The Promise of Light

by Paul Watkins

  Crow’s voice had turned gravelly. “They was horsemen, but”—he sighed—“but they were wearing armor. Do you see what I’m saying, Ben? Armor. From the time of the Crusades damn near seven hundred years ago. With my own damn eyes I could see them. They had white tunics over their armor and on the tunics were red crosses. They carried swords and lances. And there they were riding slowly beside us. Hundreds of them. I swear to Christ Almighty, I saw them with my own blasted eyes! I looked back at the others, all the rest of the company, and they could see them, too. We all looked out into the fields, none of us daring to step away from the road. All of us was pale as corpses. These horsemen had ridden up out of the grave and were coming to help us. Do you see? We was all expecting to die. We knew the percentages would catch us in the end, and most of us they did catch. But when I saw those knights come riding from the dark to help us in our war, I figured then that the line between the living and the dead was no more than a fog. And sometimes the fog blows away for a while and you can see straight through. Since then, I’ve had it in the back of my mind that the dead can come to help us. The way your father has in a way.”

  I thought about the fog between the living and the dead, Arthur Sheridan strong again and not raging in pain, waiting for the fog to blow away.

  “The horsemen were gone by the morning. They disappeared. Guthrie reported what he’d seen and at first they threatened to pull his rank and dismiss him right there. They thought, here’s some bloody Irishman had too much to drink. But too many others had seen it, too. One company not a mile from ours said they saw longbowmen from the time of Agincourt. Guthrie never got back everything he’d lost on the night we saw the horsemen. They had their eye out for him, you see, the high command. It made a fine little story for the papers but they didn’t want anyone really believing it. Fine for the people at home, you know, but not for us. A year later, we were further north, still in the trenches and it was wintertime. It was night again. One of the sentries was looking through a trench periscope at the German line. You know what a trench periscope is, don’t you? You look in one piece and through a series of mirrors you can see through a tube a couple of feet up. So you can see over the top of the trench without getting your head shot off. Guthrie asked to have a look. He was watching the German line through the periscope. Their lines lay only two hundred yards away at that time. Suddenly the sentry tripped backward and let out a yell and Guthrie told me that right then something flipped in front of his periscope lens. He looked up and saw a horseman. One of the Crusaders in battle armor, riding one of those great Clydesdale horses and not ten feet from where Guthrie and the sentry stood. Guthrie said he could see the rings on the rider’s chainmail vest. Before he passed out of sight, he turned once and looked down at them.

  “Ten minutes later, the Germans came at us with bayonets and shovels and trenchknives. The sentries weren’t ready, hadn’t heard the Germans assembling in their dugouts. They just came running out of the fog with no preliminary barrage or flares or anything else. They just came at us and they were screaming when they ran. That was the night we lost sixty-five percent of the company. When the end of it came and our line held and the Germans had to fall back, Guthrie reported what he’d seen to the brigade commander. I don’t know what he was thinking. He should have known what they’d do. He called for the sentry who’d been with him at the time, but it turned out the man was dead. They told him to forget about it, told him he hadn’t seen it really and he was just upset was all and to go back to his company. But he wouldn’t let up. He kept talking about the rider and the warning in the man’s face. It was too much, you see. They relieved him of command and sent him home.”

  “Do you think he really saw it?” Black birds with orange beaks marched on the rooftops.

  Crow shrugged. “I saw those horsemen that one night. I saw them. So if Guthrie is mad, then I’m mad, too. And everyone in that company who’s still alive is mad. But as far as I know, it’s just me and Guthrie and Stan. Percentages caught up with all the rest.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “Tuppence!” Mrs. Gisby barked in my face. Then she squinted, stretching her neck across the copper-plated bar top. “Oh, sorry, dear. I didn’t recognize you. I can’t see without my glasses and they always steam up when I’m working.”

  She talked for a while longer about her glasses, how they slipped off and broke at least once a month. Then she demonstrated, putting on the glasses and waggling her head until they slid down to the end of her push-button nose.

  I watched the khaki foam settle on my beer.

  * * *

  I had been here a week, working alongside Crow at the Dunraven Hotel, which was run by Mrs. Gisby and called Gisby’s Hotel by everyone except the soldiers. Most nights, the British officers ate dinner there, in the main dining room, which had salmon-pink walls and white curtains and silver candlesticks. There was a pub at the back entrance to the hotel. The locals all piled in there after sundown.

  Crow and I washed dishes from a quarter to seven in the morning until eight o’clock at night. We had a spot in the corner of the kitchen, where two huge metal sinks were bolted to the wall. There were rest times, after the breakfast rush and from two until six in the afternoon, when Crow and I lay down on the floor of the kitchen and slept with our aprons rolled up as pillows. But for the remainder of the day, I hardly ever looked up from the grey water in my sink, seeing the same pots and pans disappear hissing into the water as the chef threw them over my shoulder. I watched the sweat bead up on Crow’s bald head and drip into the washing water.

  I didn’t ask questions because questions were dangerous here. If I asked the wrong person, or if the wrong person overheard, the Tans would come for me. I kept telling myself to be patient. I didn’t say much about myself, but sometimes I talked about America, which seemed to the people around me to be a place more lodged in dreams than in the real world. They didn’t seem impressed that there was no war in America. They convinced themselves that America was so violent even in peacetime that it made no difference. But you could get rich in America, they said, and you could own huge tracts of land in places with names like Nebraska and Colorado. I watched Crow and Tarbox as they pronounced these words, as if they were part of a spell. They said you couldn’t get rich here and I looked around and believed them. They said you couldn’t own much land, either, because it had all been parceled out to the British and the people who worked with them. I told about Harley and Newport and the huge iron gate at Belmar and I tried to explain how hard it was to make the kind of wealth that Crow and Tarbox talked about, but they didn’t care. What mattered to them was that the possibility was there.

  “At least you can live with the hope,” Tarbox told me in his even, plodding voice.

  I was lucky to have a job. I even made two shillings a day. But sometimes I looked up from the swampy dish water and remembered that I had been offered that post at the First Bank of Wickford. I remembered how I’d told myself I would be running the place in five years, and I laughed and Crow jumped back in surprise.

  The chef’s name was McGarrity. He was bony like a starving man, but he ate almost as much as he cooked. He looked as if he had been a large carrion bird in another life, and here he was now, feathers plucked and stretched into the shape of a man. He had two jobs. Every morning he woke at three, delivered bottles of milk to people in the town and then showed up by six-thirty at the hotel to cook breakfast. McGarrity was an informer. He spied on us and told the soldiers what he’d heard and seen. Crow said he made more money off that than he did from any of his work.

  On my first day at the job he paid so little attention to me that I began to wonder if he even knew I was there.

  But the police were waiting for me as I stepped out into the alley at eight o’clock that night. They all wore their shabby bottle-green uniforms. It looked as if the only things holding the clothes to their bodies were the heavy Sam Browne belts. The three of them were Irish. You could tell them apart from the Engl
ish, who wore khaki and black.

  Crow told me later that McGarrity had tipped them off.

  I figured they knew everything, because of Stanley. They threw me up against the wall and gave me a pat-down. They turned my jacket inside out and made me take off my shoes and pulled out the insoles and looked at my hands as if to read my palms and they even looked inside my mouth. I wasn’t carrying the gun. Guthrie had taken it from me and hidden it under one of the hearthstones in his fireplace.

  I didn’t have time to be afraid. I wasn’t even sure what was happening. My mind had been taken up with my sore feet from standing all day and my hands boiled red like lobster claws from the dishwater. With the first machine-gunning of their questions, I realized they didn’t know anything except that I was new in town. Relief washed through me like cold blood, and I began cheerfully to lie, even convincing myself.

  They marched me back to Guthrie’s, past windows fogged with lace curtains and dusty-backed china animals crowding the windowsills. A slice of mirror showed us back our faces.

  Laundry hung in the gardens, sheets pinned to copper lines rusted green in the sea air. Rows of socks danced tiptoe in the breeze.

  At Guthrie’s, the policemen said hello to Roly Poly and Margaret. One of the policemen even pulled a handful of sugar lumps from his pocket and tried feeding them to Margaret, but Roly Poly knocked them out of his hand and ate them all herself.

  It seemed to calm them, knowing that Guthrie was involved. They trusted him, I could tell.

  Guthrie appeared in his slippers and his nightcap, shredded nightshirt hanging from his body as if he had just been blown up.

  When the policemen asked for proof that I was his nephew, Guthrie brought out a black metal box. From the box he pulled a stack of letters from the real nephew, and while they shined their flashlights at the stamps and unreadable scrawls, Guthrie kept up a chatter that made me wonder if he should have been working with Arnold at the First Bank of Wickford.

  The policemen didn’t read the letters. Mostly they just admired the American stamps. Then they handed back the bundle, apologized, and left me and Guthrie in the garden, staring at each other.

  Roly Poly lay down and Margaret rolled her over with her enormous black nose. That was a game they had, which they never grew tired of playing. Roly Poly lay down, front legs folding first and the back legs crumpling after. Then she stared straight ahead, as if she had no idea what was going to happen next. Margaret dug her nose into Roly Poly’s stomach and tried to roll her over. It took a couple of tries. The first few, Roly Poly tipped, but then thumped back down right-side up. Finally Margaret won and Roly Poly’s legs stuck in the air. She sat there for a while, looking up at the sky, then climbed back onto her feet.

  Tarbox also had a game which he played with Margaret and Roly. He kept borrowing them in the middle of the night. He led them out into the street and tied them to somebody’s door knocker. The person would be woken up, either by having their knocker ripped off its hinges or by an insane battering sound, with bleating and mooing thrown in.

  Three times in my first week, I had to go and fetch them, while Guthrie cussed out Tarbox and put the kettle on for tea.

  I wasn’t allowed to speak to McGarrity. Everyone knew he was an informer and he had been what Crow called Boycotted. He could speak to you but you couldn’t speak to him. It was like a children’s playground game, but played by Crow and Tarbox and Guthrie, the game had turned savage. You could see that McGarrity had been driven half mad by the silence.

  After the Tans had searched me, McGarrity left me alone. I began to feel safe in the damp heat of the kitchen. It was like being a nameless part of a huge machine. The danger seemed to have passed. The rhythm of the kitchen and sleep and the pub clamped down on me so quickly, that it didn’t leave much time for thinking. Whole days went by in which I almost forgot why I’d come to this country.

  But then it would return to me in a jolt that I was no closer to finding out the truth about my father and my mother.

  Guthrie knew it, too. When we sat by the dying fire late at night, and the chat had faded away, he could tell what I was thinking. He never gave me the chance to say what was on my mind. Instead, he’d tuck his pipe in a stone cubbyhole set into the fireplace, slap his knees, raise his eyebrows high up on his forehead and say “Tea?”

  There was no talk of getting me home. Not even talk of a plan.

  I began to wonder if Guthrie and Crow and the others thought they’d done enough for me. If I wanted to leave, I figured, I would have to set out on my own. But even with people speaking the same language, or at least knowing how, and many things familiar from my home, this place was foreign to me in ways that I did not understand at first. The more I understood about the war being constantly on, even if it didn’t show its face for days or weeks at a time, the more I understood that nobody really trusted anybody. Without trust, they were always suspicious, and the suspicion lay like mantraps in the fields outside the town.

  At first I didn’t understand why Crow and Tarbox hadn’t Boycotted a waitress at the hotel whose name was Ruth. She was the daughter of a local RIC man named Byrne, which meant that I wasn’t supposed to talk to her. But everyone else did, so I knew they had made an exception. Then I found out that she had a thing going with Crow. They disappeared sometimes in the afternoons, while I took my nap on the floor.

  Crow said he didn’t mind washing up the officers’ dishes and hearing them order Ruth around in the dining room. “It keeps me angry,” he told me, “and you’ve got to stay angry in this.”

  Tarbox stopped by most afternoons, dragging his cart because he was too poor to own a horse. It turned out that the Tans hadn’t cut all his crabpot lines. Some of the buoys had been submerged when the Tans went looking for them at high tide. Tarbox sold most of his crabs and lobsters to the hotel, carrying them in baskets made of reeds, which he lined with seaweed to keep the crabs damp. Sometimes his wife came with him. She was younger than Tarbox, with a broad smile like Clarissa’s that sent an ache through me that I had thought was long since gone. She usually tied her long dress in a knot at the side, to stop it from dragging in the sand when she helped her husband on the beach. Her legs were long and powerful and mostly she walked around barefoot. Crow said she wanted children and Tarbox was running out of excuses.

  It seemed to me that Tarbox would rather have his teeth pulled out than follow orders from Crow, but he did whatever his wife asked of him and not grudgingly, either. Around her, he carried a look on his face that made him seem as if he’d only just fallen in love, although I heard they had been married for years.

  I found myself jealous of how close they seemed to be, and sometimes I wished it was me who pulled that cart up from the low-tide sand, and my wife walking beside me.

  Posters appeared, offering a reward for the capture of Arthur Sheridan. They were slapped at odd angles on a notice board outside the town hall and on lampposts in the High street. Wind blew half of them away and rain took care of the rest.

  I came to know people and know of them, the same way I had while I was growing up on the island. Men and women were named by their trades, or by some memorable thing they had done. Guthrie was always Old Guthrie, because he had a son, and when people spoke of him, it was “Guthrie with his Idiot Sheep Roly Poly” or “Guthrie and that Bathtub of a Cow.” He was “Guthrie the man who stays out of the struggle, because of what the Great War did to him.” Tarbox was the Crabman, and people only trusted him so far, because he was a looter of bodies and smiled with his mouth but never with his eyes. They didn’t trust his wife, either, because they couldn’t understand why such a beautiful woman was living in a tin-roofed shack with this foul-mouthed man who always smelled like seaweed and whose hands were ribbed with scars. But they trusted Crow, and knew him as the youngest of the band who had once planned to smuggle guns into Ireland and start a revolution on the wind-smacked beaches of County Clare. I heard the name Sheridan spoken of carefully and with a g
entleness, as if the word was fragile like old china. My mother and my father were the ones who dared to go across the sea in search of the guns, and because of this, they let them keep their youth and rubbed out the faults they might have had, like the fault of never returning. The mention of Tom Hagan always sent the pitch of gossiping voices climbing into questions. They discussed whether he was still alive or dead and sunk down in some Connemara peat bog, where sheep skulls bleached in the reeds. Some claimed to know his hiding place among the Maamturk mountains. He was and always would be the one who had dressed up in his Sunday suit and gone to Dublin, trying to reason with the British before he turned to violence and the bringing in of guns. When Hagan’s family was killed and he fled to the mountains, he became the local saint of calm men pushed too far. There was not much talk of Justin Fuller. It seemed as if everyone but his wife knew he was dead. I guessed they didn’t speak about him because they were afraid of letting something slip of the story Crow had told—when Fuller’s neck cracked like a whip. They were afraid of telling Mabel Fuller, in a way that made them look like cowards, but they were foolishly brave about other things. I came to know Guthrie’s son, Clayton, although I had never seen him. I heard him called dangerous and cold-blooded, but not because of anything he’d done. Clayton had earned a name that drew itself from what people said he would someday do in this war.