The Promise of Light Read Online Free Page B

Melville had hooked his finger under the vein and was tugging it out of my arm. “He’ll be all right, won’t he?” I said through Peg’s fingers. Through the cracks between them, all I could see was the brightness of the bulb on the ceiling.
    “He is stable for now. Burns take a long time to heal and he’s mangled his arm pretty badly. Parts of that diesel tank hit him like shrapnel.” Melville’s voice was toneless as he concentrated on drawing the blood.
    It was quiet for a while. The others in the room had seen my blood and it extinguished their voices. The faint tugging at my veins continued. I knew that by now, they would have fitted the other end of the tube into one of my father’s arteries and that my blood would be flowing into his. I thought of it mingling, reaching his heart and charging away into the caverns of his body. I wondered if somehow my thoughts might travel with it. Maybe I could talk to him through my blood. Perhaps, now, memories that belonged to me would flicker to life in his head. Perhaps even the Dunhams would reach him, speckled in the heavy red flood from my arm. What did my father say the whiskey did? Takes out the fire but leaves in the warmth.
    The needle slid out of me and Melville folded my arm back. “Keep that there.”
    Peg’s hand moved away. She helped me to my feet.
    I kept my arm folded. Blood found its way out and dripped from my elbow.
    The other end of the tube was still in my father’s arm. The tube remained filled with blood and there was more blood on the floor. The syringe lay on the counter, by my feet. A fat drop of blood hung from the end of the needle. Melville had used it to start the flow into my father’s arm.
    Melville removed the tube from my father, and then lifted the two needle ends, so that the blood in the tube didn’t pour out on the floor. “You should go home now, Ben.”
    “I ought to stay here, don’t you think?” Dizziness swirled at the back of my head. “Jesus, is he going to be all right?”
    “There’s nothing for you to do but rest.” Willoughby’s hands settled on my shoulders. “You save your strength for the morning.”
    “Goodnight, Benjamin.” Peg was leaving the room.
    I wanted to tell her to stay. As Willoughby guided me out of the room, I saw my father lying on the table, legs still strapped down. The bandage had covered his eyes and wound once under his chin. It looked as if Melville had been trying to embalm him.
    I wished I could take some of the pain for him. It would get worse before it got better. He had told me himself about burns. The healing took months and all of it was pain. He could fend off the shrieking of his raw nerves with anger and shouting, but he didn’t have the strength to hold it back for long. Nobody did.
    The crowd had gone. All that remained of them were footprints in Melville’s flower bed, his early summer flowers stamped into the mud.

CHAPTER 2
    The sweat of a nightmare was still on my face.
    I opened my bedroom window and stared out at the darkness. Flowers showed like chips of bone among the honeysuckle bushes.
    I had been expecting nightmares, but not this soon. A few days lag-time before the images caught up with me, of seeing my father’s flesh peel off his bones. I knew it wouldn’t be long until grotesque mirror images of him and myself came stumping like cripples into my dreams, badly acting out what hurt me most.
    But the nightmare that came charging down the alleys of my sleep was not from the present. This dream had followed me through childhood and I’d thought it had long ago been put away for good.
    For more than two decades, the pictures had rested harmless and forgotten in some wrinkle of my brain. I could not believe how clearly it had burst from cover and spread like wings behind my eyes.
    *   *   *
    My mother once told me about a famous knight in Ireland. This knight had spent his life saving the kingdom from invaders. When he saw that his work was done, he