The Promise of Light (2 page)

I set down my suitcase and stood in the dark, waiting for him to finish. I didn’t want to muddle my good news with the bad news I figured that these men had brought. I had a job now. That was the good news. For weeks, I had been taking Monahan’s ferry back and forth to the mainland and applying for posts at all the different banks. I bought special bonded paper and wrote out my résumé each night before I went to bed. My father didn’t mind me living at the house, but he knew and I knew that it was time to be moving on. The house was plenty big enough, especially with my mother being gone. And he could have used the company, but he figured that after graduating from university up in Providence, it was time for me to pack up and leave.

It had got to the point where I no longer cared about what impression I made at the banks. I moved easily in my new suit and was not constantly fingering the knot of silk at my throat. It made a better impression not to care so much, and when I walked into the First Bank of Wickford, having polished my shoes on the trouser cloth that ran down behind my calves, I knew I would have a job by the time I left. I’d been getting superstitious. It seemed that the people who interviewed me had been trained not as bankers but as smellers-of-fear. At first I had plenty of fear, and they smelled it and didn’t give me the job. By the time I made it to the First Bank of Wickford, I’d stopped being afraid because I had also stopped giving a damn.

But now that I had the job, it seemed to me as if the rest of my life stretched out like railroad tracks. It was the way I once saw the train tracks that ran up from Kingston toward Boston, and down towards New Haven. I discovered them one day through the woods of the Great Swamp, when Bosley and I were hunting for quail. For a while we had sat on the tracks, pulled sandwiches wrapped in wax paper from the back pockets of our canvas hunting coats and eaten them for lunch. We found pennies that children left on the rails to be squashed by the trains when they passed.

The picture of the tracks stayed clear in my head—smooth and without obstacles. Now this was my life. I had found the path that I would follow and once I’d seen the path, I knew it was the one meant for me. I would spend two years clerking, a year as submanager and in five years I’d be running the bank. I had a house picked out to rent in Wickford.

I was glad not to be straying too far from this bay and this island. I had never been restless to leave and stay away. Long before, back into the smudged memories of my childhood, I had claimed the place as my own. The red-leafed autumns and the waves frozen green on the winter beaches and summer and spring were all wound up in my blood. Sometimes I thought of myself as a guardian of the rocks and tides, as if the island itself had a heartbeat that only I could hear, and if I pressed my ear to the grey stones in the fields, I could hear its constant thunder.

My father slapped his hand down hard on the shoulder of one of the men. “I got nothing for you, Pratt. I don’t even know what the hell you think you’re doing showing your face around here. Suppose someone recognized you. What then, eh?”

“They wouldn’t be looking for me, Arthur. I’m already gone from their minds.” The man kept his hands in his pockets. His shoulders were heavy and sloped.

“The hell you are!” My father turned away and said again, “The hell you are, Mister.”

Now the other man held his hands palm up toward my father’s face. “You can help us, Arthur. You know the ropes. You know the whole game. It’s important to us, Arthur.”

“But not to me!” My father jabbed his thumb against the chest of his black oilcloth fireman’s coat. “I’ve done away with all that now. And I don’t have any money for you. You ask Willoughby if you want money.”

“We can’t touch what he’s got and you know it.” Pratt nodded to the other man and both of them turned to leave. They stepped carefully in their good shoes over the puffed charcoal beams of the restaurant. “Well, maybe your son would have some interest in helping us.”

My father swung around. He took hold of Pratt and pulled him back to where he had stood before. He took hold of Pratt as if the man was a doll and raised him in the air and shook him. “You say one word to my son and I’ll put you in the place where everyone thinks you already are. I want your promise. I want it for old time’s sake and for every damn favor you owe me, Johnnie Pratt. So what’s it to be? Do I have your promise?”

“Yes, Arthur. I didn’t mean to say it.”

“I’m serious, now.”

“I know, Arthur.”

“It’s because of my son that I can’t help you. Because of him that I got out of all that. Does that not make sense to you?”

“It does. And could you put me down now, Arthur?”

My father dropped him in the ashes.

The other man had lit himself a cigarette. The tiny fire lit up his face and hollowed out his cheeks.

I had never seen him before. Never seen Johnnie Pratt, either.

My father slapped the dirt off his hands, as if grabbing hold of Pratt had somehow left more grime on his skin than any black dust painted on him by the fire. “Good luck to you,” he called after the two men. There was a distant panic in his voice.

They didn’t answer. They stepped into a car and drove away without turning on the lights. They reached the main road that headed up to the north end of the island, where the ferry owned by a man named Von Klug ran over to Newport. At the main road, they turned on their lights and the two white sabers cut along the road and they sped away into the dark.

My father watched them go. His mouth hung open slightly and I could tell that he was thinking hard.

I walked to where he could see me.

He squinted at first, because he couldn’t tell who it was. Then he beamed a smile and spread his arms. “And how did the job market go today, Benjamin?” He hugged me and I felt his soot-grimy hands grip the cloth of my suit behind my shoulder blades.

“I got it. The man said I could start next week.”

He stepped back, but kept his fingers pressed into my shoulders. “Yes? Next week. Good salary?”

“Good enough.”

“Well!”

I knew he was impressed. He only said “well” when he was impressed. And riding across the bay into the burning Jamestown harbor, I’d had some time to think about it. I was beginning to be a little impressed myself.

“Who were those two men, Dad?”

“What men?” He walked me away from the restaurant and out toward the fire truck. The other firemen were coiling up the fire hose. The heavy bronze spigot dragged through the sand on its way back to the truck.

“The two who just drove off in that car toward the Newport ferry.”

“Two old pals.” He nodded, as if only just remembering. “They wanted to borrow some money and I told them no.”

“You told them worse than that.”

“I can’t be expected to keep my temper all the time.” He took off his brass hat and stuffed it on my head. “You’ve got the job. Well done, Benjamin. I knew it wouldn’t take long.”

“Why did you tell that man not to show his face around here? Would people get mad if they saw him?”

“Do we have to talk about it? No one wants to see him because he owes too much money. You know how people get when debts haven’t been paid. Now look, you get home and change and have a bath or something. I’ll be around in a bit. There should still be some supper on the table. This damn fire started when I’d just sat down to dinner.”

“How did it start?”

“I’ll tell you exactly. It’s that insurance Dillon bought last year. Been driving him round the bend thinking he could get all kinds of money if his ratty busted-up fishhouse burnt down. So he sets the thing burning. But here’s the jam. As soon as he’s got a few drinks in him and sees the flames eating it all up, he remembers the stories of insurance companies not paying if there are suspicious circumstances. So he goes berserk trying to put it out by himself. Throwing slabs of ice into the fire and such.”

“Did
he
tell you all that?”

“No, but I been in this job too long to make mistakes about a thing like that. Go home now, Benjamin. Go home and rest for a while.”

The fires had stopped on the water. Night crept up close around the pilings of the dock and hid the bay behind it. There was no moon and I couldn’t see the mainland. The only blaze still burning was the one in Dillon’s fishhouse. I thought his tank of diesel fuel must have caught. It would be a while before that burned itself out. The crowds were thinning. People shuffled home, some in their nightclothes and wearing hunting boots. Monahan still stood at his ferry, alone now, but still hopeful that another stray person might appear to congratulate him on his finest hour.

*   *   *

The front door was open.

My father’s dinner lay cold on a white china plate. It was pork chops and a potato, with some of Mrs. Gifford’s apple jam for sauce. I left the door open and ate the food. It was too early in the year for mosquitoes to come in, and I liked the breeze blowing through.

After dinner, I pulled a bottle of my father’s Irish whiskey from the mantelpiece. The bottle had a red label and said Dunhams Belfast. My father’s friend Willoughby had brought it back from one of his trips to Ireland. I sat down in his chair with the horsehair stuffing. He had rubbed the leather seat dark and smooth with years of naps and pipe-smoking sit-downs and whiskey-drinking sit-downs with Willoughby and Monahan. From this chair, he would raise his glass whiskey mug into the last beam of sunlight coming through the room. He let the sun wink rainbows through its sides.

My father and Monahan used to go on and on about how you could taste the peat in Irish whiskey. I would be handed a glass of the honey-colored liquid and told to smell the peat and taste it and let it rest on my tongue. But I had no idea what peat looked like or smelled like or even tasted like on its own. As I washed the whiskey through my mouth, I would try to pull apart the different threads of its fire and let instinct tell me where the peat was hiding.

I pulled out the cork and took a drink. I swished it through my teeth before I swallowed, feeling it sting along the line of my gums. First there was only the heat, like embers scattered in my blood. But when I stood up to shut the door, the alcohol plowed through me so hard I had to sit back down.

An explosion echoed across the bay. Another slab of Dillon’s roof must have shot into the sky.

“So you’d like to make a deposit?” I said to a reflection of my face in the window. “Will that be to your checking account or your savings account? Oh?” I slugged back another mouthful of the Dunhams and sat forward. The whiskey rocked in my skull. “You don’t have a savings account? Well, allow me to explain our policy.” I stopped talking and frowned at myself. It seemed as if the fun had already gone from telling people what to do with their money and I hadn’t even started yet. For a moment, panic fluttered up inside me as I wondered if it might be a mistake to start at the bank. But I had been talking about a job as a banker for over a year now. I had no other plan.

I thought about my vision of the rails, how they were bolted to the land and raced like slivers of mercury into the future.

It was the Dunhams doing this to me. Making me think wobbly. I tapped at my chest to settle the fire. I saw myself walking into the bank in my new suit and sitting at a desk with my name on it. I heard the hum of business. The frown stayed on my face, but now it was the frown of responsibility and calm.

I’d be starting at the bank and that was that. I knocked back some more of the Dunhams.

Then a face appeared in the window.

I cried out and stood up. The whiskey went down the wrong way and its burning doubled me over. My eyes teared and I couldn’t see the floor to put the bottle down.

The door opened and I heard from the swish of cloth that Willoughby had come to visit. He was the island’s Catholic priest and I felt as if I’d spent most of my life trying to avoid him. My father sent for the man whenever it was time for a long talk. Through every spotty-faced clumsy part of my growing up, Willoughby had been there. His arm was always creeping around my shoulder. I hated saying hello to him and I hated saying good-bye. Shaking the man’s hand was like grabbing hold of a glove filled with pudding. I used to squeeze hard sometimes, to see if there were any bones inside at all. I didn’t know why my father sent for Willoughby. Most likely, he didn’t want to be the one who came trampling into my memory whenever I thought back to the times when I put a foot wrong and couldn’t put one right.

“Hello,” I was trying to say. The tears of coughing rolled down my cheeks.

Willoughby drifted in front of me. “Ben, you must come with me at once.”

“I’m waiting for my father to come home.” I jammed the heel of my palm into my eyes to squash out the tears that remained. Then I could focus on the old man.

“It’s to do with your father. Now you must come at once.” He looked as if he combed his hair with a fork. It stuck up like spikes on a hedgehog.

“What’s the matter?”

Willoughby breathed in. The air rasped down his old throat. “I don’t really know, except that there has been an accident and they need you at the hospital.”

The comfortable rumbling of the Dunhams in my head suddenly stopped. It stopped so quickly that I thought I might fall over. “What kind of accident?”

He didn’t say. He took hold of my arm and led me out of the house.

*   *   *

It wasn’t really a hospital. Jamestown was too small to have a hospital. Dr. Melville had retired here from Newport three years before and then got bored with growing cucumbers and digging for blue crabs in the mud. So he opened a clinic in the back room of his house. The back room was our hospital.

We had to run, because Willoughby didn’t have a car. He said they hadn’t been able to find one in time.

“There’s been an accident,” he kept saying as we ran.

I wanted to press him for details, but sudden fear had clogged my throat.

Bosley met me outside Dr. Melville’s house. A crowd had gathered there, almost as big as the crowd that had come to watch Dillon’s burn to the ground. The same people who had been shuffling home in their hunting boots and nightshirts now stood peering into Melville’s living room.