The Promise of Light

by Paul Watkins

  I thought of a stream not far from my home. It ran past Gilbert Stuart’s mill in Saunderstown, across the bay from Jamestown. Buckeyes spawned there in the spring. The water ran so thick with fish that sometimes I could catch them with my hands.

  “I got…” Parsons let his tired arms settle on top his head.

  “You got what?”

  “I got a first-aid kit in my pocket if you want it. I see you’ve got blood on you.”

  “It’s not mine.”

  “Oh, Christ.” Parsons started babbling again. “My daughter’s name is Evelyn. She got little blond curls and…” His head sank forward. “Little blond curls…”

  I stopped walking. The hostage idea was no good. “Look, Parsons, why don’t you just go home?” I sat down on a rock and spat on my boots.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”

  “Go home, will you? It’s that way.” I waved the Webley’s barrel toward Ennistymon.

  “You’ll wait until I’m running and then you’ll shoot me in the back.”

  “Well, you can stay here with me if you want. I don’t give a damn. I don’t know how the hell your wife puts up with all your talking.”

  Parsons backed up toward the stream, hands still raised in the air. He stepped into the shallow stream. Fast-running water frothed around his knees. “Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.” He bowed slightly forward as he spoke. Then he waded to the other bank. The river was only waist deep. Once he reached dry ground, he started running. He disappeared through the trees and his boots squelched into the distance.

  I sat on the rock for a while, thinking of the things I’d told myself the night before; what I’d do to anyone who got in my way. It wasn’t true. I couldn’t have killed that man, no matter what was at stake. “Clayton could have done it,” I said to myself. “He wouldn’t have thought twice.”

  I headed out across the fields, toward the house of Mrs. Fuller. If anyone had stopped on their way north, I knew I’d find them there. I’d find Mrs. Fuller there too, still waiting for her husband to return. I saw again the brave and useless patience on her face.

  CHAPTER 14

  Smoke curled in witch’s fingers from the chimney of Mrs. Fuller’s house.

  A group of men had gathered in the garden. They were getting ready to leave. Clayton was there with Tarbox and Crow. They were arguing, Clayton shaking his fist at Crow, and Crow had gone stony-faced with rage. Tarbox stood back, leaning on his shotgun as if it was a walking stick.

  Wounded men lay on the garden path. The front door was open and I could see wounded lying there, too. Some were covered in blankets and others had their trench coats tucked under their heads as pillows. Mrs. Fuller walked among them, handing out apples. The apples were puckered and dry from storage in a barrel.

  As soon as Clayton saw me, he stopped talking. He waved Crow away with a brush of his hand and walked over. “Where’s your rifle?”

  “It’s bust. I threw it away.” My boots had soaked through. The laces were clogged with grass and peat.

  “You were issued with a rifle, which is either going to be used by us or against us. Have you thought about that? Did you at least destroy the mechanism before you abandoned it?”

  “It was already broken.” Wind twisted my hair.

  “How exactly?” The front of Clayton’s trench coat was plastered with dried mud.

  “How? It didn’t work. That’s how I know it was bust.” I couldn’t even bring myself to be angry at Clayton. None of what he said surprised me. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to be glad to see me or ask how I was. “And I blew up one of their armored cars, so you could call it a fair trade.”

  Crow had left the group. “That was you, was it?”

  “He lost his gun.” Clayton’s face didn’t budge.

  “Leave it alone.” Crow threw me an apple. “Don’t take this all out on him.”

  “All what?” I bit into the apple. Its skin was leathery against the roof of my mouth.

  “There were attacks planned to take place all over Ireland. But a lot of them didn’t go through, including one planned against the Ennistymon barracks. That’s why we had to stay and fight them off.”

  Clayton spoke as if it was his fault. Someone had to take responsibility and because he was in charge, he took it on himself.

  “The Dublin office called off the raids because of inadequate ammunition supplies. But they left it too late for all the raids to be canceled. The news didn’t reach us until after we’d taken Lahinch barracks. By then, we were already committed.”

  “Do we have a lot of wounded?” I wished I could sit down. At least take off my boots and rub the blood back into my feet. But the other men were already lining up on the road. They were impatient to be gone.

  “Not a lot of wounded. They were using dumdum bullets. We have a lot of dead. Casualties were heavy on both sides. We figure to have killed almost twenty men between the Lahinch and Ennistymon Tans.”

  “But how many of our own?”

  “We don’t know yet.” Clayton threw his apple core across the road and a sheep ran over to inspect it. “Between those who are dead or dying and the wounded who’ll be captured, we reckon perhaps ten.”

  Mrs. Fuller shoved Crow out of the way. “It’s a shame! Terrible shame! There’s whole families that will die out now because of what happened last night.” She jabbed her finger at Clayton. “You’ve got no right doing this. You knew they’d all be killed.” Her face was the color of a radish. “My husband always said if…”

  “Your husband…” Clayton spat out.

  For God’s sake don’t say it, I thought. I closed my eyes and waited for hell to break loose.

  Suddenly the anger left Clayton’s face. “We’re lucky to have made it out with as many as we did.”

  “We should give in, then. Let them have what they want. At least, then, we’d all still be alive.” She walked inside and clumped up the stairs.

  Crow followed, trying to calm her down.

  I’d been watching Clayton. I wondered what had scratched the coldness from his eyes and replaced it with something almost gentle. Perhaps some memory of himself much younger came barging into his mind. Mrs. Fuller standing there had sent him back for a moment to his childhood, where he could not find enough cruelty to tell the woman that her husband was dead.

  I couldn’t imagine a childhood for Clayton. I couldn’t imagine him younger or older or any way except the way he was now. To me, Clayton had begun to make sense. He didn’t try, like the others, to live as if the war could be forgotten from time to time in the dark-paneled walls of Gisby’s pub or in front of a fire at night. Clayton lived in black and white. He saw no boundary to violence. The war never quit and his instincts for war never rested. He had no other instincts. Everything else had been put away in a warehouse in his mind. He claimed no friends or love of family because he could be hurt by people who hurt them.

  Now I thought of Guthrie, living in the vast bell jar of his loneliness. And I wondered if it was the same loneliness that Hagan felt, with family gone and son not knowing his name.

  “Do you think Mrs. Fuller will talk?”

  “Talk about what, Clayton?” I pulled off my boots. I had to take them off, even if only for a minute.

  “About us. To the Tans.”

  “And what if she did? Would you shoot old Mrs. Fuller?” I looked at the blood-soaked toes of my socks, where blisters had burst and rubbed through.

  “It would be necessary.” Clayton scratched at the mud on his chest.

  * * *

  Twelve of us set out from Mrs. Fuller’s house. We walked all afternoon and into the evening.

  I washed my face in a cow trough by the road. The water was tea-colored with peat. When I caught sight of my reflection in the water, I saw that I had two black eyes. The puffed skin was purple with a yellowiness around the edges. I figured my nose was broken and without a doctor, it wouldn’t heal properly. Some day it would have to be broken again in o
rder to set it back straight.

  Lavender twilight spread across the fields.

  I carried a satchel filled with a raincape and a mess tin with an army spoon inside. I also had a portable stove with some fuel tablets. It had all been taken from the barracks at Lahinch and given to me just before we left Mrs. Fuller’s house. Clayton said it had been issued. He said if I lost it, I would be punished.

  All the wounded who could not walk by themselves we had left behind. That was what Crow had been arguing about with Clayton. Crow wanted the wounded to be brought along, on stretchers if need be, but Clayton wouldn’t allow it. They had watched us as we left, knowing that they would be rounded up in a few hours and stuffed into prison forever or killed right where they lay.

  Breaths of cigarette smoke sifted down the line. Some of the men wore bandages. Sheep followed, bobbing on the road like puffs of grounded cloud.

  We walked in silence deep into the night. Wind-carved hedges curled over us like the crests of breaking waves.

  Crow dropped back and walked beside me. I knew what he wanted to ask, so before he opened his mouth, I told him about Stanley. I only said he was dead. I’d made up my mind not to tell him more than that. Crow didn’t ask, anyway. He continued to walk beside me in silence, staring hollow-eyed across the fields.

  The line slowed as we moved past a farmhouse. A black-and-white dog ran out barking into the road and nipped Crow on the heel.

  “Now then!” Crow shook his finger at the dog. The dog shrank away. Then it came back and bit him on the heel again. “You stop that!”

  “Just give it a kick.”

  “He’s only doing his job. That’s the way they’re taught to herd cattle, biting the cows on the heel. Seeing us all in a line outside his farm, he’s probably trying to herd us into the yard.” Crow held out his hand. The dog sniffed his fingertips.

  Cows crowded up to a barbed-wire fence. Steam rolled from their noses and mouths.

  Then a door slammed in the farmhouse. A lantern wobbled toward us. “Well, it’s about time!” It was an old man. He held out the lantern to Clayton. “They passed through late this afternoon.”

  Clayton stood backed against the hedge, the strange long shape of the Mauser in his hand. “Who did?” He squinted in the glare. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Alan Cottrell. Captain Sutherland knows me.” The farmer had a spiked grey beard and wire-rimmed glasses. He wore a black wool coat and heavy boots with no socks. “The men you’re looking for passed through here not six hours ago. I counted fifteen of them.”

  Nobody spoke. I realized that Cottrell had seen Clayton’s military belt and mistaken him for a Tan.

  Clayton screwed up his eyes. “Fifteen men?”

  Cottrell nodded. Lantern light splashed across the road.

  “Which way were they heading, did you say?”

  Cottrell’s arm shot out toward the north. “Same direction as you. Is Captain Sutherland here?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “You tell him Alan Cottrell says hello.” The gate creaked and the sheepdog scuttled out. Cottrell told it to sit. Immediately the hind legs gave way and its tail swished at the road.

  Clayton touched his fingers to his lower lip. “Are you sure these men were Republican Army?”

  “Well, if that’s what you want to call them. They were armed to the teeth and they weren’t Tans, so who else could they be? Where’s Captain Sutherland? He ought to be here if you’re going after so many men.”

  “Sutherland is…”

  “He’s slacking off, if you ask me. He ought to be out here leading his men. If you don’t keep moving, you’ll never catch them. They were marching two by two all up the road with one man at the front.”

  “What did this man look like?”

  “It was hard to see. My cows kept getting in the way. He was tall. I don’t know what else.”

  “Are you alone?”

  Cottrell fiddled with the buttons on his coat. “It’s just me and the wife and the dog. Has been for some years now. My wife is up in Galway with her sister for the week. I got people who come by in the day to help me with the cows.”

  Clayton turned away from Cottrell and waved the column on.

  As I walked past, Clayton pulled me out of line. He talked in a murmur, so that Cottrell couldn’t hear. “Sooner or later, the real Tans are going to come marching up this road and when they do, that farmer will tell them exactly how many of us there were and exactly how many guns we have and exactly what direction we’re heading in. This man needs killing. Do you understand?”

  I nodded.

  Cottrell nodded back and smiled.

  Clayton rested his arm on Cottrell’s shoulder. “This man will take down the details of what you saw, Mr. Cottrell. The rest of us are moving on.”

  “Captain Sutherland…” Cottrell cleared his throat. “Well, he usually makes some kind of compensation for any assistance. Nothing big, mind you. I did get up out of bed and all.” He raised the lantern and it lit up his gap-toothed face. “We had an understanding.”

  Clayton tapped me on the arm. “You heard what the gentleman said. Compensation for assistance.”

  Cottrell waited until the column was further up the road, as if he didn’t want them to hear. “Well, as I said, there were fifteen of them. And they all had rifles, as best I could see.”

  I thought of the Tans writing down what Cottrell said. Anger crackled through me. I put my hand inside my coat and grabbed the Webley’s barrel.

  “Are you going to write any of this down? Sutherland usually pays me five pound. I was wondering if you could do a little better this time, seeing as it’s, you know, useful information. You’ll catch them all with what I’m telling you.”

  In one movement, I pulled the gun from my coat and smacked it across the old man’s head.

  Cottrell spun around. He fell against the gate. His lantern broke on the road and its fuel burst into flames.

  I dragged Cottrell into his house and put him in his chair by the fire. He was still breathing. I looked around for a telephone, in case he had one. I was going to rip it out of the wall. But he didn’t even have electricity. The dog sat and watched us. Then I walked up to the column, which had stopped around a bend on the road.

  Clayton was waiting. “Is it done?” He took hold of my elbow. “Is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t kill him, did you?”

  “He’ll be out for long enough.” I looked back. The lantern’s fire was an amber bubble in the black.

  “I wanted him out for good.”

  “Then you do it.” I knew there was reason for what he wanted, but I could not convince myself.

  Clayton didn’t say another word. He pulled the Mauser from its wooden holster and went down and shot the old man. I could see muzzle flashes through the windows. When the dog started barking, Clayton shot it as well.

  I walked on. A dull and thumping numbness spread out through my veins. The dead farmer and his dog and his steam-breathing cows dropped back into the dark and we left them there. I moved in step with the column. My body slipped into the rhythm of the march, while in my thoughts I drifted far across the sea.

  CHAPTER 15

  A ruined church stood black against the sky. It had no roof or windows and the churchyard bristled with stone Celtic crosses. Figures in tattered clothing seemed to drift on the wind-scalped fields.

  By the time I ducked through the doorway, people had already lit their stoves and were cooking rations. White fuel tablets burned with a salty blue flame. From all around came the rattle of mess tins and mumbling talk and the bobbing suns of lit cigarettes.

  I crouched down next to Crow and set up my stove. I borrowed a match off him and held it to the tablet. A twitching violet flame crawled across its surface.

  Crow leaned over, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. He uncorked his water bottle and half filled my mess tin. Then he pulled a can from his satchel. “Now you see this stuff? It’s
called Maconochie.” The cigarette waggled in his mouth. A clump of ash fell into my mess tin. “You boil this can in the water before you open it. You have to eat this stuff hot or it’ll give you the cramps. When it’s done, throw your biscuits into the water. Where are your biscuits?” Crow reached in and grabbed them from my bag. “Boil them into mush. You can’t eat them any other way. One of these packets will have raisins in the biscuits. They’re called Squashed Flies, because that’s what they look like. Mash it all up and have that for dessert, and throw in everything else you can find.” Crow turned back to his own stove. He pulled his rain cape over his head, using his rifle like a tent pole.

  “Crow?”

  “What?”

  “Those people back there. The ones the farmer saw. That was Hagan, wasn’t it?”

  “Could have been anyone. That old fart’s probably so blind, it could have been the Tans that he saw and mistook them for us and then when we came along, he thought we were Tans. But I daresay it was Hagan. I heard he sometimes comes down to the Burren, which is close to where we are now. I hear rumors that there’s peace talks going on, and maybe that brought him down. There’s always rumors, and they’re never quite lies but they’re never quite the truth, either.”

  Dew had settled everywhere.

  The fuel tablet’s smoke was like grit in my eyes. I used a spoon to roll the Maconochie back and forth. Tiny bubbles rose to the surface.

  Crow hummed to himself. Smoke billowed from the anthill mound of his cape.

  Some men had lit a fire with wood gathered from the hedges. Its light bled across the church’s fieldstone walls. They hung capes across empty window spaces, so the fire wouldn’t show outside. Wind moaned through the stone crosses.

  I spooned my Maconochie tin out of the water and jammed a knife twice in the top, making an X. Then I prised back each of the four triangles. The tin was hot, so I held it between my palm and chest.

  Meat stew with potatoes and turnips. It reminded me of school lunches, wedged on a bench between Bosley and Hettie, scooping the food from tin plates with a spoon too big for my mouth.