The Fall of Light Read Online Free PDF Page A

number of cottages and stolen from cabins and yards what he could. He had an ax and a shovel and a number of irons. He
     had a blanket of coarse hair and wrapped in it a fire tongs and a number of empty blue glass bottles. For himself he had lifted
     the eggs from hens and sucked them dry. He had eaten wild blackberries that grew in tangles in the hedgerows three miles outside
     the town. By the time he had encountered the ragged traders who were camped on the edges of the market, he had the wild look
     of one unstable with emotion. The traders were travellers from all corners of the country, and they recognized at once the
     desperation in his bootless figure and the tainted air of stolen goods. Squint-eyed, fox-headed fellows, they poked with their
     fingers at the little assemblage of things wrapped in the blanket and, while considering their value, measured it against
     the value of betraying him to the law. Nevertheless it was with a handful of coins that Tomas rode on towards Limerick town.
     He tied his horse outside an empty cabin with fallen thatch and washed his face with fingertips wetted in a trough. In the
     daylight the town was less than beautiful. A dreary rain fell. In the side streets open sewers ran by broken footpaths and
     fouled the air. Tomas decided at once that their father had been right, the town was not for them, they would go to the sea.
     He hurried on, his feet cold and muddied. Small boys stopped baiting a rat and watched him pass.
    He walked up the town to the place where he had met Blath the night before. But there were only two men worse for porter sitting
     on the street. One of them looked up at him and then grinned with an empty mouth.
    “You’re lookin for ’em?” he gummed. His companion shuddered alive and dropped a loop of bloodied drool in the street.
    “A woman,” Tomas said.
    The first man began a laugh that became a cough. He coughed until his eyes ran.
    “D’ya hear tha?” he said to the other. “A woma.”
    “No no no, you want to see de man,” Gums said. “He’s over dare, forty tee, up tairs on the lep. He pays ya for yer teet, look.”
     The two men opened their mouths at the same moment and showed Tomas Foley their raw, inflamed gums empty of teeth. “Five pence
     the la.” They smiled, as if they had passed on to him some extraordinary felicity.
    “The women will be here tonigh, after dar,” said the drooling man.
    Tomas did not want to wait until darkness. He went directly to the room where he had made love the previous night, but the
     door was locked. He walked up the town and down again, and it was still not past noon. He weighed the coins in his pocket
     and briefly considered whether to buy food or boots. But in the end he did neither. He decided that he would give all the
     money to the woman called Blath because he had told her he would give her everything he had in the world, and she would give
     him back his boots. Then he would rescue her and take her with him back to his brothers and onward to the place where they
     were going to live by the sea. He did not include in the calculations that the rescue of Blath would in some way be the redeeming
     of other losses, too, the empty space that was his mother. But such existed too in the depths of his mind.
    He walked up and down Limerick town. He saw fine coaches arrive and depart. He heard the talking of men in English. He watched
     a river rat run the length of the main street, chased by the small boys. He walked until his bootless feet ached. He walked
     the way a man walks when he is walking to meet a woman who is already lodged in the space before his eyes. Then, when he had
     reached the top of the town for the umpteenth time, had patted his horse, and spoken to it, he sat down and waited for darkness.
    Years later, when life had hardened the last softness of him, when he was living in another country and those days would seem
     to take on a fabled unreality, he would think of that afternoon. It