The Promise of Light

by Paul Watkins

  My job was to guard the beach and make sure no one passed through in the night.

  Moon-bright water lay calm on the horizon. The scrape of boots on stone echoed clearly across the Burren. Whispers slipped through the ferns.

  The white-painted walls of the farmhouse were like a sheet of bone. The place seemed empty. I wondered how many people were hiding inside and whether they knew yet who had come to help them.

  The night dragged my patience away. I wanted to cross the distance to the farmhouse in long sprinting strides and not wait for the sun to come up.

  As the cold picked its way through the fibers of my clothes, I began to think of what would happen tomorrow. The Tans would come back with their plane. Perhaps they were already loading the Crossley trucks with men whose anger and instincts still lived in the trenches of France. Then even Connemara wouldn’t hide us. I imagined Crow and Clayton and the rest of us all filing into the mouth of a cave someplace in the treeless hills. There we would lie down to rest and the cave would be sealed until long after the Tans had stopped searching and gone home and died of old age. And when the time of our sleeping was over, we would unseal the cave and walk out into a world of strangers.

  The even rustle of the waves through the old mussel shells broke suddenly as someone jumped down to the beach.

  I peered from the rocks where I was hiding. I lifted the Webley slowly from its holster, hearing its forward sight drag across the leather.

  A man stood ankle deep in the shells, looking out to sea.

  My eyes blurred from staring. The dark seethed with tiny geometric shapes.

  Then the man dropped down to one knee. He held out an arm to steady himself. It was Clayton. He moved as if to stand up, but fell back. Shells crunched under him and the next wave brushed at his legs.

  I left my cover and crawled across. My palms dug into the brittle mussel shells.

  Clayton turned. A wave doused him with foam. He reached out, as if to push me away. His fingers raked down my face. They were covered in blood. Clayton’s breathing popped and spluttered, as if he was gargling spit. His throat had been cut. He kept raising his hands to push me away. The wet fingers dug into my cheeks, hard at first but growing weaker.

  A wave soaked us and rumbled away, stirring the mussel shells in flickers of opal and black.

  I held my hand against the gash across his throat. It didn’t do any good.

  Slowly his eyes closed. His hands fell away and lay half curled by his side. Another surge of water stole the heat from our bodies. Clayton kicked out at the next onrushing wave. Then he was dead.

  Strange how heavy he became in my arms. The next wave washed over us and as it pulled back, the clear water poured from his mouth like molten glass.

  I felt strangely cold at seeing him this way. It seemed to me that Clayton had long ago given himself up for dead. He had prepared himself, pushing friends away so that he wouldn’t be missed when the time came. Everybody knew that his place was in the war, but no one seemed to think he would survive it.

  For a long time, I listened, waiting for the swish of someone moving through the ferns. But I knew that whoever had killed Clayton was already through the ring and on their way to find help. No shape looked familiar in the silhouette tangle of rock and grass and trees inland. I knew I would have to get to the farm and let them know that the ring had been broken. We’d all have to move on before the Tans returned.

  I crawled to the place where I knew Crow was hiding, in an outcrop of rock that overlooked the road. As I slithered through the ferns, I saw Crow’s darting silhouette as he closed in on my movements.

  I stopped him from killing me, but not by very much. He had his straight edge razor out.

  For a moment, I wondered if it was Crow who had killed Clayton. I could have thought of half-a-dozen reasons why he might. But I said nothing. Instead, I just told him what happened.

  Crow said Clayton had been carrying maps that we would need on our way north.

  Clayton was gone when we got there. The tide had pulled him away. We could see his body drifting on deep water, hands seeming to trace the arc of tiny waves as they swelled past him. He was too far out to try and bring him back.

  * * *

  We moved toward the farm. I crawled after Crow’s muddy boots, stopping and listening and crawling, then stopping again a while later. When the breeze blew, we moved more quickly, our movements hidden in the shuffling of fern branches.

  There was no way to find every man in the ring and tell them what had happened. We just had to hope that they didn’t shoot us by mistake.

  It took half an hour to reach a wall that ran behind the barn. Through the stones, I could see the barn’s corrugated roof. Its rippled iron was the color of pewter. A stretch of mud lay between the wall and the open barn door. Puddles reflected the moon. The farmhouse still looked empty.

  Crow raised his head over the wall. “You in the farm!” His voice was deafening in the quiet that covered the fields. “We’re from the second Clare Brigade. I’m coming in.”

  The farmhouse stayed silent and dark.

  I sat with my back to the wall, looking up the slope. I watched for the blink of knife blades or the moon catching light off gunmetal. For a moment, it occurred to me that everyone had gone. Not just the Tans. And perhaps the only ones here were me and Crow, creeping in fear of our imagination.

  Crow cupped his hand to his mouth. “Can you hear me?” he called to the blank farmhouse windows. When no answer came, he slumped down behind the wall. His voice was a whisper again. “We’ll have to hope they heard us. We could always just run, Ben. Just you and me heading for Connemara. We’d be safer than in the group.” He turned to me, wanting me to agree. His eyes were silvery. “We’d stand a better chance.”

  I hadn’t told him about Hagan. It was a private thing that I didn’t want to share until I had met with the man. “We can’t just run out on them.”

  “No, I don’t suppose we could.” Crow nodded.

  I said I’d go first and Crow didn’t try to stop me. I stood, blood storming in my head, jumped the wall and sprinted. The mud seemed to spread out forever. I dove at the barn’s open doorway. My legs lifted high in the air and then the ground crunched against my chest. I skidded along the floor, through dirt and scattered straw. Then for a while, I lay still. The huge-treaded wheel of a tractor arced up in front of me.

  Outside, drops of water clung in silver bubbles along the door frame.

  Crow’s grubby face appeared and then the rest of him. He flew into the barn and belly flopped onto the straw.

  Then a bullet snapped into the wood over our heads. The drops of water lined along the doorway shuddered and fell. Another round hit the barn. Wood chips scattered across the floor.

  Crow covered his neck with his hands. He buried his face in the dirt.

  As I scrambled under the tractor, I caught sight of helmeted men advancing across the fields, running and crouching and running again.

  Then the walls of the barn flew apart. Bullets punched fist-sized holes through the wood and clanked across the corrugated iron roof. The air became foggy with dust. Volley after volley crashed in from the field. A bullet struck the tractor’s radiator grill. Musty water poured onto my head. Then rubber-smelling air from a punctured tire burped into my face.

  Gun flashes gouged at the dark from the farmhouse windows. The men in the field dove for cover.

  The tractor’s radiator water trickled down my chest in clammy streams.

  Crow brushed woodchips from his shoulders. “We have to get to the farmhouse before this whole place falls down on top of us.”

  The door to the house stood open, across the cratered farmyard mud. Someone crouched in the doorway. The paleness of a hand waved toward us.

  Crow lunged across the yard and I followed. A feeling of nakedness surrounded me. My boots splashed through the puddles. The air seemed filled with cracking whips.

  The snarl of Crow’s breathing suddenly rose
to a cry. He fell and rolled over. A puddle shattered like a mirror as he splashed through it.

  I grabbed hold of his collar and a jet of earth sprang up beside me. I dragged him toward the door. His trailing legs left a broad path through the mud.

  A chunk of the doorframe vanished. Grit spattered my cheeks. Then I was inside, let go of Crow and fell forward. Bullets thumped into the walls. It was dark in the house. A pair of boots clumped to a stop near my head and I looked up.

  A man held a shotgun to my face.

  “Are you Hagan?” I didn’t try to get up.

  “No.” His teeth were chalky pegs in the dark.

  “Then bring me to him. Please.” I used up all my breath.

  After a moment, the man lowered his shotgun. “Hagan’s not here. I’m Tiffin. Hagan left me in charge, so if you’ve got a message, you’d better give it to me.”

  Crow hugged his shin, eyes shut tight. We carried him down to the cellar.

  Tiffin’s clothes hung in rags. He looked more like a scarecrow than a man. “When we came through town last night, the people there said that the radios were talking of an armistice. So as soon as this farmer Tolliver had us bedded down for the night, Hagan went back into the town to hear the radio’s evening news. Then the Tans came through and I haven’t seen him since.”

  “What did Hagan look like?” I thought maybe I’d seen him in the town.

  “Last I saw, he was wearing a green corduroy coat.”

  I didn’t remember any green corduroy. “The Tans have gone for help. That’s what we came to tell you. We’ve got to break out now, while it’s still dark.”

  “There’s too many of them out there. We can’t break out. And you almost died breaking in. They’ll be coming at us again any minute.”

  A staircase made of flagstones brought us down into a dirt-floored cellar that was already crowded with wounded. A woman who must have been Mrs. Tolliver pointed to a clear space on the floor and we laid Crow there on a bed of potato sacking.

  “I don’t have any more bandages,” she said to Tiffin. Her voice was quivering, as if she expected Tiffin to beat her for running out of supplies.

  “Just do the best you can. All right?”

  “But with what?” She held up her hands and they were shaking. Her hair was wrapped in a flower-print scarf. It gave her the face of a child.

  Tiffin pulled off his flannel shirt and handed it to her. He said she could tear it up as a bandage.

  I took off my trench coat and waistcoat and heaped them all on the floor while I unbuttoned my shirt. The collar was stiff with dried blood and old sweat.

  Now all Tiffin had was an undershirt, so I gave him my coat and he had to roll up the sleeves.

  Crow had turned very pale and he was sweating heavily. A gouge on the top of his head had spread a bloody sunburst across his weathered skull. Through the tear in his trousers where the bullet had gone through, I could see his kneecap exposed. I knew that if we moved on, he would have to stay behind. I think he knew it, too. His eyes stayed shut and his crooked mouth did not show pain as much as it showed disappointment that it should all end here for him.

  Tiffin pulled me away.

  I followed him upstairs and into the front room. A table had been tipped against the wall and chairs lay in a pile. Our boots crunched over broken glass. Tiffin stood beside the window. He broke open the shotgun and slid two copper-ended cartridges into the breech. Then he closed the gun again and handed it to me. “You’re a Yank.” He said it as if perhaps I didn’t know myself.

  I shivered without my coat. “I need to find Hagan.”

  “You might have come too late. The Tans will be here any minute.” He held his hand out at the patch of grass beyond the window frame. “This is your ground. Anybody that moves out there, it’s your job to put them away.” He pulled a stiff leather cartridge bag from his shoulder and set it on the floor beside me. then he walked into another room.

  I dragged a chair across the floor and sat down by the window. Pain like an old man’s arthritis began to loosen from my legs, like bandages unraveled. I felt myself falling asleep. Then my foot shifted and I knocked over the cartridge bag. The noise of shotgun shells rattling inside jolted me awake.

  The land outside seemed empty and calm again. But when a breeze came wandering through the gorse, I heard the rustle of bodies as Tans closed in on the farm.

  A rock seemed to shift by the wall. Then a face appeared.

  I jumped up out of the chair, squeezed the shotgun’s trigger and realized the safety was still on. I released it and fired, stunning myself with the blast inside the room. Cordite smoke billowed around me.

  The face disappeared. Footsteps. Now the fields seemed to shudder with movement.

  Suddenly helmeted heads rose up from behind the far wall and gun flashes burst in my eyes. The window frame shattered. Stone dust peppered my skin.

  Men were running towards the house, doubled over and carrying guns.

  I felt the stun of a bullet pass by my face and rip a chunk of plaster from the wall.

  Something flipped past from one of the other windows and I heard one of the soldiers cry out.

  The blast of a hand grenade was like a door slamming in my face. It knocked me back into the room and my lungs were outlined with pain. I crawled back to the window and could see nothing but smoke.

  When it began to clear, I saw two men lying just in front of the window. Another was dragging himself back toward the wall. His leg was twisted the wrong way.

  I broke open the gun and started to reload. Then a shape swung in front of the window and someone lunged through the frame.

  It was one of the soldiers. He grabbed my hair and pulled me to him. He had hold of my throat and made me drop the gun. I cried out and jabbed my elbow into his chest but he held on. He was breathing in my face. I smelled old tobacco. He dug his fingers into my windpipe and blue flashes burst behind my eyes. I couldn’t cry out any more. He hooked one knee into the window frame and started to crawl into the room. I smacked him in the jaw with my elbow and for a moment his body grew heavy as if I’d knocked him out. But then he sank his fingers deeper into my throat and I could feel my consciousness bleeding away. I threw myself at the window frame, jamming his body against the glass. I heard the pain in his voice and his fingers slipped away. I jammed him once more and heard the frame crack with his weight. His fingers came at me again and scratched at my eyes. He had hold of my wrist so I bit him, sinking my teeth in and feeling the blood well into my mouth. He yelled and deafened me and as soon as he let go, I tugged the Webley out of its holster. I swung it up toward him. He grabbed my arm, but his grip didn’t hold. I set the barrel under his chin and for a second I could see the brightness of his eyes in the dark. He spat in my face and thrashed forward and I pulled the trigger. His head jerked up and his jaw shattered. Fragments of his teeth dug into my face like shards of broken pottery. Sparks flew out of the Webley’s cylinder and blinded me. Then, while his muscles still shuddered in the last sputters of his dying, I stuffed his body back out the window and heard it fall heavily on the grass.

  It felt as if his fingers were still sunk into my throat. I spat out his blood and cocked the hammer on the Webley, in case someone else tried to climb in.

  But no one did. One man still dragged himself back toward the wall. His tunic was shredded. He groped his way up the stones and then fell down on the other side.

  I hunched down to reload the shotgun, fumbling with the brass buckle of the cartridge bag. Sweat cut trails through the dirt on my face.

  The firing continued on the other side of the house. Its thatched roof was held down with heavy ropes that had been weighted with stones. They dangled like strange jewelry and the Tans seemed to be using them for target practice. I heard the ricochet of bullets off the stones and then a thump as the rock smashed back against the house. Orders barked from room to room and another man was dragged coughing to the basement.

  I held my hands to my thr
oat and gagged. The muscles twitched in my arms and legs and I could not calm them down. It hurt to swallow. Anger kept flaring up inside me. I wanted to lean out of the window and shoot that Tan a few more times and kill him all over again. I couldn’t help it. My nerves were buzzing with rage. Then suddenly it left me, and all I felt was tired.

  My killing ground stayed quiet. If I stared for too long at one spot, it seemed to shift and come alive. The only things that remained still were the dead men lying on the grass. The dew collected on them, just as it had on Stanley.

  I was thirsty. The smoke had dried me out and my stomach was sour and empty. Part of me waited for Tans to rush screaming out of the dark, and the rest of me daydreamed about porridge with brown sugar and slices of apple.

  Hagan was probably gone. Or the Tans had caught him. They would have sent for reinforcements and at first light they would attack again. Our ammunition would not last. If they brought an artillery piece, the farm would be blown in around us. We could not break out, because now they owned the ring. And even if we did, they would catch up with us after a few miles. For a while I tricked myself into imagining the others, lying dead in the bomb-smashed beams of the house, while I ran safe and invisible through the fields to a place where my father was hiding.

  But it was this simple: There would be no running away. After what had happened in the Lahinch barracks, there would be no giving in, either. All of us knew that.

  I had come this far, but I would not meet my father. I told myself it was enough to know the truth and enough to have had a man and a woman raise me as if I were their son. Surely, with this war about to swallow me, that had to be enough.

  During the Great War, as I read the headlines of Ypres and Verdun and the Somme, I was never able to picture the grand strategy. For me, it always boiled down to single faces in the mud, frozen by a photograph or by the way someone told it in a story. That was how I understood the war. Instead of considering the world’s new order when the war was over, I found myself wondering how it must feel to be there in the trenches and know almost for certain that death was coming with the great rolling thunder of artillery and the iron-hooded soldiers rushing in.