The Promise of Light

by Paul Watkins

  “Good enough.”

  “Well!”

  I knew he was impressed. He only said “well” when he was impressed. And riding across the bay into the burning Jamestown harbor, I’d had some time to think about it. I was beginning to be a little impressed myself.

  “Who were those two men, Dad?”

  “What men?” He walked me away from the restaurant and out toward the fire truck. The other firemen were coiling up the fire hose. The heavy bronze spigot dragged through the sand on its way back to the truck.

  “The two who just drove off in that car toward the Newport ferry.”

  “Two old pals.” He nodded, as if only just remembering. “They wanted to borrow some money and I told them no.”

  “You told them worse than that.”

  “I can’t be expected to keep my temper all the time.” He took off his brass hat and stuffed it on my head. “You’ve got the job. Well done, Benjamin. I knew it wouldn’t take long.”

  “Why did you tell that man not to show his face around here? Would people get mad if they saw him?”

  “Do we have to talk about it? No one wants to see him because he owes too much money. You know how people get when debts haven’t been paid. Now look, you get home and change and have a bath or something. I’ll be around in a bit. There should still be some supper on the table. This damn fire started when I’d just sat down to dinner.”

  “How did it start?”

  “I’ll tell you exactly. It’s that insurance Dillon bought last year. Been driving him round the bend thinking he could get all kinds of money if his ratty busted-up fishhouse burnt down. So he sets the thing burning. But here’s the jam. As soon as he’s got a few drinks in him and sees the flames eating it all up, he remembers the stories of insurance companies not paying if there are suspicious circumstances. So he goes berserk trying to put it out by himself. Throwing slabs of ice into the fire and such.”

  “Did he tell you all that?”

  “No, but I been in this job too long to make mistakes about a thing like that. Go home now, Benjamin. Go home and rest for a while.”

  The fires had stopped on the water. Night crept up close around the pilings of the dock and hid the bay behind it. There was no moon and I couldn’t see the mainland. The only blaze still burning was the one in Dillon’s fishhouse. I thought his tank of diesel fuel must have caught. It would be a while before that burned itself out. The crowds were thinning. People shuffled home, some in their nightclothes and wearing hunting boots. Monahan still stood at his ferry, alone now, but still hopeful that another stray person might appear to congratulate him on his finest hour.

  * * *

  The front door was open.

  My father’s dinner lay cold on a white china plate. It was pork chops and a potato, with some of Mrs. Gifford’s apple jam for sauce. I left the door open and ate the food. It was too early in the year for mosquitoes to come in, and I liked the breeze blowing through.

  After dinner, I pulled a bottle of my father’s Irish whiskey from the mantelpiece. The bottle had a red label and said Dunhams Belfast. My father’s friend Willoughby had brought it back from one of his trips to Ireland. I sat down in his chair with the horsehair stuffing. He had rubbed the leather seat dark and smooth with years of naps and pipe-smoking sit-downs and whiskey-drinking sit-downs with Willoughby and Monahan. From this chair, he would raise his glass whiskey mug into the last beam of sunlight coming through the room. He let the sun wink rainbows through its sides.

  My father and Monahan used to go on and on about how you could taste the peat in Irish whiskey. I would be handed a glass of the honey-colored liquid and told to smell the peat and taste it and let it rest on my tongue. But I had no idea what peat looked like or smelled like or even tasted like on its own. As I washed the whiskey through my mouth, I would try to pull apart the different threads of its fire and let instinct tell me where the peat was hiding.

  I pulled out the cork and took a drink. I swished it through my teeth before I swallowed, feeling it sting along the line of my gums. First there was only the heat, like embers scattered in my blood. But when I stood up to shut the door, the alcohol plowed through me so hard I had to sit back down.

  An explosion echoed across the bay. Another slab of Dillon’s roof must have shot into the sky.

  “So you’d like to make a deposit?” I said to a reflection of my face in the window. “Will that be to your checking account or your savings account? Oh?” I slugged back another mouthful of the Dunhams and sat forward. The whiskey rocked in my skull. “You don’t have a savings account? Well, allow me to explain our policy.” I stopped talking and frowned at myself. It seemed as if the fun had already gone from telling people what to do with their money and I hadn’t even started yet. For a moment, panic fluttered up inside me as I wondered if it might be a mistake to start at the bank. But I had been talking about a job as a banker for over a year now. I had no other plan.

  I thought about my vision of the rails, how they were bolted to the land and raced like slivers of mercury into the future.

  It was the Dunhams doing this to me. Making me think wobbly. I tapped at my chest to settle the fire. I saw myself walking into the bank in my new suit and sitting at a desk with my name on it. I heard the hum of business. The frown stayed on my face, but now it was the frown of responsibility and calm.

  I’d be starting at the bank and that was that. I knocked back some more of the Dunhams.

  Then a face appeared in the window.

  I cried out and stood up. The whiskey went down the wrong way and its burning doubled me over. My eyes teared and I couldn’t see the floor to put the bottle down.

  The door opened and I heard from the swish of cloth that Willoughby had come to visit. He was the island’s Catholic priest and I felt as if I’d spent most of my life trying to avoid him. My father sent for the man whenever it was time for a long talk. Through every spotty-faced clumsy part of my growing up, Willoughby had been there. His arm was always creeping around my shoulder. I hated saying hello to him and I hated saying good-bye. Shaking the man’s hand was like grabbing hold of a glove filled with pudding. I used to squeeze hard sometimes, to see if there were any bones inside at all. I didn’t know why my father sent for Willoughby. Most likely, he didn’t want to be the one who came trampling into my memory whenever I thought back to the times when I put a foot wrong and couldn’t put one right.

  “Hello,” I was trying to say. The tears of coughing rolled down my cheeks.

  Willoughby drifted in front of me. “Ben, you must come with me at once.”

  “I’m waiting for my father to come home.” I jammed the heel of my palm into my eyes to squash out the tears that remained. Then I could focus on the old man.

  “It’s to do with your father. Now you must come at once.” He looked as if he combed his hair with a fork. It stuck up like spikes on a hedgehog.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Willoughby breathed in. The air rasped down his old throat. “I don’t really know, except that there has been an accident and they need you at the hospital.”

  The comfortable rumbling of the Dunhams in my head suddenly stopped. It stopped so quickly that I thought I might fall over. “What kind of accident?”

  He didn’t say. He took hold of my arm and led me out of the house.

  * * *

  It wasn’t really a hospital. Jamestown was too small to have a hospital. Dr. Melville had retired here from Newport three years before and then got bored with growing cucumbers and digging for blue crabs in the mud. So he opened a clinic in the back room of his house. The back room was our hospital.

  We had to run, because Willoughby didn’t have a car. He said they hadn’t been able to find one in time.

  “There’s been an accident,” he kept saying as we ran.

  I wanted to press him for details, but sudden fear had clogged my throat.

  Bosley met me outside Dr. Melville’s house. A crowd had gathered the
re, almost as big as the crowd that had come to watch Dillon’s burn to the ground. The same people who had been shuffling home in their hunting boots and nightshirts now stood peering into Melville’s living room.

  I grew up with Bosley. Years ago, in the time when we met every morning at the Mackerel Cove bridge and shuffled to the one-room schoolhouse with leather satchels on our backs, he and I and Monahan’s son had made a pact to be volunteer firemen and another pact to take turns driving the fire truck. Bosley was the only one who kept the pact, and he grudged me in small ways for not holding my part of the bargain. He even seemed to grudge Monahan’s son for dying over in France.

  Bosley still wore his black fireman’s clothes, too-big boots flopping on the ground as he walked out to meet me. Soot cut through by lines of sweat looked like war paint on his face. He took hold of my elbow and pulled me to one side.

  “What is it, Bos?” The last bee-hive hum of the whiskey left my head. “What’s gone wrong?”

  “Your father went into Dillon’s to cap the diesel tank. He said if we capped it, we could save ourselves the trouble of waiting all night for the diesel to burn off. He walked in and a couple of seconds later, the whole thing went up. It blew him through the wall and landed him right at our feet. Melville says he should be all right. But he’s lost a lot of blood, Benjamin. He’s all banged up to hell.” Now we were deep in the shadows.

  The crowd had watched us go. I knew all of them. There was Mr. Quigley, who once dropped a brown-paper package in the street and it split open and postcards spilled out. On the postcards were pictures of naked women. Postcard Quigley. They damn near ran him out of town because of it. And there beside him was the lady who tried hardest to run him out—Miss Beecham, who taught us at the one-room school and once fell in love with one of her students, a boy named Henry Macintosh. He was only sixteen and he pretended to love her back. I saw them in the street once and it was the only time I ever saw Miss Beecham with her hair down. They made a scandal and then Henry left the island. Miss Beecham seemed to grow old so quickly, it was as if she’d strapped herself into a time machine. People said she played up the stuff with Mr. Quigley’s postcards to give the island something else to talk about besides the sight of her and Henry Macintosh, arm in arm and Miss Beecham’s face all filled with love. And in the dark I saw the face of Mrs. Gifford, who lived across the road from my father. She loved my father and brought him pies. People said they should have married after my mother passed away. At first the idea made me angry, but when my eyes had cleared enough to see how lonely they were by themselves, I saw that the people were right. I didn’t know why they wouldn’t marry. Nobody else did, either, but they all had theories.

  Men and women on the island came to be known by their jobs, or by one or two things that they’d done right or wrong. They knew Monahan as the man who drove his ferry through the hurricane, and my father as the man who stood among the fires and swore at the top of his lungs as the smoke swirled all around him.

  Soon enough, I figured, I’d be known as the banker. And I hoped only as the banker. The less I gave them to talk about, the better.

  I knew all these men and women who had come to watch, but the way they gaped with their eyes as wide and unblinking as fish, made it seem as if they didn’t know me. It made me angry to have them staring. They had crept out of their beds to gawk at the fire and now at my father’s spilled blood. I thought about the blood and felt helpless. I wanted to gather it and get it back inside him, to seal his wounds without trace and for there never to have been any pain. Please, not my father, I thought. Please not him.

  Bosley stopped walking. We both turned and looked back at Melville’s. Willoughby stood on the doorstep, squinting around to see where I had gone. Some of the nightshirt gawkers pointed in my direction. “He’s all banged up and talking funny. He’s not making any sense, Benjamin. I just want you to be prepared for it is all.”

  I could barely see him in the dark. “Thanks, Bos.”

  “I hear you got a job.” He wiped at the dirt on his face.

  “They said they’d give it to me.”

  Bosley laughed; a quiet cough of breath. He didn’t look me in the eye. “I’d been hoping you were coming to work alongside your dad and me.”

  “I thought about it, Bos.” I started walking toward Melville’s house. Already the crowd’s pale faces were turning.

  Bosley walked beside me. “I guess I just thought about it more than anyone else.”

  * * *

  I couldn’t make out any words in the constant mutter of the people who stepped back to let me pass.

  Bosley didn’t come inside. He shoved his way back into the night.

  It was bright in Melville’s clinic. The first thing I heard when I stepped through the doorway was my father’s raging shouts. Not shouting in pain. He was howling in Irish, which I had not heard him speak for many years. The door that separated us was shut. For a moment, I stood in front of it, feeling the stares from behind. I turned and saw them, dozens of wide eyes peeking through the glass.

  Then Willoughby opened the door and pulled me inside.

  I tried to stay calm, but when I saw my father, the shock kicked at my ribs. I did not recognize his face. His forehead was blistered white through the layers of soot. The fire had taken his eyebrows and most of his hair, leaving only a brittle mess of orange crumbs, which fell across the floor as he shook his head from side to side. My father had been tied down onto the clinic table. Bandages were wrapped around his bare arms and legs.

  He kept up the talking in Irish, his voice all spit and croaking, as if he had reached the last words of an argument before it came to blows.

  Melville tried to wrap another bandage around my father’s head, but my father moved so much that Melville gave up. The bandage slipped from his hands and unrolled across the floor. Melville’s head snapped up to look at me. His eyes were gray like a sled dog’s. “We need you to give us some blood.”

  * * *

  I took off my shirt.

  Melville went to his closet and pulled out a tube with a needle at each end. He also removed the biggest syringe I had ever seen. While he was uncoiling the tube, he shouted up at the ceiling for his daughter. It was going to be a direct transfusion, so I had to be in a higher place than my father. Melville cleared off his marble counter top. He moved quickly but with such care that each glass jar of tongue depressors and cotton balls made no sound as he set them down at the far end of the counter.

  “I thought I was coming here to read him his last rites.” Willoughby’s hands fluttered in front of him. “When they called me…”

  “Last rites?” My father’s voice boomed through the house. “You keep back from him with your last rites. You let the poor man die in peace. And you leave me out of this. When Hagan went away, I didn’t hear any prayers for him, did I? And for his wife? We had to fight even to get her buried in the churchyard. You leave my son out of this!”

  The marble counter was cloudy white with threads of gray woven into the stone. It seemed to grab at the bare skin of my back as I lay down.

  “Keep away!” my father shouted. Then suddenly the belt that had pinned him gave way. The leather tore and flew off to the sides. He sat up and held his hands out in front of him. His palms were burned so badly that the skin had started to peel away.

  It was seeing his hands that made me realize how badly he was hurt.

  Slowly, my father lowered his outstretched arms. “Keep him out of this,” he said. His voice was no more than a whisper.

  Peg came running downstairs. She skidded into the room. She had arrived with such speed that I knew she must have been listening for his call, maybe with her ear pressed to the floorboards, hearing every muttered word.

  I couldn’t help staring at the blackness of her hair. Although it had been years, people still thought of her and her parents as strangers to the island. I did, as well. To me, Peg seemed to come from much farther away than Newport, although the isla
nd of Jamestown was separated from Newport by more than just the distance of the bay.

  The chromium shine of the syringe blinked at me.

  Melville tied a cord around my bicep. Soon the veins on my arm stood out, green-blue and crisscrossing. Then he poured ether onto a cotton pad and stepped behind my father.

  My father’s talking had died down. He was still sitting up, head bowed forward. His fingers twitched, as if he was trying to remember a tune on the piano.

  Melville set his hand on my father’s forehead and with his other hand, he held the pad against my father’s face.

  A shudder rocked down the length of my father’s spine. The ether flooded through him like a tide.

  Melville lowered him down onto the leather-covered pillow built into the table. Then he wheeled the table over to where I was lying.

  I could smell the ether. It was sweet and peppery.

  My father looked dead. I couldn’t see him breathing.

  Peg walked over to me and I tried to sit up, but she held out her hand and made me lie still. “Do you want me to cover your eyes, Benjamin?”

  For a second, calm settled on me as I heard the softness in her voice. I didn’t have time to answer. I wished we could be any place but this.

  “Cover his eyes.” Melville talked as he wiped alcohol on both needle ends of the tube. “He needs at least two pints of blood within the next twenty-four hours. One will do for now. Father Willoughby offered to donate, but we don’t have time to do the tests to see if his blood type is right. If we give him the wrong kind of blood, we’d kill him in no time at all. So we’ll be using yours for now, Benjamin. That way we’ll be sure. Tomorrow, he’ll be taken to the Naval hospital in Newport. They’ve already got a bed ready for him. He can’t be moved now.”

  Peg’s hands passed in front of my eyes and made me blind.

  I felt the slap of Melville’s fingers bouncing off my veins. Then came the pinch as the needle slid under my skin.

  I could feel the blood being taken. It was as if Melville had hooked his finger under the vein and was tugging it out of my arm. “He’ll be all right, won’t he?” I said through Peg’s fingers. Through the cracks between them, all I could see was the brightness of the bulb on the ceiling.