The Fall of Light Read Free Page A

and looked at
     Tomas.
    “No one has died,” he said, “come on.”
    “Come on!” said Finbar in echo and perfect imitation, and in this was joined by his twin, each of them mirrors of the elder.
     They mounted and rode, and Teige came with them. They galloped along the grassy western banks of the Shannon River. They rode
     along the edge of the first light of that morning and found that no matter how quickly they moved, the river moved quicker.
     They could not catch sight of the old man. All day the Shannon was sleeved in a fine mist and they could see nothing. After
     a mile the river was no longer even a river but had become a great lake that at first they mistook for the sea.
    They rode the three horses all that day in search of their father. They scanned the grey waters where sometimes they thought
     they caught sight of him. At last they came to where they could ride no more and where the last sighting of Francis Foley
     turned out to be a singular lonesome swan riding the low waves.
    “He is gone,” Tomas said.
    The breath of the horses misted and faded. They sat crouched forward like ones beneath a burden. The landscape thereabouts
     was a green and rumpled stillness. The silence grew heavy. Then Finbar said, “He is gone to America,” and laughed a small
     laugh that faded away.
    Finan looked at Tomas to see what he would say, but he said nothing at all.
    They watched the waters.
    “He is not,” Teige said at last, “he is become a swan.”

2
    Thin pale daylight fell out of the sky. Curlews flew over the water. The wind waved the reeds in a slow rustling
     where Tomas feared to find the body of their drowned father. But he was not there.He looked up at the bank where Teige and the twins were then making camp. He looked out at where the swan moved in the brown
     waters and the evening was falling. What was he to do now? Defeat was not in his nature. Yet in a few days he had lost almost
     everything. The vision of their home burning flared in his mind, and he knew they could not go back there. He did not understand
     what had happened between his parents but from it felt an obscure guilt, as if it were the boys’ fault. He wanted to go back
     and could not. He had to be the man now. He stood there a time and watched the river and the darkness coming. He wanted to
     be able to repair their losses. He wanted to right the crooked world, to go and bring back the dead. He wanted to rescue someone.
     He stood and then grew restless and came up to the others.
    “The place he wanted us to go was farther on,” he said. “It was at the sea that has waves. We’ll go on there tomorrow”
    “We have to go back,” Teige said.
    “We cannot. They will arrest us. We have to go on and find a place, and then I will go back myself,” said Tomas, looking away
     at the air above him as if to see how his words sounded.
    Finan groaned then and rubbed at his stomach. “We have nothing left, we have nothing to eat.”
    “We’ll eat the swan,” his twin answered, and grinned.
    “We’ll not!” Teige said, and raised his chin and seemed momentarily a pugnacious other.
    Tomas calmed them with the command to stay camped there by their horses while he went down the river to the town to get food.
    “Don’t be acting fools while I’m gone. There’s only us now,” he said.
    He left them in the darkness and rode away. The clouds blew eastward and the stars revealed themselves. In those days the
     night skies of that country were vast canopies of deepest blue, all the created stars glimmered there like the diadem of a
     king. There were none lost to surrounding light, for there was none, and the patterns of the constellations were each clear
     and perfect as though drawn by a great hand in the depths of the heavens. As the cold of the nighttime came around them, the
     younger Foley brothers huddled together. They put the pony and the horse in the gap of the wind and gained a small shelter
     from the air that was blowing