The Fall of Light

1

And so in the story of our family is explained how the Foleys came to live on the island called Scattery in the estuary of the Shannon River. Sometimes the story goes no further. Sometimes you are left to surmise, to consider how these people became yours, how your great-grandfather moved out of the stuff of fable, and how the threads of the story unwound and brought it across the Atlantic Ocean. But if the teller is an old man maybe sitting in a diner in Mount Kisco, New York, or speaking quietly in a corner of a living room when the relations are gathered after a funeral, the story spins seamlessly on and those Foleys do not fade into the dark.

Within twelve hours the monk was gone. By some secret prearrangement the boatman came back and the holy man sailed from the island when all were sleeping in the small light of the dawn. He left without explanation or farewell. He did not tell them why he had come there or why leaving. He did not narrate how he had been waiting alone for years on the island and how he had reasoned it a kind of penance between God and himself for sins of avarice and covetousness. He did not tell how his sojourn was a kind of exile from the holy is-land farther up the river, and that the appearance of Francis Foley there was a sign from above that he was forgiven and could return home. All of this the Foleys would only gradually discover in time from the stories told of the monk in the town of Kilrush. There, in time, they would learn of his arrival with the telescope and his taking the confession of the landlord McKean and how he had bargained with him some portion of salvation for the rights to the island fields that were after all Saint Senan’s. They would hear of this and other stories, and in time all the stories would mingle and join tales of the monk’s cures and other miracles and they would come to think of him as a figure fallen from the skies. He would take on the same unreality and magic as had the saint himself and become like the whispering wind in the rushes.

In the dawn when they woke, he was gone. Francis stooped out the low door in the stone house and knew it. He did not need to walk down to the shore. He stood in the light drizzle with the birds of April flitting around him. He shielded his eyes from brightness that was new to him, for the island had its own light and lay softly sometimes in gleaming opalescence. The stillness was palpable. The simplicity of light and grass and birds and falling drizzle was all there was. And in that landscape the innocence of the world was recaptured for him and was a thing of stone and earth and water. It was the first time in a thousand mornings that Francis Foley did not feel the need to move onward. He stood and did nothing at all. He felt himself an old man and felt the regret and loss that he had caused and endured on his way to that moment wash through him like the tide beyond. He breathed the air of the island as if each breath were parcelled and gifted to him and might not long continue. He stood at the wall and opened his fingers upon it, the stones cold and damp. Briefly he thought to say a prayer but did not. His sons were still sleeping. He watched over the river and the fields for a long time and in that time saw that there was a white swan that seemed to linger there, paddling by the foreshore.

Later, when the drizzle had passed and the sky was creased in folds of light from under long sleeves of cloud, Teige and Tomas woke to the sound of metal hitting stone. When they went outside they saw their father digging the monk’s little garden. He turned over the ground with such ease, it seemed ground of no weight at all. Black furrows were opened in straight lines as though drawn from above. He worked and did not look up. Rooks rose and alighted there and the smaller birds came and went. The dog lay in the freshened earth and watched its new master. Tomas and Teige readied another of the cabins fit for living. They found a low stone cabin where hay and potatoes and cabbages and onions were stored, and another that may have been a stable in ages gone. They made a dry bed there, raised on timbers and facing the door. Outside it, where the wall faced south across the river, Tomas built a seat roughly hewn with the monk’s ax, and in the afternoon he carried Blath there wrapped in a blanket and she sat in the thin sunlight and looked out. She was weak and weighed less than a figure of sticks, but she smiled at him and called him her fool. Deirdre and Maeve were all times at her side. They brought her drinks of cool water from the well they had found. They combed her hair with their fingers and smoothed and brushed out her blanket as though it were some faery raiment. In turn she seemed to have upon them an effect of release, for by the end of that day their tongues were freed and they spoke and then chattered and sang.

So they began. Within two days they had begun to set the patterns of their life on that island. In one of the buildings Tomas had found the monk’s fishing pole and line and brought it to the southern shore and pulled a silvered salmon from the river. They cooked it over an open fire and the smells of the fish climbed the air. They set seed potatoes, the young girls bending in the furrows and pushing them into the ground and the brothers forking upon them the mulch of seaweed and sand and earth. Daily Teige and Tomas woke in the first thin wafer of light and like the boys of fairy tales hunted in the dawn fields for hares. They teased and chased and ran and tripped over burrows and tumbled and sighted hares running. At such times the brothers revisited some vanished or unlived part of their lives. The days of May climbed over them. There were high skies of blue with brown cloud. In her seat by the front wall, Blath coughed less often and, though her cheeks were strangely flushed with circles of red, in the evenings when Tomas came to her they could hear her laughter for the first time. He made her laugh. It was as though the evidence of his love for her were continually surprising. As she recovered a frail health, her language grew more robust. She strung curses and other assorted phrases of colour at the crows that fringed the garden plot. The two girls delighted in these and giggled and skipped about chanting in singsong the foul language while the birds lifted in the air. And perhaps it was by this same magic, the effect of words spoken to them like a spell, that soon there came more and more birds, crows, magpies, thrushes, starlings and tits, cormorants, oystercatchers, and such. And these flocked and flew over the island and darted and soared above the opened brown apron of ground and chorused in a nexus of trilling punctuated only by the flat, accented tones of gaily cried Limerick curses.

For his own part, in those early days, Francis Foley lived like a monk devoted to the making of their home. When the garden was dug, he turned to the building of a cottage. He walked the island and considered all possible sites, then settled on a ridge of ground on the northern shore near where the boatman had landed and where they could see the town of Kilrush across the river. One week he made a wooden barrow with rough wheels. The next he was carting stones in it. He did not tell his sons what he was doing, he did not ask for their help. He simply went ahead like one blinded by vision and they watched him and understood and were then there at his side. They made a cottage of dry stone walls three feet thick. The flesh of their hands dried and hardened in that handling and their fingers became crooked and locked in tight curvature like the limbs of the blackthorn. Their shoulders broadened, their arms hung out farther to the side so that even when free of stones the three Foleys seemed to bear burdens. The cottage rose off the ground slowly. Canoes carrying turf sailed past on the way to Limerick. Ferry boats and cargo ships trafficked in the estuary, but to them all Francis Foley turned his back. He did not want to deal with the outside world and for a time was able to ignore it. Then one afternoon when they were setting a flagstone as a lintel above the room door, the thin boatman appeared before them.

“Indeed yes, says he,” he said, and moved from side to side on his narrow legs as though sailing the floor.

“God bless you,” Tomas said to him after waiting for his father to speak.

“Indeed and yes.” He looked at the walls they had made and grinned a slanted grin. He seemed to have nothing more to say.

“What news have you?” Tomas asked him.

The boatman scratched. His head was lumpish like a turnip and grizzled in patches of thin beard like scurf. His eyes rolled about in the motionlessness of the building. “No, but,” he said. “Only that, and not that… devil a care I give, but…”

“Yes?”

“I brought the pony.”

Teige dropped the stone he was holding and was out the doorway then before them. He ran down to the shore to where the horse was tethered to a large lump of wood. She had swum across the river behind the boat on a long line, and her mane was matted and her flanks dripping. As Teige ran the pony sensed that it was he and stirred and hoofed at the sand and turned about there. He freed her in a moment and she whinnied and was skittish and puzzled and briefly did not realize that she was no longer tied. He let her have the scent of him and ran his hand firmly along the side of her, and then, while the others had come out to see, Teige swung himself onto her back. The motion of it was so fluid and easy, it seemed almost as if some inverse gravity were in operation or the upward pull of his body were part of a magnetic dynamism between horse and man. He held to her mane and leaned down and seemed to the others to speak soft commands then, for without an apparent action of his heels or thighs, the pony took off. She galloped down the small rim of sand and then up across the bank and onto the uneven green of the low field there, and then pony and rider were gone off away around the grassy domain of that island. The others watched without a word until they were gone. The boatman swayed.

“Teige can ride her, eh?” Tomas said.

His father nodded and stood there and looked at the horizon empty now.

“We need more horses,” he said then.

The boatman did not seem to understand the words were addressed to him. He was still looking at the place where Teige had ridden away.

“We need other things, too,” Francis said. “Tools, seeds. We can have cattle here in time.” He turned to face the fellow, and the man’s eyes rolled and slipped from side to side like glass balls upon a tide. “We have no money.”

The boatman scratched himself hard.

“Ask if there is one who needs horses broken,” the old man said to him. “Teige can tame anything and make it run fast as wind. You have seen it. That pony was wild, now she would jump the cliffs for him. He can do it. If there is one who wants a horse for a race, tell them Teige Foley is over on the island. Will you do that?”

The man shook himself as though bestirring flies.

“If that, not that…,” he muttered with low chin. “But Clancy, Clancy, Clancy there might says he and…” He stopped, unwound or overwound.

A pause grew.

“And?”

The man trembled as if some charge passed through him, then he said:

“I will.”

2

Evenings then, when the work was over and their arms ached and their shoulders were stretched and curved and tight with the effort of moving stones, Teige took the pony and rode her off about the island alone. He rode as the light fell into the water and a smudge of smoke hung above the town across the river and soon blended into the sky, crepuscular and dim with the appearance of a thing tarnished. He rode in no particular direction, trotting the pony along the shore or out across the fields they had not named yet. He rode as the stars came out in the heavens above him and glittered and made stars in the water too and silvered the grass and made soft, silken silhouettes of the rabbits that stood erect in surprise. The pony was become almost too small for him, but she still bore him nonetheless with ease and could stride out charging into the half-light, the thrumming of her hooves the only sound. They travelled back and forth that small territory then. Teige stopped her sometimes on the far shore and watched the hills of Kerry slip into the folds of the dark. Other times he turned her into the shelter of a hedgerow and she stood amidst the sweet breezes of blackberry blossom and lifted her head and her breath hawed and her sides steamed like one becoming vapour. And in that solitude and stillness, Teige studied the sky and thought of all that was and had been. He thought of his brothers gone and wondered in the vastness of space where. He thought of Finbar and his girl from the sea, how he had become almost a gypsy before Teige’s eyes. He thought too of Finan, who was more mysterious and dark and whose vanishing seemed a part of his character or a thing foreordained. To each he sent mute, wordless missives until the regret tangled in his chest and he had to dismount and squat down in the grass as though about to void himself. He lay then in the May night.

And he thought of his mother.

He had tried to bury her several times now. He had been caught too often by the suddenness of realization that she was gone. It always stole up on him. Time and again he had been on the road or engaged in some work and had stopped briefly to draw breath and then, suddenly, he would think of her and swiftly his spirit would collapse in his chest like a bird made of paper. He would feel the crush of it and gasp. It was as if each time then she died anew, as if by some trick of time and memory she had come alive again and was not with him but only elsewhere and their meeting again was not far distant. She grew near in his mind. The scent of her was in his nostrils. The warmth of her where his head had lain came over him. He heard her tell him stories beneath a darkening summer sky. He asked her always of Virgo, and as she spoke her eyes were proud and deep and lovely. Virgo lies on her back with her feet toward the east, she told him. There are stars scattered over her shoulders like jewels, she said.

At last then he had tried to build stone walls of coldness about his heart. He had said to himself out loud, “She’s gone, she’s dead, you’ll not see her again.” He had said it in darkness and light, in wind and rain, through all seasons. He had tried to consider it as a fact like winter and so move beyond the continuance of this rhythm of grief. He had chastised himself for a soft fool and cursed like his elder brother and told himself not to think of her again.

But she was still there.

He lay in the cool damp of the night grass and the pony stood attentive beside him. The stars swung westward and were like a map of man’s yearning. When at last Teige rose, the pony whinnied. She nodded her head thrice. He slipped up onto her and rode slowly back in a wide circle toward the round tower and the stone cabins where the others were sleeping. When he reached them, he dismounted and went and fetched a bucket of water for the pony and led her into the small paddock, where he bade her good night. Then, as he turned back to the little cluster of buildings behind him, he saw an eye of light glistening from the doorway of the tower. He stopped and waited. The eye moved and he saw the starlight play off it once again. Then he knew that it was his father, and that there while the others were sleeping, through the passing of time and while he should have been resting, Francis Foley was engaged in the one activity that to him made clear sense of the world. He was looking at the stars through the telescope and seeing in the heavens revealed, behind the myriad and seeming chaos of those specks of light, a shape full of meaning.

Teige watched a few minutes as the glass eye moved and reflected the sky. Then he slipped into the cabin and lay to sleep.

3

Some days later the boatman returned and brought the news that Clancy did indeed have horses for breaking. He took Teige with him then and rowed back across the river, and Tomas and his father stood upon the top of the wall of the cottage they were building and watched. The narrow black boat slipped away in soft rain and the men fell back to their work wordless and somehow burdened with apprehension. That river had already run so through the family’s life that they did not trust Teige’s crossing would lead to happiness. Still, Francis had decided he had to go. Gulls flew like ragged pieces of old cloth in the rainy sky. Then it poured down and screened the country from view and was as if some portion of the known world had been erased. The two Foleys stayed working, lifting stones up the narrow ladder while the mud floors of the cottage shell puddled below them.

When he reached Kilrush, Teige too felt the air of apprehension. Whether he had brought it with him or it existed like a thing tangible in the very atmosphere, he could not say. The town was more tired and lifeless than when he was last there. The rain stopped. Those in the streets had a worn and ragged deportment. Wan faces turned to watch him with eyes enlarged and red-rimmed. They were like heads that floated. A beggar boy of no more than ten scurried over to him. He had been the first of a small assemblage to spot Teige and came to him ahead of the others, who even then began to drift over.

“A penny, God bless you. A penny.”

The boy’s face was browned and stained about the mouth. His nostrils were yellow crusted.

“I have no money,” Teige said, and tried to walk past him, but the boy, accustomed to first refusals, trotted alongside, begging. By now the others, a mixture of young and old in shawls, wraps, tattered once scarlet petticoats, and apparel that had no name but made its owner resemble a rotund bundle on legs, had come around him. There was a blind woman without legs seated in a small cart, a man wheeling her. A flurry of prayers sounded. The beggars cried out a litany of ailments, and Teige felt his jacket tugged.

“I have nothing,” he said more loudly, still trying to move ahead of them. But the beggars were hardened to such and moved as in a promenade performance, their hands wavering and clutching, their brows furrowed and the urgency of their prayers and promises growing with each step. Paternosters and Ave Marias flew about and were strangely incongruous there like fine embroidery. Teige was not indisposed to the beggars. But the face of the boy troubled him and was like some piece of himself. He wanted to help him and run away from him at the same time. Over and again he told them that he had nothing, but the words carried no weight. The faces floated there before him until at last Teige tried to shake himself free and in so doing stepped out of his jacket and left them holding it as he hurried up the street.

Clancy, as it transpired, was not the owner of the horses to be broken. They belonged to one of the landlord Vandeleurs. Clancy was a man in their employ, a short, round fellow with whiskers and broad, curving eyebrows. When Teige met him in the store on Francis Street where the boatman had told him to go, Clancy spat on the ground and asked him if it was true he could make any horse run.

“Every horse can run without my making it,” Teige said.

Clancy nodded and narrowed his eyes in appreciation of the point and spat again.

“Run races,” he said, and widened his gait and rocked slightly back on his heels.

“Not all,” Teige told him. “Some horses are not for races, but I can pick the ones that are.”

“Fair enough answer,” Clancy said. “Come on so.”

They left there and boarded a wagon that had been laid with feeding stuffs and sacks of flour and oats and such. Teige had never seen such supplies bought. When he sat up on the seatboard, the beggars were clustered about and looked at him like one who had betrayed. The boy was wearing Teige’s jacket. The blind woman, small and crooked in her cart, was wearing the sleeves. Clancy whistled and the wagon moved away. They travelled down the end of the town and out the road a ways until they came to the gates of the domain and turned in there and journeyed in the avenue past the tall trees where cool green shadows covered the way. So long was the avenue, the house was not to be seen. The trees thickened to wood on either side of them. Midges and flies speckled the air and buzzed and were like patches of imperfect air as they rose from the underbranches in the warmth of after rain. Clancy whistled a sorrowful tune. The slow notes hung, a melancholy drapery in that verdant hush. They moved on.

“Nearly there,” Clancy said without looking at him, and he clicked his tongue and quickened the wagon. The woods were behind them then and the fields that opened on either side were lush and green and fenced with timber posts. They were the smoothest fields that Teige had seen and might have been drawn by a child and imagined into creation. The first of them held no animals at all, just a glossy sward moving in the small breeze. But before they had passed it, Teige could sense the nearness of horses. Then as they wheeled about on a long curve of that road he saw them, thirty or so mares and new foals and two- and three-year-olds, some standing, some grazing, some running to meet the breeze. The wagon slowed. Its horses whinnied and shook their heads in the harness and there was an answering of sorts in the field.

“Well,” Clancy said, “that’s about half of ’em.”

“Half?”

“He’s more money than brains,” he said, and spat forward and studied the spittle in flight. “You think you can make something of ’em? It’s eight pence a day.”

Teige climbed down. He moved very slowly under Clancy’s gaze and went over the fence and entered the field. The horses that were standing there lifted their heads high and raised their tails and then broke into sudden speed like things shocked. They went off away down the field, bringing others with them, including a number of the thin-legged foals that kicked two-footed at intervals at the air behind them. Teige watched them all and walked calmly out into the centre of the field. He had about him then a kind of ease that was broadcast by whatever means not known by science to the animals there. It was always so. It was a thing that happened. He came into the company of animals and felt at once a kind of connection. It was something with which he was already familiar, this serene and clear-sighted empathy, and he did not have to try to do anything, only wait for the animals to feel it. He stood and watched the horses that had arrived at the far end of the field as they trotted in the tightened space and turned about and cut backward across each other, cutting up the grass sod that was softened by rain. They trafficked there for moments, hot and blowing and swinging about, some rearing, some nipping, others, mares, looking for their foals. Then, a black colt with a white blaze on its face spun from the others and led them like a charge back up the field. Teige stood still as they came. He was smiling at them and was for a moment like one within a tide, islanded there by horses of all description, saying the sounds he said in greeting and holding out his hands waist-high as if proffering invisible oats.

Clancy watched him another few moments and then, satisfied that the fellow was indeed what the boatman had described, clucked his tongue and snapped the reins and took the wagon on up to the stables. Teige stayed in the field with the horses all that morning. Clancy sent a youth with ropes and collars and a long-tailed whip, but none of these did Teige want. He walked back and forth among the horses and ponies there. The day moved the rainclouds aside and the sky was then clear and blue overhead. In time the horses grew accustomed to the man in their midst and returned to grazing, standing with long necks craned and swishing their tails at the population of flies. Teige studied each of them. There were many not in good form. He saw the full range of temperament and kind, those already ailing in some manner, those whose hindquarters were stiffened, those in the early stages of colic who turned about and looked at their stomach and made small, jabbing kicks at it. There were some with redworm, roundworm, whipworm, early forms of spavin and wind galls. Teige did not know the names of all such but recognized in the horses the discomfort of their condition and from this intuited a remedy. By the midday the youth who had brought him the ropes returned with warm potatoes in a cloth and a jug of buttermilk. He asked Teige how he was progressing, and Teige told him that many of the horses were poor enough and asked how it was that such a wealthy man as Vandeleur had not better stock.

“’Tis Clancy buys ’em,” the fellow said. “’Tis he has promised there’ll be racers amongst ’em. There’s another forty in the fields beyond.”

The youth left then and Teige returned to the slow work of the afternoon. Still he did not take the ropes into the field, but went out through the animals, his fingers greasy from the buttered potatoes. He looked for the black colt and moved in circumambient fashion toward him. The colt’s eye caught him at once and he flicked his ears back and forth thrice. His jaw stopped. Teige took another few steps. The colt retained the stance he held and was for moments statuesque and posed as a thing serene. The other horses raised their heads and looked and looked down again. Teige moved his buttered fingers together. He was now five paces from the colt. He could see a nerve quiver in its neck and how the sleek black sheen of its flanks showed condition. Slowly he moved his hand out. He let the scent of the butter travel to the horse and watched for the slightest reaction. But there was none. The horse was planted. Teige took another step and said very softly the Irish word for “come.”

“Chugainn!”

And within the smallest particle of time, before the words had finished sounding and travelled with the scent of butter across the space between the man and the animal, the colt bolted. He reared and spun and blew and charged and knocked Teige to the ground all in one moment and was gone then off down the field, black mane waving and hind hooves kicking backward in short, wild bucks. When Teige began to get up, he heard the sound of laughter like glass tinkling. There by the side of the fence were two young women walking the avenue. They looked away from him when he stood up, and one of them held her fingers to her mouth while the other nudged her, and both of their heads shook then. They did not move on. Their mirth carried and flew about like an exotic bird. They were ladies of the house and wore long dresses, one green, one blue. The girl in the green dress had hair of a light gold that fell about her shoulders. She could not stop herself laughing. Her friend elbowed her time and again, but it was as if this action merely released more of the birds of glee, and they crossed that field and flickered about Teige as he stood and pressed a hand on the small of his back. The friend took a glance sideways over her shoulder to see him and quickly turned back again and whispered something and then the girl in the green dress turned too and Teige saw her face for the first time. It was less than an instant. Then the friend was pulling on her arm and dragging her around and the two of them were off away in quick steps up the avenue.

The afternoon grew cooler then. Teige worked with the horses with little luck, walking and standing and talking to them. He did not get close to the colt again all that long day. By the time the evening was beginning and there were small bats flying in the air, Clancy returned and told him to come with him to the place where he could stay. It was a stone building with a strong roof in a clean courtyard. The coach horses were stabled there and the hunters for the manor house. The youth who was called Pyle came and brought him food and stood by while he ate and then took the bowl away again. Stillness settled over the place then. The May night was calm and mild and held the tangled smells of woodsmoke and horses and the sweetness of the gorse blooming. Teige lay on straw bedding and thought of those on the island. He thought of his father watching the sky as if hunting there traces of the lost portion of his family. He thought of where in the world Finan and Finbar might be and if he would see them again. But from each of these considerations his mind wandered. He stared upward at the blackness that was unstarred. And it was then as if a map had been redrawn and he no longer possessed with surety the coordinates, for he drifted from all things in that sleepless state and time after time returned only to the image of the laughing girl.

The following morning he was up before the cock crew. When Clancy found him he was already in the field with the horses. Teige asked him what the horses were being fed and asked that he be allowed to change their diet. He pointed out too some that needed special care and should be withdrawn to other pasture. All of this Clancy agreed to without dispute, for he considered himself a judge of men and placed his legs apart and rocked on his heels with his hands on his hips and told Teige that whatever he asked would be done. He left him then and Teige returned to the horses. Later Pyle arrived and they separated some and steered the lesser or ailing animals into the farther paddock. For the rest of that morning Teige was alone with the remainder. Showers of drizzle came and went. The sky cleared and clouded and cleared again. The birds of that place were many and when the rain passed they chorused and flew and it seemed to Teige that he had never seen such a multitude. From the woods nearby they flickered and darted, thrush and sparrow and tit and robin. They sang full-throated. The song of the corncrake was there, too. And all such harmonies were intermingled in the air like threads of fine colours. Whether it was this or not, Teige progressed slowly with the horses that morning. He seemed to have lost some of his gift and was for the first time uncertain. He walked about the field in circles and held out his hands and spoke quietly, but the horses, sensing something in his manner or spirit, shied. He grew impatient then and at some times jogged futilely toward an animal that soon took off and left him there. He was so engaged when the ladies walked the avenue again. This time he saw them coming, for in truth some part of him had been all morning watching. He stopped his small running and the horses cantered away from him and turned at the far end of the field. The birds were everywhere. He watched the movement of the light-coloured dresses from the corner of his eye. He saw the golden hair. He saw that she was sauntering closer along the fence and felt himself foolish to be standing there in the empty part of the pasture with no horse near him. If he walked down toward the horses now, he would be walking away from her. The two desires to stay and go twisted about inside him and he found himself doing neither. He just stood there, the birds flying about him. Then he heard a small tinkle of laughter and there was some jostling and the crunch of the gravel pebbles, and then the girl with brown hair called out to him:

“What are you doing there?”

Teige did not move.

“Hello? Oh, hello?”

Again the noise of whispers and urgings and some scuffling of pebbles, and Teige heard the girl say, “Wait, wait, he will.”

He turned around then. They were standing there, the girl with the brown hair looking directly at him, the other turned aside and studying the smallness of her white shoe.

“We were wondering,” the girl said. “What are you doing?”

He thought to stay where he was and shout across to them. He thought it and decided on it and then was walking closer. There was a drift of perfume there. It hung like a silk. He came within it and stopped and tried to draw deeper than a shallow breath. He was looking past the girl who looked at him. He was looking at the girl now wearing a cream-coloured dress.

“Hello, do you understand? Maybe he can’t understand. What… are… you—”

“I am training the horses,” Teige told her.

“You do understand. Well, that’s what I said you were doing, but yesterday we saw you get knocked down and Elizabeth said you weren’t, you couldn’t be, because you’re not supposed to get knocked down, are you? But I said, I do think he is training them, and Elizabeth said that she supposed it could be true and maybe he’s just not very good at it.” She arched one eyebrow and her lips curved in a tightened smile.

” ‘Tis true, maybe,” Teige told her.

There was a pause of sunlight and birdsong. Then Elizabeth lifted her eyes to him and said: “I didn’t say that.”

“You did.”

“Come on.” Elizabeth pulled at the other’s arm. “Come on, Catherine, I am going back.”

“Wait, maybe he’ll show us. Won’t you show us? Go on, do some, we’ll watch. Train them. You’ve to choose one for her, you know”

“I’m going.” Elizabeth took steps away and Teige’s eyes followed her and absorbed all that she was.

“Spoilsport,” Catherine said after her, and then looked at Teige and laughed and skipped and ran and caught up with her and they were gone.

The rest of that day Teige managed even less with the horses. He moved toward them like one in a dream and they swept past. Sometimes in gathering desperation he ran then, sprinting alongside, pumping with his fists and sucking and blowing the air through his teeth. Briefly he was like one of the ancient Fianna or Indian braves, a figure mythic and noble and swift, until the horses opened gait and were gone and he was left panting and slumped in the empty grass. That evening when he lay in the straw bed he watched the image of the woman his eyes had captured. She lingered before him awhile as he stretched there with hands behind his head and the hushed darkness filled with the movement of the bats and the noises of the horses sleeping. Then he rose and went outside. The night sky was quickened with cloud. Light from a gibbous moon came and went. He walked barefoot across the courtyard and then out around by the short avenue that he knew led to the big house. When he saw it, all of its windows were dark. Two wolfhounds lay on the top of the steps to the front door. They raised their heads to look at him and Teige shushed at them and they lay down again. He stood there and studied the house and felt the feelings of his father years before standing before the house of the lord. He slipped around by the side then. He touched the walls as he went. He arrived at the back of the house where in latter years an addition had been built to the kitchen, and this he climbed until he was on the cold slates of its roof. He moved along it low and catlike until he came to a window. With the tips of his fingers then he slid it upward and watched the reflection of his face vanish as a thin curtain of muslin blew softly outward. This he moved like a veil and then stepped quietly inside.

4

He was in a corridor. There was timber flooring and it creaked beneath his foot. He heard the noise travel and listened in its aftermath for any response. But there was none. He brought the second foot inside and stood there, growing accustomed to the quiet, listening within it to hear the sounds of sleeping. He moved down the corridor then. A pulse in his brain beat and he seemed to hear it along with another in his neck. He paused to still them and failed and moved on. He came to the first of the doors and pressed himself flatly against it, his ear and the palms of his two hands against the timber. Shut-eyed, he listened. Then he moved farther down the hallway to the next door. With each he did the same, but it was no use. He could not tell. He turned and arched his head back and leaned against the wall and his chest heaved. The moonlight shone on him. He waited. Then suddenly he turned and held the porcelain knob and opened the room door next to him. It made a small click. He held it tight and leaned in and smelled the strong powdered air of the room and saw in the rumpled bedclothes a woman large and a man small. Teige withdrew as silently as he had entered. He moved down the way to the next door. This time he squeezed the lock back and there was no click. The moment the door was only slightly ajar he knew it was hers. He was informed by some instinct not attributable simply to scent or sound or sight. He knew, and stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

She was lying on her side. The bedclothes were white. Her right hand lay on the pillow beside her head. Teige stood there. He heard his own breathing and held it and wished it might have stayed so and he a silent and invisible presence there, timeless, witness only to this creature sleeping. The room stilled about him once more. When his pulse had steadied he took a step closer to the bed, and then another. He beheld her. He beheld the way her fair hair fell there and how her eyelashes quivered in sleep, how her lips were pursed. He studied the line of her nape, the delicacy of her ears. Such things. He did not move closer to touch her. He stayed there and the night passed on about him and the sleeping house rumbled sometimes and made airy noises and creaked with the traverse of ghosts and dreams. She moved in dreams of her own, too, and turned away from him and then back again, making small moans in her throat that Teige could not decipher as pleasure or pain. He matched the rhythm of his breathing with hers, and when he had achieved this he closed his eyes, and was so, and found a kind of peace in that union.

Time sped on. The moon flew through the sky and dragged her stars and still Teige was there in Elizabeth’s bedroom. He could not leave. He stood and was sentry to that beauty and could not have put in words his hopes or desire or told how long he might have stayed. Then she turned in the bed and her hair crossed her mouth and she brushed at it with the back of her hand and opened her eyes and saw him.

She did not cry out.

Teige raised his hands palm outward and made as if placing them gingerly to settle some disturbance in the air. Then he took a step backward, and then another. Without taking his eyes from her, he reached behind him and felt for the handle of the door and twisted it and then quickly turned and was gone.

5

That morning Teige struggled once again with the horses. The day was soft with rain and the ladies did not come on their walk. Time was slow and stretched out and in the absence of the obscured sun seemed not to pass at all. Teige walked about and through the horses and spoke to them and waited, wondering if Elizabeth had told and he was to be summoned at any moment and ordered to leave. In his wet shirt his chest was tight, his eyes were glossed with intensity and glanced sidelong toward the avenue. Where was she? What was she thinking? The sleek flanks of the horses glistened in the rain, their hooves making short, sucking sounds where the ground had mucked. The birds stayed occluded in the trees, and their song from there seemed to Teige strangely despondent. The long day was like an ache. When the redheaded fellow Pyle came and brought him his food, he told Teige that the men said the weather was an ill omen. There was no health in it.

“It is neither true rain nor real sun, but lifeless drizzle, they say. It is like fine netting, we need a storm to move it off us.”

Teige ate silently and felt the day press more firmly upon him. When the other had gone, he returned to the horses but in a short time realized that it was useless. He had no connection with them and at last hunkered down and sat in the middle of the field in the falling rain. Slowly, in the gradual passing of that afternoon then, the horses began to move closer to him, and it was as if he were a rock or a bush or a tree or any other part of their domain and they did not shy or move away. Soon they were all about him there and grazing at the grass that was by his side. He sat and a foal approached and then nipped at the shoulder of his shirt. The black colt with the white blaze was less familiar and stood off and sometimes pawed at the ground and blew. But Teige appeared indifferent to all and made no movement toward any of them. At some time then he heard noise in the gravelled avenue and lifted his head and saw a coach and horses pass down that way, and from the curtained window the face of Elizabeth’s friend appeared and disappeared. The coach did not slow or stop and he could not tell how many were inside it. He watched until it was gone.

That night he awaited the darkness. It fell slowly, the light lingering a long time in some higher part of the heavens where the sun had stayed all day. When at last he had to wait no longer, Teige rose and hastened as stealthily as he could past the wolfhounds to the kitchen. He climbed as before, this time slipping twice on the wet slates and pressing himself flat there for moments, awaiting alarm. But none came and he made his way to the window and opened it and stepped again into the corridor, darker now without the moonlight. Where he stepped, his feet printed wet on the floor. He dripped to her door and held his breath and screwed tight his eyes to squeeze the handle and twist and open it, and all the time he was both fearful that she had gone away and expectant of her cry. The scent was the first thing to meet him. It arrived in his nostrils while the door was only slightly ajar and caused a quivering in his spine. The darkness of the room was deeper than the night before, and at first he could make out nothing at all. He stood there and heard his breathing and again tried to quieten it and as he did he heard her move.

“Hello.” She spoke across the darkness. She did not seem surprised.

Teige took a step back to the door and they were still as shadows to each other as she spoke again.

“It’s all right.”

A pause, in the stillness his breathing.

“I knew you would come again.”

He stood and tried to understand what he should do. Then he heard the match struck and saw it aflame and she was lighting a small waxen candle at her bedside. The amber light glowed and he saw her within it and saw the white linen nightdress she wore and how her hair fell loose on her shoulders to her breasts. She lay back on many pillows then and looked at him with her eyebrows arched.

“Well,” she said.

Teige had lost his tongue.

“You can sit down.” She pointed to a wooden chair near the bed.

But Teige did not stir.

“You can’t just stand there,” she said. She moved and released an invigorating scent from the lavender pillow at her side.

“I wanted to see you,” he said at last.

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

She smiled. She smoothed the smooth quilt covering.

“What is your name?”

He didn’t want to say. He didn’t want to talk to her at all, only stand there and look at her and hear her voice and smell that scent.

“I can find out,” she said.

“It’s Teige, Teige Foley.”

“Sit down, Teige.”

He did not move.

“You must do what I tell you. Sit down.”

So he sat then and placed his hands on his knees and lowered his eyes briefly from her and felt an obscure shame or guilt as though he were a thing unworthy or had brought her by deceptive means down to this earth.

“Tell me about the horses,” she said. “Have you found one for me?”

He told her he had not and she told him he must, that she would want to go riding in the summer, that friends would come visiting and he could have horses ready for them, too. She drew her knees up under the quilt. Her face shone in the candlelight. She said she had been to town that day to buy a summer dress. She thought blue suited her, but the shops were so dreadfully poor and not at all like the ones in Cork where she mostly lived.

And all that she said Teige listened to, not for its meaning but for the sound of her voice that was to him then like a charm.

“You can look at me, you know,” she said. “You can.”

And he did. He looked boldly at her eyes and her lips and the hollow of her neck and the curving line of her breasts, and she turned her head slowly this way and that for his better admiration. And they stayed so that way for some hours, he seated in the chair and she laid out on the goose-feather pillow, telling him things about her taste in flowers and dresses and friends and whatnot. The candle burned low. When at last she tired, she told him that he must go now. He stood up.

“You can kiss my hand,” she said, “before I sleep.”

She offered it in the air.

“My uncle will kill you if he finds you here, you know that,” she said as he approached.

“I know that.”

Teige reached and touched her fingers and balanced them a moment on his and then bent and kissed them.

“Good night,” she said. “Go on now. Go.”

She snuffed the candle.

“You can come again,” she said, and in the sudden darkness Teige turned then and slipped away.

6

So it was that he visited her there in her bedroom every night after that. All the nights of May and into June he crossed the courtyard in the darkness and climbed onto the kitchen slates and across them to the window. The hounds no longer lifted their heads when he passed. The owls and bats that hooted and flew in the soft crepe blackness of the night knew his shadow, as did the yellow-eyed fox creeping furtively through the dark to sniff at the door of the henhouse. To all such he was as familiar as a star and crossed the night with the same mystery and resolve.

By daylight Teige was strangely renewed. Though he had not slept almost at all, he worked among the horses with vigour and energy. Soon he had chosen for Elizabeth a white filly and coaxed her into handling and then lunging on a line. Other horses he managed also, and was to be seen then riding some or walking them as Elizabeth and the other, who was her cousin, Catherine, came for their daily exercise along the fence. They came now even in the drizzle that spoiled the weather all that early summer. They carried light parasols and twirled them on occasion in a manner that suggested mirth. At no time did Elizabeth show him any recognition then. Sometimes she stopped and the ladies stood and studied and appraised his progress. Sometimes Catherine called out to Teige and waved for him to approach and the high clinking of her laughter carried out across the pasture, but he did not respond. He stayed closely engaged with the horses and whistled and whispered and gestured to the animals in ways he knew they understood, and then too he drew one to him and caressed its flank and stroked and pulled its ears while all the time the ladies watched. Within a few weeks many of the horses were under his dominion. All those in his care improved steadily in form. The ones whose diet he oversaw lost the bulge of belly or beginnings of laminitis, colic, and other ailments. Clancy came and stood by the fence a long time and with legs widely planted scrutinized Teige working. Then he turned on his heel and went off and said nothing.

But Teige did not care. He had lost all care for the world as long as he knew that he could each night escape into the bedroom above the kitchen. When he opened her door it was like lifting some pressure from his heart. He sighed in relief Sometimes she had the candle lit and was waiting. She was sitting upright and her hair was loose and her eyes fixed on the door as he entered. He came in and stood and she told him to sit down and he did. Every night it was the same. He did not presume, and this she enjoyed, delaying sometimes her invitation and stroking some imaginary flaw in the quilt while he stood. He did not touch her. He sat on the wooden chair by her bedside.

“You think I am beautiful?” she asked him.

“Yes.”

“More beautiful than Catherine?”

“Yes.”

She smiled and made a small laugh and looked at him. She leaned a little closer and then wrinkled her small nose.

“You smell like horses,” she said.

And to that he answered nothing, and flushed and sat there entangled in the same feelings of shame and guilt and unworthiness whose source he did not understand.

And she was contrite then to see him so and looked across the candlelight at him and was moved.

“Promise me you won’t do anything,” she said. “Promise.”

He did, and she fixed her eyes on his and slowly drew down the quilt over her knees until her feet were bare. Then she raised herself up and stood on the bed and her hair fell down and her scent assailed him, and slowly, looking at him all the time, she reached and found the buttons of the nightdress and one by one she opened them. Then when the garment was fallen open she stood there on the bedclothes and raised her two hands and drew it back away from her on either side and it fell without noise to her feet. She stood. The candlelight made her skin lustrous, her eyes were glazed. She took her hands and placed them on her breasts and then moved them down along her body, swaying them outward like wings.

“Well?” she said.

Teige looked at her.

“See, I’m not so terrible.”

She turned on the bed as on a podium and she let him study her from the back and take his time and absorb into imagination and memory the detail of that beauty.

“Now,” she said, “am I terrible? Am I, Teige Foley?”

“No.”

“Is that all you can say?” She turned, disappointed, and lay down on her back on the bedclothes. Teige did not speak. His throat was too tight for words. If he freed his fingers from their grasp on his knees, they would shake and waver. He sat. She lay there naked before him and spoke calmly of the flaws she found in her body. She said her legs were too short. She said she did not like her toes and held one foot in the air for his inspection. After a time they heard footsteps in the corridor outside and they hushed and listened and the room was tight with the beating of their hearts. When the footsteps had passed she told him he had better kiss her good night and she held out her hand. He stood then beside where she lay on the bed and he was twisted in the torment and his lips trembled and dried.

“Good night, Teige,” she said.

And he kissed her hand and was gone.

The following night when he came to her she was already undressed. She was standing in the far corner of the room and held open over her breasts a fan of peacock feathers. The candle was placed on the ground.

“Who can this be?” she said, and lowered her face in a pretense of shame. She moved across the room then and fluttered the fan, and Teige caught anew the scent of her. “Do you know how to dance, Teige Foley?” she asked him.

“No,” he said.

She stood right there in front of him. “You never say my name. You can, you know.”

He said nothing.

“Go on.”

“Elizabeth.” It was a whisper. Her face was next to his.

Then she stepped past him. “That’s a pity you don’t dance. I was watching you at the horses and thinking what a fine dancer you might be.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be silly.” She walked back down the room again, and his eyes followed her. “You’re in love with me, aren’t you?” For a moment he did not want to say. “Well?” she asked him.

“Yes.”

And that seemed to please her and she smiled and raised her head at an angle and then, moving the fan, swayed with grace as if music played.

“You could never marry me, you know. You know that, Teige Foley?” She swayed still to that unheard music and her eyes looked directly at him. “You’re a stable boy.”

“I know what I am,” he told her. He did not move.

“I could not be in love with you.”

He did not answer her and she swayed about him and danced and he watched the movement of her neck and her breasts as she arched and turned there in the candlelight and how her hair fell and he thought he had never seen anything so beautiful.

“Do you love me more than your horses?” she said, and she lay on the bed and moved her legs and held the fan so it covered her face.

“Yes.”

“Well, then. You can touch me if you want.”

And for an instant Teige was not sure. It was as if the moment his hand reached her, some tender and perfect thing might perish and tragedy and grief begin their long fall downward to him through the stars. It was as if with that first touch the entire and myriad constellation of all his future would be mapped and foretold and fated and he a mere and powerless nothing lost to the inevitability of that suffering.

Then he touched her. He touched the calf of her leg and it quivered. Elizabeth kept the fan covering her face and her leg moved under the firmness of his fingers. He knelt beside the bed and caressed her. His hands moved palely across the flesh of her stomach and circled and traced patterns intricate and ephemeral. He watched his own fingers in their tender exploration, he watched where they travelled to her breasts and how she arched and moved on the bedclothes then. The room grew close and crowded with an infinity of desire. She rolled to the side and still held the fan to her and rolled again and lay luxuriant and sighed and was to him a goddess from the fabled stellar world and he a mortal transgressing or elected by the mystery of fate.

“My name,” he said in whisper. “Say my name.”

But she did not. She said nothing at all. She turned on the bed beneath his touch and his own eyes he squeezed tightly shut with bliss and his face he lifted back where the thin moon and starlight glanced upon it and made of his features a mask of anguish and pleasure and desire.

7

The following morning when Teige was working with the horses, Clancy came to see him. He came on the cart down the avenue at pace and reined the horse roughly and jumped down and came out into the field with a purposeful stride. He moved too quickly for his girth and sighed and blew with agitation. His cap he drew back by its peak right-handedly and with his left he forked up the hair that was flattened. His cheeks were red. When Teige had reached him Clancy did not speak at first but seemed to be weighing words like lead measures in the near distance just left of Teige’s head. They stood so and the horses in the field turned to look at them. The sky soured.

“There’s been a death,” Clancy said at last. “You’re to go.”

“What?”

For a moment Teige imagined it to be Elizabeth. His face whitened and Clancy saw this and reached and held on to his shoulder stiffly at a distance.

“There’s one dead. The word has come. On the island. You’re to go.”

“Is… Who is it? Who is dead?”

” ‘Tisn’t said. The boatman came with it. He’s waiting to take you back. Here,” Clancy said, and from the side pocket of his jacket drew out some wages. “Get in the cart.”

They rattled down the long avenue then, Clancy leaning forward and making whipping sounds at the horse with his tongue, Teige sitting upright, mute and blind and impassive as a figure cut in stone. When they arrived in the town the haste of the cart turned the heads of those standing in the street. Some turned and looked and kept looking, following the two men with their eyes and enjoying in some way the sense of calamity and grief that was evident. When the cart passed the whispers began. Teige and Clancy paid them no heed. The horse raced on down the streets of the town and the island appeared green and low and tranquil in the grey waters of the river. They came to the jetty where the boatman was waiting. He looked at Teige and then looked sharply away over his shoulder as if at a perching blackbird.

Clancy offered his hand. “Sympathies,” he said.

“Who is dead?” Teige asked the boatman. But on the mention of the word the boatman shuddered and threw his shoulders and glanced quickly from side to side as if dodging the same dark bird as it sought to land upon him.

“Who is…,” Teige tried again, but the boatman had stepped down into his boat and lifted his oar. He splashed at the water with it and then sank it into the top surface, shuddering and throwing his shoulders, saying sounds that if words were lost to Teige and then vanished altogether as the boat slipped out into the estuary.

The dip and slap of the oars; the glitter of the water as it fell from the raised blades; the weak sunlight of that morning; grey clouds coming up the river like ghost galleons; the fish that moved beneath them; all such entered Teige and became part of memory. He stared across the river for signs and saw none. Where the river met the sea the boat lifted and fell and achieved a kind of jaunty precariousness, and the boatman stopped rowing altogether and allowed it for moments as though awaiting invitation or permission proper to cross those waters in that changing tide. He swayed there and felt the motion in his body and moved within it and waited until his boat did too and then dipped the oars and rowed once more. Seagulls flocked and beat hurriedly across the air. Then the rain came. It fell heavily almost at once and dimmed the light of day and made the waters murky. The boatman jabbered some curse and shook his head and let the drops scatter, then he curved his back and pulled harder to draw them to the island. Up from the shore Teige saw the cottage they had been building was now as high as the roof timbers, though these were not yet thatched and looked dark and skeletal in the rain. There was no sign of life. The boat reached the shallow waters and the boatman single-oared it about and waited then, and Teige stepped out and walked up onto the island. He went up along the beaten track that was shouldered with the yellow furze, heavy with the rain. The day seemed pressed down upon the land. He walked and felt the air of death and still did not know who had died. And while he walked the images of his father and brother were before him and he feared for both of them and tried to banish the fears and not bring himself to have to choose between them. And tangled in his mind too was the sense of an obscure guilt, a vine like a complex algebra that wove and entwined and at last related the x of illicit love and the y of death, binding cause and effect and turning improbabilities into fact.

He reached the doorway of the cabin and stood and looked into the dark. The dog came out to meet him. He could see a figure lying on a table, but he could not distinguish who it was. Then his father said his name.

“Teige, come in. It is Blath.”

She had died of typhoid fever, which was already in the close, damp air of that place. Francis Foley sat by her, and the girls, Maeve and Deirdre, looked up at Teige but did not speak. They looked away again. They had been returned to familiar Death like ones recaptured after brief freedom. Their faces were pale.

“Where is Tomas?”

“He’s gone off,” Francis said. “He was pitiful with her. He did all a man could do. He made her drinks and remedies and things he had heard and she could keep none of it in her. And we sent word for a doctor to come, and we waited and he did not come and she losing strength all the time so that she could not take even a drink of water. Tomas would go up and stand on the hill and watch for the doctor and still no sign of him.” The old man’s eyes watered in the shadows. He paused and held the anger in his chest. “Why would the doctor not come? What is the matter with us, are we beasts in the field?”

“He did not come at all?”

“He did not. She died in the afternoon. Tomas went out and I found him beating his two fists on the stones of the house over. He bloodied himself red-handed and when I came to him he threw up his fists at me and spun around and went off and would not be spoken to since.”

Teige stood there in the gloom of the cabin and he looked at the dead woman and saw the blue-and-purple shadows about her mouth and eyes.

“We must bury her,” he said.

“There is a place here on the island. Govt na marbh,” his father said. “It is where they bury some from over the water. They bring them here because of the old churches.”

Teige went out then to find Tomas. He went and whistled the white pony and she came to him and he let her smell the other horses on him and he nuzzled and stroked her and then rode off down the shore in the falling rain. He rode fast. He galloped her because of the urgency and because he found relief in that speed, racing away from many things. He rode and stopped and scanned about for his brother. Then he saw the boat coming across the water with the black figure of the priest sitting erect in the bow. He hurried back and told his father.

Francis Foley came out of the cabin into the spoiled daylight.

“Now he comes,” he said, and scowled and took from the doorside his stick and walked brusquely ahead of Teige toward the shore.

The rain muddied the way. Francis tramped along it and swung and beat at the furze randomly, scattering petals of yellow. At the place where the shore shelved off and there was a small drop to the sand, he stopped and watched the boat coming. The priest could be seen clearly now He was a thin figure with a wide-brimmed black hat. His nose was sharp and this combined with the prominent narrow edge of his chin to lend his face the appearance of having been pressed in from either side. Clutched at his chest was the Bible. Beside him in the boat sat another, a younger man also in black whose head was hatless and whose cheeks were polished a purplish hue by the rain. The boat bobbed in the shallow water. Then this boatman whom the Foleys had not seen before stepped out in the small waves and offered his back and the angular priest stood and climbed onto it and was carried so onto the sand. The younger priest did not wait for this transport but paddled across and kicked water from his shoes. They stood then and the Foleys walked down to meet them.

“I am Father Singleton,” said the priest. “Show me to the deceased.”

He raised the Bible slightly at his chest and made as if to hasten on with his business. But Francis Foley stood.

“Come on,” said the priest. “What is the matter? Do you understand me? The deceased. The dead.”

His tone was exasperated and sharp, and in his eyes was a silvery scorn.

“What is the matter with this man?” he said, and looked to Teige. “You. Do you understand? Lead us. We must hurry before the tide turns. We have other matters. Father Boland, can you?”

The younger priest looked at them and made quiver his lips as if uncertain whether to smile. When he spoke his voice was soft as a girl’s.

“We are here for the burial. There is a woman who died.”

The old man stood and he was appalled at them and felt a riot gather in his blood. The rain dripped off the priest’s hat. He sniffled.

“Are you Christians?” he snapped then. “Do you know this is a holy island?”

“We do,” Francis said at last, and stepped forward and was now not a yard from the priest and could smell his dinner off him.

“Do you know it is the island of Saint Senan, and that he decreed that no woman was to set foot on it? Do you know that?” He paused and looked and Francis Foley did not move an inch and the priest’s ire raised a purplish vein in his forehead. “And what kind of woman was she? Will you answer that?” he said. “Because I know. I know what she was. You see. Nothing is hidden, remember that, if you are Christians. Have you other women here?” The priest’s sharp features were raised and he let his righteousness and judgement be seen and felt by them and was awaiting some demeanour of reverence and contrition when Francis Foley stepped quickly forward and pushed him back in the chest.

“Go away!”

“What? Stop!”

He was pushed again and he staggered back two steps and a fringe of raindrops scattered from his hat.

“Are you defying the word of God?” he shouted. “What are you that you can face damnation?”

“Go away! Get back in the boat! We don’t want you!” Francis swung the stick now and came forward with it, and the priests retreated, the younger one hurrying back into the water and his superior raising up the Bible like a weapon or a shield.

“Have you other women here?” he cried out.

Then a stone flew through the air and splashed in the water beside him. Then another, and another. They hailed from the higher ground where Tomas was standing now, bending and lifting and firing. The priest retreated. The boatman was in his boat. The waves lapped at the priest’s shoes and he lifted his feet and put them back down again in the water, vainly trying to outstep the tide. The stones whizzed and plopped and the priest raised and brandished the Bible and his hat spun off and he reached for it and lost his nerve as the stones yet flew through the rain.

“You’ll be cursed,” he said. “You’ll all be cursed here. This is a holy island!” A stone clipped at his shoulder and he yelled out and waded quickly backward and climbed into the boat. The hat turned and tumbled in the waves. The boatman rowed them away then.

Teige turned to look up at Tomas. He was standing behind them on the small bluff, his arms out by his sides. His face ran with the rain, his shirt was marked with mud and blood, and he looked risen from some nether region where he had been wrestling with furies.

“Tomas,” Teige called out to him, but the brother did not respond or look at him and went off then running through the bushes.

“Come on. We must bury her now,” the father said.

The two of them returned up the island. The sky darkened further, the spillage of rain from the heavens a portent now and making vanish the mainland. They seemed sealed there and moved as if imprisoned in a dream of desperate business. They came to the cabin and took shovel and iron bar and then crossed over by the wiry craze of the blackthorn ditch and into the Field of the Dead. There were tombstones at every tilt and slant and others fallen and embedded now in grass the hares dunged and burrowed and made their own. There were sea captains and boat pilots and fishers and their wives, some from centuries since forgotten whose names if once carved were now erased by the sea wind. There were many children, doomed weak things who perished from every ailment and disease. All lay silent now in the falling rain as Francis and Teige uncovered a place in the brown earth for Blath. They worked without words. They did not try to blunt the sorrow with any meaning or purpose or to reconcile inequities. They dug the hole. Then they went back and Francis told the girls to step outside and wait, and he took two of the cloths they had and with Teige’s help wound them about the body of the dead. These he tied then with cords of hay rope. They had no timber for a coffin.

“I will go and tell Tomas,” Teige said.

“He knows. Leave him,” his father told him.

So the two of them came out then and ungainly bore the corpse to the graveside. The two girls followed with arms crossed and eyes far away, and behind them the dog. The rain fell. They trod anew the ancient path in the grass and made mud along it. The brown hole in the ground appeared shockingly, and was like a rent in a green garment otherwise perfect. When they were beside it, Francis took the body in his arms alone and bent down and knelt with her and then climbed down the side and was then in the hole itself, where he lowered her gently to the clay. He stood so a moment and looked upon her there. Then he climbed out and scanned about for sign of Tomas but could find none. He waited. There the girls sat in the dampness, their coughing soft and continual.

“God bless her,” Teige said.

But his father said nothing and after a moment bent and picked up the shovel and pitched the earth in upon her, and shovelled at the small mound faster and faster until the hole was made up to the level of the grass once more. Then he raised the shovel above his head and beat and beat on the grave with it, and tramped on the fresh earth and beat some more, and was still doing so when the others left him and walked away in the rain.

8

In the days following, the Foleys did not see Tomas at all. He did not visit the cabin or the grave. The weather was still broken and the island hung in mist and drizzle and the light was veiled. The girls, Deirdre and Maeve, mute and hollow-faced, went off about the fields and gathered flowering boughs and branches and wildflowers and brought these to the bare grave each day. Teige rode the white pony and looked for his brother but often imagined that, seeing him approach, Tomas had hidden down or run off and did not want to be seen again. And after a time Teige stopped and let the pony graze and let his own mind leave the island and travel across the river and up over the slates of the roof to find his way to the bedroom of Elizabeth. He sought for her image amidst the desolation and grief and loneliness that weighed there and wondered how long he must wait before he could return. For no reason he could name, he avoided his father then. And the old man seemed to do likewise. They were separate as stars, and as silent. The house that was almost built lay untouched down near the shore.

Then one night when Francis Foley had disappeared to the tower and his telescope, Tomas came into the cabin. The girls were sleeping a jagged sleep of sharp coughs. Teige was sitting in the corner, mending the fishing line. He started when he saw his older brother, for Tomas was returned to the figure they had met on the road. The ghost of dead love harboured in his eyes. A ragged beard climbed his cheeks. Teige stood and held out his hand to him, but Tomas was looking at the place empty now where last he had seen his wife.

“Tomas, sit down, you are wet through. Here, take my shirt.”

Tomas stepped softly past him and bent down and laid his hand on the shoulder of first one and then the other of the sleeping girls.

“They were good to her,” he said. He stayed bent low there and phantoms sojourned the while and he seemed to see them and watch the brief invisible happiness of his life take ephemeral form and then vanish anew.

He stood and looked at his brother.

“Maybe it’s true,” he said. “Maybe we are all cursed.”

“You know it’s not. Here, my shirt. I have another one.”

The shirt was pressed in Tomas’s fingers and he held it and smiled sadly.

“Teige,” he said. “Teige.” He said the name with slow weight, as though the sound of it were somehow entering him then, as if he were aware there was some conjuring in names themselves. It was as if he knew that by saying it so, he could both take the spirit of his brother inside him and at the same time express outward some of the love that lay all steeped and banked and inarticulate within him. He lifted his hand and held Teige by the shoulder. He gripped him like that and did not move and did not speak, and in both of them the moment sank deep like some aureate treasure, to be found and fingered years later.

Abruptly Tomas turned then and went out the door and Teige came out after him and called out to him to stay. They were in the muddied grass yard. Tomas was striding away. His brother called out to him, for Teige felt the purposefulness of Tomas’s stride and knew there was finality about it.

“Tomas, where are you going? Stop.”

The elder brother was already out by the track that led down toward the unfinished house and the shore. Teige ran behind him in the night.

“Where are you going?”

A voice flew back out of the dark.

“Leave me, Teige. Go back.”

“No.”

“Leave me!”

“I won’t.”

“Tomas? Tomas?” The father’s voice boomed then from the tower. Then Francis Foley had come out into the night, and as he approached, Teige had reached and grabbed the arm of his brother, who shook him roughly off and then ran off.

“Teige, Tomas?” The old man saw the back of his eldest son as he flew into the dark. He blew and sucked at the air. “Where is he going? What did he say?”

“I don’t know He’s going somewhere… he’s…”

“Tomas?” the old man shouted. “Tomas!” he shouted the name again, and then took off and trotted and ran after it and Teige after him. The father ran with ungainly stride. He bumped and swayed. He ran past the furze bushes that were speckled with gleam in the nothing of light. He ran and found uneven footing and plunged into briars and waved his arms at them and flayed the skin and felt blood rise and sting. He cursed the world and the darkness and the bushes. Then he called his son’s name again and got up and ran on and Teige beside him. They ran down the dark path and heard the sea grow louder and heard the noise of its breaking on the small stones. Teige shouted the name of his brother then, too. They stood there on the night shore and swung about and looked like ones that had lost their shadows. They glanced sharply right and left along the sand and the stones. They hurried a few paces along and arrested and came back again, and cried his name that the soft night swallowed and took within its deeps like the sea.

“What did he say? What did he say to you?”

Teige saw his father’s eyes wide and near and felt the sour desperation of his breath.

“He said nothing. He came and looked at the girls sleeping,” he said. “He said nothing else. Then he just turned and went off.”

The old man bowed his head, then he looked out at the water, and he and Teige stood there a long time, seeing nothing but the passing motion of the tide darkly hooded with unstarred sky.

They did not see Tomas again after that. Teige rode all corners of the island in the light of the next day but could find no trace of him. He rode and searched, although in some part of him he already knew that his brother was no longer there. His searching grew aimless and petered off in fields where the hares stood and watched him and then ran into cover where none appeared possible. It rained a soft rain that was neither one weather nor the other, but a malady of season that lingered without remedy. It did not seem summertime but for the long pale light of evening. A boat came to the island one afternoon and a river pilot stepped out and brought news of Tomas. He said he had come because he had given his word he would. He said it was the queerest thing. He said he had been sailing down to Limerick in the dawn light, leading in one of the cargo boats, and hadn’t he seen the man swimming. He had thought him a seal at first. He’d thought to bat him with the oar, he said. But he’d pulled him on board and the man told him his name was Tomas Foley and would he take him to Limerick because he was on his way to America. The river pilot said he took him to be one evicted or otherwise fugitive, but the man was not inclined to talk, he said, and they sailed on down to Limerick and arrived there as the morning came up. This Tomas got out, the pilot told them, and his clothes still wet and cold, and a second shirt tied skirtlike about his waist.

“He thanked me right well enough and asked me if I was passing back down the river to give ye word that he was not drowned. He made me promise it. And that’s why I came.”

The pilot stopped, and Teige and his father and the two girls were about him like stones standing in a field.

“America?” Teige said.

“That’s what he said. America,” the pilot replied.

“We can go and get him back,” Teige said at last.

“We cannot,” his father said. His voice was old and tired; his head was anchored on his palm. “He is gone.”

The girls turned mutely and went to the straw bed they shared. The rash that was on their bodies for weeks climbed that night into their cheeks. They cried and fretted and moaned in the dark, and Teige and Francis came to them and cooled their fevers with what means they had. And the girls called them Mother and other soft names out of long ago and looked at them as though they were from another world. Both girls were like one then and the fever rose in their bodies and they seemed to be burning up from within until all the tragedy and loss and regret of their lives perished in conflagration and they arrived in a place elsewhere and their eyes softened and they died.

9

This time the priest did not come at all. They buried the girls alongside Blath and left the shovels there and walked away while blackbirds flew and landed. They set ablaze all clothes and bedding. The dog barked at the sparks spinning in the air, where disease smoked and fumed and was vanquished. Francis folded into himself. He thought all endeavors now were futile. For Death came for everything.

“Somewhere your mother is buried,” he told Teige. “I am sure of it.” And seeing him deep in such grief and resignation, Teige did not dispute it and in his own heart partly believed it, too.

The spoiled summer passed on.

The boatman came and told them the potatoes had failed. The stalks had withered and the leaves blackened and the potatoes crumbled in the hand. There were thousands unable to pay rent. By the shore when he was leaving, Teige asked him if there were still visitors at the Van-deleur estate and the boatman shook his head and said they were all gone, there were none at the house and it was closed up now Only Clancy and some of the workers were there. Teige asked the boatman to come again, and to the man’s bashful mutter and sway he gave an armful of their own potatoes, which were then undamaged. These the boatman placed tenderly as if infants in the boat. Then he rowed out into the Shannon and was gone.

Teige and his father tended the potato field carefully then. They watched for signs of failure and rot. Francis stooped and crawled between the furrows and turned each leaf and rubbed softly with thumb and forefinger. Once Teige thought he heard him say prayers while he lay in the dirt. But he could not be sure, and his relation with his father now did not seem to allow much dialogue. They lived on then like ghosts in the ruins of the old man’s dream. Francis’s eyes became dull and his skin began to turn a papery white. He came and went from the tower at nights and seemed to age there faster than before. After long sessions in the stars he would reemerge into the thin light of morning like one dazed or newly arrived on the earth, fistfuls of his hair gone and his limbs weak and frail as a centenarian’s. Other than the words Teige thought he had heard him say amidst the furrows, the father did not speak at all. He seemed to have passed beyond language, and little by little it began to fade from him. He nodded and made small sounds when leaving the table and the food that Teige made for him, but he did not say his son’s name. The old dream of finding a home for his family mocked him now, for there was only Teige left and the island was suddenly large and empty and bare and the cries of the seabirds above it harsh and forlorn and beyond consolation.

All the rest of that summer they did not move to finish the house. Teige fished in the river and watched the pilots and fishermen and sea captains and turfmen as they sailed past. Sometimes they passed close enough for him to call out to them, but he did not do so, as though such communication would be a betrayal of some kind and his father would disapprove. He sat there and watched and they watched him, the boy from the cursed family on the island of Saint Senan.

But later in the dark then Teige Foley sailed free of that place in his mind and found and reassembled his family. He lay and imagined them and they appeared before him. Beginning always with his mother, he made of them a story no different from all the others he had learned and told. To himself he told of them as if they were stars. In stories extravagant and magical he imagined his mother still living. He followed her through various narrow escapes, moments of outrageous hardship and fortuitous chance, always allowing her the slimmest hope so that she could survive and travel on down the winds and bends of the long road that was leading to him. He saw his brother Tomas slip through the city of Limerick and walk out the road to Cork, where there were crowds of those pale and skeletal moving. He imagined them, those gaunt figures with ghosthood already immanent, their long thin arms holding cradled the bundle of their world, their hunger and frailty, the mewling of their children, the ragged faded worn quality of their spirits as they journeyed homeless toward the impossible idea of home. Teige imagined them and cold sweats surfaced on his body and he feared for Tomas then and wished the story would turn him around and bring him back to the island. But the story continued on, nights and weeks and months after that, and was horrific and relentless. Tomas saw men and women and children fall by the roadside. He saw Death move across the fields like a summer shadow and bodies falling beneath it like ribs of hay at a scythe. He saw the wagons of corn escorted out of the country of the starving, and the same wagons attacked by some without weapons, whose shrill shrieks and yellowed eyes made of them fierce and pathetic clowns, waving their arms for food while they were shot to the ground. He saw mothers without milk press their babies to their breasts and wail then to the heavens and suck on plants and flowers and grasses and anything they could find in the futile hope of lactation. He saw children die and their fathers and mothers sit by them, waiting to join them while coaches passed. On the road to Cork Tomas witnessed it all and in each story grew thinner himself, and was more indifferent to his own survival. He tramped forward each night in Teige’s mind because he could not stop and because in some way the restless journeying toward some impossible end was part of that family’s inheritance and would not and could not finish this side of Death. And in truth this was what he was going to meet, for he could not knowingly bring it upon himself or sit still and wait for it to come. At a place above Mallow, he came upon a hellish scene reeking and smoking where wild-looking bloodied men scrambled about with knives, hacking and carving at the warm carcasses of three horses. These had been slain to stop them from bringing away the corn. The horses’ heads were cast in forlorn, twisted posture in the dirt. Their flanks were opened inexpertly in haste and their insides were spilled out and trod over as the men butchered and swayed in the foul air and sought to bring away steaks. Flies buzzed there. A hundred crows cawed and darkly opened their wings in the field nearby and were so many that they seemed like missals or Bibles unused and thrown from the sky. Tomas came upon the scene and voided the nothings in his stomach. Two of the men paused and glanced at him and held their knives and were momentarily frozen with shame, stunned like some caught in God’s eye. Then the moment passed, and they lowered their eyes from Tomas’s and bent and hacked at the horses once more.

In Teige’s story Tomas saw the dead horses and thought of his youngest brother. In Teige’s story, Tomas’s heart wept then as he remembered the times innocent ages since when he and his brothers had ridden horses and ponies in fields daisied and green. Tomas remembered all their days and nights and weakened there on the roadside and did not think he could continue, until sometime later a family came passing and the emaciated father asked him if he would carry one of their boys.

Tomas carried two. Without discourse, without nicety of introduction or comment of any kind, they left that scene where the horses were denuded of even their tails and the crows pecked with impunity the glassy eyes. They travelled silent and with graven, inconsolable expression and shouldered among many others of that kind into the city of Cork.

There Tomas walked along the dockside in scenes teeming with all humankind. The air was sharpened with men’s cries and commands as families stood and jostled and bargained and bought passage across the ocean. Women wore grim, stoic expressions. Their mouths were small and thin-lipped, as though food were a fading memory, and their children sat and lay curled on the ground and made a low wailing that issued without effort. In the story that Teige told himself in the long nights on the island, Tomas found work there on the docks loading chests and supplies on board tall ships that creaked on the changing tide. He worked and was paid pennies and stayed in a cramped and crowded boardinghouse with others waiting to escape. And in four weeks he bought passage for himself on a ship called Liberty. He stepped belowdecks for the first time in his life and as he went deeper down into the ship found the daylight fractured and then gone altogether. He stumbled and reached for his way while the bosun’s whistle sounded and men ran to and fro and commands were called out on the decks above him. He heard them hurrying about over his head. At last then Tomas arrived in the quarters of the poor and sat amidst the huddled hundreds who stared through the gloom and said nothing but coughed in the queer damp air of that place that was to be their home below the surface of the sea.

Of the twins, Teige’s stories were less sure. He imagined Finbar in extravagant worlds of myriad and mortal dangers. He dreamed pirates, raging armies, weird weathers of hurricane and typhoon, thick, suffocating snows of white goose feathers, huge floods red as roses, tigers sabre-toothed and snarling, snakes, elephants, a whole terrain crawling with spiders, strange exotic natives with pierced tongues who ate the skins of others. Mammoths, dragons, flocks of bloodsucking bats, mutilators, murderers, thieves, and bounty hunters with skulls dangling and knocking like coconuts by their saddle’s side. All of these and more populated Teige’s stories of Finbar and the gypsies. Of Finan the stories were less clear. He had killed a man and was gone off for contrition. He had become a healer, a layer-on of hands, or had joined up with a troupe of actors and performed in tragedies Shakespearean and made all weep with the deep and potent veracity of his grief. He wore greasepaint and his eyes were darkened hollows and nightly he was struck down and died and from such was his own soul briefly healed. Sometime when Teige could not bear the tale or the vision he saw of his brothers’ afflictions, he summoned a land of lovely women. He closed his eyes on the night and smelled and remembered scent of the room of Elizabeth and saw her multiplied a hundred times and standing naked and tender and beautiful like flowers in a field. And for the remainder of that night then he did not leave that imagined place but stayed with her and forgot the world of pain and allowed his brothers rest and peace.

And all this while, across the way, his father sat in Saint Senan’s tower and bowed his head and stared endlessly through the telescope at the sky. He placed his eye to the glass and for hours did not move it away, and this, though the clouds did not pass and there were no stars to be seen.

10

In truth by that time Finbar Foley had led the gypsies on the long walk south out of the snowy mountains and bartered with what things they had and those they found for the timber that made new caravans. It took some time before they were again ready and equipped to travel, but the pause was welcome to all.

During those weeks they did not move on. Now their leader, Fin-bar imagined he must announce to them a destination, but he himself had no clear idea of one. Not being of gypsy blood, he did not understand that such was not required of him; the gypsies never journeyed toward an end, for motion was an end in itself Nonetheless, wrongly believing that this was needed to validate his leadership, Fin-bar Foley sought to give it to them. So, one dawn, he rose from beneath the blanket where Cait the mer-girl was grown large with his twin daughters and he walked out where the embers of the fire smoked and called the gypsies to rise and move on. They did so, coming to life in the grey light and tackling up new horses for the way ahead. When they were ready, Finbar looked along the line of them and felt a surge of pride as if he were some valiant captain trooping into battle. He sat beside Cait in the front caravan and snapped the reins and drove the line of caravans down across that country that lay to the south of the Maritime Alps. Nor by then was Cait the only pregnant woman among them, for in the weeks that followed, one by one of all of those within the perimeters of childbearing years announced themselves to be expecting, as well as two prune-faced women who boasted they were a youthful sixty. Finbar did not announce then that he would bring them to Bohemia, or make speeches on the notion of a homeland, though these loomed in his mind. Indeed, he did not know where Bohemia was but had like others before him fallen upon the idea of its being a spiritual home for gypsies and did not for one moment imagine that he could be wrong. Still, he kept the destination secret. He told the gypsies only that he would bring them to a place where they belonged, and where the weathers would be clement and the people welcome them like cousins lost.

That this was a fantasy of his own making, and born out of the need to believe such a place would exist for his own children, did not stop him from believing in it. Nor did he realize how his hopes fell into the selfsame shapes as those once dreamed by his father.

So, travelling with care for the pregnant, and with such slow indolence that measurement of progress was impossible, the gypsies moved through Liguria like an oil of olives. They arrived at the banks of the river Po and followed along them and bargained and traded with villagers there and heard tales of wars and battles and the affairs of a world in which they were no more than shadows. One of the older women who was expecting her fourteenth child had a vision there of yellow birds flying in her stomach. A night later three more of the women had the same dream and two nights later six more. They were uncertain of its provenance, but to set at ease their wives and to make real the thing imagined, their husbands went and returned with a dozen canaries in wicker cages. The visions vanished then and the canaries hung outside the front hoop of the caravans and rocked there on perches and sang sometimes to the swaying of those roads. It was discovered the birds’ humour foretold the weather; how they sang or perched or flew predicted the rains or wind to come, and the men, learning of this, were pleased to pretend they had known all along and not bargained for the birds merely to placate their women.

Before it reached the sea, the gypsies left the Po and turned northward around the Gulf of Venice. It was the summer of that year. The canaries sang sweetest and the sun shone and the swollen women took to lying in the grass and lifting their shirts and smocks and exposing to the warmth the pale orbs of their future progeny. They said the sun would give them sons. Leaving them so, Finbar sailed to the fabled city that was a thousand islands, and there in the shop of old Fabrizio Benardi he saw his first map of the known world. He could not believe it. He unfurled it across four tabletops and moved his palms outward upon it like two flat-bottomed boats travelling in opposite directions and revealing places of which he had never heard. Old Benardi, who himself had never left Venice, had purchased the map from a navigator who had arrived from the Indies. He had been assured the map was an authentic and accurate rendering even to the point of those islets previously considered too minor to merit inclusion. On the map, Fin-bar studied the place where they were, and where he imagined Bohernia to be. It was not so very far away. His sons could be born there, he thought at once, and the sons and daughters of all those in the caravans. It would be a glorious new beginning. He lifted his hands and the world rolled closed. He spun around in the dust that flew upward off all the handmade papers and scrolls of that shop and brought his face close to Benardi’s. Finbar Foley was still an impressive figure, the breadth of his chest, the thickness of his eyebrows, his firm chin and fiery stare all lent him the air of one not to be denied. He told the Venetian he had to have the world, and he offered him gold coins he did not possess for it. The old man agreed the sale, and that afternoon Finbar Foley stole the coins at knifepoint from a Jew he followed from the Rialto. He returned to Benardi’s in haste and later took the map back to the gypsies, along with several bottles of ink, some sheets of yellowish paper, and a half dozen masks that Fabrizio Benardi thrust toward him when he caught the scent of violent desperation burning the dust. That evening the gypsy men gathered to look at the map but to Finbar’s surprise were only briefly interested in it. They could not match the shape of the lines drawn on the paper with the endless terrain they had traversed back and forth in their lifetimes. It was no more like the world than the sketch of a man was like a man. Though Finbar could not see it, it made less of the gypsies’ one great wealth, their intimate and unrivalled knowledge of all the richly varied landscapes that existed. For they alone knew the world.

Despite their indifference, later that night Finbar showed the map to Cait with all the excitement of a New World discoverer. He fingered her their route through the mountains, and pointed the way ahead, and was too rapt in his own fervour to notice her brown eyes turning longingly back to fix on that western island where they had begun.

When they left there, the caravans and wagons creaked under the weight of the pregnancies. They passed northward through lands governed by Hapsburgs and met old peasants on the roadside who asked them what the world was like to the south. There were some among them who remembered the armies of Napoleon and when those same places they stood in had been renamed the Illyrian provinces. And they told of how the maps of that country had been drawn and redrawn many times and the people lived on hungry among the linden trees no matter who their sovereign. And the gypsies agreed and understood this and took their time there and shared what they had and sang songs in the night ancient and sorrowful.

At last the caravans moved on and the summer passed into an autumn mild and tender. Misreading the map, Finbar took them east across the great Hungarian plain when they should have gone north. He allowed the road to take them and they journeyed ever more slowly as the women’s pregnancies neared their time. In the vast wilderness of steppe they saw none but foxes and trundling boars and herds of deer standing or moving like dancers to some music in the wind. It was a place great and empty, and crossing it, the gypsies felt the smallness of themselves and their caravan as though all others in the world had perished. Even the canaries hushed then. The wheels rattled. The birds sat on their perches and swayed. Finally they came to the shores of the huge Lake Balaton. And, as though there were some ancient folkloric mechanism that operated there, once they saw and heard the lapping of the waves the women’s waters broke in unison. Their cries rang out from each of the caravans and at once the canaries burst into song. The gypsies made quick camp and the men lit fires and stood about them and were silent while the few women who were not with child hurried back and forth with cloths bloodied and sleeves rolled. The night fell like a velvet curtain and while the women cried and the men waited stars were spun upon it out of the dark.

All this time Finbar had feared in secret for Cait’s pregnancy. He had suffered dreams where he saw her sex bleed a river. The blood was thick and gushed alarmingly and flowed across the floor and out the door to the sea, and all the time Cait was lain on her back and the gypsies were gathered about her, awaiting the birth. Then in the dream the child was born and its birth was a kind of fluidity or issuance without effort and the gypsies were amazed and applauded. Then they began to laugh. And the laughter took the shape of white gannets and these then were beating in the air above where Cait lay. And when Finbar looked down to see his child, the birds were swooping to attack it, and he had to wave his arms about and it was still moments before he looked down and saw the infant had been born with the lower body of a fish.

He woke then, lathered in a white film with his eyes wide. But the dream recurred on many nights through the pregnancy, and sometimes in the dark he had woken to find the air beneath the hoop of canvas heavy and putrid with the smell of fish and silvery scales upon his tongue.

So, on the Night of Labours, Finbar Foley passed into a kind of torment that, though not equal to that of his wife, wrung him like a cloth. The first of the children was born just after midnight to the sexagenarian mother, who made no cry at all but claimed the birth felt like a hairball dropping softly out of her insides. Her son, Primo, was borne out on the night by his ancient father, and the others who were still attendant on the arrival of their own offspring greeted it with half-glad nods and thin smiles. The child did indeed resemble a ball. Its head was very large and covered with a downy fur, and although the other fathers-to-be did not say anything, there passed through each of them the same painful vision, imagining how such a huge ball could pass out through the smallness of a woman’s sex. The births came on in waves then. The cries and excitements of the midwives passed along the caravans and flamed torches were held aloft and there were embraces among those who were uncles and cousins and bottles of a clear, fiery liquid flashed in the starlight. It was a wonder, the synchronicity of those births like some vast clock set in the heavens and chiming the beginning of a new gypsy age. Or so the fathers said. Hot-faced and exulting in their achievement that was nothing at all, they proclaimed, they made announcement, they sawed the air with their hands and predicted marvels. Moving from one to the other, and taking the congratulations he was given for bringing them there, Fin-bar secretly studied each child for oddities. Secundo was a big boy also, born without defect. As were all the others that were pressed into his arms as if for benediction during that long night. Finbar took them and held them an instant and tried to look pleased, but the truth was that with each perfect one, his soul was tormented further by the certainty that his own child would emerge a monster.

His fear was without reason. But as the night drew on and it became clear that Cait was to suffer the longest labour and her screams came piercingly out of the caravan where three women attended her, the fear grew to certainty. He went up to the caravan and dared to lift the flap of the canvas to look in and see the river of blood. But one of the women spun around at once and cursed at him and shook her whiskered chin and pulled the canvas closed again. He stood there and heard his wife cry and briefly he thought of his own mother and whatever world she had gone to. He threw back his head then and shouted out a sound, and the gypsies about him did not understand it, for it was in a language not theirs. And he shouted it again and added before it the name of his family, and shouted it out to the swirling stars of that night by the great lake in the country that was like none any Foley had ever seen before. He shouted the words, and boars in the woods unseen stopped, foxes froze. He shouted the words and in so doing echoed his own father years before when teaching the boys in games of hurling the cry of defiance that led to victory.

“Abu! O Fhogli abu!”

Finbar Foley shouted it out and then raised his fists and shook them in the air as if at the face of some celestial beast.

The other gypsies who were about him then were startled but saw the urgency of his cry and were moved to join him. They all raised their fists and shook them and were a chorus that would not be denied.

And like all swift and traceless epiphanies, it came to Finbar Foley then that he must catch a fish. He looked out across the dark, mutable waters of the lake. He heard the laps and slaps of soft collapse as the waves sighed, and then he was running out to the water’s edge and followed by the loud surge of the newly made fathers. None had any idea at first what he was about, but each had drunk the burning juniper-flavoured whiskey that was of that place. They splashed into the chill waves and yelled as the cold bit at their calves. But Finbar was farther out still and was waist-deep and then dove out of sight. The gypsies stopped and were like puppets suspended. Their faces were like things fixed in rigid pose, not knowing if he was to come back again. They knew the tales of whole lands hidden beneath the surfaces of lakes, they knew the lore of demons and water sprites and other faery enchantments and of the many who had disappeared without a trace. There was a long moment in the stillness and silvered dark of the lake. Then Finbar broke the surface again. He stood and shook a wide corona of lake water from his long hair and then dove again. This time the meaning of his actions translated itself to the fathers, and in a great rush then they too dove down into the lake. The scene if not beheld was one such as beggared imagination. Like strange nocturnal seabirds the gypsies plunged in the cold waters, some rising as some were vanishing. Bodiless heads appeared and bobbed and then flapped out winglike arms, while next to these were the disappearing legs and lower bodies of others. The lake was alive with them, diving and surfacing again, breaking the glittered reflection of sky and its scintilla of stars. They were like some that had drunk a potion or been charmed under a spell. As though their lives depended upon it, the gypsies dove for fishes. These, coming through the lake in vast schools of gentle fluttered motion, can only have been amazed as the men’s bodies crashed down and appeared bubbling before them, the faces wide-eyed and blind in the night water. The men’s hands reached and grasped, they made slow, broad arcs of attack, causing wild underwater currents and whirling eddies so that the fish themselves were spun about and swam flatly and sideways like ones demented. Still, the gypsies caught some of them. They made nets of their shirts, some of their trousers. Others managed the impossible and bare-handed the fishes into the air. They broke up through the surface with a cry and held aloft in the small light the flashing trophies. The gypsies bobbed there on the cold water and did not know what to do then until Finbar himself appeared with a great thrashing fish and shouted the same cry as before and stepped forward and waded out of the lake with the capture in his arms. The others followed then. They walked up the banks in the night with the fishes in their arms and were like an image out of some perished mythology, fathers cradling with bewilderment the changed forms of their sons. They came to the caravan where Cait was silent now and they stood around in a throng, the men with fishes and the others who held torches. Then Finbar knelt down and placed the one he had caught on the ground before the caravan. All of the gypsies followed suit until there was a small hill of fishes flapping and thrashing out of their element.

“Cait!”

Finbar called out her name as though he were summoning her from a far shore.

“Cait!”

He made the short name long and filled inside it the volume of his own longing and love for her and the gypsies remained quiet and lowered their heads and once more the lapping of the lake water could be heard.

Then the whiskered woman drew aside the flap of the caravan.

“She is all right,” she said. “She’s come back.”

“How is my son?” Finbar called up to her.

“Oh,” said the whiskered one, “your son has no penis.” She watched as all the fathers’ heads came up and their eyes opened and their mouths dropped and there was a kind of moan that passed among them like a wind.

“No penis! But two heads!” she shouted, and brought her hands up to the sunken sides of her leathery face and leaned back and hooted a kind of hoo-hoo of owl-like laughter to the astonishment of all.

Then from inside the caravan came the other two midwives, and wrapped in both of their arms were newborns. Their heads did not appear from within their swaddling.

“You have daughters!” one of them said, and smiled. “You have two daughters! Twins!”

“Hoo hoo, no penis!” hooted the whiskered one. And the breath of relief of all the gypsy men could be felt then as Finbar stood up and moved toward the infants. And as he was doing so, some of them came and shook him by the shoulders and he stopped as if just then grasping some urgent matter and told them quickly to return the fishes to the lake. They did. Finbar took his children in his arms and went inside to Cait.

“Our sons are not born fishes, but daughters,” he told her, and smiled. And he laid down the two infants on her breasts and laid himself next to them, and he kissed the side of her face where her tears were slowly running and tasting like the sea.

11

They were both beautiful. They had their mother’s skin and their father’s eyes. They slept and suckled and seemed the children of such serenity that the turbulent passions of their futures could not even be imagined. Cait recovered from the ardour of her labour quickly but retained a kind of sensual fondness for her bed and lay there pillowed and luxuriant and told her husband she did not want to move. This mood was soon discovered general throughout the caravans. The mothers were abed. They did not want to travel on. The entire camp smelled then of warm breast milk and cotton and made the autumnal air by the lakeside heavy and drowsy. The gypsy men, suffering a deep nostalgia for their own infancy, were soon of a like mind and happy to stay the winter there. For in the aftermath of the momentous night of births all were ineluctably altered, and it was as though in the days following, minor roots had sprung from them and were twisting down into the ground. They watched with drooped lower lips of envy while their sons and daughters sucked away at these milky matrons that were their wives. Even the sexagenarian, whose breasts were bluish and flat, with nipples that were wide brown knobs like the plugs of copper baths, and who had to have her son carried by his aged father to the next caravan for a further sup, was strangely glowing. Her eyes shone with contentment and her silver hair was very fine.

The mothers stayed in their beds for a month. Then they stayed for another one. The men and the older children cooked and burnt the food and bore it on tin plates into the caravans, where the mothers lay back listening to the songs of the canaries. That the bond between the women and their new children was overly strong, or that this might cause difficulty in time, did not yet occur to Finbar. He accepted the somnolent mood of the camp and watched as for the first time in many years the gypsy men came to understand what it was to stay still. The winter was slow in coming. The horses were left to graze the long grasses that feathered the lakeside and sometimes were taken and ridden bareback into the woods in grey dawn deer hunts. And it was a good time. They lived on there in the strange, desolate beauty of that place. And some of the men who had felled trees worked at these with long, jagged-tooth saws and cut out shafts of wood and placed these at angles off the sides of their caravans and bound the rough-hewn planks together with hay rope. There were three of these shelters made before Finbar realized it. He did not know whether to knock them down or offer his help and in the end did neither, retreating into himself and secretly studying the map of the world while all about him the gypsies built their winter houses. By the time the first snows came his was the only caravan without extension. He lay on the bed at night beside Cait and played his face like the moon coming and going before his daughters.

“We’ll stay here now until the spring,” he said. It was more of a question than he pretended, for he was testing her wishes. “Then we’ll go north. Do you want to see on the map?”

“I do not,” Cait said, and she held the child they had called Rose in the air above her. “I want to stay here, or I want to go home.”

“Home?” He could not believe she had said it, and he furrowed his brow as if it were something beyond his comprehension.

“Yes.”

“Home?”

“Your hearing is working, then.”

“Where is home?”

“You know where it is.”

“I do not. This is home,” he said. “This caravan, this is all the home I have. All the home we have.… Cait.… Cait?”

Cait did not answer him. She brought the child down to her and held her close and said no more.

The snows were thin until Christmas. They fell into the lake and lingered only on the margins of the road. The gypsies lit fires and traded with those who passed that way. They told fortunes to some that came out of the snowy roads with thick capes and horses thin. The gypsies played them music on wooden pipes and sang the songs they knew. The strangers told them sorrowful tidings of the greater world, and it seemed to the gypsies it was always so. They built high their fires and kept warm their children. An air of contentment had settled over the gypsies then and they did not hanker after open roads. Even their features softened. When the snows grew worse, Finbar expected they would come to him and look to move on. But this did not happen. Instead they barricaded more thoroughly their caravans and cut wood for fires.

Gradually, very gradually, the line of caravans grew to resemble a street.

Storms of wind and hail and sleet came and went and still the gypsies did not look to move on. Finbar talked no more with Cait of bringing the gypsies to Bohemia, and he did not unfurl Benardi’s map except when she was sleeping. She loved him for that then and some nights lifted Rose and Roisin to the other side of the blankets, and rolled her bed-warm and sensual amplitude to him and let his face be lost in the roundness of her breasts. Then, when the spring arrived, she, like almost all of the gypsy women, announced that she was pregnant once more.

So they stayed on again there. Finbar came out to the campfire and gathered all of them around him and announced what he knew they were already wishing. Finbar’s broad arms were crossed on his chest, his long hank of fair hair hung down his back, and he stood before them like a god.

“It will be good,” he said, “for another year. Then our children will be strong.”

“Yes,” the men mumbled. They nodded and shrugged their shoulders in acquiescence and raised the palms of their hands slightly outward as if showing stigmata. “Our children. Yes. For our children we must.”

Finbar left them and went away down the lake and felt ashamed and dishonest.

Rains fell. One night, when all were sleeping, a gypsy by the name of Nimez hitched his caravan and dismantled its extension and moved down to the beginning of the line of caravans and made camp on the opposite side. When the others woke up he was already established in a superior trading position and had set out a stall of tin pots, ladles, bent spoons, two-pronged meat forks, prongs from meat forks, keys without locks, spikes, hooks, tin Vs of no particular usage, and other such oddments. He had put on a purple shirt and was standing before his caravan, looking down the road. Some of the gypsies were disgruntled but could not say so, for it would reduce them to no more than petty merchants. But the following night, several of the caravans were hitched and moved about in a dark ballet until the dawn arrived and found them settled in two lines either side of the muddied road. No one said a thing.

“Have you seen what has happened?” Finbar said to Cait as the girls rolled in her lap. “They have made a street.”

“What is so bad about that?” she asked him. “Don’t be afraid of the new thing. It might be wonderful.”

And he did not believe her, but neither did he know how or if he could stop it.

The place changed before his eyes. As the warm days of May came with hordes of flies, the pregnant women grew irritated under the canvas. They told their husbands they were useless. They heard that the wife of Nimez had cool silken sheets and Moroccan perfume. When their husbands lurched over in the bed to kiss them, the women shooed them away and said how could there be love in a place that smelled like horse manure. They asked why was it that their men were so slow to see the future. Did they want it to bite them in the ass? The women said the future had arrived. For, since the gypsies were no longer going to sell and barter and tell fortunes and stories and beg their living travelling miles along the roads, they must now make it from all that passed there along the road between the caravans. It was that simple.

In the morning the gypsies moved the horses farther toward the woods. By that afternoon any traveller coming down the road took two hours to pass the various booths and stalls and pitches and hagglers that were in his way. Some did not pass at all. So it was that there was soon a dealer in mirrors, a brewer of medicines, a maker of elaborate mechanical contraptions, a scarred man who offered body piercing, a trader in boar hide, a sharpener of knives, a woman who needled tattoos, and others various and sundry of that kind.

From these and others who were delayed along the way, the gypsies heard tales of the greater world. The travellers and traders spoke in all languages, and their meanings were not always clear. Nonetheless soon the gypsies understood that there was calamity everywhere, and they were better off staying there by the lake. The summer drew on. The street lengthened and the flies buzzed over it. Without anyone noticing it, the caravans themselves began to lose their origins. Nimez worked in the dark to build a kind of foundation beneath his and was one day able to sell the wheels to a passing Macedonian, who bore them off tied either side of two oxen. Other wheels were soon removed, too. Then, when a bearded Magyar stopped around the fireside one night and told them that in the empire of the Ottoman’s gypsies could still be bought and sold as slaves, the following day the horses were sold and the gypsies cut short their hair.

In all this trading, Finbar Foley took no part, and although still their leader he was soon the poorest among them. He kept his horse and did not remove the wheels from the caravan. In the mornings when he woke he caught in his nostrils the bitter smells of the street that were the smells of envy and avarice, and he was disgusted at what he had allowed to happen. He rose and took his daughters in his arms and took them off away around the lake, then to where the birds flocked and plashed in the waters and where things were simpler. He caught fish for their dinner, and they ate it every day, though Cait wondered why he did not barter some of it for the vegetables of Kaleth the grower.

“I will not,” he told her, “and I don’t want you to ask me again.”

“This time maybe your son will be born a fish!” she shouted back at him.

When the time for birth came it was not like the year before. This time there were many along the street who were able as midwives, and they visited in and out of the wheelless caravans without betraying excitement or tension, either deeply weary of this action of life or fearing displays of emotion would soil the decorum of that neighbourhood. Nor did the gypsy fathers come out and gather, but there was a muted and melancholic dullness to the street, and the births took place one by one without announcement or celebration. For his part, Fin-bar again went out to the great lake in the darkness and wished that his son would be born well. He dove into the waters and made a net of his shirt and swam there until he had a trout thrashing in the raised bag of it. He came up to the caravan, where Cait had finished her labour.

“Is he born a fish?” he asked.

And the whiskered midwife again came out and said: “He is not. But he has no penis.” She smiled the whiskered smile. “He has two heads.”

The second pair of twins was identical to the first. When he saw them for the first time, Finbar threw back his head and exploded with laughter. He laughed and Cait laughed and the first twins, Rose and Roisin, made a noise like laughter, too. He laughed until the tears ran from his eyes and he looked down at the two newborns and saw their red and tiny faces and said:

“Two more roses.”

And he kissed his two forefingers and flew them down unto the infants’ heads.

“Roseleen and Rosario.”

“Is there nothing else that springs from your penis but roses?” Cait asked him, and she smiled and his heart grew large inside him and might have taken the form of white birds with wide wings, for he felt then so light and full of hope.

The days thereafter were soft and warm. The street became a small village. But, without the constant journeying of the past, the gypsies grew restless easily in the mild late-summer nights and took to sudden knife fights for little reason. They visited the giant-bosomed whore, Cassandra, in the small hut she had erected at the end of the street, whose loose planks creaked and sometimes fell outward as her customers’ heads banged against them. Not to be offput, in midcoitus she called out to those who were queued outside to repair the damage unless they wanted their wives to see. While some ecstatic customer bobbed up and down on her chest, she made above his head the gestures of hammering to the gaping others and told them to hurry up in case she caught a cold and closed. After such loving then, the gypsies came out into the night with an empty dissatisfaction they could not explain and took to flashing their knives without provocation and spilling the innards of each other in the street. They did not fight to the death, but slashed at chests and midriffs and took a kind of perverse glee in how the blood slowly emerged like dye on the fine white shirts their opponents wore to visit Cassandra. To arrive in that street in the summer nights of that year, it might have seemed the gypsies were rivals for the love of a fabulous beauty and were engaged in a fight for her honour. But it was in fact not hers but their own honour that they sought to recapture. They knifed each other to be men, and whether you were the gypsy wounded or wounding did not really matter. In the daylight the scars were bandaged and masked and the little village seemed as normal. The bloodstains in the street vanished under the traffic and trade.

Now all of this Finbar Foley knew yet could do nothing to stop. He grew more and more isolated from those he was supposed to lead, and when the gypsies saw him in the street it seemed to him they lowered their eyes and busied themselves with merchandise. He said nothing to any of them now. In the evenings he did not unfurl the map of Benardi or mention again the notion of Bohemia. Secretly he allowed the first seeds of returning to his home country to settle in his mind, but he did not tell this to Cait, for he could not face the idea of such defeat. Then, one morning in the month of October, there arrived in the village a ghost whose name was Malone. He was a figure ancient and thin unto transparency, with baleful blue eyes and the bones of his cheeks like stumps polished and poking outward through the flimsiness of his flesh. His head was bruised and scabbed. As he walked down the street he blinked incessantly, and when the gypsy traders called to him of their wares he babbled words they did not understand and stepped on in his shoeless way. They cursed after him then and disregarded him further, though he stopped in the middle of the street and said something back to them which was again indecipherable and easily mistaken for ravings. Then he drifted on slow and ghostlike and without baggage and in the dim brown light of that season seemed little different from the dead.

Then Finbar saw him. And in a moment recognized some trait of physiognomy or bearing and knew he was from that old country where he himself had been born. The ghost-man stopped and looked at him and said:

“Ta an domhain ag dul ar siar.”

And although Finbar had not heard that language spoken in a long time, he recognized what it was and knew that the man had told him the world was nearly over.

Finbar brought him inside then and sat him by the low oak table in their caravan. He brought the man cold smoked fish and water, and he and Cait sat there and watched while this same fellow took the food and drink in slow, small mouthfuls as if these were painful to him. The man’s jaws moved in a crosswise, crooked motion. He was without teeth and crushed the food on his palate with his tongue. He was bent over and rocked softly all the time. Then Finbar asked him in Irish where he was from and the ghost-man stopped and turned his ruined face to them and said his name was Malone and he was from the place that was the County Galway.

“Was?” Finbar asked.

Malone nodded. He said none were alive there now. He said a plague had come in that country and killed the people that had once lived there. He wet the lipless gap of his mouth with a little water and then he told them. He told how the potatoes had rotted in the ground and the people been unable to pay their rent and how they were driven to the roads. He told of some gone insane and others who leapt from cliffs into the sea. He told of those who ate the grass and the nettles and the green leaves of the hedgerows and how their bodies twisted in the ditches six days and more before they died. He told of bailiffs come to tear houses down lest the families think to lodge there without rent. He said how he saw a mother of ten children offer to tear her own house down for two pennies, and how she did, with terrible tears and lamentations, until there was nothing left but rocks in the road.

The night fell while he talked on. For once he began, the stories flowed from him like a river of grief and Cait nursed the new twins and rocked them in her arms with her eyes weeping and Finbar said nothing at all. The old man had lost his daughters first. These were twelve and fourteen years old. They had sickened on the road to Waterford and fallen into a fever with frightful visions and eyes white with terror. When they died he had not a spade to bury them and dug the ground with his hands and made a cross of ash and tied it with the cord of his trousers. His wife would not leave the spot, and though he begged her and tried to drag her along the road she would not go, and he was forced to let her stay, where she sang sad songs all day long to their daughters. They watched the thousands coming and going there, those doomed and futureless and travelling to nowhere. His wife died of hunger by her daughters and he buried her alongside them in the same grave where their bodies were not yet rotted. Then he himself walked on. For he could not bear to stay there and thought Death would find him quicker if he went to meet Him.

Malone paused and looked and saw that Cait was bedding the children, and then he whispered other terrors to Finbar that he did not wish her to hear. He told of death in all its forms, of some shot, some throat-slit, others hung and swinging in the trees of the fields of North Munster with crows eating their eyes. He told of a man in delirium who cut off his arm and cooked it in a fire to feed to his son. He told of roads where the smells of putrefaction rose and how he walked on through them to meet Death and could not find Him. Only ghosts. For that country had become peopled by these. They rose from where they lay unburied in weeds and thronged the roadways. He saw them himself. They wandered listless and wan and without purpose. There were families entire. There were small infants with encircled eyes. There were gaunt great-grandfathers, all ghosted and silent and grave and journeying as things without a home. Malone had walked to Waterford and still not met Death and then taken a boat, thinking he was to drown. He had arrived in France one day without knowing the name of which country he stepped out on. Then he walked southward and eastward and all the time attendant on Death. He had heard then that those who had survived the first year of the famine were killed the second, and any last remaining starved in the third, until there was none left in that country now but a multitude of phantoms.

He finished and lowered his eyes and looked at the timber flooring of the caravan. Finbar and Cait were seated about him. They did not speak. A long time passed and all three sat in still and mute contemplation of the horror that had been told. The candle burned out and they were shadowless shades there until at last in the small hours of the morning Malone spoke and asked them if in fact he was dead.

12

On the ocean the eldest of the Foley brothers sailed for seventy-one days. The journey was to have been forty, but the captain of that ship, Abraham Huxton, chose a course more northerly than usual and brought them into seas tall as trees. Almost all of those who sat in the gloom belowdecks had never been to sea before. The distance of the journey was unimaginable to them, and in the times they were allowed to climb the stairs and take air and see the ocean, they thought it endless. Within ten days there were many who chose to stay below rather than feel the fall of their hearts as they gazed out on the churning grey emptiness. They lived then in the small cramped quarters where the air was soon fouled and where cholera and typhus and dysentery were in their first stages. Many were ill with seasickness and lay groaning day and night as the ship swayed to and fro. The drinking water was too quickly drunk and was then rationed to two cups a day, and then one. The flour was infested. Children bawled and were hushed or beaten quiet and lay then on the damp timber floor with defeated brooding faces and horror at how the green world of fields had vanished. There were mothers and grandmothers who brought with them small trinkets or minor belongings that recalled the homes they had left. These they fingered, a brass ring, enamel spoon, braid of doll’s hair, small carved cross, such things, turning them over for hours on end long after any talk had fallen silent. They sailed on. Sometimes they kept the small candle of their hope burning by asking each other about where they would go in the New World. They did not speak of the farms and villages they had left behind, but tried to be forward looking whenever the terrors they had seen ghosted before them and made their throats rise. So, they spoke of places their imaginations could not yet begin to shape, of New York and Philadelphia and Boston. And these appeared in their minds like shining citadels in the Bible wherein all their travails would be ended and their families live in peace and plentitude. But then the sea grew rough and the filled chamber pots that lay in their laps spilled about the floor and the children cried again.

Huxton sailed them into storm after storm. He was a broad-chested man who walked the decks with clean-shaven jaw thrust forward and hands holding each other behind his back. Even as the seas rose and threw the ship sideways, he tried to keep his hands behind him. He stood in the gales and sweeps of rain that whipped across the decks and he kept his legs planted as though defying Neptune to throw a storm that would unbalance him. And so they came. The wind cracked in the sails and the decks were awash as waves broke in froth and spume and painted the boards in thin white foam that came and disappeared down through the deck into the quarters below. The ship was like a toy and within it the families of O’Connors, Barretts, Keoghs, Considines, Kirwins, Mulcahys, Moriartys, Doohans, and others were thrown from their seats and tumbled in the dripping darkness with white eyes and screams. The ship rolled them about. The barrels of drinking water came loose from their bindings and crashed. They clung to each other and awaited their death. But for most of them it did not come, and the storm began to ease. A junior accommodation officer appeared at the trap above and looked down at the bowed heads and counted them and went off to make his report of losses and sometimes arrange for bodies to be buried at sea. Within days there was another storm. And then another. Huxton kept his balance. He betrayed no signs of victory or pride, only the upward tilt of his chin as the ship sailed on. In time the passengers grew to read the wind in the creaking of the hull and know the signs of tempest before it arrived. They learned how to sit in braced positions and secure such things as would roll and cause breakage and injury. They drank empty the cloth-stoppered bottles of poitin they had brought with them.

They endured.

Then, when the shores of America should have been near, they sailed into deep fog. The ship slowed and then seemed to stop altogether. The passengers came up excitedly expecting to see land and stood silent, craning forward and narrowing their eyes into the soft grey blanket that surrounded them. The foghorn sounded. The day passed. The passengers grew accustomed to that sound. Some said it would summon whales and that these were gigantic in those waters and would stove in the ship and sink her. Others said the shore of New York was less than a few miles and the fog would rise in the morning and like a cloth lifted they would see the great buildings. Neither proved true. The fog hung on. Huxton stood on the bridge with his hands behind his back. There was an eerie silence there. In the absence of storm the water made small sounds now and the sailors did not speak. The food supplies dwindled. The fog remained. The air was cold and windless and no seabirds flew.

The fog lasted another week. It seemed to the families gathered below that they had been chosen for a special purgatory. It was as though they had entered some location whose coordinates were unknown and that after the long history of tragedy they had survived, they were now to be kept there enshrouded and apart from human contact, where the memory of their hardships would perish with them. They sat and waited. Days passed.

Then the ship swayed.

It swung into a breeze and the sails flapped with a kind of urgency and even there in their quarters below, the emigrants knew they had come through. They shouted out. Tomas climbed the stairs and looked out through the air slots of the trap, for it was not their hour to come on deck.

“I can see the sky,” he called. “I can see a clear sky!”

Two days later they reached land. Huxton stood and watched them enter America.

It was not marvellous or beautiful. They did not feel the sense of welcome they had dreamed or the richness of opportunity they had been told was there. Instead there were small offices and papers and questions and waiting rooms and certification and cramped, huddled crowds moving from one place to the next without yet entering the country proper. They were in quarantine. There were medical examinations and bewildered faces and naked bodies standing in the cold. In all of this Tomas Foley moved indignant and restless. He felt like an animal trapped. He was reminded of his days in the gaol in Limerick and suffered sharp memories of the tenderness of Blath. Once when an officer gazed in his opened mouth at his teeth, he thought to lean forward and snap off the man’s nose. But he resisted and only blew his breath out and ended the examination.

It occurred to Tomas that he had not fully expected to survive and arrive in America at all. He was to have died already and had no plans for any future there. On the long voyage he had heard the dreams and hopes of the others and wanted the ship to reach the far shores for their sake only. For himself there was nothing.

But then he arrived in those cold examination halls and suffered the indignities of inspection and somewhere within him an anger fired. He stood in the long queues and saw about him the forlorn figures of the dispossessed, and the whole history of his country seemed etched in their faces. They shambled forward and gave their names, and these were Seamus and Sean and Aodhain and Brigid and Maire, and were given with quiet humility and sometimes had to be spelled out slowly, for they belonged in another world. And in those moments perhaps Tomas Foley resolved not to be defeated. He tensed like a coil. He stepped forward and had already resolved to make good there, to show all such inspectors and officials and others that he was a Foley. Determination burned in his eyes. His mouth took the firm straight line it was to wear for the rest of his days and his shoulders curved as though he lifted a burden.

He would make good there. He would work at whatever work there was and then send the money for Teige to join him. For the image of his youngest brother left on the island remained with him and he knew he should not have abandoned him so. Guilt muddied all his thoughts. Of Teige’s shirt there remained only a rag, but this Tomas kept rolled as a keepsake in the small bundle of his things.

At last he was free and walked into America. He moved out in the uncertain and innocent cluster of his fellow passengers, who looked about them with wide, dream-filled eyes and the fear of being out of place. They shambled into the streets with their few belongings. They stayed within ten feet of each other for a brief time, like a herd, and then the crowds of Polish and Germans and others intermingled among them and they were lost to each other and slipped away into the great teeming life of that city. Tomas had no money. He was arrived in New York, and the air was beginning to turn cold. He followed his oldest instinct and made his way through dusty streets down to a river whose name he did not know was Hudson and then lay down there as the stars appeared. But he could not sleep. He kept seeing figures moving about, shadows, the nameless multitude of the city’s doomed. They were like so many leaves, blown, and then blown away. When the dawn arrived he saw for the first time the silhouette of that city and walked to a street corner where men gathered and stood and waited as at a hiring fair. He was taken then in a wagon and worked on the docks, carrying crates of tea and other dry foodstuffs that had come from England and sailed around the shores of the country of famine. Those about him were from a dozen countries. Among them he found the faces of Mayo and Galway and Roscommon and acknowledged them with a small lift of his head but no more, working on until the darkness carrying boxes on his back.

He found a place to live in a tall building that was little better than a workhouse. There were twenty-four iron frames for beds and upon these each night the exhausted fell for sleep. In the dawn Tomas Foley was back on the street corner. Soon those hiring grew accustomed to looking for his face. They chose him quickly and he sat in the wagon while others looked up and tried to broaden their shoulders and contain the coughs that jumped in their chests. The winter came. It stole in along the docks in chill winds and frozen fogs, and then made the streets bitter tunnels of gelid air where people hurried with heads low. Tomas had never felt anything like it. The skin of his face cracked. He had grown a beard by then and it froze hard upon him like an iron mask. Huge snowflakes fell. The city whitened in an hour and within two slowed to a standstill. Horses slid and neighed in alarm, hooves clopping and breath misting in dragonlike plumes. And the snow kept on falling. It fell at first like blossoms in Maytime but then thickened until the streets were blinded. It fell on the shoulders of the men as they worked and made them briefly blanched like incipient angels. But it did not stop them working. For a week the snow continued. The city stopped and became a frozen image of itself, beautiful but for the dirtied smudge of tramped footprints. In the boardinghouse men held up their feet and peeled bandages and bloodied bindings from them and made hushed inner groans at frostbite and sores. They were unable to pay and told to leave and come back when they could. The place emptied by half. Down at the docks Tomas was kept on. His value as a labourer was already known and he was employed by the firm of Joshua MacMaster, Shipping Merchant, for all that winter. When the snow stopped the ice sealed it hard, and the city of New York remained a dirtied white, stained with grit and grime, and was the image of innocence tarnished.

On his first payday, it had been Tomas’s intention to take half of his money and put it aside for Teige. He planned to do this every week and put the notes under the heel of his boot until there were too many to allow him to walk. Then he would send them back to the island. But in the first weeks of the frozen winter, he had come to know an old man in the bed next to him. His name was Patrick O’Loughlin. He was a small, wiry figure without hair on his head and quick, flickering grey eyes. He had come from the County Galway years before and travelled up and down the eastern coast there in various jobs of uncertain honesty until rheumatism had made claws of his hands and curved his spine like a bow. That winter his money ran out and he could not find work. The day he was told to leave the boardinghouse he told Tomas, who took off his boot and gave him the money he was to save for Teige. He did not think of it beforehand. He did not consider that it would only last a time and that O’Loughlin would be again on the streets. He gave the money and waved away his hand at the thanks that began on the other man’s lips. That evening Tomas sipped from O’Loughlin’s whiskey bottle and felt the warmth of goodness flood up through him. It was the first decent thing he had done in America, he thought. It was his way of giving thanks for the good fortune that was his now at MacMaster’s. There would be more money for Teige.

Ten days later, after ten nights of sharing the bottles of O’Loughlin, the man told him he was out of money once more. Tomas took off the boot he wore even in the bed and gave him another handful of notes.

“You’re a great man,” O’Loughlin said. “If we had more of your kind of man, we’d never have lost our country.” He paused and watched the other’s face from the side. “I’ll surely have work when the ice is melted,” he said.

And so, somehow, as simple as that and without exactly meaning it to happen, Tomas found himself in the position of sharing all his wages with Patrick O’Loughlin. He worked for two men. He grew stronger. His legs were thickly muscled, his shoulders huge, but the wad of notes in his boot stayed thin. Through the months of January and February the city remained frozen. There were spells of further snow. Tomas wore a heavy greatcoat that he found in the storeroom of one of the ships. It had belonged to a Russian general and still had the epaulets before he tore them off. He worked on. He heard from some arrived mention of the continued famine in his country and felt rage and impotency both and that evening told O’Loughlin to get him a bottle of his own. He drank himself unconscious but managed still to wake in the morning and trudge to the docks.

The spring arrived. It arrived without any of the signals of the springs he had known. He did not see it in buds and birds and grass. On the long avenues and streets it arrived in the air itself and was there almost before he knew it. He left the coat open, then off, then worked in rolled shirtsleeves. It lifted his heart. He imagined seed settings in the island and the terrible year of famine put behind. He worked with the crates that seemed natural now to his hands and shoulders, but his mind was away in the other country. With the spring came blooms of violence. In the warm evenings hotheaded gangs marched with bats and clashed in street battles over territories unmapped. There were feuds and enmities that the spring fuelled, and men appeared on corners and alleyways like soldiers without armies but bound to continue in long, nameless wars that predated their grandfathers. They rampaged some nights and battered each other and cried old slogans and catch cries from campaigns long past. There were Italians and Slays and Irish and others and all that spring they clashed by night and released the restless turbulence of their disappointment in that new country by renewing hostilities of old. For his physique, Tomas was soon petitioned to join. O’Loughlin asked him one night as Tomas lay in his cot bed. He told Tomas they had to hang on to whatever they could or they would be run out of that country the same as they had been their own. The Irish had to stick up for themselves. He dressed it greenly so and watched across the semidarkness of the April night to gauge Tomas’s response.

“I told Burke Tomas Foley would be like ten men,” he said.

Tomas lay with his great arms crossed behind his head. The small night noises of the street sounded.

O’Loughlin leaned over. His voice was a whispered laugh.

“You can bate the heads off ’em and the police won’t even come near. They’re afraid. They’re off in the next street and they don’t come over. One night Burke’s going to go over after them. Bate ’em, too.”

Three nights later Tomas went with O’Loughlin. He met Burke, who was a big, thick-bodied man with a top lip that sneered permanently upward as though balancing there some droplet of righteousness. He nodded at Tomas. His eyes were hooded. He had large pink hands that were like the skinned flesh of fatted fowl. He said something to one next to him and Tomas recognized the voice of Mayo. Then they were a crowd moving forward. There were cries and shouts and the men beat their sticks and bats into their hands and flowed down the street as one, though flagless and without even the knowledge of the face of their enemy. They erupted into a charge. Some shouted, “Up Ireland!” and others cried out the place names of their origins, towns and villages and townlands that they would never see again. These, though cries of war, revealed a sorry truth, for they betrayed the deep-down angers of men landless and adrift in the anonymous vastness of that continent. They were cries of belonging, and as the gangs crashed there on the streets they might have been engaged in some terrible act of reinvention whereby the blood spilled could make good the loss of home.

Or it might have been nothing but the running amok of hot, bloody-minded thugs. Tomas watched it happen. The ones they charged against were Italians. He did not know what feud they were engaged in or on which side lay right. He stood back, and though O’Loughlin urged at his elbow and pointed out fellows he should charge and throw into the river, he did not move. Burke was at the rear of the scene. He studied Tomas with a tight-lipped expression and turned away when O’Loughlin failed to get him engaged.

“You could kill a dozen of ’em,” O’Loughlin said. “You could take any of ’em you wanted.” His eyes were crazed and shallow, and Tomas turned from him and walked away up the street with men shouting and beating at each other at his back.

He did not go out again on the night streets for all the rest of that month. He worked overtime for free. He volunteered to stand await for ships in the night. He tried to exhaust his body and then shut down his mind with the whiskey O’Loughlin got for him. Still, sometimes the image of open fields came before him and he felt the closure of his life and its constraints and he wanted to strike out against these. He ran the crates then up and down the gangways, he worked the great mitts of his hands and the deep muscles of his shoulders until the sweat ran glistening off him and his eyes attained the faraway look of one beaten and whipped a long time.

Then one summer evening when he was still at the docks Burke came to see him. Two others who stood back attended him. Burke gestured Tomas to him with a fat pink finger. He told Tomas that famine had struck again in their country. He made a sneer of his lip and told him they were dying again in the fields and roadways and that this would only worsen as the harvesttime drew on. He said they could all be dead soon. He asked Tomas what he was going to do to help, and did not wait for an answer. He said he was sure Tomas would do what every good man of their country would do.

Tomas said nothing. He looked out at the Hudson River sleek and black and he thought of it flowing all the way across the world and into the mouth of the Shannon.

Burke put a hand on his shoulder.

“You have family there. We all have family there,” he said. “We have to help them. We need a rebellion, and for that we need funds.”

By the time Burke left there, Tomas Foley’s wages were to be halved. The money was to be his contribution towards helping overthrow the enemies of his country. He could think of it as money for Teige. It was what had to be done.

That summer the city boiled. Waves of heat floated and bent the streets and burnt off the shoulders and arms and faces of those unused to it. There was no air. Some, freckle-faced men of pale skin, fell at their work in spells and faints or drank the river water and felt their brains swell and make bulge the baked shells of their skulls. It was hotter than they had ever known. It seemed they breathed in the oven breath of a giant beast that towered over the city. Workers who had come from other countries were less afflicted and could be seen then in a kind of swaggering ease, their tanned bodies slick with oil and their smiles white.

Through it, Tomas Foley laboured on. He became nothing, another of the myriad emigrant workers in that city who lived without hope a thing too empty to call a life. He worked, he drank, he gave over his money to O’Loughlin and Burke.

He burned in summer, he froze in winter. It was only during the short springs or in early autumn that he felt any ease, and in these he was tormented with memories of the country left behind.

And years slipped by.

He learned that the famine struck again. And then again. He saw the ships of the wretched come and knew well the wan and hollowed look of those families who had survived starvation and sickness and the sea. They seemed to him to look in more desperation than those of the year before and were like casualties in some long, horrific war. He could not bear to look in their faces. They were grey figures, sunkencheeked, with ruined teeth and bloodied gums prominent, collarbones poking outward, flesh dried and dead and flaking. There were forlorn grandmothers and mothers and children thin as sticks. A hard wind might have snapped them. One day he saw four boys of eight and ten in dirtied shirts and the expressions of old men, with coughs making water their eyes. Their father had been buried on the sea. Tomas’s throat rose at the sight of them. He held his teeth tightly together to stop his jaw from shaking. He looked about at the sorry assembly arrived there and thought: These must be the last left living in my country. And now they are here. He did not go and ask them. He did not go forward and tell that he had been one of them, too. Instead he kept his head down and worked on that day and banged the crates and spat angrily into the river whenever the vision of suffering assailed him. That night he came back to the boardinghouse soured and bitter and told O’Loughlin to get him two bottles of whiskey. When the little man returned Tomas told him he would give no more money to Burke. He told him it was useless, what had they done? O’Loughlin tried to say great progress had been made, plans were afoot, but Tomas turned and grabbed him by the throat and held and shook him like that and then threw him back on the bed with a curse. The small man said nothing more then.

In deep sleep that night Tomas dreamed his country was a woman who ran a knife across the surface of her womb. Her blood ran out like a stream and he watched it, that awful emptying that flowed over the ground. And it took the form of ghostlike faces. Tomas saw his father and his brother among them. He woke. There was a cold sweat over him.

My father and Teige are dead, he thought.

He blinked his eyes at the darkness of the long room. He lay there like that a time to steady himself. Then he leaned over and reached in the canvas bag of his things that he kept beneath the bed and he took out the tattered rolled rag of his brother’s shirt. He held it in his hands and sat so, and it was some time before he noticed that Patrick O’Loughlin was gone, along with both of his boots and any money he had in the world.

13

He could not stay there after that. When he gathered his senses, Tomas Foley walked out of that place barefoot into the streets and never returned to the dockside warehouse of Joshua MacMaster, Shipping Merchant. He just walked away. He walked westward and was like one trying to increase with each footstep the distance between himself and his country.

He is lost then from any history. And so he wandered, and in such wandering vanished into the crowds of those nameless and without domain until one winter’s night some years later in a small town not far from the city of Cincinnati.

It was snowing. The flakes whirled out of the dark. Tom Foley, for so he was now, walked out of a bar and a man came after him and hit him across the back with a swung rifle. He fell face forward into the slush of the street. The man said nothing. He raised the rifle by its barrel a second time. He wore a coat of furs and a hat of beaver skin. His face was blotched from raw whiskey and he blinked his eyes as he swung again. The rifle arced through the snow air and on the ground Tom Foley rolled to avoid it. He kicked out with his right leg and the fur man toppled and soon both were tumbling over in the mud of the street. Men came and stood to watch in the yellow lamplight. The fur man was large and grunted and tried to make fist blows from the side. But Tom paid them no heed. He rolled the man easily and then struck him hard in the midriff. Then he stood up.

He stepped two paces away in his Russian greatcoat and brushed at it with his hands. And in so doing, he did not hear the man cock the rifle at his back. There was a moment upon which his life balanced. The snow, the mud, the yellow light, the smoke that hung there, the horses, and the smells of sweat and dirt and whiskey, all were part of it. Somewhere in him he sensed his own death. It was as if Death Himself suddenly appeared there as a grey phantasm in the street, and in that same instant Tom Foley knew that He was come for him. He might have seen the strides He took toward him and how these were then so swift and effortless that Death was almost upon him before he could take a last breath. For then the riflefired. He saw his own blood spurt out through him and briefly rouge the snowy air. It shot out in fierce and sudden leakage and his brain fuddled with incomprehension as to whence it came. He looked down. The coat was holed clean through below his ribs. He fingered it and like a child then pressed the finger farther until it was inside the hole in himself. The bleeding ceased and he fell on his knees. He was there in the street, unhanded by any and studied by a few as the snow fell upon him. The fur man staggered to his feet. He swayed with the rifle that smoked thinly still. Some element of conscience fought within him, for he turned to those watching and showed an expression of strange pride and bafflement both that he had shot a man in the back.

Tom felt Death lay hands upon him. The snow touched his face, but he could not feel it. He wanted to close his eyes. His hand upon his side was soaked in blood and it squelched when he lifted and replaced it. He was cold. He knelt there and did not fall over and was like one faulty in performance of dying. The fur man behind him held the rifle another minute. None stepped out from the sidewalk. They shuffled there and murmured and held their glasses and waited. The rifle passed along the line of them as the fur man turned and gazed upon them as on a jury. Then he threw the rifle on the ground and hurried away through the falling snow.

A man walked forward then and touched Tom Foley on the side of his neck and then called to others, and these came and carried the wounded man from the street.

Three days later Tom Foley learned that the bullet had passed through him. The doctor that attended him was Philip James Brown. He was a strongly built man of about sixty years with a round head and thin, reddish hair. His eyes were kind and his manner assured. He had had Tom brought to a room at the side of his own house where men of various kind had lain to recover. There he had dressed and wrapped the wound and doctored it in the method used. He had said little at first, the gravity of the situation denying it; then, as Tom Foley sat propped on the bed, Philip Brown asked him where he was from. To the response he did not say anything at first. He nodded his head and offered Tom a drink. He watched him while he took it. He asked him what his plans were.

“I have given up making plans.”

“That a fact?”

“I plan to live until I die.”

“Glad to hear it. Hate to hear a man wanted to die after I stopped him bleeding all over my floor.”

“I’m grateful for what you did. I will repay you.”

“I didn’t do it for the money.”

“Why did you?” Tom Foley asked him.

“I’m a doctor,” Brown said, and he sat there in a chair by the bed and held his drink and the two of them dwelled in the amber hush of twilight and said no more as the noises in the street came and went.

Less than a week later Tom was able to walk. The first thing he did was go outside of the house and around to the back, where he managed one-handed to swing an ax and split the many logs that were assembled there. When the doctor returned he looked at the timber and thought to admonish the patient but simply thanked him instead.

“I will be gone tomorrow,” Tom said.

“Gone where?” Brown said.

“On.”

“I see. Plans?”

“No.”

The doctor said no more then. He waited until the evening had drawn in and the street darkened and he and Tom Foley sat one last time on the porch seats where the doctor liked to smoke in the chill winter air.

“How you going to repay me?” Brown said. He was looking away over the small fence that separated them from the street.

“You didn’t want me to.”

“Not money, I said.” The doctor kept his eyes far away. He seemed to be engaged in some study of the air in the middle distance.

Tom Foley looked at him. “What?”

“Well, let’s see here,” Brown said. “I saved your life, that’s for sure, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, there has to be some payment, otherwise every fool in the street’ll be shooting down some other fella, saying Doc Brown will patch him up no charge. You see my point? Where would that leave me? No, there has to be something,” he said, and drew on his cigarette and waited. A moon was rising through clouds and suddenly the snowed street turned a dirty yellow.

“What?” Tom Foley asked him again.

“I have a lifelong interest in this country,” the doctor said then. “Had it since I was a small boy and my mama told me she had come here on a ship from Scotland and that this country had been her saviour. That’s what she called it. Her saviour. And I often got to thinking about that. How can a country be your saviour? And I didn’t know then about all she had suffered and her sea voyage and all that. I didn’t know her father had been hunted down and hanged and that she had seen him swinging from a tree. She told me that only when she was lying in a bed dying and raving with fever.”

The doctor paused and pushed his lower lip out and back a little, then he took his right hand and rubbed at his chin stubble and waited a time.

“So, she had a good life after that beginning. That’s what struck me. That’s what it is about this country. You can begin here. It can be your saviour. Long as you don’t get shot down in the street,” he added, and made a small smile in the corners of his lips.

“There’s a man going to make this country better,” Brown said. His voice was soft but firm. “He’s going to find a way to bring the railroad all the way to California.” He paused again and let the smoke drift on the cold and seem a measure of the vastness of that distance in geography.

“I want you to go with him, Tom,” he said at last.

The night was still. The chairs creaked on the old porch.

“I want you to keep an eye on him. He’s been shot two times already.” The doctor rocked in his chair and the clouds came and passed across the face of the moon.

“Who is he?” Tom Foley asked then.

The doctor did not turn to him, his features obscured in the poverty of clouded moonlight.

“He’s my son,” he said.

14

Tom Foley left the doctor’s house two days later and rode westward on a chestnut gelding that once belonged to a man that had been gut shot in the street and cut and patched and sewn by Brown. That man was General Isaac Stephens, under whose command a unit of the Corps of Topographical Engineers of the U.S. Army was engaged in surveying the land west of the Mississippi River for a rail route that would join the two sides of the continent. In that unit was one Lieutenant Philip J. Brown, engineer, draughtsman, and map reader.

“When Stephens sees his horse, he’ll know I sent you,” the doctor had said. “He owes me. You’ll ride with them, you’ll see. Give him this.” He handed over a letter. “Say nothing to Phil, mind. But send me a letter sometimes. You know, to say how he is.”

Tom Foley had sat the horse and nodded at the old man then. He did not say he had never written a letter in his life. The doctor blinked his eyes and then raised a hand in sudden salute and went off inside.

15

General Stephens was at that time at a fort near Quincy on the Mississippi River. It was farther than Tom Foley had ever travelled over land. He had been shown where it was on the doctor’s map but only knew it as a point directly westward. Still, he would find it. It was not yet spring and the wind blew cold and bitter as he rode. He wore the collars of his greatcoat up and his hat low. The land spread out before him. He galloped the horse through terrain green and rolling and fringed with mountains. He travelled on. He did not stop, for he feared the unit of the army would be gone and the lieutenant with them. He came out into bright, hard days and followed for a time the stagecoach road to St. Louis. Then he left this and cut northward as was his understanding of the map. He crossed a hundred small rivers and sometimes stopped and watered the horse and crouched down to taste the current before continuing on. He rode with a sense of mission. He heard the hooves of his horse beat over the ground and took from that some kind of ease and satisfaction. He was happiest in motion. Sometimes he saw a coach or wagon or a lone rider or more, but all he left likewise alone and did not seek any company. The vastness of the land was like mesmerism upon him. It made his spirit tranquil, for the more he journeyed on in the same relentless way, day after day, the more the griefs of his past became numbed and then slipped away. He was a figure in the landscape, nothing more. He was a momentary speck on the huge open space he crossed, and he took from this some portion of peace.

At last he arrived at the Mississippi River. He was south of the fort and travelled along the muddied banks where rains made swift the flow. When he came into the fort he asked to see the general and was told by a soldier in blue uniform that this was not possible and was asked what was his business. Tom told him he had a personal message for the general and it was to be delivered by hand. Ten minutes later he was standing at a table in the log-built quarters of Stephens. He was a stocky man with heavy sideburns of brown hair. He wore his hat. He looked above the pages of the letter at Tom.

“You ride?” he said.

Tom Foley said he did.

“You can shoot a rifle?”

Tom Foley lied that he could.

Three days later, he left the fort with Unit 49 of the corps of the so-called Topogs Division of the United States Army. Lieutenant Philip J. Brown was the commanding officer of their number of eight men. Stephens himself had decided not to ride. He had already been on various expeditions through Minnesota and North Dakota and Montana, and whether fatigued or otherwise commanded, he this time left Brown the job of reconnoitring the lands through Nebraska and beyond the Wyoming Territory.

There were only eight of them. The general had told them that Tom Foley was scout, cook, rifleman, water diviner, and horse doctor. They led pack mules with supplies for six months and rode out of the fort with the pale March sun at their backs. They had all manner of maps, accurate to a degree, some sketched by trackers, crusty pioneers, and Indian hunters. Of the eight men, seven of them knew intimately the paper geography of the country ahead. They had studied it at length, could name gullies and canyons and mountain passes that were eighteen hundred miles farther than they themselves had ever been. They rode that morning with the confidence of such knowledge and were tall in their saddles. Some of the men were younger than Tom. They had been at schools in the east and joined the army not to fight, but to be part of that other enterprise of the advancement of law and justice and civilization westward. They were to be part of Manifest Destiny. When they had first heard heady talk of the railroad that would shrink the continent, a railroad that when completed would make possible the circumnavigation of the globe in ninety-three days, their heads caught fire. It was a fire that was easily fed, for it burned on the stuff of young men’s dreams, of voyaging into the unknown and leaving there a mark inviolable and absolute. They saw the railroad in their sleep. They saw the iron tracks running on and on across untrammelled terrain of prairie and desert and were drawn to the dream of tracing a line on that vast emptiness. In rooms in cool evenings by fireside they fingered ways across the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, deserts west of Missouri.

And now there they were. They rode out those fine spring mornings with the air soft and the world like a thing newborn. The broad sky was before them. They rode in single file without discourse and assumed the manner of such men who knew that the way was to be long and tongues would tire before horses. They rode from the Mississippi westward and crossed the Missouri River above St. Joseph and were as yet on lands already well surveyed for rails. They crossed then into Nebraska and soon their progress slowed as the engineers stopped and studied and charted the land. They opened maps and knelt on them in winds swift and capricious. They marked coordinates and spoke among themselves and did not say more than two words to Tom Foley but to ask him to fetch something or ride out and see what danger lay beyond the next canyon. He did so without pause. It was bigger country than he had ever dreamed, and when riding alone across the prairies and open spaces, he felt himself vanished from the world of men and achieved a kind of serenity there. Still, his rifle was at his side. He had seen those Indians that were at the fort and wore buckskin and blue coats and he had thought them peaceable and proud. But he had not as yet encountered what the engineers referred to as hostiles.

Brown, he found to be energetic and earnest. He was blue-eyed, had a peak of thinning blond hair and a way of addressing the others that made his statements seem urgent. When he spoke at the fireside about the railroad, his eyes glittered. He gestured with his hand and waved it like a wing. He told them to think how it would be if they were the ones to find the true route. He told them then that the way they would chart the rails would endure for all time afterward.

“It will be like this,” he said, and reached and marked with the blade of his knife a straight line in the sand. “That. Done. See? Marked out on the ground. Once. And never changed.” He looked across the fire and they looked at the line in the sand. For some time the men retained their gaze there and mutely considered it, and as the firesmoke wavered to and fro it was as if they could then imagine the great iron engine moving along ever closer until it was beating down through the very darkness behind them. It was as if the future itself were but an instant in their rear. As if, while the men each day moved on, behind them sprang up stations and telegraph offices and saloons and smithies and all manner of lean-to clapboard premises to fulfill the needs of man and become the cities of tomorrow.

Then Brown scuffed at the line with his heel and made it vanish. But his eyes glittered yet. The night passed.

They rode on. They crossed lands that had once been covered by glaciers and later by beasts unnumbered whose names were unknown and which lands were later still part of Indian country from which all white men were excluded. And all that vast and empty landscape seemed to Tom Foley to echo still with a chimerical afterpresence. They passed over a plain where a great herd of bison moved before them like a brown tide. As the animals ran, their dust hung in the breezeless air and was a cloud low and sad and slow fading. None of the men had ever seen such a herd and they stood upright in their saddles and pushed back their hats. Then one of them who was young and whose name was Cartwright let out a cry and spurred his horse and galloped in pursuit. He pulled a rifle as he rode and the others sat and watched as he tore into the dust and let off a shot at the blue sky. The bison charged. Their noise travelled over the plain and was the noise of hoof and bellow and fear. Still Cartwright raced on. The rifle he raised to his shoulder, but the motion of the horse and his own lack of expertise at such caused the weapon to waver right to left like the upturned rod of some demented diviner. He fired. The report of the bullet was a sharp and hard crack. The shot would have missed all but the widest target, but as the herd thundered on, a beast lay fallen in the dust. Cartwright rode past it. He fired again at the air and then again before he reined the horse and turned about a small circle in the passing cloud. The bison passed on. Slowly as the dust settled there resumed the air of tranquillity over the plain, but it was like a thing fractured and repaired and ever fragile now. The troop rode on to where the animal lay and Cartwright next to it, still astride his horse.

“This is the U.S. Army, Cartwright, do you hear me?” Brown asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“This is not some band of renegades, or wild men or hunters.”

“No, sir.”

“We have orders.”

“Yes, sir.”

Brown studied the distance. “If I want you to shoot an animal, I will say so.”

“Yes, sir.”

A pair of birds, dark shapes high in the blue, glided toward them.

“Very well,” Brown said, “You shot it, you skin and carve it. We’ll be at camp down there.”

He squeezed his thighs and they moved off then and left the soldier there, and Tom Foley stayed with him to help. Later, when his and Cartwright’s arms were stained to the elbow with blood and they looked like perpetrators of some foul savagery, they sat exhausted on the plain. The sun beat down. Scavenger birds cut arcs in the blue. After a time the soldier thanked the other for his help.

“Do you know writing?” Tom asked him.

“What kind of writing?”

“Letters. I’m long out of practice.”

“I suppose I do.”

That night Cartwright wrote a short letter for Tom Foley. Because Tom did not want the soldier to know his business, he asked him the words in jumbled order and later copied these in his own hand. When it was done his letter read:

Dear Doctor, He is out in country big and grand. He is right well. He is finding a route. I am watching out for him.

Yours, Tom Foley.

They journeyed on. They did not see the Indians that saw them. They camped by the many lakes in the sand hills there and ate grouse and quail and waterfowl. Summer thunderstorms crashed over them. Coyotes and foxes and badgers ran across the evening light. The men passed up over the grasslands and sheltered betimes in forests of oak and hickory and cottonwood where the shade was welcome but harboured thin clouds of insects that ate at their faces. These trees would be felled, Brown told them.

“These are our sleepers,” he said.

They traversed the North Platte River into Wyoming Territory and came to Fort Laramie and refreshed supplies. Tom left his letter there and after four days they travelled on again. They rode north to the pale red horizon of mountains. They came to desolate lands where alkali dust was deep to the knee and the water had to be rationed to drops and the horses and mules lifted up their lips to suck in vain for moisture in the air. The men’s faces burned and tanned like leather hides. They followed the routes of fur traders and gold seekers and those who had sought to make homes in the far land of Oregon. The days stayed dry. A high wind blew without cease and made move the sagebrush and buffalo grass. Whitened skulls and brittle rib cages of beasts long slain lay in disassembled poses like things struck and shattered by time. Sunlight dazzled there. The small troop passed along the boundaries of forests of pine and spruce and fir and sometimes saw moose step quickly away. They rode all the time with the knowledge of the great barrier that lay before them, for in the high-ceiling rooms where men had dreamed the railroad the Rocky Mountains always lay like God’s defiance in the way. To bring the rails through the mountains would be a kind of ultimate proclamation, a statement sent heavenward of all that man could attempt and master.

This is all the engineer soldiers knew. They rode with their gaze fixed on the peaks ahead. Slowly then they ascended through narrow passes and dry gullies. They wound their way upward beneath the blue sky and found themselves in the stillness and silence there that seemed of another world. The sun burned its relentless fire. The men dismounted and led their animals and were a thin, ragged line of blue coats and might have been the last remnants of a tribe vanquished and forgotten and wandering there until they thinly fell and the sun blanched their bones. The harsh majesty of that place assailed them. They progressed almost not at all yet all day moved about trying to find routes that were not impossible. Sometimes they tethered the horses and then Tom and Cartwright and Brown made their way up through the mountains on foot, scrabbling over the warm rocks, to find viewpoints for surveillance.

One time on such an occasion they scrambled up the mountain only to meet a bear. The bear saw them before they saw it. It had smelled them coming and laboured a time between curiosity and fear. Then when the men’s heads appeared the bear froze. It watched them like creatures landed from the moon. Briefly it crouched and in those moments seemed to belie its own reputation for ferocity. Brown’s head came up above the rock to the ledge. He saw the bear and let out a curse, and whether it was the noise or the wide whites of his eyes or the sharp tang of fear that burned on the air then, the bear rose. Brown called back to the others behind him. He tried to get them to retreat, but already the bear was coming forward. It was less than an instant, then the noise of the bear and the size of the bear both achieved that aim and the men turned about and sought places below them to jump. But there were none. The bear roared. It stood and made as yet no other action, as if such were not required but that the demonstrated evidence of its own magnificence was sufficient to make surrender all enemies. The men pushed backward and were close together and reached for weapons. The bear opened its jaws and roared again and slavered a whitish loop. It moved forward in a massive lunge at the blond head of Lieutenant Brown. Then Tom Foley shot it. The bullet hit the bear in the forehead. Its head twitched backward as if tugged by some wire or other attachment to something greater than itself. The men saw the puzzlement register in the eyes of the bear and then this the bear dismissed and came forward again and Tom Foley shot it again and Cartwright shot it, too. The bear howled out and shuddered and twisted and its right leg gave beneath it and it fell.

The silence regathered in the mountains.

“You saved our lives,” Brown said. Then they moved away from there and left the great corpse of the bear on that ledge and were like men chastened or obscurely stained.

They went on. All through the rest of that summer and into the autumn that unit of the Topographical Engineers of the U.S. Army travelled up and down the various ranges of the Rocky Mountains. They drew maps and charts and sent these sometimes by rider back to Fort Laramie. But they did not find a way to bring the railroad through the mountains. The air turned cold in the beginning of October. The rider brought back two mules laden with heavy blankets and other supplies for the winter. The first snows fell. Mountain lions came down and prowled and Tom and Cartwright sat watch and fired rifle shots. At the campfire Brown told the others they could go back. He said the winter would be harsh and long. He said he himself was going to stay on, that he could not give up now, but that for any that wanted he could issue orders to return to the fort.

None of the men left him. They watched the way his eyes burned when he spoke of what they could achieve, and the candles lit in their own eyes, too.

The winds became knives. The skin of their faces peeled off, then the new skin dried hard and cracked and in wrinkled lines turned scarlet as though branded by the burning feet of crows. Their lips blistered and opened at the corners and the burst skin puffed with pus. Their legs froze on the flanks of their horses. In their long boots their toes turned numb and they had to jump down and fall over and pull off the boots and try to beat the blood back into their feet with their hands. Two of the horses died overnight. They froze like things iced in fairy tale. From then on the men tethered the horses together and blanketed them and made their own rests beneath their legs so the meagre heat of their bodies might rise to the animals. They came on snows thick to the waist. They dug out small tunnels and made tiny progress and one time encountered the upright body of a frozen man with bluish face and finger pointing as if at the way to eternity. The fierce season made even emptier that empty place. They seemed the only ones then and the rest of the world might have perished or been taken in judgement and they alone were overseen and endured in that white and pure domain.

In those days, then, in that place where time seemed ceased and the very change of which they were to be the agent was nowhere evident, Tom Foley’s mind wandered into the past. He thought often of his youngest brother. He lay beneath the wide magnificence of the night skies there and tried to recall the stories of the stars Teige had told when they were younger. He looked for the Great Bear and Cassiopeia and Cepheus and he remembered stories of winged horses and charioteers and deeds heroic and fantastical. In his mind he heard Teige tell them the way he had learned them from their mother, and through those constellations that hung there the family was then connected and the past and the present made one. For days then Tomas’s mind drifted. He rode with visions. He passed a white day moving through the mountains but was in all but body thousands of miles away in the green fields of the island of the saint. He was there with Teige and his father. And his mother, Emer, was there, too. And the twins. And all were as they had once been and were not aged or changed, and his mother’s hair blew on the soft breeze in that place she had never seen. They were walking over the way toward the tower. He saw the blossoms on the berry bushes. He smelled the furze and the blooms of May and let his hand touch against them as he went. And all of that verdant loveliness that had entered him once now rose and screened the other world. He sat his horse and let limp the reins and walked it forward behind the others, rocking softly in the saddle and drifting back to that place where he last felt a sense of home. Snow flurried and crowned his hat. The muffled clop of hooves made a rhythm slow and hypnotic, and Tom Foley’s eyes dulled into that look that in his country was called away with the fairies. It endured for a certain time. But it stopped abruptly when he saw the face of his wife, Blath. Then the grief rose through him. He saw the ghostly faces of those multitudes dying on the roadways and their shrunken bodies and pulled himself upright on his horse and lifted his face into the wind that it might sear him.

They are dead now, he thought. All of them.

16

They did not find the route for the railroad that winter. Nor at any time in the year that followed. They sent plans and drawings and their suggestions east but heard nothing in reply. They imagined themselves forgotten. Brown used this then as his principal motivation. He told them the politicians were arguing among themselves. He said there was probably no one who thought it could be done and that the finances of the country were being spent elsewhere. He said he believed the gold in California had finished and so greed no longer fuelled the enterprise. He told the men this and they sat hunched and worn and aged about a fire. And then he raised his voice and said that he was still going on. Who would continue with him? After a time it became needless to ask. They rode on. They passed across the mountains and down into Fort Bridger but were met there with looks curious and askance, full beards and tattered uniforms lending them the air of renegades. None felt welcomed. For they were not engaged in the business of that army proper and might have been like some figments or ghosts travailing in a shadow-world. They left then and rode back to the mountains and felt they were men grown intolerant of all but each other’s company.

They travelled northward up into the lands of Montana. The seasons slipped past them. They crossed over the Rockies and down past the Big Horn. They rode wide of the villages of the Indians. And not Crow or Blackfoot or Cheyenne or Arapaho did they kill in that time.

But by then time itself was vanished for them. They existed outside of any history and knew only their horses and the land. They did not know of wars and treaties and treaties broken. They did not know how the maps of that country were being redrawn even as they rode over the land. They did not know that in Fort Laramie they themselves were reported murdered by Indians, that their relatives had been informed, and that another troop had set off likewise to find the best rail route west. Brown’s men rode on. No maps and charts and graphs were drawn anymore. The relentless immensity of the land itself made weary the vision of the railroad, and at times they forgot what it was they were seeking. Days and weeks could pass then without mention of it. In three years Tom Foley had written three letters to Dr. Brown about his son. But only the first of these had reached other hands. The other two Tom had given to traders, and these had never been seen again.

So it was. They rode in the mountains.

Then one day in the April of the year, they came down to a clear-running stream and dismounted and ducked their faces and shook the great hanks of their knife-cut beards and were in general ease when arrows landed in the chests of three of them. They fell forward on their faces. The arrows had made such small noise that at first the others did not understand. They looked along the stream at the fallen soldiers. Then arrows landed in the throats of two more of them and pierced them through. There were Indians on horseback in the stream. The water plashed and made broad, translucent arcs either side of the horses as they came, and such things seemed to be in slow motion or exist in fragments and shards where the mind’s perception shattered with shock and fear. Another arrow flew, the sound a whir. Then Cartwright fell back as he ran to his horse and rifle. Then the Indians were upon them. There were five or seven or maybe nine. Tom Foley could not be sure. He saw the one coming on a white pony with tomahawk waving and saw the triple scars across his chest. He saw the feathers in his hair. Then he jumped up at him and there was a moment and he was airborne and grappling the Indian about the midriff and the tomahawk was being raised to sink in his skull. Then the two of them were crashed in the stream and went below the surface of the water, and Tom’s hands found the neck of the other and closed upon it and drowned him there. Beneath the water he heard the sound of gunfire. When he stood again Brown was aiming his pistol and pulling the trigger time and again without a bullet firing. There was a long arrow in his thigh. Two of the Indians lay in the water. Another was running at him with knife drawn. Tom shouted out. He saw the Indian sink the knife in Philip Brown and was then upon him. He pulled him down as Brown fell back, and they tumbled onto the wet gravel of the riverbed and wrestled there. The Indian was younger and smaller than him and twisted and rolled like one demented. He broke free and stood and pranced on the ground, as might a dancer. He had no weapon. Tom Foley stood up and looked at him and they were so some little time, the Indian jostling in the space and ready to leap and the other still and braced and looking him in the eye. The moment held. There was the small noise of the stream and the groans of a man. The water ran red past them.

Then, the moment snapped, the Indian turned and ran and jumped onto the back of his pony and was gone.

Tom Foley stood there.

He watched where the other rode away. Then he walked past the fallen to Brown and knelt down and put his hand before that man’s mouth and then placed his ear on his chest. He was living still. Tom reached down then and took the shaft of the arrow low as he could and snapped it. Brown did not open his eyes. The blood from the knife wound pumped freely.

“Oh God,” Tom said. “Oh God in heaven.”

He went and took the shirt of one of the men and tore it lengthwise and came back and applied pressure to the wound with both his hands until the blood stopped coming between his fingers. Then he bound the wound as best he could and crossed down to his horse and brought up the canteen and poured the water over the lieutenant’s face.

Brown opened his eyes.

“You can’t die,” Tom Foley told him. “I promised your father.”

It took Tom Foley thirty-two days to get Lieutenant Philip James Brown back to Fort Laramie. And another five months before the son was fit enough to take the stagecoach back east to meet his father.

When it was done, Tom decided to ride back up into the mountains. But before he did, there came into the fort a wagon train, and among the homesteaders was a family whose name was Considine. He saw their freckled faces and he stood and asked them how long it was they were in that country. They spoke with the accent of the County Clare and told him they had come over only six months.

“Are they not all dead there?” Tom asked.

“No indeed. No,” said Mary Considine, who was the man’s sister and was struck by the sadness of the question.

That night, with her help, Tom Foley sat and wrote a letter to his brother Teige.

Dear Brother,

I do not know if you are living or dead. I do not know if our father is living or dead.

I am in America. I came here to make the railroad. I am in first rate health. My mind wanders some times to the days long ago. I had your shirt a long time Teigey and I intended to send you money to come. Then I thought all were dead there on account of the famine was in the potatoes.

This is a big country. I have been in the mountains. And sometimes there I thought I saw the ghost of you passing. I miss those times we had. I have lost all feeling of people here. I’d like to see you coming over a green field on the white pony.

I remain,

Your devoted brother

Tom Foley