The Fall of Light

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This is a story that has been passed on. It is a story that begins when my great-great-grandfather was a small boy. It has been told and retold over for a hundred and fifty years. It is not a history. As with all such telling, each has added his own colouring, imagined and created details that were otherwise perished. These same were then forgotten or elaborated upon and others still added until the story itself became a kind of airy bridgework linking the living and the dead, the teller and those of whom it told.

It is the story of a family that is mine. Although its figures have grown outlandish in the telling, and dates and times and places been lost to the inexactitude of memory and invention, I recognize them yet. They are the Foleys. They are the ones that lived in this country long ago.

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.

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