Pete Hamill - Forever

Suddenly Bridget was coming down the stairs, leathery boots clicking on oak, dodging around the smashed chandelier. She was dressed in a long, fancy dark blue coat, a fur hat, leather boots and gloves, and carrying a velvet bag about three feet long. The wages of sin. She looked smaller than she had in bed. Her eyes were jittery with fear, made worse when she glimpsed the headless body of Patch. Cormac boosted her onto Thunder’s back and handed up her bag, which was light and must have contained clothes.

Then Cormac went back inside to the piles of wood. If the Earl of Warren did come back to his grand mansion, he would find only ashes.

They rode and rode into the gray morning light, into rain, into hills; finally, as the rain faded off, into forest again. They were heading west. He thought: There is blood on my sword, from the small man in the stable, from the severed neck of Patch. I’m now a different man. I am sixteen and I have killed. What’s more, killing Patch was too easy, too final, too personal. And too savage .

Cormac barely knew Patch and had killed him as easily as Patch had killed his father, and with about as much feeling. Thinking: No, that’s not true, I did have feeling. Before I cut off his head, there was true rage. Rage is a feeling. But when it was over and his bald, one-eyed head was rolling down those marble steps like a fruit that had fallen off a wagon, I didn’t feel what I wanted to feel. I wanted to feel clean. I wanted to feel that I’d closed a small circle. Now, riding to the West, to where the dead go, to where the sun sets into the ocean sea, I don’t feel either emotion. I’ve closed no circle. I’m not clean.

And what of this young woman, the earl’s whore, who said her name was Bridget Riley? She was behind him on Thunder’s bare back, gripping Cormac’s waist with her small pale hands. Her bag was strapped across her shoulders, her weight thus disproportionate to her size. He could feel her hands on his stomach. He could feel through all the layers of wool and shit-smelling burlap her hard breasts upon his back. He felt her breath on his neck. While they rode on, pressed together, he listened to her whispered tale, her story entering him like the warm breath from her mouth.

She told of how her father was widowed when her sixth sister was born and how there wasn’t ever enough to eat and how the Siberian cold came and how the father (tearful, gruff, almost wordless) sold her to the earl for two sacks of oats and three bushels of potatoes. The price of one young Irish woman. She talked about a boy she had loved when she was thirteen (long ago, for she was sixteen now), Richard, his name was, Richard Murphy, and how she had let him have his way (her voice trailing into forest cold) and how he had gone to America and how he promised he would send for her and never did. She told Cormac that she had lost all faith in the Christian God and his commandments (for how could he love us if he sent away the people we loved and let so many others die?) and then had begun to go with other young men (not many of them in that forlorn region) and some older men too (with their wives at home and she in the woods or a wagon with the poteen-smelling farmers) and finally some Englishmen from the barracks (challenging even the old Irish gods with her blasphemy) and how after all of that (and all of them) she had never found one who was like the one who went away to America. Richard, his name was. Richard Murphy.

That was when Bridget Riley began to feel like a whore. Not from opening her thighs. From opening her heart and having nothing enter. And so she didn’t even mind when the earl bought her for oats and potatoes, because (she thought) maybe her sisters would survive the long starvation and maybe one of the horses would live and maybe her father too. And after all, she’d be warm and she’d be fed.

“I didn’t love him, and most of the time didn’t even like him,” she said. “But sometimes he made me laugh. Sometimes he made wicked remarks. Sometimes he would sing some music-hall song, and act it out. Sometimes he juggled with dinner rolls.”

He felt anger make a move, remembering the earl as he juggled outside the public house in Belfast, then tried to picture him juggling for Bridget Riley. He heard his father’s voice: They say he has charm. … He said nothing and the anger seeped away. They paused beside a frozen stream and he chopped a hole in the ice and they knelt down to drink. Together above the water, they smelled of perfume and cow shit and fresh sweat, soap and pine and dirt. Her face was flushed, her hands raw from the cold.

She opened the wide bag and lifted out a small bundle of men’s clothes and told him to get rid of what he was wearing since the English soldiers would be looking for someone dressed in burlap and smelling of cow shit. She giggled when she said these things and laughed out loud when he replied that he could never wear clothes that were worn by the Earl of Warren. Her voice turned angry and she told him that he had no choice, if he wanted to live.

“You’ve murdered one man, and possibly two,” she said. “Surely to God, the earl’s men want you dead. And just as sure, they’ve told the soldiers. They’ll all be after you and happy to hang your Irish bones from a tree limb. If they don’t burn you instead, nice and slow. Don’t make it easy for them.”

She paused then and added in a solemn voice: “Besides, they didn’t belong to the earl. He was a bigger man than you.”

Cormac surrendered to her logic (and his growing fear), stripped off his own clothes, and donned the new ones, including a long black overcoat. She smiled up at him and told him he was now a fine figure of a man. And while he shoved aside some rocks and hid his old clothes, she dug deeper into the bag and brought out two small loaves of bread and some salted pork and a few figs, and said that she wished they could have a spot of tea, but that was, of course, impossible.

They ate in silence, while Thunder took long drafts of water from the hole gouged in the icy stream. Bridget Riley seemed lost in her own thoughts, her eyes unfocused, chewing steadily. For a moment, he felt that he must protect her, that he must first help her get back to her home place before he went off on his own journey. Then he saw himself taking her with him. If the earl had gone to America, they could go to America. There he would keep his vows to the Irish tribe. And free Bridget Riley from the man who had bought her for two sacks of oats and three bushels of potatoes.

It was almost dark in the empty world, and they watched the sky change and black clouds race and the moon begin its climb. She touched his cheek. He touched her hair. Then she was standing above him, her body blocking the moon, looking around their little thicket (as if trying to remember each naked tree). She shook her head. “We’d best go,” she said. “Before it’s too late.”

He could not tell what she was thinking as they resumed the ride through the empty land, heading for the West. Is she afraid of feeling anything for me? Are some other feelings moving in her? She seems much older now than when I saw her in the silky bed in Carrickfergus. Older than I am. Old as caves. She shows a hard face to me, and then feeds me and warms me and clothes me. The earl’s possession. The earl’s woman. And she seemed able to read his thoughts.

“Sure, he’s already gone,” Bridget said.

As if she knew that he was seething with the unseen presence of the earl.

“Then I’ll find another ship,” he said.

Her voice was weary.

“For God’s sake, get off it,” she said. “Stay where you belong. Find yourself a woman and a house and—Jaysus, why do you care for him anyways?”