The Promise of Light (14 page)

Stanley climbed onto his bicycle. “You make me laugh sometimes, Harry. You act as if you were still in the service, putting people on report and saluting and all the other crap. You’re nothing but a bunch of crooks, and whatever you pulled out of that boat in the harbor today isn’t going to change anything.”

“Careful what you say, Stan.”

“No, you be careful.” Stan set his bike rolling. Then he looked at me. “And you be careful, too.”

Tarbox made choking noises. “But we got to go back. We can’t just let them burn the town. I got…”

“Cousins, Tarbox. Cousins in Lahinch. Yes, I know. And your wife.” Crow took the rifle off Tarbox’s shoulder. “But if we go in there now, the Tans will be waiting for us.”

“My crab pots … What am I going to do without my pots?”

Crow pushed him gently back into the house and shut the door. “I wouldn’t have wished this on you, Ben.”

My teeth were still clenched, waiting for the shock of gunfire. I couldn’t believe that the anger in their voices would only end in this. “Who was that man?”

“He’s a sergeant in the RIC. Royal Irish Constabulary. Irish policemen working for the English.”

“Well, what’s he doing here? I thought you were fighting against them.”

“We are. Supposed to be, anyway. Stan was with me in the Great War. We were in the Irish Guards. When Stan and me came home two years ago, he joined the RIC. He was just looking for a job. But now that the troubles have started here, he’s afraid he picked the wrong side. So every chance he gets, he lets me know what’s going on with the RIC and the Tans. And besides that, I pay him. He’s an old bastard, really. He’ll probably get killed by someone like Tarbox, if the RIC don’t catch him first.”

I walked back toward the house. I didn’t feel safe in the open.

“When we started giving the RIC a hard time over here, the British army enlisted thousands of ex-soldiers and sent them to Ireland. They were mostly left over from the Great War and couldn’t get jobs when the fighting was finished. They make good money. One pound a day, for some of the officers. Poor old Stan in the RIC earns less than half of that.”

“How could you and he be friends after something like that? You didn’t join the RIC.”

“Sometimes I look at the job I have now, washing dishes at the Dunraven Hotel, and I wonder how I stayed away from them. If you can’t understand why Stan joined the RIC, it’s because you didn’t sit around after the war for months and bloody months with no job and no hope of a job. It wasn’t any different for the Tans, for some of them, anyway. No job. Trying to pretend that we were back to being civilians. At least in the trenches you didn’t have to go around making believe that your life was worth something. I had meant to settle down when I came home from the war. I had plans for a business of my own, building houses and thatching roofs. But there was never a chance for it. The war just kept going. I got dragged back into it again.”

“How about Tarbox?”

“He’s the only man I’ve ever met who enjoys all this and isn’t ashamed to admit it. He’s never had a break from it, not since the day he was born. He told me once he wouldn’t know what to do with himself if the fighting ever stopped.” Crow unbuckled the heavy brown belt from around his middle, and held it out to me. On the belt was his gun in its holster. It was a long-barreled revolver with a swivel ring at the end of the handle. “It’s a Webley. I meant to give it to you sooner.”

“I can’t take that.”

“And why not? Don’t you know how to use it?”

I thought of the pie tins flipping through the air, and the smack of the bullet striking them. “I don’t want to carry a gun.”

The gun was heavy in Crow’s outstretched arm. His hand was beginning to shake. “I’m not asking you to do it for some high moral cause. I’m asking so you can keep yourself alive. Keep yourself alive,” he said again.

I took hold of the gun. Its leather holster was warm from resting against Crow’s body. “Is there no one I could talk to? No one who’d listen to me?”

“You should have seen us when we tried to talk with them. Reason it out. Negotiate. We went all the way to Dublin as the representatives of County Clare. We wore our Sunday suits. It was me and old Guthrie and Tom Hagan and Fuller was there as well. Guthrie made us all polish our shoes until we could see our faces in the shine. Fuller’s wife stuck flowers in our buttonholes. Hagan was supposed to do the talking. If anybody could have made them see our way, it was him. He had his points all written out on a piece of paper. You see, we believed they would listen. But they made bloody fools of us. Bloody fools.” Crow’s tongue slipped across his cracked lips so he could talk. “You don’t forgive a thing like that.”

CHAPTER 7

I stood naked in the middle of a room. My hands stayed double-fisted against my chest, shielding my heart from the chill. One foot stepped on the other. Toes curled over toes.

Mrs. Fuller lifted a basin of soapy water from the stand where I had washed. She pushed open the window with her forehead and poured out the water.

Sunlight spread in yellow sails across the walls.

Needles of cold drew goosebumps from my arms.

She threw me a towel. Then she began pulling clothes from a cupboard and setting them out on her bed. “Now these.” She held out a pair of heavy wool trousers. They were grey-and-black herringbone. “These should last you.”

I pulled them on. Then I took a flannel shirt without a collar, a waistcoat made of the same heavy wool as the trousers, and a tan wool jacket with leather buttons. It all carried the smell of another man’s sweat and tobacco. These were clothes for living outside and walking through the fields, baggier clothes than the ones we wore at home. You’d have noticed if a man walked down the street in Jamestown wearing a waistcoat like this. But I needed them. My own clothes were ruined and the jumbled colors of this tweed were my first step into hiding.

Mrs. Fuller smiled. “My husband is a little smaller in the chest than you. All you Americans are fed on steak, I hear.”

I tried to put my hands in the pockets but found they wouldn’t go. The pockets were stitched shut.

She emptied the cupboard and the drawers, holding jackets up against my chest and then throwing them on the bed. “Last year, the police were so worried about men walking around with hidden guns that they said they’d shoot anyone with their hands in their pockets. And Justin was always walking around that way. So I stitched them shut, you see.”

“Do you think he would mind me wearing his clothes?” I felt I had to ask. But even as the words were coming out of my mouth, I was staring at the heap of my suit. It lay in the corner, crumpled like a raisin. I’d rather have walked around naked than try to put that on again.

“Oh, do hush, Mr. Sheridan.”

*   *   *

I stood at the bottom of the stairs, hugged by flannel and wool.

“You look like an Irishman now.” Crow sat by the fire. Spread out at his feet were stacks of money. It was American money.

Tarbox sat next to him, holding slices of bread over the flames. The bread was spiked on the end of a log iron. “It doesn’t look like real money. It looks like lottery tickets.”

“Where did it come from?”

“It was in that note from Willoughby.” Crow’s face was lit up in the sharp-gold sun. “He wrote a note to say you didn’t know about it.”

“He told me that envelope was filled with letters.” I pictured Willoughby again on Monahan’s ferry, stuffing it into my hands. I saw his clear eyes looking straight into mine as he breathed the lie into my face. I had thought of him as old and tottering, the gears of his mind all ground down and slipping. But I saw now that his creased skin was only a cloak, and his black priest’s robe, that made him seem to drift across the ground, was one more layer of camouflage. He lived two lives, blessing and preaching and burying and christening, and then sending off money for guns. I wondered which life his heart was in as I didn’t think it could be in both.

“One letter. That’s all it was. The rest was these bills. It was for your own good that he didn’t tell you about the money. He sends us some from time to time. There’s people in Boston who all pitch in, then give him the bills to send.”

Tarbox pulled the bread out of the fire and looked at it. He nibbled on a smoke-greyed crust. “What are we going to do with all of this? I say we should divide it up between the three of us. No one would be any the wiser.”

“We’re going to buy Clayton Guthrie out of prison, before they take the poor bastard over to England and we never see him again.” Crow handed me a piece of toast. “Clayton is commander of the local IRA brigade. He was taken prisoner of war by the British last week. According to Stanley, they’ve still got him at the Lahinch police barracks. They haven’t had the chance to ship him out yet. Stanley said he’d take the bribe.”

Tarbox held a bill up to the light. “And how much is that going to cost?”

“All of it, Crabman.”

“But there’s damn near three hundred dollars here!” Tarbox spoke so slowly, even in his anger. “What’s he going to do with all that money?”

I wanted to finish his sentences for him.

“I think he’s going to buy his way across to America. He wants to own some land in Oklahoma, although I don’t think he knows where it is exactly. That’s what he told the brigade commander, anyway.”

Tarbox slapped the bill on the floor. “Stop with calling Clayton a brigade commander! Give this poor bastard Yank a chance to see how things really are before the Tans take him in and kick the living shit out of him. You have to understand, Ben. When Crow here starts talking about prisoners of war, you’ll get in your head the idea that we’re all gentlemen on either side. As if all you’ve got to do is stick your bloody hands in the air and call it quits and they let you go home at the end of the day. I say it’s no use pulling Clayton out of prison. That money’s better spent on guns.”

Mrs. Fuller walked into the room. Her lips shuddered, as if she was getting ready to say something.

“We need him!” Crow spat out.

Tarbox crunched at the bread. Crumbs bounced from his mouth as he talked. “You need him, Harry. We all of us know that the only reason you’re in charge is because he’s in prison, and you’ve just got out of prison yourself. Clayton’s a good man. He’s my friend, too. But he’s gone.”

“Oh, you mustn’t say it.” Mrs. Fuller shook her head.

It seemed to me that the ranks didn’t matter, anyway. Crow was too worried about hurting anyone’s feelings to give orders. And Tarbox would do whatever he felt like, no matter who was in charge.

I looked at Tarbox and saw he was a dangerous and ugly man. It was as if he had been born in someone’s nightmare, then kicked his way out of their head.

“The—Lahinch—barracks—is—a—bloody—fortress!”

Tarbox measured the space that his words filled in the air. “Show Sheridan the barracks! Let him decide! We can buy guns with that money. Or dynamite or uniforms for boosting the morale. There’s factories in Dublin building bombs out of jam tins, Mr. Sheridan, and we’re lucky if we get any of those. With three hundred Yank dollars we could buy real hand grenades. Right now, we got all the plan-makers and able men we need. But we don’t got the guns. If the
Madrigal
hadn’t gone down, we might have enough, but we don’t.” He ran out of breath.

“My Justin!” Mrs. Fuller shouted. She was red in the face. “Couldn’t you buy my husband out?” She took hold of my arm. “He wouldn’t cost much. You could buy him out with your American money, Mr. Sheridan.”

“It’s not his money, Mabs.” Crow gathered the bills and stuffed them in his pocket. “They’ve got your husband out of our reach.”

“Oh, but he wouldn’t cost much.” Mrs. Fuller bent over into Crow’s arms. Tears squeezed through her shut-tight eyelids. “He wouldn’t cost much.”

Crow led her upstairs.

I sat down next to Tarbox. “I came ashore with a crewman named Baldwin. You saw him on the beach. Do you know what happened to him?”

Tarbox swallowed and the bread slipped down his throat like a piece of broken glass. “I don’t know. Perhaps he ran off on his own.”

When Crow came back down, he shut the door behind him.

Tarbox picked at his nails. “When are you ever going to tell her, Harry?”

“Tell her what?” I walked to the window.

Crow spoke quietly. “They hanged Fuller in the courtyard of Ennistymon prison. I was there. I saw them do it. I heard his neck crack like a whip. One of these days the English will get around to notifying her, but they’re not in any hurry.”

*   *   *

A black-and-white cow stood in the road. Its udder was heavy with milk. Around its neck hung a leather collar with a brass ring at the throat. It was eating tufts of grass that grew between rocks in a wall.

Crow smoothed his hand along the cow’s flank. “She’s from the dairy. They must have set the animals loose before they burned it. Look. There’s three more.”

I saw the black-and-white clumps of Holsteins in the distance. “I don’t understand burning a dairy.”

The cow ground its jaw back and forth, spying with huge dark eyes for more grass.

“It was a cooperative dairy. Our local business.” Crow raked his fingers up and down the cow’s neck, talking to it with a sound like a huge cat purring.

He and I were the only people on the road. Tarbox had walked with us part of the way, then taken a short cut home across the fields.

I saw Tarbox’s house in the distance. It was a tin-roofed shack, with no walls to fence in his plot of land. Instead, the house lay in the middle of the largest vegetable garden I had ever seen. Elephant ears of rhubarb wobbled on their red stalks in the breeze.

Tarbox’s wife was bent over, pulling up carrots. She slapped them against her thigh, beating off the dirt. It was too far to focus on her face, but I saw how her back was broad and strong and I saw the outline of her smile as Tarbox ran toward her.

“The Tans burned the dairy for a reprisal. We kill one of theirs, they kill three of ours. If somebody even looks at them the wrong way, they arrest him. If he gets away, they burn his house. Then sometimes there isn’t any formula to it. They just get pissed off about something and burn a whole town, loot the shops, burn down the bloody dairy. It’s the damnedest thing about the English. They’d burn the dairy into cinders, but they wouldn’t harm the cows. I saw Englishmen over in France in the war, blubbing their eyes out from having to kill a wounded horse, but I seen them cackling like old hags when they shoot some Irishman. Look there.” Crow pointed at a field. “That’s where your parents used to live.”