The Promise of Light

by Paul Watkins

  “We’ll have to give them a black eye or two, won’t we, ma’am?”

  She tightened her grip on the coarse wool of Crow’s jacket. “I say you kill every last bastard Tan in Ireland. Won’t you do that for me, Harry?”

  Crow looked down at her brown-spotted hands. “We’ll give it a try.”

  “And have you brought your friend along to help, Harry?” She jerked her chin toward me. “Will he do the job for us?”

  “This is Guthrie’s nephew from the States.”

  Mrs. Gisby’s face was fierce as she could make it. “Have you come to help us, then?”

  “Give it a try.” I hoped that would be enough. I breathed in the sea spray, the drift of breaking waves beyond the dunes.

  Mrs. Gisby’s face lost its tiny fierceness. “Now you tell your uncle that he should come and work with me at the hotel. I’ve been asking him for years but he won’t listen. He could work with Harry here or do anything he wants. You tell him to stop fussing with that fat old sheep of his and that cow he keeps tethered in his garden. Tell him he needs the company of a lady like myself. His old wife’s been dead almost ten years now, and it’s time he moved on from that.” Her face went blank for a moment, as if she had forgotten everything she’d said. Then she kissed Crow on the chin. “Are you my one and only, Harry Crow?”

  “I thought that Mr. Guthrie was the man you had your eye on.” He grinned and hid his smile.

  She stretched out her arms. “Marry me, Harry.”

  Crow stepped away, still smiling. “I already love you too much.”

  * * *

  The houses were empty. I knew from the silence.

  Each window frame carried the shark’s teeth of smashed glass. Light snagged on the teeth as Crow and I moved through Lahinch.

  Chairs and chests of drawers had been dragged from the houses and left. The drawers were open and clothes speckled the road. I saw shoes and a hairbrush and the trodden-on rag of a tartan dressing gown. In brightly painted doors, I made out the dents of rifle butts. The shiny brass fingers of spent bullet cases lay everywhere.

  Only one of the houses had been burned. Its paint had bubbled and peeled and slate roof tiles lay in splinters on the road. Still-smoking beams jutted from the rubble like the blackened ribs of a huge dead animal.

  A man on a bicycle pedaled toward us. He swerved around smashed chairs and an overturned table, moving more and more slowly, until he had to put out his foot to stop the bike from falling over. “They shoot looters, you know.” The man was a priest. A white collar gleamed at his throat.

  “I didn’t come to loot.” My voice bounced off the houses.

  “I don’t know you.” The priest’s trousers were tucked into his socks to stop them catching in the gears. “Who are you?”

  Suddenly I couldn’t remember. Nephew? Whose nephew?

  “I asked who you were.” The priest had a sharp nose and pale-blue eyes.

  “Guthrie’s nephew!” Crow slapped his hand on my shoulder. “He’s come over from the States to see his uncle. Benjamin, this is Father Petrie.” Crow’s thick hand reached out, palm up, pointing the way to the priest.

  “You’re responsible for this, Harry Crow.”

  “For what?” Crow’s hand curled shut and dropped.

  “For this!” Father Petrie swung his hand above his head, taking in the wrecked houses and gun shells and smoke. “For the killing of those Tans down by the bridge last night. I know what work you do.”

  “I work at Gisby’s hotel, Father. You ask anyone.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with it. You work there in the daytime and at night you go out and start wars!” Petrie stepped forward. The wheels of his bicycle clicked.

  “I’d be grateful if you didn’t spread rumors, Father.”

  “Spread rumors to who? Everyone’s out hiding in the sands. Rumors is all I’ve been hearing since I heard the first gunshots last night. They’re saying Arthur Sheridan has come back with a gang of Italian assassins from Chicago. They say it’s his ship that went down in the harbor. They brought guns with them. And that’s not a rumor. I saw them. I don’t like the Tans any more than you, but what good are you and your thugs to the people of Ireland if you shoot and then run away, leaving us to fend for ourselves?”

  “There’s people who’d be happy to fight a pitched battle if the sides were even, Father. As it is, and you know very well, the Tans would wipe out the Republican Army in half an afternoon.”

  “So how can you blame the Tans? They don’t know who’s out to kill them and who’s just trying to get on with their lives.”

  “I can find plenty of ways to blame the Tans.”

  Petrie gave up talking to Crow. Now he turned to me. “And you’re Guthrie’s nephew? How long will you be staying?”

  “Just a little while.” I found myself almost whispering. Smoke from the burned house slid over the rooftops.

  “You don’t look like Guthrie’s blood to me, boy.” Petrie wheeled his bicycle down the road. Its chain tic-tacked across the gears.

  * * *

  Crow stared at the brass door knocker bolted to Guthrie’s front door. It was in the shape of a hand, with the fingertips held together. “It gives me the willies, that thing.” He banged on the door and stood back.

  The white lace curtains rippled as someone looked out.

  Footsteps crunched on gravel in the alley that ran by the house. Then a man poked his head around the corner. A mustache bunched under his nose.

  Crow cleared his throat. “Mr. Guthrie, sir.”

  “What do you want?” The man rummaged in his pocket and pulled out a pair of glasses. He put them on and squinted at us. The lenses were so thick, it seemed as if he was looking down the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

  “I wanted to talk to you, sir.”

  “What about?”

  Crow made a tiny choking sound in his throat. “If we could talk inside, sir?”

  “Come around back.”

  Tethered to a post in Guthrie’s garden was a fat sheep and a cow. I had never seen a sheep this fat before. It looked like a barrel that had been rolled in fluff. The two animals had been lying down, but they stood as we entered the garden. They had looks on their faces as if they expected to be introduced, or at least given something to eat.

  Guthrie pulled two sugar lumps from his pocket. He gave one to the cow and then one to the sheep, the lumps held out on the flat of his hand. “I’m busy,” he said to us over his shoulder.

  “This is business, sir.”

  Guthrie ignored him. He turned, holding out a hand to me and I felt the strength in it. “I haven’t met you before.”

  “Ben.”

  “Well, this is my sheep and her name is Roly Poly. And this is my cow named Margaret.” The collar of his shirt was too big, and it made his neck look thin and scraggy.

  The veins stood out on Crow’s forehead. “Sir, this is Ben Sheridan, sir. Ben Sheridan.”

  The pressure changed in the man’s grip. It grew stronger and then suddenly let go. “I hear Arthur’s come back.”

  Crow cleared his throat again. “Mr. Guthrie, sir, it appears that the rumors surrounding…”

  “Shut up your babbling, Harry. Where’s Arthur? I just heard that your dad came ashore with fifty hired mercenaries. Italians. Father Petrie told me that not ten minutes ago. The Tans have gone berserk trying to find him. There’s lorry loads of them down at the beach.”

  I made out the shadows of old age on Guthrie’s face, the hollowness around his eyes. “He’s dead, sir. I came here to scatter his ashes.”

  Guthrie nodded and his hands clenched by his sides. His back was crooked, as if the weight of his shoulder blades was too much to carry. “I should have known that as soon as I saw you. You’d better come inside.”

  * * *

  Guthrie lived alone.

  There was a way a house smelled when a man had the place to himself. I knew that from my father, just as I knew the smell of a widow’s
home from Mrs. Gifford, across the street from where my father lived.

  The distance from here to America didn’t seem to matter. I breathed in the same earthy, smoky mustiness that my father left behind. I wondered now if he had brought it with him from Ireland, the sea spray and the peat tattooed into his pores.

  One blanket-padded chair stood by the fireplace. On the wall was a lithograph of Galway Bay. In another lithograph, a man with a deerstalker hat and a mustache waded into a stream with a fly-fishing rod.

  But Guthrie hadn’t always lived alone. A few props of a woman’s life still perched on the window sill—a china dog and a tiny lady in porcelain, frozen as she strutted through the dust.

  Crow wandered to the white lace curtains. He peered into the street. Pulled back from the glass panes were heavier curtains made of purple velvet, to close in the room at night.

  Guthrie clattered into the kitchen. He dug a spoon into a jar of tea leaves. “Keep an eye on the street, Harry.” The burbling kettle over the fire had softened the brittleness between them.

  “I hear you knew my father, Mr. Guthrie.”

  “Of course I knew your father. And your mother.” Guthrie’s face appeared from the kitchen. “I cried when I heard she had gone.”

  “More than ten years ago.”

  Guthrie brought in the tea and set it down on a low table at the center of the room. He trickled the tea into cups and added milk from an earthenware pitcher. Guthrie sat down by the fire and pointed to another chair for me to take my place.

  Crow stayed at the window. “Ben didn’t know about the guns. Willoughby didn’t tell him.” Sun through the lace curtains spiderwebbed his scalp and face. “He told me Arthur died of blood poisoning. Some doctor messed up a transfusion and told him that Arthur wasn’t his real father. Something about different blood types.” He laughed and his breath clouded on the glass. He kept it up until he saw that Guthrie’s face had remained stony. Then his laughter collapsed into coughing and clearing his throat.

  I sat cradling my tea, feeling as if I wasn’t in the room at all, and had dropped in like a ghost at the mention of my name.

  Crow changed the subject. “Willoughby sent us some money. Three hundred American dollars.”

  “And you’re looking after it, are you, Harry? Now that Fuller’s underground. You may have taken Fuller’s job, Harry, but you haven’t taken his place.” Guthrie studied the smoldering peat in the fireplace.

  “We’re going to get Clayton out, sir. I have a contact at the Lahinch barracks. He’ll take a bribe.”

  Guthrie blinked fast a couple of times. “I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “You say that, sir, but you don’t mean it.”

  “I’m not involved.” He glared at the fire, as if Crow had hidden himself somewhere in the flames. “I haven’t spoken to my son in months.”

  “I came to ask if you would look after Ben. I know you have that nephew who’s coming over from the States one of these days.”

  Guthrie poured more tea into their cups. “He wrote that he was coming last year and he didn’t. He said the same thing the year before that. But what am I supposed to do if this is the year when he finally arrives?”

  “You could tell him not to. Write him a letter, sir.”

  “If I was to lay a guess on it, I’d say you’ve already started telling people that Ben here is my nephew.”

  “I didn’t have any choice.”

  “The Tans will come.” Guthrie looked hollow-eyed and sad. “Burn down my house. I’m not involved in this! I’ll sit here and drink tea with you, Harry Crow and if the Tans come by afterward and ask me what I did, I’ll tell them. And if they ask for tea, I’ll pour them some as well. Do you see the way it works, Harry? I’m out of this now. If I take a Sheridan under my wing and hide him away, I’ll be as mixed up in things as you are.”

  “We’ll get him home as soon as we can.”

  “No you won’t. You need him here. You need him because of his name.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Of course it’s true!” Guthrie picked up a poker and beat at the flames. “You heard the rumors that are already going around. Already! This boy hasn’t been in the country two days and already you’ve got people here believing that Sheridan and his avenging battalion of Wop gangsters is here in the hills and ready to thrash the Tans out of existence. It’s idiots like Petrie that do it. They spend half their time bellowing at people to be calm and the other half spreading rumors that can only bring panic. And it’s people like you”—he jabbed his finger at Crow—“who keep the rumors alive! This country needs heroes and nobody knows it more than a man like you, Crow. You can’t just keep spitting out the old stories about Cuchulain, and Finn MacCool asleep in the hills and ready to come down and save Ireland when the time is right. Even Mrs. Gisby won’t believe those stories. But Arthur Sheridan! There you’ve got yourself a live one, don’t you, Harry? Better than a live one! The son!”

  “Are you going to shelter him or not, sir?”

  I stayed silent, feeling them bat my life back and forth like a tennis ball. I thought to myself, You have never taken charity from anyone. And here you are now, not only begging, but having someone else do it for you. It would be better just to get up and leave. You are asking more than just charity. It’s more than you should ask from anyone.

  But I didn’t get up. I knew what was outside and how long I would last on my own, with only waterlogged American money and a voice to give me away. I found myself surprised at how much sense it made to take Crow’s gun and blow my head off before the soldiers got to me and made me tell them names.

  Guthrie slammed his hands down onto his knees and Crow fell suddenly quiet.

  They had been talking, but I hadn’t heard them. I was far away inside my head, pacing the grey corridors and wondering whether to die.

  Guthrie was talking to me. “Bring your things around, Ben. I’ll keep you as safe as I can.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Crow settled his cup in its saucer. “He only has the one suitcase, and that’s up at Mab Fuller’s for the moment.”

  “I thought I recognized Fuller’s clothes.”

  The tea was cold. It tasted sour in my spit. “I didn’t mean to bring trouble, Mr. Guthrie.” I couldn’t even raise my head to meet his gaze.

  “You can’t help what you bring.” Guthrie’s yellow-nailed fingers drummed on the edge of his chair.

  * * *

  I walked to the end of the street with Crow, still numb from realizing how much it cost these people to hide me. I wondered where the hell my plan had gone, and that strong resolve that had flared up inside me as I lay in my cabin on the Madrigal.

  It wasn’t fair. I didn’t come to hurt anybody, or to do anything wrong. I told myself all this, but even to me it sounded like the bleating of sheep. I wouldn’t have expected the soldiers to believe me, and it seemed too late for that now. It was not fair, but fairness had nothing to do with it.

  “It’s been such a long time since Guthrie saw his son.” Crow buttoned his coat against the chill. “Clayton went away to university in Dublin last year. Trinity, he went to. While he was there, he joined the Sinn Fein. But he decided they weren’t doing enough, so he joined the IRA. They trained him and sent him back here. He’d been in charge of a local brigade for the past six months, ever since Fuller went to prison. But then the Tans arrested Clayton and I had to take over. And damn near everything I’ve done, I’ve buggered up. If it had been Clayton here to deal with the Madrigal’s guns, they’d all be ashore by now and hidden away. Instead of that, there’s only a couple of dozen. That’s why we need him back, and that’s why Guthrie won’t have anything to do with him. He says he’s had enough for one life.”

  “Why do you say that?” The sky was very pale, with clouds that streamed like wagon tracks from one horizon to the other. I thought it meant rain. Bosley could have told me. He knew things like that.

  Crow kicked a rifle cartridge. It jangled aw
ay down the road. “I told you he was with me in the war. He was our company officer. He was a bit old, but he’d been in the Territorial Army for a long time and when he volunteered, they didn’t turn him down. Well, he was relieved of his command in 1917. He was disgraced.”

  “What did he do?” It made me dizzy to stare up at the clouds.

  Crow stopped in front of a chest of drawers that had been dragged into the street. He opened a drawer and pulled out a neatly folded handkerchief. Then he blew his nose in it and stuffed the handkerchief in his pocket.

  “In the spring of 1915, we were in the area of Mons in France. One night we were moving up to the line, up to the trenches. We marched and the officers rode on horseback. It was a damp night and we had half a moon looking down on us. It appeared now and then from the clouds. Stretching out on either side of the road were fields, just muddy fields as far as I could see into the dark. It was just a piss-awful night, all cold and wet, and it was about the time when people were realizing that the war would go on for years and not months like they said in the beginning. The trench war had started. We were setting up the patterns that would go on for another three years. We’d move up to the line, live in the parapets for two weeks, then be relieved and go back for two weeks’ rest. Every time we went up to the line, we’d lose ten or twenty or once as many as forty percent of the company. We lost sixty-five percent when the Germans came at us out of the fog with bayonets one night and our sentries didn’t see them in time.

  “This time I’m talking about, it was maybe two in the morning and we were all marching along in silence, when suddenly Captain Guthrie reins his horse in and stops. I heard the bit clunk in the horse’s mouth and looked up. He’d been startled by something. But then he rode on. For a while it was quiet again, nobody speaking or singing, no smoking allowed, everybody just thinking about being at the line and how soon it would be before they fall into the ten or twenty or forty percent that go back from the line all rotten in a donkey cart. Or who don’t go back at all. Then Guthrie calls me up to the front. I break rank and go stamping up through the mud to see what he wants. I was a corporal, then. I see his face and he’s pale. He’s frightened. He leans down from his horse, and his horse is frightened, too, and his damn face is so pale, I can’t stand to be that close and I step back. He says to me, ‘Look out into the fields and tell me what you see.’ And I saw riders. I looked and in the moonlight and shadows, I saw a line of horsemen moving in pace with us. They were heading toward the front, same as we were. ‘Cavalry,’ says Guthrie. ‘Do you see the horsemen, Crow? Tell me I’m not mad and that there’s horsemen in the fields. No, sir, I told him. You’re not mad. I see them, too. I didn’t know we was moving up with a cavalry group. Then suddenly he leans down at me again, his face so damn pale, you’d think he had a wound that was draining all his blood. ‘Look at them again, Crow.’ So I looked.”