by Pete Hamill
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.
3.
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.
On the edge of Belfast, the houses at first were scary to Robert: small, narrow, cramped together, all made of dirty red brick, with wet slate roofs and chimneys poisoning the air with sulphury smoke. From a distance, it was hard for him to believe that human beings lived there, and as they came closer it always felt to him that the clouds had chosen to banish the sun. Robert watched the strange new people: men in dark long coats, collars pulled high under dark cloth hats, women in dark skirts that reached the ground, dark shawls hiding their white wintry faces. Many houses were crowned with English flags, but even they had molted into permanent gray under the steady gray rain and the steady gray smoke from the coal fires. The only flashes of color came from the scarlet jackets of the English soldiers.
One shop sold paper and pencils, tobacco in cans, cigars, and a newspaper called the News-Letter. His mother always stopped there first, slipping her purchases into a deep flapped oilskin bag. On the street, she nodded at some women and murmured with others, but she seemed apart from them, even the ones Robert had seen crowded in beside her in the Sunday balconies of St. Edmund’s. Sometimes a woman touched his hair and exclaimed that it was black as coal and told him he’d grown bigger. But this chat didn’t seem real. In Belfast, the boy never felt part of the people, and, he was sure, neither did his mother. As he waited outside the shops, boys stared at him, at his clothes, at his face. What are ye? they’d say. Papist or Prod? And the boy learned to answer, Prod. Because he thought that was what he was: a Protestant named Robert Carson. The other boys babbled on about Good King Billy and asked him many questions about the glorious Battle of the Boyne, in which some of their grandfathers had been soldiers less than fifty years before, or so they claimed. They demanded from him knowledge of strategy and tactics and the numbers of the dead, the noisy catechism of their triumph. There seemed no use in telling them that he was only six; the knowledge they wanted him to recite was a matter of blood, not age. Bran growled as he sensed their hostility and suspicion: Until the boy’s mother left the paper shop and stepped into the gray drizzle and said to them, Away with ye now, away.
In spite of the hostile packs of other boys, Robert loved gazing into the windows of the shops, filled with objects small and large, in colors that were dazzling midst all the gray and black; or staring at the sheen on the slates of the sidewalks, where the rain gathered in puddles and color sometimes rose from splotches of oil. But it was never his street, the Carsons’ street. It was where his mother went on Saturdays to buy things that she couldn’t get from the peddlers on the road outside their house with its hearth that would never die away.
Beef and fish were the main things she carried away from the town. The butcher was a gaunt, pale man who said little. He took his money with a grunt and wrapped the meat. Always the money first. He never spoke Robert’s mother’s name. No Thank you, Mrs. Carson. No See you about, then, Rebecca. The fishmonger was thinner and smaller than the butcher but was always laughing and saying, How are ye, Mrs. Carson? when she entered. He wrapped the fish before he took the money. Naturally Robert and his mother preferred the company of the fishmonger. Bran, however, much preferred the butcher, although that dour man ne
ver once offered him a hunk of stripped bone.
The trip home from Belfast always filled Robert with relief and expectation. Sometimes his mother even skipped along, singing a song, accented by Bran’s sharp barks, all of them happy to leave the grim city behind, to make one final stop at the home of Mrs. Benson, who sold spices and salt. Then they rushed together into the greener, leafier, sweeter-smelling countryside. Bran plunged into wet meadows and rolled on his back, growling in pleasure, cleansing himself of the aroma of rotting eggs that had settled upon him from the coal fires of the dark city. Once Bran spied crows gnawing on grass or seeds. He rushed at them barking, then skidded to a stop as they rose in a black flock. The dog froze for that stunned moment, startled by the gathering of crows into a single giant thing that blackened the sky, in awe of a movement he could not make himself.
At home on all days, Robert loved watching his mother transform the raw materials of their journeys into sumptuous meals, singing all the while to herself, for the joy of the song. She cut meat into cubes, tossed trimmed fat to Bran, added spices and vegetables and water, and within hours, all was ready. She then vanished into the bedroom and washed her face and hands, and always donned the silver earrings the boy’s father had made for her long before Robert Carson was born. They were each shaped as double spirals, with small clips that attached them to the lobes of her ears. They were simple and beautiful, and sometimes she let Robert handle them, and he tried to understand how they were made. Horseshoes were blunt and simple and powerful; he could see himself making them in the forge; but he could not envision the delicacy of these earrings coming from his father’s hard hands.
It was always dark when his father came home, and his routines seldom changed. Each evening, his father washed, and then hugged the boy and whispered words to his mother that the boy could not hear. They ate gloriously tasty stews out of the terra-cotta bowls. Or trout from mountain streams. Or salmon from the sea. His mother broiled the spiced and salted fish on the open fire, basting it with butter, laying the fish out for them with mounds of boiled potatoes upon a plate. All of this done cheerfully, without any apparent effort. Robert loved the way the house filled each night with a new odor, a stirring of the sweet peat fire and the herbs and spices of the food. He would look at his father, see him glancing at his mother. The tall man said very little. But when his plate was wiped clean with an end of bread, he hugged Robert’s mother and whispered his thanks to her and then turned to the boy. A nod. Robert understood and thanked her too. Bran always remained still, a prisoner of discipline and ritual, knowing he must wait his turn. When the humans were finished, he could begin. Each of them saved something for Bran, the skins of fish, some lumps of potato, crusts of bread, and he went to his bowl (made by Da from a plumber’s flange) and ate with a steady, hungry, well-mannered motion until everything was gone. Then he too went over to the boy’s mother and fell to the flagstones before her, thankful and content, licking the last spicy remnants from his chops.
But there was more to Rebecca Carson than cooking, or cleaning, or guarding the life of the fire. Across those endless days when Da was in the shop, she was teaching her son many things. To read, for example, although he could not remember later how she did that. There were few books in Ireland then, but when a new one arrived at the paper shop in town, she would rent it and bring it home and read it very quickly (for each additional day of reading cost more money) and showed Robert the letters and the words and the pictures. They owned a large Bible too, and she read the stories with the boy, or told her own versions of the tales. Robert didn’t like the story of Abraham and his son Isaac because he couldn’t imagine his father taking him to some lonely hill to sacrifice him to God. He liked other parts of the story better, especially the part about Abraham sending a servant to the land of Haran to find a wife for Isaac and how he found one named Rebecca.
“Are you named for her?” Robert asked his mother.
“Aye,” she said, and smiled to herself. “But then there are many people in Ireland named for characters in the Bible. There are Isaacs in Belfast and Jacobs…”
“Is there a Robert in the Bible?”
“I don’t think so.”
And then she shifted back to the story and how Abraham found the land of Canaan and how when his wife Sarah died—there were plenty of Sarahs in Ireland too—he buried her in Hebron and how years later Abraham was buried there too. He was one hundred and seventy-five years old.
“One hundred and seventy-five years old?”
“Aye, and a good man he was, old Abraham.”
“Was he the oldest man that ever lived?”
“No, that was Methuselah. He lived to be nine hundred and sixty-nine years old. Or so the Bible says. And when old Noah died, he was nine hundred and fifty.”
“Will Da live to be nine hundred and fifty years old?”
She laughed out loud.
“I hope so,” she said. “That would be grand.”
And then she returned to Abraham, who was the father of his people and took them out of their endless wandering, their living in tents in the desert, and brought them at last to the land of milk and honey, to Israel.
“And where is that?”
She opened her worn paper-covered Book of the World, which they also owned and had no need to return to the paper store, and on two of its pages there was an engraved map of the world. She showed Robert where Israel was, although it was now called Palestine. She pointed out some of the other lands where the Hebrews had wandered, way out at the end of the Mediterranean, near the rivers called the Tigris and the Euphrates, before they found the land of Canaan. Even on the small map, it was a long way from Ireland, and on days of thrumming rain Robert dreamed of going there, to the dry, bright deserts and the palm trees, and then to rise like a hawk and keep flying above the lines of the map until he could see the date trees beside the River Jordan. He would ask her to repeat the names of the rivers again and again so that he could remember them always, because it seemed to him wondrous to have rivers with names that twisted and turned like the rivers themselves. How could poor, simple, bald Lagan stand up to Euphrates? And the Tigris: Was it filled with tigers? No, she said, it’s a name of a place, I guess, but maybe tigers were named after the river. She sounded very reasonable, but at night, before sleeping, in the room where a horse’s skull was lodged in the wall, Robert could see golden rivers filled with writhing tigers.
Over and over again, he asked her to tell him the story of Joseph and his brothers and the coat of many colors. She told it in different ways each time, and later, when he could read, she had him tell it himself, out loud, while she worked at the cooking. Sometimes it was a simple tale of vanity. When he was a boy Joseph had a coat of many colors and was vain about it, flaunting the coat before his brothers, who wore gray clothes like the people in Belfast. Joseph had ten brothers, and they shunned him because of his vanity. Which is why, when his father sent him to find the brothers in the desert where they were tending flocks, they first thought of killing him, and then sold him to some passing men on camels. By this time, Robert knew that he had two brothers who were born before he arrived, and they had died. But suppose they had lived?
“If I’d been as vain as Joseph,” he asked his mother, “would they have thought of killing me? Would they have sold me to a circus? Or to some black sailing ship down past Sandy Row, bound from Belfast to Spain or Africa?”
“I should hope not,” his mother said. But then she paused and turned her head, as if thinking of those dead boys, her vanished sons, and then went on with the tale.
Sometimes the tale was told as a story of exile. In Egypt, the mightiest country of the time, among its pyramids and glittering houses and its Sphinx staring from the desert, Joseph came to manhood as a slave. A slave is someone owned by somebody else, Rebecca Carson explained in a grave voice. They have to work for that person and don’t get paid. They still have them in America, the slaves, I mean. And a few other places, too… But G
od had given Joseph intelligence and the gift of understanding dreams. Even the Pharaoh, the name the Egyptians gave to their king, called upon him to interpret one special dream. Joseph listened to the Pharaoh and told him that the dream meant there would be seven years of great harvests and then seven years of famine. When the crops don’t come in at harvest, and the people have nothing to eat, his mother explained, that’s called a famine. Do we ever have them in Ireland? Aye, she said. Sometimes.
Joseph convinced the Pharaoh to store one fifth of all the produce of the seven years of great harvests in warehouses, like the ones down by the harbor in Belfast, only larger and brighter, painted white, and gleaming in the sun. That way, when the bad times came, when the famine happened, the people of Egypt would have plenty to eat. And Joseph was right. The famine came, and the people of Egypt ate, while the rest of the area starved, including the Hebrews.
At that time, years had passed since Joseph had been sold into slavery, and now he was tall and strong, no longer a stranger in a strange land, but a man with more power than anyone else except the Pharaoh. And then one day into Egypt came his brothers. They had come to buy grain to feed the starving Hebrews. They were brought before Joseph and did not recognize him, because now he was tall and strong, speaking Egyptian in a deep voice, even using a translator to maintain his disguise. For Robert, this was the best part of the story. For Joseph did not suddenly speak Hebrew, remind them of their plans to kill him and their decision to sell him, and then have their heads lopped off. He was kind to them. He fed them and gave them drink. He listened to them. He inquired about their father and other members of their family, and thus learned that his father still lived. Some details astonished Robert when first he heard the tale. The detail about how Joseph lived to be one hundred and ten years old. Or the way his father passed away at one hundred and fifty. But each time he heard the tale again, such details astonished him less.