Pete Hamill - Forever

“Well?”

“We’re quite sorry about your wife, Mister Carson.”

“Thank you.”

“But we have a question for you,” Robinson said.

The boy’s father— His name is Fergus O’Connor —looked at the preacher in a blank way. He seemed to know the question before it was uttered.

“It’s about her burial, I suppose.”

Silence for a long moment. Her name was Rebecca Samuels. She was a Jew.

Robinson said: “She was not buried in our churchyard.”

Fergus O’Connor folded his arms across his chest.

“True?” the Rev. Robinson said.

“You know that’s true.”

“Where is she buried?”

“In the West,” Da said. “According to her wishes.”

The visitors looked at one another, as if the blacksmith had confirmed something for them.

“That leads to another question, Mister Carson.”

“Ask it,” he said, the muscles in his bare forearms moving. “Are you Catholics?”

“No.”

“You’re sure? Because it’s very suspicious that—”

“I told you that we’re not Catholics. You see us every Sunday at your chapel. You—”

“There are many hidden papists here,” one of the other men interrupted. “Full of treason, the lot of them.”

Cormac Samuel O’Connor moved around to the side, watching his father.

“I’ve answered your questions.”

“But I’d like—”

“Good night, Reverend Robinson.”

Fergus O’Connor unfolded his arms and opened the door. Then he bowed slightly, making Robinson’s face twitch. The faces of the other three knitted themselves into angry furrows.

“Try to stay dry,” Da said. “And don’t fear: I’ll control the dog.”

Cormac Samuel O’Connor learned that he and his father were not unique. Everywhere, men and women changed their names and embraced strange gods in order to live. The Spanish did it, and the Muslims did it, and the Jews did it. In Spain, the Jews became conversos . Christians became Muslims and later, after the fall of Granada, Christians again. And so in Ireland, where Christians killed Christians during the wars of religion, Fergus O’Connor’s father changed his name, and the name of his children. And, many centuries earlier, so did the family of Rebecca Samuels. But such a conversion was always a lie told in order to live. It was the making of a mask. And sometimes, in order to survive, a mask was not enough. Sometimes a man must have a weapon.

Late on the afternoon after the visit from the Rev. Robinson and his posse, Fergus O’Connor began to make the sword. He did this with Cormac’s help, describing each step in detail. While rain fell steadily from a dark sky, Bran sprawled on his belly, his eyes alert to danger or absorbed in watching the process. Thunder was led in from his stable to watch. The boy had seen John Carson make hundreds of sickles, and many knives, but he had never before made a sword. Now Fergus O’Connor was making a sword.

He went to work as if he had made hundreds. He began with three old iron horseshoes, laying them on the fired grate of the forge until they turned white, then lifting them with wide-mouthed tongs to the anvil. There he straightened them, lengthened them, braided them together. They formed the core of the sword. “They’ll make it light in weight,” Fergus O’Connor explained, “and easier to swing many times without tiring.” Then he melted the steel, flecked with iron, and applied it smoothly in three heats to the core, folding it over three times, welding again, dressing it with glancing hammer blows, molding it, packing the steel around the core, adding a groove down each side, forming a perfect point.

Between each welding heat he scoured the blade with a paste made of charcoal, the ashes of straw, and fine Lagan riverbank clay. He held it up with the clamps, examined it in a piercing way. “The danger,” he said, “is oxidation and scaling.” Then he covered it with a thicker paste, adding polishing-stone powder and salt. He stripped this off the edge, exactly one sixteenth of an inch, and returned the emerging sword to the fire. When it was cherry red, he withdrew it, wiped away the coating, and drowned it in oil so sizzling that Bran barked.

While the blade cooled, he made a sword guard from rolled-up bars of iron and steel, welding the roll together and then flattening it so that it would protect the hand. He used shears and chisel to shape it into an elegant metal flower.

All of this was done in a day, Fergus O’Connor working with a sense of urgency, glancing out at the road as if wary of being seen. When the sword had cooled but was not cold, he used a needle-pointed burin to etch two figures into the broadest part of the sword, just below the handle.

Two spirals, thin at the top, curling around, then widening at the bottom. Like sea serpents. One on each side. Matching the spiral earrings of Fergus O’Connor’s wife.

There was little traffic that day; the weather was too fierce. Da delicately sanded the etched markings, then passed the rough paper to his son for more sanding while showing him a hunk of white bone he had long saved, part of a wolf killed in the mountains.

“This will be the handle,” he said. “The grip. We’ll be finished by tonight.”

“It’s very beautiful, Da.”

“Aye,” he said, “but it’s not meant to do beautiful things.”

He told Cormac to go home and lay out the makings of dinner. He’d be home soon. Bran followed the boy back to the house and watched as he chopped onions and potatoes, and peered into jars of unlabeled spices, trying to remember what his mother had done on all those days when the two of them were here together. At one point, as he dropped the vegetables into a pot of water, Cormac Samuel O’Connor begin to shake.

Thinking: She’s gone.

Thinking: Da needs her. I need her. As do Bran and Thunder. The O’Connors need her. But she’s never coming back. She’ll never turn her head suddenly from this hearth, with her spiral earrings flashing.

And then he forced himself to stop.

Thinking: Not now, not ever. No tears. No sobbing. Now you’ve got to be a man.

Thinking: You are no longer little Robert Carson. Not Robby or Bobby or Rob. You are Cormac Samuel O’Connor, from the days before Saint Patrick. You’re the son of Fergus, not John.

When his father came home, he had the sword in his hand and smiled in a proud way. He whipped it in the air, making five or six cutting movements in a few seconds, and then smiled again, as if at himself. Cormac thought: He has a wonderful smile.

“We’re not done,” Fergus said. “But it’s what I wanted. Light and hard and tempered.”

They took turns polishing the blade, using a file crosswise on its flat sides, emery cloth for the fine edges. The boy could see his face in the polished steel and thought: You are Cormac . The cutting edge was like a razor. He glanced at his father, staring into the fire. And he is Fergus.

“Let’s eat,” Da said.

Over the next few years, Cormac received three separate educations. All were happening at the same time, but in separate places. As young Robert Carson, he heard one version of the tale of the world at St. Edmund’s, the one about the civilizing glories of the British Empire. Jesus, of course, came first, the Redeemer of sinful Man, the son of God whose gospel of love was tempered by the vehemence of the Old Testament. But the mission of Jesus also explained the mission of Britain. With God’s blessing, he and his schoolmates were told, the British were expanding all over the earth. To America. To the Caribbean. To distant India. Taming barbarians. Bringing law to the lawless. Saving savages from the idol worship inflicted by the Whore of Babylon who ruled in Rome. They heard about brave Sir Francis Drake and his daring battles against the corrupt Spanish and treacherous French and even Cormac O’Connor, safe behind his Robert Carson mask, found those tales thrilling. He kept his questions about the moral point of the story to himself. Clearly, said the Rev. Robinson, God had chosen Britain to civilize and pacify the world, creating both a national duty and a personal mission for every God-fearing Protestant. And God had truly smiled on his blessed people. Hadn’t God created a monstrous storm to defeat the Spanish Armada? Hadn’t God helped the British build the greatest fleet of naval vessels in the world? This was all clear to the Rev. Robinson, although not quite so clear to the boy. The Rev. Robinson insisted that in Ireland, and particularly in the valiant North, fearless English armies (with help from the Dutch) had waged a righteous struggle to break the papal yoke, the tyranny of Rome, the Whore of Babylon, and in the process rescued Christianity itself.