The Promise of Light (3 page)

I grew up with Bosley. Years ago, in the time when we met every morning at the Mackerel Cove bridge and shuffled to the one-room schoolhouse with leather satchels on our backs, he and I and Monahan’s son had made a pact to be volunteer firemen and another pact to take turns driving the fire truck. Bosley was the only one who kept the pact, and he grudged me in small ways for not holding my part of the bargain. He even seemed to grudge Monahan’s son for dying over in France.

Bosley still wore his black fireman’s clothes, too-big boots flopping on the ground as he walked out to meet me. Soot cut through by lines of sweat looked like war paint on his face. He took hold of my elbow and pulled me to one side.

“What is it, Bos?” The last bee-hive hum of the whiskey left my head. “What’s gone wrong?”

“Your father went into Dillon’s to cap the diesel tank. He said if we capped it, we could save ourselves the trouble of waiting all night for the diesel to burn off. He walked in and a couple of seconds later, the whole thing went up. It blew him through the wall and landed him right at our feet. Melville says he should be all right. But he’s lost a lot of blood, Benjamin. He’s all banged up to hell.” Now we were deep in the shadows.

The crowd had watched us go. I knew all of them. There was Mr. Quigley, who once dropped a brown-paper package in the street and it split open and postcards spilled out. On the postcards were pictures of naked women. Postcard Quigley. They damn near ran him out of town because of it. And there beside him was the lady who tried hardest to run him out—Miss Beecham, who taught us at the one-room school and once fell in love with one of her students, a boy named Henry Macintosh. He was only sixteen and he pretended to love her back. I saw them in the street once and it was the only time I ever saw Miss Beecham with her hair down. They made a scandal and then Henry left the island. Miss Beecham seemed to grow old so quickly, it was as if she’d strapped herself into a time machine. People said she played up the stuff with Mr. Quigley’s postcards to give the island something else to talk about besides the sight of her and Henry Macintosh, arm in arm and Miss Beecham’s face all filled with love. And in the dark I saw the face of Mrs. Gifford, who lived across the road from my father. She loved my father and brought him pies. People said they should have married after my mother passed away. At first the idea made me angry, but when my eyes had cleared enough to see how lonely they were by themselves, I saw that the people were right. I didn’t know why they wouldn’t marry. Nobody else did, either, but they all had theories.

Men and women on the island came to be known by their jobs, or by one or two things that they’d done right or wrong. They knew Monahan as the man who drove his ferry through the hurricane, and my father as the man who stood among the fires and swore at the top of his lungs as the smoke swirled all around him.

Soon enough, I figured, I’d be known as the banker. And I hoped only as the banker. The less I gave them to talk about, the better.

I knew all these men and women who had come to watch, but the way they gaped with their eyes as wide and unblinking as fish, made it seem as if they didn’t know me. It made me angry to have them staring. They had crept out of their beds to gawk at the fire and now at my father’s spilled blood. I thought about the blood and felt helpless. I wanted to gather it and get it back inside him, to seal his wounds without trace and for there never to have been any pain. Please, not my father, I thought. Please not him.

Bosley stopped walking. We both turned and looked back at Melville’s. Willoughby stood on the doorstep, squinting around to see where I had gone. Some of the nightshirt gawkers pointed in my direction. “He’s all banged up and talking funny. He’s not making any sense, Benjamin. I just want you to be prepared for it is all.”

I could barely see him in the dark. “Thanks, Bos.”

“I hear you got a job.” He wiped at the dirt on his face.

“They said they’d give it to me.”

Bosley laughed; a quiet cough of breath. He didn’t look me in the eye. “I’d been hoping you were coming to work alongside your dad and me.”

“I thought about it, Bos.” I started walking toward Melville’s house. Already the crowd’s pale faces were turning.

Bosley walked beside me. “I guess I just thought about it more than anyone else.”

*   *   *

I couldn’t make out any words in the constant mutter of the people who stepped back to let me pass.

Bosley didn’t come inside. He shoved his way back into the night.

It was bright in Melville’s clinic. The first thing I heard when I stepped through the doorway was my father’s raging shouts. Not shouting in pain. He was howling in Irish, which I had not heard him speak for many years. The door that separated us was shut. For a moment, I stood in front of it, feeling the stares from behind. I turned and saw them, dozens of wide eyes peeking through the glass.

Then Willoughby opened the door and pulled me inside.

I tried to stay calm, but when I saw my father, the shock kicked at my ribs. I did not recognize his face. His forehead was blistered white through the layers of soot. The fire had taken his eyebrows and most of his hair, leaving only a brittle mess of orange crumbs, which fell across the floor as he shook his head from side to side. My father had been tied down onto the clinic table. Bandages were wrapped around his bare arms and legs.

He kept up the talking in Irish, his voice all spit and croaking, as if he had reached the last words of an argument before it came to blows.

Melville tried to wrap another bandage around my father’s head, but my father moved so much that Melville gave up. The bandage slipped from his hands and unrolled across the floor. Melville’s head snapped up to look at me. His eyes were gray like a sled dog’s. “We need you to give us some blood.”

*   *   *

I took off my shirt.

Melville went to his closet and pulled out a tube with a needle at each end. He also removed the biggest syringe I had ever seen. While he was uncoiling the tube, he shouted up at the ceiling for his daughter. It was going to be a direct transfusion, so I had to be in a higher place than my father. Melville cleared off his marble counter top. He moved quickly but with such care that each glass jar of tongue depressors and cotton balls made no sound as he set them down at the far end of the counter.

“I thought I was coming here to read him his last rites.” Willoughby’s hands fluttered in front of him. “When they called me…”

“Last rites?” My father’s voice boomed through the house. “You keep back from him with your last rites. You let the poor man die in peace. And you leave me out of this. When Hagan went away, I didn’t hear any prayers for him, did I? And for his wife? We had to fight even to get her buried in the churchyard. You leave my son out of this!”

The marble counter was cloudy white with threads of gray woven into the stone. It seemed to grab at the bare skin of my back as I lay down.

“Keep away!” my father shouted. Then suddenly the belt that had pinned him gave way. The leather tore and flew off to the sides. He sat up and held his hands out in front of him. His palms were burned so badly that the skin had started to peel away.

It was seeing his hands that made me realize how badly he was hurt.

Slowly, my father lowered his outstretched arms. “Keep him out of this,” he said. His voice was no more than a whisper.

Peg came running downstairs. She skidded into the room. She had arrived with such speed that I knew she must have been listening for his call, maybe with her ear pressed to the floorboards, hearing every muttered word.

I couldn’t help staring at the blackness of her hair. Although it had been years, people still thought of her and her parents as strangers to the island. I did, as well. To me, Peg seemed to come from much farther away than Newport, although the island of Jamestown was separated from Newport by more than just the distance of the bay.

The chromium shine of the syringe blinked at me.

Melville tied a cord around my bicep. Soon the veins on my arm stood out, green-blue and crisscrossing. Then he poured ether onto a cotton pad and stepped behind my father.

My father’s talking had died down. He was still sitting up, head bowed forward. His fingers twitched, as if he was trying to remember a tune on the piano.

Melville set his hand on my father’s forehead and with his other hand, he held the pad against my father’s face.

A shudder rocked down the length of my father’s spine. The ether flooded through him like a tide.

Melville lowered him down onto the leather-covered pillow built into the table. Then he wheeled the table over to where I was lying.

I could smell the ether. It was sweet and peppery.

My father looked dead. I couldn’t see him breathing.

Peg walked over to me and I tried to sit up, but she held out her hand and made me lie still. “Do you want me to cover your eyes, Benjamin?”

For a second, calm settled on me as I heard the softness in her voice. I didn’t have time to answer. I wished we could be any place but this.

“Cover his eyes.” Melville talked as he wiped alcohol on both needle ends of the tube. “He needs at least two pints of blood within the next twenty-four hours. One will do for now. Father Willoughby offered to donate, but we don’t have time to do the tests to see if his blood type is right. If we give him the wrong kind of blood, we’d kill him in no time at all. So we’ll be using yours for now, Benjamin. That way we’ll be sure. Tomorrow, he’ll be taken to the Naval hospital in Newport. They’ve already got a bed ready for him. He can’t be moved now.”

Peg’s hands passed in front of my eyes and made me blind.

I felt the slap of Melville’s fingers bouncing off my veins. Then came the pinch as the needle slid under my skin.

I could feel the blood being taken. It was as if Melville had hooked his finger under the vein and was tugging it out of my arm. “He’ll be all right, won’t he?” I said through Peg’s fingers. Through the cracks between them, all I could see was the brightness of the bulb on the ceiling.

“He is stable for now. Burns take a long time to heal and he’s mangled his arm pretty badly. Parts of that diesel tank hit him like shrapnel.” Melville’s voice was toneless as he concentrated on drawing the blood.

It was quiet for a while. The others in the room had seen my blood and it extinguished their voices. The faint tugging at my veins continued. I knew that by now, they would have fitted the other end of the tube into one of my father’s arteries and that my blood would be flowing into his. I thought of it mingling, reaching his heart and charging away into the caverns of his body. I wondered if somehow my thoughts might travel with it. Maybe I could talk to him through my blood. Perhaps, now, memories that belonged to me would flicker to life in his head. Perhaps even the Dunhams would reach him, speckled in the heavy red flood from my arm. What did my father say the whiskey did? Takes out the fire but leaves in the warmth.

The needle slid out of me and Melville folded my arm back. “Keep that there.”

Peg’s hand moved away. She helped me to my feet.

I kept my arm folded. Blood found its way out and dripped from my elbow.

The other end of the tube was still in my father’s arm. The tube remained filled with blood and there was more blood on the floor. The syringe lay on the counter, by my feet. A fat drop of blood hung from the end of the needle. Melville had used it to start the flow into my father’s arm.

Melville removed the tube from my father, and then lifted the two needle ends, so that the blood in the tube didn’t pour out on the floor. “You should go home now, Ben.”

“I ought to stay here, don’t you think?” Dizziness swirled at the back of my head. “Jesus, is he going to be all right?”

“There’s nothing for you to do but rest.” Willoughby’s hands settled on my shoulders. “You save your strength for the morning.”

“Goodnight, Benjamin.” Peg was leaving the room.

I wanted to tell her to stay. As Willoughby guided me out of the room, I saw my father lying on the table, legs still strapped down. The bandage had covered his eyes and wound once under his chin. It looked as if Melville had been trying to embalm him.

I wished I could take some of the pain for him. It would get worse before it got better. He had told me himself about burns. The healing took months and all of it was pain. He could fend off the shrieking of his raw nerves with anger and shouting, but he didn’t have the strength to hold it back for long. Nobody did.

The crowd had gone. All that remained of them were footprints in Melville’s flower bed, his early summer flowers stamped into the mud.

CHAPTER 2

The sweat of a nightmare was still on my face.

I opened my bedroom window and stared out at the darkness. Flowers showed like chips of bone among the honeysuckle bushes.

I had been expecting nightmares, but not this soon. A few days lag-time before the images caught up with me, of seeing my father’s flesh peel off his bones. I knew it wouldn’t be long until grotesque mirror images of him and myself came stumping like cripples into my dreams, badly acting out what hurt me most.

But the nightmare that came charging down the alleys of my sleep was not from the present. This dream had followed me through childhood and I’d thought it had long ago been put away for good.

For more than two decades, the pictures had rested harmless and forgotten in some wrinkle of my brain. I could not believe how clearly it had burst from cover and spread like wings behind my eyes.

*   *   *

My mother once told me about a famous knight in Ireland. This knight had spent his life saving the kingdom from invaders. When he saw that his work was done, he took fifty of his best men, all of them strapped into armor plated with gold, and he led them to a mountain cave that overlooked the kingdom.

He made them all lie down, and one by one he sprinkled sleeping dust into their eyes. They fell into the deepest, calmest dreams.

Then the knight hung a bell from the roof of the cave. He sealed off the cave’s entrance with a boulder and lay down like the others. If the kingdom was ever in danger again, the bell would ring and wake them. Until then, they would sleep, safe in the promise that one day they would return into the light.