Pete Hamill - Forever

In one lesson he cut off a tree limb that was eight inches thick. Not chopping it or hacking at it like a butcher. Cutting it in a single stroke with his blacksmith’s arm and his perfect sword, like a knife cuts butter. More important than the sword’s strength and power, he said to his son, was the way it was used. He taught through example and drill how to unsheathe the sword in one whiplike motion. How to slash with it or stab with it. How to avoid the other man’s sword, his thrusts and swings. In their first lessons they used simple wooden poles, father making son repeat the motions over and over again until all his movements became swift and fluid. Then he handed his son the sword itself. The feel of it always awed the young man, at times even cowed him. Its power seemed to surge up his right arm in a liquid way. Sometimes the younger man’s exhausted arm would ache, but at such moments the father urged him to try even harder. Or to switch to his left hand.

“You don’t ever want to die,” he said, “because you’re tired. Or because you’ve been wounded in your fighting arm. Each arm must have equal strength. And one other thing: If you think you’ll get tired, then you will get tired. If you think you’ll lose, you will lose.”

Fergus showed Cormac the principles of balance, and the way to shift weight, sliding forward on one leg, not leaping but pushing on the back leg. He urged him to move side to side, never to stand straight in front of an opponent, chopping at him, but to use quickness and surprise to fool him, and then to finish him. He knew everything about sword fighting, and one Sunday Cormac asked his father where he learned what he knew.

“I was a soldier,” he said.

“You were?”

“Aye. When I was your age.”

“And where did you soldier?”

His eyebrows rose. “Why, in Ireland, of course.”

“Tell me about it.”

“No.”

“Why not, Da?”

“I did nothing more than did better men than I. ’Tis nothing to brag upon.”

“Did you fight the English?”

“Aye.”

“Did you… kill men?”

“Aye.”

“Many men?”

“Too many.”

Fergus turned the sword over in his hand, retreating into himself, then said: “We’d best be going. It’s almost dark.”

Back at the forge, they never displayed the sword in the open air, afraid that some spy might be watching. If they were indeed suspected of being Catholic, then a spy could be peering at them from the woods, and it was forbidden for a Catholic to possess a weapon of any kind. For a while, Fergus hid the sword behind a false panel in the tool shed, then he moved it to a slot he built into the rush matting of the roof. On days of hammering rain, when the woods were empty of curious strangers, they practiced reaching for it by standing on one of the three-legged stools, making a swift, fluid movement that ended with a slash of the air. One late night, Fergus designed a map case for the sword, with a wide fluted bell for the handle, equipped with a leather loop that could be slung upon a saddle horn. That was the way they carried it while traveling. Cormac O’Connor was learning that people and things were not always what they seemed to be.

In the forge, when Cormac was not sharing the work, his father made him lift hunks of iron and steel, working his biceps and shoulders and back, doing curls and thrusts, then lifting pig iron over his head, the weight always increasing. Cormac’s muscles grew harder and tauter, and in the dark Sunday forests the sword felt lighter. His father had him skip rope too, explaining that a swordsman needed legs with spring and power. And he established codes. Never use a sword on someone who can’t fight back. Don’t drink, ever, because drink makes the wits rust, and you can die without a fight. If you draw your sword, prepare to kill with it or to die.

“And tell none of these to any man,” he said. “He must never know what you’re thinking. That’s the business of yourself, lad.”

Across two summers, Cormac became a Celt.

He was taken by his father to the sacred grove, passing through the talking trees, and placed in the care of Mary Morrigan. She was assisted by the men and the younger women. Each time his father left, Cormac hated the moment of separation, and so did Thunder and Bran, who were going back with Fergus. That first time (Cormac later thought of it as a first semester), the dog refused to move and Thunder tossed his head in protest. But Fergus growled his orders, and they obeyed in a sulking way, and off they went through the trees. When they were gone, the old woman took Cormac by the hand led him through the woods to the mouth of a cave on the slope of a hill. Here the young man slept on furs while becoming an Irishman.

Mary Morrigan taught him the Irish language, with its eighteen letters, starting with the words for man, fear, and woman, bean, and bread, aran, and water, uisce . She taught him how to say “I want.” And then she began talking in Irish to him, even though Cormac didn’t yet understand. Cormac was angered by this new stage. He thought: Why does she insist on speaking this language? It’s gone, destroyed. He thought: Why not just use English? But she calmed and fed him, and named the food in Irish, and the pots and the fire, and told him to sleep and then, in the morning, started over again. As he moved around the forest that surrounded the grove he understood that it was actually a village with trees separating and hiding the houses. About six hundred people were hiding there from the world. Beside one house there was a huge well, and all drew from it, using hand-carved wooden buckets. In another house were supplies of oats, available to all. Cormac didn’t see anyone using money. About a dozen horses, small and lean, were tied to trees with straw ropes (he never once hear them whinny). Pigs and chickens roamed freely. At a tanner’s, animals were skinned, their pelts hung on ropes to dry, while sweet, sickening odors rose from boiling pots. A metalsmith gave shape and beauty to shields and jewelry, and Cormac chatted in his broken Irish with a blacksmith who knew Fergus. Mary Morrigan introduced Cormac to the men and the women and the young people, and all of them spoke to him in Irish. He listened and nodded shyly and remained mute.

Then one morning Mary Morrigan asked him in Irish whether he had slept well and he answered her in Irish, “Yes, I’ve slept well.” The key had turned in the lock, the way he had climbed a magic ladder into arithmetic. By the end of summer, he was not simply speaking Irish, he was thinking in Irish. And, yes: dreaming.

“Good,” Mary Morrigan said that first morning after the key turned. “There’s much for you to know.”

She instructed him about the seasons, and the great feasts. Imbalc, with its sacred flame, and the white stones that were marked with your own sign and thrown in the fire, and how if your stone wasn’t there when the fire cooled then it had been consumed like food by the flames and you’d been blessed by the gods of fire. Beltane , on the first of May, when Cormac saw cattle driven between walls of flame, and a maypole dance, and then men and women falling down together in the woods. And though this had not happened to him, although he had lain down on the earth with no girl, he wanted to dance around the maypole with all of them, red-haired women and golden-haired girls, dark-haired and black (while rough-skinned Mary Morrigan whispered to him in Irish: “No, not you, not here, not yet” ). Lughnasa in August: a great gathering of horses and cattle, to be traded and sold, with beef roasted for the tribe, and fires lighting up the night sky, mad dancing and much music and Mary Morrigan telling him that Ireland is a woman, is called by some the Dark Rosaleen, is always deep in the dark heart of the dance. Samhain in November: the harvest gathered, fruits and grains and great soups simmering in immense kettles while the music drifted through hills and over mountains and into caves and down into the Otherworld. They used that word a lot, as if it named a specific place. Cormac would hear more from Mary Morrigan about the Otherworld.