Pete Hamill - Forever

Through the day, a rain fell upon their part of Ireland, now hard, then suddenly weak. His mother didn’t mention the birthday either, acting as if it had completely vanished from her memory. When the rain eased to a steady drizzle, Robert leaned over the half-door, gazing into the dark line of forest.

Then, as the rain began again to drive hard, he saw his father coming from the woods. The boy’s heart tripped. His father was riding a beautiful black horse. Robert burst through the door and ran through the rain to greet him.

“Happy birthday, son,” Da said, and smiled, sitting high in a rough saddle.

He reached down and scooped up Robert with one hand and jammed him in the front of the saddle, where the boy ran his hands for the first time through the horse’s lustrous coat. It was September 9, and his father had come home with a horse. His horse. Their horse. On his birthday.

Together, they trotted to the front door, where Rebecca stood smiling in a delighted, conspiratorial way. Bran barked loudly until he saw John Carson dismount and then swing the boy down, holding him beneath the arms, whirling him and laughing louder than the storm. A rumble of distant thunder came from the south.

“Thunder,” Da said. “We’ll name him Thunder.”

“Yes, yes,” Robert said. “Thunder! Yes, Da, thank you, Da, oh Da, oh Da, thank you.”

Then all of them stood in the rain and ran their hands over the wet ebony coat of the horse named Thunder, who shuddered in delight. The boy would always remember the feel of muscles rippling in the shoulders of the horse, the grooves of his neck and buttocks and thighs. There were cables of tendon drawn like lines from his knees to his hocks. The horse looked at them with liquid black eyes as the rain pelted them all. Looking as if he knew that he had found his home.

Robert’s heart was beating hard. A horse. Here in the gray sheets of Ulster rain. After the beef stew and the slice of apple cobbler and the toasting with icy water; after the hugs and the vows of more and more birthdays and a wonderful year to come at school; after his father hugged him again and again; after he saw tears welling in his mother’s eyes; after all of that, they walked Thunder to the tool room of the forge, where he gobbled a huge bucket of oats and then folded his legs and lay down upon the straw.

“He’s yours now, lad,” Da said.

“No,” Robert said. “He’s ours. Forever.”

In the morning, an hour before Robert left for school, and while the rain eased into mist, Da showed the boy Thunder’s hooves, the central cleft, the sole, the wall around it, and explained how the shoe was shaped to fit around each hoof like a sheath. “When you come home,” Da said, “we’ll make him some fine shoes. The two of us. Now, away with you.”

Robert learned very little at school that day. While the Rev. Robinson droned on and on, the boy’s head was filled with the beauty and power of the horse. When school ended, he ran all the way home. Da was in the forge. He smiled at Robert and stepped to the anvil, and without a word began shaping new shoes, with the boy’s help, adding a fine line of brass as a trim between the hoof and shoe. The new shoes fit perfectly; it was as if John Carson had been preparing for this piece of work for many years, and of course, he had. Then one hoof at a time, gently using nails and calks, he attached the wonderful shoes. The lines of brass looked like gold.

That night they planned the fence that would mark the limits of their land and become the free home of Thunder. Since they had never owned a horse, they never before had need of a fence. Two nights later, some of the burly strangers appeared at dusk, carrying wood and tools, and began hammering and singing and drinking. When they heard the sound of horses in the distance, they went silent and vanished into the darkness until the horses or coaches had passed. Four of them, in fact, were always in the darkness. Robert tried to help with the fence, but was sent off to bed, where his mother told him to dream about lands of milk and honey.

When he awoke at dawn, the strangers were gone and the fence was finished. It now marked the limits of everything that was the Carsons’: the house, the forge, the hawthorn tree. Over the following weeks, he and his father made a trough for oats and a one-horse stable in the space between the back of the forge and the hawthorn tree. And every day, in the early morning or after school, Robert rode Thunder. Sometimes his father got up on the horse too, the three of them looking suddenly as if they were one creature, and the man showed his son the tricks of control. Within weeks, Robert could ride with a saddle or without, using the bridle or making the horse stop or turn with the pressure of his knees. Da taught him to talk to Thunder always, because, he said, the horse understands. It’s your tone of voice, he explained. The tone of your voice. Just tell him what you want, and he’ll know. Be kind to him, be gentle, and when you need him, he’ll know how to be fierce.

Thunder became the happiest of Robert’s duties. His father put him to work cleaning and oiling the hard rough leather saddle, doing the work each day until the saddle grew softer. He showed him how to wash Thunder so that his coat glistened without the presence of the sun. He could not leave a trace of soap on the great black coat, for it would irritate Thunder’s skin and make him flake. Thunder loved the feel of fresh water, as Robert did, and rain, as the boy did too, and the feel of a coarse towel drying him in the stall. And the horse loved them to talk to him: whispering to him, running fingernails along his long flat brow. Every morning before breakfast, the boy looked into the horse’s deep, intelligent eyes and spoke in low, loving tones and the horse answered with the love in his eyes.

One Saturday afternoon, Da took Robert for a ride into Belfast. Down the road past the butcher and the fishmonger, and deeper into places the boy had not seen on trips with his mother. He explained to the boy how they lived in an area called Stranmillis, which ran down to the banks of the River Lagan, which in turn flowed into the Lough, the immense harbor that dug into the land from the east. He told the boy that the name Belfast came from an Irish phrase: Beal Feirste, which meant the Mouth of the Sand-Banked River. These were the first words Da spoke directly to him in Irish, but he added no others. He was too busy explaining geography to the boy, pointing out Cave Hill and Divis and the Black Mountain, all rising above the Sand-Banked River, then gesturing across the shimmering water at a distant castle called Carrickfergus.

“That was built before there was a town,” Da said. “To guard the entrance to the Lough. And before that, the Vikings were here, the Norsemen, building forts and houses and eating the fish, which were thicker here than in all of Ireland.”

His knowledge astonished the boy as they followed a smaller river called the Fearsat, a slow, leaky tributary of the Lagan. Soon the embankment itself was paved and flagged, with Thunder’s gold-trimmed shoes making a clacking sound, and they were in Castle Street, the river still moving sluggishly to their left. They passed many shops run by linen merchants. Da named the bank and the post office and the ruin of the original castle of the Lord of Donegal. A large crowd milled about in front of the Market House, talking and smoking and gesturing, and Da said that much of the town’s business took place there, usually out of the rain inside the building. As they moved, Castle Street became Front Street, and his father told Robert the names of smaller streets feeding into it: Ann Street and Rosemary Lane, Pottinger’s Entry and Wilson’s Court, Crown Entry and Winecellar Entry, with men and women and horses moving steadily in and out of the lanes. Da carefully explained all of this to his son, and to Thunder too, as if wanting to give each of them the essential geography in which they lived.