The Promise of Light

by Paul Watkins

  When they had gone up to the house, Harley went back to patting his pockets. “Matches?”

  I shook my head. “Is there anyone who doesn’t know I proposed to your sister last year?”

  “Hell, I doubt it. She told just about everyone. My kingdom for a light.” Then he took out the cigarette and threw it away. “Why did you say your dad isn’t the fire chief when he is?”

  “Because he’s not anymore. And besides, I know what it means to these people to have a father who’s a fire chief. It means nothing at all, and they’d just laugh about it. I’m tired of giving these people things to laugh about. And there’s another thing, Harley…”

  “You can’t just abandon your family!” Harley’s forehead crumpled. You can’t deny who they are. I mean, look at me. I know I was a walking goddamn farce at university. I couldn’t have just shrugged off being the son of Albert Maxwell. People would have said I was a fraud. So I went the other way.” He stood up and spread his arms at the house. “I fucking went and wallowed in it!”

  For a second, I saw him again in the smoke-foggy air of a university club called Rudolph’s. It was his birthday. He stood at the head of a table, drinking champagne from a trophy cup while the rest of us pounded on the table with our fists. The tables were deep carved with names, and when the wood became so hacked that the tables could no longer be used, they hung them from the walls instead. Harley kept drinking. Champagne dripped from his chin. Fists kept up the drumbeat until his cup was empty.

  Harley’s arms were still spread. People on the terrace thought he was waving to them and waved back. “You can all go to hell,” he told them in a voice they couldn’t hear. “That’s right. Straight to hell.”

  “The obituary didn’t say how my father died, did it?”

  “It said he died in a fire.”

  “He died when the doctor gave him a transfusion of my blood. It poisoned him. This means it’s almost impossible that he was actually my father.”

  Harley scratched at his chin. “So your mother was a naughty girl.”

  “The doctor said he couldn’t be sure. He said it was his guess because of the blood types that I was adopted. It means that my real father is probably still over in Ireland. Maybe my mother, too.” I put my hands in my pockets and looked up at the cloudless blue. “The priest on Jamestown said I should just forget about it, but I’ve alrady made up my mind to go to Ireland and find out.”

  “You’ll get no peace until you do know. I can tell you that much just on instinct. You can’t leave your blood. It’s one thing to be adopted, and maybe you were. But not to know. Who could stand that? Your blood is running through somebody’s veins over in Ireland. If you try hiding that, either to others or to yourself, you’ll drive yourself mad before long. Even if the truth is bad, at least it’s there. I’d rather know that my father made his money selling useless guns that blew up in the soldiers’ faces and in my mother’s face than know nothing at all.”

  “I’ve always thought that must be hard to live with.”

  “It is. But it’s given me a purpose in life. It’s not even the guns that bother me so much. It’s that when my father was called up for duty in the Civil War, he did what was legal at the time and paid a man three hundred dollars to take his place. I remember him saying that at the end of the war the man came back to my father and asked for another three hundred dollars. My father told him that wasn’t in the contract and to leave before he called the police. I remember he said ‘Why should I pay you twice what we agreed?’ The man said ‘Because I was at Antietam.’ ‘So?’ my father yelled. And the man kept talking. ‘Because on that day the entire regiment that you were supposed to be in were running in a fixed-bayonet charge through a cornfield at the Confederate lines. None of us could see anything but cornstalks. Then suddenly we were out of the corn and in front of us were hundreds and hundreds of Rebel men in their butternut-colored clothes. They all had their guns raised and ready to fire. There were cannons too,’ the man said, ‘and then those men in butternut were gone all of a sudden behind smoke and the noise made me deaf and the regiment, your regiment, Mr. Maxwell, didn’t exist anymore.’ My father said to him, ‘I’m not paying you a damn thing.’

  “So spending this family’s money the way I do is like a way of paying him myself. I’ll keep paying until it’s all gone.”

  He was quiet after that, and I stood up to go. “I have to leave now, Harley.”

  “Yes.” He wasn’t really listening. His mind was far away, running with the soldier through the cornfields of Antietam.

  Thurkettle and I were just leaving the driveway, when I saw Clarissa walking toward us. She wore an off-white linen dress and was barefoot.

  I had been saying something to Thurkettle, but when I caught sight of Clarissa, I fell silent. I waited too long, letting my vision blur around the paleness of her dress against the dark, waxy green of rhododendron bushes that lined the avenue. Strange how even now she seemed to live more clearly in my mind than when I saw her with my eyes.

  I turned to ask Thurkettle just to please keep going, but Clarissa had already flagged down the car. She’d been across the road, at one of the other mansions. In her hand she carried a floppy Panama hat, with flowers woven into the brim. She laughed, and smiled as if there had never been any awkwardness between us. She leaned into the car and kissed my cheek and asked me how I was doing.

  I didn’t remember what I said. Maybe nothing at all.

  And I didn’t remember what she said, except that her last words to me were to take care of myself. It was as if she knew already that I was going far away. She smiled as if we were friends and would always be friends and maybe she believed it was true. I didn’t recall any mention of the death and was glad of that.

  The way the light settled on her face reminded me of when I had given her swimming lessons the summer before. I held her body in waist-deep water, while she paddled at waves that crumbled all around us into foam.

  Every time I saw her now, I thought of something in the past, even when she was standing there in front of me.

  Then Thurkettle and I were driving on toward the ferry. I twisted in my seat to watch her disappear onto the chalky dazzle of the driveway at Belmar. I saw her body outlined through the linen of her dress as she walked past the iron gates. Then I faced forward again and saw how Thurkettle kept his gaze straight ahead at the road. I wanted to ask him what I’d said, but I kept quiet and his face gave nothing away.

  We drove along the avenue of mansions. Sun flickered down through the trees.

  It was not a mistake to fall in love with Clarissa. I didn’t blame myself for doing that. My mistake was trying to leave behind everything I had grown up with and burying it and expecting it all to stay buried. The reason I never introduced her to my father, although I always invented excuses to her and myself, was that I felt ashamed. I was proud of my father and his reputation on the island, but I knew it meant nothing to her and would never mean anything to her. And she never saw our house because in front of her I was ashamed of that, too. I never brought her out to meet my old friends from the island and I never talked about her to them. Even as I asked Clarissa to marry me, I had somehow convinced myself that none of these things mattered. The shame I felt then didn’t come close to the shame I felt now.

  My other mistake was not falling out of love, even though I knew I did not belong with Clarissa among these mansions. Having money would not change that, and Mrs. Maxwell asking me to take care of Harley’s wealth only rubbed it in deeper.

  I couldn’t have said just then where I did belong. I used to think I knew, but this death had jolted me off course. Now the island seemed dark and unfamiliar, to me who had called myself its guardian and listened to its heartbeat in the rock.

  I hoped that going to Ireland would show me something of where I belonged, even if it pointed me straight back to the island of Jamestown and the house that I wanted to leave. Perhaps it is that way for everyone, I thought. You start out with
the whole world to range across and claim, and you end up returning to the place where you started, choosing a few square feet of land, the way that my father had done.

  * * *

  I told Thurkettle not to bother taking the ferry across with me. I said I could walk home from the Jamestown landing.

  When he had gone, I listened to bandstand music coming from the town. Soon the café people would move from their metal chairs on the sidewalk to the indoor rooms as the evening chill drifted in off the sea.

  Jamestown clumped quiet and shadowy across the water. The music from Newport could be heard all up and down the bay, but you never heard any coming from Jamestown. Instead, you would hear waves breaking on the cliffs at Beavertail, and wind through the rigging of boats in Jamestown harbor. Those sounds were drowned out in Newport. All you heard there was the music.

  * * *

  I stood at the bow of the ferry, tasting salt that sprayed up in my face. Sunset turned the bay into a field of boiling copper.

  The ferry was almost empty. The Newport people never came to Jamestown, unless it was to pass through on their way to the mainland. Then some of them took the Kingston train back up to Boston or down to New York and Philadelphia.

  They almost never walked through Jamestown village, because there was nothing to buy except hardware from Briggs’s general store or groceries from Allington’s. So they moved quickly past the squat houses with their sun-bleached paint and lobster pots set out to dry in the backyards.

  To the island people, downtown Newport was a bubble of laughter and songs, which they could touch now and then but which was not theirs. When winter came, the bubble disappeared. Half the shops closed down. The metal café chairs that used to jam the sidewalks lay stacked inside the closed cafés. Sailors in their dark wool coats shuffled down Thames Street with their collars turned up against the wind. Fishermen waited out storms in their drafty dockside huts.

  I used to wonder what the Newport people did all through the winter. I imagined them hidden away in rooms with dark-paneled walls and green felt-covered card tables, impatient for the snow to melt and for the Gulf Stream to return.

  A nurse stood on deck with me. She wore a blue cloak with a red trim over her white clothes. She was pushing an old man in a wheelchair. The old man’s head was tilted to one side. A tartan blanket covered his legs.

  They had come from the Sturgess Rest Home, which had a little wooden sign out front that said—DROP IN FOR A SMILE. So when we were younger, we used to walk past and give our version of a Sturgess Home Smile, which was a mindless slobbering grin.

  Often the old people would be wheeled out to the dock to watch the ships come in. The old people seemed mostly to be interested in themselves. I’d seen men and women slumped in wheelchairs, pushed into patches of sunlight, and the only part of them that seemed to be alive was their eyes. Sometimes they studied their hands, fingers wafting gently like weeds in the current of a stream. With nothing else to do, the nursing-home residents became students of their own disintegration.

  Sometimes my father had spat out how miserable he thought they looked, but I wondered if he would have said it, if he knew how much time he had left.

  * * *

  Two men were standing in my driveway. The engine of their car was still running.

  I recognized them as the same two men my father had been yelling at, the night Dillon’s fishhouse burnt down. They wore the same long raincoats and kept their hands stuffed in their pockets.

  They watched me coming closer. Then one man said “It’s him,” and walked across to meet me. His hand slipped from his pocket and reached out to me like the blade of a knife. “We come to say we’re sorry about your da.” He was Irish, with a faint American twisting of the words. “I’m Pratt and this is Duffy. Come here out of the dark, Duff.”

  Duffy shuffled over. The tight curls of his hair were mashed down on his head with brilliantine. “Your father was a great man.”

  Pratt nodded. “An inspiration to us all.”

  Pratt slapped Duffy on the arm. “Anyway, that’s all we came to say.”

  “You were talking with my father the night of the fire.”

  Now Pratt turned. “Yes, we were. Did he mention that?”

  “He said you owed him money. He said you were crazy for showing your face around here.”

  “Money was it?” Pratt chewed his lip and then laughed. “Well, I’m sure I might owe him a bit.”

  I moved to the front door at the house and swung it open. “Would you like to come inside? I’d like to talk with you.”

  “No.” Duffy took a step toward the car. “No, we got to be going.”

  I stood in the doorway. It was dark behind me and I felt as if I was standing at the entrance of a tunnel. “How much do you know about what my father did in Ireland?”

  They were quiet for a while. I heard waves breaking on the beach. I stood very still, barely breathing, frightened that they knew everything but wouldn’t tell me.

  Pratt’s hands found their way back inside his pockets. “It really is time we were going.”

  I wanted to force them to stay. “What did he do? I heard he was in prison.”

  “If he’d meant for you to know these things, then surely he’d have told you himself.” Duffy opened the car door and sat behind the wheel.

  “Don’t go. Please. Who are you two? How did you know my father?”

  “We’re old friends is all.” Pratt had reached the car. He rested his hand on the door. “And if you heard us talking the other night, you’d have heard us promise to keep you out of it.”

  “But what harm is there in telling now?”

  Pratt slipped into the car and before the door was shut, Duffy had already started the engine.

  First I only walked after them. Then I ran. I chased them down to the edge of the road and saw Pratt turn to look at me. “Why won’t you tell me?” I shouted after them. “For Christ’s sake, why?”

  I wouldn’t be able to catch them. And even if I did, they wouldn’t tell. I had seen a window, when they paused and thought it over. They had come close to talking. The words were already forming in their minds. But the window shut quickly and they knew they had to leave before they broke their promise to my father.

  They could have told me everything. I knew it. I could see it on their faces. And I knew I would never see them again.

  I knew nothing about Ireland, except that my parents came from the west coast. They never spoke of it, and they were not the only ones to start again as they passed through the gates of Ellis Island. I had friends at university whose German or French or Italian parents seemed to have forgotten where they came from. It had not troubled me until now, but suddenly it was all I cared about.

  I started packing. I threw a suitcase on the bed and crammed in socks and trousers and shoes. There was no time to waste. I didn’t know how long it would take to sell the house. I’d have sold it for one ticket, if the boat was sailing that day.

  Perhaps in Ireland there was also a window, and if I didn’t get there soon, it too would close. The country seemed an impossible distance away, anchored out of reach somewhere in the past.

  CHAPTER 4

  The masts of sunken sailboats jutted from the harbor like dead trees in a flooded field. Dillon’s fishhouse had almost disappeared. Its roof lay slopped into the guts of the building. Paint had blistered on its walls. The breeze lifted ashes from the rubble and blew them across the dockyard.

  I stood at the ferry landing. The ferry was halfway across the bay, its bow snubbing the waves. I could just make out the figure of Monahan, in his red-and-black check coat, standing outside the wheelhouse with his hands tucked behind his back.

  I had written out an ad for selling the house and now I was going to Wickford, where I’d place it in the paper. It was strange to think of leaving the island. But in my mind I had already sold the house and left. At the bank, I would tell them that I needed some time before starting. If they turned me do
wn, I figured, I could always work for Harley.

  The area around Dillon’s had been roped off, but children ducked under the rope, grabbed pieces of wood and steel and ran away with them as trophies. There was nothing worth taking, but the fire had made the junk special. I knew it was also because my father had been blown through the side of the building by the exploding diesel tank. Its closeness to his death had turned the melted iron and charcoaled wood into talismans.

  As the ferry dodged past sunken boats and made toward the landing, I caught sight of Willoughby. He wore a coat over his black robe. The collar was a flash of bony white across his throat. He carried a small suitcase hugged to his chest.

  Seeing Willoughby reminded me of unfinished business. I knew about the rush of documents and bills and funerals to be organized from when my mother died. Dying was expensive. It cost my father two weeks’ pay to have a decent tombstone set above her grave.

  It could all wait. I had no patience for it now.

  Willoughby lifted one hand and showed me the paleness of his palm. Then he walked off the boat straight toward me. “I was just coming to see you, Ben. See how you’ve been getting on.”

  “Not too bad.” Cars started their engines and climbed off the ramp. They kicked up dust on their way into town.

  He held up the suitcase. “This is for you.”

  “I was just heading into Wickford to put in an ad for the house.” I watched him closely, waiting for creases to slice across his forehead and for the blood to drain from his lips as he pressed them tight together. I had stopped caring or even wanting to know why it made him so angry for me to be selling the place. I wished I could have made him stand in the living room and see the pictures of my father and the odd and distant image of my mother, sparking off the walls and chairs like a squadron of fireflies. That would have made him change his mind.

  “I think that can wait for a while.” The creases split his forehead into strips. He handed me the suitcase.

  It was heavy. Somehow I had thought that it was only filled with clothes. “The paper only comes out twice a week. If I don’t place the ad in now, I’ll have to wait a long time before they can fit it in.”