The Promise of Light (26 page)

The rifles kicked back into the men’s shoulders. The noise of gunshots clapped off the barrack walls.

Byrne flew across the railing. One of his arms dislocated. His body shook, then slumped. Slowly the handcuff chain slid down the railing, dragging Byrne with it, his hands still pinched in the cuffs. He moved inch by inch until his body settled on the ground.

A moan came from the line of British soldiers. A Tan dropped to his knees. His fingers dug into the ground.

No one moved to help him.

The soldier began to crawl forward. The tendons stood out in his neck. His cap fell off and he crawled over it.

Still no one moved.

The soldier’s arms gave way and he rested his forehead on the ground. He began to cry.

I heard someone barely a foot away draw in breath.

“Get back in line!” The shout was deafening. A Tan stepped out of rank. He was a sergeant, with three chevrons and a crown stitched to his right arm.

The IRA guards didn’t move. Nobody did.

The sergeant’s face was crooked with rage. “Stand up and get back in line!”

The soldier rocked his head back and forth, still sobbing.

Then the sergeant walked across and picked up the man by his collar. The soldier shook his head. His jaw locked open and the moaning sound crept out. The sergeant spoke to him in a voice that only the two of them could hear. Then the soldier moaned louder and shook his head again.

The sergeant smacked him in the face with the back of his hand and dragged him to the ranks. The two Tans on either side of the soldier had to prop him up. He stood with his knees half bent, ready to fall if the others let him go. His head hung forward. The sergeant went back to his place, raised his hands in the air and stared in front of him.

Clayton said nothing. He made no gesture to show that he had even seen what happened. He shouted for the IRA men to fall in on the road.

There was a sound of heavy footsteps on the grass as people followed his order. I ran with them.

Then the hammer of a machine gun sent me down on my face. The others dropped, too. I lay pressed to the ground with my hands covering my head.

The Tans were crying out.

Their shrieking paralyzed me. I realized that they were the ones being shot at.

The gun’s stitching thunder continued for long after the shouting had stopped. Then I heard Clayton yell to cease fire.

I raised my head from the dirt and saw others doing the same.

The Tans were all down, their bodies cripple-twisted and lying on top of each other. There wasn’t even the movement of a wounded man.

Byrne’s corpse had settled on the ground, as if his skin was already blending with the grass.

A Lewis gun had been set up in the hedge facing the Tans. Clayton must have ordered it. The two men who had manned the gun, one carrying a sack of spare magazines, sank back through the hedge and lined up on the road.

Crow stamped toward Clayton. He looked as if he had gone mad. “What is the fucking point of executing Byrne in front of all these people, and then shooting them as well?” He screamed in Clayton’s face.

Clayton talked back too quietly for us to hear.

Crow was shaking with rage. “There’s a corridor in hell for people like you!” Then he spun around and walked back to the road.

“What did he say?” I asked him as he passed me.

At first Crow didn’t know who I was. Then he said in his old quiet voice, “Clayton told me he wanted it to be the last thing those Tans saw on this earth.”

I found myself almost untouched by the bodies on the ground. There were too many of them. It dug into me more to have seen Byrne there by himself, or McGarrity facedown in the mud. But the carpet of khaki-clothed men left me with only a numbness, and I was already numb from the beating.

*   *   *

We set out across the fields, loaded down with guns and bandoliers.

Clayton caught up with me. He had been running and was out of breath. He carried two Lee-Enfield rifles and gave one to me.

I slung it on my shoulder without breaking stride. I didn’t want to talk. All the violence I’d seen since I walked ashore seemed to come from Clayton. It sparked off his fingers like lightning.

I had hoped somehow to stand outside the war, and even thought it was possible. But with the killing of these Tans, it made no difference what I’d believed. It seemed as if I had crossed the line so long ago, I could no longer recall when it was.

Clayton knew what I was thinking. “They got what they deserved,” he said.

I didn’t answer. I raised my head and watched the moon spread silver across the black sky.

CHAPTER 13

The dark was filled with whispering. Fog had settled in.

I sat against a low stone wall, sheltered from the wind. One by one, I pulled bullets from the bandolier and loaded them into the rifle. I set my thumb on the brass bullet cases and pressed down until they clicked into the magazine.

Men in trench coats drifted past. From close by came the scrape of wall stones being rearranged.

The field beyond the wall sank down to a hollow. A stream ran through it, and trees clustered on the banks. The Ennistymon Tans were down there somewhere. They had come across the open ground, avoiding roads. Now they were forming a battle line. Shards of voices traveled on the wind as the soldiers regrouped in the dark.

When the magazine was full, I chambered a round and settled the gun across my lap. I tried to calm myself by thinking of home. It had been a while since I last imagined the daily movements of Willoughby, Hettie, and Harley, and the tides around the island. It used to be that every time I found myself with any room to think, standing half-asleep over the grey dishwater at Gisby’s, I had traveled home in my daydreams.

The daydreams had ended, but I couldn’t remember when. The point had come and gone without my noticing. The island and the people I knew there had lost their clarity. Now they seemed blurred at the edges and half formed, like the products of my sleep.

A part of me had already given up hope that I would reach home again. That part began to call this place home, and had sunk roots into the black soil. Even now, it didn’t want to leave.

I wondered if Guthrie would be all right. Perhaps the word of him sheltering me never reached Ennistymon and now, with the Lahinch Tans gone, there would be no one left who knew.

Someone passed a canteen down the line. I shook it to see if there was anything left. The canteen was cloth-covered, with a wine-cork for a stopper. When I took a mouthful, I felt my eyes open wide with surprise. Whiskey. Perhaps even Dunhams. It sent the same bright fire down inside me.

Mist billowed across the fields and I could no longer make out the shapes of men lying near me. I only heard the rustling of their clothes, as if the fog itself had voices. I corked the water bottle and slung it on my back, then crawled along the wall to where another man was sitting. I had met him once at the pub but couldn’t recall his name. Coogan, maybe. Culligan. Cadogan. I held out the canteen.

The man pulled out the cork with his teeth.

Culligan. Countryman. I still couldn’t remember.

He wiped the mouth of the water bottle on his sleeve, then drank three heavy swallows. “I’m going home.” He breathed alcohol in my face. “The Tans have turned around and left. A while ago, you could hear them down in the hollow. Now there’s nothing. They’ve all buggered off.”

It was true that the voices had stopped.

“Besides, I have to show up for work tomorrow.” He tucked the rifle under his arm and set off towards Lahinch.

I stood by myself, barely breathing as I listened to the fog. Then I returned to my spot by the wall.

Stanley and Crow were there. Stanley carried a Lewis gun. Its barrel was as thick as Stanley’s leg. In a satchel on his back were spare magazines, round like plates and two fingers thick.

Crow unclipped the bayonet from his rifle. He ground its blade a few times on a stone. “It’ll be like old times, Stan.”

“So it will indeed, Harry.” Stanley swung the Lewis gun back and forth on its stand.

My mouth still tingled from the whiskey. “I just talked to a man who said the Tans have turned back. He was on his way home.”

Stanley looked up. “You’re fucking kidding.”

Crow scraped his thumb across the bayonet’s blade and then clipped it back onto his rifle. “They’re still out there. They can walk around like ghosts. And the last thing the Tans are going to do is turn around and go home. They’re probably looking forward to this. Bloody useless, isn’t it? Have to fight the damn war by ourselves, Stan.” He stepped back into the fog and his footsteps faded away.

Stanley fixed a drum of bullets onto the Lewis. “We shouldn’t be here at all. There’s only about twenty of us and there must be at least fifty of them. When daylight comes, hundreds of them will be crawling all over this place. We should just get up into the hills.”

I stared at the fog. It wove into shapes that I recognized, then scattered and left me straining to make out what I’d seen.

Stanley took three grenades from his pockets. A bar stretched along one side of the dull gridded surface, held there by a pin. He brought one of the bombs close to my face. “It’s a Mills bomb. All you do is keep your fist wrapped around the bomb and the lever bar. Then you pull out the pin. Don’t let go of the lever. Once you do, you’ve got seven seconds. Do you see?” Stanley set the grenade back on the wall. The grid pattern stayed printed on his palm.

“When are you leaving for America, Stanley?”

“Soon as I can. I’ve had false papers made up. Passport. Work permits. I paid to have it done.”

“But they’d recognize your face.”

“Not after I’m through with it.” Stanley grinned. Then suddenly his smile collapsed. “I can hear them.”

All I could make out was the far-away burble of the stream. The saliva wouldn’t go down my throat, so I spat it on the grass.

Something rustled by the wall. I grabbed the rifle and aimed it at a patch of fog. Stanley swung the Lewis around. His legs were braced to take the shock. The rustling kept up and then we saw a man moving toward us on all fours. A rifle was strapped to his back. It was Clayton. When he saw the Lewis aimed at him, he rose to his knees and waved his hands in front of his face. “They’re here.” His voice was scratchy with whispering. “Tarbox just caught one of their forward scouts up on the ridge. We found these on him.” Clayton pulled a clip of bullets from his pocket. The copper tip of each bullet had been filed down so that it looked like the end of a chisel. “Dumdums. If one of them’s done that, then they all have.”

Clayton set the bullet in my hand, then curled my fingers over, as if the bullet was a gift. “They don’t fly straight through the air. Instead, they cartwheel end over end. So when they hit you, they don’t just leave a little hole. They tear out a space the size of your hand. Are you sure you didn’t tell them anything at the barracks?”

“If I say I didn’t tell them anything, then I didn’t.”

“It’s good for you that you didn’t talk, Ben.” Then Clayton’s head snapped around towards Stanley. “It’s you I don’t trust.”

Stanley used his sleeve to rub damp off the barrel of the Lewis. “Well, you don’t have a lot of choice, do you?”

“Give the Lewis to Sheridan.”

“He doesn’t know how to work it.”

“Well, teach him.”

“No time.” Stanley’s voice was growing hoarse.

“I don’t trust you with the only decent weapon we’ve got.”

“Look you.” Stanley held out his hand. His fingertips rested against Clayton’s chest. “I got as much to lose in this as you do. More, if they catch me.”

Clayton watched Stanley’s hand. The space between them had vanished, cut off by the outstretched arm. “If you break formation before you get the order from me, I’ll have you shot.” He didn’t wait for a reply. He continued down the wall, with the slow, loping tread of a hunchback.

I settled back into the quiet. Hagan’s face shimmered in front of me, as if seen from underwater. I was afraid to finally set eyes on him. It seemed as if I had never thought past the idea that he might exist and never dared to give him shape and character. I wondered if he knew that I was here and plodding my way north to find him. People in Lahinch spoke of Hagan as if he knew everything, watching down from the treeless rock of the Connemara hills. He had gone away and left them years before, but they would not leave him. They made Hagan keep them company in the stories that they told.

There had never been anything in my life that I thought worth fighting for. But having come this far, I would do anything to finish what I started. If people stood in the way, I’d do whatever it took to push them aside. It was all that mattered now, and for the moment I didn’t care if I keeled over dead the second after I caught sight of Hagan, because it was as far ahead as I could think and as much as I dared ask for.

Stanley jerked his chin at the place where Clayton had disappeared. “It’s him you want to watch. Not me. I been in worse places than this.” He’d been muttering to himself for a while now, but I had not been listening.

“Why?” The damp rested in my lungs.

“Because he thinks he’s got the whole bloody war planned out in his head. Who’s going to die. When they’re going to die. Why they’re going to die. I think he must sit down at his desk every night with a slide rule and figure it all out.”

Noise came from the fog. I crouched down behind the wall. With my thumb, I pushed forward the gridded metal stub of the Enfield’s safety catch. I flexed my hand, trying to drive out the chill.

The noise came again, metal on metal. Whispering. A rustle as someone crawled forward.

Stanley hugged the butt of the Lewis against his chest.

There was a shout. Then a slow growl came from the fog. The growl rose to screaming. Footsteps thumped toward us.

I shouldered the rifle and tried not to blink.

Howling echoed around us. Boots trampled the ground.

Fire burst along the wall. Shapes appeared from the fog. Running men. They held rifles out in front of them, bayonets fixed on the ends. Their mouths were open and the dew was wet on their helmets. Bayonets swished through the mist.