The Fall of Light

1

And three years passed.

The stars rose and fell across the sky and told their timeless stories. But of Francis Foley and his sons in this time there is little recounted. They are like ones that have slipped inside a pause in the story. As if nothing good can be told and it is better for the silence to enfold them.

The old man walked the country in vain search for his wife and sons. He wore a long ragged coat of rough wool dirtied brown. He carried a willow wand. He crouched in the grass and caught pheasants in the dawn. He walked back to the lord’s estate and came into it by darkness and stood in the charred ruins. He saw the gardens left ragged and unkempt. He slipped away and asked of some that lived nearby if they had seen a woman looking for her family. He met with vacant stares. He moved off and searched all the roadways running west. Sometimes he was befriended by the poor and sat in small dark cottages listening to their grievances with the turfsmoke encircling the room. He dug the potato gardens of widows and carried small boys on his shoulders. Then he travelled on again, beating his way back and forth along the roads of that country, all the time looking for his family He encountered any number of constables, landlords, agents, and witnessed every kind of crookedness, cruelty, and oppression. He asked if any had seen boys that looked like him. He heard of four boys that had died in a fire in Gort in the country of Galway, and he went there with the ashes of grief and regret dry in his mouth. He stood with the mother and father of the dead boys. He worked for them in the little lump of a field they rented, pulling the rocks from it and bearing them over to make higher the walls. He left when the dream of his wife woke him one night in the stable there. He went out under the stars and thought they were different, that they were beckoning him as they did others in the fabled past. And so he journeyed again in darkness with his eyes heavenward like a figure blind or visionary, being led by a light aeons away.

He walked that way, eyes skyward, through the winters of three years. In time the stars themselves seemed to reassemble in the constellations above him and were then the unjoined puzzle of a woman’s face.

2

It was winter. In the plains of Tipperary snow fell thickly. It gathered in broad fields and rose high against walls. Cattle stood in stunned bewilderment and lowered their heads as though to look where the grass was gone. They did not move. They waited, dumbly. The snow slowed the world. It fell so thickly that roads filled and coaches stopped or slid into ditches. Horses crashed and broke their hips and were shot on the roadside. The distance across a valley was blurred to nothing and vanished altogether. It appeared as though the landscape itself were being erased and with it time and space and the whole history of man on that island.

The snow fell. Cottages smoked thin, windless plumes into the pale grey sky. Women looked out from doors and threw crumbs for hens while their children scurried about barefoot and in wet rags. Briefly there was the holiday of it, the countryside made beautiful and pristine in a god-willed immaculate creation. It was not itself. The country was like a country in dreams. Birds flew in short, inquisitive flights. They flickered onto the powdered tops of walls and settled for berries of the holly that were plentiful that year. The scene held. When the snow stopped the air froze hard and sealed the white country in ice. Skies were blue and cloudless, by night they were million-starred. No breeze blew. In God’s slumber the entire island might have slipped its moorings and floated northward into a colder climate, defying the fixed certainty of maps. Such was the difference between this and the green country of everyday. A still and iced Christmas passed, and the serenity of the season slipped away and was replaced by hardship. Ridges of cabbages perished and were like long, white-mounded graves in haggard little gardens. As fodder ran short the cattle in the fields began to starve. Their thin flanks showed the cages of their bones, their hides matted with mud in which they had rolled and now wore like crude clothing. At water holes and by the sides of drains and rivulets brown mucked patches of ground opened and spread as animals made slow crossings back and forth each day to dip their noses in the glacial waters.

And across this frozen scene in the January of that year, Francis Foley came. He was thin and bearded. He coughed hollow, raking coughs that echoed across the stillness of the fields. His eyes were worn from sleeplessness and sunken in rims of darker skin. His lips were flaked and broken, the hairs of his moustache overhung them in clumped straggles. He had walked the country back and forth, following rumour and the pattern of the stars, but in that time he had found neither his wife nor his sons. Sometimes, in the middle of an empty road in the County Galway or Roscommon, he had imagined he saw one of them coming toward him. He saw some figure down the road and stopped and waited. His chest opened with the inflation of hope. The figure on the road was walking slowly. Francis blinked his eyes to clarify it, but still he could not make it out. Was that not the way Tomas had of walking? Was that not his proud angle of head? The old man stood and was like a rock in the road. But his heart raced, imagining he had come to the beginning of the end of contrition, that here would begin the reunion of his family and that this time he would bring them all together to the monk’s island and start anew. He stood in the road, and the cold held his feet. Then there appeared before him the figure of one homeless and forlorn and wandering like him in the winter of his life. They passed with minor greeting or silence and went on. Other times, the figure seen on the road vanished entirely and was a figment of desire or something incorporeal, and Francis Foley at last moved from his stance and hobbled on.

Yet, as he travelled he did not lose hope entirely. His death and resurrection by the monk had given him a sense that his life was not to be without purpose, and he endured. His fear was not that he would not find his wife and sons, but that when he did they would have starved or fallen to disease without him. At first he had supposed his sons would still be by the riverbank in Limerick where he had last seen them, and he had gone there and looked at the Shannon waters that in that time were not rushing or wild and seemed a gentle mockery of his failures. He had walked into the County Clare and asked of them there but learned nothing and turned east again into the stars.

Yet all that was already long ago by the frozen January when he trudged not for the first time into Tipperary. The road was packed ice. He walked into the little brown cloud of his breath and kept his eyes ahead of him on the emptiness of the way. There was a small breeze scouring. It polished harshly the skin of his cheeks and left him with the sense that his face was being peeled. His eyes watered and in that way made uncertain the figure that appeared on the road not a hundred yards ahead of him. Francis saw the figure that he could not yet call a man or woman and screwed tight his eyes to release the tears. The figure was coming toward him. The old man stopped. He stood in against the stone wall ditch and laid his hand on the frozen stones. With an intuition that he did not understand but was a foreknowledge of sorts, he knew that this was not just another of all those wretches who had crossed his road. His fingers wrapped onto the top stone on the wall. He held it there readied like a weapon, for at first he imagined this one coming to be none other than the Fallen Angel himself come to take Francis Foley to Hell. He held the stone also out of the need to feel contact with the tangible world and for the reassurance it gave that he was not already dead. The figure moved slowly in the white scene. It was a man, he saw at last, a small man on a small horse. Still he did not lose any of his mistrust and prepared to throw the top of the wall. His heart was hammering now. Blood was awakening in his feet, and they were throbbing. The figure was thirty yards away now and Francis Foley was suddenly afraid of it there on the road in Tipperary. It wore a hat. Its face was unseen. Francis lifted the stone off the wall, and another rolled and clattered out onto the road. He shook and looked about in fright, but the landscape was placid and empty and blanched in the grip of that season.

“Dia duit,” he called out, for he knew the name of God was abhorrent to the Devil and reasoned that he needed to know at once if such was his adversary.

The figure on the road stopped and slowly raised its head in such a manner as to suggest that the man had been riding the horse in sleep and now lifted his face into the breeze to see if he was waking or in dreams.

And it was Teige. Father and son saw each other and did not move. There was a stalled moment of disbelief, puzzlement at the work of fairies or madness that threw such a likeness on the snow road. For Teige had long supposed that his father was dead and similarly imagined this to be only the most recent of a long catalog of his family’s ghosts, although the one with the most verisimilitude. Francis Foley was no more certain that this was Teige, and the beating of his heart raced up the side of his neck and into his right temple, where he could hear it like a drum. He touched his tongue to the crisped edge of his lips and tasted the sting. He looked at the boy now grown almost into an old-looking young man and there flashed before him the last moments they had seen each other in the flooded river. Then he said the boy’s name.

“Teige.”

He heard how old and thin his own voice had become since he had last said the name and could not imagine what he looked like, as it was so long since he had seen himself. The stone fell from his hand.

“Teige, it’s me.”

And his son stopped and looked and blinked his eyes and then climbed down off the white pony and walked directly across the slippery road to the old man. And in the moment when his father thought that he was about to embrace him, Teige struck him with both hands in the hollow of his chest and sent Francis Foley flying backward onto the snow.

3

He lay there for some time. He lay there and Teige stood over him and kicked at the snow about him and cursed and then shouted. The loneliness and anger of those three years came from him now sharp and heavy as stones. He yelled out curses and was weeping as he did so. Birds crossing the noontime in the daily hope of a thaw and the emergence of worms wheeled about and flew elsewhere. Cattle in the rumpled fields turned their heads to listen. Teige spat and coughed and spewed the words out. He told his father that once he had had brothers. He told him once he had had a mother and a family. He told the old man that he had ruined everything, that he had torn up the world and thrown it away. He told him everything was gone now, that Finan was gone, that Tomas had vanished, that Finbar had stolen a girl from the sea and ridden off with her and the gypsies and had not returned the following year. He told the old man there was no point in their even looking for them, that the Foleys were gone into the wind and it was all the father’s fault, all his own stupidity and recklessness and stubbornness. The stones of his anger kept coming, and soon they were piled there all about Francis Foley where he lay on the ground being buried alive in the evidence of his vanity and error.

Time passed and still Teige stood there on the road over his father. The glitter of the ice began to melt around the fallen figure of the old man while his beard strangely thawed and his eyes watered. He offered no resistance. His mouth was agape. His hands were thrown to the side palms upward, as though attempting to hold the unbearable weight off his chest. And they were still so a long time, the father on his back and the son standing over him. The winter night drew on. At last, Teige stopped. He stood over his father with his mouth open and no further accusation came out. His jaw ached. In the bluish light of the crescent moon he could not tell for sure if the old man was still living, and he got to his knees beside him in the snow. Then he lowered his head until it lay on the other’s chest.

“Teige son,” said Francis with his hollowed eyes staring at nothing. “Teige son, ‘tisn’t all over. We’ll find them, we will. I found you, didn’t I? And I have been drowned and in a place where none or few have come back and yet here I am. Teige son,” he said, and raised one hand out of the wet and melted ground and lifted it to touch the boy’s head.

They lay so a while. Then they rose and moved into the shelter of a roofless cabin, and Teige tethered the pony and they slept.

It was the pony and not the thieves that woke them. Dawn was rising with silvered streaks when they opened their eyes. There were figures there. At first they could not separate them from the gloom and they seemed like insubstantial fragments or velvet shapes come alive as the light thinly cracked the morning open. There were three or four of them. Francis sat upright and called out. The pony was being led away on its rope and was resisting and turning about in the road and making a long whinnying of dismay. One of the thieves smacked it hard across the face and shouted and pulled down on its rein as the pony’s fright worsened and it tried in vain to rear on its hind legs. Teige was up and running then. He was a flicker of light and then shadow, and his father was behind him. They hurried on the slippery road, crying out and making such sounds as they hoped might ward off the thieves. These last, vagabond and itinerant, had come on the two figures lying on the road and had at first supposed them dropped dead from exhaustion and hunger and the ways of the road. They had approached them the way men approach blessings that have fallen from the sky. They had quickened their step and moved around the fallen, examining their clothes and small belongings and beginning whispered argument about possessing the pony. There were three and a boy, they were blackened, their heads hatless. One with the toothless and sunken expression not uncommon then shook his head and held a stub of finger to his lips when he had discovered the father and son were alive. In the obscurity they had moved with the infinite care of those engaged in detailed work of jewellery or silversmithing. They had fingered the rags of the sleeping in absolute silence like some flimsy wraiths or strange angels elected to divest and prepare the mortal for the hereafter. The dirty garments of the Foleys could not be removed without waking them, and the fellows had taken only the boots and the pony.

Now, in the sliver of light, the Foleys charged at them. The thieves, whether grown accustomed to near capture or out of natural fecklessness, seemed unafraid of punishment and ran about and yelped in high voices and called names. They were giddy and wild. Teige arrived first at the pony. He placed his head next to her shoulder and said some words and then ran his hand along her back, before leaving her to stand snuffling anxiously and as he chased one of the thieves that had his boots. Francis was by him. He was concerned not for the robbery but only for the safety of Teige, and that nothing separate them again. He cried out to frighten the robbers off. But these would not let go of the boots they had and jumped about in weird dance. At last Francis caught hold of the scruff of one of them and yanked the man toward him, and a piercing cry rang out. The others froze. They stood watching, balanced on the moment between fight and flight. Francis held the man’s head locked within his forearm. The boots fell to the ground. He looked for Teige and saw him turned to where the boy robber was holding the pony.

“We have no fight with ye,” said Francis. “Leave us something, and be gone along the road, and we’ll not think on it again.”

The man within his hold grimaced. He felt the nearness of his neck to snapping and called out to the others. One of them took a coat then from three he wore and laid it on the ground. Francis released the thief and the fellow stepped away and twisted his head about. There was a strange sense of clemency there and a moment without words as the thieves stood in shambling pose with eyes downcast. Then the scene disbanded. The men scrambled away in the gloom, muttering and groaning, and the Foleys did not chase them.

“God in heaven,” Francis said, “the people there are in the world, Teige, eh?”

The father looked at his son from the corner of his eye. He was not sure if he was to be struck down again, and balanced there on that moment, testing gently the relationship between them. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

Teige was thin as a young ash. The curved branches of his ribs were plain even in that half-light.

“I am not,” he said. And then, without looking up and in a slender voice: “Are you?”

“God, no. No,” said Francis, and then added quietly, “Thank you.”

Francis bent down and picked up the coat and held it in the air. “Well, isn’t that fine style?” He smiled then and Teige saw it and it was like an image abandoned in the farthest corner of the boy’s mind, a sweetness in that expression that belonged in the days when he was much younger and the old man had carried him on his shoulders.

Teige did not say anything.

“Made of good stuff, too,” his father said. “Here, take it, Teige, it’ll be warm.” He offered it and his son took it and put it on.

Teige lifted a handful of the hardened sleet-snow to the pony’s mouth, and she lipped at it and drew back her top lip and showed her teeth and moved her head right and left like that as if soundlessly laughing. Teige bent down and began to push the snow on the ditch away with his hands. When it was apparent what he was doing, his father knelt and together they cleared the snow from the rough tufted grass that lay below. When it was so exposed the pony moved closer and, after nosing cautiously, chomped the frozen grass with a tearing sound. Father and son watched. Francis tried to figure out what they would do and how he would say it. They waited in the dawning light, and each felt its revelation with shyness. There they were, the mismatched pair of Foleys, in the middle of the country of the lost. Their breath hawed. Blackbirds came and landed in the field over the wall, attending the pony’s finishing the patch of grass.

In that tentative renewal between them, Francis did not know how to broach the subject of the boy’s mother. Then Teige said:

“I have looked for my mother.”

“I went back there, too,” said his father. “I searched every road. I asked any I met.” He had more to say but did not say it. He looked at his son, then when he could not bear it he looked away. He did not say that he feared Emer was dead, and Teige did not turn on him with recriminations or vent further his anger and loss. Instead each stood and the air between them was filled with tangled memory and grief. Teige’s mother appeared there in form invisible and was a figure with fair hair falling instructing him in the stories of the stars. She lingered a time in the silence of the undisturbed landscape of field and hedgerow spread out before them. The two men tried in vain to hold her there, but she was like a star retreating as the morning came on.

Francis felt the weight of his years, and the immense loneliness of the road passed over his face like a cloud. Later, he thought, later he could go and look for her again, but he did not have the strength for it now. For now he had to be with this boy. He had to take him somewhere. He had to make a home.

“Well, son,” he said at last. “Will we go toward the sea?”

4

As they crossed the country the snow melted. It was like a blanket of green being unfurled. The skies moved again and rain fell. Cattle stood in the timeless mesmerism of drizzle, then crossed the fields in slow phalanxes, finding shelter in the hedgerows as squalls blew the hard rain sideways. When the squalls passed, storms crashed. Thunder broke over February. The stars in the night sky vanished. In the dawn, the light was pale and seemed a poor cheapened imitation, a grey murk that drizzled. The countryside itself looked strangely sorry, like a place in tales where the king has been banished and every plant, hill, and valley suffers in punishment awaiting renewal. So it was. And across this through the falling weathers of the beginning of that year Francis Foley walked westward with Teige on the white pony at his side. They were not companionable, they did not speak in the day as they moved along other than to announce rests or the place where the pony needed water. Still, the presence of the boy consoled his father. He saw how Teige had aged, how loss had marked the expression of his eyes and stolen their brightness, and yet despite the chastening of such knowledge he was still grateful.

They moved west over the curves of the road. Sometimes Teige dismounted and walked the pony. He never offered his father to ride, and Francis did not ask. They passed all and sundry on their way, a long and varied parade of vagabond unfortunates whose ills and complaints formed the whole catalog of life’s undoing. There were infirm old widows, shawled and wrapped so as to lose all shape of womanhood and seem instead accumulated bundles of cloth, browned by the road. The feet in their broken shoes ached and they shuffled flatly with flawed ankles or tendons torn. There were all manner of mendicant and pauper, thin skeletal figures who drifted along with doomed eyes. Few stopped on their way when they met the Foleys. They eyed the pony and then turned their faces downward and shoulders sideways as if shamed by their homelessness. With such figures in their squalor, Francis and Teige were already familiar. They had each seen many on their separate wanderings, yet in the passing of each of them father and son nonetheless felt shivers of foreboding. Where had these come from? They were going nowhere. The road for them was the last hope, and upon it they carried the impossible burden of their untold stories. Day and night they appeared and disappeared. They were like a fairy folk or the infinite population of the dead. None seemed to know each other, none said their name. Whatever their quest, it remained in its secret history and travelled away with them.

On one evening when an army of such passed them going eastward on the road, Teige broke the day’s silence and asked his father why they were all going in the opposite direction.

Francis stroked his beard. They were stopped beneath three leafless trees and gnawing at raw potatoes.

“We are going to the sea, Teige,” he said. “They are going to Dublin.”

“But why? Why do they not stay?”

“Each one has their reasons. Our reason is to leave our name in that town of Kilkee for Tomas and the twins, and then we will go to the monk’s island and make a place there. Then when the boys come back they will be able to find us. That is our reason. You have seen the sea, is it so terrible?”

“No.”

“Tell me what it is like.”

Teige was squatting on the ground and the pony’s long neck was grazing near him. The cold was coming in his shoulders as the heat of walking faded. “It’s like the end,” he said. “It’s wild, though.”

“Wild?”

“Oh yes.”

“Good. That’s what we want, eh? Wild, wild sea. Did you go into it?”

“I did.”

“And were you afraid?” The old man had said it before he thought better of it. He remembered the disastrous scene in the Shannon River and looked down and tightened his mouth.

“I was,” Teige said, and lifted his face. There was a moment then in which their still fresh reconciliation might have come asunder, in which the father might have made a grunt of disapproval and shook his head, leaving his son to feel the isolation of cowardice. But Francis Foley said:

“Good. That’s good. You were right, too.” He glanced at Teige from under his eyebrows. “There’s many drown in it, I suppose?”

“There is,” said Teige.

“And it’s fierce.”

“Yes.”

“You were right so,” said his father. “You were right to try it and then keep well out of it.”

Another pause, then Teige added: “I didn’t, though.”

“You didn’t?”

The pony flicked her head. Her tail swished. The boy looked at her a moment and felt his father’s eyes upon him.

“No,” he said, “I still went in, three times.”

The father said nothing then. He sat there and the emotions he held made his lips quiver. He blinked. Dark clouds moved across the sky. The night fell and the stars came and went and wheeled above them and each lay down to the slender hope of their dreams.

The following day when they were passing a cottage a cry stopped them. The cottage was not unlike others, a small building of dark stone with crooked windows and door open to the road even in that February. The cry was that of a woman, it came from the garden beyond. The Foleys stopped, the pony flicked her ears. Then Francis called out. There was no response and Francis looked to Teige, who slid down the pony. Together they walked in around the cottage and found in a small garden a woman of fifty years trying to pull up from the earthen ridges the fallen body of her husband.

When she saw them she let go the man’s shoulders, and while he lay motionless with open eyes and mouth she slipped down onto her knees at his back. Her black-and-silver hair was astray across her face. Her mouth twisted from effort. Her husband, a figure older than she with a face locked in an expression of astonishment, did not move. She propped him against her breast and though the Foleys were there kept making over and over strange sounds of endearment and something that might have been a form of the man’s name, Cathal.Francis bent down to them and Teige stood behind him. He told the woman they would carry the man into the house, but she seemed unable to grasp this, as though she were from another country or already taken from sanity by grief. The old man told her again, but she still did not seem to understand, and at last Francis gestured Teige to him and together they picked the man up and bore him out of the dirt and in through the open door. The woman followed them, her hands holding each other tightly in a knot. In the gloom of the kitchen something stirred and was then two small girls pressed against the corner of the dresser. The man was laid out on a settle bed. He was breathing but still frozen in that look of amazement, his left side locked in an attitude of bracing. The woman stood looking at him and brought her hands to her mouth, making moaning sounds. The girls came to her then and she enfolded each of them in one arm and the three stood there at the feet of the stricken man. Francis got a bucket and traced the muddied track in the grass until he came to the spring well. He was back with the water before Teige was sure where he had gone.

“He has been out there a while,” the father said. “Get the clothes off him. Make up the bed. Has he the fever?”

The woman did not turn to respond.

“Woman of the house,” he said again, and then one of the small girls stepped out of her mother’s side and told them not to shout, that their mother could neither hear nor speak.

Francis Foley lifted the man up against his chest. The woman was made to understand and, helped by her small daughters, she readied the bed. Teige took the man’s feet and hoisted him upon it. The stiff figure was undressed and his clothes taken out the door by Teige, who was instructed by his father to burn them. In the freshness of the day Teige felt relief outdoors and stayed awhile in the low corner of the garden. A black-and-white sheepdog met him there. It looked up at him with blank, sad eyes. When the sod of turf Teige had carried from the hearth at last retook flame, he dropped the clothes upon it and watched the thick smoke take the contagion and carry it into the sky. Back inside the cottage he watched his father trying to get the man to drink. His hand was cupped beneath the man’s chin and the water spilled. The woman was sitting, watching. There was understanding now in her face, a stilled knowing, and she did not weep. She looked at her husband in the bed, seeing in his eyes the entire story of their relation, the history of their time together now come to this.

“Did you burn them?”

“Yes.”

“The poor man is nearly gone,” Francis said behind the woman. “I don’t know how long he was out there, fallen. The girls told her they heard him cry. She mistook their meaning.”

“If it’s the fever…,” Teige said.

“I don’t think it is.”

“But…”

“No. He’s like a clock stopped. That’s not the fever.”

That night the Foleys stayed in the house of the stopped man. Teige slept on the floor on blankets he was given and Francis sat in a chair of ash and sugan rope that the man himself had probably made. The mute woman dropped her head, and the two girls slept in the one narrow bed and did not move in their dreams. In the stillness of the cottage mice scurried, their sudden dartings in the shadowed corners like tiny erratic pulses of life. The night was long and cold. Wind gathered in the west and blew against the door. The dog whimpered where it lay. The sash of the window whistled like a punctured sigh. In his sitting Francis watched the stopped man and thought of his own time between worlds when he thought he had drowned. He thought of the long darkness, the terrible sense that light and touch and taste had been taken from him. He thought of it all and then reached over and rubbed the man’s feet between the palms of his hands.

5

The Foleys stayed on. The family’s name was O’Connor. The mute woman made them meals from the end of their winter storage of vegetables. Flour was beyond her means and they had no bread, but some days they ate a kind of potato cake that was coarse and lumpish yet sustaining. The two girls who were aged about eight and nine were called Maeve and Deirdre and seemed to know their mother’s will instantly. They spoke for her and told the father and son that they were welcome. Francis told them they would stay for a little time and help them until the man recovered. For already there were signs that he was not to die. The stopped quality of him had already begun to change, although ever so slightly. The fixed, lopsided twist of his mouth had softened and he spoke a kind of flattened speech whose words were not yet comprehensible. Still, his eyes were alive. He watched the father repair the half door where the boards had rotted. He watched Teige stand by him and hold the hammer and pieces of timber that had been salvaged from a broken cart. As the days passed on the Foleys fixed all about the house that they could find. There were windows that did not open, a thatch ladder with broken rungs, a broom without a handle, stone walls that had been knocked. Francis Foley went at each of them with quiet zeal. Though he was not gifted as a carpenter or mason, he set himself at these tasks like a man engaged on some complex and involved proving. It was as though he were to demonstrate in the house of the O’Connors that the world itself could be repaired, that no breakage was beyond remedy, and that soon all would be restored in the vision of the innocent. He hammered and banged. He whistled softly. The small girls skipped and danced steps to this rhythmic reparation, this making good of all that was damaged. For it was not unlike those cottages in fables that become for a time an island of their own and in which the laws of the world do not govern and the hardship of life is suspended.

Finally when all was done about the cottage and the weather lifted and the ground was crisp, Francis took Teige to the garden and showed him how to dig straight furrows. The two of them worked side by side, turning over the new ground as the birds flew about them and chirped and squawked in the hope of worms. At times the father stopped and leaned on the fork and sighed. He looked with satisfaction at the work they had done yet recalled the old pain that reminded him that this place was not their own. His great chest rattled, he had a wheeze that came like an afterbreath once he had exhaled. But he turned to the work again, moving over the brown earth and making it ready for seed potatoes. When they had finished, the patch of opened soil was a neat rectangle of promise. They stood at the head of it and leaned there and watched the birds alighting.

“You can feel the spring today,” Francis said.

“You can.”

And they stood so and said no more and were like the guardians of something greater than themselves whose majesty could be felt in simplicity. They went then and drank water from the spring, and the two girls came running and told them their father was able to stand. They hurried back and went in the door and saw Cathal O’Connor propped up on his feet with his arm over the shoulder of his wife.

“I am grateful to ye,” he said in thin words that could now be understood. His eyes were gentle and his face soft as linen.

” ‘Tis a thing of nothing,” Francis said. “Your potatoes’ll be in the ground tomorrow. Come.” And he looped the man’s arm over his and hoisted him in light and heavy steps out the doorway and was soon joined by the man’s wife and daughters. Then in a pose redolent with hope and faith in the constancy of the world, they stood and looked upon the garden with the dog scampering back and forth over the furrows chasing the birds.

That evening Cathal O’Connor died in his sleep. None saw or heard his passing in the night and it was not until the light was already breaking that Francis Foley woke and noticed the absence of his breathing. At first he did not believe it. Then he reached and lifted the man at an angle from where he lay next to his wife. Francis held his face close to the man’s mouth to sense the slightest air, and when he found none he pressed his ear against the chest and then laid the man down and pounded at his heart with his fist. He was doing this when the wife woke. Her eyes stared wide and frozen in their expression. The daughters woke and stood. Still Francis Foley hammered at the man’s heart. He was shouting to him now. He was crouched upon the bed with one knee on either side of the thin man, one instant beating away at him and the next bent low to listen. Then he was thumping at the heart again. Teige came beside him.

“Come on,” the father hissed. “Come on, come on, come on.” He whispered low curses and paused and looked above him into the mud beneath the thatched roof. He whispered further prayers or damnations then to spirits in worlds above or below. His voice grew urgent and his words came through his teeth. He shook the dead man for the last flicker of life until Teige said to him:

“Father, stop. He is gone.”

And so he stopped. There was silence. From outside the door the dog moaned.

Later then, in the garden that was to be for that spring, Francis and Teige Foley buried Cathal O’Connor.

Two mornings after, they found the body of the man’s wife drowned in the stream that was called abhainn mine. A voiceless scream was still in her eyes. Francis shut them with small pebbles and laid her in the ground alongside her husband. The following day they left there with the pony pulling the old cart and the two girls sitting mutely upon it.

6

And by that time in the caravan of gypsies far away, Finbar Foley was travelling south with a mer-girl called Cait. The gypsies, sensing some change in the stars, had not returned to the races on the sands. When the old man Elihah died, a younger voice had spoken and told that it was time to cross the water again. So they had left that country and journeyed by stages first into Wales, then through the Cambrian Mountains and across the Severn River and down onto Salisbury Plain. There they had camped some time until one night the stars or the unknown forces of the universe moved them and they woke and broke camp and crossed into the wider spaces of northern France. Others of their kind told them there was a new cruelty abroad among mankind, that gypsies had been killed for the look in their eyes, but that many now had foretold the end of the reign of those wealthy and privileged and the coming of the time of the poor.

These gypsies were not unlike those with whom Finbar travelled, though they spoke in a language he could not fully grasp. It was not French but contained it, too, as it contained in piecemeal the languages of all the other countries they had seen. But in a short time Finbar grew accustomed to it and, discovering a new gift, was soon so conversant in that strange hybrid of words that none could say he was not born to it. His manner and look now, three years after the races, were almost indistinguishable from those of the gypsies. He had let his hair and beard grow long and wore a ponytail of his golden curls. In the caravan at night he bedded his mer-girl with a passion that made the old axles of the wagon creak and caused the gypsies outside to cheer. He seemed gifted in sex. The truth was that from the moment he had first been kissed by Cait, his soul had been sucked out and he was left with an insatiable thirst for it. It was a craving that lived in him day and night and could be satisfied only in the moments when he was in her arms. Her kisses still tasted of oysters. Her tongue was a fish in his mouth. Though she was long gone from the days when she had strode the waves for seaweed, her flesh was imbrined and in the dark hoop of the canvas Finbar swam in it and practised each stroke onto perfection. She was a woman of ample hips and round breasts who laughed when the golden curls tossed about her. She liked to reach down and grab on to them as Finbar’s lips travelled up and down her legs and back and forth across her belly in the search to find his soul. Sometimes then she cried out in such sharp ecstasy that the canvas ripped above them and the stars glimmered. Mornings after such loving Finbar appeared with chafed mouth and the red-rimmed, puffy eyes of the long-distance swimmer and worked to patch the caravan. He was become a man. Since last seeing his twin, he had doubled the size of his chest. He did not show any regret for leaving his brothers, nor did he even tell Cait that he was a twin. All of that was like wreckage to him now, and he dove into her every night to forget it and leave it deep fathoms in the past. Many of the gypsies thought that he would quickly tire of her. They had seen incandescent passions before and watched them flare and burn in their own destruction like the extravagant tumult of Venetian fireworks. They expected it to be done by the end of the first winter and the woman to leave the caravan, curse the gypsies for the spell that had befallen her, and make her way back into the ordinary world. They thought too that Finbar must at last reach the end of passion, for he travelled through it so quickly that surely by the spring he would have arrived at its last unexplored corner, then thrown aside the map with the sexual disillusion visited on many. But it had not happened in that way. With indefatigable fervour Finbar continued to love her and rock the caravan through the night. In the warm days of the first French spring, the gypsy women had looked at Cait for signs of her carrying a child. They sought this as proof of some kind of fairness in the world, an inescapable truth of how the universe was balanced and beauty and pleasure to be paid for in the fullness of time. They had looked for it too as a means of dispelling their own secret mistrust of her, the stranger amongst them whose blue eyes and pale skin might steal their men. But as the seasons passed there was no sign of any child. By the second year rumours divided at the campfires. It was something she was doing to avoid conception and the risk of losing him. The women said that she was brewing odd potions and they narrowed their eyes and shook their heads at this defiance of nature. The gypsy men whispered among themselves that it was no such evil, that she was adept at strange positions of lovemaking that increased the man’s pleasure almost to madness and made childbearing impossible. They said she did so with Finbar’s full consent, and was right, too, for the fortune-teller had told her that from his loins only twins could spring.

So, as the caravan journeyed down through the fields of France, the frantic loving continued and for both of them the old country faded and was put away like the things of childhood. They did not speak to each other of the past. Cait was a capable woman with a lively manner, and she bore no sentimental attachments. She sat on the timber seatboard and sometimes held the reins and clucked forward the horse while Finbar sought for sleep in the back. She learned the spices of the gypsies and soon cooked braised suckling pig and other assorted meats in such a savoury manner that the smoke itself was sustaining. Her only weakness was an occasional longing for fish. When it arose she could not abide meat of any kind and demanded that Finbar find her a river. He would set off then on the small grey horse that was theirs and be gone until the evening or the following day, when he would return with a bucket of live trout. The excitement would be immediately visible on Cait’s face and she would reach in and take some of the fish in her bare arms and hold them slithering against her bosom. Although he knew what to do, she would still command Finbar to fill their zinc bathtub, and he would do so, and later her cries would be heard like seagulls about the camp. For some nights after, the caravan would groan and rock all the more and the gypsies at the fires would seem to see it as a ship sailing away across a dark sea.

As ever, the gypsies had no destination or fixed itinerary. They wandered down through Normandy and found themselves crossing the Maine and into Anjou and then farther south still into the country called Limousin. They travelled down the map of France like ink dribbling down a page. Had they considered it, had they seen a map, they might have chosen a more southeasterly route, but they had not, and the leader now among them was too young and raw in the manner of command to show his inexperience and ask for opinion. His name was Masso. While the roads were easy and the weather clement, he waved them daily forward. He did not show his own fright or uncertainty, or the reality that he had no idea where he was leading them. There were green fields. There were animals they stole and killed and others they hunted. There were tranquil farmhouses where the gypsies could barter tin spoons and ladles and other assorted oddments of their own manufacture. There were broad valleys where in the summertime they came to a somnolent stop and where in the buzzing of bees and flies they told stories and drank sweet wine. Sometimes armies passed them on the road. Men in blue and scarlet and black boots to the knee marched past heading off to some field of blood, doomed figures already called by Death. They looked at the gypsies with leering expressions, then looked at their women with a kind of hopeless lust, passing on all the time. Thirty, forty cannon rattled past and cavalrymen too with bridles of supple and polished leather and spurs that jangled in the afterdust. So the world passed by those gypsies, and it was as if they were living in a parallel domain or had escaped into an undiscovered dimension where none saw or cared for them and where the history of the world was not known.

Then, at the end of summer, when lassitude had almost overcome them all and their faces were dark with sun, Masso announced that they must leave the soft valleys and go east once more. He made the announcement with no fixed idea of the geography of that country but was secretly thinking that his position as their leader would be made secure if he brought them into Bohemia. So, they had set out just as the mistral was blowing. Under their breaths many of the gypsies cursed. Their eyelids were heavy and their eyes narrow and small. They had grown soft in the summer and now the journey into winter made each of them age rapidly. Within two weeks they were in the mountains and the wind blew knives past their ears. Then there fell upon them the infamous snow that was widespread throughout Europe that year. It fell in those mountains in large, thick flakes. Each was like a piece of paper, torn fragments of some broken treaty between heaven and earth. It fell from the sky so quickly that the caravans had to stop in the narrow passes. The drop to the valley below vanished, the peaks above likewise, and the gypsies were held there with frozen faces, amazed. They looked to Masso for enlightenment and were told to go back and sit in their caravans. The following day the snow was rising above the wheel axles. Men dug as the snow drifted upon them and made of their shoulders white epaulets or poor wings. Food was thinned. Battered buckets of snow were melted and the water added to thimble measures of soup stock. As the hunger became first a sound and then a loud noise like a beast among them, Cait opened the barrel of salted fish that she had stored and Finbar carried some along the stalled line of the caravans. Still the snow fell. The mountains that they did not know were the Alps mocked them with their white peaks. In his caravan Masso stared at the canvas wall and slowly rocked. It came so that he could not bear to look outside, and instead in the unearthly silence of that place he listened to the soft pounding and slide of the snow as it began to bury his caravan. Then, when Finbar came with others of the gypsies to ask him how they were not to starve, Masso stopped his rocking and looked them straight in the face.

“You must eat me,” he said, and stabbed a thin iron spike clean through his heart.

They did not eat him but took all of his clothes, his blankets and scarves. Under Finbar’s direction they distributed these to the very young and old gypsies until they were like deeply padded polar creatures and not even their faces could be seen. The starving horses they released and watched as they made slow, terrified progress away down the road. Then they pushed Masso’s caravan over the edge of the road and it crashed and splintered and echoed as the only sound of man in those mountains.

They endured another seven days and nights. Finbar Foley became their leader without election or discussion. He told them to gather six in a caravan and embrace each other’s bodies as if in the strongest grip of passion. He told them to lock their lips and breathe into each other and seal there the energy of life in one long and continuous circuitry of warm air.

The caravans lay in the snowy pass, and within each of them the gypsies embraced. Young and old clung to each other and worked an elaborate puzzle of connection so that no part of man or woman was left untouched. Giggles, groans, moans, and other sounds travelled the length of the caravans and into the white air like the ghosts of pleasure. And then there was silence.

Years later, when the grandchildren of those gypsies told it, the snow would fall faster and faster. Each flake would become larger, they would spread their arms to show, and the snowflakes would transform until they were wide as sheets unpacked and tossed from some chest in the heavens. The gypsies would hear them fall upon them. In the darkness of their caravans they would sense the weight of whiteness thump as though it were landing on their spirits. Then by the magic of such memories, and the inheritance of the inexplicable that was theirs, the gypsy grandchildren would tell how the snow sheets defied science and were not cold but warm. The heat inside the hoops of canvas grew. Those who had prepared themselves for death and were starved and frozen into stilled pose as in some collapsed mosaic of byzantine intricacy now moved their limbs. They stretched as the blood warmed and ran into their toes. Their faces felt the breath of those next to them. Their eyes dribbled a rheumy warm fluid and then their noses, too. Sweat flowed off them and the heat was such that in their delirium or fever they rose and threw off the layers of clothes they were wearing and fell to the most passionate and sexual loving that surpassed even their own dreams. The caravans steamed. The young writhed upon each other. The leathery skin of those gypsies old and long travelled softened like apples in October and filled the air with the fruitful scent of remembered Indian summer. Whether the gypsies were dead or dying, they could not be sure. Whether this was the hereafter or they were being granted a final night of loving on the farthermost edge of life seemed equally likely, and they did not question it.

Their grandchildren would pause there to allow the story its own room in the minds of those who listened. And then, at last, they would tell its outcome, how the sheets of snow over the gypsies’ heads had been melted by body heat. The sweat that dropped through the floorboards of the caravans made a river in that mountain pass and carried the snow away upon it. Then when the temperature inside the caravans grew too great, the canvas had been thrown back and the green world revealed. They had survived, and when their bodies cooled and they put on their clothes and looked away from each other with low abashment, there remained the feeling that Finbar Foley had saved them. He walked along the line of them and shook each by hand and kissed them. Then he told them that without horses they could take only the best caravan and that each should put within it what was most precious and the men would take turns pulling it back down the mountain into France.

So they left there, walking out of the blizzard in the cold of dawn, a ramshackle collection of gypsies pulling a single caravan toward the dream of spring. At their head was Finbar Foley, and on the seatboard of the caravan sat the mer-girl Cait, pregnant at last with Foley twins.

7

Francis Foley and Teige and the young girls Deirdre and Maeve were similarly journeying. They crossed the open green land of Tipperary in the mild weather that followed the snow. The girls sat mute and impassive on the cart, and behind them at a small remove followed the O’Connor dog. When the cart slowed, so did the dog. When it stopped, the dog stood in arrested pose and watched from a short distance and then sat upon the grass verge of the ditch to wait. The young girls did not pay it any heed and seemed themselves, whether by sympathy, grief, or chance, to have acquired their mother’s dumbness. They stared at the road. They ate their food in a trance and were like creatures fallen from another world. Their eyes could not be met. When Teige brought them the bowl of their dinner and was careful to kneel to their level to speak in his softest voice, the girls’ eyes looked elsewhere. In the night Francis told Teige in whispers that they must expect it would take time. They were lying in a field on the blankets they had brought from the O’Connor house. The night sky was starless and the darkness falling in a fine mist. For an hour each had lain there awaiting sleep, listening to the small noises of the night and hearing the dog sneaking closer in the dark.

“It will be a while,” Francis said.

Teige lay and did not move. He was trying to understand how his father knew in the dark that he was not sleeping.

“Yes,” he said at last.

It was a conversation like that, fragments of speech and response separated in the dark sometimes by pauses so long as to make each statement seem the end or beginning, or the inconsequential ramblings of the last awake.

“Those girls will come through it, though.”

The old man paused. His voice was low and edged with desperation. Teige heard him swallow nothing. The soft rain fell on them. In the dark the dog arrived at the cart where the girls were sleeping.

“They seem like birds,” Teige said, “stunned and fallen down in the grass. Why will they not say anything?”

The sky was moonless and the world seemed lost and without light.

“They will,” Francis said after a time. “They will come through.

“They will,” he said after another moment.

Teige said nothing. He knew his father was speaking not only of the girls, but of the terrible plight of orphans that weighed on him, filling the space about him with memories. Where were his other sons? Where was Finan gone? Had he really killed that man? Where were Finbar and the gypsies? What corner was Tomas vanished into, and why had he not returned? Where, oh where was Emer?

“We will give care to them,” the old man said when he had recovered. “We will bring those girls with us to this island, Teige. Yes. We will.”

If he said more, Teige did not hear him, for he fell asleep even as the dog claimed its place on the cart between the two girls and lay with low moans, hunting in its dreams the ghosted scent of its vanished master.

In the morning they moved on again and the dog resumed its place a little ways behind. Teige drove the pony and cart and the two O’Connor girls sat upon it still like the daughters of Lot. The Foleys crossed the Shannon at a bridge and made their way across the County Limerick and into Clare. Sometimes the road they travelled gave way to such mud that the pony could not pull through it and Teige and Francis both had to pull and push, making slow progress with the girls useless to help and the dog watching from the ditch. The farther west they travelled, the higher the mud on the axle of the wheels.

In the late afternoon they came upon a farmer with a black cow in the road. In that season before the beginning of new grass, he was allowing her the poor grazing of the ditch outside his fields. Francis called to him a greeting, and the man acknowledged him with the kind of low-voiced circumspection that seemed habitual there. When he could no longer avoid conversation the farmer asked them where they were going. The old man told him they were heading to the town of Kilkee in the west to see if there was news of his eldest son. The farmer nodded. He placed his hand on the backside of his cow. The cow did not move. She was thin and pregnant and exhausted. The farmer moved his mouth about as if trying to find some difficult word there. He looked over the ditch at the wet fields. He said a sound that was not a word, and then at last brought himself to ask them if they wanted food that night.

They ate in a small cottage that was unlit by any lamp even after darkness fell. There was a shadowy gloom there to which their eyes became accustomed. The woman of the house was robust looking with greying curls that fell down her cheeks. There were the shapes of a half dozen children standing. The O’Connor girls sat amongst them on a bench and ate the potatoes and potato bread and winter cabbage and drank the buttermilk but did not speak. The farmer did not speak either and only made low, guttural noises of response when Francis addressed him. His wife answered instead. She seemed lightened by their company, and it was apparent that the dour farmer had invited the Foleys there as a peace offering against some earlier argument with his wife. He had brought them to disprove his meanness, though he would not burn a lamp.

“You’re like people who’ve seen a lot,” the woman said. “I’ve seen no place but this parish and not even the farthest ends of that.” She glared down the table at her husband, who did not raise his eyes to her.

“We’ve seen enough,” Francis said. “But few places with the charity and welcome of your house.” He looked over at where she was standing by the deal dresser in the darkness. He nodded to her his thanks and was not sure if she saw him or not. The children who were standing along the length of the table had finished eating and were waiting to see what their father might leave on his tin plate. The youngest of them was aged about four. Teige watched as the man sopped milk in a semicircle with the butt of his potato bread. There was a half of it left. He sopped the milk thrice and ate it. Then he took the second half of the butt and circled the hollow of the plate again, although it seemed already dried. This too he mouthed. Then he stood up, stepped back, and went from the cottage. The children scrambled forward amidst the shouts of their mother and found of the nothing he had left crumbs and flakes of food not enough to nourish mice but small trophies to them as they fell at each other and toppled noisily onto the ground. The O’Connor girls watched this in some alarm at first, and Teige saw their faces and motioned them not to be worried. Then the mother of all those children assured the girls too and watched not without glee or pride as that mob of hers, boys and girls alike, tussled and squirmed and cursed and were general entertainment. A short time after, the farmer came to the door. His face was twisted like a rag.

“Come,” he said, “now.”

The Foleys and the eldest boy followed the farmer to the cabin. There a lamp had been lit. On a damp bed of mucked rushes the exhausted black cow was labouring. The farmer held the light high and they each saw the shine of her, the gloss of effort leaking out through her hide. Her eyes were wild and the pull and blow of her breath uneven and rasping like some faulty mechanics. The farmer hung the lamp on the wall, then brought up from the ground a length of thick rope.

“She won’t do,” he said to none of them in particular. “You’ve pulled a calf?” he asked Francis Foley.

“I have, and many, but she’s not ready.”

“She’ll die.”

“She won’t,” Francis said.

“She’s older than that boy,” the farmer said, nodding toward Teige. “We’ll pull her now.”

He ran his hand along the back of the old cow, but in her terror and hunger and weakness she frighted and turned sharply in the byre and knocked the farmer sideways against the wall. He cursed her with a kind of exaggerated violence, then stepped forward again and this time thrashed at her with the rope like a whip. He made connection to her backside only twice and she bucked and moved in a quick-trot directly at them. The boy jumped in against the stone wall of the cabin. Teige was pushed by his father sideways and felt the side of the cow against him as she passed. She reached the far wall and moaned. Then she bellowed loudly and arched her great head and roared once more. Pig squeals came from the next cabin over. The farmer strode up and whipped at her again. He shouted at her to stop that and be quiet, but she was still not finished bellowing and had her face now against the old door.

“Don’t, she’ll push the door out. Wait!” Francis called, but the farmer was not to be deprived of his chance to whip her again. The rope flew back and was in midcurve high in the air when Francis stepped up and grasped the farmer and held him hooped in his arms. The man wriggled and cursed and tried to stamp on the other’s foot, but he could not break free, and the son, watching, allowed a crooked smile to slide over his mouth as though at a circus.

“Let me off!” the farmer shouted, but Francis Foley held him and kept him there imprisoned and told Teige to see to the cow.

Teige moved forward with his hands out wide and whispered sounds.

He said over and over words that sounded like a sea.

The cow had her back to him. The place where she had been whipped had welted in two clean lines. Still Teige whispered the sea until it was all about them and the farmer in Francis Foley’s arms quietened. Teige was next to her now, and the noise he made became instead a low moan that was almost unvoiced and sourced in some deeper part of his insides below his larynx. He came about until he was before her, then licked his fingers and held them out and touched them against her foamed mouth. And she did not back away. The old cow stood in the low light with Teige putting his fingers inside her mouth and moving them within her mucus. The boy gasped at it. The farmer remained quiet. He watched as though at a dream. Then Teige licked his other fingers and, after withdrawing one hand, slid the other there, and the cow puzzled on them and turned her tongue upon them. Then Teige withdrew his moist hand and brought it down her back and softly inside her. He was knelt on the rushes, his head against her steaming flank and a hand inside her. She stood still some moments, her mouth working as though at the memory of her mother’s udder. Then, very slowly, Teige moved his weight down along her and pressed his right hand deeper inside to feel for the calf. Sharp smacking sounds of suction and fluid escaped. She stood for him. His arm was lost inside her now and was vanished up to his elbow. The others watched his face in the lamplight for signs of what he found. But for a time they could not tell, and Teige said again the sound of the sea and the low moans which spoke only to the cow. Blood and a heavy blackish stuff leaked there. The cow groaned. The boy’s face was a white moon against the wall. Teige turned his hand inside her and twisted his elbow around until it was facing the thatch. Then back again. A spasm travelled through her. She lifted her left hind leg and made a tiny kicking flick at nothing. A foamy sweat rose in separate places on her black hide. Then Teige began to withdraw his arm from inside her. He did so in slow stages, waiting and then pulling, easing his way from the depth of her as his arm came back out into the lamplight with skeins of blood flecked upon it and a transparent film of membrane. His arm withdrew as far as his wrist and then stopped.

“How is she, Teige?” Francis asked him.

“Backward. But she’s here now.” And again he made the sound of the sea. And while he was making it he withdrew his hand another piece and the bone white tips of the calf’s hind hooves appeared where they had pierced through. The farmer went to step forward.

“No, wait.” Francis Foley’s hand was on his shoulder. “You’ll start her. Teige knows. Wait.”

Teige’s bloodied hand was free in the air and the calf’s legs were out as far as the shins.

“Now, quickly,” Teige said, “or the hip will lock and the calf will die.” And before another minute had passed his father and the farmer and the farmer’s son had come and the rope had been secured over the hooves and the calf pulled free onto the rushy floor. Teige bent to blow in its nostrils. The black cow turned her head and made a moaning. Francis moved his hand on her swollen udder until the beistings came and Teige and the farmer lifted the calf upright in the world for the first time. It stood and toppled like a thing of sticks. Now its forelegs were fixed solid and its hind buckled, and now the opposite. It tottered and was for a time like an imperfect creation. The men came and steadied it and held its mouth in place, where at first it would not suck. Milk squirted and oozed out over it. Driblets ran across the calf’s mouth but not into it. Teige had to slip his thumb in the side of the mouth and accustom the tongue and wait until the calf discovered sucking and could then have the hand-warmed teat wedged in its mouth.

The men stood back. In the yellowy light of the lamp they watched with the same mute reverence as was since time began. The calf milked at the mother and twice pushed its head quickly against the bulge of her udder for more.

“Tell your mother we have a heifer calf,” the farmer said. His son nodded and ran out. Still the two men and Teige stood. Teige’s clothes were wet and stained. His father looked at him and had to blink his eyes then for the power of pride that coursed through him. Then he looked up at the old timbers of the roof and the thatch as though seeing through them and beyond into the heavens and the stars.

When the cabin door opened, the woman of the house appeared and she looked at the calf and the black cow and said, “Well, ye did well and thanks due to these strangers.” She smiled briefly at her husband, and he made a timid return of the same. Then she looked at Francis and Teige, and in the stillness of the cabin the intake of her breath was audible. She saw them for the first time in the light.

“It’s yourself again,” she said.

Francis turned to her. Her face showed she was astonished.

“You,” she repeated.

“You have seen me before?”

“Yes. Only you were younger. Four days ago or so, wasn’t it? On the road.” She stopped suddenly and became thoughtful; her hands came to her mouth and pulled at her lower lip.

“Perhaps it was a man like me?” said Francis, and he came forward excitedly and took the lamp from the wall and held it next to his face.

“I’d swear it was you. You came along the road and you stopped at the door begging. You had that woman. She was out by the wall beyond.”

“It was my son,” Francis said in a low whisper. “We are searching the country for him. Tell me.”

“I gave him bread and some grease of the goose and some small potatoes and a jar of buttermilk. He was thin. The woman beyond was coughing. I could hear her all the time he stood there. He took the things. He had a way of looking that said how sad he was to be begging there. I would have offered him a place for the night, but I knew himself didn’t like me to. He hates me thinking good of them as passes on the road, and I know it is only misfortune that separates them from us. So I didn’t offer and he went off and the woman coughing with him and I heard them like that some way down the road and I inside at the hearth. And when himself came in”—she nodded toward the farmer, who studied the ground—“we took to shouting at each other. I told him I would be gone the road and leave the children to him if he didn’t invite the next beggars he met to come and eat with us. And them was you and your other son today” She stopped and drew breath and looked at the calf. “And see what good you’ve done us.”

“He was thin?” Francis Foley asked her at last.

“He was.”

“But he was well?”

“I couldn’t say that. I thought after he might have signs on him of whatever the woman had in her chest. His eyes, they…” She paused and watched the effect of the news on the two strangers and then nodded. “I am sorry for ye.”

The farmer joined her. “Yes, we are sorry for ye.”

Francis stood absorbed in his grief. If, in some other world, his flesh had been laid out and examined for the evidence of loss and regret, there would be apparent at that instant the running and deepening of wrinkles. He aged as the knowledge twisted into him like thorns.

“How many days?” Teige said. “How many days ago that you saw him?”

“Three, maybe four.”

“Think!” Francis boomed, and the black cow shuddered a step away.

The woman pulled at her lip. “What day have we? Yes, it was the day after Sunday last, I’d say.”

“Three days so?”

“Yes.”

“Which way did they go on the road?”

“West,” she said. “Making slow progress now, I’d say.”

“Teige, get the girls ready,” Francis said. “We’ll go now.” He turned to the woman. “Thank you,” he said, and swiftly went out into the dark and began preparing the cart and the pony.

A half an hour later, with Deirdre and Maeve O’Connor sitting on the front of the cart and a portion of a killed goose and a bundle of potatoes and hens’ eggs and two winter cabbages on the back, the Foleys left. The farmer and his wife and children watched them under the held high lamp. They knew there was nothing to say and witnessed their departure as though such haste and desperation were familiar and had often been reenacted in the history of that country. Francis Foley nodded to them a final time and told Teige to cluck the pony, and they hurried westward, down the road under a thin light of few stars.

8

They went westward in the dark with the old man hastening ahead in a kind of soft-footed jogging that slowed and sped up continuously like a faltering engine of hope. The slap of his old boots on the road was a doleful music. Teige drove the cart and the dog followed some paces behind. The dawn opened before them and in the pale glow of its first light the father peered at all shapes and shadows that lay down the road as if each one might be the figure of his eldest son. They crossed the soft ground of the County Clare. They passed through the town of Ennis when it was still sleeping and its ghosted narrow streets echoed with the hoof clops of the white pony. The Foleys looked up at the curtained windows of the hotel, the shuttered boardinghouses and the open doorless entranceway of the poorhouse, but they did not stop or make enquiry. They heard low groans and whimperings that escaped in slumber through the crevices of old buildings.

The dampness of the streets and the stone houses were like a cold purgatory and Francis Foley quickened his pace and passed quickly on. He knew his son was not there. He jogged on in boots torn with soles flapping. The rags of his coat fluttered. His long hair was plastered awry with sweat and rain and showed the bald places of his scalp like islands. Teige offered him his place on the cart, but the old man declined. It was as if he imagined he were being guided now on the trail of Tomas, as if he alone knew which turns on the road to take and knew not by logical reason but by an inner prompting that would reunite him with his own flesh. Teige did not argue. He saw the look in his father’s face, the sunken hollows beneath his eyes and the fixed, locked mouth, and knew the old man’s resolve was not to be questioned, that for him it was a kind of repentance and a journeying toward forgiveness.

Rain fell and stopped and fell again, as if such weathers were features of the geography. They went northward from the town and turned west at a crossroads and trekked through the wild open bogs and bleak land of Cill Maille. There by a place that might have been called Misery or Desolation were the grey waters of Loch na Mine, the lake with no bottom where water sprites lived. Frances stopped and held his right hand against his chest and was sucking at the air when the cart arrived up behind him.

“We can stop here awhile,” he said, his breast rising and falling as if about to release something.

“Are you all right?” Teige asked him.

“Feed the girls, water the pony,” the old man said, and slumped to the ground.

They ate some of the goose then and the girls went to waterside for their privacy and returned and sat again mute upon the cart. Teige brought the pony to drink. The dog moved in a low crouching manner closer to the smells of meat. Before they were ready to leave she was eating from Teige’s hand.

“They cannot be far now,” the old man said. He looked through the rain at the emptiness of the road.

“You think they—”

“I do.” The old man raised his head so his thin neck was extended, then he scratched at it as if deliberating a distance. “We will find them today, Teige,” he said, and did not say aloud, “Or never.”

There was a still pause then in that eerie brown place of bogland and drizzle. The emptiness of the road made small their hearts. They said nothing. Waterfowl plashed in the lake and moved the time forward until the father finally stood and they left once more.

They drove on down through the townlands of Barsaile and Glean Mor and Cluain I Gulane. When they arrived in the village of Cill Mhicil it was late afternoon of the fair day there. Polyps of dung lay cooling in the street. Bootless boys in brown rags stood herding groups of two or three cattle while their fathers had adjourned elsewhere. The cattle were watchful and skittish and young, and when the Foleys passed them they made small, panicked movements and had their sides tapped by the boys’ sally rods. There were curt cries and sharp commands. In the yards, horses were tethered and raised their heads, dripping drinking water, when the Foleys passed. Farther down the village, carts with old horses stood and the men eyed the strangers furtively from beneath their caps. They studied the white pony and chewed in the hollow of their cheeks and awaited what trouble might brew. They did not let their eyes meet those of the Foleys. They did not show any sign of welcome or wonder or even of noticing that they were there. Instead, as if out of some inherited sense of distrust of anything they did not know, they leaned against one of the eating houses there and looked at each other’s shoulders and waited.

Francis Foley walked up to them.

One of them thought he was going to be struck and took two quick steps back. Francis Foley was ragged and worn thin and wild looking. The dirt of the road was creased in his face. When he went to speak he felt his lips blistered along the insides.

“I am looking for a man,” he said.

The group of four men heard him but said nothing. One of them offered a hint of a noise and a small nod.

“I am looking for my son,” Francis said to them, this time in a louder voice and taking a step closer. Behind him Teige stopped the cart in the street. The men looked past the old man as though suddenly he were invisible. None of them wanted to speak, preferring the comfort of feigned ignorance, until one with a screwed eye called out:

“Will you sell the pony?”

“What’s the matter with ye? Are ye deaf or stupid?” Francis said.

One of them looked down at his boots, another made a quick grin and grinned it away down the road the strangers had come.

“We’re neither,” the screwed eye said. “I’ll give you a price for the pony.”

“Have you seen a man and a woman walking down this road today?”

“We’ve seen many.”

The men murmured a sound that was not quite laughter. Their shoulders swayed with the signs of the day’s drinking upon them.

“My son and a woman. That’s who I’m seeking.”

“For some trouble, is it?” said the screwed eye.

“For no trouble. For his good. The last he saw me I was drowned.”

“And a sight cleaner then,” the eye said to his companions, who laughed.

“If you give me the price of the pony there, I’ll tell you,” he said.

“The pony is not for sale,” Francis said.

“I have a fine few laying pullets there and a banbh,” said the eye, and touched the peak of his cap sideways to obscure his other.

“God bless you, but you’re thicker than the floor of the cart.” Francis stepped up and elbowed past them, entering the eating house at their back while they followed him, grinning and nudging as if about to witness a performance.

In the obscure light he could make out shapes of men there and sticks and the outward thrust of their legs on the mud floor. A noise of spoons rattling in earthenware bowls and the smell of potatoes with butter and milk met him.

“I am looking for a man and a woman,” he announced. “It is my son, and I am certain he came through here. Has anyone seen him? He is with a woman and she is ailing, I’m told.”

The spoons paused. Amid the smells of cooked food rose the heated stench of farmers and their drovers. Some scratched themselves in wait and unleashed the scent of old urine from their trousers. Francis heard their breathing labouring in the dark, but none answered.

Finally a woman at the counter said: “There was a man with a woman passed through here no more than a few hours ago.”

“West?”

“Toward the ocean,” she said.

He could not even see her face. “Thank you,” he said. Then he was gone from there and called to Teige that Tomas was indeed ahead of them not far and that they would catch him before dark if they hurried. Teige clucked and snapped the reins, and Francis jogged ahead of them out the end of that village and into the light that was falling into the sea. They took the road west toward Crioch, meaning “End,” along the open country of no tree or bush where the fields themselves were winter combed by Atlantic breeze. It was a road Teige had travelled with the gypsies once before. It was the road that ran through the village of Doonbeg and on to the curved strand of Kilkee. The white pony seemed to recognize it and opened her stride on the road as if just ahead of her were the figure of her first love, the vanished gypsy boy Mario. She galloped now and raced next to the old man so that he reached out and held on to the leathers and was sped on like that. The pony’s eyes were wide and showed their whites; her mane fluttered in the breeze. Upon the cart the two small girls, Deirdre and Maeve, clung to each other. The road flashed past. Hares in the field stopped dead and listened. The seabirds circled. Then, there it was.

A figure on the road.

But it was not Tomas. It was too tall.

Even knowing this, the father shouted out. He let go of the pony, and Teige reined her to a walk as the old man ran on, calling out and waving his arms. The figure that was like the figure of a giant stopped. It turned slowly, then, the way one might in a dream, and Francis Foley and Teige saw at once that there on the road to Kilkee was the aged and burdened figure of Tomas, carrying on his back the skeletal, fevered body of the woman Blath.

9

Tomas Foley had aged and was thin and weakened. The woman he carried on his back had shortened and curved him, and though he put her down carefully on the side of the road, he could not stand up straight to meet his family. He had been carrying her for so long that the skin across his shoulders was callused. When he turned to look at Teige and his father, he was not sure if they were phantoms. He blinked beneath his fair curls and passed a hand across his brow.

“Tomas,” his father said, and then said no more, for he had stepped forward and embraced his son and his heart broke to feel the thinness of him in his arms. They held each other and were still and wordless there in the road. Teige watched them and the girls in the cart watched too and the dog turned its head. Then Tomas stepped back and let out a groan, and he held out his hand to Teige and then clung to him.

“Teigey,” he said into the side of his brother’s neck, “I’m sorry.” They held each other tightly and shook with emotion. “I meant to come back to you,” Tomas said, but did not release his hold. The sea sang down the cliffs to the west. Gulls buckled in flight in the sky. The three Foleys did not move, as if afraid that any step would separate them again and this time forever. They stood in the road. In a fable they might have remained so, transformed through the release of all their regret and suffering into stones or petrified trees. They might even have chosen such a fate, for in a family that had journeyed so much already none could now think of moving. They were still as the fields.

At last Francis Foley broke the spell. He went over and introduced himself to the woman Blath lying on the ground.

“You are the famous father,” she said to him, and she smiled weakly and he could see that she was beautiful and that her beauty was ravaged through illness and fatigue. “He has spoken of you often.”

“You are welcome among us,” Francis said. “I hope he has not told you what a fool he had for a father.”

“Indeed he did,” said Blath. “But that father was drowned, you must be a new one.” She smiled again and there was in her expression such a tenderness that Francis saw at once how she loved his son.

“That’s just what I am,” he said, “a new one.” And he was stopped from further speech for she started coughing then, and in a swift movement he bent and picked her up and carried her to the cart.

They did not tell their stories then. They embraced again and looked at each other and stood back, and then Teige shouted out cries of victory and threw his hands in the air.

“Tomas is back! Tomas is back!” he cried, and made the others laugh at his manner as he jumped up and punched at the air. Tomas went over and climbed upon the cart; he told the O’Connor girls his name and they nodded slightly and Teige told him they were Deirdre and Maeve.

“And this is still your gypsy pony?” Tomas said.

“It is,” his brother told him. “It surely is.”

“Finan and Finbar?” Tomas asked, but knew the moment their names reached the air that there was an answer already in their absence.

“Later,” the father said. His eyes were wet. He made motions with his mouth before speaking as if afraid to dare the words. “We are going to see our new home now.”

And Teige handed Tomas the reins and went ahead and walked with his father leading the pony forward.

10

This is the story that Teige and his father heard of what happened to Tomas. They did not hear all of it at once. But some of it they heard that first night when the Foley cart had arrived at the seashore and Francis Foley had walked down to the edge of the country and stood alone a long time with his face to the sea. They heard it when he returned to the small fire Teige had built of sticks of ash and thin faggots scavenged from the fields nearby. They heard it while the wind played and they sat close to each other and even the two girls stayed awake with the dog taking turns in their laps. Tomas sat with the woman Blath lying curled and small beside him. As he told it, his hand sometimes travelled down the twist of her hair. She lay, her eyes open all the time, and her face like worn vellum shadow-creased and burnished in the movement of the flames. Tomas told them some of it that night, and stopped when it seemed the woman grew distressed or the fever in her made her moan and her teeth jabber though they piled their coats on her. He told some of his story that night and more the night after and again over each of the four nights they stayed there on the edge of the town of Kilkee.

He had gone back to Limerick that day long ago. He had ridden in along the banks of the Shannon River with his head low on the horse and his eyes watchful for bailiff and agent and constable. He had considered the situation. He knew that she was waiting for him. He knew too the life that she was living and that her waiting was secret and silent and existed only in the thin, insubstantial way of hope or prayer. Still he remembered a look in her eyes. He told Teige this. He said it looking into the starless sky when she was sleeping. There was a look in her eyes when he had told her that he loved her, he said, and that was all he saw that day riding back into the town of Limerick. He had no plan.

“No,” his father said, as though this were an inevitability of his birth.

Tomas had arrived back in the town in the evening. Rain was pouring down and the streets were mucked and the sewers ran like dark streams. Rats traversed the streets and carried leftovers from the stalls of the market. Apple cores, plumstones, flecks of potato skin, passed into the shadows. Tomas tethered his horse in the narrow alley behind the building where he knew Blath was. The rain fell. In his wet shirt his chest hammered. He said he tried to swallow hard, for it seemed he had bitten a huge apple and the piece of it was wedged in his throat. But there was no apple, he said. He went around the alley. When he approached the front door, he saw it was locked. He wanted to bang on it. But for once he knew he shouldn’t and crossed the street and waited. The curtains of the rooms upstairs were drawn poorly and frayed amber light showed. The rain threaded across it. There was the traffic of late gentlemen in their coaches passing up the street, there were dragoons in uniform cursing and laughing and kicking a bottle they had emptied. There were dogs that meandered night-eyed and low-snouted. So many dogs, he told them, dogs and rats and figures scurrying in the dark.

He waited a long time and none came out or in. He waited longer still. He struggled with doubt and dark imaginings, and when he could wait there no more he stepped into the rain and walked across the street up to the front door and banged on it like a hopeless emissary of love. He banged again. Then he heard the noise of calling from within and footsteps coming on the stairs. He was asked his name through the door, and he said, “I am Tomas Foley, I am here for Blath.” And the door opened and there was a man there of small stature with bald pate and whiskers and the smell of tobacco.

“She’s not here,” he said. His eyes were screwed near shut. He rocked on the balls of his feet as though a long time used to the sea.

“Where is she?”

“There’s another Blath,” he told Tomas, “there’s as many Blaths as you want, eh?”

Tomas hit him then and the man fell back against the banister and his eyes opened wide for the first time and he rolled himself quickly to one side and stood with the swaying motion of a boxer, though Tomas was nearly twice his size. He fisted at the air and made short jabs of no import as Tomas advanced upon him.

“Where is she?” he asked again.

The man did not say, and Tomas reached across his fists and lifted him and flung him against the wall. He followed him across the hallway and pulled him like a sack upward until the man’s eyes were somewhere below his chin. He held him there and asked him again where she was. The man shook his head in quick motion as though his head were preparing to spin off. Then Tomas broke his arm. The man’s screams brought an old woman to the top of the stairs. She held a candle and peered down at them. Her eyes were painted. Her hair was loose and those strands she possessed at the sides of her head were brushed outward by intent or accident and lent to her the weird air of one grotesquely masked. She shouted for them to get out in the street. Tomas asked the man again as he held him against the wall, and this time he heard that she was gone, that all the girls were gone to the house of Lucius Stafford, cousin of the baronet. He heard the news but did not comprehend it. He stood a moment staring into the face of the man. The man, fearing for his other arm, said the name again and told him where the place was.

When Tomas left there it was the middle of the night. The rain was still falling. He found his horse and rode out into the darkness to the south. His progress was slow. The rain blew in his face and the moonlight was lost to him. He had been told where the house was and so went there with the single purpose of getting Blath back. He was not thinking of the other girls or who they might be or in what engaged. He was gifted the naive vision of the lovelorn and experienced such a simplified view whereby the only significant measure in the world was the straight line between lover and loved. He rode on, an absurd servant of forgotten chivalry or one bearing lit candelabra through the falling rain. He arrived at the house before dawn and saw its candlelit windows as he came upon the curve of the avenue. It was a tall house. Its chimneys smoked the scent of oak wood. Next to it, a smaller lodge nestled in the trees. Tomas tied off the horse and crept up across the lawns in the rain. When he reached the house, he knelt and looked in the window and thought he had arrived by some magic inside a painting.

“I could not believe it at first,” he told them. “I could not understand it.” For there inside the long room were naked statues of women. There were a dozen or so of them. They were as like real as could be imagined. Yet they did not move. They were set about on alabaster podia through the room in a series of poses, some bearing fruits, some holding a hand out in frozen invitation, some covering modestly with draped arm or fingers their bosom or sex. It was not until he saw Blath there with flowers in her arms in the pose of Persephone that Tomas knew for sure that they were not statues. Then he saw Lucius Stafford in the gown of a Roman emperor with a garland of leaves about his head and three others similarly attired. They moved among the goddesses. Lucius led a pair of fawn bullish dogs like mastiffs on a rope of red velvet. They passed down along the figures there. They laughed and made comments on each and restrained themselves to resume their performance and seem imperial. The goddess Diana holding a wooden bow wavered in her place, and one of the men whipped at her with a tasselled cord.

“I saw no more,” Tomas said. “I went down and broke the lock of the small lodge there. And I made a brand of a handle and cloth wrapped about it and I laid it in the ashes until it was alight. Then I came up the lawn to the big house and crashed in the glass and stepped in with the fire.”

Screams and glass shattering and the barking of the dogs and the astonished cry of Lucius Stafford announced him. The emperor raised his hand as though to call forth bolts of lightning. His companions held up theirs as if to hold firm the beautiful reality of the women in their power, but the goddesses had leapt down and were running naked in all directions. Tomas waved the firebrand in zigzag and briefly marked the air as he walked forward. The Romans backed away. They called out for him to stop. He struck the face of one of them with the burning wand and he fell writhing to the ground. Then he saw across the room that Blath had seen and recognized him and was standing there with her arms across herself, unsure of whether to stay or run. And the room was suddenly full of people and the firebrand was wrestled from him and fell on the carpet and spread flame. There were two men on his chest. There was another struck him in the ribs with a wooden baton. Smoke was thick. Flames ate up the curtains. Tomas could no longer see Blath or any of the women. He cried out her name. He kicked aside one who came at him low and saw the man’s head twist sharply back as though the neck were broken. Then from behind he was hit with the blow of a poker and the room spun sideways and he fell senseless to the floor.

“When I awoke I was in Limerick gaol,” he said.

He said it in a whisper to his father in the small hours when the others were sleeping and the sea sighed in rhythm as though rocking the world.

“They had me there as a robber.” He felt his wrists when he told it, and Francis Foley saw the marks of irons on them. “I was I don’t know how long in a place dark and wet no bigger than half the cart. It was a place of nothing. No bench, no bed, nothing. I stood in my own shit. I cold not see my hand. I was in a place like under the world. Once in the day they slid back the hatch and threw in what I was to eat and it landed in the dirt many times until I learned to listen for it coming. There was a silvery kind of light for a moment then. Then it was gone. That was how I knew it was another day passed. I counted them then. When I had counted a hundred I thought it was forever. I thought they would release me. They would come any minute. But they did not. I began to count again. I tried to count each minute of each day and fell asleep standing and fell down along the wall and woke with my face in muck and counted again.”

Tomas stopped. They gazed dimly at the night sky awhile.

“There were four hundred and thirty-seven days like that in that darkness and dirt,” he said when he started again.

“Oh God,” the old man said. “Oh God.” Teige awoke then and listened without stirring.

“I thought,” Tomas said, “they had forgotten me, and I hammered on the door until my fists were numb. I beat my head against it. Still none came. I think they took days away and did not come at all, for sometimes I counted the day longer than it could have been. Or it was that my mind was wandering. I thought of Teige and the twins then with the gypsies. I thought of the white pony racing on the sands and how Teige would surely win. I thought of Blath and where she could be and did she know if I was living or dead. I tried sometimes to see the patterns of the stars in the blackness, but my mind failed me. I could tell rough seasons by the cold in the floor or how the smells thickened and rose. But the darkness, the darkness,” he said, “that is…”

His head bowed then and his shoulders curved. His father placed a hand upon his back. The sea sighed. They said no more that night. Teige closed his eyes tight and drifted uneasily to sleep.

What he told them the next evening was how one day without warning the footsteps approached and the hatch was not opened, the door was. Two men reached in and lifted him out of the cell.

“I did not seem myself to myself,” he said, “so weak was I. I could not walk. I was a flake of Tomas. I was bone with flesh fallen off it. They dragged me from under my armpits. My feet scraped and bled on the stones. They bore a lantern that burned my eyes and I hung my head and saw the nakedness and dirt of myself passing down that place that was like a sewer beneath the gaol. I tried but could not talk. My mouth was sores, my tongue like that in a leather boot. When I reached the stairs I felt the light on the crown of my head hurting. When I got to the top I discovered I was near blind in this eye,” he said, pointing his finger to it.

“As they took me down along the corridor, another in chains passed me going toward my cell below. He flinched when he saw me. I heard his irons shake and the sounds of struggle as they beat him forward. I was thrust on, dragged by my gaolers and brought at last to a large hall with barred gates and iron bars from floor to roof. Inside were maybe three hundred men and women. They clamoured toward the gate when the gaolers approached and were threatened back with lashings and the beating of batons on the bars. I was thrown in there then. The gates were locked and the gaolers went away.

“I lay on the ground. There were high, barred windows. The daylight hurt me. I curled there and did not know if I was to live or die. Then the people came about me. They were beggars and thieves and rebel men and ones caught without means. The women were to be in separate quarters, but all these were filled and so they were brought here to that large gaol instead and were to wait until such space became open to them. Some were there without trial or judgement other than the wishes and say-so of their landlords or some other one. They saw how I was and clothed me with abandoned rags. They carried me back toward the wall where the ground was driest, for the light passed there each day. The women sat me then on cloths they had made themselves of their own rags. One touched water on my lips. I thought I fell in dreams then. I thought I lost the world and slipped into imagining, for before me then I saw Blath.

“I thought one eye was blind and the other saw dreams. But she was small and bent down and was near to me and I smelled her and her fingers touched on the place on my forehead that was bruised and bloodied from beating on the door. And it was her.”

They were seated again by the low fire beside the cart on the west coast of Clare. When he said her name Tomas looked to where Blath was now sleeping. He had thought that if they did not move for some days, her health might recover, but as she lay her breaths came in broken parcels and her body still shivered beneath their blankets and coats.

“It was her,” Tomas said.

“She had been brought there after the fire in Stafford’s house. Some had told against her and said that I had come to kill him because of her, and so she was brought in without trial in the night and thrown in the gaol and forgotten there. For one year she did not know if I was living. She hungered, she grew ill, and her feet swelled. They had called for the surgeon of that place for her. Farley, his name was, a man big in the stomach. He came there sometimes and ate with the captain. I saw him. He passed the gates of our gaol with a cloth over his mouth. The guards took Blath to him. They laid her on a table there and he looked at her feet and he cut them then.”

The wind came up from the sea and was bitter at their eyes and lips.

“He bled her to release the swelling. They told me he swayed with the wine of his dinner. He cut too forcefully and severed the backs of her heels.”

Tomas cupped his hands before his face and bit on his two thumbs. He stayed like that until his voice was steadied.

“When I saw her, she could no longer walk. She had to drag herself on the ground.

“The fool, she called me. ‘There’s my fool for love.’ Those were her words. And she lay in against me and the others stepped away and left us so in that corner of the gaol where the light sometimes fell.

“She made me well. I wish with all my might I could have made her so, too. But Farley had destroyed her. She was in and out of fevers then, agues, her blood froze. Sometimes her teeth chattered so that I wedged my fingers in her mouth to hold her jaw. She recovered a day, then fell hysterical the next and kicked at night robbers she saw coming in dreams to cut off her feet. I thought to myself she would die there. I thought, She will die if she does not get outside this place again. And I thought of escape. As she could not walk, I carried her around the great room of our gaol on my back. I made myself strong. In the dark I dreamed of every way to get out of there. The walls were thick stone. The barred window was high, and even if the bars were gone, she could not climb to it. My mind knotted like a cord with it. I thought all the day and every day and still could not think of a way to get her out of there. I spoke with others who were there. Many were not guilty of more than small crimes. Some had come from the petty sessions in Ennis where they said the gaol was three times filled and the stench of shit and fever hung like a brown cloud. There was a father and son who had been convicted of killing a bullock out of hunger. They were being taken to Dublin and sent from there by ship to Australia.

“We lived four months on rye bread and water. Then the bread itself was rationed. We were given half of what we had been. We were told no reason. Some of the men grew wild and angry. Hunger made them fierce. Then, when the guards came to take a Mrs. Doherty who had died, the prisoners rushed at them. In that,” Tomas said, and clicked his fingers, “the guards’ necks were broken. Then we were all pushing forward like a wave and I lifted Blath and put her on my back and we raced forward down the stone hall and one of the men had the guards’ keys and opened the great gates and there was pistols fired behind us. Some fell. I did not look back. We made the wall. The daylight was soft to us and the air fresh and we were dizzy with it. We had forgotten what air smelled like. But we pushed on. Then the outer gates were opened and we were pouring out of there with the guards following. There were more shots and calls and screams. But I ran on and Blath crouched low on my back, like a jockey, Teige,” he said, “eh? And there were many recaptured. There were. But we were a great crowd and they could not take all of us and we scattered like insects do from beneath a lifted stone. I made it to the river and we stayed there among the bushes until dark.

“In the night then I carried her away. I thought of you, Teige. I thought, Teigey thinks I am dead now. I must find him. But Blath could not travel far and we were slow and had no food. The days passed us by. I could not go even to see if you were there. I sent prayers for you. I came on the workings then where the men were put making the roads and I took work there so as to have food. We slept in a cabin where the thatch was partial. I made the road above Newmarket, lifting stones and breaking more of them. Then I thought, Teige is not there anymore. He is gone from there. You will never find him. Stay here now and do this work and she might recover. I thought God might smile on me. And when that road was built there was another. And another. And we lived that way and had enough to keep death away. Until a week or so ago. Then the work was stopped and we were sent away. The hungry winter was over, the poor harvest of last year would not happen again, they said to us. Go back to your farms. And in the cabin where we were I looked at Blath and she was coughing a thick, clotted stuff and I said to her, ‘Now maybe we should go to the sea.’

” ‘The sea?’ she said. ‘My sweet fool.’

” ‘My father had wanted it long ago,’ I said to her, ‘and many say the air there cures the lungs.’ I did not tell her I wanted to be sure that you were gone from there, Teige. I did not tell her I was afraid that she would die.

” ‘The sea,’ she said. ‘I have never seen the sea. Let’s go there.’

“And so we left and were on this road where you found us.”

He finished his tale, and his father and his youngest brother sat hunched beside him. It was dark. The sky was immense with constellations and they glittered above them like things new. None of them spoke further. They looked away at the stars and past the stars. Down at the end of the fields the sea turned softly, like a restless spirit come home at last.

11

The morning of the next day the Foleys left and crossed the narrow peninsula of the County Clare from the coast of the Atlantic to the estuary of the Shannon River. Blath travelled on the cart between the two girls and lay wrapped in blankets. The road was not smooth and they journeyed slowly now, conscious of each jarring motion from pothole and stone. With the presence of the ailing woman the young girls seemed to find new connection to the world. She was not their mother, but she resparked within them some filial response that had seemed perished. To soften the road, they took her head upon their laps in turns. Then, on the road beyond Moyasta where the estuary appeared in mud and sand, they began without announcement to sing her a song. It was a slow air and might have seemed more mournful if not for the sweetness of the girls’ voices, which Teige and his father heard with some astonishment. They slowed the pony even more then and travelled rapt and lost in that music and their own meditations and dreams. When the air ended the girls sang another. Rooks in the flat fields seemed to quieten. Beyond the hedgerows a few thin cattle waited for drovers and fodder and hung their heads once more when the Foleys were nothing but that passing song on the breeze. And so they went on, like a caravan of exhausted minstrels in motley browns and greys: Francis, Teige, and Tomas all walking ahead and trying each in his own way to imagine a future that might repair the past.

They arrived in the market town of Kilrush in the failing light. There had been a horse fair and the streets were filled with its aftermath. Boys moved about with sticks and wore the air of men. Women disassembled wooden stalls on wheels and cried out at cats, dogs, and children. A pony and trap came with speed and the flickering of a long whip as a youth of fifteen made a show of recklessness and skill and galloped wildly past. Boys yahooed and ran after him. Some shabby genteel in ornate waistcoats and ragged jackets posed like men deserving of their idleness and studied the crowd. Others, beggars of all description, moved in broken file with hands out, offering prayers for pennies or food. Those who had abandoned even this slumped by the roadside as the sun went down.

Francis Foley walked the pony and cart through them all. He walked with his head erect and his nostrils drawing hard on the air as if to bolster a thin faith. It was over three years since he had left the monk. It was three years since he had seen the map with the island sketched upon it, and in that time he had often wondered if he had imagined it or it had been a ruse of the holy man’s to get him to leave the telescope. He wondered if the monk was dead. There were a dozen elements of chance spinning like glass balls in his mind. He shook his head at them. He realized suddenly the full weight of hope that pressed upon this moment. Here was to be their destination at last. Here was to be that home that would be theirs and for which he had set out so long ago and all but destroyed the family for whom he wished it. He walked down the streets of Kilrush to see if the future existed. He screwed his eyes tight and opened them again, and as he turned down Francis Street he kept his eyes low on his opened and broken boots. He watched them take each step of the road. He watched how they swung up into the air and fell again in that mindless way and how the soles flapped and the sores on his shins showed. He did not look up. He walked down toward the banks of the river. The girls had stopped singing. His sons did not speak. If the island were not there, he would will it into existence. He would rent the skies and call down new creation. He paced more slowly. He turned and brought them along by the shoreline. He let go the reins of the pony and Teige took them. The old man did not look up. He drew in the smell of that river that he knew now better than all the smells of his lifetime. The road beneath his feet turned to mud and sand, and at last he stopped. His head was bowed as before God.

“Tell me what you see,” he said.

The heaving of his breath and a little river breeze made uncertain his words.

“Tell me what you can see, boys,” he said again.

They looked. The dog came from the cart and stood at their feet.

“There is an island,” Teige told his father. “There is a green island.”

12

They sailed to that island the next morning in a narrow, canoelike boat that was made of canvas and coated in pitch. The boatman was a thin fellow with light gait who rode the rise and fall of the waves like a cork and kept his eyes on the horizon as though it were the drawn limit of the world. They were such a scene. Blath had to be carried on, and her boarding in the bobbing waters by the little jetty was itself an adventure. The two young girls had never been on the sea. When they understood what was to happen, they shook like paper dolls in the breeze and had to be cajoled and lifted by the brothers, during which they came more vividly alive and boarded the boat squealing and wriggling and kicking. It was only when they were aboard and the dog jumped to join them that they calmed and looked about and marvelled at the water over the side. Francis Foley had bartered with the boatman and left to him the pony and cart until such time as the old man could come and pay for the ferrying and reclaim what was theirs. The boatman was not much inclined to conversation. He shook his head at things he said only to himself. There were fragments muttered, disagreements, but to those listening there were only bits of language, phrases clipped short and left like the scissored lines of disparate letters.

“Iniscathaig? Scattery?” he had said, and nodded. Then, as he stood back and watched them lift Blath aboard, he had added, “Not that I believe it… oh no. Ha! Blessings and curses, says he, and that’s that.… Saint Senan himself never and—” He stopped abruptly then and said no more, and they were no more enlightened as he dipped oars and pushed off.

So, in one canoe then, with Teige looking backward at where the white pony was tethered on the dock, they sailed out into the swift current of the river. What had seemed flat slow murky water from the land soon became a slapping tide where the sea met the Shannon. They tossed upon it like a thing of little substance, and the two brothers thought of the last time they had seen that river with their father. Francis himself was standing in the bow. He knew that he was a man who would not drown. The day was cold and a wind cut across them as they pitched forward. For a time the island seemed to get no closer, though the boatman worked hard with his oars and kept his eyes fixed on the destination ahead. Still the island lingered there before them. It appeared for a time as though the current were uncrossable, that though they laboured they would never arrive and were held there in midwater in a vision at once tantalizing and purgatorial. The canoe lay low in the river. Water splashed and wet the girls and they cried out with glee and Blath held her arms around them. The boatman talked words to the fishes that sped beneath them and rowed on. Beyond the island, the coastline of the County Kerry seemed like another country. None of them considered it, so bound were they now on this small green place that Francis Foley had dreamed. Then, as though they had passed through an invisible portal in the tide, suddenly they were near enough to see the gulls walking on the pebbles of the shore.

Francis Foley cried out. He cried out and waved his arms and was in danger of falling overboard. His sons did not know what to do. Tomas shouted to him, but the old man kept it up and the girls shouted then too and the gulls rose off the shore and wheeled and screamed and beat their wings in the sky above them. Francis shouted out a long, wordless sound of no language that was greeting and announcement and victory. Then to the astonishment of all, he stepped out of the boat and made as though he could walk on the surface of the water.

Tomas reached forward to save him but was too late.

He stepped but was only up to his waist in the water, for they were in the shallows now. And then Francis walked up ahead of them out of the sea and was in his own mind a fabled discoverer arriving on shores untrammelled by the history of bitterness and betrayal that was his country’s. He walked up upon the pebbles and slowly turned around to look at those coming in the boat. He waded out to meet them and carried Blath in his arms. Teige and Tomas took one of the girls each upon their backs and went back again for the small bundles of their things. By the time they had laid the last of them on the coarse sand, the boatman had already turned the canoe and was rowing back toward the town.

They stood with slow comprehension. They had at last arrived at the place where they could live in safety and peace, and as this realization dawned Teige looked at Tomas and then smiled and laughed and his brother laughed too and the young girls ran about and skipped on the sand.

Then the old monk appeared.

He was there before any of them had seen him coming and seemed to have dropped from the sky. He did not look a day older than the last time Francis had seen him. He wore his brown cassock and his hands were concealed where they held each other inside the sleeves. In the moments when Francis first saw him, he thought the monk an apparition of his own conjuring. He stared at the monk and said nothing. Then he looked at the others to see that they too saw him. He felt lighthearted with their celebrations. His long body shivered without sensation of cold. The monk’s eyes were upon his and seemed of a piercing blue. His bare head was hairless and what grew at the sides of his temples was grey. When he spoke his voice was a warm, deep honey.

“Here you are at last,” the monk said.

The sound of his words made him real. Francis Foley’s mouth was agape.

“Yes, I can speak to you here. I knew you would come, but I did not think it would take so long.” The monk smiled and came forward among them, and his hands appeared. “These are your family,” he said, arriving before the astonished old man and holding out his hand to him in welcome. “I am very pleased to see you at last.” He stood smaller than all but the girls and reached and took the hand of the man in his and shook it firmly. “Welcome,” he said to Francis, “you are all very welcome.”

The brothers stood with the girls where Blath lay supported against a rock on the shore. They were speechless. The small waves lapped and dragged some pebbles back and forth in watery dance. Gulls arced overhead.

“Come,” the monk said then. “Let me help you. The place is not very much, but it is dry.”

And he gestured with his hand the way forward, and when they did not move he motioned again and led them himself up from the shoreline and along a track in the grass. For a small and older man he was nimble on his feet and sprang forward at times like one hurrying to show a rainbow. And the Foleys followed him, the girls skipping in the windy exposure of the sloping island, Tomas carrying as best he could the woman on his back, and Teige and his father loping behind. Happiness lit their faces. They passed up across the island, taking the green track and startling hares that darted and zigzagged away. The whole of the island could be seen then and the Shannon waters about it now grey, now blue, as the sun came and went in high, scudding cloud. The way took them through a stile in a stone wall, past tangles of hedgerow and briar and entwined woodbine in early leaf and led them to a tall, round tower of stone. Beside it were other small buildings, too.

“There were seven churches here,” the monk said cheerily over his shoulder as he strode on. “This is the place of Saint Senan,” he called out. “It is an ancient site, from before the days of the Vikings,” he added. “Now, here. In here.”

They entered into the shadows of the stone building of one room where a table and stools stood. In the corner lay a bed of straw.

“It need only be the beginning,” the monk said. The Foleys stood with slow comprehension. They looked at the stools as if to see the figures of themselves sitting there, but it lay beyond their imagining. The monk allowed them their bewilderment but added, “There are many stones, there can be other houses. And here, come, look.” He stepped outside again and this time Francis Foley was near to him and the monk pulled on the old man’s ragged sleeve slightly and led him in through the doorway of the tower as the others crowded behind like visitors to the House of Miracles.

And there in the centre, all gleam and polish and impossible perfection, stood the stolen telescope.