The Promise of Light

by Paul Watkins

Muscles trembled in my legs, ready to explode and start me running.

  Two men jumped out of the truck. They unfolded a map and looked at it under the headlights. Both men took turns pointing at the map, then one man laughed and knocked off the other man’s beret. They folded up the map and got back into the cab. The parking brake rattled again and the truck headed up toward the Cliffs of Moher.

  Crow walked to the river. “It’s the dusk patrol. They go out every night and every night they get lost. They’re not looking for us.” He cupped water in his hands and washed his face, running fingertips over the smoothness of his scalp.

  I heard a gasp as freezing water reached Crow’s skin. “Will Stanley keep his word?”

  “He will, because I’m paying him half now and half later. And it’s not just for the money, either. With a hundred people like Stan, I could have won this war by now. I’m tired of running it all by myself.” Crow walked out from under the bridge.

  I stayed hidden in the shadows. It made me nervous to stand in the open, as if my body was locked into an Enfield rifle’s sights.

  “Tomorrow night, you make your way across the fields to the statue of the Black Virgin. Across the fields, mind you. If you go by the road, someone might see. You must arrive by ten o’clock.”

  “Why do you need me?” I thought of the Virgin’s stone face.

  “Because from tomorrow night onward, we’ll all be answering to Clayton. You’ll need one of us to take you up north to find Hagan, and Clayton is the only one who can give permission for that. Hagan is your way out of here. He’s the only one in this part of the country who could find you a place on a boat going home.” Crow’s silhouette folded its arms against the navy sky.

  “Maybe I could find him by myself.”

  It was as if Crow didn’t hear. He stepped into the dark and vanished through the rustling dune grass.

  For a few minutes longer, I stayed huddled under the bridge. I remembered how I’d promised myself before I came to Ireland that I wouldn’t leave until I had found out the truth. If I didn’t find out, the uncertainty would stump after me like a cripple for the rest of my life. So I couldn’t go back yet.

  But I couldn’t stay either, because as soon as Baldwin talked, the soldiers would come hunting for me in their mud-colored clothes. I was becoming superstitious about them, believing they could smell my fear the way I’d been superstitious about people at the bank smelling fear. It sparked along the branches of their nerves. They would close in, sure of the tracks, because I couldn’t hide.

  * * *

  Singing. A flat and tuneless hymn rose from the runner beans and squat potato plants in Guthrie’s garden.

  I could see a man sitting in the dirt.

  The singing stopped. “I got to talk to you, boy.” It was Tarbox. His hand flew up to say hello. A beer bottle was stuck on his thumb and he waved it back and forth.

  Guthrie stood in the doorway. His nightshirt hung down to his ankles. “Aren’t you gone yet?” He shuffled over to Tarbox. Then he curled his fingers into a fist and rapped on Tarbox’s forehead. “Hello? Hello? Haven’t you got a wife at home? Hello?”

  “It’s because of my wife that I’m here.” He swatted Guthrie’s hand away.

  “Sitting in my runner beans?”

  “She says you should save your life and get rid of this boy here. She says the Tans will stove in your fuzzy old head. She says you can’t look after yourself, let alone this boy. What’s that bloody funny medicine smell?”

  “Udder balm for my feet.” Guthrie stood back. “I got sore feet. Now get out of my beans.”

  Tarbox lifted himself up. “I’m sure that’s why Lily Gisby won’t go near you.”

  “Oh no, don’t bring her into it.”

  “You should just go ahead and marry the woman. You’re in love with her after all.”

  “It’s Lily who’s in love with me. Everybody says so.”

  “She forgets who you are sometimes.”

  “Well, she loves me when she remembers. And if you must know, I have been thinking about a more permanent arrangement between Lily and myself.”

  Tarbox didn’t reply. He wiggled a finger in his ear, as if Guthrie’s voice was only a ringing in his head. He swayed in front of me. “I got nothing against you. But Guthrie’s already been through enough with his son, who’s off fighting a war he can’t win.”

  “Careful what you say.” Guthrie lifted the stalk of a runner bean. When he let go, it flopped back into the dirt.

  “Oh, it’s true.” Tarbox looked around the garden, as if the rows of cabbages and Roly Poly and Margaret were an audience who would applaud him when he stopped speaking. “Clayton was always talking about the millions of Irishmen ready to rise up when they hear some magic trumpet blast. But there’s not millions. There’s just Clayton and Crow and me and half a dozen others, who go running through the fields at night and shoot soldiers in the back.”

  “You tell that to Clayton when you see him.”

  “Clayton is a dead man.” Tarbox quickly stood back, as if he expected Guthrie to strike him. “You know it’s true.”

  “Oh, and what an emotional speech you’re giving us tonight, Crabman. It’s an inspiration to every bum drunkard in Lahinch. You might want to have been speaking it louder, mind you. I don’t think the Tans in their barracks on the hill could hear the last few words.”

  Tarbox backed up, aiming his finger at Guthrie and trying to figure out what to say. Then he tripped over the runner beans. The thin wooden support poles collapsed on top of him.

  Guthrie helped him to his feet.

  “I’m sorry for saying it.” Tarbox wore a scarf of beans around his neck.

  “It might be true.”

  “I have to tend my crab pots.” Tarbox walked off down the alley, still wearing Guthrie’s beans and with a beer bottle stuck on his thumb.

  I heard waves thumping the shore. “I could go north to find Hagan. Crow says he could help get me on a ship going home. I could go now if you want.”

  * * *

  Guthrie closed his blue-viened fist around the iron poker. He whacked the fire. Peat crumbled into marmalade-colored ashes. “Don’t you listen to Tarbox. You stay here as long as you have to. And besides, Hagan is best left alone. You’d have to find him first and that could be damn near impossible. The British have been trying to track him down for years. You won’t have better luck.”

  “Crow says he lives up in the Connemara hills.”

  “They say he’s up there and that sometimes he comes south to the Burren. When soldiers are attacked up in that area, they always blame it on Hagan, but they never know for sure. He could have been dead for ages and all that’s living on now are the stories they tell about him. And if he’s not dead, then he’s old. Sometimes on the winter nights, I think how he must feel the chill, now that he’s getting on in life.”

  I tried to picture Hagan, but the man seemed only a vague presence far to the north, crag-faced and cold in the rain.

  Steam puffed from the kettle in the fireplace. Guthrie walked over to it, wrapped a handkerchief around its handle, and poured boiling water into a teapot. Then he took the nightcap from his head, jammed it on the pot, and shuffled back to his seat. “It’s true Hagan used to get people out of the country. But it’s too far to go. You’d never reach there alive.”

  “I’ll leave here as soon as I can, Mr. Guthrie, but before I do, I want to find out who my parents were. And I think if anybody knows, you do.”

  A ripple moved along Guthrie’s jaw. “Is that so? Well, I got nothing for you there. Why dig up old bones, anyway?”

  “You do know, don’t you?”

  He hobbled into the kitchen. “Tea?”

  Now I stood. “You do know!”

  Guthrie stood in the doorway to the kitchen. “Look at me now. Look me in the eye and listen to what I’m saying. I don’t know a damn thing. Nothing. And even if I did, I’d tell you to leave it alone. What happened might have happened for a r
eason. To save you some misery perhaps. To save misery from others. Leave it alone. Please.”

  Guthrie had shut up like a clam, the same way Pratt and Duffy did. I knew I’d get nothing more out of him. “I meant to tell you sooner. They’re setting Clayton free tomorrow night. I’ll be there. It’s the least I could do after all you’ve done for me. Maybe I can help.”

  “Clayton doesn’t want anybody’s help. I can tell you that from experience.”

  * * *

  An army truck grumbled up the road to Ennistymon.

  I lay in bed, wondering how I’d be if I’d grown up here. By now, perhaps I’d think like Crow, far beyond the line of no forgiving.

  If he or Clayton wouldn’t help me and help me very soon, I’d have to set out by myself. That was clear now. I had enough patience left to wait until I met Clayton, but no more than that.

  I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t even close my eyes. I climbed from my bed and dressed. I attached the collar to my shirt with two silver studs, one at the front and one at the back. Then I pulled the suspenders over my shoulders. From the suitcase, I took my father’s cylinder and crept downstairs with my boots in one hand so as not to disturb the even snuffle of Guthrie’s sleeping.

  The western sky seemed plated with the colors of old bronze.

  As I walked along the beach, I could make out the whale-belly hulk of the Madrigal, still slumped beyond the waves. Foam coasted in on the high tide. It bubbled down through the sand before it reached my feet.

  I unscrewed the cap from the cylinder and threw it out into the water. With the next wave that rumbled up onto the sand, I poured out the ashes. It was dark and I could barely see them fall. The sea foam gathered them and folded them away into the tide.

  I felt no great sadness. It was a man reduced to this but the man was gone from these ashes. There was no need for tears in saying good-bye.

  I threw the cylinder as far as I could out into the sea. As the nickel sides trapped night-blue light and vanished into a swell, I caught sight of a rowboat on the water. It lay a few hundred yards from the shore. Oars creaked in their oarlocks. The rower stood and leaned over the side. It was Tarbox, out gathering crabs from his pots. He paddled hard to catch the waves that surfed him back to shore. He sang to himself as he rowed.

  I thought about the times when I’d gone crab-catching with Hettie, at low tide in Mackerel Cove. We used sticks made from white-birch twigs to stir the tide pools, in case a crab hid there. Sometimes the mud exploded and two claws rose up out of the brown, clamping down on the stick. The crab struggled, blue-green shell with spikes at each end, flippering the shallow water with its back-leg paddles. But the crab never let go. I could pick it up and set it in a potato sack and then have to cut the end off my stick before I could go back to hunting for more crabs. The twig got shorter and shorter, and after a while I’d have to find myself a new one. When Hettie and I came home, we’d empty our sacks into an old bathtub out behind her father’s garage—pinching, slow-scrabbling crabs and clots of sand and torn-off lengths of stick.

  I pulled off my boots and socks and waded out to help Tarbox. The cold made my muscles cringe.

  Two wire baskets lodged in the bow were jammed with scuttling crabs.

  We dragged his boat up to the dunes. Tarbox lashed it to the trunk of a driftwood tree. His cart stood nearby.

  Tarbox rubbed the heat back into his hands. “What are you doing here, anyway? Usually the only ones I see are the Tans when they come to pester me.”

  “I couldn’t sleep. I was scattering my father’s ashes.”

  “Ah.” Tarbox nodded. His wide eyes blinked the strange bronze color that glimmered on the horizon. “Last year, a man named O’Keefe came down to the sea with the ashes of his wife. He scattered them and all the while he was yelling ‘Bye-bye dear. Bye-bye.’ And the wind was blowing the wrong way … Oh, it was a hell of a mess.”

  I looked at the broad flat space of Tarbox’s forehead, and the sharp stump of his nose. He looked as if he’d been badly chiseled out of stone.

  Tarbox lifted a crab basket and set it down on the sand. “I don’t mean you any harm with the things I said back at Guthrie’s. It’s just that I’d hate to see him end his days before he gets his hands on Lily Gisby. Or her hands on him. Or however you want to believe the story. They’re both mad for each other, but neither one wants to admit it. It’s been going on for so many years that if he did turn around one day and said he loved her, she wouldn’t know what to do with herself. That would probably be the end of it, and I dare say Guthrie knows that. I think he keeps her away so that they’ll stay in love.”

  I saw something glinting near the bow. It was a brass crucifix, nailed into the wood of the forward seat. The cross had been polished, while the rest of the metal on Tarbox’s boat was crusted with salt spray and rust.

  Tarbox kicked at the crab pot and the crabs rustled inside. “I think you’re bad luck, Mr. Sheridan. You can’t bring good to anyone here. And any place you go, people will be risking their lives to give you a meal or a bed. Hagan won’t help you. I think he’s been dead for years. I hear so many damn stories about him up in the north. People say when Hagan did as much as look your way, you could hear shovels digging the earth of your grave. But whatever you do, the longer you stay around here, the better chance the Tans have of finding you.”

  Now I stepped closer. “They’ll find out a lot sooner if you keep talking so loud. It’s my life you’re juggling here.”

  “But it’s you I’m talking to, not them.” Tarbox aimed a finger at the dunes, as if the soldiers were out there, eyes reflecting light, and he could see them. “Or are you forgetting already who you are yourself? The way I hear Crow talk, you never knew to begin with.”

  CHAPTER 10

  “Bugger!” Guthrie’s slippered foot stamped in the hallway. Morning light through a stained-glass window in the front door spread blue and ruby light across the floor. “That damn McGarrity has forgotten to deliver the milk!”

  “You could drink your tea without it.” I walked out to the hall, sleep peeling back from my body.

  “Tea without milk?” Guthrie lifted the empty jug that he always left outside his front door last thing at night. He waved the jug in the air. Usually, McGarrity would have filled it long before sunrise from one of the dull metal churns on the back of his cart. “Oh, don’t be a heathen, boy.”

  “How do you expect to stay healthy anyway, with just a mugful of tea and a slab of that gnarly old soda bread for breakfast? You never buy the fresh stuff. You buy it when it’s a day old and half the price. And when I bring home bread still warm from the ovens, you don’t touch it.”

  “My bread’s not gnarly.” Guthrie’s voice collapsed into muttering. “It’s perfectly good.”

  “Calm down. I’ll go and buy you some more milk.”

  “I don’t have to calm down. I’m an old fart and I don’t have to calm down for anyone.” I watched a smile work its way through the lock-jawed grumpiness on his face. “Except perhaps for Lily.”

  I pulled a shilling from my waistcoat pocket. “How much milk will this get me?”

  Guthrie took the coin and squinted at it, as if this shilling might be worth less than any others. “More than we need. Get the milk from Lily’s Hotel. They’ll always sell a pint or two. You could get it on the cheap since you work there. Mention my name and you might just get it for free.”

  “If McGarrity is Boycotted, why do you still let him deliver milk to you?”

  “There’s no place else to get it. He works for an English-owned dairy in the area. Tans burned down the others. Hurry, now.” His eyebrows bobbed up and down. “Or there’ll be trouble.”

  * * *

  I walked past the town hall, my thoughts still muffled with dreams. A sign above the entrance gave names and dates of ships that had gone down near the bay. It listed the survivors and the dead, names carefully painted in yellow on a blue background.

  A man sat on a crate by the door,
a basket of eggs at his feet. He rolled one of the eggs gently between his palms while he waited for people to buy.

  I walked with my hands clutched behind my back. It made me move with a plod. At home, I would have walked with my hands in my pockets, but I didn’t dare unstitch them after what Mrs. Fuller had said about men being shot for having hands in pockets.

  Jackdaws cackled in the street. They marched on the slate rooftops, feathers black and shining like splinters of coal. Their beaks were gunmetal grey.

  Tarbox pulled his cart up from the beach. He stopped in front of the Town Hall and wiped sweat from his forehead onto his sleeve. The cart was jammed with crab baskets, blanketed in seaweed. He nodded at me, but did not smile.

  McGarrity’s cart clattered across the road and down an alley. The horse he used to pull his cart was chestnut brown and had a sagging back.

  McGarrity reined in the horse and climbed down. The sleeves of his too-big jacket had been rolled up to his forearms.

  An army truck rumbled down the main street, windscreen reflecting the sky.

  I had learned to take the rush of acid in my guts whenever the soldiers passed by. I just kept walking, head down as if looking for cigarette butts in the gutter.

  Then a boy appeared from a doorway. He stood between me and the truck. Clutched in his fingers, nails bitten down to the pith, was a sharp-edged knot of flint.

  The Crossley truck was twenty feet away.

  Suddenly, the boy’s arm swung back and snapped forward.

  A spider web of bright silver splashed onto the windscreen. The sky’s reflection vanished.

  The boy spun on his heel and started running. He plowed headfirst into my stomach.

  The air punched out of my lungs. I tipped over backward and the boy fell on top of me.

  The truck stopped. Its brakes squealed and scattered the jackdaws from the chimney pots. A soldier jumped out. He grabbed the boy by the hair and lifted him almost off the ground. Then the boy’s hair tore out in the soldier’s hand and a patch of white showed on the boy’s scalp. “You’re in for it now, you little fuck.” He threw away the clot of hair and took another grip on the boy’s neck.