Pete Hamill - Forever

In all years and all seasons, he could see his father working iron with his back to the forge, using tongs to lift the molten iron from the fire and then laying it in a white lump upon the anvil and with his tools transforming it into a sickle or a horseshoe, a lamp holder or a pot. His long-fingered hands were very quick, and in movement he seemed all of a piece: arms, hands, hammer, metal. Everything was fitted together to create rhythm and ease and power. The face of the anvil, for example, was on a level with his knuckles, the best height discovered by the old ironmasters for swinging hammers without tearing up the muscles of the back. Sometimes he dipped the iron in the water of the slack tub, adjusting the temperature as he worked, his brow furrowed and creased, his legs spread to create a fulcrum, his mighty arms bringing either raw power or fluid delicacy to the task. Sweat poured from him in all seasons. Even in dead winter, his gray collarless cotton shirt turned black. In summer, he often sent the boy to the stream with a pot for fresh water and drank it down, letting it splash over his body and neck before returning to hammer and iron and heat.

When the sun began to set in the west and he was finished for the day, he would hang the bellows on a high hook against one wall, to keep it from small dangerous invaders, then sit a while in silence, and then walk to the house. Six days a week, he scrubbed the smell of salt and sweat from himself with cold water and a coarse cloth. On Saturday nights, after the boy was sent to bed, he bathed in a large wooden waterproof tub lashed with iron bands he’d made himself, the joints so tight not a drop ever touched the flagstone floor.

One Saturday night when Robert was six, he saw his father enter the new room that he was building as an addition to the house, the room where the boy soon would sleep. Da had broken a hole through from the main room and fitted it with a door. Two new walls were already up, draped with canvas to ward off rain, awaiting only their coat of lime wash. But the western wall was not yet finished. Da entered this unfinished room carrying a lumpy burlap package in one hand and a lantern in the other. His tub awaited him about six feet from the hearth, where two huge iron pots of water simmered beside the open fire, but John Carson was not yet ready for his Saturday-night bath. The boy’s mother rested in the bedroom. Robert feigned sleep on his rough bed rigged from a base of stools placed near the jamb wall.

When his father entered the unfinished room, the boy slipped off his cot and eased into the shadows to watch him. His father untied the cords of the burlap package and removed the skull of a horse. Robert’s heart tripped. On one of their walks to Belfast that summer, his mother had shown the boy a horse’s skull off to the side of the road, bone white and sad. The Carsons did not own a horse, and that lonesome skull made Robert whisper a growing desire: to ride a horse. He told his mother that above all he wanted to ride a horse with his father. His mother hugged him that afternoon, and said, “Aye, a horse. I’ll talk about it with your father.”

And here on this Saturday night was his father with a horse’s skull in a burlap sack. Da gazed at the skull for a long moment, holding it in two hands as if it were a chalice, and then in the light of the lantern, he squatted low and began to mix mortar in a tray, thickening it with dry straw. He placed the skull in a hollow place in the wall, and then used the mortar and some kiln bricks to hide it. He was breathing hard. Then he paused, placed his fingertips against the now-blank wall, bowed his head, and spoke for a minute in a strange clotted language.

Robert hurried back to the makeshift cot, and lay awake with his eyes closed and his heart thumping with excitement. A horse’s skull! In the western wall! He heard a smooth click as his father shut the door of the unfinished room, hiding the wall with its new and secret resident. Da’s boots fell separately to the floor. He walked on bare feet across the flagstones and knocked gently on the bedroom door. The boy’s mother whispered words Robert could not understand. Then she was at the hearth, her smell altering the air, and the boy heard her pouring water into the great tub. Water that gurgled. Water that murmured. Eyes shut tight, the boy heard a rustling of clothes, and then Da’s voice saying Ah! as he eased into the water. Then there was another unbinding of clothes. Silence. Then she said Oh!

Robert opened his eyes. Squinting, so they couldn’t see that he was seeing. His mother was standing in the tub, facing his father. Her flesh ripe and flushed in the orange light of the hearth. Her breasts full and dark-nippled. Her belly round with a thick black V of hair below. She squatted and slipped into the water with Da, and Robert closed his eyes in shame and fear. He could hear small splashes of water, wordless grunts of approval, a sighing stillness, a chuckle, then a silence again. The slippery sound of water and soap. Of hands on flesh. A long, soaking silence, like peace. Finally the sloshing sound of a body rising from water, and the boy peeked again. His mother was drying herself with a rough cotton towel, smiling, drying under one heavy breast and then the other. His father rose from the water. Robert closed his eyes.

His father was seldom in the house. He had customers in the shop, travelers, wayfarers, men with horses needing shoes, or men awaiting sickles to be carried to harvests, or men with ruined tools to be ground and hammered into second lives. They called him Mister Carson if they were strangers, or John if they’d been there more than once. Sometimes when the moon was high, the boy saw other men emerge from darkness, great burly men with wild orange hair, their shirts cut from animal skins, and Da stopped work and retreated with them into the tool room. They used the language Robert heard when his father buried the horse’s skull in the wall and they never called him John. At other times, Da borrowed a horse and packed his tools and kissed Robert’s mother on the cheek and then rode off into the hills. He was gone for three or four days, a week. The boy was always afraid that he would never return.

“He has work to do,” his mother said. “There’s so few like him,” she said. “He needs to help people who can’t do what he can do.”

There were no houses near them and no children his age with whom Robert could play, and yet he was not lonely. He often spoke with Bran, their dog, and the dog understood him. Bran had dark red hair and a setter’s long nose, and he understood all of them. In bad weather, Robert was almost always inside with his mother or playing on the leeward side of the cleared open patch that surrounded the slated house. Sometimes, he threw sticks and Bran raced after them, his ears flapping, his legs a blur, snatching the stick with a sudden pounce, then turning, racing back to the boy, dropping the stick precisely at his feet, then demanding that they do it all again. Sometimes, Robert’s mother prepared lunch for his father and the boy carried it to the forge and Da thanked him and hugged him with his hard, sweaty arms and then took the food with his handmade forks and knives and sat under the hawthorn tree and ate in silence, gazing into the Irish distance.

In the house, Robert helped his mother as she prepared food or tended the fire. She told him when to add fresh turf. She taught him to count by numbering the remaining bricks of turf, and then she would make notes on rough paper. She called this the List: the names of foods and supplies that she would need for the week, or tasks to be finished. Peddlers came by in horse-drawn carts, one with huge sacks of potatoes and mounds of fresh-picked vegetables, another with turf, a third with butter and eggs, cheese and milk (except on rare days of high heat), and his mother haggled with them in her teasing way, and bought what she needed and crossed the items off the List. Or they would go to town together for beef and fish. They walked to Belfast on Saturday mornings, passing St. Edmund’s Anglican Church into lanes gradually more crowded with farmhouses and people: Robert’s first glimpses of the world beyond their house. Bran was usually out front, his head high, alert to danger, peeing on stone markers.