The Promise of Light (16 page)

A truck was moving down the road. It jolted over the potholes. As the truck passed, Crow and I had to climb up on the wall because the road was so narrow.

The truck-driver’s face was pink in a breeze through the open window. More soldiers filled the back, rifles between their knees.

I could call to them. The whole story wedged in my throat, ready to spill out fast if they would listen. For a moment, I didn’t care about Crow or Tarbox or sad-faced Mabel Fuller. The soldiers would hear me out. I could tell them everything now and soon be going home. The chance would vanish, as I hid myself away in the basements and attics of Lahinch. If they found me after that, there’d be no point in explaining.

Then I saw Crow’s hand in the corner of my eye. He had twisted the grass around his fingers, cutting off the blood. His fingernails drained white. He was watching me and he knew what I was thinking.

I saw his face suddenly stripped of age, the way my father and mother would have known him, in the days before they went away and never came back. Then I imagined all of them, Tarbox and Fuller and Mabs, all young again and friends and handing around Willoughby’s letters that told about my growing up.

I couldn’t turn them in. Not even to save myself. My face grew hot from the shame of having thought it.

The chance was gone now. Before long I’ll be one of Crow’s people, I thought, moving across the fields at night, wrapped in a trench coat and leather gaiters.

“Harold!” A woman’s voice called from somewhere in the crags of sand. “Harold Crow!” It was the voice of an old woman, high-pitched and jabbing our ears.

First I could see nothing. Then the woman drifted over a ridge. She wore a dress that came down to her feet and a shawl covered her shoulders. In her hand, she was carrying a mug. “Harold, I’ve brought you some soup!”

“It’s Mrs. Gisby.” Crow stared at the approaching mass of cloth. “She owns the hotel in Lahinch. She’s my boss, believe it or not.”

Mrs. Gisby had a smile-wrinkled face. She was flushed from the work of moving across the sand. At the wall, she stopped and Crow helped her down to the road. Then she held out a tin mug of something brown and clear. “I saw you coming up the road.” She held the mug up to Crow’s mouth. It clinked against his front teeth.

Crow winced and stood back. He took the mug and looked into it.

The old woman panted and grinned. “Have you seen the ship?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Crow handed me the mug. “There’s a lot of soldiers about today.”

Mrs. Gisby snapped her head up the road and then down the road, as if someone might be coming who would hear. “They’re taking the guns!”

“Guns is it, Mrs. Gisby?” Crow lifted her up and sat her on the wall. “Now how do you know that?”

“The soldiers are saying so. An officer walked among us, asking if we’d seen any of the sailors.”

“And have you seen them, ma’am?” Crow brushed off the sand that had clotted at the ends of Mrs. Gisby’s dress.

“I have seen them, yes. But they’re all dead. They washed up on the beach and the soldiers laid them out in the sun to dry.”

“To dry?”

“That’s what they said.” She nodded and leaned forward. “And there’s another thing. Arthur Sheridan has come back with his army.”

Crow grinned at me, then turned back to Mrs. Gisby. “So you remember Arthur Sheridan, do you?”

“Well, of course I do, Harold.” She batted him on the arm, rocked back and fell into the dune grass. “I’m not so old as I forget. They say he’s come with his army of Yanks and he’s armed to the teeth is what I hear. Those guns the Tans have on the beach, those are just the ones his army couldn’t carry.”

Crow helped her up. “Has anybody seen them?”

“Of course they have!”

“Who, ma’am?”

She rested her hands on her knees and thought for a minute. “I don’t know. But he’s been seen.” Now she beamed at me. “Are you one of Harold’s friends?”

I nodded, amazed at the depth of creases in her skin.

“Well, drink the soup then.” She flipped her hand.

It was cold beef bouillon. Bitter saltiness pinched at the corners of my mouth. My stomach was too empty to care.

“Is everybody from the town all right, Mrs. Gisby?” Crow gathered her hands into his. Her fingers disappeared in the folds of his palm.

“They burned the creamery…”

“I know, ma’am. But is everyone all right?”

“Broke every window in the high street. They say McCusker, the glass man in Ennistymon, will be rich from fixing all this smashing and burning.”

“Casualties!” Crow shouted. “Is anybody dead?”

“No, dear, except for a couple of Tans.” Her hands worked their way out from the grip of his palms. They fluttered in front of her and came to rest against the lapel of Crow’s jacket. “We all ran to the dunes as soon as the shooting started. But the houses, Harold. They burned the poor houses.”

“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.