The Promise of Light (8 page)

My other mistake was not falling out of love, even though I knew I did not belong with Clarissa among these mansions. Having money would not change that, and Mrs. Maxwell asking me to take care of Harley’s wealth only rubbed it in deeper.

I couldn’t have said just then where I did belong. I used to think I knew, but this death had jolted me off course. Now the island seemed dark and unfamiliar, to me who had called myself its guardian and listened to its heartbeat in the rock.

I hoped that going to Ireland would show me something of where I belonged, even if it pointed me straight back to the island of Jamestown and the house that I wanted to leave. Perhaps it is that way for everyone, I thought. You start out with the whole world to range across and claim, and you end up returning to the place where you started, choosing a few square feet of land, the way that my father had done.

*   *   *

I told Thurkettle not to bother taking the ferry across with me. I said I could walk home from the Jamestown landing.

When he had gone, I listened to bandstand music coming from the town. Soon the café people would move from their metal chairs on the sidewalk to the indoor rooms as the evening chill drifted in off the sea.

Jamestown clumped quiet and shadowy across the water. The music from Newport could be heard all up and down the bay, but you never heard any coming from Jamestown. Instead, you would hear waves breaking on the cliffs at Beavertail, and wind through the rigging of boats in Jamestown harbor. Those sounds were drowned out in Newport. All you heard there was the music.

*   *   *

I stood at the bow of the ferry, tasting salt that sprayed up in my face. Sunset turned the bay into a field of boiling copper.

The ferry was almost empty. The Newport people never came to Jamestown, unless it was to pass through on their way to the mainland. Then some of them took the Kingston train back up to Boston or down to New York and Philadelphia.

They almost never walked through Jamestown village, because there was nothing to buy except hardware from Briggs’s general store or groceries from Allington’s. So they moved quickly past the squat houses with their sun-bleached paint and lobster pots set out to dry in the backyards.

To the island people, downtown Newport was a bubble of laughter and songs, which they could touch now and then but which was not theirs. When winter came, the bubble disappeared. Half the shops closed down. The metal café chairs that used to jam the sidewalks lay stacked inside the closed cafés. Sailors in their dark wool coats shuffled down Thames Street with their collars turned up against the wind. Fishermen waited out storms in their drafty dockside huts.

I used to wonder what the Newport people did all through the winter. I imagined them hidden away in rooms with dark-paneled walls and green felt-covered card tables, impatient for the snow to melt and for the Gulf Stream to return.

A nurse stood on deck with me. She wore a blue cloak with a red trim over her white clothes. She was pushing an old man in a wheelchair. The old man’s head was tilted to one side. A tartan blanket covered his legs.

They had come from the Sturgess Rest Home, which had a little wooden sign out front that said—
DROP IN FOR A SMILE
. So when we were younger, we used to walk past and give our version of a Sturgess Home Smile, which was a mindless slobbering grin.

Often the old people would be wheeled out to the dock to watch the ships come in. The old people seemed mostly to be interested in themselves. I’d seen men and women slumped in wheelchairs, pushed into patches of sunlight, and the only part of them that seemed to be alive was their eyes. Sometimes they studied their hands, fingers wafting gently like weeds in the current of a stream. With nothing else to do, the nursing-home residents became students of their own disintegration.

Sometimes my father had spat out how miserable he thought they looked, but I wondered if he would have said it, if he knew how much time he had left.

*   *   *

Two men were standing in my driveway. The engine of their car was still running.

I recognized them as the same two men my father had been yelling at, the night Dillon’s fishhouse burnt down. They wore the same long raincoats and kept their hands stuffed in their pockets.

They watched me coming closer. Then one man said “It’s him,” and walked across to meet me. His hand slipped from his pocket and reached out to me like the blade of a knife. “We come to say we’re sorry about your da.” He was Irish, with a faint American twisting of the words. “I’m Pratt and this is Duffy. Come here out of the dark, Duff.”

Duffy shuffled over. The tight curls of his hair were mashed down on his head with brilliantine. “Your father was a great man.”

Pratt nodded. “An inspiration to us all.”

Pratt slapped Duffy on the arm. “Anyway, that’s all we came to say.”

“You were talking with my father the night of the fire.”

Now Pratt turned. “Yes, we were. Did he mention that?”

“He said you owed him money. He said you were crazy for showing your face around here.”

“Money was it?” Pratt chewed his lip and then laughed. “Well, I’m sure I might owe him a bit.”

I moved to the front door at the house and swung it open. “Would you like to come inside? I’d like to talk with you.”

“No.” Duffy took a step toward the car. “No, we got to be going.”

I stood in the doorway. It was dark behind me and I felt as if I was standing at the entrance of a tunnel. “How much do you know about what my father did in Ireland?”

They were quiet for a while. I heard waves breaking on the beach. I stood very still, barely breathing, frightened that they knew everything but wouldn’t tell me.

Pratt’s hands found their way back inside his pockets. “It really is time we were going.”

I wanted to force them to stay. “What did he do? I heard he was in prison.”

“If he’d meant for you to know these things, then surely he’d have told you himself.” Duffy opened the car door and sat behind the wheel.

“Don’t go. Please. Who are you two? How did you know my father?”

“We’re old friends is all.” Pratt had reached the car. He rested his hand on the door. “And if you heard us talking the other night, you’d have heard us promise to keep you out of it.”

“But what harm is there in telling now?”

Pratt slipped into the car and before the door was shut, Duffy had already started the engine.

First I only walked after them. Then I ran. I chased them down to the edge of the road and saw Pratt turn to look at me. “Why won’t you tell me?” I shouted after them. “For Christ’s sake, why?”

I wouldn’t be able to catch them. And even if I did, they wouldn’t tell. I had seen a window, when they paused and thought it over. They had come close to talking. The words were already forming in their minds. But the window shut quickly and they knew they had to leave before they broke their promise to my father.

They could have told me everything. I knew it. I could see it on their faces. And I knew I would never see them again.

I knew nothing about Ireland, except that my parents came from the west coast. They never spoke of it, and they were not the only ones to start again as they passed through the gates of Ellis Island. I had friends at university whose German or French or Italian parents seemed to have forgotten where they came from. It had not troubled me until now, but suddenly it was all I cared about.

I started packing. I threw a suitcase on the bed and crammed in socks and trousers and shoes. There was no time to waste. I didn’t know how long it would take to sell the house. I’d have sold it for one ticket, if the boat was sailing that day.

Perhaps in Ireland there was also a window, and if I didn’t get there soon, it too would close. The country seemed an impossible distance away, anchored out of reach somewhere in the past.

CHAPTER 4

The masts of sunken sailboats jutted from the harbor like dead trees in a flooded field. Dillon’s fishhouse had almost disappeared. Its roof lay slopped into the guts of the building. Paint had blistered on its walls. The breeze lifted ashes from the rubble and blew them across the dockyard.

I stood at the ferry landing. The ferry was halfway across the bay, its bow snubbing the waves. I could just make out the figure of Monahan, in his red-and-black check coat, standing outside the wheelhouse with his hands tucked behind his back.

I had written out an ad for selling the house and now I was going to Wickford, where I’d place it in the paper. It was strange to think of leaving the island. But in my mind I had already sold the house and left. At the bank, I would tell them that I needed some time before starting. If they turned me down, I figured, I could always work for Harley.

The area around Dillon’s had been roped off, but children ducked under the rope, grabbed pieces of wood and steel and ran away with them as trophies. There was nothing worth taking, but the fire had made the junk special. I knew it was also because my father had been blown through the side of the building by the exploding diesel tank. Its closeness to his death had turned the melted iron and charcoaled wood into talismans.

As the ferry dodged past sunken boats and made toward the landing, I caught sight of Willoughby. He wore a coat over his black robe. The collar was a flash of bony white across his throat. He carried a small suitcase hugged to his chest.

Seeing Willoughby reminded me of unfinished business. I knew about the rush of documents and bills and funerals to be organized from when my mother died. Dying was expensive. It cost my father two weeks’ pay to have a decent tombstone set above her grave.

It could all wait. I had no patience for it now.

Willoughby lifted one hand and showed me the paleness of his palm. Then he walked off the boat straight toward me. “I was just coming to see you, Ben. See how you’ve been getting on.”

“Not too bad.” Cars started their engines and climbed off the ramp. They kicked up dust on their way into town.

He held up the suitcase. “This is for you.”

“I was just heading into Wickford to put in an ad for the house.” I watched him closely, waiting for creases to slice across his forehead and for the blood to drain from his lips as he pressed them tight together. I had stopped caring or even wanting to know why it made him so angry for me to be selling the place. I wished I could have made him stand in the living room and see the pictures of my father and the odd and distant image of my mother, sparking off the walls and chairs like a squadron of fireflies. That would have made him change his mind.

“I think that can wait for a while.” The creases split his forehead into strips. He handed me the suitcase.

It was heavy. Somehow I had thought that it was only filled with clothes. “The paper only comes out twice a week. If I don’t place the ad in now, I’ll have to wait a long time before they can fit it in.”

“You don’t need to sell the house. Not to get your ticket.” His hand found its way to the familiar perch of my shoulder. “I’ve got you a place on a boat leaving from Boston. It’s heading to Galway with a load of farm equipment.”

“When?” Suddenly I saw myself walking down a gangplank into Ireland. The picture was so clear and sudden that for a moment Jamestown seemed to disappear out from underneath me.

“Three days. The captain is an old parishioner of mine. It won’t be comfortable. It’s only a cargo ship.”

“That doesn’t matter. Thank you.”

“I daresay you’re already packed.”

It seemed to me sometimes as if my skull was like rice paper to Willoughby, with thoughts lit up like candle flames behind it. “What’s in the suitcase?”

“The ashes.”

I slammed the case down on the ground. The flesh cringed on my arms.

Willoughby bent slowly down and picked up the case again. “I took care of the cremation.”

We reached the road and started heading toward my house. I kept looking straight ahead, not wanting to catch sight of the case in Willoughby’s hand. I could not see a man reduced to this.

“Have you had many people stopping by?” His overcoat rustled as he walked. Sea spray still clung in beads to the cloth.

“Two men came by last night. They were talking to my dad the night of the fire. I’d never seen them before that. They were Irish. Their names were Duffy and Pratt.”

“That doesn’t sound familiar.”

“My father was angry with them about something. They wanted money but he wouldn’t give them any. He said they were mad showing their faces around here. And he said if they wanted money, they should come to you, but they didn’t want to do that. I guess they drew the line at taking money from a priest.”

Willoughby walked on a few paces and then suddenly stopped.

A car drove past us, clunking through its gears. Leaves flickered in the breeze. All around us, the grass was thick and heavy in the first green blaze of summer.

“Did you say this man was named Pratt? With a nose like a bird? About as tall as me?”

“That’s him.”

Willoughby seemed to be watching me, but then I saw that he was staring out across the bay. I even turned to see what had caught his eye, but there was only the white-capped water and Monahan’s ferry, heading back to the mainland.

Then Willoughby changed direction. He began walking back toward town. “Come with me,” he called over his shoulder.

He turned down a side road before we reached town. We walked down a dirt lane crowded at the edges with purple-flowered chicory and black-eyed Susans with petals so bright yellow-orange that they seemed to fizz in my eyes.

Willoughby led me to the cemetery, stepping fast beside the thunder-colored tongues of old graves, past my mother’s, where I thought he was going to stop. He kept going until he reached the far wall, where poison ivy had already begun to creep its oily leaves across the stones.

The suitcase thumped down in the grass and he swept back the tall weeds that had grown around a stone.

The stone said:
JOHN THOMAS PRATT. BORN ARAN IRELAND
1878.
DIED JAMESTOWN JANUARY
7th 1904.