The Promise of Light (15 page)

The only way I could tell that a house had stood on the spot was from an iron gate that stood propped between two lengths of collapsed wall. A few of the foundation stones remained, jutting like broken teeth from the ground.

Crow stood with his arms folded, red-faced from the wind. “Did you think there would be some grand home?”

“I didn’t know what to expect.”

“It was a nice old house, with a strong slate roof and stone walls. After the storms, there’d be smashed slate all over the road. They’d kill you if they hit you. Chop you in half like an ax. Your mother’s kitchen was back there facing the fields. She’d bring vegetables right in from the garden and sometimes I’d see her washing the dirt out of leeks on the back step. When they were married, the whole town came marching up this road with them at the front and we had a party in the garden here. And Tarbox and I dressed up as straw men and came to call. And the music went on all night. I carried Tarbox home on my back. And after they’d left, for America, the house burned down. It was never proven that the soldiers did the job. The wind was blowing the way it’s always blowing up here and nobody could do a thing to stop the blaze. Sparks were rolling down that road like marbles into town. My cabbages had little grey specks of ash all over their leaves. And when the fire was over, one by one, the stones from this house began to disappear. I don’t know who took them. They’re probably scattered all over the walls and houses and shepherds’ huts of this town. Here”—Crow reached across and buttoned my coat so that it covered the thick brown gun belt—“hide this a little better. Make your dad proud of you.”

I stared at him, remembering how angry my father had been when he found out about Bosley and me shooting pie tins in the woods. It struck me silent to think of how differently we had both known the same man.

Crow stood back. “What? What did I say?”

It made no sense to hide it from him anymore, so I told him about the fire at Dillon’s fishhouse, and how my father had been burned. I told him about the transfusion and how my blood had killed him. Then I explained what Melville told me about blood types and Arthur Sheridan not being my father.

Crow’s eyes thinned into slits as he heard about the fish-house. He nodded in sympathy for Dillon and his business gone to hell. And his mouth opened in an “Ah” when he heard about my father blown out through the wall. But when he heard about the transfusion, his eyes began to open again. He breathed in, ready to ask about my mother, but I knew what was coming and told him. Crow’s eyes grew very wide and then he dug the heel of his palm into my back. “Well, what do you want to go believing a doctor for, anyway? The bastard probably made some mistake that did your father in and then blamed it on some chemistry he knew you wouldn’t understand and wouldn’t be able to prove.” Then he made a noise in his throat, a “so there” noise to show that he knew he was right.

“But what if the doctor wasn’t lying? There have been enough lies told already.”

“Not lies. It sounds to me more like your father’s just not telling you about the time before you were born. He left for America with his wife, settled down, had you and then put the past behind him. That’s all there is to it.”

“But they had me before they left Ireland. I was born here.” I waved my hand across the far-reaching fields. “Somewhere here.”

Crow began bumping his knuckles over his chin again. “No you weren’t. I saw your mother up until a week before she left the country. And she wasn’t pregnant then and she didn’t have children before that. They said you were born over here, did they?”

I nodded. The news barely reached me. It was only one more lump of rock to be rolled away into the darkness at the back of my mind.

“Well, that’s one lie I suppose you could say that they told you.”

“I was hoping one of you would know the truth. I guess I had hoped it would all just fall into my lap.”

Crow started walking again. “Well, it’s not me who’s your father. I can tell you that for a start. If you’re not Arthur Sheridan’s son, then as far as I’m concerned you could be anybody’s child.” He turned suddenly, heels grinding into the road. “But that doesn’t matter to me. Arthur raised you and called you his son, so who cares what your blood has to say for itself?”

The way I heard people talk about Arthur Sheridan, it was as if he still clung to life in this place. To Crow and Tarbox and the others, he had somehow survived the blaze that reduced him to ashes. To them it was something like prophecy. He said he would come back and they held him to his promise. Now I was the promise come true.

I had tricked myself into believing that this would be easy. I’d heard the warnings from Willoughby and Harley, but I was not listening. I expected it all to come clear in one long story from some gravel-voiced old man or woman. But now for the first time I saw the possibility of failure, how I could pull away shadow by shadow hiding the truth, and still not know at the end.

We walked on toward Lahinch. The holster made a lump in my jacket. My elbow brushed against it when I walked.

The cow still stood in the road, a black-and-white road block, chewing grass.

“As soon as the soldiers know that you came off that boat, they’ll come for you. We’ll just have to put you up with someone in the town. Someone who will say you’re part of their family. We’ll get you a job. That will keep you out of trouble for the time being. I’m taking you to Guthrie. He’s Clayton’s father, the one we’re buying out of prison. So he owes us, you see. He can’t refuse. He was my commanding officer in the war.”

“Did he know my father?” I couldn’t help calling him that, and neither could Crow.

“Guthrie knew your dad better than any of us.”

We walked past a roadside temple. Under a stone arch was a figure of the Virgin Mary, moss-crusted hands held out as if waiting for rain. She stood behind steel bars and her clothes were painted black.

A shadow passed suddenly over Crow’s face and he stopped in the middle of the road. He reached his arm out to make me stop as well. “You’d better stay here for a minute.”

“Why?” I thought he was going to make us get down and pray to the statue.

“The reason everybody talks about your father coming back here isn’t just because they’ve been waiting all these years to get another look at his smiling face. And it’s the same reason the Tans will tear the place apart looking for anyone by the name of Sheridan.” Crow watched me very carefully, as if waiting for some glimmer of knowledge in my eyes, so he wouldn’t have to be the one to unravel the secrets that my father had kept all these years.

But there was no glimmer. I stared at him and waited for the truth, telling myself that this was what I’d come for, no matter what it cost me.

“Your father ran guns for us in the winter of 1897, and when he left for America around the time of your birth, he said he’d come back with more guns. So all this time, we kept him to his word. Until now. People see you and they see the guns that came off the
Madrigal,
and it’s as if he kept his promise after all.”

I lowered my head, as if my skull had become too heavy for the muscles of my neck. On the horizon in my mind, I caught the last glimpse of myself as I’d imagined I would be when I found out the truth. Somehow I’d thought it would make me happy. It would make things fit together and leave me stronger than I was when I started out. But now I began to feel like the butt of some vast joke. I waited for Crow to burst out laughing and for more laughter to reach me like the cackling of witches from every house and stone and tree. But when I looked up at Crow, I saw no mockery on his face. I saw only how he wanted me to know all of what he had to say, now that he had begun.

He ran his fingers across the bars of the statue’s cage. “We used to meet here, your dad and I and others, when we were planning to bring in the guns. This was in the summer of 1897. A group of Americans, some of them had been young Union officers in your Civil War, managed to gather up a good number of guns. They were all members of organizations that supported Irish independence. The Hibernians. The Clan na Gael. Others. They’d been ready for the rising in 1867, but the rising never came to anything and now with them getting old, they thought it was their only chance of seeing something done. They had it planned for the hundredth anniversary of the rising of 1798. They sent word that we should go across and pick up the guns. They’d help us charter a ship. They’d keep us safe when we were there. So your father volunteered. He went across in the winter of ’97. Then, in the spring of the next year, we had word that a ship had been chartered and was leaving Boston. We were to meet it off a place called Spanish Point, just down the coast from here.

“The ship left Boston, but somewhere between its leaving and arriving in Ireland, the English found out about what it was carrying. It was a man named Hagan who told us that they knew. He was working for the English at the time as a policeman. The same as Stanley is now, except Hagan didn’t charge us for information. We had no way of getting word to your father. Spanish Point was crawling with the English. Guthrie and I couldn’t get near the place. The English were going to wait until your father landed. Then they’d get everything. But the ship struck rocks and sank in the middle of the night. They were the same rocks a Spanish galleon struck hundreds of years before. That’s why they call it Spanish Point, and there’s people here with black hair that they say are descendants of Spanish sailors. We thought that your father had drowned. But he showed up a month later in Galway. He said he’d swum to shore and made his way north. He told us that only half the shipment had come over on that boat. The rest was still in America, because the Yanks had been worried about the boat getting stopped and they didn’t want to risk losing everything in one blow. Your dad said he’d go back and bring the other half; another two hundred guns. He left with your mother, smuggled away in some ship with the help of Tom Hagan. They left and they never came back.

“I’m thinking he must have found himself finally safe in one place and changed his mind about running the guns. He had a better life there. It could only have been better than the one he left behind. They had a price on his head in Ireland, and you can’t trust anyone when there’s a price on your head.”

“Isn’t there a price on
your
head?”

“Not yet, although God knows they’ve arrested me enough times and kept me in prison on suspicion of various things. But so far, they’ve always let me go, because of lack of evidence.” Crow spoke with surprise in his voice, as if he couldn’t understand himself what had stopped them from putting him away once and for all.

“And they didn’t burn your house?” I imagined pictures eaten off the walls by fire. Bottles of alcohol exploding in the heat. Chairs and tables vanished in the flames.

“They haven’t burned it yet. When they burn your house, you may as well just go to the Connemara hills and live in an old shepherd’s hut. The English can’t find you up there. Sometimes they try rounding people up, but it never works. You can disappear in the hills. You can vanish into thin air. Tom Hagan did when the English found out he was keeping us informed. He lost his wife and child in a fire when the English burned his house. I hear rumors that Hagan’s got a group of men with him now. But all they are is rumors. And there’s other rumors that Hagan died some years ago. Either way, he just vanished.” Crow made a movement with his hands, joining the tips of his fingers together and then spreading them slowly apart. “Vanished.”

“Is that where Tarbox is going?”

Crow laughed, his hand finding its way to his mouth as if he was ashamed of his teeth. “When they burn his house, he’ll go. And you might, too. Hagan used to help people get out of the country. He’d find them ships with captains who would let them stow away. He might be the only one who could help you.” Crow stopped suddenly and pointed at the horizon.

Part of Lahinch was burning. Columns of smoke stuffed the sky with dirty grey.

“In the end, the soldiers will make too many people angry. There’s a line people cross where all they can think about is making the soldiers go away. Dead or living, it doesn’t matter. Every day there’s more of us crossing that line. That’s where I am, and Tarbox and Clayton Guthrie and his da. You’ll be there, too, if you stay here long enough.”

At the sound of Crow’s voice, the scattered hulks of wandering cows raised their heads and stared.

CHAPTER 8

Sun cut the water into blinding shreds.

The
Madrigal
lay tilted to one side, wedged in the sand. Waves slapped against its open portholes. Where cannon shells had exploded, its hull was peeled back like the skin of a huge fruit.

Small boats rowed out to the wreck, waves swinging their bows in the air. Crates of rifles salvaged from the cargo were stacked at the high-tide mark and guarded by soldiers.

The dunes were scattered with people. They wandered across the sand like sleepwalkers, as if gathered in some dream and led by visions out toward the sea.

“Those are people from Lahinch. If they stayed in the town, the soldiers might have shot them, instead of just burning their homes.”

I caught sight of two soldiers. They stood on a bridge that lay further up the road. Both carried fixed bayonets on their rifles.

I felt a jolt in my stomach, telling me to turn and run. But they had already seen us, so we had to stand our ground.

And as if Crow had felt the jolt, too, he rested his hand on my arm. “If they ask, you’re Guthrie’s nephew. He’s got one who’s supposed to be coming over on a visit from the States sometime soon.” Crow spoke with his chin against his chest, eyes peering up through the black shrubs of his eyebrows.

The soliders would listen to me if I told them the truth. For a moment, I was sure. I nodded hello as we came close.

The muddy brown uniforms smudged their bodies back into the grass and stones and the river bubbling under them, as it headed out to sea.

The hands of the soldiers knotted around their canvas rifle straps. They stared right through us, and I knew that there would be no talk. I put away the smile and looked down at my shoes. My hands edged toward the stitched-shut pockets of my trousers.