The Fall of Light by Niall Williams Read Free Book Online

first house of all those that fell short of Francis Foley’s vision of paradise.
    They began a home there. She left her work. He would not have her going there, and she herself was glad to walk in with her
     head high and say she would not be back. Then there was a brief blue summer of three weeks before the weather turned around
     and came at them from the east. The wind burned the hay. Seeds did not come to properfruition, trees lost their leaves in August, and by September a fierce winter had already arrived. Emer carried their unborn
     son like a promise of new spring and watched the dark days for signs of light. Her husband, who had dreamed so extravagantly,
     had to hire himself at fairs. He disappeared before dawn and did not return until the physical exhaustion of his body was
     brought about by those who paid him less than the cost of feeding their horses. Slowly, so slowly, a sour disappointment seeped
     into the cottage. Tomas was born in January, when the snow was lying thick on the fields and there was no work even at the
     fairs. They ate small birds and berries. In the deep silence of the one dim room their marriage staggered under the impossible
     weight of dreams. Words were a reminder of other words and went unsaid, but the vision of the place that had been conjured
     remained. It lingered like a shadow in the corner, and soon Francis Foley could not look at the leaking thatch, or a place
     where the mud floor puddled, without hearing the reproach and mockery of his own words. Years slipped past them. The twins
     were born. Francis lay in the low bed at night and listened to the scouring wind and then for the first time in his adult
     life said a prayer to God for guidance.
    He was too rash and independent a man to wait long for reply, and the following morning when none had come, he loaded his
     wife and family on their small cart and moved them northeastward into the wind. Emer did not want to go.
    “This is madness,” she said.
    “Nothing is gained by sitting still,” he told her as the gale bit off his ears. “This is not our home.”
    “It could be.”
    “No, it couldn’t. Look at it. We are going. This is not what I promised you.”
    “What if I said I didn’t care?”
    “You’d be lying.”
    “I wouldn’t.”
    “This is not our home.”
    They wandered like biblical travellers looking for a sign, and were met with blizzards. Gulls were blown out of the sky. To
     keep his family alive, Francis stole sheep and killed them with his hands. They slept under hedges of whitethorn, the father
     lying himself down and lettingthe others rest wrapped upon him as the cold rose into his bones and by the dawn made of his face a white, bloodless mask.
    When at last they found a place to live, it was no better than the one they had left behind. They stayed a year and two months,
     then moved again.
    And so on it went, that life of struggle and hardship that followed the innocent days of love so swiftly that soon they themselves
     were almost forgotten and survived only as the thinnest faded memories of a once upon a time sweetness. They did not find
     a home. They lived on for times in various cabins and ruined cottages, deeply mired in the disappointment
of
their dreams. They stayed awhile and then moved, each time at the insistence
of
Francis over the increasing resistance of his wife. At last, when Teige was born Francis found work as one of an army of
     gardeners on an estate. They had a small cottage. The country itself was lost too in disillusionment. Spies and betrayals
     were everyday, the air of towns was opaque with mistrust and the yellow scent of greed. Those who owned the land did not live
     on it, and those like Francis who worked it imagined they were little more than the beasts in the field. It was a long, hard
     kind of living. And though he heard the whispered news of rebels, the perennial plots and hot dreams of those who promised
     a new country of their own, Francis Foley resisted