies and his twin moved, he did too, as if connected, though he walked up the roadway with his eyes turned sideways to the girls below.

15

That evening high fires were lit and wind dragged the flames in twisting tongues of wild unpredictability while the lanterns on the caravans marked a semicircle out of the darkness above Kilkee. From the little streets of the town, the place above on the hillside where the gypsies had camped was like a lightship landed. To there the people of the town made their way, scuttling up through the darkness to hear their fortunes and what their futures held. They lined up outside the caravans and made in their waiting a trail of mud. Some went to the bonfires where the gypsies drank and paid money and tilted back their heads to sample the fiery liquids that shone in bottles of green and blue glass. Matches of fistfighting and wrestling brewed up there. Tussles sudden and short-lived broke out, and there were cries and shouts and cheers, and then the gypsies gathered around again and one sang a song or made a remark that drew laughter. The scene grew loud with the night. More and more men and youths arrived from the town below. Some who were quiet and civil in the streets were here discovered wild and manic and leapt about and jostled against others and cursed loudly. The more these fellows drank of the gypsies’ whiskey, the darker their eyes grew. Smoke thick and heavy curled into the night. A man with reddened face and eyeballs wide took a run and jumped across the fire and was then flaming as his jacket caught. Momentarily he was unaware of this and stood looking back at the others with boastful gaze even as they waved and shouted at him. The flames seared him then and he fell to the ground, the vision of one combusted from within by sins limitless. He rolled in the mucky grass and screamed, and the others howled and laughed. But soon another attempted the same leap. He ran with bottle in hand and launched himself and flew flameward. His legs were out before him. He made the image of sitting in the air and yelled as the fire scorched him and he crashed smouldering on the far side of it. He stood and drank in celebration and spat back into the fire a stream that caught alight and made him seem one in a company of weird phantasmagoria. And so it went on, in strange and terrifying carnival. Fights erupted for reasons slight and soon forgotten, and the men knocked each other down and rolled about. The sea wind blew and smoke travelled sideways and enshrouded them. Down at the caravans Johnny McMahon came from visiting Diado the fortune-teller, his face made scarlet and his legs bandy. The crowd surged toward him and shouted to know what he had been told. But Johnny, who was for many years the comical innocent of the town, stared bewildered at them and when he tried to speak could say nothing at all. Men grabbed at his jacket sleeve. There was a flowing, pushing mob in the mud and faces caught and profiled in the lantern light. The gabble of voices swelled around the poor man, then some lewd joke was cracked and laughter flew and Johnny staggered away.

By the fire Finan sat. His twin was gone to see the mer-girls that had come up from the town and were queuing now to learn of their lovers. Finan drank the sharp and bitter whiskey that burned the back of his throat. His eyes were glass. In the smoke and wavering of the heat he saw images of faces distorted. He thought he saw demons and blinked and screwed up his eyes and drank some more. A small fellow dared by others then announced he would attempt to dive face-first through the fire. He was wiry and thin and held up his arms that were like sticks. He was with another, a broad figure with scars on his face. Some tried weakly to dissuade him, but many others urged him on. His companion said he would take any bet that his friend could not do it. There ensued then a rapid and heated calling of wagers, and in bizarre fashion gypsies and men argued as to what would constitute a failed attempt. If the man was burned in the face, one said. If he was scarred, but not if he was singed. If his clothes were alight, it was all right. They considered this and other elements of the dive there amidst the crackling and spitting of the burning logs while the sea roared not far distant. The night sky turned its stars. Men swayed as if at sea and held aloft glimmering glass bottles. They cried out and drank toasts of little sense to the thin fellow who would face the fire.

In this wagering Finan took the side of the diver. He thought the attempt brave and foolish both and yet was touched with admiration for it. Then, when the gypsies and others there were ready, the thin man seemed to swallow a clarifying reality, for he stood back and said he had changed his mind. Bedlam broke loose. One pushed another, and accusations and sharp words flew out on the air. Then the companion of the thin fellow turned on his friend and cursed him for being a coward, and these two wrestled and fought by the fire. The other men and the gypsies watched them, for in their fighting seemed released some long and bitter enmity which had survived like an aged thorn beneath the skin. The thin man was small and young, and his manner of fighting was full of quick kicks and smacks, darts and shimmies. But he was worse for drink, and his blows flew wildly in the smoky air. He spun his arms about and was like loosened machinery coming asunder. He spat and said he didn’t have to jump if he didn’t want to. And it was clear to all that these were fellows who conspired to win money at gatherings such as this, and that in his way the thin man had reneged and his companion was shamed. Still on their feet, they grappled and wrestled. The young man swung at the older and missed. Then the man with the scars on his face reached back and shot the full of his fist onto the other’s nose. There was a crunch and stuff flew and the fellow fell backward. His hands came up to his face and caught the blood running there. The other stepped forward again and delivered into his stomach another blow. The fellow fell to his knees. Then the bigger man leaned down and with two hands picked up his victim and lifted him full into the air and said the wager was still on, for he would pitch the chicken face-first across the fire. He walked with the fellow in his arms and the blood dripping. He came to the edge of the fire and was so deciding the manner best suited to fling his companion when Finan Foley leapt at him and knocked him to the ground.

It was an action rapid and unconsidered. The man crashed into the side of the fire and sent aloft a scattering of sparks while his friend squirmed free. Finan hit the big man with his right fist, and the fellow’s neck snapped back. Then he hit him again. He felt the pain rush down the length of his own arm, and as he did he was shouting out words that none there understood, and seemed to be fighting a mortal enemy against whom he had many deep and long unspoken grievances. He struck another blow. He hit the man and did not know he was dead, and the fire made of his face a twisted mask of red and brassy orange. Then the thin fellow was wailing out something and knocking him over and pulling at his dead companion and the gypsies were coming forward to ensure that Finan was not harmed. He was dragged back through the crowd and brought quickly away and taken to a caravan where he went inside and lay down and the world thumped in his head and he realized with horror the monstrousness of what he had done.

16

In the days following, more tribes of gypsies arrived in the town of Kilkee. They brought their horses and ponies and made camps in random fashion on the grass that oversaw the sea. Soon there were scattered clusters of caravans dotted about the fields that ringed the town. The day of the races was not announced, and Teige could not discover when it would be. He did not see Finan or know where he was hiding, and when he saw Finbar it was always in the company of a group of gypsies and his manner did not invite conversation. Teige had already decided that the moment the races were over he would ride back into Limerick alone if necessary to find his brother, then go east to search for his mother. He wanted the race to take place at once, but when he asked the gypsies about it he always received the same reply, that it would happen when it was ready. There was no date set and time itself seemed an antiquated and overly formal invention so that days and nights rose and fell and the gypsies might sometime sleep until noon or after and sometimes be risen and walking about the town in the predawn like spectres come to visit. They showed no anxiety but rather now that they had camped by the ocean they took the arrival and gathering of tribes like a medicine of the spirit. Their hearts were lifted to see so many like themselves, and the buoyancy of their mood grew daily. It was the year’s end in the gypsy calendar, and the festive nights of ribaldry, of renewed friendships and fierce rivalries, revealed it as such. There were knifings and fistfights on the night strand. The constabulary adopted a policy of indifference and left the gypsies to their own affairs. Of the three officers in the town, two of them had previously booked annual leave.

So, the town became for a time a gypsy island. Men and women continued to visit the fortune-tellers and story makers by night. They paid for the gypsy whiskey and grew wild-eyed, watching men who could eat fire or swallow gold coins and find them again in the shells of their ears. They heard the stories of the animal called elephant and imagined him there on their own beach loaded with a mountain of seaweed, or miraculously unsinking tramping slowly across their bogs with the fuel for the winter. The children of the town suffered enlarged imaginations. They watched the exotic visitors with awe and dreamed of running away with them to far places that were not rainy and cold and poor and where kings and queens were glorious and beautiful and not the ones of which they had heard. They spread stories among themselves of the gypsies’ scars and magic, and these stories in turn grew other stories and became wilder and more ferocious with each telling, and the gypsies became pirates, vagabond thieves, or daring circus figures tumbled down from a high wire in the sky.

While the days passed, Teige rode the white pony on the strand of Doonbeg out of sight of the other gypsies. The pony ran well there, and Teige spoke to her and stood her on the sands and let them both look a long time at the breaking of the waves. The sea was slow mesmerism. The farther out he looked, the farther it seemed to go until it did not seem to be moving at all but was a steady line of grey without wave or wimple. He rode there in the nights too and liked the empty tumbling of the world beneath the stars.

“It’s like a rim of iron,” he told the silent pony, “where the world ends.”

In the darkness he watched it. The wind blew the sand in ribbons.

After a long time Teige spoke. “Once,” he said in a whisper, “Jason met a clever shipwright called Argus.”

The pony stood on the shore. It was an empty arc of pale light.

“And this shipwright had from Mount Pelion got tall pines, and of these built a fifty-oared ship so strong that it could stand all winds and waves, and so light that it could be carried on the shoulders of its crew.”

He stopped and thought of that magical craft and tried to think of nothing else.

“This ship was named the Argo. In it were assembled the best and the bravest, the sons of gods and men, who were known as the Argonauts.” He watched the sea and the night sky. The waves sighed.

“And all were bound on a far course,” he told the pony, “to the distant eastern shores, where they must tear free the Golden Fleece.”

Clouds moved and the stars came and went again. “On a far course,” he said again, then said no more, the story stopped, its words gone in the wind.

17

And in that night the horses sensed the turning of the year and whinnied along their ranks and dragged hooves against the packed mud like creatures pawing for freedom. It was the beginning of Samhain, the time of dying and resurrection in the antique spirit world of that place, and the ghosts of horses dead passed in along the seashore and made those living flick their ears and roll their eyes in the dark. Teige rose from his bed and walked out among them and ran his hand on the fevered flesh of the frightened animals. The night was cool and the sky charged with stars. The traffic of spirits was such that the horses would not quieten, though Teige spoke to them in a soft voice and tried to make the very nighttime calm with his presence. He knew it was the time of ghosts. He knew the tradition and belief of their coming from all graves on those nights and revelling in wild abandon before taking some back with them to the kingdom of the dead. He thought of his father’s spirit and wondered where it was, and in the still air of that night when he could not hush the horses he stood back and let them stamp and noise and grow accustomed to the strangeness. From caravans came the shadowy figures of gypsies drawn from their beds by the same presences that had disturbed the horses. Tousled, soft-shouldered figures, they ducked about in the dark as though expecting to encounter some flying debris, the blown souls of the vanished. Soon there was a small gathering. One of them began to hum and another took it up and then it was general, a kind of windy low notes in the pipes of their throats. They shambled around, crisscrossing in the darkness and humming like things without language. The sound was not unsettling, though, and Teige without reason or understanding joined in. And the horses stilled and listened. The small breaths of the wind carried the humming off into the fields about. The gypsies looked into the sky, and sometime here and there one of them made gestures in the air, waving their arms in a way that Teige could not interpret either as welcome or defence. Elihah, the oldest of them, came out and was brought across the grass by two of the younger gypsies bearing lanterns. When they stepped from his side he stood a moment by himself as though balancing one final time on the threshold between life and death. He then spoke words aloud that Teige did not understand and the gypsies brought him the lanterns and he threw them down in a pile of gathered branches and a fire sprang up. The Samhain had begun.

Within minutes the old man was gone and the other gypsies were about. Fires were lit and horses were released and ran wild off down the field into the dark. Across the bay other fires now burned with small tongues of light. From each camp around the town the same custom-worn and time-honoured gestures were taking place. It was as if a bell had tolled or a preternatural announcement had taken place. For though it was without clocks or even the rising of the sun, the moment of the spirits’ resurrection and return seemed unanimously agreed. The gypsies’ mood rose with the heat of the fire and soon they were singing and there were some who leapt in ragged trousers and bare chests by the flames and yahooed with wild ferocity. Women came out dressed in bright skirts with hoops in their ears, and though they had slept only a few hours, they danced flamboyantly with different partners. They held up their skirts to show their legs and stamped in the muddy grass, laughing full-mouthed in the dance of the dead. Teige was pulled in by one such woman and spun to music of drum and whistle. He flew about in her arms and watched his brother Finbar do the same. The place was swept into a festive mood. The stars turned in the sky and the sea fell in sighs, exhausted.

From the town came those who knew what to expect. They had watched for the fires on the hill and slipped from the beds of husbands and wives to steal into that place where the spirits of the dead guaranteed the time of licentiousness and free pleasure against which the priests and pastors had vainly preached. For the townspeople were even wilder than the gypsies. Girls pulled their skirts high and dragged and pushed the men about, throwing off lovers and taking others in a giddy and mad rush, as though each had to be touched and tasted before that time of freedom was past and manner and decorum returned for another year.

In this way Finbar was pulled aside by one of the mer-girls of the sea and kissed hungrily on his lips. He tasted the salty girl almost before he saw her. In the firelight she flew him around so that she and he were one side golden and one side dark. Then she spun him away and out into the greater darkness and the tufted grass that grew by the cliffs. She held his hand and he climbed up into the fall of her hair and kissed her neck as they ran along. Then she slipped away in the dark. Finbar hurried after her. There was nowhere to go in the rising and falling undulations of the field that were like a calm sea. They chased and tumbled and she called him gypsy in Irish and laughed and threw her bare feet in the air and kicked as though treading deep water in the sea of the sky. Finbar held the calf of her leg and touched the skin and marvelled, and the girl turned into a fish there before him. She glimmered in the starlight and was slippery in his hands. She twisted about and was free of clothes and Finbar imagined her a salmon in the grass and he grappled her in his arms and she wriggled silvery and marvellous and beautiful.

The Samhain burned on. Cattle stolen or bartered in exchange for whispered prophecies to farmers desperate for love or fortune were slaughtered there. Though its blood was not fully drained, a beast was dragged heavily across the grass, spilling gore and scenting the night with fresh death as its head tilted with uprolled eyes of blind horror. A trail was left. Then the gypsies endeavoured to mount the animal on a crude and massive spit, and many attempts were in vain with the spiked end bursting and tearing through the flank of the beast with cries and jeers and curses and men falling about.

Teige left and went to the white pony. He told her the races would be tomorrow, for he knew that the gypsies would bring all the animals down to the sands to meet the ancestors who had raced there. Then the sports would begin.

“We won’t win,” Teige said, and stroked the pony.

The fires did not die out that night but were kept burning into the dawn. As the light rose, the sea seemed quickened and a white floor of surf lay all across the bay. Remnants of the night were scattered in the grass, wood and bones and fragments of clothing torn or discarded. When the gypsies stood into the morning, there was a strange communal shyness among them. They blinked at the light and studied the ground. When they heard that two of their horses had plunged over the cliff into the sea, their natural superstition caused them to suppose the white pony must be gone. Then Teige found her waiting beneath the wiry and back-combed shelter of hawthorn bushes and the men knew the day was to be theirs.

There was suddenly a renewed urgency. The camp came alive with the business of preparing for the races. A group of the gypsies came to Teige and stood about him and nodded. They smiled brown, gap-toothed smiles at him and said nothing. Then when he walked across the field leading the pony, they followed like designated escorts of Fate. There were other races and other horses for the gypsies to run, but it was upon the white pony they would gamble the wealth they had gathered over the previous year. They moved down to the beach, where the wind blew the sand against their ankles and made powdery falls of each hoofstep. The sky was full of quick-moving cloud, the sea brilliant. Soon there were more than two hundred gypsies and their number swelled with the population of Kilkee spilling down toward the beach to watch. Dogs galloped in crazy circles with lolling tongues and flapping ears. Boys ran along the sand before the event and mimed horses they rode in ghost races. Girls looked for the ones that they had danced with in secret the night before and blushed when they could not tell which one or ones they were. All knew it was the beginning of the end, that when the exotic visitors left, winter would be upon them with the colour and excitement of those days and nights passing into memory.

A way was cleared across the white strand. The gypsies had sticks they stuck into the sand. These were topped with ties of red and yellow cloth and made a start and finish. In the clarity of the daylight then all the gypsy tribes were revealed, some one-eyed, some crippled, misshapen, round-shouldered, black, toothless, grin-faced, narrow-eyed, lipless, and handsome. Teige looked about at them as though looking at company kept in dreams. He saw his brother Finbar draw aside the mer-girl called Cait and take her away from the races down to the shore. He did not see Finan and did not know that that brother was already on his way out of the town, that he had suffered deeply pangs of remorse and guilt, faced the violence that had arisen within him, and experienced a grim revelation that he must give his soul for the one that was perished. Teige did not know Finan was already gone, was already fissured from the family and lost to the obscured and traceless domain of zealots, that he was heading for the port of Cork and thence to the continent of Africa to begin work in the service of God. Out of some desperation, Teige imagined that perhaps at last Tomas might arrive, that the road that wound down to the shore would shortly be dusted with the charge of his horse. But it was not to be, and soon Teige could look nowhere but at the pony. He stood beside her and kept her calm while the noise and excitement grew around them. The first races happened, accompanied by wild frenzy. The gypsies had the habit of spitting, jeering, throwing small handfuls of sand at the horses of other riders. They made sudden large gestures, flinging both hands upward like pantomime salutes to a rash, inexorable deity, startling the horses and making the whole scene skitter sideways.

The white pony threw her head up and down, and Teige laid his arm over her and made a matching nodding motion and then blew his scent once more across her nostrils. He had a rope halter but did not pull on it. When the pony moved about to evade the scene, he stepped to meet her chest and was there in her view. He did not look at the men or ponies he was to race against. Instead he made the world small until within it there was nothing but his eyes and those of the pony. And he was standing so, his head upon the long white nose, when those gypsies that were self-appointed his guardians came and told him it was his turn.

Teige walked the pony through the crowd. They were a blur of colour as though his eyes were teared or blinding, and he saw no face he recognized. Then there was a gypsy standing by him with hands cupped for his foot, but Teige did not need him and swung up and onto the pony’s back. Still he did not look at the other horses. He leaned forward and patted the pony’s neck and spoke gently. There was a rope held raggedly across the way. Then a roar. The rope fell. There seemed a long pause, like a rip occurring in the fabric of time, and though the gypsies screamed and the riders crouched in a forward lurch, the horses did not race away. There was a fractured instant in which nothing happened and the horses intuited the race that had arrived before them and were in the very motion of the first leap forward. It was as if the whole crowd inhaled at once and the poor and tattered, the small farmers and fisherfolk gathered there, were stilled momentarily and framed so as in a picture. Teige would recall the scene for his lifetime. He would recall the snapped moment, though he was not even aware of seeing it at the time. He was sensing the way across the broken sand. He was breathing over the pony’s ears, and then somehow he knew that the race was on and the rhythm of it flowed through him like second nature. He became that strange oneness with the animal that was at once apparent to all there. He rode as though he were part of the horse. He was crouched and low, and his face was pressed forward and white where he galloped in the flying sand and spray. They were in the lead before the halfway turn and already the gypsies of his caravans were screaming and jumping along the inner edge of the course. There was a brown gelding at his side, and a sleek black animal foaming just behind it. But in the flash that was the race, Teige barely saw them. The pony plashed the shallow seawater into a fine whiteness that rose majestic and ephemeral. The splash and speed made the scene shimmer and perhaps was part of the reason why suddenly the gypsies saw the ghosts. At first they were the figures of the other horses in the race, and then behind them, and coming in a horde from the deeper sea, the charging shapes of a thousand more. They galloped out of the ocean and thundered down the bay. The gypsies all saw them at once and thought to run for they would not survive the stampede. Then they saw their own grandfathers as young boys with shiny black hair and flashing teeth and how they clung to the manes of the ghost horses and rode wildly along next to the boy Teige at the front of the race. They all came forward in one great mass, splashing high the water and getting closer and closer. Then, the moment the pony crossed the finish line, to the gypsies’ eyes it became two. Without breaking stride, the ghost of itself parted to the left and was ridden out into the sea with the boy Mario on its back and all the other grandfathers and spirit horses following behind until vanishing into the waves. The gypsies shouted and surged. Teige felt their hands grasp his legs, and then he was toppled over into their arms and borne shoulder-high over the throng. He saw the sky and the white clouds in swaying, bumping motion like the world coming to an end. Hands flew up and touched him. They patted against him and fell away, and more pushed forward and did the same. He thought to get down and set off at once, but his will was not his own and he was carried along down the beach at Kilkee and the sky spun about and his heart raced with victory. He was caught up in it, and as the gypsies raced him along on their shoulders and threw him skyward and caught him and threw him up again, he did not know whether to laugh or cry.