The Promise of Light (21 page)

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.

“He’s just a kid.” I tried to stand up. My soda bread-and-jam breakfast was climbing back into my throat.

Another soldier jumped down from the truck. He carried a rifle. The steel of his helmet looked rough, from sand that had been sprinkled on the wet paint and then painted over again.

The boy touched his hand to the bald patch on his head. “You bloody tore my hair out. You bloody bastards tore my hair out!”

“You won’t have any hair at all by the time we’ve finished with you.” The soldier twisted the boy’s arm so that the boy had to stand on his toes.

The boy’s mouth was locked open with pain.

“He’s just a kid,” I said again. I was standing now. Chips of lightning wove in front of my eyes. “You’ve got no right to beat up on children.”

The soldier kept the boy’s arm twisted. “Well, someone’s got to take the blame for this.”

My temper snapped and I spoke without thinking. “Fine, I’ll take the goddamned blame.”

“Right you are then,” said a voice behind me.

Then my head exploded.

*   *   *

Powder-blue sky filled my eyes. I was lying in a room and looking out through a doorway. Then the sky went away and a face cut out the sun.

It was a woman. “That Tan hit you right on the temple.”

“Clarissa?” I tried to sit up.

The woman’s arm held me down. “Rest a while longer.”

Another face appeared. Crow. He looked watery and out of focus. “What did you think you were doing?”

“I don’t know.” My jaw hurt. My bottom teeth and top teeth didn’t seem to match up the way they used to.

“But what did you expect was going to happen after you back-talked that soldier?”

“It was a kid. Just a kid with a rock. They tore out a clump of his hair.” I saw where I was now, on the kitchen floor at Gisby’s Hotel. The same place where I took my naps. There was the underside of the sink. Here were the brick-red tiles below me. Forks and knives clinked together as people ate breakfast in the dining room. “I wasn’t thinking about what they’d do to me. I guess I was still half asleep.”

“Damn right you didn’t think. Another time, you let that boy fend for himself.” Crow’s white apron was painted with food.

The woman had long black hair tied in a ponytail with a blue ribbon. It was Ruth, the waitress at Gisby’s, the one nobody was supposed to talk with, since her father was an RIC man. “You can’t blame that boy, what with all the things they’re saying in school since that ship ran aground.”

Crow held a lit cigarette to my lips. “What are they saying?”

“They’re telling the story of that ancient chieftain and how he never died. Instead, he took his best warriors and led them to a cave somewhere up in the hills. He made them all lie down and sleep, with a promise that he would return one day to rescue the land.”

“I know that story. My mother told it to me.” I thought of the old dream rising through my memory, like a whale coming up from deep water to breathe.

“And the thing of it is, these boys talk of that ship as if it were the chieftain’s and it was him who walked ashore with all those guns. Now the boys in the school don’t see some gold-armored knight riding down from the hills after sleeping for a thousand years. They see the IRA men in their grubby trench coats and wool hats and rifles gone rusty from being hidden in the hedges.”

“Did they let the boy go?”

Gisby called for Ruth from out in the hallway.

Ruth brought her face close to mine. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

I nodded and a fleck of cigarette ash dropped onto my chest. When she was gone, I squinted up at Crow. “What happened to the boy?”

“They let him go. But they almost took you up to the barracks. By now, they’d know who you are. Instead, they just dumped you in the alleyway outside. They said they didn’t want you showing up late for work. Who’s Clarissa?”

“Not someone you’d want to meet.” I rested my hands against my face. “I took a punch.”

Crow started to laugh. His cackling grew louder and louder until a surprised look appeared on his face and he began to cough. He jammed his fist against his mouth and spluttered. “They snuffed you out like a candle.”

“Thank you, Harry. I know.”

*   *   *

Guthrie sat with his feet in a basin full of water. Steam coiled around his legs.

I stepped into the room. It was three in the afternoon, but I thought I should still bring him his milk. The pain was a sluggish thump inside my head.

“Is that you, Ben?” Guthrie pulled the glasses from his pocket and held them up to his eyes. “I could have opened my own dairy by now.”

“I got stopped.” It felt as if some gargoyle was pacing on my brain.

Guthrie pulled his feet from the basin and pattered them on the floor. “Any trouble?”

“None. Did you give up on the udder balm?”

“Mrs. Tarbox gave me a recipe.” Steam curled like smoke off his toes. “Damn stuff smells worse than the balm.”

“But does it work?”

“I can’t tell. It hurts too much.” Guthrie kneaded the steam from his feet. “I’ve made up my mind about something. I’m going to ask Lil to marry me. I’ll ask her the next time I see her. Yes. I’ve said it now. That’s what I’m going to do.”

“Congratulations. People will say it’s about time.”

“They can say what they like. They always do, anyway.”

“Is there anything you want me to tell Clayton when I see him tonight? I don’t think they’ll be bringing him straight here.”

“The less you tell me, the better.”

“No messages?”

Guthrie slowly hooked the wire temples of his glasses around his ears. “It’s dangerous for the two of us to talk. He knows that. It’s the cost of what he’s doing.”

*   *   *

Old bundles of flowers lay at the Black Virgin’s feet, their colors bled away.

I searched through the trees that clumped behind the shrine. Wind clattered the branches. Someone else was there. I could feel it, and started to think it might be the Virgin. She glowered at me from her chiseled stone veils.

Then a man stood up from the hedge. He wore a trench coat and leather gaiters and carried a rifle. The man raised his hand slightly, spreading his fingers, cautiously waving hello.

“Crow?” I couldn’t be sure. Shadow cloaked his body and his face.

“Yes, it’s me. Isn’t anybody on time any more?” Thistles clung to his legs. “I told Tarbox to be here by ten. That’s the trouble with him. He wants independence for Ireland, but he can’t be bothered to show up on time to collect it.”

Crow had dug a foxhole. We both sat in it, shoulder to shoulder.

I wasn’t afraid, the way I had been crossing the open fields. With night closing in, the darkness belonged to us now and not to the soldiers. “How close are you to getting independence?”

“Depends on who you talk to.” Crow pulled a piece of fruitcake from his pocket, broke it in half, and gave a piece to me. “If you read the
Irish Times,
you’d think we never had a chance. Each time someone makes a speech about Irish freedom, they’re all applause and high hopes. But then when someone actually does something toward getting that freedom, like landing these rifles on Lahinch strand, they call us murderers and thugs.”

“So who else do you listen to besides the
Irish Times?
” I picked out the slivers of candied cherry and ate them first.

“You can listen to Clayton if you want. He’d have you think that independence was so bloody close you could smell it. Or you can listen to Mrs. Gisby. She doesn’t even know what independence is. She just wants to see blood, like an old hag at a boxing match.” Crow’s voice disappeared as he stuffed the fruitcake in his mouth.

The sky was purple now. Mist crept from the hollows and spread across the fields in slow grey ranks.

“Look at this.” From his coat, Crow pulled a wooden pistol holster. He opened it and took out a strange looking gun with a long barrel. The number 9 was carved into its rounded butt. “It’s a broom-handled Mauser. Belongs to Clayton. They gave it to him in Dublin when he joined the IRA. I heard it came ashore in a German shipment of arms to Bana Strand during the war. When the Tans brought Clayton in, I ran over to his house and took the gun away, as I knew the Tans would search the place and find it. I buried it out in the fields for safekeeping. He’ll have it back tonight.”

I listened, ear to the wind. “I hear someone coming.” My backside bristled with pins and needles against the damp earth.

“It would be about bloody time.” Crow pulled a thistle from his trousers. He reached across and stuck it on my coat.

Then came the sound of boots on the road. And whistling. Tarbox appeared, followed by wandering sheep with muddy tails and splats of blue dye on their backs. He stopped by the Virgin, poked his head inside the shrine and kissed her on the cheek. Then he faced the hedge and threw open his arms. “I know you’re in there, Harry. I can smell you.”