Pete Hamill - Forever

The cold went on and on, and they set some routines: the dog and horse released each morning to relieve themselves, to be followed by Fergus and Cormac. The outhouse blew over on the first night of wind, so Da fashioned a harness to go around Cormac’s waist, to be strapped around an alder tree if the wind blew too fiercely. When Fergus gripped a tree, nothing could blow him over. They made jokes about shite freezing into cordwood before it left your arse and the miracle of pissing icicles.

They learned from a passing coach that the ink had frozen on the presses of the News-Letter . All schools were closed. Churches had locked their doors. In Belfast, ships were frozen to the quays. You could ride a horse across the iced surface of the River Lagan. When the weather warmed slightly in the third week, snow fell for eighteen hours, and began to melt the next day, and then the Siberian wind came howling more angrily than ever, as if showing its contempt for all of them, and the wet snow froze into giant hard-packed drifts. Six weeks into 1740, the odd traveler told them of destroyed crops and dead cattle and horses all over the north of Ireland. Within a week, food had begun to run out, because people had not been warned, had not heard Mary Morrigan speak about the bad times that were coming, had not understood the story of Joseph and his brothers. Fergus and Cormac O’Connor were among the lucky ones, for they had food. But as more reports of starvation came to them, Cormac began to feel guilty about having what might save the lives of others, and he told his father so.

“There’s nothing to be done,” Fergus said. “If we give out all we have, it’d be gone in two days. Then there’d be nobody left to bury the dead. Or tell their story.”

“But who will feed them?”

“When there’s this many starvin’, only a government can feed them. But they won’t. Not this lot. The whoremonger Chichesters are happy and warm in London, burning Irish logs in their fires and eating Irish beef. They know how great—for them—is the news from Ireland. The more Irishmen that die, son, the more land for the landlords when it’s over.”

He was right (Cormac thought), but his son was still angry, and struggling with guilt, and trying to bury both feelings in hard labor. They took axes to the stream and broke off large splinters of ice and filled pots with them and boiled them at the hearth for water. They rationed their food and the oats. Thunder gave off much heat, so they could be stingy with the turf, and at night the horse settled against the western wall, and Bran huddled beside him. As the stack of turf lowered and the merciless cold continued, they embraced Bran’s intelligence and soon all four of them huddled together in the nights, covered with coats and blankets.

Cormac used the green notebook as a diary and made sketches of what he saw when he rode Thunder through the cold. The notebook filled (his script now smaller to save space and often cruder because he was forced to write and draw with gloved hands) as more and more reports arrived about the general calamity and the indifference of London. Soon there was talk of famine. Just as there had been in Egypt and Israel. Corn stalks had been burned black by the great wind. Grass died everywhere, turning pastures the color of blood. Many shops in Belfast were closed because there was nothing to sell. Cormac wondered in his green notebook about the fate of the fishmonger and the butcher and about his friends and even the Rev. Robinson. The mud of Belfast must be like brick now. He was careful about some of his thoughts, since he did not want the notebook to turn into evidence. He did not, for example, record his feelings about the Rev. Robinson. Would the good reverend find a way to blame the Vatican for the Irish disaster? Of course. It was God’s will, wasn’t it? God’s harsh lesson about sin. Cormac wished God, if he did exist, would just show up and speak plainly.

One February day, it was warm again, and the snow melted away. But still, it did not end. That night the cold returned, driven by a brutal wind, freezing the earth into iron. Two mornings later, Cormac was riding west alone on Thunder, in search of wood to feed the forge and food to feed himself and his father, because at last they were running out of both. The frozen trees resisted his ax, and he settled for stray fallen branches that he lashed to the saddle. There was no food. Anywhere. Fields and woods were littered with the corpses of cows, wolves, sheep, and horses, some of them stripped of flesh, many of them wedged beneath fallen trees that had provided no true shelter. Some villages were blocked by red-coated soldiers who warned Cormac that everyone left alive was dying of fever and dysentery.

“There’s no water since the snow melted,” a soldier told him. “At least they could melt the bloody snow. Now the wells are frozen like fecking rocks and the fecking streams are dry. ’Tis a pity. They’re even drinking piss.”

On the way home, Cormac saw the body of a coatless young girl in a stiff blue dress. She was about nine. Her face was black. A dark blue hand was bent across her brow. She was shoeless. He tried to imagine what had driven her into the cold without coat or shoes, and then imagined both being ripped from her corpse by foragers among the dead. And what had driven her into the cold at all? He imagined a brutal father or a dead family or the fear of ghosts in some ruined cottage. He wondered too where the Other People were and whether they were huddled together in the Otherworld for warmth the way he and his father and Thunder and Bran huddled each night in their house. That dead girl might have been looking desperately for the door to the Otherworld, where she would be warm in the place of emerald light.

Suddenly Cormac wanted the warmth of a woman. Tight and wet and warm in a cave that smelled of peat. There before him was a girl who would never be a woman, and the earth was so frozen that he couldn’t even bury her. He rode hard for home.

Then, early one blue morning, Cormac came awake beside Thunder. He felt a dampness on his brow and he could see light through the cracks of the door and his breath didn’t make steam when he exhaled. Bran sensed the change too and started shaking himself, and then they were all up. Fergus said nothing, as if afraid this was an illusion. He opened the door, and Bran dashed outside, leaping and rolling, with Thunder after him, bumping the doorjamb like some large younger brother, shaking his great black body, testing the earth with his hooves. Fergus stood with a blanket draped over his shoulder. An immense brightness was coming from the sea. They heard a bird sing.

“We’ve come through it,” Fergus said.

And so they had.

In late morning, with the doors and windows open to air out the horse-smelling house, Fergus hitched Thunder to the cart and told Cormac to join him and explained to Bran that he must stay behind. “There’s smoke coming from the chimney,” he told the dog, “and that’s good. We don’t want strangers believing there’s nobody at home. So you must stay inside, Bran, and bark your head off if anyone comes.” The dog listened unhappily but accepted his duty. He went inside, and Fergus locked the door behind him. Then they started west.

“We need a wagonload of wood,” Fergus told his son. “We need food. There’s only one place to find both.”

For hours they traveled to the secret country of the Irish. Death was everywhere: more dead cattle, more dead humans, more dead wolves. They crossed a stream and saw a dead swan wedged in ice against boulders. They arrived at the grove before dark. Whistles and howls echoed through the cold-stripped forest, and then words in Irish and Fergus answered and then the guards appeared, wrapped in thick furs, thinner, grimier. They nodded and smiled and moved father and son forward into the sacred grove. They saw a huge cauldron on a mound of burning logs, with smoke and steam and sparks rising into the dark air.