Pete Hamill - Forever

“A fool,” said Mary Morrigan, telling him the story for the first time. “A great man was Finn MacCool, a hero. But also a bloody fool. You see the point? Love can do that to any one of us.”

“Has it done it to you?” Cormac asked.

She looked at him for a long time, then stared into the fire.

“Of course,” she said, but offered no details.

Cormac loved the story of the stupid end of Finn MacCool and believed it completely, and sometimes laughed out loud at the ending. He wished there were books in Irish so he could read these tales, but all were spoken by Mary Morrigan. More than all other tales, he was entranced by the story of Usheen. As told by Mary Morrigan, Usheen was the son of Finn and Sava, but he never knew his mother. She had come as a fawn from the Otherworld and was reclaimed after the birth of Usheen. But the boy was brought up among the Fianna and became one if its bravest warriors. Then he met a beautiful woman: Niave of the Golden Hair. She was the daughter of the king of Tir-na-Nog, the Land of the Ever Young. Usheen was entranced by her and followed her across distant seas to this magical land in the West. For a very long time, he was blissfully happy. There was an abundance of food and flowers, and weather that was an eternal springtime. But after several hundred years, during which he didn’t age a single day, Usheen got homesick, wanting desperately to see Ireland. Once again, stupidity played its part. Usheen had been warned upon arrival in Tir-na-Nog that if he ever again set foot upon the soil of Ireland, he would die. He ignored the warning, or deceived himself about its terms, thinking that if he went on horseback, and remained on his horse, he could avoid touching Irish soil and thus remain alive. He was prepared to live forever with Niave in Tir-na-Nog, but first he must rid himself of the aching longing for his first home, for his comrades in the Fianna, for the place where he once was a great warrior. So he set off on horseback for Ireland. And when he arrived, everything had changed.

The great old houses had crumbled into rubble. His comrades were dead. Tara was gone with the wind. The warriors, poets, and women he knew had vanished. He learned from strangers that almost three hundred years had passed since he left with Niave of the Golden Hair. He sobbed for all that was gone and turned his horse to return to his much-loved woman in Tir-na-Nog. Then he saw a famished woman on the road, apparently dying of thirst. Touched by pity, distracted by his sense of loss, he leaned over awkwardly to give her a drink, slipped from the horse, and landed hard on the earth of Ireland. Before the old woman’s horrified eyes, Usheen instantly withered into bone and skin, giving off the sweet, sickening odor of death and decay.

Cormac asked Mary Morrigan to tell him that story over and over again. Where was Tir-na-Nog? To the West. Was it an island? Yes, she said, it’s an island. But sometimes it’s under the sea, she said, and sometimes it’s in a far part of the Otherworld.

“Can it be in America?” Cormac asked.

She looked at him in a dubious way.

“Why do you ask that?”

“So many people are leaving Belfast for America,” he said. “Maybe—”

“No,” she said, her voice as old as tombs. “I don’t think it’s in America.”

Then came the night near the end of his second summer in the Irish grove. Cormac noticed Mary Morrigan staring long and hard at the fire in a kind of absolute solitude. Her shawl was pulled tight against her lean, hard frame. He asked what was the matter. She didn’t answer. He waited. Over two years, she had taught him to wait. Finally her voice rose whispery and distant from someplace deep within her.

“A bad time is coming,” she said in Irish.

Her eyes remained fixed on the low orange flame spurting liquidly in and around the burning logs.

“There’ll be starving and wailing and killing,” she said. “You’ll hear the banshee cry in the night.”

She poked the fire with a blackened oak stick. The flame stirred. Sparks danced into the air but had no way to reach the stars through the roof of the cave.

“You’d best get ready,” she said. “It’s coming.”

Later, her words made him toss and shift beneath the thin muslin blanket in his place in the darker recesses of the cave. He kept thinking of Joseph and his brothers, the warning to the Pharaoh, the horrors of the bad time: the tale coming to him in his mother’s voice. The cave felt damper, colder. He knew Mary Morrigan’s prophecy was true; she didn’t lie. And that meant he must warn his father. Mary Morrigan would speak her truth to the tribe, but Cormac must tell his father. He was coming in the morning, to bring his son back to his life as Robert Carson, son of John. He knew his father would come for him, because whenever he said he would do something, he did it. He wondered whether Mary Morrigan would tell the tribe the tale of Joseph and his brothers. There were no Christians in this holy grove, and no Jews other than Cormac, and he was only half Jewish. These were the Irish. And Cormac was Irish, and a Jew, and he knew the tale. He thought: Shall I tell the tale of Joseph to Mary Morrigan? Shall I tell the Irish tribe? And what, after all, did she mean by her prophecy? Will plagues come first, arriving tonight as I fight against sleep? Will they start in the city of Belfast and follow John Carson into the forest? And will plagues be followed by locusts and boils and hunger?

All those calamities from the Christian Bible, spoken softly and carefully by his mother or bellowed by the Rev. Robinson: They were coming. They must have been what Mary Morrigan called the bad time. They must. But although Cormac knew the words of calamity, they didn’t put pictures in his head. What, after all, was a boil? What did a locust look like? His mother had tried to explain them to him. A boil, Rebecca Carson said, was a great shiny swelling on the body, pale yellow, bursting with disease. And a locust was an insect like a grasshopper that came in great clouds of its fellow creatures to eat the green off the face of the earth. Turning now in the damp, peat-smelling darkness of the cave, trying to convert words into vivid pictures, he wished his mother were there to describe them better to him. He wished she could rise from the place where she was buried, only a few hundred feet from this cave, emerge from the emerald light of the Otherworld, and explain to him what she knew and the truth of what she’d seen and whether it was like the truth of Mary Morrigan. And if the plagues and the boils and the locusts were real, if they were part of that bad time coming, he wanted his father to be safe from all the badness. And, yes, he thought: I want to be safe myself. I want to live a long time, to see what happens to everyone, to discover what happens to people I don’t yet know. Thinking, as he remembered the rules set by Mary Morrigan: I need to earn my way to the Otherworld. I need to build my courage. I need to forge my passion. I need to avenge all unjust acts committed against family and tribe. I must learn to live with the pain of the world until my time comes. Then I will see my mother. Then I will see my lost brothers. He fell asleep trying to imagine the sound of the banshee.

Then he was awake. An hour later, or three hours, he could not tell. The fire dozed, and in its light he saw the leathery face of Mary Morrigan very close to his own. Her grainy fingertips touched his cheek. She was kneeling beside him.

“You’re a good lad,” she whispered.

And then leaned down and kissed him.

She shuddered. So did he.

Then, with a wind rising beyond the cave mouth, rustling the trees before it, her hard, granular skin fell away, vanishing into the dark orangey air, and Cormac O’Connor was afraid. Looking down at him was a woman with an oval face framed by thick ringlets of black hair, eyes lustrous and hungry. He smelled pale roses. Her full lips widened into a serene smile. He touched her face. To see if it was real. And to still his trembling hand. Her skin remained the color of leather but was now smooth and pliant. Dark-skinned woman. Dark Rosaleen of the old, sad Celtic song. She moved his blanket aside and played with the bone buttons of his coarse blue shirt.