Free The Promise of Light by Paul Watkins

had jolted me off course. Now the island seemed dark and unfamiliar, to me who had called myself its guardian and listened to its heartbeat in the rock.
    I hoped that going to Ireland would show me something of where I belonged, even if it pointed me straight back to the island of Jamestown and the house that I wanted to leave. Perhaps it is that way for everyone, I thought. You start out with the whole world to range across and claim, and you end up returning to the place where you started, choosing a few square feet of land, the way that my father had done.
    *   *   *
    I told Thurkettle not to bother taking the ferry across with me. I said I could walk home from the Jamestown landing.
    When he had gone, I listened to bandstand music coming from the town. Soon the café people would move from their metal chairs on the sidewalk to the indoor rooms as the evening chill drifted in off the sea.
    Jamestown clumped quiet and shadowy across the water. The music from Newport could be heard all up and down the bay, but you never heard any coming from Jamestown. Instead, you would hear waves breaking on the cliffs at Beavertail, and wind through the rigging of boats in Jamestown harbor. Those sounds were drowned out in Newport. All you heard there was the music.
    *   *   *
    I stood at the bow of the ferry, tasting salt that sprayed up in my face. Sunset turned the bay into a field of boiling copper.
    The ferry was almost empty. The Newport people never came to Jamestown, unless it was to pass through on their way to the mainland. Then some of them took the Kingston train back up to Boston or down to New York and Philadelphia.
    They almost never walked through Jamestown village, because there was nothing to buy except hardware from Briggs’s general store or groceries from Allington’s. So they moved quickly past the squat houses with their sun-bleached paint and lobster pots set out to dry in the backyards.
    To the island people, downtown Newport was a bubble of laughter and songs, which they could touch now and then but which was not theirs. When winter came, the bubble disappeared. Half the shops closed down. The metal café chairs that used to jam the sidewalks lay stacked inside the closed cafés. Sailors in their dark wool coats shuffled down Thames Street with their collars turned up against the wind. Fishermen waited out storms in their drafty dockside huts.
    I used to wonder what the Newport people did all through the winter. I imagined them hidden away in rooms with dark-paneled walls and green felt-covered card tables, impatient for the snow to melt and for the Gulf Stream to return.
    A nurse stood on deck with me. She wore a blue cloak with a red trim over her white clothes. She was pushing an old man in a wheelchair. The old man’s head was tilted to one side. A tartan blanket covered his legs.
    They had come from the Sturgess Rest Home, which had a little wooden sign out front that said— DROP IN FOR A SMILE . So when we were younger, we used to walk past and give our version of a Sturgess Home Smile, which was a mindless slobbering grin.
    Often the old people would be wheeled out to the dock to watch the ships come in. The old people seemed mostly to be interested in themselves. I’d seen men and women slumped in wheelchairs, pushed into patches of sunlight, and the only part of them that seemed to be alive was their eyes. Sometimes they studied their hands, fingers wafting gently like weeds in the current of a stream. With nothing else to do, the nursing-home residents became students of their own disintegration.
    Sometimes my father had spat out how miserable he thought they looked, but I wondered if he would have said it, if he knew how much time he had left.
    *   *   *
    Two men were standing in my driveway. The engine of their car was still running.
    I recognized them as the same two men my father had been yelling at, the night Dillon’s fishhouse burnt down. They wore the same long raincoats