The Promise of Light

by Paul Watkins

  “Your father lived a long and healthy life, Benjamin.”

  “No, he didn’t, you damn liar. Excuse me Melville, but you’re a damn liar about that.” I would apologize later. But for now he was a liar and we both knew it and Peg knew it and Hettie hiding out there in the raining static knew. The fire had cheated my father out of decades and there was no denying it.

  * * *

  His hand was like a river stone. Its cold bled into my palms and my fingers, not just a chill but deep, glacier-water cold.

  They had pulled a white sheet over his head. It covered his whole body. But his arm had swung loose just as I walked in the door. Willoughby lifted the arm and put it resting on my father’s chest.

  I walked straight over to his hand and held it between my palms. It wasn’t just cold on the surface, but cold all the way through. It gave out cold and chilled the blood in my palms. His scars were still raw pink and bubbled white. The pain was still in them, still raking at his nerves.

  I didn’t need to see his face. On my way past the smoke of Dillon’s and the tiny flood of Dillon’s melted ice, running in trickles from his ice shed, I had told myself that I had to see his face. From his face, I would know for myself if he was dead. It didn’t matter what they told me on the phone. I didn’t trust anyone then. I was ready to call them all liars until I saw his face. But now that I had touched his hand, I didn’t need to see the face. Didn’t want to. If the pain had marked itself on his eyes and his mouth the way it had done on his hands, I would never be able to get it out of my head. It would be fuel for nightmares for the next thirty years. So I let the blanket rest where they had put it, and I didn’t call them liars, but still I couldn’t look them in the eye.

  “There’s no need to draw any blood.” Melville had his test tubes ready. There were three tubes, each half-filled with blood. “This is your blood, this is your father’s and this is mine.”

  “Take some out of me now.” I rolled up my sleeve and held out my arm, fist clenched and the veins already bulging to the surface. I didn’t care about his test. I wanted them to take my blood and channel it into my father’s veins. It would warm him, I thought, and bring him back to life. I wanted to pound on my father’s chest and start his heart beating again. I’d beat on him until his ribs began to crack.

  Melville took my blood. He did his test and said it was proof.

  I felt my father’s hand again. River stone.

  People were talking at me, but I could not hear what they said.

  Willoughby had on his purple sash. He was saying prayers over my father.

  “Beat on his chest.” I sat in a chair in the corner, hands clamped onto my knees, as if I meant to prise off my kneecaps.

  “Eh?” Melville was filling out a form on the marble counter top. The nib of his pen scraped on the paper.

  “Hit him in the chest and start his heart again.”

  “It’s too late for that, Benjamin.”

  “Well, did you do it when it wasn’t too late? Did you try at least?”

  Willoughby’s muttering prayer was like an insect buzzing in the room. He kept his eyes closed as he prayed.

  Melville put the cap carefully back on his pen. He walked across to me. “I can assure you that correct procedure was followed at all times. If I had known you weren’t related to your father, I would never have made a direct transfusion. You have to believe that. But I checked your records and your father’s and your mother’s, and in all of them it is indicated that you are their natural son.”

  I stood up to go. “Are you saying that my mother slept with another man?”

  Melville sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “No, I’m not. But I can’t rule that out. It looks to me as if you were adopted. Somebody has lied to you, Benjamin, and maybe they had a good reason. Whatever it was, we might never know, but the lie cost your father his life.”

  * * *

  I walked through the house with nothing to see by but moonlight. I didn’t know where the day went. It seemed to me I had slept through most of it. The times I woke, I couldn’t stand the daylight in my room. I pulled curtains across the windows and lay with my arm crooked across my eyes.

  It was the sense of movement that I couldn’t stand. Time grinding forward. News of the death crackling through the streets like some electrical current. The more time ground forward, the more I lost sight of him. In my sleep, I watched him falling away, the same as I’d seen him before. He grew fainter and fainter and the last fool hopes of feeding him my blood and punching his heart back to life began to disappear. I could feel the cold that had settled in his body, as if the blood I’d given him could send back messages of the stillness in his veins.

  Not my father and mother. Suddenly they were like strangers. Her death had come too soon for me to know her. And now, with him gone, I felt his life distilling down to a staggering of half-completed motions and words. It seemed to me then that soon he would have shrunk in my mind to a single picture—perhaps the raising of his whiskey glass toward the sun and all the honey-tinted rainbows that would spread around the room.

  I knew what Melville had told me, but I couldn’t make sense of it, as if he’d spoken in a different language. I tried to shove the news far away into a distant corner of my head, but it dragged itself back into the light.

  For a while, I forced myself not to cry. It kept him somehow closer to life to clamp my jaw shut and stare at the ceiling until my eyes were painfully dry. I held it back with anger at his vanishing, the same way he had raged against his pain. But as pictures of him grouped in my skull, massing in ranks and charging, I could not hold back the sadness. His face that shimmered in front of me was kind but helpless, and it was this feeling of not being able to help him that snapped the last threads of my strength and blinded me with warm and salty tears. Grief prised open my mouth and leaned into my chest, so that the sounds of my crying leaked out. I had cried more easily for things far less important, but in my lock-jawed silence I had hoped to keep him anchored to the world.

  When my eyes finally cleared, and the barbell weight had lifted from my ribs, I knew he was gone. I could feel only the calm emptiness that he had left behind, not shrieking in pain and ugly with wounds.

  He was leaving me now. He was saying good-bye. His brave and smiling face rippled and scattered like a reflection stirred up in a flat-calm pond. When the calmness returned he was gone.

  I heard people knocking on the door downstairs. Once I even heard someone come in quietly and leave and, a while later, a smell of apple pie drifted up the stairs.

  Not my parents. Each path of my thinking broke down suddenly into the echo of Melville’s toneless voice. If this kept up, I knew it would drive me mad. Even as dreams slumped down on top of me, the voice still marched on my brain.

  When I woke, the sun had grown paler and fallen through the trees. I was hungry, so I went downstairs to find the pie. It was good and Hettie had made it. I knew it was hers because of the shape of the crust, which was latticed in strips like the pulled-apart threads of a blanket. She was the only one I knew who made lattice crusts. Mrs. Gifford from across the road made thick crusts on her pies like roofs on sturdy houses.

  I sat at the kitchen table and ate with my fingers, drinking cold milk from the bottle. Pie tastes better in the dark.

  Not my father. Each time my eyes came to rest on a corner of a room or a piece of furniture, a picture of him would spark into view like struck flint. Already this house was haunted.

  I heard footsteps outside.

  I knew from the walk, that it was Willoughby. I sat down in the horsehair-stuffed chair, put my hands on the sweat-polished arms, and waited.

  Willoughby walked in without knocking. He stood for a moment on the doorstep, then saw me in the chair and gasped. “Oh, Benjamin. You gave me a shock.”

  “I’m just sitting here.” I felt like a troll, crouched in the shadows and waiting.

  He stepped into the room and closed the door. “I’m su
re he really was your father.”

  There it was again. The babble of a foreign language.

  “Melville’s just made a mistake. And that’s the way we should leave it. There’s no good in dredging up the past.”

  “Do you think I’m just going to shove this aside? We’re not talking about some rumor. I gave my father a transfusion of blood and it killed him.” I kept my hands locked tight on the arms of the chair, as if the room would fall out from beneath me and leave me drifting in space. “Was he my father or wasn’t he? And how about my mother? Who the hell was she?”

  Willoughby’s hand shrank away. “I don’t know. That’s God’s truth. I don’t. I came over from Cork and that’s a long way south of where Arthur lived. I didn’t know him until I came to America.”

  “He’s my father until someone proves to me that he’s not.” I said it, but the words were hollow in my mouth. I would still call the man my father, but it was because I had no other name to give. An earthquake had come to my vision of the smooth, shining rails and their clear path into the future. The land beneath them had been cracked and blown away. I no longer saw myself moving steadily forward. Instead, I began hurtling into the past, chasing the last fading trace of the dead man. I ransacked the warehouse of my memory, looking for a sign that would have told me of this sooner. But there was nothing.

  “Right you are, Benjamin. I’m not believing any chemistry of Melville’s.” Willoughby pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket. “Does this mean anything to you?”

  THE GREY DOG IS FOLLOWING ME. It was Willoughby’s writing. I handed back the paper. “Should it mean anything?”

  Willoughby sat down in a rocking chair by the fireplace. “He said that to me before he died. I thought it might hold something for you.”

  “I don’t know any grey dogs.” The room had dissolved around me. I felt myself shunted back and forth in my chair by vicious poltergeists.

  Willoughby smoothed his brown-spotted hands across his face. “He said a number of things before he passed away. He asked to be cremated.”

  “If that’s what he wanted.” Every damn place my eyes settled in the room, there stood the dead man, locked in some action from the past.

  “You don’t quite understand. The Catholic church does not cremate people. Your father must have known that. He was raving.”

  “But that is what he asked for?”

  “Well, yes.” Willoughby took off his collar. It was held to his shirt by two gold studs. He set it down and it lay like a white sickle blade on his knee. “This is a very difficult request, Benjamin. It would never be allowed if we went through the proper channels.”

  I pictured his ashes as the fine grey dust of burnt pine. I held my breath even against the imagining of the smell. “He should have what he wanted.”

  Willoughby stood up suddenly. “You idiot! Do you see the spot you’ve put me in?”

  I blinked at him. My mouth fell open a little. He had never shouted at me before. But then I realized he wasn’t yelling at me. He was yelling at my father, whose face still seemed to drift in front of Willoughby’s old eyes.

  “I can’t allow it!” He raked his nails across the bare wood of the table. “And still I must allow it. This will have to be kept very quiet. Isn’t that right, Ben?”

  I nodded, wondering where my father was now. I felt him to be close. It seemed to me I could even hear the faintest rustle of breathing, a sound that did not come from Willoughby or me. I did not understand why he had asked to be burned, after all his life of dousing other fires.

  “He also asked that you carry his ashes back to Ireland and scatter them near the town where he used to live. He was quite specific about the place. He wants his ashes scattered on the beach at the town of Lahinch.”

  I let the words sink in. Then I raised my voice. “But that doesn’t make any sense! He hardly ever spoke of the place.” There seemed to be some hidden reason in his asking to be cremated that maybe someday would come clear to me. But Ireland? I thought he had long ago shrugged off the place and everything that went with it.

  “He didn’t speak of it to you, perhaps. But you see, Benjamin, it was where he grew up. It was a kind of holy ground. He didn’t need to speak of it, and least of all to you. Of all the things he said and did that make no sense to me, that much I do understand.”

  I had thought this island was his holy ground, the same as it was for me. I believed it was a thing that joined us across the crevasse of years and misunderstanding. The further I had gone away from Jamestown, the more I found myself returning to it in my mind. My heart beat smoothly here. I felt the rising and falling of the tides in the roar of blood through my body. I had some strange communion with the ghosts of Conanicut Indians, who had lived here and slid without sound across the bay in their white birchbark canoes. And no matter how much Bosley and Hettie treated me like a tourist for going away, I knew and they knew that I was not one. A part of me was anchored here and they could not dislodge it.

  Now I realized that I had not spoken of this to him, or to anyone at all. This knowledge of a holy ground could not easily be gathered into words, and even to try was somehow to devalue it.

  Even in his pain, he had not been raving. I understood what he wanted. Now I would bring him to the place where his heart had once beat smoothly, because I knew that if anyone could tell me the truth about who he was and who I was, it would be there in that place. I could not go forward until I knew one way or the other. There would be no peace. It could not be swallowed and forgotten. If the people I had called father and mother all my life were not my blood, I had to know why it stayed buried like my nightmares until now.

  I walked to the window and looked out into the garden.

  My father stood in the moonlight, arms spread wide and his mouth open ready to scream.

  I cried out and stepped back.

  “What is it?” Willoughby rushed to the window. “What?”

  I looked again. It was a scarecrow in the vegetable patch, with a wretched sackcloth face. Floppy-gloved hands stretched palm up, as if waiting for rain. It was my father’s coat. My father’s hat wedged onto its straw head. I had forgotten about the scarecrow. It had only just been dragged from its winter place, propped up against the lawnmower in the garage.

  I stared at the scarecrow. “The only way I’m going to settle this is by going to Ireland. I was born there, you know. A month before my parents left the country.”

  “I know that.” Willoughby’s hand settled like a bird on my shoulder. “But what would you do when you got to Ireland? Who would you talk to?”

  “There must be town records. There’d be people who remembered my parents.”

  “There’s a war on over there.” Willoughby scratched at the back of his neck. “It costs more than you have to get passage on a ship.”

  “I’m selling the house.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud!” Willoughby stamped away back to his chair.

  “I don’t want to live under this roof anymore.” I knew that if I came back some day to live on the island, I’d choose the other side or maybe live out toward the cliffs. But I wouldn’t come back here. This was his house and it would never be mine. From now on, the murmurs of voices and pictures and smells would keep me from feeling at ease. It wouldn’t help to clear out the furniture and repaint the walls, the way some people did when they inherited a place. Then the furniture itself would turn to ghosts.

  “You’ll be murdered if you go to Ireland.” Willoughby began to rock in his chair. He stared straight in front of him. “I’m saying to you there’s a war on.”

  “What are you not telling me?” I paced slowly toward him. “What do you know?”

  “Nothing that could help you.” He started to put on his collar. Years of wearing it had left a permanent crease in his neck, as if he’d been hanged but survived.

  “Let me decide that.”

  “I believe,”—he cut the air with the knife-edge of his palm—“I believe he w
as active in trying to get the British out. I don’t know how active. I only heard some stories and I’m sure they can’t be true.”

  “What are they?”

  “If he didn’t tell you, then he didn’t want you to know.”

  “Tell me!” My shout punched off the walls and left behind a shuddering silence.

  “I heard he spent some time in prison.” Willoughby got up from his rocker and walked into the kitchen. His fingers scraped in the pie tin as he gathered together some crumbs. “You should leave well enough alone.”

  “What did he mean about the grey dog?”

  The scraping stopped in the kitchen. “There’s something in my memory that speaks of a grey dog. Some awful godless thing.”

  “It doesn’t matter, then.” I could hear the old man’s raspy breathing.

  “Perhaps not, but the thought of being followed by a grey dog at the hour of my death does something to me in my bones.”

  The scarecrow’s gloved fingers twitched in the wind. It was as if the last spark of my father’s life still rested somewhere in the widespread arms, ready to strike out at crows when they dropped squawking from the trees.

  CHAPTER 3

  A man with pale-blue eyes stood on the doorstep. He was wearing a Panama hat.

  “Hello, Thurkettle. What can I do for you?” After Willoughby left, I had fallen asleep with my head on the table. Now the wood grain was printed on my cheek.

  Thurkettle tried to smile, but only bared his teeth. He worked for the Maxwell family. Harley Maxwell, the family’s only son, was my friend at university. Thurkettle wasn’t their butler or chauffeur or gardener, but at one time or another I had seen him being all these things. The Maxwells spent their summers in Newport, just across the bay.