by Pete Hamill
4.
When the boy was a week short of six years old, he started school. That meant shoes each day and knicker pants and a white shirt with a short tie and a new coat to keep off the rain. Now he was up each morning at the command of the clock, to wash, dress, and walk twenty minutes to the schoolhouse. It stood to the right of St. Edmund’s, Church of Ireland, where his father and mother joined the other proud Protestants each Sunday morning at nine o’clock. The church was neat and handsome, with a spare feeling to it inside and out, and a balcony where the women sat apart from the men. Behind the church, surrounded by a neat garden, was the rectory, where the Reverend Henry Robinson lived, attended by a stout, round-faced, cheerful woman who was his housekeeper.
There were about fifteen of them in the one large schoolroom, of different ages and sizes, all boys (for girls were not allowed to be educated). He was called Robert by some, and Rob or Bobby by others. The teacher was the same Reverend Robinson who thundered on Sundays: tall, wiry, with a large beaked nose always dripping in the Irish chill. Through the mornings, as he gave his lessons, the man would blow into his handkerchief and then examine the product as if it were evidence of sin. He wore the same black jacket each day, shiny at the elbows, and knicker trousers, white shirt, grimy white stockings that vanished into buckled black shoes. He stood on a raised platform beside a desk. Ready at hand was a springy birch cane he called the Punisher.
The Rev. Robinson was never happy. Or rather, he never smiled, at least not in front of the schoolchildren. He did seem happy when whipping the Punisher against the tender bottoms of his charges. And he seemed to single out Robert Carson. From the day of Robert’s arrival, he could read without the teacher’s help, which seemed to gall the man in black. Whether called Robert, or Rob, or Bobby, he felt the daily condemnation of the Rev. Robinson’s beady eyes.
The curriculum was simple: reading, writing, arithmetic, and Protestantism. The Rev. Robinson expressed no reverence for anyone or anything except God, Oliver Cromwell, and William of Orange. His holy trinity. At God’s command, and with God’s help (he told the boys, his voice quivering, his clogged nostrils flaring), Cromwell drove the treasonous, idol-worshipping, priest-ridden Catholics beyond the Pale of Settlement; they learned no lessons and rose again, and in 1690, William of Orange arrived on our blessed shores to defeat the same Catholics at the glorious Battle of the Boyne. There were still Catholics among us, he intoned, hidden, secret, the spies of Satan, and it is God’s demand that we convert them to the freedoms and liberties of Protestantism by any means necessary. Robert’s further instruction in theology was of a similar lofty order.
“How can you tell a Catholic from a Protestant?” the Rev. Robinson asked one day.
“By his rotted teeth,” someone said.
And someone else shouted, “By the smell, eejit.”
“Here, here,” the Rev. Robinson commanded. “Don’t call a fellow Protestant an idiot.”
Robert had never heard any of this at home, and so he said nothing. He saved his religious fervor for Bible class. He could talk about Moses and Abraham and Isaac. And about Aaron’s rod, which was a shepherd’s staff, and how Aaron could turn it into a snake, or use it to change water into blood, or to bring down upon his enemies great clouds of lice or fleas or hornets or flies. To Robert, that was another amazing tale. He knew about Joshua and his army, blowing their godly rams’ horns at the battle of Jericho. He knew about Daniel in the lion’s den, and Gideon’s fierce army and the wicked Jezebel (although he didn’t quite understand what was meant by “wicked”), and how Delilah cut off Samson’s hair while he slept, robbing him of his strength. The Rev. Robinson read the line that said “Let my people go,” and told his flock that it was the cry of every honest, God-fearing Protestant when confronted by Catholic riches, Catholic corruptions, Catholic vice, and Catholic power. This bored Robert. He wanted to hear more about donkeys that talked, and rocks that gave water, and chariots of fire; he wanted more about all the thrilling murders in the Bible, and the great men who had many wives. A vein in the Rev. Robinson’s temple pulsed with fury as he roared about the Whore of Babylon, who lived in Rome and called himself the Pope, but he didn’t answer Robert’s question about what a whore was (the older boys giggled or whooped at the question, which allowed the Rev. Robinson to avoid the answer and direct his fury at their knowing laughter). The Rev. Robinson insisted on discussing, in order, each of the Ten Commandments. Young Robert Carson wanted to know if it was true that Joseph lived to be one hundred and ten.
He did make some friends. Billy Painter. Sam Longley. Harry Martinson. Boys like those from town, but better dressed, with faces shiny and scrubbed, bursting with mischief. As time passed and one term gave way to another, and then eased into a summer, and then another winter, Robert discovered that he was good at some things in school and poor at others. He had good penmanship (with a reed pen dipped in an inkwell), and that same talent could be used for drawing. He would draw their house and the hearth and the forge, and pictures of Bran and his friends at school. He never drew his parents. His right hand did what he wanted it to do, and when he was bored he could also use his left. The works of his left hand seemed to come from a different boy: the writing blunter, the drawing bolder. The Rev. Robinson always smacked him with the Punisher when he caught him writing left-handed (“A sure sign of Satan’s presence,” he snarled), so the boy only wrote that way at home. There he had noticed that his father was right-handed, but his mother wrote the List with her left, though completely untouched by Satan and his wiles. He felt proud that he had taken a hand from each of them.
Robert was not as good at arithmetic as he was at reading and writing or even Protestantism. Once he got the hang of Protestantism, it was easy. Catholics were bad, Protestants were good, and the King of England was the greatest man alive in the world. But arithmetic, at first, was more difficult: abstract, without a story.
Seeing this weakness, his mother helped him with his sums, again turning to the turf pile to explain addition and subtraction. But then the boy would cite an example from his father’s forge, as if it gave proof of confused logic. If Da put four pieces of metal on the grid and melted them and banded them together into a sickle, didn’t that mean that two and two made one?
“Sometimes you think too much for your own good, lad,” his mother said, and laughed out loud.
Then one day near the end of the second year at St. Edmund’s, it all came together in some mysterious way. Robert was adding a column of about seven double-digit figures. He looked for the first time at the column as if it were a ladder. In his mind, he climbed up the right side, counting as he went. Twelve. Yes: Write down a 2 and carry the 1. Then he climbed down the other side and had 17, wrote it down and ended up with 172. The trick was to make it a journey, not a story with heroes and villains, Hebrews and Egyptians, just a going from one place to another, counting miles, maybe, or trees, or stone markers, or houses; the climbing of a ladder to the top step and then a climb back down. The boy admonished himself for wanting everything to be a story. And now realized that some journeys were not stories. On some journeys, nothing really happened.
You just kept taking steps. Once he had that in his brain, even arithmetic seemed easy. It wasn’t the same as a story, because it had no meaning, unless you were counting days and weeks and months and years and, eventually, centuries.
5.
The boy was ten when they saw the strange people coming along the roads. Bran smelled them first and barked in his deepest basso profundo voice, running to the edge of the land to frighten them away from the Carson house. These strangers were not like the burly red-haired men who sometimes appeared in the forge. Bran knew those men and their strange language. These arrivals were ragged and thin and shambling, like trees without leaves, their eyes wide with need. The sight of them filled the boy’s mother with fear.
“Come in now, son,” she said. “Come in right now.”
She shouted to her husban
d down at the forge and then locked the doors and closed the windows. She whispered prayers. She watched the strangers from the window, where Da was shooing them away with a hammer in his hand. If they came near, even the women, even the children, she screamed at them: “Go away, please, for God’s sake, go away.”
Robert had never seen her like this before, she who was ordinarily so kind and generous with everyone who passed, and almost totally without fear. But these people terrified her, and as she held the boy close, she told him some of the story. About how such people had arrived years earlier, when they lived in another house, all of the ragged strangers coming from the west, heading for Belfast, and how they carried with them something called the cholera. And how his lost brothers felt pity for them and ran down with food and water, and these people (or people like them) hugged the boys and thanked them and in three days the boys were dead.
“My poor boys,” she said now, fighting tears, her voice a soft croon. “Those poor good boys. It was my fault too, because I didn’t know, I was ignorant, I told them to bring them the food and the drink. And they did. And they died.” She breathed deeply. “They were your brothers, lad.”
She hugged Robert tightly.
“Well, by God,” she said, “you won’t die.”
And then Da arrived, his work finished early, bending under the lintel of the door. Grave. His face set.
“Don’t worry, Rebecca, ” he said. “They’ll not get in here.”
He held her close to his chest, soothing her, and added. “Well, let’s have dinner. And Rebecca, darlin’? Why don’t you wear your earrings?”
That night in his bed beside the wall that contained the horse’s skull, Robert tried again to imagine the faces of his lost brothers and how they ran down a slope like the slope outside this door, to a road like the road outside this door, and gave food and drink to sickened people. And then died. He tried drawing their faces in his mind. Not the featureless creatures of his night dreams. Faces like his own, or those of his friends at St. Edmund’s or the boys he saw on his trips to town. And he thought: That was not fair. How could God let such a thing happen? If he was so powerful, why didn’t he stop my brothers before they reached the road? Make a storm or an earthquake or a flight of bees: but stop them while they were running down the slope? Robert began to cry.
Then the door opened and his mother was there, wearing her double-spiraled earrings.
“It’s all right, son,” she said. “I’m sorry if I upset you. Don’t cry anymore.”
“I don’t like God.”
“Ach, son, what a thing to say.”
“He let my brothers die. They never did anything bad, I’m sure of that, and he let them die.”
“He works in mysterious ways, they say.”
“I don’t like him.”
“Hush, now.”
They both went quiet. His mother gazed out the curtainless window, to where the trees stood silvery in the moonlight. She listened, fully alert, but heard no strangers moving on the road. Even Bran was now asleep.
“Did I ever tell you about Noah’s granddaughters,” she said, “and how the Hebrews came to Ireland?”
“No.”
“Well, the story starts just before the Flood. The world was full of wickedness then, and God was disgusted with his creations. So he planned a great flood. He appeared to Noah, who was then an old man, and told him to build an ark, a ship large enough to hold men and women and two of each animal in the world.”
“I know that part, Ma. What about his granddaughters?”
“Well, one granddaughter was named Cesara, and she was very smart and very good and kind. But she realized there would not be enough room for her and her woman friends on the ark. So she and her friends began to build smaller boats, seven of them. And sure enough, the rains began to fall, for forty days and forty nights, filling the world to the peaks of the mountain-tops. And Cesara and her friends began sailing to the west, because they lost sight of Noah and his giant ark. Only one boat survived the long journey, which took three years, because there was no land anywhere for them to stop. They ate fish. They drank rainwater. Some died. And then finally the waters of the world began to recede. And they saw land. Green and rich and beautiful. There were only three men left and fifty women, including Cesara. And they sailed for the shore, and it was Ireland.”
“They were all Hebrews?”
“Aye, every last one of them.”
She stared out at the night. The moon was gone. A soft rain was falling.
“They stayed in Ireland, and married and multiplied, and some of them kept the old ways, the old religion, the religion of the Hebrews.”
She gripped her son’s hand, then turned away. He understood.
“Are you a Hebrew, Ma?”
“Aye.”
She held the boy closer.
“Don’t be telling all your friends, now,” she said with a smile. “Some of them are pure stupid about Hebrews. Or Jews, as they call us. Does it make you feel any differently about me?”
“It feels grand, Ma. Sure, you’re related to Cesara. And Rebecca. And Ruth. And Esther too, and all the others. Joshua and Samson and Abraham and Joseph—”
She laughed in a delighted way.
“I don’t count that Samson as any relative of mine,” she said. “He was a bit of a bollix, wasn’t he?”
Now Robert laughed. And then listened to the rain for a moment, spattering the slates.
“This means I’m a Hebrew too, doesn’t it?”
“Aye,” she said, “and a good one too.”
The boy felt as if his mother had handed him a map to a secret treasure. Then she kissed his forehead and whispered: “Sleep now, lad. You’ve school in the morning.”
6.
The cholera passed, and the ragged people vanished from the roads. In school and pulpit the Rev. Robinson intoned against the sins of the victims, and how they must have somehow failed God or he would not have chosen them for death. On the way home from Sunday services, the boy’s mother fumed. The nerve of that bloody-minded, snot-nosed fool, she said. How dare he? How dare he say that those poor people died because they were sinners, or Catholics, or people who had fallen away? Meaning, of course, how could the Rev. Robinson accuse her own two sons, the boy’s lost brothers, of some mortal sin that caused their death before he was born?
“Cholera’s a disease,” she said as they walked together as a family. “It comes from man, not from God.”
John Carson listened, saying nothing.
Robert didn’t know what his father was thinking, but he now carried within him the secret his mother had given him. The secret of being a descendant of Noah, a hidden, shadowy Hebrew, a private thing that was a gleaming, glittering, large secret. When he again read the Bible after receiving his secret, or heard his mother telling the old tales, the book became a kind of biography. Their story, and his story. The Hebrew tale was passed to him across thousands of years, from a world of sand and palms, where murder and betrayal were part of the story, and heroism too. It had been passed to him in the dark, wet northern hardness of Ireland, which itself was a kind of miracle. He held the secret within himself, never mentioning it to his father or his friends. He polished it. He burnished it. “O Noah,” he often whispered in the dark. “O Abraham. O Joseph with your coat of many colors. I am you too.”
Then, on a day of frail, misty rain, as he sat alone inside the door, Robert heard a tremendous barrage of hoofbeats on the wooden bridge. The sound rushed into his head, to stay forever. He hurried outside, and saw for the first time the black coach of the Earl of Warren. The coach was immense to his young eyes, tall as a house, polished black with silver adornments and a large W emblazoned on its doors above a coat of arms. The metal-rimmed wheels were a blur, the undercarriage bounced violently, and it was heading up the road to Belfast, drawn by four frothing brown horses, whipped by a fierce man with a patch on one eye. Out front were three horsemen in scarlet jackets. Three more followed t
he coach. Robert ran to look closer. And saw for the first time, peering from the dark interior of the coach, the sallow, fleshy face of the Earl of Warren. Alone. His eyes glittering as he glanced at the boy.
Then the black coach was gone.
And the boy saw his father standing in front of the forge, watching it go.
7.
One Friday evening, his father packed tools in a leather satchel, slung it over his shoulders, said a quick good-bye, and walked up the slope into the hills. Robert felt like weeping. That Sunday, he would be nine. His lucky number. The ninth day of the ninth month. And Da walked off without discussing his return. He could be gone for a night or a week. He could be absent on a birthday made even more important by that number nine. All through Saturday, Robert worked at his lessons and played with Bran near the stream and swept out the forge and helped feed peat to the hearth. He never mentioned the birthday to his mother. On Sunday morning, he went to St. Edmund’s with her and saw his friends but didn’t mention his birthday to them or explain why his father was not in church. I am nine, he thought, but to say a word would be a sin of vanity.
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.