The Promise of Light Read Free Page B

couldn’t put one right.
    “Hello,” I was trying to say. The tears of coughing rolled down my cheeks.
    Willoughby drifted in front of me. “Ben, you must come with me at once.”
    “I’m waiting for my father to come home.” I jammed the heel of my palm into my eyes to squash out the tears that remained. Then I could focus on the old man.
    “It’s to do with your father. Now you must come at once.” He looked as if he combed his hair with a fork. It stuck up like spikes on a hedgehog.
    “What’s the matter?”
    Willoughby breathed in. The air rasped down his old throat. “I don’t really know, except that there has been an accident and they need you at the hospital.”
    The comfortable rumbling of the Dunhams in my head suddenly stopped. It stopped so quickly that I thought I might fall over. “What kind of accident?”
    He didn’t say. He took hold of my arm and led me out of the house.
    *   *   *
    It wasn’t really a hospital. Jamestown was too small to have a hospital. Dr. Melville had retired here from Newport three years before and then got bored with growing cucumbers and digging for blue crabs in the mud. So he opened a clinic in the back room of his house. The back room was our hospital.
    We had to run, because Willoughby didn’t have a car. He said they hadn’t been able to find one in time.
    “There’s been an accident,” he kept saying as we ran.
    I wanted to press him for details, but sudden fear had clogged my throat.
    Bosley met me outside Dr. Melville’s house. A crowd had gathered there, almost as big as the crowd that had come to watch Dillon’s burn to the ground. The same people who had been shuffling home in their hunting boots and nightshirts now stood peering into Melville’s living room.
    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,