by Paul Watkins
It was a scrolled certificate, painted with angels and crosses and the first letter of every paragraph bloated with gold. The certificate said that the name Arthur Sheridan would be mentioned every day in prayers at the church of St. Anthony in Boston.
“They do it for a penny a day. I paid them a year in advance. I figure you could hang it over the fireplace if you wanted to.”
“Could do.” The angels all had clown-smiles, with grins reaching up to their ears.
“You know what I found in the attic yesterday?” He pulled a revolver from his mailbag. It was the one he and I had used to shoot pie tins in the woods. “Do you think we still remember how to use it?”
I took Hettie’s pie tin and wedged it upright in a crack of the wall that ran behind the house. I counted back the twenty-five paces. Then I handed the gun, butt-first, to Bosley.
“You go ahead, Benjamin. Let’s see if you remember.”
I shot it off the wall and shot it again in the air. The smacking sound of bullets punching through tin brought me back for a moment to the time in the woods and the sulking of my father when he learned what I had done. I handed the gun back to Bosley and we didn’t shoot it again. I knew I could shoot for the rest of the week and not hit the pie tin in the air the way I had just done.
Bosley knew it, too, and he didn’t want to try. He stuffed the gun back in his bag. “So you’ll be leaving town now, I reckon.”
“Yes, Bos.” The gunshots made a distant rumble in my head.
“Seems to me you’re always leaving some place, Benjamin.”
“You’re right, Bos.”
Bos nodded. “I know it.”
* * *
I looked back at the island as I headed for the mainland. I thought of the stillness of the house, all doors locked and windows shut. The dust was already settling.
Willoughby said he’d keep me company across the bay. He stood next to me, his back unnaturally straight, the way he did when he was giving sermons. He stuffed a heavy envelop into my hand. “The Madrigal will drop you off in Galway. You’ll find a man there to meet you. I sent a wire last night. The man’s name is Justin Fuller. He’s an old friend of mine and your father’s. There’s several letters in that envelope, that I’ve written over time. I’ve included a note that will explain everything to him. He’ll take you south to the town of Lahinch. That was where your father and mother used to live. I want you to promise me something.”
Justin Fuller, I was thinking. I tore through my mind, hunting for a memory of the name, and there was nothing.
“Promise me, Benjamin, that you’ll scatter the ashes and head back to Galway and come home when the Madrigal leaves port. That should give you about three days. She’ll pick up a cargo of crystal and wool in Cork and then she’ll head straight back to Boston.”
“But what about the questions? What about talking to people and finding out who my father is? Do I have any family in this place Lahinch?”
“Not as far as I know.” Willoughby smoothed his fingers through his silver hair. He was trying to remember, but if there had been names in his memory, they had slipped away long ago. “When you board the ship now, you’d perhaps do best not to mention that you’re carrying the ashes. They’re a superstitious lot out on the water and they’re liable to see it as bad luck. You’d just do best to keep it to yourself.”
“So what should I tell them when they ask why I’m going?”
“Well, there’s a hundred reasons why someone should wish to cross the Atlantic. Tell them you’re going to visit family. Now, you’ve got your papers?”
I patted the chest pocket of my coat.
“And you’ve got money?”
I patted my other chest pocket. It was all my savings.
“And the ashes?”
I had packed the urn into my suitcase, safe among the trousers and the shirts.
“You stay if you have to, Benjamin. You do as you see best. Sometimes I forget that you’re grown up now. I still remember you in your short trousers, down at the Narrow River, raking up clams for dinner. It’s true, I do. The time”—he held out his hand, palm up and shaking from old age—“it pours through your fingers like little grains of barley.”
I looked at him and thought, You’re falling away, too, just like my father did. How does it feel to fall away?
All across the bay, wind carved out waves, the crystal of melting icebergs drifting down from the north. I tried to imagine my father running across the ice of the frozen bay, how he would have laughed to make himself brave, listening for the groan of the cracking surface. I wished I had been there to run with him. Closing my eyes, I pictured the dark below the ice, where blue crabs waited blind in the stillness, tapping their way from rock to weed to rock, hearing the strange thump of footsteps overhead.
* * *
Railroad tracks reflected sun, like lightning bolts captured and straightened and laid out side by side.
I sat on a bench at Kingston station. The stationhouse was small, with a blurred window at the ticket booth and benches like pews in a church but arched to fit against the small of a person’s back.
The bone-snap sound of a car’s parking brake made me turn. I saw Thurkettle stepping from the Ford. Thurkettle walked around to the other door and opened it to let Harley climb out.
“I have arrived!” Harley spread his arms wide.
“Hello, Harley! Hello, Thurkettle!” I was glad to have company.
Thurkettle started to wave hello. He flapped at the air with one hand, then stopped and fidgeted and flapped with the other.
“You mustn’t do that to him. You catch the poor man off guard.” Harley pulled a handful of coins from his pocket, selected three pennies and put them on the nearest rail. Then he stood back on the platform and pointed to the bright spots of copper. “The train squashes them flat as postage stamps.”
“Thanks for coming to see me off.”
“You didn’t think I would, did you?”
“No.” A chevron of Canada geese flew past, squabbling in the pale sky.
“Shows how much you know. As a matter of fact, Benjamin, I came here hoping I could talk you out of going. I know I’ve left it to the last minute, but the last minute is often the only time a person can see something clearly.” Harley stepped out onto the tracks. He ran his shoe along the polished rail. “You’ve got a nice, calm life here. But if you get on this train, your life is going to change. You may find calm again, but it’s not going to be the same as you have now. Your parents didn’t just forget to tell you about their life before they came to America. They did it for a reason. And they loved you, so the reason must have been a good one. I know I said a lot of things earlier about how you can’t run away from the truth. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe the truth is that you were never supposed to know. You can’t dig up the past and go back to living the way you were before.”
“I don’t want to go back to the way I was before.”
“But how far are you prepared to go? Have you thought about what it might cost? People might not want the past to be uncovered. Their own nice calm lives might be at stake. And they’ll fight you for that calm. They’ll fight you with everything they’ve got.”
I watched the coins on the tracks. “Yes, I imagine they would.”
“So it hasn’t worked. I haven’t talked you out of it?”
“No.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever tried to talk anyone out of something before. Mostly it’s been people trying to talk me out of things. I needed more practice. Then it would have worked.”
“Maybe so.”
The stationmaster walked outside. He wore a red cap with a black brim and carried a brass whistle on a cord around his neck. He pointed south down the tracks, rolling and unrolling a yellow flag attached to a baton. “See it?” A column of steam frothed above the trees. Then the train came into view.
I set my hand on Harley’s shoulder. “Thank you, Harley.”
The tracks began to ping. Th
e pennies shuddered on the mercury-shining steel.
Harley squinted at the approaching train, which swallowed the lightning-bolt tracks and hid us in curtains of steam. He said something, but I couldn’t hear what it was. Then he turned and walked fast toward his car, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched. He didn’t look back.
Thurkettle opened the door.
I picked up my suitcase and climbed on board. I looked through the window, hand raised to wave good-bye, but Harley had already gone.
PART 2
CHAPTER 5
Thunder.
I climbed from my bunk and swung open the porthole. The night air was thick with fog. Waves barged out of the dark and broke against the Madrigal’s hull.
Thunder. There it was again. I pulled on my clothes. They hung like a fireman’s from a wooden peg, shirtsleeves inside coatsleeves, trousers dangling from suspenders.
I stopped on the gridded iron stairs that led up to the deck. From here, I could see down into the engine room. The constant trample of the engines had long since made me deaf. The reek of diesel fuel was in my spit and clothes and sweat.
I tried to remember how long I’d been at sea. One by one my fingers uncurled as I tried to mark each day, but time meshed together and I couldn’t keep count.
Thunder. I walked up to the deck. The fog seemed to rush at my face. Three crewmen stood near the bow, looking out into the fog.
“Is there a storm?” I asked them.
Only one crewman turned. His name was Baldwin. “The cliffs!” he yelled. “Waves against the Cliffs of Moher!”
“I thought it was thunder.” I felt my weight shift from foot to foot as the Madrigal rolled in the waves. “How are you ever going to find the port in this fog? Is there a lighthouse?”
Now Baldwin walked closer. “I tell you what. You go back to your room and get dressed in your shiny shoes and your Big Town Yankee suit and prepare for going ashore.” He took his hands from the pockets of his heavy black coat, slowly and with a strain on his face, as if it was a favor that he didn’t want to do. He reached his hands up to my shoulders. “We’ll ask for your help if we need it.”
I thought about strangling Baldwin, imagined closing my hands on the tough elephant leather of his neck and digging my fingers in deep.
I wasn’t welcome on the boat. Most of the crew just ignored me, but Baldwin seemed to enjoy his constant volley of half-insults, never quite enough to start a fight, taunting me as if I was an old bear tied to a tree with no way to defend myself.
I had a small bunkroom. Six paces to the window and three from side to side. The walls were paneled with dark wood. I had the place to myself, which pleased me at first, but then began to drive me mad.
Each time I walked into the galley, following a path of mumbling voices and pots clattering on the stove, all talk stopped and eyes shifted down. The only sound then was the scrape of spoons in bowls, and chairs scudding back across the floor as men got up to leave. I counted nine men on the crew, including the captain, who had shaken my hand when he boarded the ship and then completely disappeared. All of them were Irish.
For the first three days, while I could still keep track of time, seasickness hollowed me out. I had bruises on my collarbone from rushing at the porthole to throw up.
Now and then, Baldwin would knock on the door and ask if I wanted to eat, listing off combinations of food that he thought would make me feel worse.
After four days, the sickness went away. I slept through one night, and when I woke I lunged out of my bunk, making for the porthole. I swung back the latch and stuck my head out. It was only then that I realized I didn’t need to be sick.
That evening, Baldwin carried in a tray of food. There was soup and buttered bread and an apple and tea.
While I ate, he sat cross-legged on the floor. His face was round and he had blond hair cut so short it stuck up in pinewood-colored spikes.
I lifted the bowl of soup to my mouth and drank it all. The bread went next, then the apple and the tea. It went down fast and half-chewed and barely tasted. “What have I done to get you so angry at me?”
Baldwin patted a rhythm on his knees, as if he had a song in his head that wouldn’t go away. “Captain says we’re not supposed to bother you. He said no questions. Told us to mind our own bloody business. These days it seems as if every trip we make to Ireland and every trip back to Boston, there’s someone coming along with us who we’re not allowed to talk to. It’s a risky business carrying people like you and it makes a bad job worse.”
I remembered what Willoughby had said about not mentioning the ashes, so I told him I was going to see my family.
“Are you?” His expression didn’t change.
“Yes, as a matter of fact.”
“Well.” He climbed off the floor, and slapped the dust from his backside. “There we are, then.”
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“No.” He walked away into the guts of the ship. “As a matter of fact.”
* * *
Boredom took the place of sickness.
I began to think of how it might have been to travel on a liner. Drinks before dinner. Chefs with butcher knives who cut slices from roasts set out on buffet tables. In my daydreams, I pointed to the parsleyed potatoes, holding out an imaginary plate. I heard the clink of glasses and silver knives and forks.
When the daydreams were over, I wandered the corridors to the crew’s mess and sat at a metal table eating what the crew had left behind. I watched ladles and copper mixing bowls swinging constantly and evenly on their hooks with the motion of the waves.
Signs appeared on doors. CREW ONLY. They were handwritten signs, stuck up with white tape that looked as if it had been borrowed from a first-aid kit.
Maybe a liner wouldn’t have been as expensive as all that, I thought. Not if I traveled second class. At least they might have a library. I thought of green felt-covered tables in the reading room and brass buzzers you could press which would bring a waiter up from below. Then I’d ask for coffee and the waiter would bring it on a tray with silver tongs for lifting crumbly sugar cubes into my coffee, holding them there until the cubes vanished. And maybe once I’d slide a silver teaspoon up my sleeve and carry it to my room and study the liner’s crest engraved on the handle.
I imagined myself walking the liner’s deck, hands behind my back, nodding hello to people sitting in chairs.
The Madrigal’s deck was not a place where I could walk with my hands behind my back. The times I climbed up from below, I moved from one clump of tarpaulin-covered crates to another, feeling the hammer of waves more sharply here than in my cabin. Iron-gray sky seethed above the ship. A small tractor was tied down on the bow, blanketed with wornout tarps, which were held around the crates with lengths of ginger-colored hempen rope.
My lungs filled with the emptiness of ocean air. Before this, the farthest I had ever been out to sea was half a mile beyond Narragansett Bay. There, I could still smell traces of land and the horizon was bubbly with trees. But here it was only the sea.
The cylinder lay nestled in my suitcase. Sometimes I caught sight of it as I unpacked a clean shirt or unfolded a new pair of socks. Once I took it out and held it. The weight of it strained at my wrists.
I tried to imagine how Ireland would be. I painted pictures of it in my head, but the pictures were blurry and vague, like watercolors. All I came to know was how little I’d been told about the place.
A plan formed in my head of how I would go about uncovering my parents’ past. I phrased the questions I would ask, and even designed a poster to be nailed up on the local noticeboards. I would be persistent but polite. I would circle and keep circling until I had uncovered every layer of what I didn’t know. There was enough money to stay for a while. I’d even pay bribes if I had to, as soon as I could get to a bank and change my dollars into local currency.
It was my great adventure. I started to enjoy myself, and I found a resolve that I had never felt bef
ore.
In the long, midocean nights, I convinced myself that I would have no difficulty. The hard part, I thought to myself, was getting to Ireland, and I had as good as done that already. The people of Lahinch would be as interested to know about the lives of my parents after they had reached America as I would be interested in knowing how they were before they left. I imagined a breathless exchange of stories, which I promised myself I would write down and save and pass on to my own children some day. And if it turned out that they were not my true parents, then I wouldn’t waste any time in finding my real mother and father. I knew it might make for some awkwardness. I felt I was ready for that. But I wouldn’t let anything get in the way. If one person did not want to answer my questions, then I would ask someone else and keep asking until the truth was finally spat out. I tried to picture a different set of parents, but I couldn’t. I only saw the same two faces that had softened so gently with age as I grew up beside them.
* * *
Lifeboats had been lowered on deck. Crewmen unbattened tarpaulins and stacked wooden crates in the boats. They lifted the crates by their rope handles, showing the weight with grimaces dug into their cheeks.
I had put on my suit, the same one I wore when I’d landed my job at the bank.
I realized now that we would be mooring offshore and rowing the supplies in. Perhaps the port was too small for their ship, or too crowded and they didn’t have time to wait for the docks to clear. I snuffed out the idea of myself walking down a gangplank and onto the quay.
The captain stood outside the wheelhouse, hands in pockets. He nodded down at me.
Mist hedged us in. Each movement of legs and arms and lips sent a smooth stream of particles twisting away to regroup.
The only sound the crewmen made were grunts when they lifted boxes and more grunts as the boxes swung into the lifeboats.
I walked over to them. “Need some help?” I took off my hat as I spoke. Water had made drops on its felt brim and ran across my fingers.
“Help? You can help if you want, Yank.” Baldwin tweaked the buttons on my coat. “Got into your city clothes, have you?”
