The Fall of Light

by Niall Williams

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Francis Foley is a proud, stubborn man, and cannot stand to be beholden to anyone. Quick to anger and slow to forgiveness, it is his temper that, one day, costs his sons their home -- and their mother. This will not be the last of their losses however: as the four boys and their father embark on an odyssey to find untenanted land they can call their own, their already diminished family is divided still further. But if a combination of choice and chance cause the five to separate and scatter, each to their own road, then a series of casual encounters and coincidences offer some hope for reunion and -- in Francis's case -- redemption.

Set in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century, The Fall of Light traces the footsteps of the five Foley men. With elegant, elegiac prose, Niall Williams guides his characters -- and his readers -- through hazard and hardship, friendship, love and death, through to Europe, America and Africa . . . and home again.

Release date: October 14, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 384

Sample

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


“Is that the sea?” he said.

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


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

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


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


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


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

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

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


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


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


“Tomas!” Finbar shouted.

Finan roared, “Tomas!”

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

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


Then the rope stretched taut.

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


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


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

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


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


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


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

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

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

“Get up!”

But Teige did not move. The river ran.

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


Still Teige did not move.

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

“I don’t want to.”


“Because you are a coward.”


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

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


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


“Get up.”

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


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

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


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


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

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

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

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

“She has not!”

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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


“He is gone,” Tomas said.

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


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

They watched the waters.

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

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


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

“We have to go back,” Teige said.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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



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


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


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

“Yes, tell us one,” said Finbar.

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


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


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

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

“Fifty?” Finbar asked.

“Fifty.”

“O-ho!”

They watched the stars and imagined.

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


“I love Cetus,” Finbar said.

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


“She was eaten.”

“She was not,” Teige said.

“She was!”

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


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

“Upside down,” Finbar said.

“Upside down,” said Teige.

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


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


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

“Are you sick?” Finbar asked him.

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


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



In the dark Tomas had ridden his horse into Limerick town with the intention of stealing something for his brothers to eat.
But from the moment he arrived on the hardened mud of the side streets, his resolve weakened. At that stage in his life, it
was the biggest town he had ever seen. Dimly in the distance he saw the bridge named Wellesley with its elegant arches. The
high steeple of the ancient cathedral appeared above the rooftops, and across the river were the neat plantations and well-made
fences of the land of the marquis of Lansdowne. He tied his horse and brus