Pete Hamill - Forever

Each evening now, after a hard and exhausting day in the forge, John Carson stood outside the house, looking for signs in the sky and the sea and the movement of birds. Inside, when they became Fergus and Cormac O’Connor, they talked beside the hearth. Fergus gave his son any news that might be connected to Mary Morrigan’s prophecy. Hints of bad times came from customers in the forge, from travelers with damaged axles, facts decoded from the oblique reports in newspapers. In Belfast and Derry, groups of men had been making midnight raids on certain houses, searching for disguised Catholics. The incidents seemed isolated. Fergus said he thought they were not. “They are signs,” he said, “and must be read correctly, like the tracks of wild animals.” He explained that these actions were caused by a kind of fever that would lie dormant for years and then suddenly erupt. A fever in the brain. A black fever in the heart. “Good men are taken away,” he said, “never to return.” Cormac asked if these raids were the bad time coming. His father nodded at that possibility.

“We must be very careful,” Fergus said. “Whatever you do, don’t speak Irish in public. Not a word. Give them no excuse. Create no suspicion. They are worse than fools. They are murderous fools.”

Sometimes they spoke of life and death, and how death came to every man. And how some forms of death were unacceptable. He didn’t mean the death of Rebecca. That was, when all was said and done, an accident. It was carelessness made deadly. But it was not murder.

“And murder?” Cormac asked. “What is to be done about murder?”

The older man gazed into the fire, his eyes smoky.

“In our tribe,” he said, “the murderer must be pursued to the ends of the earth. And his male children too. They must be brought to the end of the line.”

A pause.

“That’s very harsh, isn’t it, Da?”

“Aye,” he said. “But murder is harsh too.”

In the blue black hour before dawn one morning, Fergus woke his son, telling him to dress and follow him. He was carrying the map case and a small leather pouch tied with a leather thong. In the forge, Cormac watched as his father stuffed the matted sword into the case. He handed the boy a spade and took one for himself. They eased outside and flattened themselves against the shadowed side of the house, wary of being watched. Bran was with them, silent, so dark they could see only the whites of his eyes. They all paused, sorting the sounds of awakening birds and small animals in the darkness. Bran growled but didn’t bark. Then, as an inky cloud veiled the moon, they hurried across the open space to the hawthorn tree. Together, they removed a rectangle of sod and then dug a narrow, shallow trench. Fergus laid the leather bag down first and it made a dull clunking sound, so that Cormac knew it contained coins. Then Fergus placed the encased sword on top of the bag. The clouds passed, and in the sudden moonlight the leather bag was darker than Mary Morrigan’s skin. To Cormac, it looked, in fact, like a lumpy leather pillow for the sword, and for a moment he saw his mother again, lying in her piece of the Irish grove with the things beside her that she would take to the Otherworld.

But he also knew that this was not a burial; it was a preparation for this world. As they covered the bag and sword with heavy earth, Cormac longed for the sweet earth of Mary Morrigan’s cave and the taste of her earth-colored breasts and the scent of pale roses.

“If anything happens to me,” Fergus whispered, “come here and retrieve these, son, and take them on your journey.”

“I understand.”

Fergus didn’t say where that journey might take him, but it would surely be away from their small piece of Ireland. In silence, they fitted the sod perfectly upon the trench, tamped it down, returned the spades to the forge, and went to prepare breakfast. They were sure they hadn’t been seen. If they had, Bran would have warned them. As they reached the house, a morning wind blew hard off the sea.

One evening a week later, with the days edging toward Christmas, Bran began barking loudly in his deepest baritone, and there was a fierce hammering at their door. Bran told them: This is danger. Fergus dropped his newspaper and pointed at his son.

“Get ye in your room,” he ordered, “and stay there.”

“Da, I’m sixteen, I—”

“Now,” he said.

Cormac did as he was told, leaving the bedroom door open a few inches so that he could see what was happening. The main room was illuminated by only one candle and the low, dull fire of the hearth. Cormac’s heart was fluttery. Bran kept barking. Fergus placed one stool on top of another, leaving three blunt legs facing the roof. Those legs were now the height of his anvil, within reach of his hand. The knocking on the door was harder, muffled voices louder. Carefully, Fergus opened the door, holding Bran by his leather collar. Cormac glimpsed gaunt, pale faces and the flickering of torches.

“What do you want?” Fergus said.

“We want to search this house,” said a hard, burred voice. The speaker moved closer to Fergus, and Cormac could see the man: short, bull-necked, the apparent leader.

“Why?” Fergus said.

“We’ve reason to believe you’re a papist. A hidden Catholic. A Catholic with a Protestant mask.”

“You’re wrong,” Fergus said, and chuckled.

“You’re lying, mister,” the bull-necked man said.

“That, I’m not,” Fergus said, his voice darkening.

“We’ll see to that. We’re going to search this papist hole. Step aside.”

Cormac saw his father’s fingers curl around a leg of the stool. “If you take one step into this house,” Fergus said, “I’ll break your bloody head.”

The bull-necked man stared at Fergus for a long moment. Cormac knew what he was seeing: eyes as cold and gray as steel. Squatting in the darkness, Cormac reached under his bed for the length of iron he used for his exercises, and remembered the horse’s skull buried in the wall of this room long ago. He thought: Give me what I need, horse.

“We’ll see about that,” the bull-necked man said, as if by talking tough he could ease his own doubts. He turned slightly, eyes on Fergus but speaking into the torches. He said dramatically: “Billy?”

A taller man, younger, with a hat pulled tight over his eyebrows, stepped into the doorway to the side of the bull-necked man. He was nervously holding a pistol in his left hand, pointing the long silvered barrel at Fergus. Cormac’s father didn’t move.

“You’re breaking the law,” Fergus said calmly. “Just pointing that pistol at me is a crime.”

“ ’Tis a far worse crime to be a secret papist,” the bull-necked man said. “Your crime is treason.”

Now Cormac could see the pistol and the forearm but not the face. The man was stepping back to take aim. Cormac slipped out of the bedroom, gripping the iron bar, moving quietly along the wall toward the door. His father’s attention was focused on the men, and on controlling the angry Bran.

“You’re all very brave and sure,” Fergus said, “when you’re holding that gun on a man.”

“We’re following God’s orders, papist.”

“Sure, God wouldn’t have the likes of you pathetic bastards doing his work,” Fergus said.

Cormac thought: He must sense that I’m approaching the door, out of the sight of the men, but he won’t move his eyes my way. I’m sure he isn’t blinking.

“If you’ve naught to fear, let us in,” the bull-necked man said, a tremor of uncertainty in his voice. “We’ll know in two minutes if this house is fouled by the Whore of Babylon.”

“Now I understand,” Fergus said. “You’re an expert on whores.”

“Stand aside,” the man said angrily, “or you’re a dead man.”