The Fall of Light

1

The story leaves him and returns to the island. Always the story returns there. The teller changes the lens and the green slope of the island reappears in focus. And it is as if the teller understands that the island is an image for all Foleys thereafter, that there was something passionate and impetuous in the character of the family that made each of its men islands in turn, and that this was a trait deeply fated and irreversible. It was their nature.

On the island of Francis Foley in time the telescope aged. The hundred seasons of the rain, of drizzle and mist, shower, sleet, spells sudden and violent of cloudburst and downpour, worked their way into its timbers. The wet winds that braced the river came inside the tower of the saint, where all that time the telescope lay propped at an angle to see the stars. Its timbers shrank. Fissures wormlike climbed with slow persistence toward the brass rims. The beeswax that had once been worked into its surface by the monks was long since desiccated and returned to the air. Now it grew more and more to resemble the man who grave and silent visited it each night like an eremite. The golden curls that had once been his were white now. The strength of his body that had one time been a vision of potency and inviolable faith in his place in the world was now vanished. As if wires had been cut, the musculature was slackened, and his was a figure wasted with the angles of his elbows and other joints in odd protuberance like some fallen tenting. His past was longer than his future now and haunted his eyes and gave to them an expression at one time vacant and deep as if seeing but not what lay before him. By that time Francis Foley’s manner was quieter than a whisper. In the daylight he slept in the corner of the stone cashel where he and Teige had survived the famine on fish and berries and the rabbits that lived there. When he woke Teige fed him. They sat either side of the low fire and the smoke travelled about them.

Language had slipped away from them. It passed in the first season after the disappearance of Tomas and did not fully return. It was as if the winds that blew then were a keening or requiem and father and son said nothing but sat and listened until in time they found they had passed beyond dialogue and were in a place now where such was impossible. In the place of words were sometime small gestures, the least lift of eyebrow, wrinkle of lip, or nod of head. But even these were barely required. In the afternoons the old man went out around the island. He walked away in a slow ramble and kept in his hand a hazel rod, always going around by the shoreline and doing so in all weathers as if it were a station of penance, and while he trod there he revisited sins of his past. Then, when the night fell, swift in winter, slow in summer, he returned and went to the tower. One night the noises of his efforts as he moved the telescope into place alarmed his son. The father’s chest made a soft soughing as if sycamores in full leaf rustled there. And Teige came to him and appeared in the doorway of the tower and then came inside and helped him get the telescope into position. His father made the half-smile of gratitude that always verged on weeping. Then Teige left him and crossed back beneath the stars and wondered for the millionth time at how nothing else in the visible world now seemed to matter for the old man. All nights then after that, Teige came and prepared the telescope. It made no difference if the night sky was occluded or rain fell. Francis Foley would still take his place there, lying down on a bed of hay and opening and closing his mouth as he brought his face to the eyepiece and fit it there as if crudely adjoined by such mechanics to the mysteries of creation. He lay there until the dawn gathered in the stars. He lay in what private perusal Teige could not for a long time imagine. For it seemed a practice cold and aloof and without purpose other than a fascination the father should have outgrown. Still it endured. And it was not until one night in October of the year after Tomas had left that it finally fell to Teige to discover what the old man was doing.

It was a night brilliant with constellations. And all the stars from Pisces to Pegasus to Hercules and on above to the Canes Venatici glittered like a diadem bejewelled. Teige could not sleep. He lay in the stone building where the air was cold and damp with the coming of winter. The mud floor, as if it received the season ahead of time, as if winter and summer and spring rose from below and did not fall from above, exhaled a chill, dark breath. It travelled inside the clothes on Teige’s back and made him shiver so that he rose and beat his hands against his arms. The plume of his effort came and went, visible on the pale starlit air. The dog raised its head and lowered it again. Teige looked to the bed of hay where his father never slept in the night, then he stepped outside beneath the sky and stood and watched all that was still and yet slowly moving there. The river was quiet. Across on the farther shore the town of Kilrush slept in an unlit huddle. Teige walked out and went to where the pony was standing. He stroked her neck and her flanks and laid his head against her. Then he went back across the wet grass to the wall where he saw the glass of the telescope glinting. He crossed then to the tower, but not in such a way that his father would see him. When he reached the wall he pressed in against it and came around the curve so until he was next to the doorway where the eye of the telescope peered out. Teige squatted down then and from that position aligned his naked eye to the view of the stars his father beheld. He found Cassiopeia and Ursa Major and Minor and the myriad others then that gradually revealed themselves the longer he stared. The night slipped on, the stars wheeled another fraction in their endless turning. The cold made Teige embrace himself, and he crouched there small and shivering and attendant to that ancient pattern above wherein his father’s mind roamed.

Then he heard the whisper.

At first he was not sure if it was his own dream speaking or if at such a time in the night sprites or other such came and whispered for mischief and devilment. He pressed his ear closer to the doorway. Then he heard his father say words in a tone barely audible. He could not know what they were. His father was lying on his back with the telescope to his eye, and the sounds travelled upward in the high acoustic of the tower and were all but lost to him. Teige heard them like the smallest noise; the footstep of fox or badger coming from some covert might have been louder. He leaned more forward still and turned his mouth back that his breath might not give him away. Then he heard them again. The old man was speaking. The words slipped off his lips and rose and faded, and still Teige could not make them out. Then he took the greater chance and leaned in below the angle of the telescope and was in the same space where he could see his father’s prone body and hear now what he was saying.

“… what sorrow is mine is mine. I am not asking for less,” he said. “Do you hear me?” he whispered. “Listen.” He paused. His breath was a sigh. At his feet Teige heard his heart thumping.

“I am asking for her. And for my sons.”

His voice then was thinner still. It seemed to Teige that he said some words that did not escape his mouth, that these were formed in the air like silent promises or prayers and ascended into the ether of space as so many credos must have in the centuries since that tower was constructed. Teige moved back and sat once more outside against the wall. He pressed back his head and felt his body shake. He looked up at the stars then and blinked, for they swam in water like swans.

2

Every night after that, Teige came and listened outside the tower where his father watched the sky. He understood then that the constellations had become for the old man the face of God and that while gazing upon it, Francis Foley confessed sins of pride and others that he hoped might redeem the souls of his wife and sons. To the pitch of his whispers Teige grew accustomed and soon could hear almost all his father said. There, he heard the old man tell God the name Teige. He heard him ask of Tomas and Finan and Finbar. Some nights he heard him say the name of Emer only, and whisper this over and over as if reminding the ear of a forgetful deity. Other times the whispers spoke of that country and the blight of the potatoes and the stories the boatman had brought of those thousands dying. Francis made appeals. He asked if all were suffering some sin that was beyond atonement and if He above might not consider the punishment only of some. He offered bargains of damnation eternal. He promised his soul. Then again on other winter nights he asked God for signs. He asked Him to show Francis in the heavens some small glimmering that he might know he was being heard. He turned the telescope slowly across the skies and seemed to Teige to aim it northerly at the Coma Berenices. These, that were the constellation named for the beautiful amber-coloured tresses of the Queen Berenice, obscured a thousand galaxies too distant to be seen and were the first astral story that Emer had told Francis.

Whether there was a sign in the sky or not, Teige could not know. Through all that autumn and winter, he came each night and listened to his father talk to God through the telescope, and always the same topics rose in whispers off his lips. And from this Teige was strangely comforted.

One day in the second year after Tomas left and when the blight was again in the potatoes, the boatman came. He came up from the shore and stood at a tilt before Teige. He was thin and grey about the cheek and swayed in the small wind-rain. He said nothing. He passed a hand up over the crown of his head where the hair was vanished and an oily dirt streaked. Then he muttered something that Teige did not catch and made a sudden shrugging which led to coughing. His body racked. He stopped and looked at the ground, then back over his shoulder where his boat lay near the shore. Teige looked beyond him and there saw sitting in the hull the sorriest assemblage of rag and bone that comprised the boatman’s family. There were twelve in all, his nine children, his wife, her sister, and his own mother. The children sat to the front, aged from four to fourteen, and were a mass of faces wan and doomed and obscurely contrite like ones condemned. Behind them huddled the three women. They had lost their house, the boatman mumbled to Teige. They had been evicted the night before. He turned about as he said it, as if something sharp and coiled twisted within him. He did not want them to take to the roads, he said, and then said no more, because Teige told him not to.

“You can stay on the island,” he said, and when the man said nothing, Teige touched him briefly on the shoulder and walked down before him to where the boat lay on the water.

Their name was MacMahon but had through use and familiarity become Mac, and then, to distinguish them from the multitudes thereabouts with that appellation, the BoatMacs. They were a mute congregation of souls and seemed sundered from the world, with only the strange music of their name to recall their origin. Nanna BoatMac, Livy BoatMac, Tibby, Tabby, Oonee, Aggee, Gra, Bu, Prun, and the others that their father, BoatMac himself, had christened. Now they looked at Teige with that same expression of mistrust and guilt and shame that had become habitual in that time. They did not speak out. They slumped and endeavoured to make themselves seem a burden smaller than they were. One of the children shivered. They were cold and wet, and the cold wetness of them translated itself into the morning and lent them the air of travellers from the Country of the Drowned. Their hair was matted, their eyes stinging. Sores had opened at the corners of the lips of two of the girls, and these they had torn with their nails until they looked the awful image of some caricature of down-mouthed Desolation. Teige stood before them and did not know what to say. He reached out his hand to one of the small girls, and she pulled back. Gulls that had followed the boat screamed in the air. The dog that stood on the bluff waited. Slow rain began.

Teige turned to BoatMac.

“You are all welcome,” he said. “Tell them to come.”

The man nodded and shook in himself and swayed. Then he stepped down into the water and took the first of his daughters in his arms and bore her over and placed her like a proven treasure on the sand. While he did this with each of the girls, his sons tumbled out. Slim splashers, freckle-faces, weedy-armed fellows in torn shirts and rags of trouser, they came onto the island and variously spat and kicked at the sand and looked as if considering its worth. When they were all ashore — the grandmother borne on the boatman’s back in a vision that crumpled Teige’s heart like paper — they stood about in a little cluster and did not move as the rain mizzled upon them. They were like climbers arrived on the thin ledge of hope and dared not budge. The boatman coughed. Gulls rose and fell again. Waves broke. At last Teige told them to come with him and see the places where they could stay. He walked off a few paces, but the BoatMacs remained behind.

“Hereabouts,” the father called, “hereabouts is fine.”

“What do you mean?”

The man twisted. His shoulders turned like a sail.

“Hereabouts,” he said.

“There are ruins up here, there is the house we were making. It is not finished, but—”

“Hereabouts,” was all BoatMac said. Then he made a sudden nodding and raised the palm of his hand and turned and told some of the boys to go off and find timber and they ran like hares and were gone. By night there was a mound of materials gathered on the shore. When the darkness fell, the girls and the two sisters and the grandmother got back aboard the boat. While the boys and their father slept on the shore, the women slept on the water, believing the island still held a curse for any woman that spent the night there. The following morning the boatman and his sons set about building a long platform along the shore. It was a crude, raftlike structure loosely moored with rope lashings. But it sufficed. The sisters and the tiny grandmother and the daughters all came onto the island by day. The little old woman set herself on the rocks and stitched at a shirt. The boatman’s short, sturdy wife helped like a man, while her sister sat disconsolate with empty eyes and hands limp in her lap. The younger girls recovered their energies quickly. They ran about and went searching for mussels and periwinkles beneath the swooping and crying of the seabirds. They gathered mounds of seaweed. When boats passed up the Shannon River, the two youngest of them yahooed and waved their arms like the happily shipwrecked, heedless of loss and tragedy. By the second evening the women and the girls slept on the platform. By the third it had already begun to resemble a home. Teige worked with the boatman to make three-legged stools, and a hunk of driftwood became their salty table. The women thanked him graciously. The grandmother, shrunken and curved like one rescued from depths, worked without end at her stitching. She rocked as she did so and did not stop even when she told Teige he was their saviour. Her eyes followed him a long moment, but she said no more.

In the week that followed, the house raft was roofed with stitchings of canvas and other cloths the BoatMacs had with them. The seaweed the girls gathered was mounded at a place nearby where they would dig a garden. Soon the home was done and was a weird raggle-taggle assemblage of blankets and sacking and twisted sticks of blackthorn and sally bush and rods of hazel and bags of goose and gannet and other feathers, and all adorned with thrown clusters of wildflowers the girls gathered. It made an image at once homely and desperate and could seem a place inventive and bohemian, or what it was, the frail, decrepit, and tumbledown remnant of a family ruined.

Francis Foley did not come down to meet the MacMahons. On the first evening Teige told him they had arrived. The old man paused briefly and studied the steam that rose off his broth. Swirls of vapour ascended and vanished. Then he made an all but imperceptible nod and ate on.

The season turned. Rains fell all day and night and made swollen the tide. The Shannon waters ran more swiftly and in the starless, moonless dark the home of the BoatMacs creaked and moaned and threatened to break loose. But it did not. The father and his sons would not let it, plunging in the river, hanging on to the raft house, making new lashings with knotted ropes while on the platform the girls huddled against their mother and grandmother and attended their doom like those fabled in the antique times of the Flood. Still they survived. Then in the winter of that year, gales came down from Iceland and carried within their force fierce, flintlike showers of hail. These streaked out of white grey skies and were multitudinous as arrows flighted from above. They pierced the flesh with ice. No man could raise his face. Borne on the power of the frozen winds, they seemed to foretell the end of all season and be precursors of some new age, boreal and quiescent. In such weathers the raft house of the BoatMacs was daily destroyed and rebuilt. The rough tenting of their shelter took off and flew across the water. Stones were brought from farther down the shoreline and built like walls along the wooden flooring. The family sat and hung on to what they possessed and still would not move up to the safety of the island buildings. The gales continued. Teige came and went and offered what help he could, and through the continued inclemency of weather all that winter, the family of the boatman’s became his. For though the gales and hails and sleets and storms remained brutal through February and on into the month of March, the BoatMacs did not despair. They did not curse their misfortune or decide to return to the mainland. Even the sister of the boatman’s wife, who had buried her husband and her children, remained stoic and crouched in the bitter season as if in quiet assent, as if such were a kind of purgation.

And so they endured.

A spring arrived. Birds, starlings, sparrows, golden orioles, thrushes, chats, swallows, corncrakes, and cuckoos flew and sung. The skies were a light blue and the breeze a mild and soft gentling. On those days the boatman took by turn one of his sons and went off and ferried passengers from the town of Kilrush down the river, or acted as pilot for the bigger boats that sought to navigate the waters called the Scattery Roads on their way to dock at Limerick. He returned in the evenings and brought a basket of fish, some of which were always carried to the table of Teige and his father. So the Boat-Macs lived on there, and their moored raft house became more secure still, and in the daytimes any number of the children could be seen going about the island, chasing birds and hares, skipping in dance step, hunting fairies, and gathering the assorted sundries that are the treasures of childhood.

In May Mr. Clancy appeared. He was rowed across in a long skiff and stood up in the bow when the children of the BoatMacs gathered on the sand to greet him. He came onto the island and asked one of them to get Teige Foley. While the boy ran off, Clancy did not proceed further. Instead he stood with legs planted and examined without comment the extraordinary sight of the ramshackle home at anchorage some few yards distant. He held his hands behind his back. He moved his lips in a tight line from side to side, as though struggling to contain exclamations. The children of the BoatMacs clustered before him and stared. They looked at his green jacket and his long boots. When Teige at last appeared coming down the rutted roadway to the shore, Mr. Clancy strode swiftly up to meet him. He said some words the others could not hear. He gestured with his right hand a kind of onward motion. Then Teige left him and went back up the roadway, and the other man returned to his place on the shore and stood there and waited. The children looked at him. Under their scrutiny he tapped his pockets and found coins and drew some out and proffered these to the smallest of the girls standing near him. In his palm they sat like brown buttons. The girls did not move. Their eyes studied his face and he moved his hand farther out to them. Then the girls turned to see their mother, who stood up with arms on her hips from the clothes she was scrubbing.

“We have no need. Say thank you, girls,” she said.

“Thank you,” they said.

And Mr. Clancy pocketed the coins with a mixture of rue and shame and like a darkness passing felt what sufferings this family had survived. He stood and waited. One of the girls brought him an earthen jar of spring water. She watched him while he drank it back. Then Teige came and went to the BoatMac’s wife and told her he must go and would be gone some days, and he asked her if they would give care to his father until he returned. She told him he did not need to ask, and then Teige said goodbye to them and the children came to him and he embraced many of them and lifted high two of the girls and kissed their heads. Mr. Clancy stood nearby. Then he turned on his heel and led the way down to the boat, where the oarsman was waiting. Teige followed him and climbed in and then left that island for the first time in a long time. The boat pulled out into the river and Teige looked back and saw the congregation of the BoatMacs standing there, and the sky high and blue, the fields greening with the renewed hope of the turning world, and there, in the distance, the lone, long finger of the saint’s tower.

3

On that crossing neither man spoke. They arrived in the town of Kilrush, where at the dockside were the usual congress of petitioners, mendicants, ragged ones of mock genteel bearing, and others, hags, crones, aged-looking urchins, men toothless and head-bandaged in cloth filthy and frayed. Mr. Clancy waved all aside and Teige walked behind him and they reached a place where a boy minded the horse and cart. Mr. Clancy threw him a coin. Then they climbed up and passed on out through the streets of the town, where some paused and stared at them, gaping with a kind of naked inquisitiveness at the one who had come from the island. They reached the estate and passed in through the stone pillars and along the tree-lined avenue, where the new leaves rustled in tender breeze. Teige’s throat tightened. He thought of the girl Elizabeth and felt the weight and loss of time and was like one given a glimpse of his younger self. They travelled on. They came to the big field where Teige had worked the horses, and there were many there again that day, and some stopped grazing and raised their long necks and stood statuesque and beautiful and others equally so started and ran and traced a long arc through the fresh grass. Clancy slowed as they passed them. He let Teige watch and for the first time made comment to say some that Teige had broken were fine horses now

But it was not for these that he had been brought, and soon they were turning the wide bend and proceeding on up to the yard and the stables. The closer they got, the more Teige suffered a deep longing which took the form of visions almost palpable and of such a verisimilitude that he risked reaching out like the mad to touch them. He saw the figure of the girl standing and undressed. He saw how her hair fell. He saw her walk across a floor and keep her eyes fixed on his as he watched her. He saw the purse of her lips. Then Clancy was calling to him to get down and they were stopped in the yard before the stables.

Teige got down and felt the solidity of the cobbled ground restore him. He filled his lungs and drew in the smells of that place that were of horses and blacksmithing and woodsmoke and honeysuckle and ivy and all of which revisited him then.

“She’s in here,” Clancy said.

Teige went to the stable half-door. When he got near enough to see only the shadows, the mare inside turned and swung around away from him and snorted with her face to the wall. Teige placed his hands on the top of the door. He leaned there and looked in at her. She was a five-year-old, high and fine and white.

“She’s ready for him,” Clancy said. “But you bring her near and she won’t take him. We’ve brought her three times last year. He’s Bonaparte, lad. You’ve heard of him?” he asked, and at once knew it was foolish. “Well, he’s over East Clare. He’s the one himself wants for her.”

Teige opened the door and was inside the stable before Clancy could tell him not to. He was whispering the sounds he whispered in that language that was not language in any sense other than it existed between him and horses. He stood still and whispered and raised his hands very slowly until they were flat-palmed up to the air like one holding a most delicate and invisible wall. He breathed outward and let the presence of him establish and mix and become inextricable from the sunlit motes of straw dust and the fumes and odours of dung and urine and sweat that hung and made thick the air there. The mare whinnied. She did not turn back her head. Thrice she stamped her hind leg on the off side of him. The damp straw of the bedding was moved aside by that action and the hoof hit the stones of the floor under and made a retort sharp and angry.

“She knows her mind,” Clancy said.

Teige turned and looked at him, and Clancy understood and said he would leave him to it and they would take her to the stallion in the morning.

For the rest of that day, Teige and the mare became familiar each with each. Pyle, the youth that had before brought him his food, was now a redheaded fellow muscled but callow, who came and stood with a bowl of potatoes and a sullen expression. Teige thanked him for the food, but the fellow said nothing but stood and cracked each of his knuckles and then went off. The day was fine and warm. Flies travelled the sunbeams. They buzzed about the horse and felt her heat and she whisked her tail to little avail. The signs of thirst were on her, but she would not take water and was restless and nervy and seemed ill at ease in her own horseflesh. After a time Teige put on her a halter and brought her out and led her clopping across the yard and out down the avenue. He walked her with short lead firmly and said things and kept his head close to hers and allowed the softness of the day to ease her and let her feel her liberty from the stall. He took her on down the way but then turned at the fork and crossed to follow the main avenue so as not to bring her past the grazing horses. He was some way along this when he saw the carriage coming.

The mare flicked her ears, then locked and planted her feet and stood like the semblance of a horse cast in iron or bronze. The noise of the wheels and the beat of hooves and the sleek dark black colour of the rushing carriage all quickened the air there. Teige tried to coax the mare to the side out of the way, but she would not budge. And the carriage bore on toward them. Its dust rose in a cloud and hung pale and luminescent like the fore- or afterpresence of a deity. Teige could see the coachman in livery and see the fellow wave his free hand to clear the avenue, but the mare snorted then and snuffled and shook her head and turned about on the short lead and did not step out of the road. She sniffed the excitement out of the air, and though Teige shush-shushed her and reached his hand to pat the side of her neck, still she frisked and turned and tried to step about in a small circle. The coach was all but on them then. In moments the coachman cried out and stood upright and reined hard back to his chest, and at last the mare moved off the avenue onto the verge of grass. The coach stopped and the mare grew more anxious still. Teige released its lead to the full and let the animal sense it had its freedom. When she moved back so did he. He was in a small, scuffling, pulling, dragging scene then, with the mare moving this way and that and he following with the line fully extended, when the woman in the carriage looked out the window, and he saw in side view in the briefest instant that it was Elizabeth.

He saw her. Then he saw the other figure, a man in a black suit of clothes sitting close by her side.

4

The coach passed on. Teige tugged sharply on the mare’s lead and brought her closer to him and they stood then in the wake of dust and fading noise and the slow reassembling of the world. He could not breathe. He stood a time looking at only the soft curved line of the mare’s back and the fields beyond it, and all were tranquil and still like the changeless and unreal country of dreams. He did not look after the coach. He studied the green horizon of hedgerow and blossom as if such might secure him to the earth. He opened wide his mouth. Then the mare pulled up her head twice and he snap-tugged at the lead and admonished and turned her about and brought her back up that avenue to the stable, where that time she drank water. He left her there then and went across the yard and worked the pump hard and fast until it gurgled and a frayed water came. He stooped and doused his head and the water was first slightly sun-warmed and then cold and then colder still. He shook off the drops and then cupped his hands and drank some and looked across his dripping fingers to see the youth watching him. Teige walked over. Pyle’s eyes lowered and were gone then beneath a fringe of lank red hair. Teige stood next to him.

“Busy at the house, are they?” he said.

“I suppose they are.” The fellow cracked his knuckles.

“Visitors?”

“Feck all I care,” Pyle said, surly and short, his gaze fixed on the ground at his feet. “More logs, more water, more logs, feck,” he said.

The afternoon sunlight beheld them. Flies and honeybees flew. The snout of the pump dripped a slow, heavy drip of aftermath.

“Feck,” said Pyle again, daring beneath the blind cover of his hair. “What fires do you need and it fine as any summers day? But fires in every room it’s to be. More logs. And more. For the married ones. Feck.”

Teige did not speak then. The blue sky seemed to pulse. He turned about and found it best to squat down against the wall a moment, as if to study the cobbles of the yard. Then the other fellow got up and went off and Teige stayed there and held back his face to the sun blaze.

For the rest of that afternoon he did not take out the mare. He sat outside there and watched across the yard where the maids and butlers came and went briskly. From time to time he got up and went inside the stable and spoke to the horse and stroked her, but she was restless in the heat and the flies. The time passed slowly. He turned in his head the news that Elizabeth was married. He turned it this way and that, as if trying to find comfort while a stake was in his heart. He told himself it was to be expected. He told himself he must have known all along, that she was certain to be married as soon as she left there and went back to Cork. She would hardly even remember you, he said. You were nothing to her. You were how she tolerated the boredom of being here, nothing more. She probably told her friend and they laughed at you and how you came across the roof in the night to sit and see her naked. He told himself such things, as if bitterest medicine worked strongest. He made mocking images of himself and watched them portentous and comedie in the theatre of his mind. He derided all notions of love and made of them pathetic constructs of artifice and lies for innocents and fools. Anger roiled in him and came and subsided and came again. He saw his life like a story and one without great event or passion, but instead a long dwindling of days islanded with his father. He took from this the solace that such was meant to be, but soon this too was found frail and its comforts thin and chimerical. In the labyrinths of such considerations then the afternoon passed. The lustre of the sun was slowly diminished and the walls of the yard transformed from yellow to gold to an umbered brown. Red-combed hens walked about and pecked the straw stuff, scrabbled three-toed, stood one-footed, dunged a blanched dung, and made sharp head turns, quizzical and affrighted. To these Teige tossed powder of crushed oats that lay in the deeps of his pocket. The hens flurried and ran in startled, swooplike movement. They pecked fast and frantic and in the still emptiness the tiny tapping of their beaks on the cobbles sounded. When the ground was cleaned they stood attendant and Teige got up then and flapped his arms and they scattered in all direction with noise and feather and were in riot so when Elizabeth came into the yard.

He saw her. She wore a dress of pale blue that touched the ground. She carried above her head a parasol and crossed slowly to the stables. There she stopped not ten feet from him and made to look in on one of the other horses stabled there.

“Are you going to say hello to me?” she said at last. She had not turned. She was hidden beneath the parasol and studying the gelding that had come forward for her touch.

Teige stood. He looked across the yard, but there were only the hens in retreat. He turned back to the door of the mare’s stable and stood and looked within.

“You heard I am married now?” she asked him, still not showing her face.

“I did,” he said. His voice was low, his breath seemed to move through ashes.

She reached her right hand and touched the long face of the gelding.

“And what do you think?” she said.

“I have to tend to the mare, that’s what I think,” he said then, and opened the door and stepped into the darkness.

“Teige?”

He heard her say his name, but he did not answer. He took brushes from where they lay in the straw and with swift, arcing motion set about grooming the horse. When he paused later he listened and then came up to the door and looked outside and she was gone.

That night he lay in the straw and could not sleep. He watched the occluded moon cross the partly clouded sky. He heard owls and bats and others nocturnal traverse the dark. The mare shuddered in dream and lifted her hind hoof sometimes and stamped as if in crude imitation of one demonic. Then she stilled again and her breathing resumed its slow and steady heave, filling and venting the vastness of her chest in rhythm hypnotic. Mice myriad and minute scuttered over the stones, vanished into the walls and under the doors. Teige rose and walked out. The vaulted hood of stars glittered in revealed fragments as the clouds passed. Cassiopeia shone her tale of tragedy to all that might read it there, but Teige did not delay. He crossed the yard and by instinct and memory moved to the shadows beneath the wall. He pressed himself close to these and followed their line around by the house. He did not see the red-haired fellow that saw him. He came around by the kitchen and found then the holds between the stones for his fingers and climbed up onto that first low roof. He crouched low and was a shadow and again did not see the shadow of the youth below in his wake. He came to the window and found the sash partly raised. He lifted it with two hands then and waited to still his breath before he stepped inside onto the floorboards of the hallway.

All was an umbrageous hush. Ghosts and their shades ambled and paused momentarily, quizzical and looking askance to see one living among them. Then, in the grave and somnolent manner of their kind, they passed onward and were as shadows as they went about their ceaseless business in the halls of that old house. Teige stood and listened, the dreaming and the dead alike making the softest sounds. Then he stepped forward barefoot and with hands out as if to fend off attack or to balance on a rope. He came to the door of the room where she had slept before and he pressed his ear against it and could not hear the breath of any. Slowly he squeezed the handle around and opened it inches and then he leaned in and saw that the bed was empty. He blew a long, thin breath and tried again to still himself, and while he did he passed through brief, sharp agonies of indecision familiar to all such lovers, and then he went down the hall to the next door. He listened. She was not there. He went on, around the turn of the corridor, emboldened now and grown more reckless as he proceeded. The floorboards creaked, ghosts and dust and dreams astir. He came to a door then and stopped and knew that she was within. He tried to still himself. Then he reached and opened the door.

There were shadows on the bed. The darkness was jumbled with shapes and shades, tones grey and pewter. Teige stood, strange like a creature incorporeal. He waited, attendant on some discovery and incipient disaster, and with the passing of each moment could not quite believe that none came. Slowly the shadows assembled and were the shapes of a man and woman sleeping. He moved a step closer and could see her then where she lay with the man’s arm outstretched across her, a pale raised line like the weal of a scar. Teige moved again and this time knelt down on one knee and was close enough now to be enveloped in the smells of her. Her face in sleep was calm and very beautiful and Teige studied it then without haste or anxiety, as if the progress of all time had since ceased and such perusal were his business eternal. Then she moved and the man’s arm moved and she pressed her head back and angled in the pillow and showed the line of her neck that was fine and white like a fabulous bird’s and Teige reached and touched it.

Elizabeth opened her eyes. She opened them quickly and wide as if seeing a vision, though yet she did not seem to be seeing at all. There was a brief hiatus, a frozen instant. Teige’s fingers touched her lips and her eyes turned to look at him. The man beside her sighed like a sea cavern. None moved. Then very slowly Teige got up and her eyes followed him and he stepped a step back from her and another and all the time she watched him. He came to the room door and reached and opened it and already she was easing herself from the body that lay by her. Teige stepped outside into the corridor and turned and pressed himself flat against the wall and tried to draw his breath.

“You’re mad.”

She closed the door. Her voice was a whisper and when he heard it he wanted to hear more.

“You will be killed. You know that?”

He said nothing. His eyes studied her.

“They will take you out in the fields somewhere and…” She stopped. Something in her wavered as though in a sudden warp of heat.

Teige reached and kissed her mouth and laid his palm against the side of her neck. They stopped and she looked at him and then kissed again and were one twisting shape among the shadows and the soft ghosts and silent dust that assembled there.

5

In the dawn when Clancy came to him, Teige was lying awake in the straw of the stable. Neither man spoke but went at once as if by mute accord and brought out the horse and stood her briefly in the yard. The day was thickly clouded as if there were no heavens. The air smelled cool and damp and flies were not yet abuzz. The horse’s eyes studied with long, slow circumspection the horsecart in which she was to be loaded. She had never yet travelled so, but it was the squire’s belief and shared with others of his kind that the exertion of the ride over to the east to the stallion would weaken the possibility of a strong issue. So Clancy said. She must be loaded and brought. In the thin light then Teige and Clancy set about it. A line was run from the horse’s halter on up the gangway and into the cart with high creels. Clancy took this and led it through the top bar and waited for Teige to begin to coax her on. But the moment the horse felt the tension on the line she pulled back with her head and took two steps backward and Clancy tugged at the rope harder and called out a curse. The cobbles of the yard rang out with the sharp clopping of hooves. The fellow Pyle appeared with tousled hair and looked at Teige with crooked grin. Clancy shouted to him to get behind her and urge her forward, which business he set about in a manner wild and mad. But Teige already knew that it was hopeless. As if it travelled along the very rope, fear reached every sinew of the horse. She backed and shook and twisted her head about, thrashing the rope line sideways, for all the world as if she were some fabulous marine creature hooked on a fishing line descended from above in the realm of the gods.

“Stop, leave off,” Teige said. And the tension on the rope slackened and he undid it and let it fall to the ground. “Get off, go away from there,” he told Pyle, and the youth scowled and scratched at his freckles and did not move back.

“Do it!” Clancy shouted.

“But I’m coming to—”

“Go away!” Clancy roared.

Pyle stepped back then and his eyes narrowed and then were lost beneath the falling fringe of his hair.

Teige turned the horse about then so she was headed in the direction opposite to the gangway. He stroked her neck and spoke to her and felt the heat in her body. Then he ran his hand firmly down the length of her long face and stopped and with one hand held there across her nose and the other flat against her flank, he coaxed her backward. She stepped a step and then another. When her hoof reached the wooden planks she hesitated only for a moment, then clattered up backward with Teige holding her so. She was loaded. Clancy came about and swung up and closed the cart. He did not say anything to Teige.

“Am I not coming?” Pyle asked.

“You are not,” Clancy told him. “Do you think I want her maddened? You will clean out the stalls.” The fellow’s face crumpled into a sour twist.

Clancy climbed up and sat beside Teige and they drove the cart away down the avenue.

In slow, rocking motion, the cart pulled by two black horses and labouring on all hills almost to the pace of walking, they passed out through the town of Kilrush and eastward along the road to Ennis. They travelled past wild brown boglands and small roadside cottages with doors open and dark, dim interiors whence the face of a man or woman peered like an animal frightened. Blackbirds flew up and landed. Smaller birds there were none. Long tracts of the road were empty of all living. There were many cottages ruined, thatch torn down or tumbled inward and standing now with roofs gaping, strange and sad in the aftermath of famine. At a place where green fields opened to the south, Clancy passed Teige the reins and rummaged in a bag and brought out hunks of bread and a stoppered jug of milk. They did not stop as they ate. The morning came up over them, the sky grey and sunless. At the town of Ennis a shower of rain fell and stopped and then came again and continued falling. They passed on, as if veiled within it. The backs of the horses shone. The road, softening beneath them, tuned the pitch of their clopping a semitone lower.

At that town they drew the attention of many. Some who were stopped in doorways studied them like a show. Small children, boys and girls alike, ran along in the rain and shouted and tried to hit with sticks the sides of the creels. Clancy swung a short whip backhanded toward them in warning and Teige stood up and turned back and tried to soothe the horse. But soon the children slowed of their own accord and stood in the rain and faded off, mucked and white-faced and melancholic as some dwindling image whose meaning was potent but hard to fathom. The rain thickened. The road east took them out of the town and soon they were again without company on the long brown ribbon bordered by green. The land was still and the cattle within it stood in the falling rain. Berry bushes dripped in the hedgerows. The flowers of the fuchsia hung and fell red and purple on the roadside.

They passed on. In the pallid light of that afternoon they came to the place where the stallion was at stud. When they passed through the gateway the mare lifted her head and neighed and moved about in the narrow confines of the cart.

“Stop here,” Teige said. They were the first words he had spoken in some hours. Clancy did as he was told. The cart stopped and Teige got down and walked along by the side of it and spoke up to the mare. Then he went on ahead into the yard and across to the stable, where already the stallion was turning and making long, ratcheted sounds to be released. There was a man there with eyes he opened wide every second, as if a reverse of blinking. Teige looked in at the stallion.

“You’ll take him out? And be able to hold him?” he asked the man.

The fellow widened his eyes. “I will.”

“Wait until I say. I’ll close over the gate.”

Teige went then and brought out the mare on a line and told Clancy to shut the gate between her and the stallion. And when this was done he called up to the other and told him to bring out the stallion, and soon both horses were frisking on lines either side of the shut gate. He backed the mare then to the gate and held her there and let the stallion approach and take the smell of her and raise his head as if savouring it and twist it about thrice in the heavy rain air. He came to her and his nostrils widened and his sex rose and he pressed and angered at the gate impatiently, and still the man held him. The mare did not kick back as was her won’t.

“Let her through to him now!” the man called. “I won’t be able to hold him.”

“No, hold him, wait. Wait.”

Teige took the mare then and turned her away and walked her in a small muddy circle there where she could see the stallion. He held her back when she would have stepped forward. The rain ran on his face.

“Now, now open the gate,” he called, and Clancy stepped across and did so and the stallion came forward, pulling the man with the wide eyes like some minor nuisance. Then the two horses passed alongside each other and the mare tried to bite and her teeth showed in the air and each neighed aloud and Teige called out for the ropes to be loosened. Then, with the men standing muted about them in the pouring rain, and holding the long lines limp, the stallion mounted the mare and became briefly a thing colossal, high and muscled and shuddering as if with the charged currency of the earth itself.

In moments it was over. The men came to and sharply reined the horses apart and with swift economy of movement brought each back to the places of their confinement. The mare was backed up the platform and it was raised with a clatter and shut. The stallion, subdued and dull-eyed, was led inside the stable and the door bolted. Clancy went off to the house with the other man and performed what matters of business were required. Teige waited. He looked at the mare, tranquil now, her coat damply matted, and the coupling already passed like some figment into the deeps of her memory. If there was such, Teige thought. If it’s not just of then, done, and then gone. The rain fell. He waited. No sound came from either horse.

When at last Clancy came out he had the flushed cheeks of strong whiskey and his eyes were brightened like glass polished. He climbed up on the cart and told Teige he was good, by God, he was good, and they would stop and get a drink to celebrate. They would, so they would. He clucked at the horses and they wheeled about and out of there. A short time later they came to the town of Killaloe on the banks of the river. The rain stopped then and the place hung in sorry wet aftermath like a child half-drowned. Clancy looked along the street for a place suitable to their needs. No sooner had he found one than there appeared a small boy ready to hold the horses and keep all safe while the men went inside. Teige and Clancy got down, and Clancy gave the boy something. Already there was a little cluster of some too proud to be called beggars who assembled to beg there. They stood in the men’s way with no menace, but urgent persistence. Their begrimed hands opened, palm upward like rough petals. Their clothes steamed a strong sour odour that was the perfume of rain and sweat and poverty. They offered prayers and blessings and intercession with saints of all name and manner and appeals to the Virgin herself for the cause of the good travellers. As if wading in murk, Clancy raised his arms above them and tried to move forward. He saw the doorway where he was headed and pushed toward it, parting the beggars and telling them he had nothing for them. He did not look back at Teige behind him. He did not see how they gathered about the younger man, and how Teige stopped there.

Teige stopped and his mouth opened and he felt himself weaken as though a surfeit of air had arrived in his lungs or he were suddenly out of his element. His hand outstretched was taken by one of the hands offered to him. Others joined this and took him gently. He near staggered but did not and yet seemed almost asway as he came forward. His expression was of one caught and transported in revelation even there on the grey wet street of that town. The look of his eyes must have bespoken something or resembled a beam, for the little crowd followed the gaze and turned and saw at whom he was staring.

It was a woman, one amongst them, who hung back and waited on the side of the street. She was wrapped in a shawl and stood with patience and a faraway look. She did not turn her face to see Teige coming to her. She did not lift her eyes from the scene infinite in distance upon which her mind gazed. He came to her and the little crowd of the others came with him. Some held his sleeve, others the hem of his jacket, but none said anything now. Dreamlike, as if the moment did not exist but must be lived anyway, Teige reached the woman and stood before her, and a cry escaped from deep in his throat and seemed to buckle him. For he fell down onto his knees and then reached up and touched the face of the blind woman who was his mother.

6

And some time then in the darkness of the night many miles away, Finbar Foley woke and felt the left side of his body was dead. Beneath the covers he reached across himself and with his right arm made short, tapping motions as if to gently awaken the part that was numb. When this failed his actions grew more urgent, and Cait woke in the bed beside him to find him beating at his left breast with his fist.

“God almighty, what are you doing?” she said.

“Half of me is dead,” Finbar told her, and no sooner had he uttered the words than their reality struck him and he let out a sharp cry and stopped still.

“What is it? Tell me, what?”

“It is Finan,” Finbar said. “My twin, he is dead.”

When the light dawned over the lake that morning, he went down the ramshackle street to the house of the fortune-teller. By then the feeling in his left side had returned, but an ache persisted as if he had been lanced and he walked crookedly, his right hand clutching at his left side. He did not wish to be noticed on such consultation and wore a green felt hat pulled low on his forehead. When the fortune-teller saw him at her door she nodded sagely, as though his future were already with her or she were already many pages ahead of him in the tale of his own life. She waved a pendulous arm and he entered. With his hat on he sat in a room that no longer resembled the caravan it once was. There were silks and other thin cloths draped and curtains of purple beads that swung and clacked minutely in the afterwards of his arrival. Candles burned and made the air dense as a soup of flowers. The fortune-teller sat on a kind of cushioned throne and raised her bejewelled fingers and made of these a gesture as if playing an invisible concertina. She remained so, feeling whatever vibrated there in the space between them, for some time. A large woman, she had passed her seventieth year but scorned all such measurement of time and was on that her fifth lifetime lipsticked and thickly painted and bewigged in a tousle of flame red hair. She watched Finbar with steady gaze while fingering the air. When at last she stopped, she asked him if he wished the cards as well.

“Do you need the cards before you can tell me?” he said.

“I do not. I can read the future like script on paper. It is there,” she said, and waved a heavy hand toward his face and stirred the soup so its scents swirled.

“Well?”

“Men come for only two reasons. Love or death.” She paused. She watched him move as if in some discomfort in the seat. “You are not a man in love.”

“Is it true, then?” he asked her.

Yes,” she said.

“He is dead?”

“He is.”

For a moment Finbar did not react. He was like one transfixed before an altar. His face betrayed no expression. His eyes did not move from the eyes of the fortune-teller. And he stayed so.

“Tell me,” he said.

Then, as the air of that room grew steadily warmer, the fortuneteller told him the story of Finan, his twin. She told him Finan had sailed from his own country and gone south and arrived in a port in the country of France. His heart was heavy and his soul could find no ease in the world, she said. He met a priest there and confessed his sins, and though the priest did not understand his language he absolved these but told him he was one called by God. He kept Finan with him in a monastery for five years and then one day told Finan he must sail to the continent of Africa and do God’s work there.

“More?” said the fortune-teller.

“More.”

He boarded a ship then and was on the sea for many weeks, she said. He arrived in the port of Sierra Leone in the blaze of summertime. His head burned, his ears crisped. He moved among slavers and callous men and others who had come there to live outside the law and the rules of human decency. He wore the black clothes of a priest and in these suffered the heat like a further penance. He preached in vain, for none there would listen to him. He grabbed a man by the arm to stop him beating a slave and was himself knocked down and beaten in the dirt.

The fortune-teller paused. She asked Finbar again if he wished her to continue, for she knew the story that lay ahead.

“Tell me,” he said again.

“He did not know what good he could do there,” she said. “He asked God and got no answer and went from there eastward.”

He crossed scorched places in the dry interior of that country where there was none, or where passed figures silent and nomadic. The first signs of malaria were already in his eyes. He walked toward the foothills of the Wologisi Mountains. There was a tribe there that scattered when he came. He travelled open country past herds of elephants and came to swamps of stewed heat where herds of pigmy hippopotamus lay. At a place where caves opened in the ground he came upon a wretched tribe withered with the scabs of leprosy.

“Here he stayed awhile. He tended to them, for they were frightened and dying and had been long outcast and lost the trust of human contact.”

In the night he told them the word for God, she said, and he pointed at the heavens and they mistook God for the stars. But when God could not cure them, his faith weakened. He asked God many times to come and show a sign. But there was none. Then when his own sickness was worsening he left there and walked on.

“I see a forest of trees dripping. There are trees of fig and palm and rubber.”

“And he is there?” Finbar asked.

“Yes.”

He was in that forest where monkeys screeched and crashed above and where the bright wings of birds fluttered and vanished in the high branches. He was unable to walk now and sat down and tried to pray, but no prayers could form in his mind and he suffered delusions and saw in mirage the face of God. But it was the face of his father. His mind buckled then and he was not sure if there was a God or if he had had a vocation and if his devotion was not simply the expression of lost love. There was only the long figure of the father who had not seen Finan as a child in his own right and who had vanished in the river before the boy had become a man. There was only the boy’s longing for his father to acknowledge and know and love him and that this impossibility had become his yearning for God.

“And with that revelation he cried out there in the forest,” the fortuneteller said. “He cried out your name.”

She stopped and waited a moment and the heat in the room was such now that it was difficult for Finbar to breathe.

“He cried it out loud and then the other names of his brothers and then cried for his mother. He cried out and saw one coming to save him. He saw it as clear as if it were real and that was the one he had prayed to and was his own father, who in his vision then lifted him like a child in his arms and bore him away to a place distant and lovely as the stars.”

She stopped. Finbar held his face in his hands. Sweat glistened in the creases of his brow.

“He died alone there?” he asked her.

She nodded. “Yesterday,” she said.

Africa lingered in that room for a spell. Time passed, or did not. The heat of the room rose and rose then to such a degree that at last there appeared in translucent mirage the wavering, sunburned figure of the lost twin Finan Foley. He stood there before them, his face placid and his arms by his sides. Then Finbar could bear it no longer and let out a cry and reached his left hand to his brother and at once the image like a fever broke and was gone.

“Now” said the fortune-teller as the room cooled, “what will you do?”

Finbar touched his side where the ache had passed. “I will go home,” he said.

He got up then and paid the woman and went back down the street to Cait and his six children. He told her to get ready, they were going on the road.

Her hands flew to her mouth, as if she had to hold her hope a moment. “Where?” she asked him.

“To dip our daughters in the sea where I found you,” he said.

Then he went outside with a shovel and dug at the grass that had covered the wheels of the caravan. He dug for two hours, and some of the gypsies came outside to see what he was doing and some were glad and others vaguely ashamed. He told them he was going on the road and any were welcome. He was not going to seek their ancient home, he said, for a Magyar traveller had told him that it was not Romania but a place in the north of the country India from which they had long ago been banished and come across Asia Minor and Byzantium like seeds in the wind. He was going west and north, he said, to see the sea again. He unrolled for those that were gathered in curiosity the map of Benardi, and upon it he traced a route like one showing the way to the lost.

Then he went and bought two horses and hitched these and after some efforts moved the caravan for the first time from the deep ruts in which it was foundered. And with the first great sway of motion in their cages, the canaries sang. Two other families of the gypsies joined them. Their caravans were beyond recovery and they came instead on foot with bundles tied. Then, without further announcement, in the warmth of the afternoon, they left there, Finbar Foley and Cait and, with the two youngest, the now half dozen Roses. The caravan creaked out the road past the lake, some following behind in slow file and the children of others skipping and hopping alongside for part of the way as if witnesses to some strange and fabulous carnival.

7

If the story of Emer Foley could be told, the telling would take the days and nights of the rest of her lifetime. The sorrow of the words themselves would weigh so upon her that her heart would crack, making weep the skies and blacking the stars. Such was Teige’s understanding the moment he knelt before her in the town of Killaloe, for so it seemed written in the lineaments of her face. He did not ask her where she had been. He touched her face and told her he was Teige. Those assembled murmured and pressed forward the better to witness the scene of annunciation, and to them Teige raised his right hand and said nothing and did not take his eyes from his mother. The beggars stopped. They clustered there as if at the edge of some invisible arc drawn about the man and woman, as if these were upon a stage and they the chorus. The mother’s face crinkled in a puzzle.

“Teige,” she said, “is it Teige?”

Her voice was cracked and whispery and frail and seemed like a thing left long in harsh weather.

“Mother.”

She reached out both her hands and they hung in the air slightly aflutter until her son leaned forward and put his face between them. She drew him to her then and they seemed to melt upon each other, and not the horses or the carts or the people that moved in the street mattered for them at all. Understanding this, the crowd of onlookers slowly stepped back and then dispersed down the street to speak of what they had seen and to console themselves of their own losses and the many of theirs that were missing or gone.

Teige and his mother embraced there in the thin wet afternoon light. They wept. They held to each other like ones rescued in a drowning. They said nothing at all. After a time Clancy came out to see where Teige had got to, and he came upon the scene and in his mood made buoyant by whiskey he called out loudly and clapped Teige on his back. Teige stood up then and told him this was his mother who had been long lost. And Clancy offered her his hand that she could not see and he said, Well, well, well, and Emer stood up from the street and was now a woman small and light and crooked, though she held her chin high.

“You’ll be coming back with us, then?” Clancy said. And when neither of them responded he nodded forcefully and answered himself. “Yes indeed. Indeed you will.” He waited a moment, his legs planted, as if unsure whether he could suggest to the others to come into the public house for a final drink before the journey. Then some torch of self-consciousness shone upon him, and one-handed he smoothed down the tuft of his hair and said: “Well, we’ll go now, then.”

They left there in the late part of the afternoon with the light poor and the mare hungry in the cart. Those who had been her company stood by the wayside and though she was blind raised their hands in farewell. They watched her go and stood out in the street after she had passed, taking solace from that reunion and studying the horizon upon which the travellers diminished. On the seatboard softly the mother rocked. Her head she kept at a slight angle away from Clancy and toward her son, and sometimes she freed her two hands from where they held each other and opened them in the air and Teige placed his right hand between them and they closed about it. Now in the easy drifts of his intoxication, Clancy said nothing. He was comfortable in himself and was as one who has suddenly discovered his spirit larger than he imagined. They moved on. The countryside passed in its ceaseless green unrolling. Carts and coaches and men on horseback journeyed across the dying of the light. Farmers and sons drove two or three cows with sticks, and these dunged the road and the last flies found them. As the day fell into twilight, those coming and going on that road took on the unreal form of things without substance. Riders appeared and faded in the gloaming. Soon they were travelling in the first darkness of night and it came to Teige that this was the world his mother saw, and he reached his arm about her and held her against him. On the outskirts of the town of Ennis, Clancy stopped the cart and palmed flat his hair and looked at the darkness and then reined the horses to the left and brought them to a large farmhouse. There he climbed down and went inside and came out to the Foleys some time after and told them they would stay there the night. Teige brought his mother down from the cart then, leading her upon his arm to where Clancy’s sister was standing at the open door. The woman welcomed them and brought them inside, where she said food would be ready for them shortly. Teige went outside and untied the mare and took her to a stable and fed and watered her and, crossing back, he moved beneath the stars, which were clear now and arrested him a moment. He looked at Orion and Pegasus. He thought of his father that night, studying those same constellations, and knew that he must tell his mother about him and about his brothers. And he thought too of Elizabeth and lingered there in the stillness of the yard and looked across at the yellow lamp glow of the house and stood and felt the existence of such a thing as grace.

Later that night, then, in a small room that was off the hearth, mother and son lay sleepless in a cover, their separate histories vast and unspoken in the dark above them. Slender stellar light fell. The sill of the small window shone and showed in the corner lacelike tracery of spiders. Mice worked. At last, though he did not know if she was awake or sleeping, Teige said: “Mother?”

It seemed strange to be sounded aloud. It seemed a word he had never heard himself say.

“Mother?”

“Yes, Teige.”

“They are all gone,” he said. “Finbar, Finan, and Tomas, too. I am the only one left.”

She did not say anything at once. He wondered in her dark world if shades or shadows fell. He wondered if there was blackness and then utter blackness. He reached his hand toward the shape of her and his fingers arrived at the softness of her face that was like a fallen fruit wet in the grass.

“I thought I had cried my last,” she said.

He told her quickly then that none of them may be dead. He told her of the river crossing with the telescope and the chase from Limerick and the gypsies and the races on the sands. He told her of Tomas and his love and how they had been lost to them for so long. He told her of the twins vanishing and how they had never returned but wandered in separate somewheres unknown. He paused and did not tell her then of his own searching or the years of solitude tramping the roads. He heard her sighs. He heard the new sorrows make room in the confines of her spirit. The night moved on a time. Clouds came from the west and darkened the window. Then rain began.

“I found him,” Teige said then. “Father, I found him on the road. He was looking for us. He was looking for you. He knew of an island.” He stopped himself a moment and did not know if she wanted to be told. But he felt compelled and said: “He is there now. He is sorry. He looks for you in the stars.”

There escaped from her the smallest cry, as if some great weight had been pressed against her chest and she could utter nothing more. Teige did not continue. Then out of the darkness his mother’s hand reached for him and touched his face and then her other joined it and she held his head between her fingers and kissed his forehead.

“I came back,” she said. “The day after. I came back.”

She paused and her breaths came in sharp gasps.

“We had a fight. He wanted to go, I wanted to stay. I went out the door. I only meant to be gone a day until he could see how he needed me. God forgive me. I came back the next morning, the house was on fire. They were hunting him. I thought you were burned. Oh God.” She cried out and she moaned as if torn and Teige drew her closer and they held to each other then, weeping in the darkness of the night. He stroked her silvered hair, he touched her blind eyes, and murmured to her shush-shush sounds while all about them in the fields of that countryside a bitter rain fell.

8

In the dawn the skies cleared. A buffeting wind like a busy housekeeper moved about and took down the first leaves of autumn. Sycamore trees around the farmhouse made whispers and shivers, sea sounds. Birds were sent about and arced and whirled on air that gleamed. Teige rose and went to see to the mare and then led his mother to the table which Clancy’s sister had lain. Clancy himself did not appear at first, and his sister knocked and called to him several times before his head came around the door. He would take no food. He would be ready shortly, he told them. They ate and rose and thanked the woman. Then Teige backed the mare once more onto its transport and they left there.

The road west was already busy that morning with marketgoers. Drovers had been out moving with cattle since before light. Now their customers followed in their wake. There was a stream of those buyers, hawkers, gawkers, and others on foot and cart, travelling into Ennis. Wisps of straw and hay blew down the wind, the pungency of congregation of men and beasts leavened in that blustering weather. All studied the mare as she passed, but Clancy, who was returned to his taciturn manner, did not give them so much as the corner of his eye. He clucked at the horses and brought them through the town and out the farther side on the road to Kilrush. They travelled on, the blind woman seated between the two men and her son sometimes saying to her brief descriptions of what country they passed. She wore a shawl against the breeze. What visions of those she loved unrolled as the landscape passed could not be said. She sat and was like one revenant from other worlds, burdened by what she had witnessed and what could never be told. The horses clopped and beat down the road. Gusts of wind rose across the hedgerows and leaves and smaller birds briefly dallied in the polished light. At cottages along the way some had bedding and blankets out and beat at these and made thin clouds of dust in which hens scattered and flew. At others faces maybe men or women watched from just within and gave scrutiny to all without show of emotion, as if they were themselves no more than milestones and merely measured all that passed in the long continuum of human sorrow.

They went on. When they neared the town of Kilrush and the grey estuary waters could be seen, Clancy looked to Teige and gestured with a motion of his head in the direction of the island. Teige nodded in response and Clancy turned again to face the road with the woman between them none the wiser of their discourse. They came in about the town and there in its windy streets were those familiars who had seen them go and saw them return now and saw the strange woman on the seatboard. They studied her as the cart passed and asked aloud of one another who she might be and what trouble might be abrewing. Some moved along the street then after the cart as if hooked.

Down at the water’s edge by the small pier, Clancy left the Foleys. He paid Teige and told him to come back to them when he could, that there would be more work for him, and he bowed his head to the blind woman and seemed about to say something when the words escaped him. So he turned away suddenly and climbed up and clicked with his tongue and was gone. Mother and son stood there in the wind. The water slapped. Some of those who had followed down through the town stayed a short distance away and watched surreptitiously.

“We are going to the island,” Teige told his mother, “we are going to Father.” He hesitated a moment, then said, “Some say there is a curse against women there. They say—”

“We will go,” she said, and held up her head and was briefly the proud and headstrong image of her former self. She raised her hand for him to take it, and he did. And she said nothing more. Clouds fast moving swept above them. The light there came and went. Gulls and other seabirds hovered and plunged and rose again briefly dripping. The noon and afternoon passed as they waited for a ferryman to take them across. The fishing boats were long gone and had not yet returned. Only small skiffs and other canoelike boats of canvas moved on the water. One of these, piloted by a man of ragged beard and neck boils, at length arrived at the pier and Teige asked him for their passage. The fellow shrugged, as if such were not his business but rather some purgatorial labour, as if he were bound to ferry all until he died. He sat there and held the moor rope and waited while Teige tried to help his mother to board. The boat bobbed alongside them. Timbers creaked. The light was swiftly dying. The little crowd of onlookers came down along the pier.

“Where are you taking her?” one of them called. “Are you taking her out there?”

But Teige did not reply. He stood in the boat himself at last and reached his arms and told his mother to step to him. And she lifted a small blind foot and it wavered an instant before she stepped forward onto the air. Though the boat rocked, it did not capsize. The ferryman dipped his oars. Teige and his mother sat. He hooped his arm about her. The wind that was moving fast now fluttered her shawl, and soon they had left that shore that she would not walk upon again and they were out in the twisting currents of the waters where the river met the sea.

9

The children saw them first. They came from the raft house and ran on the shore and peered in the gray light and waved to Teige, and he called back. Before the boat had reached the shallow waters, the young girls were standing in the waves. When they saw the figure of the blind woman they hushed with the mystery and stood with their arms hanging. The pilot brought them in to where Teige stepped into the water. Then Teige reached and lifted his mother and walked in with her in his arms until he was on the pebbles of the shore. The children came about him, for it seemed a thing of marvel. When he told them this was his mother who had long been lost, the marvel seemed doubled, and some of the children laughed and spun instant cartwheels as though giddy with the turning of the world. The old woman smiled. She said she was sorry she could not see them, for they seemed so lovely, and some of them stood next to her so her hand could alight upon their heads. Their own mother came out then and greeted the Foleys and asked if they were not hungry and would they come and eat.

They went on board that creaking home of salty logs and rope lashings and sat at a table and ate the fish and potatoes and buttermilk as if in any inn. They took no notice of the breeze thrashing at the canvas and sacking coverings. The children stood along the table. Mary BoatMac came and went about them with quiet solicitude. Her husband, she said to the old woman, was gone up the river to Limerick and would be sorry to have missed her arrival. “But we’ll welcome you here any time, any time at all,” she said, and looked and her eyes watered. “Your son, Teige,” she added, “he is, he is…” She seemed to lose language adequate to her needs. “He is so good,” she said shortly then, and then said no more, for a flush of sentiment ran through her and she turned about and went out to her sister.

They ate. The children teased and pushed and made jokes. Outside the evening fell and at last Teige looked across at his mother and knew that they could delay no more.

“We must go,” he said.

“Yes.”

Then he took her hand and placed it on his arm and led her away out into the darkness and up from the shore along the stony pathway toward the tower. The wind was blowing. Clouds raced before the coming stars. Late hares fleeted and vanished. Thornbushes in their twists of growth whistled and did not move. Out in the waters nothing trafficked and the long black line of the river was slick and cold and fast moving. Teige drew his mother closer to him. The way was uneven and she stumbled. He steadied her and was moved again by the slightness of her and how the woman he had looked to as a boy was now this frailty on his arm.

“It is not much farther,” he said. “I will carry you.”

“No. You will not. I will walk to him.”

And she raised her chin and her blind eyes looked away at an angle and held so, as if seeing what he could not. She stood. He took her arm. They moved on. When they came close enough, Teige could see the glass of the telescope and he told her: “He is there. He is watching the sky.”

“Lead me right to him.”

“I should tell him.”

“No.” She clutched at his arm with her fingers. “No, Teige. Stay here.” She stepped away from him then and was a shape in the dark against the darkness, holding her hands out and moving forward in the night like a thing of flimsy sail. She walked toward the tower and Teige watched her and then, when she thought she was close, she called out:

“Francis! Francis!”

And he must have heard her and not believed her voice part of the corporeal world, for he did not move then and she called again and still he stayed there, lain on his back with his eye against the eyepiece. The wind took her words the third time she called. It played them across the night and swept them into the tower. And Francis Foley heard his name said in her voice and thought it a sweetness long gone out of the world and imagined he was near the precipice of this life and she calling him to cross a bourn into the next. He took his eye from the stars. He looked at the stone walls as if in puzzlement that he was still not transported. He touched the straw on the ground and then lifted his head to look outside, and he saw her there. She stood some feet away, and behind her stood Teige and all about them the blowing darkness. He looked from one to the other and back again and seemed to reach understanding slowly or slowly to overcome his fear that the moment was mere vision. Then he said her name. He said it and stood and she opened her arms and something in him seemed to buckle then and it seemed he would fall down. But he did not. And he came forward and said her name again and reached out his hands to her face and knew that she was blind, and then he raised his head to the dark and swirling heavens and let out a cry long and hard and pitiful and cried it again and voiced there the grief and regret and loss of all his days. Then he held that woman to him and kissed her head and her face and did not let her go.

10

Later, when his father sat beside the bed where his mother was sleeping, Teige left the stone cabin and went down to the shore. The night was wild now. The wind thrashed at hedge and tree and made moans in the gaps of the stones. The river and the sea surged. Waves broke on the shore and dragged the pebbles in an urgent music. Tethered on its moorings the raft house sung, but the BoatMacs were sleeping soundly. Teige paused a moment to be sure, then he went on down to the boat and pushed it out into the water and climbed in. He rowed out into the crosscurrent but was inexpert and was soon marking a course westerly on the outgoing tide. He pulled on the oars. He tried to steer across the darkness for the few lights of the town. The wind threw rain slantwise down the night. The waves were capped with white and slapped and churned and his progress was slow. But he was not to be stopped, and he made his way into the centre of the river and across and arrived at the shore some ways from the pier. He drew the boat up there and turned her over upon the oars, and he left then and walked along the grassy shore to the town. All was dark and empty. Rain lashed and stopped and fell again. Buildings grey and cold and grim of disparate size with roofs tiled and mismatched and at levels up and down stood and took the weather and seemed things of some inhuman order that had no fear of time. As if such were the faces of that town and would stand there forbidding and severe forever. The wind howled. Teige walked up the street with head low. Rain stains saddled his shoulders. Cats in an alley mewed. A dog, lone and wolflike with coat forked with dirt and gutter water, passed down the centre of the town and gave no heed to any. It appeared to have journeyed a long distance and returned there perhaps in such metamorphose from another life, so grave and decided was its manner. It padded down the darkness and was gone. Teige walked on. He went out the end of the town and was soon in the blackness of the country road to the estate. The night starless, he saw not four feet in front of him. He shut his eyes and stood some moments blind. He heard his own blood racing in his ears. Then he opened his eyes and was accustomed and saw the way in the dimmest light that fell from sources obscured and years gone. He went on. Cold was inside his clothes now. He hurried then, running into the darkness as the storm that was not a storm yet gathered overhead. Trees on the roadside whooshed and let down their leaves. Teige knew his way in the darkness. He came to the gateway of the estate and went up the gravel. He passed the fields where the horses had grazed and where he had first seen Elizabeth. He took note of the fields and the fence and the places he had seen her, as if such were talisman’s and assured him of love. He came to the stable yard then and saw that the horses were fastened in and the doors bolted. Still some neighed and whinnied when he came there and he went to one and through the door said words, though these were gone in the wind.

The night whirled. As he crossed the yard Teige turned and looked into the heavens as if some rent might appear there, and he thought of his mother sleeping on the island and the lore of the curse, and had he the time to make a prayer, he would have done so. He went as he had before around by the back kitchen. There he scrabbled at the wall for finger and toe holds and, finding these between the stones, he began to climb. The slates of the roof where he arrived were wet, and the soles of his feet slid upon them. He crouched and moved on all fours and found his way to the window. It was shut tight. The latch was turned over. He pulled at it hard as he could but could not open it. On the wind another shower of rain fell. Teige cursed it softly and looked along the dark of the house, but all windows were likewise latched against the storm and there was no way he could get in unless he broke the glass. He squatted there and the rain blew on him. What desire fired in his body flamed then. He would break the window. They might not hear. They might be so soundly asleep. They might think it the crash of thunder. There on the roof before the window he took off his shirt then and wrapped it around his fist. He looked at the glass. He knew the ruin that might await. He knew his life might all have come to this one moment, and that forever all happiness or sorrow might be traced back to this. And he did not care. He drew back his hand to break the glass and he saw her there framed in the window. He stopped. She was there in her nightgown. She had heard the noises at the window. She had been waiting.

There was a time that froze and was held. There was a stilled moment that entered each of them, a moment in which Elizabeth did not open the window and Teige did not move. A time in which the meaning of that moment was only then becoming apparent. And then Elizabeth unlatched the window and the curtains blew inward and Teige climbed inside the house.

He was wet and cold and half-naked. But she shut down the window and then turned and kissed him there in the corridor. They kissed as if hungry. They seemed like creatures whose condition was to be joined at the mouth. Then they stood and she touched his face and he tried to kiss the hand and she drew him along the corridor to a room that was her dressing room. He closed the door behind them and came to her and kissed her nape and she moaned out and pulled at his hair and then he bit into the shoulder of her nightgown. He lifted it high to reveal her. He stood and looked at her and she trembled and she said in a whisper his name. Then he laid her down on dresses of green and yellow brocade and silks of scarlet and black, and she said to him to take off his clothes and she watched him as he did so. And then there in that room while the storm thrashed the world outside and her husband slept not fifteen feet away in the next room, Teige Foley loved Elizabeth Price and changed his life forever.

11

When they came outside the night was in hurly-burly. Teige carried her small case. They came out the kitchen door and at once the wind whipped it from Elizabeth’s hand and banged it hard. They ran then. Leaves flew in circles in the yard as they crossed it. They went to the stables and Teige opened the door on a chestnut gelding that neighed and stamped in alarm and wall-eyed turned about in its narrow confines as if visited by nightmare. Teige approached it palms extended and spoke to it in what seemed tones of urgent beseeching. Then he laid his hands along the horse and moved beside it and so was able to fasten a bridle. He led the horse out then into the storm. He took Elizabeth’s hand and brought her closer and then cupped his fingers for her foot and helped her mount the horse, which sidestepped and made shivers of nervy reaction until he soothed it once more beneath his command. They set off then out of the yard and down the avenue, Elizabeth bareback on the horse and Teige carrying her bag and leading it at a quick trot alongside. The wind sang demented in the trees. The starless, moonless dark seemed itself a creature poor tormented by some flagellant merciless and huge. Noises crashed about. Branches snapped. Boughs moaned in long ache, and still the wind blew. Rain lanced sidelong and vanished and came again. Down the end of the avenue they went, the horse wild-eyed and on the point of frenzy and Teige mastering and coaxing it and taking rearward glances to see if their pursuit had begun.

They reached the gates. He looked to Elizabeth. There was an instant in which they might have turned back at that threshold. She had discarded already her bonnet. It hung in the branches of an oak, where it would be found in the morning. Her face was wet and her hair was blown free of pins and came across her mouth and she moved it aside as he looked at her. Then he climbed up on that horse and she held to him, and they rode off down the road toward the town of Kilrush.

They arrived there in darkness still hours before dawn. They came down the centre of the streets between those buildings where all lay in grim repose, clutched in fearful sleeps while the wind took the slates off the houses. Nothing moved. The air smelled of salt and squalor. Gutters and sewers ran sleek and black like festered wounds opened. The night howled. At the end of the town they came to the shoreline and rode along it to the grassy place where Teige had left the boat. There they got down and stood before the river that now was like the sea. Teige turned the horse about and waved his arms and slapped its back and it went off and was lost into the rent and velvet dark. There, he told Elizabeth, was where the island was. It was not far, he said when she looked and could make out nothing. She stood there while he overturned the boat and laid it on the water. She seemed in all manner one unsuited to such adventure. She seemed too fine and delicate in appearance, too long used to the broad, high-ceilinged drawing rooms and dining rooms of elegant china. She seemed of a different world and stood there on the brink of this in the thrashing of the storm like one not quite awake but lingering in the vestiges of a dream. Her toed shoes were muddied. Spatters, muck splashes, painted her legs.

“Come.”

She stepped into the boat. It dipped and righted itself and dipped again and then Teige had pushed it off and they were fast in the current. The river took them. The tide that had been unruly before was wild and swollen now The boat crashed against waves and was taken without course. Elizabeth cried out and clung to the sides. She called Teige’s name. She cursed. They spun off into the dark and were like the smallest toy of the sea. Teige pulled and angled the oars and tried to steer about in that blackness, and the town came before them and then the mouth of the river and then the island and all seemed as if in some dark dioramic scene played for those watching from above. Teige rowed. He pulled and shouted at the storm as if it were a thing animate. He let out long, wordless cries and these were lost in the wind. Elizabeth’s face was white. She called to him that they must go back. Water slapped in the boat at her feet. She called to him again, and he shouted back to her that they could not. They were in the current fast and strong. Above and about them the storm thundered. It let down its rain in cold sheets and darkened the dawn.

But some time at last, whether by chance or design, the small boat crossed the midpoint of those waters and Teige was able to row it to shore at the eastern end of the island. They came up on the stones and Elizabeth stood and retched and Teige held her about the waist. Then she took three steps and had to sit in a weakness and he let her back into his arms and held her there on the open ground where the rain fell upon them still.

After some time slender light opened to the east as at the rim of the world. Clouds heavy and regally purpled were revealed sailing across the sky. The field the lovers lay in was littered with small leaves and twigs and feathers and other debris. Pieces of sacking, cord, cloth, such things. The wind like a ghost departing moved about the place a final time. And then it was gone. The fields of the island settled in the dawn light, and in that serene and unreal aftermath Elizabeth clung to Teige. They were soaked to their skins. Their faces were cold when they kissed. They stayed there a time still and gazed out and watched the morning come across the fields. It was as if they could not move yet into the new world they had brought about. As if the full realization of what was now their life were only just arriving and they were as yet only beginning to comprehend it. So they held to each other and said nothing, and when she felt the fright of what lay ahead of them Elizabeth kissed him hard. Small birds ventured across the air. Hares that came it seemed from shadows darted out and down the fields and painted tracks of dark in the silvered grass. At last Teige stood up and offered her his hand and they walked off down the island toward the tower.

He brought Elizabeth to the cabin where he slept and he set a fire there and blew the flames alight. Then he left her briefly as if she required privacy to undress and he went to where his mother had slept with his father and was afraid he would find her dead. He stood in the doorway and saw there an image that he would carry with him for the rest of his days. His mother lay small in the arms of his father. Both of them were sleeping. Their breaths came and went in slow, easeful rhythm. Upon their faces was the same expression that was an expression he would return to and see in the air of nights far distant from there and would tell himself was the look of peace and forgiveness. He watched them awhile. He watched them and did not want to step away and did not want the world to spin onward and the rough consequence of all our actions to follow. Then he went out the door and down to the raft house, where already BoatMac was standing on the shore looking for his boat. Teige told him he had taken it and where it lay now on the far side of the island. The boatman looked at the stones.

“It was a fierce storm,” he said.

“It was.”

“Bad night to go out in a boat.”

“It was. I am sorry,” Teige said, and did not know if he would tell more. Then the man’s wife appeared and was standing there and saw him in his drenched clothes and must have read in his comportment some affliction or beneficence, for she asked him:

“Are all well?”

Teige looked at her. Her face was kind. Her eyes seemed to contain deeps he had not noticed.

“She is very wet,” he said.

“Your mother?” said the boatman.

“No,” said his wife.

A moment held. The water sighed.

“Gather her wet things,” she said then. “I will have food for you both soon.” And she turned and went back to the house and left her husband standing there and studying the ground as if for pieces of the story missing.

Sometime later she crossed up the pathway to the cabin and called in and Teige came to the doorway and welcomed her. She stood inside then and saw Elizabeth and saw the beauty of her and seemed to understand at once that she was some man’s wife, for she looked at Teige and took the wet clothes and asked him if he thought they would be going soon.

His judgment was impaired and he told her no.

“Eat and then sleep so,” she said, and took the clothes and went off back down the path.

And they did. They slept before the fire in that small stone cabin while the morning after the storm lightened outside. They slept in fits of dreams and shuddered sometimes like things fearful. Their legs lay entwined.

They woke with the sounds of the children playing. Elizabeth turned in Teige’s arms and she studied his face. She put her fingers in his hair and traced his brows and closed his eyes.

“He will come after me,” she whispered.

“He’ll never know where to find you.”

“He will,” she said.

They lay there. The yelps and cries of the children rang out. Smoke in slow ascension twirled inside the chimney. Neither of them moved. They lay still and were as creatures white and bare and beautiful fallen from another dimension.

In the noon they rose and Elizabeth came out by Teige’s side and saw that ancient site of church and tower. She saw the town across the water which seemed nearer than she had hoped and nearer than their night sailing had suggested. And she said to Teige: “He could almost see us.”

“He will not look. He will think you are gone to Cork or Dublin or finer places than this.” And he smiled and put his arm around her.

Outside the tower on a stone trestle sat Teige’s father and his mother. Francis Foley had awoken ten years younger than he’d slept. His face had dropped from it weariness and doom, and his eyes were lit. He stood up when he saw the lady.

“This is Elizabeth,” Teige said.

“Elizabeth.” His father held out his hand.

“She is to be my wife.”

His mother took Elizabeth’s hand and then to her son opened her arms and he leaned over and she embraced him. “She is very beautiful,” she whispered, “I know.”

“We’ll start on the cottage for you tomorrow,” the old man said, and smiled. Then he sat down again by his wife’s side and took her hands as if as guarantee against the world sundering again.

It was the first day of the new. Storm cleansed, green, and tranquil, the island lay in the waters as an idyll or the vivid dream of Francis Foley years before. Boats sailed again along the Shannon. The traffic of white sails or men at oars proved the world moving, but to the two Foleys, father and son, it seemed to be moving only out there, away from the island. They were each likewise gifted a pure innocence that morning and were like men under some enchantment in which time did not pass and loveliness endured. Teige walked with Elizabeth about the island and the children of the BoatMac came along and they gathered the red and orange wildflowers of montbretia and the feathered plumes of late purple loosestrife. They sang singsong chants. They chased and ran away and Teige and Elizabeth sat down on the grass and kissed and then lay back and watched the vaulted blue sky.

They were lying so when the children came running again.

“Come, come! Mommy says come! There is a boat coming.”

Teige took Elizabeth by the hand and they ran then across the fields down to the raft house by the shore. Mary BoatMac was standing there with her husband. Approaching steadily across the estuary was a long boat and in it sitting grim and purposeful were the sheriff and three constables, the wronged husband in a plum suit, and the red-haired youth Pyle.

There was a moment in which they all stood and watched, in which the slow and steady action of the oarsmen seemed in some world not this wherein the laws of force and motion did not apply and the boat not coming closer. It was like a picture or a scene posed, the little crowd on the headland and beneath the blue sky with white clouds the figures of Law approaching.

“Quickly, you must go quickly.” It was Mary who spoke. She turned to Teige and shook him by the arm until he looked at her and broke from his disbelief that they could have found Elizabeth so soon. “You have to go,” she said. “They’ll be here. Take them,” she told her husband, “Mac, take them across the island to the boat. Go up to the tower with them and tell Mr. Foley. Go! Go on, go quick,” she said, and as they turned to go added, “God bless ye.”

They ran up the beaten path that was soft and muddy after the rain. Teige took Elizabeth by the hand, and with the shambling stride of one unused to dry ground, BoatMac hurried behind. They went up past the long grass and the jumbled bushes of blackberry and the brambles wild and scented. Birds flew up. As if the world were freshened in the aftermath of the storm, all the natural wonder of the island seemed like a thing charged, alive, emanate from some source secret and holy. There was a tang in the breeze. Late blossoms of that season that had survived yet held the last bees, and these hummed the air. The beauty of that landscape in all its detail, what sights and sounds and smells, all of these registered with Teige Foley as he ran and were to be there in some part of him still years later, when he would recall running across the island a last time.

Francis Foley stood from the stone bench when he saw them coming.

“What is it?” he asked. “Teige, what is the matter?”

“There are constables coming. They will say I stole a horse. There will be a man who is Elizabeth’s husband.” He stopped and drew his breath.

“Teige.” His mother held out her hands to him. He came to her and she embraced him. She held him a long time. “Go,” she said. “Go and be happy.”

He stood and she gestured for Elizabeth and she held her, too. “Do you love my son?” she asked her in a whisper, and what answer she received was not heard, but she embraced the young woman hard and then released her.

Teige faced his father. “I sent the horse back last night. They will find it. It’s—”

“Teige.” His father stopped him. “Teige,” he said again, and said it slowly and burdened the sound with such tenderness that no single vocable seemed capable of carrying such or no word as dear to him then as the sound of his son’s name. “I will beat the heads of any of them that walk up here,” he said. “I will let none stop you. Go.” He reached his hand and laid it on Teige’s shoulder.

And then they were gone running. They ran across the island with BoatMac coming behind them. They ran to the place where the boat lay upturned on the far shore, and this they righted and slid it down the weeds and mud into the water. And then BoatMac held the boat while they climbed inside it and he pushed it farther into the water and then climbed in himself and took the oars and pulled away. And they did not see Francis Foley stride down the path to the other shore and meet there the little party of the wronged and the righteous. They did not hear his booming voice as he called out damnations against those who trespassed there or accused his son in the wrong. They did not know that the sheriff would say the youth Pyle had given them reason to suspect Teige and that Pyle would grin and the plum fellow alongside would scowl with pale effete manner and show his distaste at this discourse with rabble such as these. Nor would they know that Francis Foley’s ire would burn then and he would say he had answered all queries and that even had his son taken the horse and the woman, it was no more than God’s own will, for any could see the kind of man this was. And the sheriff would perhaps in secret agree and stand back and instruct the constables back into the boat and say they would return if the horse was not found. And the plum fellow would cry out that the island must be searched for his wife, and his voice would be high and thin in a timbre that would be mocked in games by the children later. His cries would go unanswered and at last he too would get on board and all would sail away, in gloom and dismay as they had come, the youth Pyle with crooked grin looking back all the way.

None of this did Teige and Elizabeth know. Their boat carried them safely to the town of Limerick. There BoatMac left them with subdued farewell after Teige had thanked him and offered in vain to pay from the money Elizabeth carried in her bag. They took a ship that same afternoon and sailed from Limerick up to the town of Galway and spent that night there, where they purchased passage in the morning on the Mary Ann, bound for the coast of Nova Scotia.

12

In the week after Teige was gone, the BoatMacs moved from the raft house into the unfinished cottage by the shore. Francis Foley insisted on it. He came down with his wife on his arm and asked them please to move there and said he would help finish the building and they would be the first true settlers on the island. It was what Teige would have wished, he said, and was the least they were owed. He told them to take a field and grow what they wanted and take another for sheep or cattle. By the beginning of the following spring, there were lambs born there. The cottage was thatched. Another was built next to it by the boatman and his sons, but when they came to offer it to the old man, Francis said he would prefer to stay where they were and that soon enough there would be takers for it, indicating the oldest of the daughters.

The season was mild and easy that year. The waters of the river ran smooth and blue grey. Swans that had not been seen in some time sailed off the shore. Michael, which was discovered to be the name of BoatMac, came up to the tower one morning and told Francis Foley he had been asked to enquire if other pilots could settle with their families on the island. The old man studied the blue sky where high gannets flew. His wife sat by his side. His gorge rose and fell with some emotion unsaid and he waited a time for it to pass.

“They want to live here?”

“They do.”

The old man nodded. “A village should be made down by the shore,” he said.

And by the early summer then there were seven more cottages under way. Seagoing men with short legs and stout chests and with sons thin and wiry scattered over the stones, hauling and tapping and knocking edges. Walls rose. Thatch was mounded on the sand. Buckets of mud and lime and water were borne along the shore, and soon such traffic made there a printed trail ankle-deep that the tide took in the evenings. By night the pilots sailed away and the assemblage of their unfinished cottages appeared like antique ruins of some earlier time. Doorways and windows looked like eyes upon the starry river. In the silence soft and crepuscular hares, badgers, and foxes visited and moved as shades stealthy and inquisitive. Francis Foley came down then too and walked along the way that would become the street. The dog followed him. He stood in each of the roofless houses where none were there to see him and he touched sometimes details of masonry or joinery and let his fingers rest there. He stood so for long moments, his hand upon a wall, as if such were a connection of profound necessity and it restored him to do so. It did not escape him that these were to have been the homes for his sons, and he thought of them in the world and looked upon the night sky and went up then along the path to hold his wife in her bed.

In the dawns the black currachs of the pilots returned weighted in the water with supplies. The boats were drawn up and turned over on the shore and lay long and dark like strange insects warming in the sun. The cottages rose as in a race, their walls three feet thick with broad sills and deep lintels of hewn oak. With lighter timbers the lattice of roofs were made and seemed in broad day the bleached ribs of sea creatures once great. When they came to the thatching, the pilots were less expert and brought from the town some tawny fellows with dark hair and long needles and hooks and other tools secured in their belts. Bare-chested, these thatchers ran up and down light ladders and worked and sewed above and sometimes whistled and were like brown birds nestled there. They ate and drank in those lofty perches and looked betimes out to the sea as if gauging what weathers their work would have to withstand. When they were done and gone again, the pilots brought their families across. A flotilla of figures wrapped and shawled and bearing bundles, they came from the district of Kilbaha to that island with a quiet and humble gratitude. They moved up about the small village and saw for the first time their homes. Children ran along and whooped and went in and out behind the houses. At once the women went about making their homes. They untied bundles of blankets and put clay pots, earthenware, and tin canisters on sills. They hung crosses and some had other images of their religion and they placed these like shields in corners or over doorways. The pilots meantime stood outside in a small gathering and watched the Shannon. One made small comments on the tide or weather and others concurred in soft mutterings. Their eyes were narrowed and their faces crinkled, grown accustomed to long scrutiny of the horizon. In the evening one among them played a concertina and they gathered outside the houses and smoked pipes and some sisters danced together. Others of the women joined. The men bashful and slow sat or leaned against walls and watched. Only later were some cajoled to step out there, but when these did, their movements light with the drink they had taken, the whole swayed and spilled over and broke with laughter. One sang a song then, shut-eyed and sad. He sang for the drowned and those gone and these sounds travelled out across the mild night, plaintive and grave. Then a hush fell and spread and all said their good-nights and went to sleep there for the first time.

And so another summer drew on. In the first light of each day and in all weathers the pilots launched their currachs into the water and sailed out in a race against each other and were like so many water-borne beetles as they travelled out to meet ships bound for Limerick. Whosoever reached the ship first drew the entitlement of piloting it in through the dangerous currents and past the sandbanks. Others bobbed in the heavy waters and scanned the horizon and waited. They watched the sky for seabirds to tell them if ships were coming. They lived all day on the water and in the falling dark returned and stepped with jaunty gait up the street where children and dogs came to meet them.

These men had little contact with the Foleys. Their wives sometimes went with potato breads and griddlecakes and such up to the house by the tower and they were welcomed and thanked by the old man. But he rarely came down among them. Michael and Mary visited. They sent meals with the children and came themselves on many evenings and told them about the antics of the Brennans or Behans or McNamaras or Scanlans or any of the families that lived there. They told of sea escapades and boats overturned and news brought on the ships from the world outside. And these things the old man and his wife listened to politely and nodded and made little comment, for it seemed news of a place fictive and unreal.

The seasons turned. Cousins of those living there came and built houses, too. A girl of the Griffins married and for her a house was made in the half acre behind her father’s cottage. Winter and spring and summer and autumn chased each other across the sky and the constellations wheeled and the moon rose and fell like hope and still none of the sons of Francis Foley returned there. One night as they sat outside in that silent and peaceful way that had become their custom before sleep, Emer asked Francis to tell her what the stars were like now. She sat there in her darkness absolute and turned her face upward. She knew he had not gone to the telescope once since she had been returned to him and knew him well enough to know that such may have been a pact promised to be kept if indeed she came back.

“Tell me,” she said.

He did not think he should at first. At first he thought it risked her in some obscure way. He thought fortune and misfortune so close to each other that there was the thinnest sliver between them and the slightest error could bring the latter.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I would like to hear you tell me about them. I will place them around my dark.”

And so he did. He looked up high into the sky at Cassiopeia and told her its form and then took her down through the sky to the Bears Minor and Major and over to Castor and Pollux, too. These he named and she sat attentive and did not tilt her head but seemed to be gazing nonetheless upon a panorama of inner stars.

“You love them so, don’t you?” she said one night when already such mapping of the dark had become their custom.

“I do. They are so pure,” he said to her. “They are like something perfect. From the time of Adam. And I cannot look at them without thinking of you. Thinking of the days we met and the nights we went out roaming and you told me stories of them.”

She did not say any more. She held his arm. They sat there.

“I will think of them now as the boys,” she said.

The night was still. A moon gibbous and bare hung overhead.

Francis’s voice answered softly: “Yes.”

Five days later Michael McMahon came up to the tower and brought with him a letter that had been left in the town of Kilrush he said for he didn’t know how long. It had lain in dirt in a corner, for none had wanted to bring it over. It was the letter from Tom Foley to Teige. The old man read it aloud. He finished by saying the name Tom. Then he said it again. Tom. Then he started the letter from the beginning and read it over once more.

“We must send a letter to him,” Emer said. “And when Teige writes to us we will tell him where he is. And when the twins come back we will tell them, too.”

That night when they sat for their stellar vigil the air had turned cold, and Emer Foley asked him then to take her to the telescope. He led her there and laid her down alongside him and he blew on the eyepiece and cleared webwork and dust. She placed her head upon his chest over his heart.

“Now,” she said, “I will tell you about my stars.”

13

And Teige and Elizabeth arrived off the coast of Canada just before ice forced the closure of the ports along the Saint Lawrence River. They arrived after a long journey in which Elizabeth had suffered sickness and woke from fitful sleeps crying out in fright. Her face grew paler and her cheekbones more prominent. Teige served her food and drink and brought to her what comforts he could find. He urged her to come on deck and take exercise, but she had a horror of her fellow passengers. They were walking dirt and disease, she told him, and she would not move from the narrow bed. When he came to her and tried again to have her walk with him when briefly the ship found calm blue waters, she shouted at him:

“I don’t need exercise! I’m not one of your horses!”

For the remainder of that grey voyage then she lay belowdecks. She turned her face in her pillow and was like a rag twisted. Her eyes took on a haunted look. The farther the distance travelled, the deeper she fell in despair. She berated Teige for clumsiness and smacked away the plate when she saw his thumb above it against the pork. She despised how he befriended others of the passengers and found in his very appearance faults she had not noticed before. Sometimes after she had screamed at him, then she calmed and sobbed and opened her arms to him and asked for forgiveness and said it was the wretched sea. It was the wretched boat, it wasn’t her at all. He was not to mind.

And for the most part, he tried not to. He tried to imagine the life ahead of them. When he walked on the windy deck or held to the rails in the sheets of rain, he looked at the blank horizon and tried to be emptied of his fears. He lifted his face to the weather. He sought in his mind the image of the island and his father and his mother there. Long hours while Elizabeth lay below he thought of them and thought of his brothers gone and wondered where in the vastness of the world was Tomas. He stood and held on in that swaying ocean that was like a watery bridge between the old life and the new. He stood until his loneliness weakened him. Then he came down the steps and along the passage to where Elizabeth lay and he took off his coat and knelt beside her and caressed the top of her head. He lowered his forehead then to her until it rested against her shoulder and he could stay so a long time and she would not move and no word would pass between them.

For reasons not explained to its passengers, the Mary Anne did not arrive in Halifax but came about Cape Sable and docked at Saint John, New Brunswick. When Teige and Elizabeth disembarked they gave their names as Foley and were man and wife. Elizabeth told the officer they met that their luggage had been sent ahead of them. They walked off down the gangway in the chill air of late autumn in a place where the air was pungent with fish and gulls made raucous sounds overhead. Fishermen, bearded high onto their cheeks, worked with crates and barrels wherein the silvered catch slapped in spasm. Some spoke, but not in words that Teige understood. Elizabeth laid her hand upon his arm.

“This way,” she said, indicating that they should not follow the clump of their fellow passengers, those freckle-faced Galwegians who moved like some slow, lumpish porridge all together up the street.

There were men in peaked caps and others in suits of black that studied the arrivals there. There were some that called out offers of lodging and food and more still that cried out sailings on ships bound for Boston and points south. Past these Elizabeth guided Teige and past those too who stared wide-eyed upon her beauty and followed her with their heads. They went along a street of mud upon a walk of loose boards. The heel of Elizabeth’s shoe caught and she slipped and cursed and stamped at the plank.

“We’re getting out of here tomorrow,” she said.

They took a room in a boardinghouse run by a woman red-faced and large. She was Mrs. Flump. She wore an apron tied about her from neck to knee and within such lost all shape but was a great mound smelling variously of flour and carbolic. Her eyes were bright blue like things lit. She asked where they were bound.

“We are not sure,” Teige said.

“Boston,” Elizabeth replied. “Our trunks are sent ahead.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Flump.

Their room was small but tidy. Elizabeth sniffed at the sheets and found them clean and then lay upon them in her dress. Teige undid her boots.

“This is hell,” she said. “We are fallen into hell.” Her eyes stared at the ceiling boards where a web had recently been woven.

“I will take you to a better place,” Teige said. “This is only tonight. We have just arrived. There is a huge country here. We will be happy.”

“Oh God, Teige.” She held out her arms to him and he came to her and they held each other and kissed and waited for the fall of night while keeping mute their separate fears.

In the morning Mrs. Flump gave them a breakfast of eggs, but these Elizabeth could not stomach and she retreated to her room at once.

“Is she expecting?” Mrs. Flump asked Teige. “I often find those expecting can’t eat the eggs.”

Teige’s face was blank, and Mrs. Flump saw his surprise and quickly added, “No, I suspect probably not. It’s probably just the long journey.”

Still the thought remained with Teige, and when they left there and Mrs. Flump stood in her doorway and gave them a carbolic-scented napkin of her scones, he thought her eye studied Elizabeth for some further sign.

“Good luck to ye,” she said. “I hope ye’ll be happy.”

They returned to the dockside. Men watched them. Some with knives bent over fish barrels stopped and looked at the woman in the green dress. A wind blew her hair. She stood alone a time and waited while Teige made enquiries. Then he returned to her with another man who was thickly whiskered and stood very close to her while he told her of the schooner that would bring them to Boston. They sailed from there at noon. Some passengers of origins various stood on the deck in frayed and sea-soiled finery and watched the coast pass. Trees dense and evergreen lay along the shore. Impenetrable forest seemed the landscape and to the eyes of those come from the distant continent the whole seemed country wild with as yet little mark of civilization. They imagined therein were the Indians they had heard of and that these were even then watching the ship with arrows in bows aimed as she moved down the coastline. The voyage was without incident. Cold wind made choppy the waters and slowed the progress of the schooner, but when she arrived in Boston none of the passengers cared. For they were cheered by the elegance of the buildings and the sight of the streets. Elizabeth too smiled and stood on the deck as the ship came in. She squeezed Teige’s arm, her face flushed and her eyes travelling over the thoroughfares. When they disembarked a man stepped over to them and speaking to both but looking at Elizabeth said he could tell they would be seeking fine accommodations and would they allow him to guide them to the best. He carried Elizabeth’s one bag. They went to a hotel finer than any Teige had ever seen. The man tipped his hat and stood and waited and Elizabeth gave him some money in their own currency and he thanked her and was gone. They took a room with flowered paper on the wall. Above the posts of the bed was a canopy of cream-colored linen. Their breakfast was brought on a tray of silver.

They stayed there. In the daytime Elizabeth went out and bought new clothes and returned with these and tried them on before a standing mirror. Teige told her she was beautiful. He searched for signs that she might be pregnant but did not know what these were and if he found them or not.

“We should think of moving on from here,” he said to her one evening after they had dined in the grand room where the chandeliers that had come from Milan glittered above them and let fall brilliant splinters of broken light.

“Why should we?”

“I have no work. We cannot stay here. We must be near the end of your money.”

Her expression turned cold.

“Money is vulgar, Teige. Please don’t speak of it.”

“But—”

“Please, Teige.”

He looked at his plate.

“Thank you,” she said. “You are so sweet. Always so sweet.”

The following morning she went and bought him a white shirt and black suit. He tried them on in the room. When he stood before her she considered him a time and then told him to go to the barber’s and to buy new shoes. Then he would be perfect, she said. He did. In that same afternoon returning, he crossed the lobby of the hotel and caught in a gilt-framed mirror the image of himself and was almost another. He went around and came back to pass the mirror again. He looked then like none in his family ever had and was the copy of others who sat with newspapers in the leather chairs there. That evening Elizabeth was in light humour and sang as she dressed for dinner. Her hair was pinned above and about her neck she wore pearls he had never seen.

“How long do you think we will stay here?” Teige asked her.

“Until we find a house.”

He said nothing. His heart sank. She came to him and touched his shoulder.

“You can get a job soon. I asked today for you at the bank.”

“I can’t work at the bank.”

She turned her cheek as if it had been struck. “We’ll be late for dinner,” she said after a time.

They went down the carpeted stairs and entered the dining room, she upon his arm with her head erect and her pearls shining like defiance. They ate roast beef and potatoes with gravy and were served a bottle of wine courtesy of a man at another table. They said almost nothing. As if they had come into a country of extreme civility wherein all discourse was predicated upon polite formulae, Elizabeth addressed him in dulcet tone over such matters as the passing of the salt and the pouring of the wine. But nothing more. She sat and was the liveliest woman in the room. When the meal was ended, the man who had gifted the wine came to their table and asked them if they were coming in to hear the piano played. He was French with a name Teige did not catch.

“Oh, yes,” Elizabeth said, “thank you. We would love to.”

They sat with the man, whose hair was black and sleek and cuffs linked with studs bejewelled. He asked what plans they had and Elizabeth told him they were as yet undecided but that Teige would probably take a job he had been offered at the bank. The Frenchman looked at Teige and smiled. He said it was a good job. Men get rich in banks, he said. He bought them champagne to drink a toast to their beginning. When Teige asked him what business he was in, he said he was in the business of seeing opportunity. He accented the last word so such that Teige was unsure at first of his meaning. There is much opportunity in this country, he said. More than in France. France is old and tired now. Elizabeth agreed.

“Very old and tired,” she said, and giggled and touched her fingers to her mouth where the champagne had left a fizz.

The Frenchman smiled.

“We should go to our room,” Teige said.

“It is early,” said the Frenchman.

“Yes, it is early,” Elizabeth scolded.

They stayed on. The piano music was played and ended and the umber light of that room dimmed further until all were but shadows slumped here and there. At a moment without warning, Elizabeth’s head suddenly rolled and she swayed sideways and the Frenchman caught and held her. He sat her upright once more and removed his arm. Teige lifted her to her feet and she staggered and said small nonsense and the Frenchman offered to help but was declined. He stood to wish them good night. They went then, tilting, wavering, going over and back in staggered progress and were like a thing of sails traversing into dangerous waters.

14

The Frenchman’s card arrived with their breakfast. Elizabeth could not eat. She moaned and put her head beneath the pillows. The tray was placed outside the door. Teige rose and went out about the city in the black suit. He went to the bank she had mentioned and entered and stood beneath the high-domed roof and watched for some moments the business transacted there. His chest pounded. He watched those men, bald, bespectacled, as they bent over papers, collars pinched beneath their chins. Light suffused through high windows and lit dust motes as they swirled and fell. The air was arid. Across the marbled floor a guard came and asked him if he needed assistance. He turned and went outside then and stood on the steps and tried to catch his breath. He had felt as if his life had been taken away, as if it were a document of sorts he guarded in his chest and the instant he walked inside the bank it had been withdrawn to be kept by another. He stood and watched the sky where clouds moved brisk in the wind. There were signs of the coming winter. He stood and did nothing and considered, and then he crossed down the street to the railroad station and bought two tickets for the afternoon train. Then he went back to the hotel and asked at the desk for their bill. When it came he saw the figure and did not know how they could pay it. He went upstairs and woke Elizabeth.

“Come on, you have to wake now. We have to go.”

She shook her head with its tousled hair. It was as if she were being asked for a dance.

“Yes,” he said. “Elizabeth, how much money have you got?”

She opened her eyes to look at him. “What?”

“How much money have you got? We have to pay, or give them something if we can’t. We have to take a train this afternoon.”

The urgency of his tone roused her.

“What are you saying?”

“We can’t stay here.”

“Yes, we can.”

“No. We have to go.” He began to gather her things that were too many now for her bag.

“Stop it. Leave my things.” She sprang from the bed and was beside him, pulling back her dress. “How dare you,” she said. She struck at him with her hand. It landed on his cheek and he stepped back and raised his two hands as if to still the angry air.

“I cannot work at the bank, Elizabeth. I have to go into the country. I have to work on land with horses. This is what I can do, you know that. We can have a good house, for our child.” He gestured right-handed to her midriff.

“What?”

“Are you—”

She shouted, “No! No, no, stop!” She turned back to the bed and threw herself upon it and wept.

Teige stood and felt the life go out of him. He put down the bag. He took off his jacket and he sat beside her on the bed and he stroked her hair. When at last she turned her wet face to him, she said: “Can we stay?”

And he answered her, “All right.”

15

So they did not take the train that afternoon, and Teige went down and told them at the desk of the hotel that there had been a mistake and the man there smiled and was most gracious and said how delighted they all were. The first snow flurries blew. The fire in the lobby was loaded high with logs and the scent of woodsmoke hung thickly. Elizabeth bought a coat of fur. It was made, she told Teige, from wild bears that ran about in the rest of that country. Imagine. She told him to get one for himself, but he declined. He sat in the hotel room and despaired. He went out to the outskirts of the city where the land opened and the treed skyline told of the wilderness beyond. He found a blacksmith’s yard and stables and passed some time of the day examining the horses there. He surprised the smith with knowledge of hooves and offered to help, and showed such skill as belied his fine clothes. He went there several times thereafter. When he returned to the hotel he was again in his black jacket, but his skin smelled of horses.

On many evenings the Frenchman joined them for dinner. Such was his frequency that Elizabeth and Teige were customarily seated at a table for three and sat in attendance until he arrived. Evenings when he did not come they sat muted over the noise of their knife and fork. When he did he came with many apologies and kissed Elizabeth’s hand and ordered champagne. He made jokes about extravagant heiresses with triple chins. He told stories of the glamour of New York and the fine houses he had stayed in and told too of his favoured place in that country that was called New Orleans where the ladies wore jewelled garters sent from Paris.

When they came upstairs after one such night, Elizabeth told Teige he should ask the Frenchman for a job.

“You cannot sit around forever.”

He came to her and held her about the shoulders. “Elizabeth,” he said, “I want us to leave. You know that. I want us to go west. There is—

“No.”

She spun away. She went to the dressing room. He came there and opened the door, where she was taking down her dress. When she saw him there she stopped.

“Once you wanted me to see you,” he said.

She held her hands across herself. “Please, Teige,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

She closed over the door.

The day following, he rose before her and went out across the frozen morning to visit the smith and the horses. One that had recovered from lameness he took for a ride and went out at a gallop across thinly crisp and whitened grass. The plumes of his breath and the horse’s breath were like signals of some release. The land they crossed was fresh and unspoiled and open and the sky above clear and bluer than any he had seen. He took the horse down the steep of a valley and journeyed along this until he came to a stream. He paused there and dismounted and let the horse drink and he squatted and scooped palmfuls of icy water for himself. He doused his head. He shook the wide ring of drops and then shouted out. He shouted again and the horse startled and went a few paces in the stream but intuited there was no call for fear and stood then looking sidelong. Teige stood and opened his arms and shouted again, and the shout travelled up that valley and was heard by what birds and beasts dwelled there and perhaps by these alone was comprehended.

Teige whistled and the horse came to him. He stroked its flank. He laid his forehead upon its shoulder. In fields at the north of the valley some cattle stood. A hawk high in the blue travelled a wide arc. Teige climbed on the horse and rode on. He rode all that day and afternoon. He rode along the edge of woods and stopped to smell the trees and to recall that smell from a time long ago when he and the twins waited for Tomas with a swan. He rode across the fast fading light of that winter’s day and stopped sometimes to let the horse graze and rest and to consider the world in which he found himself. Then he went on. He went in an arc no different from the hawk’s, as if upon a long invisible tethering, and by the coming of the darkness he was back at the smith’s. He returned the horse. The smith worked at a fire, hammering. He told Teige he could have the horse for little money for the work he had done. Teige said he had worked for the horses and not for payment and the man said he understood this and this was why he offered.

Teige told the smith he was unsure if he could take the horse but would return. He went back to the city on foot and his suit was soiled and worn looking, and about him was the smell of the land. He came in the doorway of the hotel and from what signals he could not say knew at once that something was awry. It was as though all were canted slightly, or a glass opaque had been placed between him and what he saw. He went past the desk, where the clerk at that moment spun to study the keys. He went up the stairs and into the room and saw at once that she was gone. Her clothes, her bag, his eyes looked for these, though he did not move. There was only her scent. Upon the bed he saw the note she had written him.

Dear Teige,

I am gone. Please do not try and find me.

It will only embarrass both of us. We are finished. It was my fault.

I have paid the hotel bill.

I wish you every happiness,

Elizabeth.

16

He stood and held the note and looked it over again. Then he crumpled it and threw it across the room. He went to the chest of drawers where his old clothes lay and he stripped off the black suit and put them on. With the suit bundled under his arm he left that room then and went down the stairs quickly and caught the eye of the desk clerk, who looked askance at him in that old apparel. He crossed the marbled lobby beneath the chandeliers and out to the street. There was snow trafficking in the air. Those moving in that thoroughfare were thickly coated in furs, and other heavy materials, and at once Teige had a glimpse of what the winter would be like there. He went out the way he had come. The snow fell but did not seem to land. It crossed the air and vanished when it touched the ground. Yet still more fell, spiralling in windless descent out of the evening dark. Teige turned his face to it. The stars were gone. His breath rose briefly and then passed into nothing. He went on. He walked out the end of the streets into the utter dark. The road was softened beneath him. The snow falling was visible only barely when it passed his eyes. He tramped into the night and went on out to the blacksmith’s. He found that man’s low house by the roadside and went and knocked on the door.

The smith came out in a vest and trousers.

“I need the horse,” Teige said. “I could work for you for a week.”

The smith blinked as if there were something he was just seeing. “Have you nothing you can trade?” he asked.

“Only these.” Teige held out the black suit.

The smith took the suit that was too small for him and turned it over in the half-light. “For funerals,” he said, and smiled, and Teige smiled, too.

“You have already done the work. The horse is yours,” said the smith. He told Teige to wait a moment and went back inside, where the figure of a woman moved, and then he came out with a lantern. They crossed the yard where the snow fell across the amber light and the smith held the lantern aloft while Teige unbolted the door. The horse neighed and Teige went and calmed her.

“You have no saddle,” said the smith.

“No.”

“Take the bridle.”

The smith watched while Teige brought her outside and he held the lantern and considered what tale untold underlay this scene, and of it he did not ask. Teige turned and offered him his hand.

“It is a cold night,” the smith said. “You should wait.” He indicated with his left hand the stables.

“I cannot,” Teige said. They shook hands. “Thank you.”

Then he slipped up onto the horse’s back that was already starred with scintilla of melting snowflakes. He said some words to the animal and then he turned her out of there and they went out of the lantern light and down the dark.

Teige rode out the road in a direction south of the city. Of the geography of that country he had only the vaguest semblance and even prior to that moment had not exactly considered where it was he was to start his life with Elizabeth. He had heard men speak of the west as if it were more than a compass point, as if captured in that appellation were a territory majestic and free and without parallel. But he did not know where it was, nor did he comprehend the vastness of that continent. That night as he rode he rode for distance only, to be farther away than it was possible to be. The road wound away from the coast. He went down through woodlands where the snow stopped and a small chill wind tunnelled. He passed on and met none coming or going and found in his very bones the sad familiarity of such lone travel, as if reencountering there a truth about his own condition. In the hours yet before dawn he slowed the horse and walked her and then drew her to the side of tall trees, where he bowed his head and for some short time slept.

He woke with birdsong. Light was breaking and the country thereabouts was revealed in verdant and purple colour. He rode on. South of there he came upon two boys and a man hunting cattle in the dawn. The gate to a field was open, but the cattle in their own peculiarity broke and ran past it and the boys ran after them with the man shouting. Teige turned the horse and headed the cattle off and turned them back. The drover boys joined him and they returned the cattle to the field proper. Then the man indicated the farmhouse not distant and said breakfast would be readying now.

Teige stayed there a week. The boys called him Ty. The woman of the house caught the melancholy of his demeanour and fed him double portions of eggs and meat as remedy for such sadness. He helped with the cattle and winter fencing. The days were cold and bright and the sky like a sheet of blue pulled taut over the world. When the man tried to pay him for his work, Teige would take none. The man offered him an old saddle then and said he would not be refused.

He went off south and west again and crossed the valley of a great river whose name he did not know. He saw mountains ahead and kept these to his right shoulder then. He stopped sometimes at places and worked a few days and was sometimes paid and sometimes given food. He stayed always briefly and made attachments to none. What history was his and how he had come to be there, he kept like a parchment folded inside him. As he rode the horse his mind was sometimes erased of all and he achieved in the rhythmic motion a state akin to innocence absolute. But in the evenings when he had to rest the horse and sat on a stone in the grass, he was often assailed by the memory of what he had left behind. He saw the woman’s face as he had first seen it. He returned to the old country and saw himself there in scenes as if from the life of another. He thought of his father and mother on the island and he looked at the big sky there and considered what stars he could see. He knew he should attempt a letter, but in the ruins of his dreams felt a vague uncertain shame and could not begin.

All that winter he rode south. Then when the spring came and the waters ran in clear streams everywhere, he turned the horse west and headed up through a pass in the Appalachian Mountains. By the summer of that year he had reached the Ohio River. He had thought when he reached it he must be nearly most ways across the country. The heat of the day scorched his forehead and he took to wearing a hat. The horse took lame and he had to rest her awhile on the outskirts of a town where in that season all was dust. He went and found a smith’s there and from short exchanges learned of those multitudes who considered that merely the starting point for their own sojourns west. The country was vast beyond imagining, he understood then. And from that knowledge he took solace, for destination was not what he sought and there was in endlessness a certain comfort born of the recognition that there would be no turning back.

He went due west then and came upon many wagons and riders and walkers, too, all as if under some heliocentric influence following the falling trajectory of the sun. Such were the numbers moving on the roads that it appeared as though the earth herself were flat and had been tipped on the side and all manner of men and women were then propelled to travel westward. Teige rode at times among them. All had their own tales and without exception had left their lives behind on the basis of stories they had heard of the land that lay ahead. They were a long, loose caravan of faith. Their countries were many. By the time he had crossed the Mississippi River, Teige had heard described the gold of California that some believed was plentiful yet. He had heard of similar riches at the end of the Oregon Trail and of untouched land there said to be only waiting for farming. But to none such was he drawn. He could not envision himself a farmer, could not now imagine being in a house fixed and still. He went south. His skin crisped in the sun. His forearms where he held all day the reins blistered in a line of watery moons. His horse suffered and whole days he spent then only seeking for water. He had come into Nebraska. On prairies there he saw herds of bison for the first time and paused his horse upon a crest and sat and watched over them a long time. He slept on a bedroll beneath the huge sky. In dreams he saw the face of his brother Tomas and saw him on the night he had last seen his face as he left the island and woke and wondered if he were living or dead.

For days he went nowhere at all. He rested the horse and spoke to her and brought her to water. If she died, he thought, I would too. For such was the empty vista he beheld that travellers there seemed less than sporadic and his bones would have whitened before he was found. Nonetheless this same emptiness soothed him too and there was in his silent and solitary state a kind of peace. He stayed in that country awhile. He watched the birds of prey high against the heavens like smallest flaws in the blue. He heard the prairie dogs in the night. When the ashes of love gathered in his mouth he stood and went off across the dark, sending badgers and foxes and coyotes alike in scattered retreat. He walked and sometimes howled out and sometimes stopped and bent over and wept. He felt like a disease in the blood the shame of failed love and could not explain to himself how it had happened. After a time he returned to his horse and his bedroll and lay until the dawn.

One noon clouds heavy and black rose up in the western sky. They came quickly and gathered as they did so, crossing the land like a grim assemblage. Teige watched the shadow coming. Then he brought his horse to shelter in some rocks and waited. Thunder crashed. The horse’s ears went flat and then she let out a cry of alarm and stamped backward and he spoke to her and held up his palm and laid it on her nose. The thunder banged again and the rain fell. Lightning forked. It flew from the sky so close that Teige turned about, and at once the horse ran. She raced off out of the rocks and down into the prairie below. He saw her go and he called after her, but then she was gone. The rain came on. It fell in torrents. Again and again the thunder rolled, grave and declamatory. The air flashed electric. Teige turned his face to the sky and let it fall upon him. He wanted it to be the rain of home. But it fell too hard and was dark and stiff and urgent and seemed with its thunder crashing the antique locution of some god primitive and without other means of communication with his creation. It rained on. It made floods in the darkened ground. Night was made of the daytime as the clouds crossed. Still Teige stood. He thought for moments of the lightning falling through the sky and striking him. And if such had happened, he would not have regretted it, he told himself.

But it did not. The clouds rode on. The storm had made clear the air that in that aftermath was briefly cooled like a drink. Teige took his bedroll and walked on down into the prairie after his horse. He whistled for her and called out. He crossed the dampened ground where the dust clung to his boots and made upon them a reddish coat. The land all about was empty of man or beast or bird. The herds that had grazed there were all elsewhere and the scene entire was tranquil and vacant. He might have been the sole creation left extant.

Time passed. He walked on and the white eye of the sun reappeared overhead and the air wavered with heat once more. He crossed land where the hoofprints of the bison had left a trail wide and broken and there lay there bones of some fallen long ago. He called for the horse. He stopped and considered the endlessness of the terrain and the futility of his attempting to walk out of it. He sat down then. He had some few supplies enough for maybe two days. He had a canteen of water. He had a pistol. The night fell. He was aware of Indians and knew of tribes such as Sioux and Cheyenne, but he did not fear these, for he held his life lightly. A moon climbed above him. Her stars arrived. In the stillness of the dark of that prairie then Teige Foley lay down and after a time, as though to the company of his brothers, began to tell the stories of the constellations above. He spoke aloud. His voice carried a little in the windless night. And in such dark and beneath the canopy there he told of Pegasus the winged horse and Equuleus the foal, and he traced with his eyes the pattern of stars his father saw. He spoke until his lips dried and his voice became a whisper. The enormity of that landscape was spread out about him in the night and upon it he less than a speck of light or dust and with as little consequence it seemed to any in heaven. The moon slid down the dark.

17

Upon the island winters wet and cold came and were followed by wet and cold springs. Like time the river ran. Smoke climbed from the cottage of the little village and in the damp seasons did not ascend but barely, hanging in the air like a presence or a spirit without form. Gulls and other seabirds flew there. As if these knew the clock of human hunger, they assembled in the sky while the pilots and fishermen ate in the evenings and were there to swoop when the scrapings were thrown outside. Uncertain summers followed. A drift of light rain came up the estuary and drizzled in the windless air and this remained and the autumn was winter once more. All moved in a slow yet ceaseless falling. Upon a ledge in the stone building, Francis Foley kept the letter of Tomas. He awaited news of Teige, but none came. The letter like a thing returning to some former state had grown thinner, its single page read so often that it was light as a wing. When Francis took it from the ledge and lifted it in the candlelight, he saw the ink that was faded from black to grey and he did not tell his wife the words were vanishing. In the season that followed when the rain swept down and the dampness of the climate threatened to turn all rheumatic, the letter soaked up the watery air and in the brief warmth afterwards the ink evaporated altogether. This did not stop him from reading it to his wife. While he read it he watched her face and saw there how her blind eyes settled on some vista of her son and how imagination in some way redeemed the absence and loss.

They endured. The years passed over them. Then in the April of a year there came across the river a flotilla of boats and upon them a colourful crew of figures. The men were dressed in shirts of red and yellow and such and the women were long-haired and wore bracelets and golden hoops from their ears. They came ashore where the village women and children had gathered to meet them. The men stood with legs akimbo and hands on their waists. The women studied with brazen looks the clothes and manner of the females there. The island children held to their mothers’ skirts and stared. One among the arrivals, a man with hair to his shoulder and a white shirt, stepped forward. Behind him was a beautiful woman with about her an array of a half dozen figures in steady progression from girl to woman, each the twin of another and each more lovely than any there had seen before. The man spoke in an accent that made the words seem made of wood.

“We have come from the town of Kilkee yesterday,” he said. “They told us there that there was a man here with an eye on the heavens.” He paused and looked over them. Mild wind blew. None moved or showed recognition.

“A glass,” he said, and made with his hands the shape of a great telescope and aimed it at the sky. “A man who looks at the stars.”

“He is here.” It was a young boy of the BoatMacs. “He is here,” he said, “in the tower.”

They went then like a wave and passed all together up the path and past the hedgerows of thorn and bramble. The children ran ahead and made noise of high-hearted cries and excitement, and in the fields thereabouts rabbits paused in alarm and then darted away. They came within sight of the tower. The man in the white shirt strode to the front. His face was browned from climates not theirs, and his dark eyes contained deeps from scenes witnessed none there could imagine. Yet all could tell he was upon one of the moments of his life.

The crowd reached the tower and the clamour deflated and they stood thereabouts in a roughly drawn arc. Then Francis Foley came out into the daylight, and Finbar his son saw him for the first time since he had thought his father drowned in the river.

There was a moment in which they looked at each other like ones newly reencountered in the mists of the hereafter.

“Finbar?” the old man said then. “Finbar?” He raised his hand to pause the air and seemed as if he would fall down. Then he went back to the doorway of the tower where Emer stood and he led her out into the light and told her this was her son Finbar come back again.

She came to his arms, and at once the gypsies cheered. They cheered and clapped and some laughed and pushed each other about. Children embraced in giddy mock performance and ran off then with shrieks and wild yahoos. Finbar brought forward his wife, Cait, and the half dozen Roses.

“My lovely daughters,” he said, and then laughed himself with head back at the blue-and-white sky.

As if this then were a latch released, the gypsies turned and went down the village and began the business of celebration proper. Some of them were those originals who had left the lake with Finbar years before, who had wintered by the great forest and crossed the mountains into France in the spring. Others were some they had met along the way, ashen figures dispossessed and tramping the roads without direction. There were men and women of various nations, their look and language each their own. All for reasons unsaid had taken up with those gypsies and journeyed westward toward the ocean. Their progress had been stopped often. Sometimes in the softness of the season when crossing a river such as the Saone, they had found themselves turned south and slowing to a languorous motion while the sun shone. They had drowsed and drunk the wines there and seemed in a place Elysian. The perfumes of that landscape wafted and wound about them. Their journey westward then had been stalled. Their horses grew fat on summer grass. Then, a morning of changed wind, and without announcement or discussion Finbar yoked his caravan and the others did likewise. Leaving the flattened imprint of their stay upon the grass and the blackened eyes of their fires, all had turned about and headed north and west once more. They had little sense of time, only season. They followed roads that led to others. They crossed up through France. They met a troupe of actors who performed in frayed and gaudy costumes the plays of Moliere. They came upon some that were soldiers deserted from a war of which none had heard. At last they reached the sea at Cherbourg and sailed from there to Plymouth. In England they did not stay long. Rain made grey that country and they crossed up through it in the last days of winter and so wended onward toward the place Finbar imagined home. In the town of Kilkee they had found none of Cait’s family living. Nor was there sign of the Foley brothers. Upon this discovery, Finbar had led his wife down to the white strand with their daughters, and while the other gypsies camped on the high field that overlooked the sea, he had walked with his family along the sand there and said little and watched the waves breaking. “Here I saw your mother the first time,” he told the girls after a while, and they smiled widely and their eyes shone, for this was a story they had often heard, of the mer-girl and the seaweed, and they giggled at this sudden proof of the actual. The Roses ran off then into the tide, the younger ones only to their ankles and kicking high, cold splashes that glittered. Their mother and father watched them and were in some fashion by this restored.

Two evenings following, Finbar heard of the man on the island with the glass.

Now to each gypsy of those originals the long journey there seemed as nothing. Though none were cousin or kin to any, the instant the mother had embraced her son there had passed through them like a charge the sense of something right in the world. They did not explain it to each other. But there the travail and effort, the long uncertainty of their shapeless lives, all fell away. They clapped backs. They hung arms over shoulders. They went down to the village again and from there to their boats wherein were stored all manner of items none there had seen before. The gypsies carried up onto the sand chests with iron padlocks. While children ran about they opened these and brought out strange wood and paper goods. Others set up a yellow tent on the sand. A gypsy with open shirt held his hands wide and then clapped and clapped again a beat and then to this rhythm sang in what the islanders did not know was Italian. A fire was lit there and flames crackled and twisted this way and that in the small breeze. The gypsy women showed jewels and hoops and bangles. They proffered in their palms blue stones mined from countries in Asia and ran between their fingers Indian silks they had gathered on their wanderings. None of these they tried to sell, but showed them like gathered evidence of the wonders of the world and their part within it. By the fall of darkness the pilots had returned. They came ashore with some amazement and passed up through the fires and singing and roasting meat like ones somnambulant in vivid dream. They went to their cottages as if to confirm the island was the same they had left in the dawn and then came down sheepish and circumspect and stood on the edge of the firelight where their children were dancing.

When the dark was deepest blue then a small assembly of the gypsies carried in bundles sticks with wads of cloth wound about them. One other bore a firebrand. They went to the shore and the crowd murmured and the singer stopped, as did the one playing the blue guitar. Then a touch-paper was lit. Into the sky streaked a trail of light. It blazed upward and turned the heads of all below and upon a moment then exploded with a bang. Splintered light fell. Those watching ducked down their heads at first and held them fearful so until the same fragments faded like things erased into the dark. Other fireworks were shot into the night. All manner of trajectory was briefly there illumined and in all colours of the spectrum. Wheels of fire spun above them. Blue balls of flame whirled. Now the gypsies did not await the decline of one to send another but flashed some that fizzed fast and others that flew and climbed the dark in slow ascent and met there the falling tendrils of scintilla yellow and gold. The night sky flared and was shred in ribbons. In the crowd below some held their arms up as if to reach the sky blooms and cried out and shouted. More rockets were fired. Each rose in swift, short bursts of fury and released itself high and bright above like things in glorious failure unable to reach some higher plane. The music began again then. The strings of the guitar were plucked in dance time and the island women linked arms with each other while their men watched. The gypsy men were less bashful. They clapped wide claps and threw back their heads and made swaying body movements as if in time to some inner rhythm of the universe deep and secret and ancient.

That night they slept where they fell down. By the next the islanders were less unsure of their visitors. In the day they shared with them food and their children played together and went off hunting about the island. When night fell the festivities resumed. The Roses came and danced there. Some fellows from the town of Kilrush rowed the night river and came up on the shore and saw those sisters and weakened to their knees at their loveliness. These same were then told by the pilots to be gone, and they returned to their boat and rowed a small way and then sat in the tide and looked back upon the scene with yearning. The Roses danced. Their mother and father came down from the tower and watched them.

“There will be boys to beat away every night now,” Finbar said.

“I hope so,” Cait replied.

The month of April passed. A warm and easy summer began. At times the pilots took with them some of the gypsies when they rowed out to meet the ships. These delighted in the race and took off their shirts sometimes and held them flapping in the wind like flags or banners. They saluted the victor with broad operatic gesture that threatened to capsize them and then called out to each other gambles on who would win the next. In the night when the men returned, they took to predicting the races of tomorrow. The gypsies turned over cards and made inexpert prophecies and pretended for a time that they had seen the unknown. But in truth what future was yet before them none there knew. They did not ask Finbar how long they would stay, and neither did he mention to any of them his intentions. The days rolled on. Bees and birds of summer flew. The buttery almond scent of gorse was spread over the air and then sweetened further by honeysuckle and fuchsia. Sun dallied the day long. The river ran blue as a southern sea. And in that season the island seemed a place from which none would ever leave. What clamour and battle and bitterness was history seemed to exist in an elsewhere. The summer hung there, its weather like a gift.

Then, in the end of August, the old restlessness returned in the blood of Finbar. He woke and imagined he was moving. He went out into the day and stood awhile and watched the water and the sky.

“We have to go,” he said to Cait when he came back.

“I know,” she surprised him by saying. “I have been waiting. There’s no home for the likes of us.”

“We will come back every year.”

“You need not worry. Your daughters will see to that,” she said.

Finbar went then and walked up to the tower to tell his father and his mother.

“We will go north to Ballinasloe to the horse fair in October,” he said. “We will go on but promise to come back.”

His father nodded and held Emer’s hand in his lap.

“Every man must live his own life,” he said. “You will come back?”

“Every year in the summertime.”

“God bless you, Finbar,” said the blind mother, and she raised her hands to feel his face.

The following morning the gypsies sailed from the island. Before they went, Finbar brought to his father the map of Benardi. “Look at this and you will think of us,” he said. “We will be back when the blossoms are on the trees.”

They left then and the island women and children watched them go, and some youths swam alongside the boats a ways and then stopped and gathered breath, their heads like dark blooms on the water. They swam back and came ashore and the boats receded farther and bore off with them the imaginings of many. For the islanders had grown used to the gypsies and now in their absence felt the silence fall like a heavy curtain. In the night there were no festivities or gatherings. Mists grey and wet enshrouded the island, and the season turned. It was a place again hushed and alone and when the rain fell it seemed to make dreary and dull the world and many there dreamed in secret of what adventures had befallen those gypsies now.

The islanders looked for them in the summer. And when they came, good as their word, they came with the same flourish of colour and revelry, of song and music and dancing and fireworks. They came this time with canaries. They brought them in many cages and hung these in the twisted trees, where the canaries sang to other birds there. They brought kites of stick and paper too and flew them on long lines from the shore. Such flying was good for the spirit, one said, who did nothing else all day but tug softly on the unwound spool and gaze up at the distant fluttering as if at some furthermost extension of himself wild in the breeze. Their gifts were many and varied and became like tokens of goodwill exchanged between those who arrived and those who welcomed them. They were the beginning of what would become a custom. The things they brought carried within them stories of the greater world, and whether the islanders laughed or raised their eyebrows at such as winding music boxes or hot peppers or slippers of silver with curved toes, they enjoyed all and were grateful. In the beginning of autumn they left again and promised to return and did so. There were no more than the half dozen Roses, but these with each visit became more beautiful still. And in time the gypsies’ caravan itself would come to seem like a touring carousel crossing the earth back and forth, bound by some antique covenant, and sheltering within it those beauties. They were like Grecian figures reincarnate and had dark eyes and pale skin that maddened many. No sooner would they land on the island than the river would fill with night-boys crossing in boats for glimpses of them and the pilots would run down and pitch stones and yell and wave their arms as if able to shoo away fate. Fin-bar himself did not join the pilots. He knew his daughters’ beauty bore with it some seeded destiny and knew that one day too he would have to meet it. He grew older and strangely wiser. He came to his father and brought him always a chart of some kind. He brought maps and drawings of islands newly named. He brought the latest cartography of their own country and scrolls and parchments inked with mountains and rivers and shorelines. The old man took these with grace and thanked him each time. He told Finbar he studied them when he was gone away and placed them to one side. To his mother Finbar gave scented oils and powders and such. He gave her candles, though he knew she could not see their light, for he said they could be lit for remembrance. Then he sat with them in that old place of stone and none of them spoke, and the summer breeze blew and each of them thought of the brothers gone.

Then one year the gypsies did not return in the summer.

The islanders watched for them. They invented reasons: how the gypsies might be delayed in mountains, or on sea crossings, or in any manner of trouble that might be abroad. Into August they waited for them to come before they began to accept the chill of autumn was arriving. The gypsies never came, only the winter with sleet and ice.

Then, a day in the following June, a boy ran through the village calling, “They are here! They are here!”

The boats they came in were laden low. They had been in countries in the East and brought all manner of strange and exotic goods, some of whose uses were unknown to themselves. They brought there too a form of early bicycle, an angular contraption of iron rims and timber handles that looked in some ways like an assemblage of garden tools on large wheels. This one of the gypsies demonstrated, wobbling out down a sloping field of grass, cheered and chased by the children until like a proof of some laws of science he slowed to standstill, balanced an instant, and finally toppled. There were other such near inventions, three-handed clocks with cuckoos that sang, sheets of carbon upon which faces could leave their imprint, socks that were soled like shoes, thick-glassed spectacles that made all look far away, a pendulum that if hung over the expectant foretold the sex of the unborn.

While all these were uncased and held out and shown to the islanders, Finbar went up the pathway to the tower. Even as he approached it he felt some change had happened. It was as if there were a warp in the air, a rumple in the fabric of things that was all but imperceptible. As he came past the last of the stone walls to the little opening there, his father and mother were not sitting outside. A shiver passed up through him. His breath was caught. When he came to the doorway of the tower itself, he stopped and called out to them. Birds were singing. Sunlight made light and grey the stones. That moment he noticed such details and they entered him and adjoined his memories.

“Finbar?”

The voice of his father was softened. Finbar stepped inside the shadows and saw the two of them lying in each others arms beside the telescope.

“Is it you?” his father said, and his hand rose white and slim and wavering until Finbar knelt and took it.

“She is gone,” the old man said. “I am waiting to go with her.” And his hand returned to stroke the grey hair of Emer and then came to rest upon her once more. Finbar said nothing. He bowed his head and held his hands together and from him like a river invisible ran his grief.

“You must let me take her,” Finbar said.

“No.”

“I must bury her.”

“Bury the two of us. She is waiting for me. I will be with her tomorrow”

“Father…”

“No.” The old man’s eyes flashed again as they had often done before, and he fixed them upon his son only a moment yet sufficient to still all argument. “No, Finbar, please. Tomorrow.”

Finbar walked outside into the sunlight. He lifted his face to the warmth and the brightness of that June day and he heard the birds singing anew and the sounds from the village travelling upward to where he stood. He watched the cloudless sky a long time. The dog came and lay at his feet. Then he went back inside and told his father he would be back to him in a short time. He ran down the pathway he had come and said to Cait and the Roses and the gypsies and the islanders that his mother was dead and his father dying. Mary Boat-Mac put her hands to her face and wept.

“I am going to stay with him tonight,” Finbar told them. “Light no fireworks for this evening. I will see you all in the morning.” He embraced his wife and children then and took some bread and smoked fish and from one of the canvas bags the latest charts he had brought for his father.

He went back along the way to the tower. His father was as he had left him.

“I need no food, Finbar,” the old man said.

“Drink this.” From a bucket in the corner his son scooped water and brought it to his father’s lips and held it there while it spilled and was some part taken.

Finbar sat then beside them both. The sunlight that fell did not reach inside the tower but lay only at its doorway like a golden cloth that was slowly withdrawn throughout that quiet afternoon. The father and son said almost nothing. In the stillness that assembled, Finbar listened for his father’s breaths and heard each one as if each were a thing singularly gifted and counted and measured out in some accountancy finite and exact. At times Finbar thought the breath that came was final and he would not get to give his father the last charts. There seemed stalled moments in which the continuation of life paused and held and was uncertain of continuance, then Francis Foley sucked in again. As the long daylight diminished and began to fade into night, Finbar told his father he had another chart to show him. The old man opened his mouth but did not say more than a thin sound. Then Finbar brought it out for him and unfurled that scroll that was long and yellowed and marked in ink of black. The writings upon it were in a fine hand. But it was not upon these that the eyes of the old man fixed. For it was a map not of countries known, but of the heavens above. Therein were scored all the constellations and the planets on what were called the First Plane, and then below these was another diagram, called the Deeper Heavens, where stars were given that Francis Foley had never seen.

“Here,” Finbar said, “is explained how to see the future.”

The old man’s eyes read what they could, for the writing was in several languages, Latin and Greek and some English and other scripts from lands in Arabia. He studied for a time the planetary cycles shown there, the cycles of Pluto, of Neptune and Uranus. There were farther cycles shown, too, of Saturn and Jupiter, and lastly of Venus, Mercury, and the Moon. There was more there that Finbar did not understand, the symbols of the zodiac, the patterns and repetitions of history that were constant, the planetary clusters in Aries, Taurus, and Gemini. There were details of all manner of calculation and methods of interpretation, birth signs, astromorphology, the Thebaic calendar, and a brief account of various cosmogonies.

Finbar held the scroll open, and his father looked at it a long time. He did not speak. When Finbar asked him if it wasn’t a marvellous thing, the old man did not reply to him but smiled a weak smile and gestured to his son to bring the telescope to him. He laid the chart aside then. The darkness had fallen. Finbar turned the great instrument and brought the eyepiece close to his father, and when it was in position the old man brought his face to it.

Finbar sat there in the darkness. He listened to his father breathing. He mourned in silence for his mother.

The night was mild and the sky cloudless and the stars therein shone. Francis Foley made only the slightest sound as he surveyed all above and studied there what galaxies were unveiled. He did not cry out or exclaim or make otherwise known what he saw but while the hours passed one upon the next and the stars turned, he seemed to slip through some portal in his understanding of the universe and enter a dimension of revelation. In that sky then he saw Finan dead in Africa. He saw too his son Tomas, and saw him in a homestead in a territory of tall grass and trees. He saw him with a wife called Mary Considine, who was kind and gentle and a mother to their three children. He saw the farming they did there and the seasons harsh of snows and heat.

Teige too was in that sky revealed to him. Francis Foley paused when he saw him and lifted away his eye from the telescope and blinked it twice, and Finbar brought him something moist to his lips. The old man swallowed and it seemed a labour. He made a moaning sound in his throat, as if he would speak but knew he must not. Then he resumed his gaze and saw Teige with the strange clarity of how one sees the unreal figures in a story. He saw him alone in the dark in a desert place. He saw the dust there blow across the night and sands gather around the boy’s boots and cover them over while he hunkered there and waited for the dawn. He was without his horse. In the breaking light he rose and walked and was a speck in the landscape of desolation. Teige went on. He crossed that empty terrain that seemed endless, and about him skirted small animals that ran and scavenged there. He walked through the blaze of sun. A hoop of red was burned about his neck, as if he had been in hot irons or once held by thongs. His eyelids were caked. His brows wore the dust of that place in deep wrinkles. When he had no water he stopped walking. He squatted down and broad-winged birds encircled black against the sky. For two days he lay so. The birds came and landed nearby and stepped and pecked at nothings and looked sidelong and waited. The night came on. Teige imagined he would die then. He said some words to his father and his mother and shut his eyes.

In the morning he was found by two riders heading south ahead of a herd of horses that were bound for the army in the war that was threatened against the rebels. They came upon him and sat him upright and gave him water. They asked him his name. One of the men was by the name of MacNamara. He took Teige on the back of his horse and they brought him out of there. He joined with those herdsmen then and rode south with the herd. He showed in time what knowledge he had of horses and moved through that land that was wide and majestic and various. He rode through canyons and through the passes of mountains and by forests vast and serene. All that land he passed along and sat by night at campfires where flames twisted and died. He grew accustomed to that life and its rhythms. They delivered the horses and went north for more. Sometimes they encountered Indians that were hostile and there were rifle and pistol battles and some fell and died. Other times the natives they came upon merely watched them from bluffs and grassy crests and kept them in long and grave scrutiny but took no action, watching the herds of wild horses pass in clouds as if seeing the spirit of the land itself traversing there. In such a life then years passed. And these were already in the future as Francis Foley saw them. And in that future too he saw the day when Teige Foley would stop with a lame horse at a homestead in the Wyoming Territory, and the woman who came out on the porch would silently remark on the familiarity of his face and ask him his name. And then she would send her son running and Tom Foley would hurry back from the fields and brush the dirt from his hands on his pants and come into the yard and see his brother Teige for the first time in many years.

And perhaps it was so.

And perhaps all was so revealed that night to Francis Foley as he lay with his wife, silently gazing beneath the stars. And in that fall of light from heaven to earth perhaps all our stories were told, all actions of the living and dead explained, and all time past present and future there revealed. In such eternal patterns perhaps the old man gleaned secrets and mysteries hitherto undisclosed and saw there in the stars the future generations of his family, saw the children and grandchildren and their grandchildren and theirs. Perhaps he saw in the sidereal light all the times to come. He saw those like me the great-great-grandson of Teige Foley, who years hence would return to that island seeking his spirit, who would walk over the windy fields and watch the river and think of the long story and that it should be written down. Perhaps he saw the others who would leave there for America. How in time the last family would go from that island and it would return to a place empty and green once more. Perhaps that last night Francis Foley saw there the whole history of endeavour and understood as none can its meaning. And perhaps in so doing, he found peace.

By the dawn he lay back on the straw bed. He placed his hand upon his wife’s back and breathed his last.

The sun rose palely and made vanish the stars. Birds of morning sang.