Pete Hamill - Forever

Across those years, he attended all of the feasts except Imbalc, because if he disappeared from St. Edmund’s in February, he might attract hard attention. In summer, many people scattered around Ireland, including the English and the Protestants; none went off in winter. Across those years, a new calendar was being added to his sense of time. The calendar of Ireland. Before Samhain, he and his father cleaned every speck of dust from the house, as was the custom, and followed another custom by leaving food for Cormac’s mother. When they returned to the house from their journeys to the forests or the town, the food was always gone.

All those great feasts revolved about the land and the sun and the marvelous gifts they granted to mortals. If the sun was not a god, what was? Who was? In the old days, Mary Morrigan said (and his father confirmed), the feasts were held under sun and moon on free, unfenced land, drawing men and women from all over Ireland. They were held now in the last unconquered forests of Ireland (the timber along the edges departing each month to build mansions in London or to be turned into ships for pirates and buccaneers who stole and looted for the English crown). The boy, becoming a man, becoming a Celt, saw that guile was essential to all his summer Irishmen. They needed the gift of deception as they traveled to the feasts on roads patrolled by British redcoats. Guile and deception, along with the ability to see and to hear and to connect their facts, because informers could be among them. The feasts were now held behind hidden pickets of men armed with swords and pikes, disguised as trees, allies of birds and deer and wolves, watching always for the English with their guns.

Cormac was never clear about his exact location, because none of the Irish made maps that could be found by their enemies (later he was certain that the grove was on the inland side of the Mountains of Mourne). What he did know was simple: He was in pure, untouched Ireland. They all spoke Irish. The jokes were Irish and the laughter was Irish and the gods were Irish, and so was the story, the legend, the binding tale. Along with one other immense thing. Beside the fire in the cave, on rainy summer nights, Mary Morrigan explained to him about the Otherworld.

“The Otherworld is beneath us,” she said, gesturing with a leathery hand, her palms flat with the ground beneath them.

The Otherworld was a place, as she described it, not a mere story or an abstract idea, and it was reachable through raised mounds called shees . Down there lived people called the Tuatha de Danaan, who had been in Ireland before the Celts, a race of poets and warriors who fought to maintain their place and then, after one final defeat, had retreated beneath the surface of the earth. Ever since, the Irish, when they died, had been following them into the earth. Hearing her descriptions, Cormac understood that the Otherworld was not like the ferocious Hell described by the Rev. Robinson, filled with flames, torture, screams, and horror. There was enchanted music down there, she said, and endless games, and eternal feasting. Nobody ever got ill in the Otherworld, and nobody fought, except for fun. There was no such thing as old age or even time. The future was the same as the past, and the present contained both. Or so said Mary Morrigan, as Cormac struggled to understand, and to imagine.

“Who gets in and who’s kept out?” he asked.

“The just are admitted, the unjust barred,” she said. “The Christians borrowed all that from us.”

“So my mother is there?”

“Aye.” She paused. “If you live a just life, you’ll see her there. Of that, there is no doubt. Sure, didn’t we help her into the Otherworld from this very spot?”

“Who else is barred?”

“Those who fail to avenge injustice,” she said. “For want of courage. For want of passion. If an unjust act is done in the family of a man or woman, it must be avenged. That is the rule.”

Another pause.

“And suicides,” she said. “Those who cannot live with the pain of the world and kill themselves are barred forever.”

On many smoky evenings, she told him tales of the Other-world. There was a very special, beautiful light down there too, she said, invented by the Tuatha de Danaan. A light never seen in this world. A light created by millions of emeralds embedded in the walls, a green, watery light that was both alluring and welcoming. The just people who came to the Otherworld were cared for by the Other People, which was what some called the Tuatha de Danaan. Sometimes the Other People emerged into our world from the emerald caves, disguised as fawns or birds or beautiful women, and lured our heroes back down into their secret world. Wasn’t the great Finn MacCool himself tempted? And the great Celtic warrior Cuchulain?

“Are the Other People angry with us?” Cormac asked. “Never. They’ve come to accept everything. They understand human weakness. But they can be rogues themselves. There are so many old people down there—those who’ve lived long lives—that they miss certain beautiful sounds and faces. That’s why they sometimes steal children. Once in a great while, for a joke, they’ll steal your food.”

“Do they marry and have their own children, the way we do?”

“Never. They can’t have children. That was part of the bargain with the gods. That’s one thing they gave up when they chose to live forever.”

“And do they live only in the shee? ”

“No, Cormac. The shee is the entrance. That would be like trying to live in a doorway.”

The Otherworld, she explained, stretched everywhere. There was an entrance in the Cave of Cruachain, where it was possible during the feast of Samhain to enter the Otherworld. But no human should go before it was time. That was one reason for the rule against suicide. And there was a dark part of the Otherworld too, she said, ruled over by Donn, the lord of the bad Irish dead, full of immense serpents, red horsemen, the walls hung with severed heads. She didn’t dwell on this, and Cormac was pleased; it sounded too much like the Rev. Robinson’s Christian Hell.

“When your time arrives,” she said, “and you have lived your full portion, and added to decency in this world, then you too can live in the Otherworld. You can unite with all those you once loved here in the world. You can share the music, the feasting, and the emerald light. But,” she went on, “if you add to evil, if you defy time, you’ll find yourself in the land of Donn.”

Hearing these tales, Cormac looked differently at the land, imagining those who lived beneath him, including his mother and his two lost brothers, and he often ached to be with them. He also woke sometimes at night in a sweat and trembling, in the slippery grip of the enraged and punishing Donn. He wanted then to pray, to find the strength that Joseph found in the land of the Pharaohs, but he felt there was no god who would hear his prayers. He said his mother’s name and his father’s, Thunder’s name and Bran’s, and swore to whoever might hear him that he would avenge all injustices, starting with what had happened to his mother.

Most of the time he was free of nightmares. And in his waking hours, his head was full of other visions, exuberantly brimming with drama and magic. From leathery Mary Morrigan, he heard wondrous tales of Cuchulain and his great warrior rages. And of Finn MacCool and how he assumed the leadership of the Fianna by getting rid of the killer of his father. This wasn’t easy to do, for his father’s killer was smart and hard and vicious. But Finn was special. A druid gave him a crane bag containing a shield, a sword, a helmet, and a pigskin belt. A great bard allowed him to eat the Salmon of Knowledge, which gave him wisdom and the gift of poetry. With armor and poetry, Finn became the man who saved Tara. He was the man who married Sava, who had been magically transformed into a fawn and became human again at the sight of Finn, and who gave birth to their child, Usheen (which Cormac later learned was spelled Oisin). But Finn was not perfect. No god was perfect. No warrior or poet was perfect. And as he grew older, imperfect Finn made a terrible mistake: He fell in love with a woman named Grainne while he was still married to Sava. But there was a younger, shrewder rival for the love of Grainne, a man named Diarmuid. At this time, Finn’s wife prophesied that if Finn ever drank from a horn, he would die. After treacherously arranging for the death of Diarmuid, Finn went off, bursting with vanity and dishonor, to leap the River Boyne in one bound. But first, in his defiant arrogance, he sipped liquor from a horn. And then fell into the river and drowned.