Pete Hamill - Forever

No words were spoken. She eased out of the ragged clothes of Mary Morrigan, naked now in the firelight, shifted above him and his tense, sweating body, and held in her dark smooth-skinned hand her smooth full dark-nippled breast, and offered it to his mouth. He took it. Hard-nippled brown-nippled dark-skinned woman. Suckling him. Dark-skinned woman with hair falling like a black flower from her head, as he tried to suck all she knew, all she was offering, all she could give him. Her soft smooth kneading hand, damp and cool as the dark air, found his bursting cock and slowly smoothly moistly firmly she began then to move him out of himself, out of that place, out of time, into the future.

He told his father none of this, of course, when he came for Cormac in the morning. Nothing about the wetness and the tightness and the milky taste of Mary Morrigan, nothing about the scent of pale roses seeping from her flesh, nothing about the rising midnight wind and the whipping sound of trees and the long, deep stranger’s roar that had come from within him and the caress of hands and the taste of tongue and lips and hair: and nothing either about the dark, emptied sleep that followed.

From his place in the morning trees, he saw Fergus O’Connor, his fierce-limbed father, drive the cart into the grove, and the men of his Irish tribe rushing to greet him while Bran leaped from the seat and bounded forward to greet Cormac. The dog was jumping and leaping and licking his hands, his tail whipping the air, then gestured with his head for Cormac to follow him to Thunder. His father waved, signaling with his hands for Cormac to stay back for now, follow the dog, his face saying, Wait, son, I must do something first. Cormac understood. Following Bran to the horse, he looked around, but Mary Morrigan was nowhere in sight. He wondered if she’d told the men what had happened in the night (for in the time of feasts they spoke of all things) and then thought that she had not. And then wondered if it had happened at all, if it had only been a dream. Then, thinking: No, it was not a dream. I can smell her on me. The scent of pale roses.

Bran and Thunder broke his thoughts. The great horse was slick from the journey, his black coat streaked with white foam. Cormac loosened the harness, hugged Thunder’s massive head, and led him to the hidden stream, where all three drank together from the silky current. The water was the color of the sky.

Through the trees he could see the men now unloading crates from beneath a false bottom Fergus O’Connor had added to the cart, using one of his father’s tools to open each in an almost reverential way. Suddenly they were all holding new muskets. Then Fergus was showing them how the guns were used. This was what he needed to do first, Cormac thought, and he didn’t want me to be part of it. Men use muskets. And I’m not yet a man. Da must know that a bad time is coming.

The men moved into the forest with the guns, and Fergus came to fetch his son, to hug him, to drink sky-colored water with the boy and the horse and the dog. Then they all gathered with the others for a small feast of eggs and bread, bacon and vegetables, washed down with icy water from earthenware mugs. The other women brought the food, young women, golden-haired, long-gowned, their bodies hidden. In his mind, Cormac could see their breasts and bellies and hidden hair. But none were made of the stained dark skin of Mary Morrigan, who was still nowhere in sight. The men grew flushed and excited, skin reddening, nostrils flaring, but not because of the women. “Let them come now ,” one said. “ Let them come, and we’ll be ready for them.” Another said, “ Aye, let them come, and we’ll fight them with their own weapons.” All talking abruptly, breathily in Irish, while Fergus said nothing. He had done his work, kept a promise to deliver the weapons; what was to happen with the guns was in the future. Cormac asked him where he’d gotten the guns. He answered that it didn’t matter. He said he hoped they’d never be used, that they would rust in their hiding places, because he hated the guns, which were mere machines.

“But we must be ready,” he said, “if the English come for us.”

Then they were leaving, Fergus exchanging somber embraces with the men and polite, grave nods with the women. Thunder was harnessed to the empty wagon. Cormac still could not see Mary Morrigan, and he ran through the trees to the cave, but she was not there. He felt that this was not right. Not right, after what had happened in the cave. Not right, to just go away without a word. All summer she’d been his teacher, of language and music and stories. And in the cave… He returned, breathless from running, to the cart. Bran hopped up between them and his father uttered a word in Irish and Thunder stepped off.

Then at last Cormac saw Mary Morrigan. She was high on the slope of the hill at the mouth of the cave. He stood up in the wagon and waved. She made a small, sad, finger-curling signal with her ancient hand, and then was lost behind a screen of trees. As he sat down, his mind filled with images of dark and pliant skin, the flesh of roses.

“It’s all right, son. She’ll be here when you come back.”

“I hope. Because she says that a bad time is coming.”

All the way home, they talked about what Mary Morrigan had told Cormac. “We must be ready, Da, ” Cormac said, and his father answered, “Aye.” The boy reminded him of his mother’s story, the tale of Joseph and his brothers and how the Pharaoh listened while the Hebrews did not. “Aye,” he said, “I remember it well.” Nodding, listening, his face heavy with memory. Rebecca seemed to be with them on those roads: Rebecca to the father, Ma to the son. Dark hair and sweet voice and still dead in the rain and mud of Belfast.

“Well,” Fergus O’Connor said, “if bad times are coming, we must prepare.”

“Would she know all this?” Cormac said. “Our Mary Morrigan?”

“Yes.”

“Suppose she’s wrong?”

“About such things, she’s never wrong.”

At home that night, they began to prepare. Fergus made a list (as if dictated by his mother) of the tasks they’d share and the things they must store. Food most of all: potatoes, oats, corn, salted bacon, cooked beef, limes against the scurvy. And turf to keep the hearth alive.

“We’ll get through it,” Fergus said. “No matter what form it takes. Now, get ye to bed, for we have much to do on the morrow.”

In the dark room where the horse’s skull was buried in the mortar, Cormac thought of plagues and locusts and his mother, imagining Joseph’s face and the Pharaoh’s voice, and then saw in the blackness Mary Morrigan beside him, with her damp hands, her voice whispering Irish words in the light of a fire, her tight, fleshy cave enclosing him and her smooth skin pressed against him.

In the morning they began their tasks. Cormac rode Thunder to town on the first of many trips to buy candles, bacon, lime, biscuits. A produce wagon arrived late in the day with a special order of turf and another wagon brought sacks of oats. Together, father and son moved furniture to make room for the turf and the oat sacks against the inside walls of the house, and then ordered more. Every day, Da worked furiously in the forge, making horseshoes and sickles to earn money and handing some of the work to his son. At school, Robert Carson said nothing, as always; reticence had become his way, the truth of his thinking and of himself, buried in restrained talk of games or discussions of the stories in their schoolbooks.

One afternoon he did remind his friends about Joseph and his brothers, hoping they’d understand what he meant; but they discussed it only as a good story. The Rev. Robinson was teaching more quietly now, with fewer rants about Moloch and the Whore of Babylon (for he was older too), but Robert Carson said nothing to him about the bad time either. In truth, if boils and plagues did arrive, he would feel little sorrow if they went at the preacher. Perhaps he would emerge a humbler man, one who questioned his brutal God. The warning was Irish; the Irish would do what they must to survive.