Pete Hamill - Forever

“Ach, go home, will ye? Go home and hammer your wives—if you’re tough enough.”

“Billy!”

The unseen Billy cocked the hammer, and then Cormac swung the iron bar, pivoting on his left foot, hurling all his weight into the blow. Billy’s hand must have splintered into many pieces (Cormac thought) because he screamed and screamed, the way an injured baby screams, over and over, his voice fading into the darkness. The gun fell with a clattering sound, and Fergus placed a foot on it, gesturing to his son with an open hand without ever taking his eyes off the group of gaunt Christians. Cormac tossed him the iron bar. He squatted and with one blow smashed the pistol. Then he stood and kicked the pieces across the threshold. The men looked whiter and gaunter now, their eyes as tentative as the flames of their torches. The bull-necked man was wide-eyed. Out behind the others, Billy the gunman was whimpering.

“You can pick up those pieces, you bloody idiots,” Fergus O’Connor said. “They’ll fit right well now up your arses.”

Then he slammed the door shut, flipped the latch, released the furious Bran, winked at his son, and smiled.

“Thank you, lad,” he said.

As the enraged Bran barked and leaped and scraped paws against the door, they could hear God’s messengers murmuring and talking outside, their voices rising and falling like jangled music. They must have known (Cormac thought) that the house with its stone and plaster and slate roof was immune to fire from outside. But they didn’t sound interested in storming the doors to charge into the house with their torches. The sound of Billy’s voice moved above and through the other voices, a whimpering and groaning thread of pain. And then they went away.

Fergus O’Connor exhaled. So did his son. “They’ll be back,” the father said.

But on this, Fergus O’Connor was wrong. The gaunt men didn’t come back. What came instead was the killer wind.

It arrived on the evening of December 27, 1739, while all the good Ulster Christians were still exulting over the birth of their various Christs. Father and son were reading by the light of candles. Fergus was again absorbed in The Drapier’s Letters, by the Dean. Cormac was reading the poems of Alexander Pope, borrowed from school before it closed for Christmas. He was copying some of Pope’s verses into a folio book, using a new reed pen and ink his father gave him as the season’s gift. In the margins of his precious green notebook, Cormac doodled faces he remembered (Robinson, or the gaunt night visitors) and images provoked by the poetry (hills and streams and ruined castles). From time to time, his father told him to listen to a few sentences from the Dean. Or asked his son to show him the sketches or recite some lines from Pope.

“If some of our more neighborly eejits ever saw that book of yours,” he said with a laugh, “they’d be sure it was written by the Pope in Rome.” He smiled. “And there was a Pope Alexander, you know. A right bastard he was, at that.”

Then, in the pause after talking, they could hear a whine, distant at first, thin, then widening and growing louder, and Bran was up and alert, growling in baritone counterpoint to the whine, baffled because there was not yet anything to smell. Fergus laid the Dean on the floor beside him, went to the top door, cracked it an inch, and then was shoved back two feet by the wind. He braced himself and slammed the door shut. They latched the shutters on the windows and gazed at the roof, which had begun to tremble.

“A gale,” Fergus said, trying to hide his alarm. “From the east. The worst I’ve ever heard.”

For an hour, Cormac imagined the wind coming all the way from Russia, across Germany and France, gathering ice in the Alps, adding more force over chilly England, driving with all its arctic strength to Ireland. Nothing could stop it. No king could demand it to halt, no soldier could shoot it. They heard Thunder whinnying in the stable, the high-pitched panic of a trapped animal. At first they did nothing, waiting for the wind to die. But the wind did not die. And then Fergus could stand it no more. He donned his heaviest coat and pulled a wool cap down tight upon his brow.

“Stay here,” he ordered.

“I’ll go with you.”

“No, you’ve got to be ready to find me if—”

And he was gone, with Cormac’s weight shoved against the double doors, pushing hard to latch them shut behind him. Cormac heard huge branches being torn from trees, thumping as they landed, and the deep, throaty sound of the wind under the high-pitched whine, and something clattering off the roof: branches, slates, bricks. The wind drove down the chimney, forcing smoke into the room, and the windows shook and rattled and made cracking sounds as the punishing wind shifted and whipsawed and turned upon itself. Cormac no longer heard Thunder’s anguished voice. Bran paced, prowled, made nervous circles. Head up. Alert. Pausing to smell and listen at both the east door and the west.

Finally there was a hammering at the doors, and Cormac opened the inner one. His father’s face was raw and scraped. His hat was gone, his eyes wide. But he had Thunder by the harness. He unlatched the bottom door and tried pulling the horse into the house, urging him: “Come in, Thunder. Come with us. Come in.” In the roar and the whine, the great horse refused to cross the threshold. Cormac thought: This is not his world. His world is the barn and the fields and the forest. The horse backed up. Cormac joined his father, hauling on the reins. Useless. The wind roared past them into the house, extinguishing candles, knocking over pots and chairs and rattling the dishes on the sideboard.

“Hold him,” Fergus said, and while Cormac held the taut reins, his father rushed into the darkness past the whinnying, frantic Thunder.

Thunder winced, his eyes widened in pain, he made a twisting sound in his chest and rose with hooves pawing at the air, and then Cormac pulled hard on the reins, forcing the horse’s head down low, and with an iron stomping of hooves, a shuddering churning movement, the horse entered the dark human house. Father and son dropped the reins and hurled their weight against the doors until they closed. Fergus jammed the latches shut. Cormac could see dimly in the light of the hearth; he found a candle and lit it from an ember. An aura of light rose from the flame, and Cormac could see his father still at the door, his butt pressed against it, legs stiff, facing his muddied boots, until he straightened up, flattened his shoulders against the door, and slid to the floor.

“Glory be to God,” he said in Irish.

And then he laughed and switched to English.

“Glory be to bloody God.”

Cormac squatted to face him.

“Can I get you something, Da?”

“A spot of tea, Your Worship,” Fergus said, in an English accent.

“Righto, Your Lordship. But shall I first show the king to his bed?”

Fergus looked past his son at Thunder, stood up slowly, and they both laughed.

“How did you get him to come in?”

“Squeezed his balls until my hands hurt.”

He guffawed and so did his son. Thunder whinnied, as if demanding an explanation, or lamenting the condition of his balls. Bran looked baffled; the rules of the world had abruptly changed. The two humans bent over laughing until the tears came. All the while the wind was howling as it arrived from Siberia.

The wind howled all that night and through the next day. And when the wind began its retreat, the cold remained. For seven weeks, the temperatures stayed below zero. On the first day, father and son stepped outside and their eyes flooded and Cormac’s lashes stuck together. They found the stream frozen and the well a deep block of ice. They took Thunder with them, the two of them riding him, great clouds of steam rising from his nose and mouth. Everywhere, trees were uprooted. At least a dozen houses were smashed flat. The steeple of St. Edmund’s was jammed like a spear into an iced thicket twenty feet from the church, and there was no sign of the Rev. Robinson or anyone else. On the bald, distant hills they saw three frozen horses lying on their sides. When they returned home, Thunder bent easily under the doorframe.