Pete Hamill - Forever

And so, moving under the arc of the moon, he told Bridget Riley the bare bones of his story, and how the earl and Patch had taken the horse, this horse, and killed his father, and how he must avenge that act, no matter what it took. She listened and then breathed out heavily, making a small puff of steam.

“You’re terribly bloody young,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

He didn’t reply. But she talked then in a casual way, as if discussing someone she had read about in the News-Letter . The earl had long spoken of going to New York, but surely not to stay forever. Just to open a branch of his business. “Which is, of course, the slave business,” she said. “Aye,” Cormac said. “I know.” The earl would rave sometimes about the fortunes to be made in America, she said, and how foolish it was to pay strangers a commission to handle his New York business when he could make money at both ends of the trade. “He needs New York,” she said. “It’s a growing market, after all.” He could feel her nodding behind him, bumping against his shoulder. “Now I understand better why he left so quickly,” she said, and then told him even more.

“I was home—if you can call it home—the night he killed your father,” she said. “I just didn’t know it at the time.”

She told him how the earl came back to his unfinished mansion that night (Thunder whipped and shoved by eight men into his stall), his eyes jittery, ignoring her for the brandy snifter, running his hands through his hair. He slept only three hours and then rose in a colder mood. He had his manservant pack some bags and load the black coach. He told Patch to guard the house and say nothing to anyone who came calling. Then he and the manservant (a Londoner named Marley) took the coach to Belfast.

“He never said good-bye, the cold bastard,” she said. “He told me I’d be taken care of, to stay where I was, and if he was delayed in New York, he’d send for me. Bloody liar that he is.” She paused. “The last thing I heard him say was to Patch: ‘Get rid of that bloody horse.’ ”

He might have been telling her a tale, she said, when he mentioned New York. He could have gone to London or France. But he was probably on his way to America.

“If you want him badly,” she said, “you’ll have to cross an ocean.”

They arrived at last at a crossroads. Off to the left, back from the road a hundred yards, there was a collapsed church. The stone walls remained standing, but the roof was gone, another victim of the long winter.

“I know the way from here,” Bridget Riley said abruptly, backing away from Cormac, prepared to slide to the ground. She was ready to walk miles to what might only be a place of death. Dead father. Dead hearth. He thought: I’ve just begun to know her.

“Please stay with me,” he said.

“I can’t,” she said. “You have something in your head, Cormac, that’s more important to you than I am. You’ve got America. You’ve got murder.”

“I can manage both,” he said.

“Sure, you’d just lie with me and leave me,” she said, and laughed. “Another Irish bastard.” She smiled. “Better I leave you when it’s me doin’ the leavin’.”

She eased herself down off the horse and gazed at the road that hooked back north. A few streaks of reddish dawn appeared to the east.

“Let’s rest a bit before you go,” Cormac said. “I can build a fire.”

Her face went blank, then tight.

“I’d best be going,” she said.

She ran her fingers along Thunder’s mane, slung her bag over a shoulder, looked at Cormac, and smiled. Then she turned. He slipped off the horse and grabbed her hand. She pulled it away from him and walked off. He watched her get smaller as she climbed a rise. She waved a hand in farewell but did not turn her head. Then she was gone.

In the grove, fed and warmed by a fire, Cormac told his story to the men. There was much fury about the killing of Fergus, but no tears. Their huge hands clenched spears and muskets, eyes first blazing and then going dead, cursing the earl, cursing the English. They told Cormac that he’d done the right thing, laying his father on a blazing pyre, properly helping his passage to the Otherworld, where they’d be certain to meet again. And he should not worry: They would track down the men who worked for Patch (for they had their own men in Belfast and every other town) and kill them. They asked Cormac to describe those men again and again, and at his urging brought forth paper and charcoal for him to draw their faces from memory. They knew at least two of the faces; the men with those faces would surely not survive.

He told them too about the gold coins his father had buried for him, and the earrings and the copy of the Dean’s book. He told them about the sword and showed it to them, and they examined it with almost religious reverence. They listened as Cormac spoke and murmured in Irish and spit out bitter words, and then they stood and sipped from goblets and shook themselves loose in the night air, and then once more admired Cormac’s sword, hefting it and saying that Fergus of the Connor was a great maker of swords, like his father and his father before him and the many Connor fathers all the way back to the years before the conquest. As Cormac finished eating and talking around the fire, one man began to croon a sad tune and the others joined him, and when they were done it had become a song of resistance and defiance and ultimate triumph.

While they talked and sang, the women worked on Thunder’s wounds, rubbing them with an oily unguent that smelled of spring mint. They promised Cormac (when he strolled away from the fire, looking for Mary Morrigan and not seeing her, and afraid to ask after her) that if Bran was alive (they were sure he was) and made his way here to the grove (he knew the way), they would care for him for the rest of his life and then make certain that he eventually joined Fergus O’Connor in the Other-world. They giggled at Cormac’s new clothes, which were baggy and wrinkled but at least (one woman said) not hairy with the skins of wolves. Then the women retreated. The men sat with Cormac in silence, and then one of them, burly and red-haired and named Fintan of the Hills, said: “You must go to find the earl.”

“Aye.”

“You must hunt him to the ends of the earth.”

“Aye.”

“You must erase all of the men of his line.”

Another said, “Until no man lives that carries his seed.”

“Aye.”

“And, of course,” said Fintan of the Hills, “you will have to go to America.”

The question was how and when. Not all were sure about the location of America, except that it was over the sea to the west. A grizzled older man just back from the western coast said that a ship was leaving from Galway in two days’ time, bound for America and specifically for New York. Not Canada. Not Jamaica (he said, as if reciting a litany). Not Charleston or Philadelphia. Saying the names of places in a language that was as foreign as the places. This ship’s bound for New York, he said. The voyage took eight weeks (he’d heard this from one of his men in Galway City, but the others couldn’t believe a voyage could last for eight weeks, unless it was a voyage to the moon). The grizzled man said that if Cormac left on Thunder before the morning light, he might arrive in Galway in time to board the ship. All agreed he must try. So did Cormac.

They explained the roads and the hazards. None, not even the grizzled man, knew the price of the passage. They did know Galway. They described a city with white houses and Spanish women (for Galway traded with Catholic Spain even if Belfast did not) and a wide road through the town leading directly to the quays. He was warned: There was some risk. English soldiers could be waiting to arrest him at the ship if word had spread to the ports about the killing of Patch. The earl’s own men could be waiting too. Cormac must pause and look hard at what stood before his eyes, and read the signs of danger. But there might be greater risk in staying, both for Cormac and for the tribe. All these possibilities were minor. There was one dominant reason for departure: the debt of honor that could only be satisfied in New York. Cormac Samuel O’Connor must satisfy his father’s spirit by killing the man who had killed him.