The Promise of Light

by Paul Watkins

  “My name is Benjamin Sheridan.”

  “Who?” The man barked in my face.

  I said my name again.

  The man pursed his lips and looked down for a moment. Thinking. Then his head snapped up. “You’re the one who was supposed to meet Fuller, aren’t you? We got a cable from Willoughby. You’re Arthur’s son, aren’t you?”

  We both turned as Tarbox dragged a body across the road. The dead man’s head lolled back. Iron heelplates left white lines on the road.

  “No looting the bodies now, Tarbox. Remember what I told you.”

  Tarbox ignored him. He dropped the man and rummaged through his pockets, taking cigarettes and a brass-cased pocket watch.

  I dug in my coat pocket, where I’d put Willoughby’s letter before I left my cabin. “Are you Mr. Fuller? I have a letter for Mr. Fuller.”

  My gaze kept drifting back toward the dead man. I still couldn’t believe what I saw. But I was too afraid for my own life to feel the weight of sadness and shock that I knew I should have felt at seeing this.

  Another explosion came from the ship. Deep and far-away rumblings that blew fire from its smokestacks. I closed my eyes against jets of color that flickered across the water and smudged orange on the wet sand.

  “I’m Harry Crow,” the man said. “Your father said he’d come back, but I see that he sent you instead.” He took hold of my shoulders and spun me around to face the other men. “This is Arthur Sheridan’s son!” he shouted to them.

  Their talking died away. The men stood staring now. A smell of spilled gasoline seeped from the truck. Pebbles of rain slowly darkened the road.

  I looked from face to face, struggling to focus through the salt that burned my eyes.

  CHAPTER 6

  “What do you mean you didn’t know about the guns?” Crow’s face stayed hidden under a short-brimmed wool cap. His lips were chapped and bloody.

  I held my collar to my throat. My inner thighs were chafed raw from the damp trousers. “All I know is that I was supposed to get off the boat in Galway and meet a man named Justin Fuller. That’s all Father Willoughby told me.”

  I had to concentrate to understand Crow when he spoke. I’d heard accents clipped with Irish before, but nothing like the singsong of the way Crow twisted words. It was a lulling voice, a voice for lulling children to sleep at night.

  Cold rested like wet towels around my bones. Often I turned to look back down the road, expecting to see khaki-coated soldiers, bristling with knives and guns. I waited for the gravel road to shudder underneath me as artillery fired in the distance. But the fields spread out empty and thick with grass. In the hollows, reeds stretched from soil so dark brown and damp it looked as if it had been soaked in tea. I wondered what happened to Baldwin. Maybe he didn’t get up after I knocked him into the water. I might have killed him. I had never hit anyone before, and it made me a little sick to think of how much I’d enjoyed paying Baldwin back for his days and days of bearbaiting.

  We had been walking for an hour already. The sun was up, but mostly it stayed muffled in the clouds. Harry Crow had walked beside me all the way. His heavy, shapeless boots made him look as if he had just wrapped pieces of dead cow around his feet. Men left the group in twos and threes, heading out across the fields. Crow said that these were the ones who had to show up for work on time, so no one would know where they’d been. Soon the fifteen men were down to eight.

  I didn’t try to make talk. It took all my strength just carrying my suitcase and the two rifles I’d been given. Again and again, I tried to think of what to do next. It was like striking sparks from a flint to start a fire, but no fire came and no comfort and no plan.

  Hedges thick with brambles lined the road. Where the road ran next to a field, thick walls blocked them off. The wall stones were almost flat, patched with lichen and moss. It looked as if thousands of books had been stacked across the countryside and painted dark grey. In places, the walls had collapsed. Sheep with gnarly wool and black faces gathered at the openings to watch us pass. Their tiny round droppings speckled the road.

  On the ocean side, the land was bordered by cliffs. Headlands jutted out into the water. Waves smashed into the rock and spray unraveled in the air.

  Crow fingered the brim of his cap. His nails were lined black with dirt. “Perhaps Willoughby didn’t know about the guns, either. It doesn’t matter now, though, does it?”

  I thought about turning myself in to the police. I imagined a place noisy with typewriters and people who would listen. But the picture of the dead soldiers swept that aside. I had come into the country illegally and that meant the only way out would also have to be illegal. I couldn’t do it without help. Couldn’t do anything in this place without help. My money was no good. My clothes were no good. With my accent, I might as well have been wearing a flag. I was afraid to tell Crow about the blood test. From the way Crow treated me, I knew it carried weight to be Arthur Sheridan’s son. If I told him the truth, I worried he might throw me aside.

  My life had become so fragile. It seemed as if the slightest pressure would shatter my bones.

  “I was sorry to hear about your mother passing on. Willoughby wrote us a letter about it.” Wind skimmed over the hedge tops, flattening grass in the fields. Sheep huddled for warmth. “And how’s your old dad?”

  “He’s dead. That’s why I’m here. To scatter his ashes, Mr. Crow.” The cold had a grip on my jaw.

  Crow’s fingers spread and rustled through his beard. “I was afraid of it when I saw you. I wondered what news you were bringing. And how did he die?”

  “Blood poisoning.”

  “I suppose that’s as good a way as any.” It looked as if Crow had spent his life outside. Wind had cut grooves in his face and his eyes stayed narrowed, almost shut, as if walking into a storm wind that only he could feel.

  “Are you taking me to see Mr. Fuller?”

  “Fuller was taken to prison. I’m here in his place.”

  “Then this is for you. I don’t know what it says.” I took Willoughby’s letter out of my chest pocket. The ink had smudged from black to blue to pink at the edges. On the Madrigal, I tried to read the letter by holding it up to a light, but the envelope was too thick.

  Crow stuffed the letter in his pocket. “I was sure your father would come back. But I never thought he would be dead when he arrived. He never wrote, but Willoughby kept us in touch, about you going away to university and how you were looking for a job as a banker. I even knew what you looked like. Willoughby described you very well. And sure your dad would have spoken of me. Of Guthrie and Hagan and the others.”

  “No, sir.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Neither can I, Mr. Crow.” I felt pebbles on the road through my sponge-soft, ruined shoes. “How am I going to get home?”

  “That’s not an easy thing.” Crow bumped his knuckles over his chin. “I’d say the only way you’re going to leave this country is when the English do. And that might never happen. It’s a war now, you see.”

  “I didn’t come to fight. Surely you can see that for yourself.”

  “Well, I’m telling you now that you’ll have to fight. Because they’ll come for you before they come for us.”

  A cigarette found its way down the line. As I took the stub from the man in front, I looked for a second at the man’s face. He was smiling. Crow had puffed on the stub with his bloody lip. Its paper was pin-pricked with red. I inhaled, feeling the tobacco smooth out ragged edges inside me. Then I returned the butt to Crow, who pinched it between his thumb and index finger and breathed in until the ashes burned his skin.

  I held down the smoke, then let it leak from my mouth. “Is it possible we’re not talking about the same Arthur Sheridan?”

  “A scar like this?” Crow raked his thumb across his forehead.

  “Right. That’s him. He got that scar when he fell off a horse.”

  “Not that scar, he didn’t. An Englishman did that to him in
Belfast prison. With a blade. One of these.” Crow pulled a straight-edge razor from somewhere in the folds of his trench coat. He opened it with one hand. Its blade caught light from the egg-yolk sun. “I wouldn’t be the one to call your father a liar, but I saw his blood run out across the blade and I remember the policeman shook it and the drops splashed on the floor. I saw your father’s eyes closed with the pain.”

  Another slab of my childhood fell away, like a pane out of a window. It seemed to me I knew more lies than truth. “Where did these guns come from?”

  “From people in America who know we need them.”

  Crow folded the razor and hid it somewhere in the lining of his trenchcoat. It seemed he didn’t want to say any more about it.

  * * *

  We came to a slate-roofed house. It had a bright-blue door. The windows were shuttered, but smoke leaked from the chimney. Wind batted it down, making it pour like grey liquid from the roof onto the road. The smell of it was heavy in my lungs.

  Against the side of the house was a mound of black bricks. The bricks were made of earth; crumbly and faded to deerskin brown at the edges where the moisture had run out of them. I knew these were peat bricks, used instead of wood or coal to keep the fires burning. Willoughby and my father had talked about them, as they tried to make me taste it in their whiskey. Their fingers had fluttered up to their faces, as if following the wisps of burning peat. And now with the smoke’s tobacco-sweetness clear in my senses, it seemed to me I could recall its taste, slipped into the amber of the Dunhams.

  The line stopped. Now there were only six of us left, I set down my suitcase and looked at the blisters on my palm, bulging like white grapes from the skin. I worked my hands into my pockets. They were filled with sand.

  Crow pounded on the door with a rifle butt.

  A moment later, a man in overalls walked out carrying a teapot. Two mugs dangled from his fingers. He looked down the line and then back to Crow. “Well, for God’s sake, Harry! I thought it was just you.” He held up his arm, crooked fingers curled around the mug handles. “I don’t have enough cups!”

  I pinched the blisters and popped them one after the other, then pressed my palms together to stop the stinging pain.

  “There’s been some trouble in Lahinch,” Crow said to the old man.

  “The buggers in Lahinch are always trouble.” Shreds of steam reached from the teapot’s spout. “I’d rather cross all the way to Ennistymon than…”

  “We don’t have time for talking, Will.” Crow raised his hand to silence the man.

  Will’s face grew suddenly pale, as if Crow’s heavy-boned fingers had drained all the warmth from his body. “Well, why bother me at all, Harry Crow? You and your County Clare gunmen.”

  “Sooner or later, the Tans will be coming up this road and asking after us. And you didn’t see anything.”

  “I didn’t?” Will raised his eyebrows.

  “No, you didn’t.”

  The man’s ears turned red in the breeze. They looked like wedges of tomato. “All right, then. So what am I supposed to say when they point to all these bootmarks in the mud?”

  “I want you please to run your cows down the road for a mile and then run them back. That’ll take care of the tracks.”

  “I’ll do it soon as the wife and I have had our breakfast.”

  “Now, please, Will. We need it done now.”

  Tarbox walked up to the man. He gripped Will behind the neck and shook him. “You’ll do it now or you won’t have any cows left to run. Are you understanding me, you old fart?”

  Will hunched down like a turtle into its shell. “Oh, it’s you, Tarbox.”

  Crow tried a reassuring smile, but instead he grinned like a skull. “There’s a good man, Will. We’re all very grateful, I’m sure.”

  Tarbox unhooked a mug from Will’s hand, poured himself tea and sipped at it as the rest of us filed past up the road.

  * * *

  We walked for another hour, footsteps finding rhythm in the hammer of waves on the cliffs. The air was thick with sea spray.

  Then we shuffled to a stop outside a low-roofed house. Its walls were bone white and thatch carpeted the roof, patched with pea-green mold.

  Tarbox walked down the line, two rifles on his back. His sweater was still clotted with sand. He stopped in front of Crow, but kept his eyes on me. “Mrs. Fuller says we should all go inside and warm ourselves. Is it really Arthur Sheridan’s son?” Tarbox spoke slowly and carefully, as if we wouldn’t understand him otherwise.

  “Ask him yourself, Tarbox.”

  He turned to me now. Behind the bumpy leather of his skin, his eyes were bright blue and staring. “I met your dad once.”

  “You never did, Tarbox.”

  Tarbox slapped off Crow’s cap. “I did so, you old bugger.”

  For the first time, I saw that Crow was completely bald. There was not even the blueness of his hair having been recently cut off. He had been bald for some time, and the sun had tanned his scalp the same as it had tanned his face.

  “You pick up my hat, Tarbox.” The baldness made Crow’s eyebrows stand out thick and black.

  Tarbox had been smiling. Now it flaked off his face like old paint. “Oh, stop pretending that you’re in charge. It’s only temporary for you. I’m sure they’d have put me in charge if I’d wanted the job.”

  Crow bent down and picked up his cap. “Nobody in their right mind would put you in charge of anything, Tarbox. We’ve only got to ask your wife about that.” He fitted the cap on his head. Its lining was polished with sweat. “You’ll be wondering why it is that I’m bald, Ben.”

  “Like a bloody hard-boiled egg!” Tarbox made as if to slap off Crow’s hat again, but Crow gave him a stare that made him change his mind.

  “I had a bad case of the lice in the war, and so I shaved my head to make them go away. I kept it shaved for so long that I must admit I prefer it this way now.”

  “I did see your dad, you know.” Tarbox nodded, as if I needed more convincing. “It was in a pub. I shook his hand. And I read Willoughby’s letters about you. I heard you was going to be a fireman, but then you decided on the banks instead. Myself, I would have stuck to putting out the fires.” Then without waiting for me to say anything to him, he turned and ran up the road. The rifles crisscrossed his back.

  Through Willoughby’s eyes, they had all kept watch on me, as if through some trick mirror in my house. I had earned their friendship and their trust, without ever knowing who they were.

  “Did he really meet my father?”

  “I doubt he can remember. Tarbox keeps crab pots out in the bay off Lahinch. You’ll hear people calling him Crabman. He throws the crabs in baskets and puts them on a cart and then he sells them in town. Over the years, they’ve pinched his fingers so all that’s left of them is scars. He doesn’t seem to mind. He talks to himself when he’s out on the bay. Sometimes his voice carries across the water and you can hear him in the town.” Crow folded his arms. “It’s a shameful thing.”

  “What is?”

  “You here in this country, breathing the dust of your ancestors and not even knowing their names.”

  * * *

  Heat coiled in bands around my body as I stepped into the house. The roof was low and heavy-beamed. Its walls were plastered stone.

  A woman barely contained by her dress stepped in front of me. Before I could put down my suitcase, she swung her arms around me and pressed her face against my chest.

  I could smell her hair. I saw the tight-curled threads of grey and rusty brown. Her hands pressed at my ribs. Then she let go and stepped back and sighed. “They told me you were here.” She handed me a mug of tea and showed me into the front room, where the other men had gathered. They rested their rifles against the fireplace and eased themselves down on the floor. A man crouched on his hands and knees in front of the fire, blowing on embers.

  “Are you Mrs. Fuller?”

  “Yes.” She filled up the doorway. Her f
eet were tiny, wedged into cloggy brown shoes. The flower pattern on her dress had almost washed away.

  “I was supposed to meet your husband.” The white powder of dried salt clutched at my face.

  “He’s in prison, Mr. Sheridan. But they’re letting him go soon and he’ll be pleased to see you then. Now drink your tea before it goes cold.”

  First I tried to sit down on the suitcase. But I could feel it giving way, the neatly balled socks and folded spare trousers and white shirts buttoned and starched, all of it pasted with sand now and wrapped around the cylinder. So I sat cross-legged on the floor and sipped at the tea. I spread my hands around the mug. Heat buzzed my nerves back to life.

  We brought with us the smell of the outside, the mustiness of damp wool and rain. Dreary sky flooded steel-grey through the windows. Another three men left for home. Now it was only Crow and Tarbox and me.

  Tiredness rushed through my head. I tried to shove it away, enough to clear a space where I could think. But I didn’t have the strength. It was like trying to push back water. Voices seemed to echo through a length of cardboard pipe. My eyes closed.

  As I dove off the precipice of sleep, I searched for my father, peering through the veil between the living and the dead.

  * * *

  “Ben?”

  My blurred eyes looked up at Crow. I seemed to be looking through a layer of oil.

  “There’s a man outside who has some news for you.” The shredded lining of Crow’s coat hung down over his knees.

  I looked at my watch. It had stopped. Water condensed into tiny silver bubbles on the inside of the glass. From the shadows on the ground, I knew it couldn’t have been much past noon. Then I followed Crow outside.

  A man stood in the road, leaning on a bicycle. He wore a green uniform with silver buttons. “One of the Tans from that truck you people shot up on the road back at Lahinch wasn’t dead. He just lay in the ditch and as soon as you lot marched off, he came running into town. He said he heard the name Sheridan, but he was lying on his face so he couldn’t see anything. Now he’s telling everybody that your father’s back in town.”