by Paul Watkins
I stared at him, remembering how angry my father had been when he found out about Bosley and me shooting pie tins in the woods. It struck me silent to think of how differently we had both known the same man.
Crow stood back. “What? What did I say?”
It made no sense to hide it from him anymore, so I told him about the fire at Dillon’s fishhouse, and how my father had been burned. I told him about the transfusion and how my blood had killed him. Then I explained what Melville told me about blood types and Arthur Sheridan not being my father.
Crow’s eyes thinned into slits as he heard about the fish-house. He nodded in sympathy for Dillon and his business gone to hell. And his mouth opened in an “Ah” when he heard about my father blown out through the wall. But when he heard about the transfusion, his eyes began to open again. He breathed in, ready to ask about my mother, but I knew what was coming and told him. Crow’s eyes grew very wide and then he dug the heel of his palm into my back. “Well, what do you want to go believing a doctor for, anyway? The bastard probably made some mistake that did your father in and then blamed it on some chemistry he knew you wouldn’t understand and wouldn’t be able to prove.” Then he made a noise in his throat, a “so there” noise to show that he knew he was right.
“But what if the doctor wasn’t lying? There have been enough lies told already.”
“Not lies. It sounds to me more like your father’s just not telling you about the time before you were born. He left for America with his wife, settled down, had you and then put the past behind him. That’s all there is to it.”
“But they had me before they left Ireland. I was born here.” I waved my hand across the far-reaching fields. “Somewhere here.”
Crow began bumping his knuckles over his chin again. “No you weren’t. I saw your mother up until a week before she left the country. And she wasn’t pregnant then and she didn’t have children before that. They said you were born over here, did they?”
I nodded. The news barely reached me. It was only one more lump of rock to be rolled away into the darkness at the back of my mind.
“Well, that’s one lie I suppose you could say that they told you.”
“I was hoping one of you would know the truth. I guess I had hoped it would all just fall into my lap.”
Crow started walking again. “Well, it’s not me who’s your father. I can tell you that for a start. If you’re not Arthur Sheridan’s son, then as far as I’m concerned you could be anybody’s child.” He turned suddenly, heels grinding into the road. “But that doesn’t matter to me. Arthur raised you and called you his son, so who cares what your blood has to say for itself?”
The way I heard people talk about Arthur Sheridan, it was as if he still clung to life in this place. To Crow and Tarbox and the others, he had somehow survived the blaze that reduced him to ashes. To them it was something like prophecy. He said he would come back and they held him to his promise. Now I was the promise come true.
I had tricked myself into believing that this would be easy. I’d heard the warnings from Willoughby and Harley, but I was not listening. I expected it all to come clear in one long story from some gravel-voiced old man or woman. But now for the first time I saw the possibility of failure, how I could pull away shadow by shadow hiding the truth, and still not know at the end.
We walked on toward Lahinch. The holster made a lump in my jacket. My elbow brushed against it when I walked.
The cow still stood in the road, a black-and-white road block, chewing grass.
“As soon as the soldiers know that you came off that boat, they’ll come for you. We’ll just have to put you up with someone in the town. Someone who will say you’re part of their family. We’ll get you a job. That will keep you out of trouble for the time being. I’m taking you to Guthrie. He’s Clayton’s father, the one we’re buying out of prison. So he owes us, you see. He can’t refuse. He was my commanding officer in the war.”
“Did he know my father?” I couldn’t help calling him that, and neither could Crow.
“Guthrie knew your dad better than any of us.”
We walked past a roadside temple. Under a stone arch was a figure of the Virgin Mary, moss-crusted hands held out as if waiting for rain. She stood behind steel bars and her clothes were painted black.
A shadow passed suddenly over Crow’s face and he stopped in the middle of the road. He reached his arm out to make me stop as well. “You’d better stay here for a minute.”
“Why?” I thought he was going to make us get down and pray to the statue.
“The reason everybody talks about your father coming back here isn’t just because they’ve been waiting all these years to get another look at his smiling face. And it’s the same reason the Tans will tear the place apart looking for anyone by the name of Sheridan.” Crow watched me very carefully, as if waiting for some glimmer of knowledge in my eyes, so he wouldn’t have to be the one to unravel the secrets that my father had kept all these years.
But there was no glimmer. I stared at him and waited for the truth, telling myself that this was what I’d come for, no matter what it cost me.
“Your father ran guns for us in the winter of 1897, and when he left for America around the time of your birth, he said he’d come back with more guns. So all this time, we kept him to his word. Until now. People see you and they see the guns that came off the Madrigal, and it’s as if he kept his promise after all.”
I lowered my head, as if my skull had become too heavy for the muscles of my neck. On the horizon in my mind, I caught the last glimpse of myself as I’d imagined I would be when I found out the truth. Somehow I’d thought it would make me happy. It would make things fit together and leave me stronger than I was when I started out. But now I began to feel like the butt of some vast joke. I waited for Crow to burst out laughing and for more laughter to reach me like the cackling of witches from every house and stone and tree. But when I looked up at Crow, I saw no mockery on his face. I saw only how he wanted me to know all of what he had to say, now that he had begun.
He ran his fingers across the bars of the statue’s cage. “We used to meet here, your dad and I and others, when we were planning to bring in the guns. This was in the summer of 1897. A group of Americans, some of them had been young Union officers in your Civil War, managed to gather up a good number of guns. They were all members of organizations that supported Irish independence. The Hibernians. The Clan na Gael. Others. They’d been ready for the rising in 1867, but the rising never came to anything and now with them getting old, they thought it was their only chance of seeing something done. They had it planned for the hundredth anniversary of the rising of 1798. They sent word that we should go across and pick up the guns. They’d help us charter a ship. They’d keep us safe when we were there. So your father volunteered. He went across in the winter of ’97. Then, in the spring of the next year, we had word that a ship had been chartered and was leaving Boston. We were to meet it off a place called Spanish Point, just down the coast from here.
“The ship left Boston, but somewhere between its leaving and arriving in Ireland, the English found out about what it was carrying. It was a man named Hagan who told us that they knew. He was working for the English at the time as a policeman. The same as Stanley is now, except Hagan didn’t charge us for information. We had no way of getting word to your father. Spanish Point was crawling with the English. Guthrie and I couldn’t get near the place. The English were going to wait until your father landed. Then they’d get everything. But the ship struck rocks and sank in the middle of the night. They were the same rocks a Spanish galleon struck hundreds of years before. That’s why they call it Spanish Point, and there’s people here with black hair that they say are descendants of Spanish sailors. We thought that your father had drowned. But he showed up a month later in Galway. He said he’d swum to shore and made his way north. He told us that only half the shipment had come over on that boat. The rest was still in America, because
the Yanks had been worried about the boat getting stopped and they didn’t want to risk losing everything in one blow. Your dad said he’d go back and bring the other half; another two hundred guns. He left with your mother, smuggled away in some ship with the help of Tom Hagan. They left and they never came back.
“I’m thinking he must have found himself finally safe in one place and changed his mind about running the guns. He had a better life there. It could only have been better than the one he left behind. They had a price on his head in Ireland, and you can’t trust anyone when there’s a price on your head.”
“Isn’t there a price on your head?”
“Not yet, although God knows they’ve arrested me enough times and kept me in prison on suspicion of various things. But so far, they’ve always let me go, because of lack of evidence.” Crow spoke with surprise in his voice, as if he couldn’t understand himself what had stopped them from putting him away once and for all.
“And they didn’t burn your house?” I imagined pictures eaten off the walls by fire. Bottles of alcohol exploding in the heat. Chairs and tables vanished in the flames.
“They haven’t burned it yet. When they burn your house, you may as well just go to the Connemara hills and live in an old shepherd’s hut. The English can’t find you up there. Sometimes they try rounding people up, but it never works. You can disappear in the hills. You can vanish into thin air. Tom Hagan did when the English found out he was keeping us informed. He lost his wife and child in a fire when the English burned his house. I hear rumors that Hagan’s got a group of men with him now. But all they are is rumors. And there’s other rumors that Hagan died some years ago. Either way, he just vanished.” Crow made a movement with his hands, joining the tips of his fingers together and then spreading them slowly apart. “Vanished.”
“Is that where Tarbox is going?”
Crow laughed, his hand finding its way to his mouth as if he was ashamed of his teeth. “When they burn his house, he’ll go. And you might, too. Hagan used to help people get out of the country. He’d find them ships with captains who would let them stow away. He might be the only one who could help you.” Crow stopped suddenly and pointed at the horizon.
Part of Lahinch was burning. Columns of smoke stuffed the sky with dirty grey.
“In the end, the soldiers will make too many people angry. There’s a line people cross where all they can think about is making the soldiers go away. Dead or living, it doesn’t matter. Every day there’s more of us crossing that line. That’s where I am, and Tarbox and Clayton Guthrie and his da. You’ll be there, too, if you stay here long enough.”
At the sound of Crow’s voice, the scattered hulks of wandering cows raised their heads and stared.
CHAPTER 8
Sun cut the water into blinding shreds.
The Madrigal lay tilted to one side, wedged in the sand. Waves slapped against its open portholes. Where cannon shells had exploded, its hull was peeled back like the skin of a huge fruit.
Small boats rowed out to the wreck, waves swinging their bows in the air. Crates of rifles salvaged from the cargo were stacked at the high-tide mark and guarded by soldiers.
The dunes were scattered with people. They wandered across the sand like sleepwalkers, as if gathered in some dream and led by visions out toward the sea.
“Those are people from Lahinch. If they stayed in the town, the soldiers might have shot them, instead of just burning their homes.”
I caught sight of two soldiers. They stood on a bridge that lay further up the road. Both carried fixed bayonets on their rifles.
I felt a jolt in my stomach, telling me to turn and run. But they had already seen us, so we had to stand our ground.
And as if Crow had felt the jolt, too, he rested his hand on my arm. “If they ask, you’re Guthrie’s nephew. He’s got one who’s supposed to be coming over on a visit from the States sometime soon.” Crow spoke with his chin against his chest, eyes peering up through the black shrubs of his eyebrows.
The soliders would listen to me if I told them the truth. For a moment, I was sure. I nodded hello as we came close.
The muddy brown uniforms smudged their bodies back into the grass and stones and the river bubbling under them, as it headed out to sea.
The hands of the soldiers knotted around their canvas rifle straps. They stared right through us, and I knew that there would be no talk. I put away the smile and looked down at my shoes. My hands edged toward the stitched-shut pockets of my trousers.
A truck was moving down the road. It jolted over the potholes. As the truck passed, Crow and I had to climb up on the wall because the road was so narrow.
The truck-driver’s face was pink in a breeze through the open window. More soldiers filled the back, rifles between their knees.
I could call to them. The whole story wedged in my throat, ready to spill out fast if they would listen. For a moment, I didn’t care about Crow or Tarbox or sad-faced Mabel Fuller. The soldiers would hear me out. I could tell them everything now and soon be going home. The chance would vanish, as I hid myself away in the basements and attics of Lahinch. If they found me after that, there’d be no point in explaining.
Then I saw Crow’s hand in the corner of my eye. He had twisted the grass around his fingers, cutting off the blood. His fingernails drained white. He was watching me and he knew what I was thinking.
I saw his face suddenly stripped of age, the way my father and mother would have known him, in the days before they went away and never came back. Then I imagined all of them, Tarbox and Fuller and Mabs, all young again and friends and handing around Willoughby’s letters that told about my growing up.
I couldn’t turn them in. Not even to save myself. My face grew hot from the shame of having thought it.
The chance was gone now. Before long I’ll be one of Crow’s people, I thought, moving across the fields at night, wrapped in a trench coat and leather gaiters.
“Harold!” A woman’s voice called from somewhere in the crags of sand. “Harold Crow!” It was the voice of an old woman, high-pitched and jabbing our ears.
First I could see nothing. Then the woman drifted over a ridge. She wore a dress that came down to her feet and a shawl covered her shoulders. In her hand, she was carrying a mug. “Harold, I’ve brought you some soup!”
“It’s Mrs. Gisby.” Crow stared at the approaching mass of cloth. “She owns the hotel in Lahinch. She’s my boss, believe it or not.”
Mrs. Gisby had a smile-wrinkled face. She was flushed from the work of moving across the sand. At the wall, she stopped and Crow helped her down to the road. Then she held out a tin mug of something brown and clear. “I saw you coming up the road.” She held the mug up to Crow’s mouth. It clinked against his front teeth.
Crow winced and stood back. He took the mug and looked into it.
The old woman panted and grinned. “Have you seen the ship?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Crow handed me the mug. “There’s a lot of soldiers about today.”
Mrs. Gisby snapped her head up the road and then down the road, as if someone might be coming who would hear. “They’re taking the guns!”
“Guns is it, Mrs. Gisby?” Crow lifted her up and sat her on the wall. “Now how do you know that?”
“The soldiers are saying so. An officer walked among us, asking if we’d seen any of the sailors.”
“And have you seen them, ma’am?” Crow brushed off the sand that had clotted at the ends of Mrs. Gisby’s dress.
“I have seen them, yes. But they’re all dead. They washed up on the beach and the soldiers laid them out in the sun to dry.”
“To dry?”
“That’s what they said.” She nodded and leaned forward. “And there’s another thing. Arthur Sheridan has come back with his army.”
Crow grinned at me, then turned back to Mrs. Gisby. “So you remember Arthur Sheridan, do you?”
“Well, of course I do, Harold.” She batted him on the arm, rocked b
ack and fell into the dune grass. “I’m not so old as I forget. They say he’s come with his army of Yanks and he’s armed to the teeth is what I hear. Those guns the Tans have on the beach, those are just the ones his army couldn’t carry.”
Crow helped her up. “Has anybody seen them?”
“Of course they have!”
“Who, ma’am?”
She rested her hands on her knees and thought for a minute. “I don’t know. But he’s been seen.” Now she beamed at me. “Are you one of Harold’s friends?”
I nodded, amazed at the depth of creases in her skin.
“Well, drink the soup then.” She flipped her hand.
It was cold beef bouillon. Bitter saltiness pinched at the corners of my mouth. My stomach was too empty to care.
“Is everybody from the town all right, Mrs. Gisby?” Crow gathered her hands into his. Her fingers disappeared in the folds of his palm.
“They burned the creamery…”
“I know, ma’am. But is everyone all right?”
“Broke every window in the high street. They say McCusker, the glass man in Ennistymon, will be rich from fixing all this smashing and burning.”
“Casualties!” Crow shouted. “Is anybody dead?”
“No, dear, except for a couple of Tans.” Her hands worked their way out from the grip of his palms. They fluttered in front of her and came to rest against the lapel of Crow’s jacket. “We all ran to the dunes as soon as the shooting started. But the houses, Harold. They burned the poor houses.”
