Pete Hamill - Forever

From the stable, Robert saw the Rev. Robinson coming up the road, awkward and gaunt. He remained hidden in the dark and was relieved that the preacher didn’t stay long. Then everybody was gone. Da called “Son, son, come home now” from the door, and Robert walked slowly back with Bran. The boy didn’t want to enter the house, but in a hoarse, low voice, his father told him to come in and change into dry clothes. “Him too,” he said, nodding at the soaked dog. Bran seemed to understand that they needed him with them that night. He shook off the rain, twice, and followed the boy to his room.

When Robert returned in dry clothes, his father was staring at his wife, at Rebecca, the descendant of Noah. At the boy’s mother. He said nothing. The doors were now closed and locked against the world. But the world would not leave them to their grieving.

There was a sudden sharp knock on the door. Bran barked angrily, as if he needed to take out his anger on someone, anyone. Da only looked weary: another mourning visitor, paying respects. He sighed and went to the door. A thin, trembling man stood there, a scarf tied tightly around his head under a tall fur hat. He bowed in a nervous way. Da barred the way to the house, leaving the man in the dripping rain. Bran barked and barked, while the boy tried to calm him.

“Yes?”

“Excuse me, sir. You’d be Mister Carson, sir, am I right? Mr. John Carson?”

“Aye.”

“Sorry for your trouble, Mister Carson,” the man said. “But I’ve got something for you.”

The man peeled off a kid glove and slid an envelope from inside his coat. He handed it to Da, then bowed, turned, and was gone. Father and son heard the receding gallop of a horse.

The father stared at the envelope, then turned it over. Heavy vellum paper. The deckle-edged flap sealed in red wax, embossed with a W.

He cracked it open with a finger. Inside there was a lone vellum card. He exhaled disdainfully, then showed it to his son. A single word was written with a steel pen: Sorry. Clipped to the card was a ten-pound note.

Da held the ten-pound note between thumb and forefinger as if pinching the tail of a rat.

“Ten pounds,” he said. And for the first time he sounded bitter instead of grieving. “That’s what he thinks an Irish life is worth.”

He walked past his son to the hearth and dropped the bank-note in the fire.

Then he turned to the boy.

“It’s the two of us now, son.”

The boy rushed to him, into his enveloping arms, and then all the caged words burst from him, rushing on a river of guilt, If I’d only stayed by her side, if only I hadn’t seen Tommy Hastings, if only I hadn’t tried to cross the lane, words of anger and protest and revenge, I’m going to find him, I’m going to make him pay, I’m going to get that cruel, slaving pig, and then no words, just bawling. Then sobbing. Hopeless. Empty. Shuddering. And when Da led him to bed and consoled him with whispered words and told him to sleep, because they were going on a long journey in the morning, Robert didn’t want him to leave the room. He wanted him there. He wanted his mother there. He wanted them to tell him stories. He wanted them to sing a song.

But Da closed the door softly and went back to the room where his wife lay cold and broken. Robert heard the sound of turf being dropped upon the fire. And then the doors opened and his father went outside to howl with Bran at the moon.

He was awake before dawn. Robert cracked open his bedroom door and glanced at the hearth, hoping none of this had happened, that he’d moved through a terrible dream, that his mother would be standing there, mixing porridge in a pot. But no: Her body was where he had seen it last, lying on boards beside the hearth. It was wrapped now in a kind of oiled cape, her face barely visible through a tightly drawn green shawl. Da whispered to the boy to dress warmly, for they were going to the West.

In his room, Robert pulled on wool shirts and socks, staring at the wall where the horse’s skull was hidden. Tell me something, he thought. Tell me what this is all about…. When Robert came out, his father lifted Rebecca Carson as if she were a sleeping child and told the boy to open the Western door. They passed through, his father bending under the transom. Thunder was already harnessed to a cart roofed by a small canvas tent. Da laid his wife on rush mats on the floor of the cart. He looked at her for a long moment, as if remembering unfinished conversations, and then went back to place some damp, slow-burning turf on the fire. He emerged with extra blankets, closing the door behind him. Tenderly, he covered her body with the blankets, and then he and his son climbed up on the seat of the cart and started into the bruise-colored darkness, riding to the West. Bran hurried along beside them.

They rode for hours, following narrow paths into dense forest. High trees sheltered them from the rain. They saw no houses, no towns. They climbed and climbed. At one point, they paused and Robert lifted the panting Bran up on the buckboard. It was full daylight now, but still dark among the ancient trees.

Then, from the leafy darkness Robert heard a voice say something in a language he didn’t know. A tree was speaking! His father answered back. Using words Robert had never heard him say. The boy trembled with excitement: There in the cold mist, his father was speaking to trees and the trees were talking back. Every fifty feet another tree talked, its branches moving, and his father answered. Bran was alert, his wet nose quivering, his jaws clamped shut, but he didn’t bark. He too seemed to know the secret language of the trees.

Finally the path ended. A wall of trees and foliage blocked their way. Da waited and said nothing. Thunder shuddered and pawed the ground as if anxious to go on.

And then the trees parted, and they moved forward into a wide hidden grove.

In the center was an immense flat boulder, like a stone table supported on legs chopped from the face of a mountain. There were carved markings on the boulder that Robert couldn’t read. Around the edges of the grove, hidden under the dark spreading branches of alder and oak, he saw tall stone columns rising twelve feet into the air, as if aimed at the stars. Their tops were rounded, their sides finely planed. The hush was eerie, the sound of something that had not yet happened. Thunder shuddered again. Bran growled. A hawk cried from some unseen place high in the sky. Then from the trees came some of the men who had visited Da in the evenings when his mother was alive. Their women were behind them, and some white-bearded men in long dark gowns, all of them speaking that language.

Da eased off the wagon and so did Bran and the boy. The men embraced his father and whispered to him. None of them wept. Four of the women lifted Rebecca Carson from the wagon and carried her to the flat boulder, which Robert now realized was an altar. They laid her out on the altar, applying oils from small jars to her eyelids. Then more men came from the woods with immense torches and jammed them into the ground, one flame at each point of the altar, north and south, east and west. A breeze whipped the flames of the torches, making them look like wild orange hair.

Da took his son’s hand and led him to the head of the altar, where they stood together behind the woman they had lost. At the foot of the altar, an old woman (whose name the boy would learn was Mary Morrigan) began to chant. All the others, women and men, followed her lead. Da knew all the words in the strange language. His son didn’t know the words, so he stared at the old woman, with her creased, ravined leathery face, her blank milky eyes, high cheekbones, steel gray hair. Her hands were brown, worn, still, as if carved from wood. She finished the chanting and then she began to sing in the voice of a child: pure, sweet, high-pitched, and charged with feeling. A pause. Then more chanting, with her words followed by the deeper responses of the others. At some lines, Da squeezed his son’s hand, as if trying to comfort him, responding to the words that the boy didn’t understand. And then it was over. For almost five minutes, they stood together with heads bowed, hands gripping arms.