Pete Hamill - Forever

And so it was agreed that Cormac should sleep a few hours and then hurry to Galway. In the town, he could release Thunder and someone (one of their men) would make certain that the horse found his way back. The horse, they said (as his father always said), knows the way.

Excited, sad, angry, feeling very young and very old, anxious to leave and desperate to stay, Cormac went off to sleep in Mary Morrigan’s cave. He hoped she would be there. He heard a lone horse move off through the forest, vanishing into the west. In the cave, as his eyes adjusted, he saw Mary Morrigan huddled under her mound of furs, her head turned away from the smoldering fire. He undressed in silence, feeling awkward, strange, altered: and finally curled beside her. Her body was cold as stone. Her eyes were closed. He thought: She’s dead. He touched her face and then kissed her withered lips. This time there was no change. Tears leaked from her shut eyes.

“Don’t,” she whispered. “You smell of a whore.”

The scent of Bridget Riley was on his skin, put there by their long ride together, intensified by the heat of the cave. She must have also smelled the remnants of his desire. He rose, shivering in the cold, and retreated to a mound of pelts and burrowed into them and tried to sleep. Behind him was the blank wall of the back of the cave, furry with damp. He could see the mound near the fire that he knew was Mary Morrigan. Sleep was broken by jagged images of the past three days: his father taking the steel ball in the chest; fire rising from a pyre; the head of Patch bouncing on steps; Bridget Riley’s red lips and white teeth and one bared breast; his father again (laughing); Mary Morrigan’s cold neck; his father (urging him to run); the horses galloping for freedom; his father staring at black clouds; icy rain; barns; the smell of shit; Da.

Then nothing.

He wakened to a fluttering noise and a thin, high-pitched wail and reached for the sword. In the dim light above the guttering fire, he saw a shiny crow beating its wings. Darting forward. Darting back. Beating glossy black wings against the smoke-tinged air. While the high-pitched wail filled the cave, louder and louder. It was not the wind, because nothing stirred except the crow. He didn’t move. It was surely the banshee.

Then, from the bundle, the other Mary Morrigan rose in her nakedness, full-breasted, round-bellied, hair falling in the dim rosy light. She started walking toward Cormac, but her eyes didn’t see him. She was smiling. Following the crow. His heart froze. He could say no words. She walked past him, her hips swiveling, going to the blank back wall of the cave.

The crow vanished first.

Into and through the rock.

And then Mary Morrigan turned, gave him a small mute wave, walked straight at the wall, and vanished.

Cormac lay very still in the emptiness. The high-pitched wail was gone too, leaving a loud silence. Her clothes made a formless pile beside the fire. He knew where she had gone, and now it was time for him to begin his own journey. He dressed quickly.

The world was windless and thick with fog. Thunder bent into the task of taking Cormac to Galway, head lowered, great muscles straining on the rising slopes, then relaxing as they descended into depressions in the land. The horse seemed to know that an irreversible choice had been made. For Cormac. For him. A decision based on blood. And though Cormac whispered to him in Irish and English, he seemed to know that he had no say in the matter. They kept moving west and south to Galway City.

Sometimes they heard men talking in the fog, the sound amplified by the stillness. The words were never distinct. Each time, Thunder paused, alert and silent, until the loud blurred voices faded. The fog thickened. Cormac felt them climbing, then descending, but saw nothing through the fog. Away off: the sound of rushing water. A stream coursing over rocks. But Thunder stopped and wouldn’t move. Cormac nudged him, ordered him to go ahead now, we have little time, horse. He did so carefully, his ears alert, not so much showing fear as an immense reluctance. Finally they pushed through tattered fog and saw the stream and Cormac knew why Thunder wanted to avoid this crossing.

The stream was thick with corpses. Almost two dozen of them. Jammed against boulders to form a human weir. The glistening current had ripped flesh from exposed hands and arms and faces and washed bones to an ivory white. A dozen fleshless skulls grinned up at them, the scoured heads jutting from shredded clothes. The arms of one corpse were wrapped around the remains of a child whose body still carried strips of blue flesh. Like the family in the farmhouse. Cormac thought: When was that? Two weeks ago? A month? Five years?

A dozen yards downstream, the smashed timbers of a raft were jammed against rocks. He thought: They must have been fleeing to the sea, to a town, to houses, to fish, to a place, another place, someplace better than the place they’d left. He thought: They were full of prayers and fear. And then came the heart-stopping moment, the careening raft turning the bend and ramming against those boulders. Destroying heads and bodies and drowning the rest. He thought: Here they are before us: nameless and lifeless, from no place anymore, arrived at a final place whose name they never learned. The weather is surely warmer now than on the day they died. Smell them. Smell the sweet, corrupt stench that can’t be cleaned by the rushing stream. Not now. Not for a hundred years.

Thunder abruptly became his own navigator, jerking to his left, moving upstream a few hundred yards from the bodies and their rotting odor. He crossed at a broad, shallow place where boulders had been ground by the years into pebbles. On the far side, Cormac dismounted and they drank from the icy water. Cormac paused at first, afraid, wondering if there were other corpses upstream, poisoning the rushing waters. But Thunder took deep drafts, and he trusted the horse’s judgment and his knowledge and followed his example. Slaked, exhausted, he opened a coarse canvas bag and fed Thunder some oats.

Then he untied the thongs of the leathery sack his father had hidden for him. He fingered his mother’s spiral earrings, remembering her voice and her smile. He hefted The Drapier’s Letters, thinking it would be fitting, a kind of prayer, to read some lines of Swift as a way of remembering his father. He pushed open the clasp. And stopped. Folded in the pages were sixteen one-pound notes, ornate with the printing of the Bank of England, and a folded letter. The letter was addressed to Cormac and was written in his father’s careful hand. My Son,

If you should read this Letter, then I shall be gone to the Otherworld. I have left here for you these Objects that I hope will be of assistance in your own Journey. I can give you Money and Gold but cannot give you what you will need most. That is, a belief in Justice and Work. I think you have a Love for both and will not let that Love die. I think you know that the Tyranny of those who stole Ireland will eventually be defeated no matter how many of the Irish they kill. As long as one Irishman remains alive, singing in Irish, they have lost. In your life, I hope you will never oppress the Weak, that you will oppose Human Bondage in all its guises, that you will bend your Knee to no man. Be kind. Find a good Woman and love her. And thank you, my Son. You have made my life a great Happiness. Your Father

Struggling for control, Cormac pressed his father’s words to his trembling heart. Read them again. Saw his face, his sinewy arms; heard his voice; pictured him sitting alone at night to write these words (as if knowing he might never get to speak them); saw him hammering iron; saw him gently taking Rebecca’s elbow as they left a church that was not their own. Cormac wanted to speak one final time to him.