by Paul Watkins
“He is stable for now. Burns take a long time to heal and he’s mangled his arm pretty badly. Parts of that diesel tank hit him like shrapnel.” Melville’s voice was toneless as he concentrated on drawing the blood.
It was quiet for a while. The others in the room had seen my blood and it extinguished their voices. The faint tugging at my veins continued. I knew that by now, they would have fitted the other end of the tube into one of my father’s arteries and that my blood would be flowing into his. I thought of it mingling, reaching his heart and charging away into the caverns of his body. I wondered if somehow my thoughts might travel with it. Maybe I could talk to him through my blood. Perhaps, now, memories that belonged to me would flicker to life in his head. Perhaps even the Dunhams would reach him, speckled in the heavy red flood from my arm. What did my father say the whiskey did? Takes out the fire but leaves in the warmth.
The needle slid out of me and Melville folded my arm back. “Keep that there.”
Peg’s hand moved away. She helped me to my feet.
I kept my arm folded. Blood found its way out and dripped from my elbow.
The other end of the tube was still in my father’s arm. The tube remained filled with blood and there was more blood on the floor. The syringe lay on the counter, by my feet. A fat drop of blood hung from the end of the needle. Melville had used it to start the flow into my father’s arm.
Melville removed the tube from my father, and then lifted the two needle ends, so that the blood in the tube didn’t pour out on the floor. “You should go home now, Ben.”
“I ought to stay here, don’t you think?” Dizziness swirled at the back of my head. “Jesus, is he going to be all right?”
“There’s nothing for you to do but rest.” Willoughby’s hands settled on my shoulders. “You save your strength for the morning.”
“Goodnight, Benjamin.” Peg was leaving the room.
I wanted to tell her to stay. As Willoughby guided me out of the room, I saw my father lying on the table, legs still strapped down. The bandage had covered his eyes and wound once under his chin. It looked as if Melville had been trying to embalm him.
I wished I could take some of the pain for him. It would get worse before it got better. He had told me himself about burns. The healing took months and all of it was pain. He could fend off the shrieking of his raw nerves with anger and shouting, but he didn’t have the strength to hold it back for long. Nobody did.
The crowd had gone. All that remained of them were footprints in Melville’s flower bed, his early summer flowers stamped into the mud.
CHAPTER 2
The sweat of a nightmare was still on my face.
I opened my bedroom window and stared out at the darkness. Flowers showed like chips of bone among the honeysuckle bushes.
I had been expecting nightmares, but not this soon. A few days lag-time before the images caught up with me, of seeing my father’s flesh peel off his bones. I knew it wouldn’t be long until grotesque mirror images of him and myself came stumping like cripples into my dreams, badly acting out what hurt me most.
But the nightmare that came charging down the alleys of my sleep was not from the present. This dream had followed me through childhood and I’d thought it had long ago been put away for good.
For more than two decades, the pictures had rested harmless and forgotten in some wrinkle of my brain. I could not believe how clearly it had burst from cover and spread like wings behind my eyes.
* * *
My mother once told me about a famous knight in Ireland. This knight had spent his life saving the kingdom from invaders. When he saw that his work was done, he took fifty of his best men, all of them strapped into armor plated with gold, and he led them to a mountain cave that overlooked the kingdom.
He made them all lie down, and one by one he sprinkled sleeping dust into their eyes. They fell into the deepest, calmest dreams.
Then the knight hung a bell from the roof of the cave. He sealed off the cave’s entrance with a boulder and lay down like the others. If the kingdom was ever in danger again, the bell would ring and wake them. Until then, they would sleep, safe in the promise that one day they would return into the light.
Nobody knew where the cave was. No one would ever find it.
* * *
One night after she had told me the story, I surfaced from the black of my sleep into the strange light of my dreams and found myself inside the cave. An oil lamp was burning on a shelf dug into the rock, as if I’d been expected. I saw the knights stretched out on the dusty ground. The lamp bounced light off their gold armor. Their faces were calm. I heard the creak of the armor’s leather bindings as the knights breathed deeply.
I could find no way out of the cave. A boulder blocked the entrance and a bell hung from the ceiling.
I was only there for a moment. Then I sank back down into the river of my sleep and woke with the dream still clear in my head.
This was not the nightmare. That came a few days later, when I returned to the cave.
This time, no light was burning. I stood in the India-ink darkness and heard only the breathing of the knights. I was afraid to move, in case I stumbled into the bell and woke the knights. I knew they would kill me before I had a chance to explain. I could feel their breath around me. The shine of their gold had been extinguished in the black. I waited for the dream to end, to fall away, and for me to wake up in my bed. But the dream wouldn’t end and panic was closing around me.
When I did wake up, I found myself smothered in blankets and unable to move. For a while, I couldn’t breathe or even open my eyes.
In this same nightmare that returned and returned, I visited the place where the knights lay sleeping. I had time to think about what would happen if the bell suddenly rang. The boulder would roll aside. The knights would wake and the dust would fall from their shields. They would all charge out into the blaze of green that my mother had told me was Ireland.
I had a sense that if I went with them, I could never return to my family and friends. But if the bell rang, I would go. I knew it like an instinct.
* * *
My father had laughed when he heard about the dream. “Wasn’t that King Arthur? He wasn’t Irish? Well, was he?”
Willoughby was there. He leaned forward through cobras of smoke that rose from his pipe. “Of course he was Irish. In his heart, he was. And they say the same legend goes for Finn MacCool. Don’t you listen to your father, Ben. You’d better believe that it’s true.”
Then my father leaned back and his chair’s horsehair stuffing rustled. “Well, I say that bell’s been ringing nonstop for five hundred years, and those knights have got so old they’re deaf as posts.”
“They don’t grow old,” I told them.
Then Willoughby nodded, “And the bell hasn’t rung yet, for sure.”
In time, the dream faded. The fear it brought grew stale. But the nightmare stayed like a pool of deep water in my memory, that I sidestepped whenever it came close.
Thoughts of my mother and her stories kept me from falling back asleep, so I climbed up to the attic, stepping along the cross beams. I knew what I was looking for.
My father kept a box of things that used to belong to my mother, whose name was Mae. He couldn’t bear to throw them away.
It had been a long time since I’d dreamed the dream of the knights in the cave and a long time since I’d thought of my mother. I wanted to find the box and go through it, to see what memories of her it jolted to the surface of my mind.
I knew what the box contained. I could tell the story of every item. There was a scarf that still smelled of her. It was this scarf that killed her. She had just bought it and got it wet in the rain as she walked home from the shops. Halfway home, she bundled the scarf in a ball and held it between her chest and her raincoat. The damp scarf chilled her, and two days later she came down with pneumonia. She didn’t last long after that. I wondered why my father kept it. There was a pair of shoes,
worn so you could see how she had walked on the inside of her heel. I had once seen my father take these shoes off my mother’s feet. He set them softly on the floor and then gently squeezed her feet with his big hands. He kneaded them and made her close her eyes, as the pain-shut nerves hummed back to life. There was an umbrella with black lace at the edges and clothespins she had painted red so as not to lose them in the grass. The clothespins made me think of years before, and of playing hide-and-seek with her among the sheets hung out to dry.
For my father, these were the keys that broke open pictures of my mother and made him love her again as if she were alive. Of all the things I’d helped him carry out to the dump after she died, each one a key of its own, I wondered why he kept the glossy red clothespins, and the scarf with her perfume distant and wound into the threads.
I found the box and took out the clothespins and clipped them one by one onto each of my fingers, the way I had done years before.
It didn’t help much to see these old things. I could no longer remember much about my mother. I had lost the pitch of her voice and the tone of her skin and I knew her eyes had been brown but not which of the dozens of shadings of that color. Everything I had taken for granted, I lost.
So I shoved the box back into the dark and began to rummage through trunks and stacks of books.
I dug through the pockets of my father’s old oilskin fireman’s coat, but found only sand and the crumbs of stale tobacco. Then I put on the coat. It was worn through at the elbows and the brown corduroy collar.
I found his bamboo fly-fishing rod that he only used once, one late September near a town called Roscoe in the Catskill mountains, but he talked about the time as if he’d been going there for years. It began to rain. Drops trampled the tiles close to my head.
I opened a book and a scrap of paper fell out. It was a flyer for a meeting of the Boston Chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians in October of 1917.
Suddenly I remembered standing in front of my father and holding out the leaflet. It had arrived in the mail that day.
I was in his bad books then. My friend Bosley had borrowed his father’s service revolver and the two of us went into the woods to shoot it. We carried a stack of old pie tins, set them up and shot them from twenty-five paces away. The pans made a smacking sound as they were hit, and spun away into the trees. Bosley got himself a whipping for taking the gun without permission, and I was in trouble now, too. It was the first time we’d been caught, but not the first time we’d used the gun. Over the dozen times when we had taken the gun into the woods, we had taught ourselves to shoot and we were good at it now. The pie tins were so full of holes they looked like cheese-graters.
My father had just come back from putting out a fire. A dairy farm had burned on the north end of the island. When the fire truck ran out of water, they threw buckets of milk on the flames. He sat in his chair, still wearing his fireman’s clothes, boots splashed white from the milk and starting to smell sour.
I tried to make conversation, to break through his sulking and silence that I’d been out shooting pie tins. He had yelled at me that there was no place here for guns. He yelled until he was hoarse and then he shut up for a few days.
He took the leaflet that I held out to him, read it and then wedged it into his book as a marker.
“Are you going?” I asked him. Talk to me, old man, I was thinking. Enough of this grizzly quiet.
“No. I got nothing to say to them up in Boston.” He pulled the suede tobacco bag from around his neck and undid the mother-of-pearl button that held the bag shut. From a pocket, he took his pipe, and with one finger scraped shreds of mahogany tobacco into the bowl. “The Boston boys talk too much and when it comes time to do more than talk, they do nothing.”
I set the flyer back inside the book. The rain was coming down hard now. In the gloomy corners of the attic, I heard droplets plipping on the old trunks and boxes, having found their way under the slate.
As I walked downstairs, seeing the wind-blown rain run silver on the windows, I tried to think about what possessions would one day fill a box of someone’s memories of me.
* * *
I sat in the leather-backed chair and watched the sun come up bloody through the trees.
Once I fell asleep and for a few seconds when I woke, startled by the wailing of a seagull overhead, I felt only the happiness of finding a new job. There were the shining rails again, and I was on them now, on the path I would follow through life.
Suddenly I remembered my father. A heaviness settled back onto my shoulders. It was knowing the pain he was in, and being helpless to prevent it.
I walked into the kitchen and cranked the handle at the side of the telephone. I held the dull black earphone to my ear. There was a space rubbed dirty on the wall from leaning there as my father or I spoke into the phone. Not many people on the island had telephones, but we did because of my father being the fire chief.
Hettie snapped onto the line. She had just started as operator for the Jamestown circuits. I heard she had already electrocuted herself twice. “Ho?” Her mouth was full of something. “Hu oh? Yes?”
“Hello, Hettie. This is Benjamin Sheridan. I wonder if you could put me in touch with…”
“The hospital. Of course.”
“I guess everybody knows, then.”
“Well, I should say so.” She crunched at what sounded like a piece of toast.
“How are you, Hett?”
“Fine.”
I waited for more, but she had nothing else to say. Hett and I used to be friends. There was a time when she thought we were more than friends. But I wasn’t thinking that way, and we began the slow drifting apart that I’d already begun from Bosley and the others after I went away to university. Now when I returned to Jamestown they treated me like a tourist. The beaches and the cliffs that had belonged to all of us, only belonged to them. The truth was that they weren’t leaving the island, not now and not ever, so they grudged me my escape and would no longer share what they had.
I heard the burble of the phone ringing at Melville’s.
“Go ahead.” Hettie’s voice was brittle.
“Hello? Dr. Melville’s. Hello?” This voice wasn’t brittle. It was Peg’s voice and it flooded my head. She always answered the phone. I thought that if it was possible to fall in love with someone only by hearing them speak, it would be a voice like hers.
“Hello, Peg.” I watched my breath condense on the telephone’s mouthpiece. “This is Benjamin Sheridan and I’m calling to see how my father is doing.”
She told me to hold on.
I wondered if Hettie was listening, hiding someplace in the rush of static on the lines. “Hettie,” I whispered into the breaking waves of telephone silence. “Hettie, are you there?”
“Mr. Sheridan, this is Dr. Melville.”
Then I knew something was wrong. He didn’t call me Benjamin.
“Hello, Dr. Melville. I was calling to speak with my dad. How’s he doing today?” I narrowed my eyes, waiting for the word. I felt the worry at the base of my throat, clumped behind my Adam’s apple. It sparked along the notches of my spine.
“Are you adopted, Benjamin?”
“Of course not. You know that.” I leaned against the worn patch on the wall.
“I have no idea what happened.” He sighed and the sigh roared in my ear. “That’s not exactly true. I do know what happened, but I don’t understand … Again, that’s not quite true…”
Someone took the phone away from him. Then Willoughby’s gravelly voice popped onto the line. “Benjamin, your father passed away last night, about three hours after the blood transfusion. He went into some kind of arrest, as Melville here has been calling it. Are you there, Benjamin? Can you hear me? Blast everything, has this line gone dead again?”
Suddenly I felt as if I was breathing the smoke of Dillon’s fishhouse as it tumbled into ashes and shoved back the crowd with its heat.
“The line’s gone dead.�
� Willoughby clicked his tongue.
“No.” The air was thin and didn’t feed my blood. Smoke seemed to barrel out at me from the telephone’s mouthpiece, jamming my windpipe with soot.
“Benjamin, I’m coming right over. There’s something that needs to be explained.”
“What needs explaining? Stand where you are and explain it.” I thought of my father tumbling far into the past, still in his fireman’s clothes, cartwheeling away into the dark. Already time had raced ahead and was covering him up.
“Dr. Melville is saying that … now let me get this right…”
Again the phone was snatched away and I found myself listening to Melville again. “He went into arrest after the blood transfusion. It was the wrong kind of blood. You put the wrong blood into someone and you might as well be feeding them poison. What I’m trying to say is that your blood should not have had any bad effects on him. That is to say, I know your father’s bloodtype, and I even have your mother’s type on file. And those two types together could not have produced your type. Based on all that we know in the medical world.…”
“Oh, get on with it, Melville!” Willoughby shouted in the background. “Just tell him what you told me.”
“I don’t think he was your natural father, Benjamin. I know this must sound absurd.”
“Revive him!” I shouted.
“I can’t, Ben.”
“Revive him!” I didn’t even know for sure if it was me shouting.
“He’s dead, Ben. You must understand.”
“Revive!” The word burst from my mouth like a command to my father himself.
“If there was any possible way, Ben. But there isn’t. Do you see?”
Finally, a flicker of understanding passed like a shadow through my mind. But for now, it was only a flicker.
Melville’s words beaded up along the miles of telephone wire and fell like sand into my ears. I found myself thinking about Peg, how her hair was so black it sometimes shone blue in the sunlight. The normal running of my thoughts had not been interrupted. I wondered when I’d get the call from the First Bank of Wickford and I wondered if Hettie was still listening. “I’ll be there in a minute,” I said. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. “I’m giving you more blood and I want you to test it again. I want to see the test. I want you to be wrong.” All the moisture had drained out of my body. I felt it in my dried-out eyes and in each crossed thread of my skin. I knew that if I clenched my fist, the knuckles would crack open and bleed.
