by Pete Hamill
Blindly.
And then the boy’s mother was there, grabbing him by the waist, pivoting at once, jerking him free of the mud, and hurling him to safety.
As the horses smashed her into the mud and the steel-cased wheels rolled over her.
Rebecca Carson did not scream.
Her body simply issued a great whoosh. As if all the air and all the life and her very soul had been abruptly squashed out of her.
It was Robert who screamed.
He screamed and ran to her, pulling himself through the sucking mud, and screamed and fell face forward into the mud and screamed and rose and screamed and felt hands grabbing his arms while he screamed and felt the rain hammering him and his dead mother and he screamed.
When there were no screams left, and no voice, Robert sat splay-legged in the mud, holding his mother’s ruined head, and saw through tears and rain that the black coach was stopped a dozen yards beyond them. The door opened. The Earl of Warren put a tentative foot on the runner below the door, brushing in a distracted way at the rain pelting his black velvet coat. He looked at Robert cradling the broken body of his mother. Then the earl sat back heavily in the coach and closed the door behind him. But the black coach did not move. A murmurous crowd was thickening now, with shopkeepers and Tommy Hastings and other boys and men who looked grim. Patch came slopping through the mud.
“Bloody stupid Irish,” he said. “Running in front of a coach like that.”
Robert stood up, moved around Patch, and dashed to the coach, slipping and floundering. He jerked at a door handle. When it opened, the earl stared at him with concern on his face.
“I’m sorry, lad,” he said in a smooth, sympathetic voice. “I didn’t see what happened, but there’ll be an investigation, and there’ll be some compensation. Of course, I’ll pay for the funeral services and—”
Robert leaped at the earl, punching at him, screaming I’llkillyou, I’llkillyou, I’llkillyou, up on the runner now, reaching in and grabbing at his neck, trying to hurt him, to give him pain, crazy and snarling: “You goddamned slaver, you slaver, you cruel rotten slaver.” All of this in a matter of seconds. And then Patch was pulling the boy off the earl, whirling him, heaving him like a sack of potatoes through the rainy air into the mud. Three rain-soaked redcoats were suddenly there. One slapped Robert’s muddy face, making his ears ring. Another raised his rifle butt as if to batter the boy. Then the earl emerged again and shouted: “Stop, you brainless bugger, it’s his mother.”
The redcoat obeyed. Robert rose from the mud and saw the earl peering down at Rebecca’s body, his face a mixture of fear, pity, and surprise. Robert felt his rage seep out of him like rain-water and he fell into a drawn-up ball beside his mother’s body. Now some of the men came from the side and lifted him, and carried Rebecca out of the mud and laid her in front of the fishmonger’s shop. Robert saw the earl wave with a sneer at Patch, ordering him to get up on the coach. Then he slammed the door and leaned out the open window.
“Take her home,” he said in a vague way to the crowd. “And the boy too.” He paused, then added in a subdued voice: “I’ll take care of everything.”
10.
Behind the closed door of the bedroom, Da washed the Irish mud off the body of his wife. He dried her. He dressed her in her best cashmere gown. Standing outside the door, Robert heard him murmur one sentence: “O my Rebecca, O Rebecca, I will see you soon enough.” Da attached her double-spiraled silver earrings. Then he carried her out of the bedroom and placed her upon a pair of planks stretched across the low stools beside the hearth. In the light of the fire and the lanterns, she seemed to the boy to be sleeping. He and his father stared at her for a long while. Outside, Bran began a low, pained, desolated howling.
“Comfort the dog, son,” Da said. “We can comfort each other later.”
And so he did, lying with Bran in the lee of the house as the drizzle fell from the Irish sky. The dog was on his side, lost, forlorn, empty, his eyes wide, his pink tongue flopping over his teeth, his body trembling with hundreds of small breaths. He was as inconsolable as the boy. They huddled together in the dark for a long time.
Then people started to arrive, trudging through the rain, kicking mud off their shoes at the door, entering in a tentative way, saying what they could say, which was not much. Sorry for your trouble, each of them seemed to say. Sorry for your trouble. Some of Robert’s friends came from school, all but Tommy Hastings, who someone said was beyond consolation, blaming himself. But Robert hid from them in the dark with Bran, and walked with the dog through the black rain to the stable to feed Thunder. There the boy begin to bawl again, and Thunder pawed the straw at his feet and Bran let out a long banshee howl.
From the stable, Robert saw the Rev. Robinson coming up the road, awkward and gaunt. He remained hidden in the dark and was relieved that the preacher didn’t stay long. Then everybody was gone. Da called “Son, son, come home now” from the door, and Robert walked slowly back with Bran. The boy didn’t want to enter the house, but in a hoarse, low voice, his father told him to come in and change into dry clothes. “Him too,” he said, nodding at the soaked dog. Bran seemed to understand that they needed him with them that night. He shook off the rain, twice, and followed the boy to his room.
When Robert returned in dry clothes, his father was staring at his wife, at Rebecca, the descendant of Noah. At the boy’s mother. He said nothing. The doors were now closed and locked against the world. But the world would not leave them to their grieving.
There was a sudden sharp knock on the door. Bran barked angrily, as if he needed to take out his anger on someone, anyone. Da only looked weary: another mourning visitor, paying respects. He sighed and went to the door. A thin, trembling man stood there, a scarf tied tightly around his head under a tall fur hat. He bowed in a nervous way. Da barred the way to the house, leaving the man in the dripping rain. Bran barked and barked, while the boy tried to calm him.
“Yes?”
“Excuse me, sir. You’d be Mister Carson, sir, am I right? Mr. John Carson?”
“Aye.”
“Sorry for your trouble, Mister Carson,” the man said. “But I’ve got something for you.”
The man peeled off a kid glove and slid an envelope from inside his coat. He handed it to Da, then bowed, turned, and was gone. Father and son heard the receding gallop of a horse.
The father stared at the envelope, then turned it over. Heavy vellum paper. The deckle-edged flap sealed in red wax, embossed with a W.
He cracked it open with a finger. Inside there was a lone vellum card. He exhaled disdainfully, then showed it to his son. A single word was written with a steel pen: Sorry. Clipped to the card was a ten-pound note.
Da held the ten-pound note between thumb and forefinger as if pinching the tail of a rat.
“Ten pounds,” he said. And for the first time he sounded bitter instead of grieving. “That’s what he thinks an Irish life is worth.”
He walked past his son to the hearth and dropped the bank-note in the fire.
Then he turned to the boy.
“It’s the two of us now, son.”
The boy rushed to him, into his enveloping arms, and then all the caged words burst from him, rushing on a river of guilt, If I’d only stayed by her side, if only I hadn’t seen Tommy Hastings, if only I hadn’t tried to cross the lane, words of anger and protest and revenge, I’m going to find him, I’m going to make him pay, I’m going to get that cruel, slaving pig, and then no words, just bawling. Then sobbing. Hopeless. Empty. Shuddering. And when Da led him to bed and consoled him with whispered words and told him to sleep, because they were going on a long journey in the morning, Robert didn’t want him to leave the room. He wanted him there. He wanted his mother there. He wanted them to tell him stories. He wanted them to sing a song.
But Da closed the door softly and went back to the room where his wife lay cold and broken. Robert heard the sound of turf being dropped upon the fire. And then the doo
rs opened and his father went outside to howl with Bran at the moon.
11.
He was awake before dawn. Robert cracked open his bedroom door and glanced at the hearth, hoping none of this had happened, that he’d moved through a terrible dream, that his mother would be standing there, mixing porridge in a pot. But no: Her body was where he had seen it last, lying on boards beside the hearth. It was wrapped now in a kind of oiled cape, her face barely visible through a tightly drawn green shawl. Da whispered to the boy to dress warmly, for they were going to the West.
In his room, Robert pulled on wool shirts and socks, staring at the wall where the horse’s skull was hidden. Tell me something, he thought. Tell me what this is all about…. When Robert came out, his father lifted Rebecca Carson as if she were a sleeping child and told the boy to open the Western door. They passed through, his father bending under the transom. Thunder was already harnessed to a cart roofed by a small canvas tent. Da laid his wife on rush mats on the floor of the cart. He looked at her for a long moment, as if remembering unfinished conversations, and then went back to place some damp, slow-burning turf on the fire. He emerged with extra blankets, closing the door behind him. Tenderly, he covered her body with the blankets, and then he and his son climbed up on the seat of the cart and started into the bruise-colored darkness, riding to the West. Bran hurried along beside them.
They rode for hours, following narrow paths into dense forest. High trees sheltered them from the rain. They saw no houses, no towns. They climbed and climbed. At one point, they paused and Robert lifted the panting Bran up on the buckboard. It was full daylight now, but still dark among the ancient trees.
Then, from the leafy darkness Robert heard a voice say something in a language he didn’t know. A tree was speaking! His father answered back. Using words Robert had never heard him say. The boy trembled with excitement: There in the cold mist, his father was speaking to trees and the trees were talking back. Every fifty feet another tree talked, its branches moving, and his father answered. Bran was alert, his wet nose quivering, his jaws clamped shut, but he didn’t bark. He too seemed to know the secret language of the trees.
Finally the path ended. A wall of trees and foliage blocked their way. Da waited and said nothing. Thunder shuddered and pawed the ground as if anxious to go on.
And then the trees parted, and they moved forward into a wide hidden grove.
In the center was an immense flat boulder, like a stone table supported on legs chopped from the face of a mountain. There were carved markings on the boulder that Robert couldn’t read. Around the edges of the grove, hidden under the dark spreading branches of alder and oak, he saw tall stone columns rising twelve feet into the air, as if aimed at the stars. Their tops were rounded, their sides finely planed. The hush was eerie, the sound of something that had not yet happened. Thunder shuddered again. Bran growled. A hawk cried from some unseen place high in the sky. Then from the trees came some of the men who had visited Da in the evenings when his mother was alive. Their women were behind them, and some white-bearded men in long dark gowns, all of them speaking that language.
Da eased off the wagon and so did Bran and the boy. The men embraced his father and whispered to him. None of them wept. Four of the women lifted Rebecca Carson from the wagon and carried her to the flat boulder, which Robert now realized was an altar. They laid her out on the altar, applying oils from small jars to her eyelids. Then more men came from the woods with immense torches and jammed them into the ground, one flame at each point of the altar, north and south, east and west. A breeze whipped the flames of the torches, making them look like wild orange hair.
Da took his son’s hand and led him to the head of the altar, where they stood together behind the woman they had lost. At the foot of the altar, an old woman (whose name the boy would learn was Mary Morrigan) began to chant. All the others, women and men, followed her lead. Da knew all the words in the strange language. His son didn’t know the words, so he stared at the old woman, with her creased, ravined leathery face, her blank milky eyes, high cheekbones, steel gray hair. Her hands were brown, worn, still, as if carved from wood. She finished the chanting and then she began to sing in the voice of a child: pure, sweet, high-pitched, and charged with feeling. A pause. Then more chanting, with her words followed by the deeper responses of the others. At some lines, Da squeezed his son’s hand, as if trying to comfort him, responding to the words that the boy didn’t understand. And then it was over. For almost five minutes, they stood together with heads bowed, hands gripping arms.
The old woman came to John Carson and took each of his hands and brought him to a clear spot between two of the stone columns. One of the gowned old men handed Da an oak-handled shovel. He turned the first wet clod of black earth, and then three of his friends joined him. They dug until the lip of the long rectangular trench was almost even with John Carson’s shoulders. Then they paused, their faces blistered with sweat, hands and furs black with earth. A robed man offered each a hand to climb out of the grave. Robert followed his father as he walked back to the altar where the body of Rebecca Carson lay, and a burly man produced a goatskin bag, translucent and plump with liquid. He handed it to Da, who drank of it, then passed it to the man on his right, who passed it to Robert. The taste was harsh and bitter in the boy’s mouth, but he swallowed the liquid and knew to hand the bag to the next man. Robert felt his stomach burning. The old woman was the last to drink.
Then his father lifted his wife’s body for the final time and carried her to the grave. There were rush mats now on the bottom of the trench. Da sat on the muddy lip of the grave, holding the body while his son watched, then slid down with her into the grave. He hugged her tight, his face a pained mask, then laid her on her side on the rush matting, with her arms and legs drawn up. The old woman passed an earthenware bowl full of apples to Da, who placed it beside his wife. To Robert it was clear that this moment was about his father’s wife, not the boy’s mother, but he felt that it could be no other way.
Then one of the old robed men handed John Carson an iron wheel, about eight inches across, with arrows at the cardinal points, and his father rested it against her drawn-up thighs. A sign of the world, Robert supposed, as he inched forward to look down. He realized then that his mother was not wearing her spiraled earrings and he felt better. At least his father would have them as a sign of his loving her. And being loved back.
Finally John Carson grabbed his son’s offered hands and climbed out of the grave. There were no signs of obvious grief: no tears, no sniffles, no choking sounds. He took two more rush mats from the old woman and floated them down over Rebecca Carson’s body. With the spade, he began to cover her. He threw down seven loads of black earth and then handed the shovel to the boy. “Seven,” he said. “Only seven.” The soaked dirt was very heavy, and Robert didn’t want to do this, but his mother was already covered, and so he added earth to earth. Seven loads. And then John Carson handed the shovel to one of his friends, and he to another, until as many as were needed had taken their turns.
Then she was covered, a black mound rising above her grave. John Carson placed one hand on his son’s shoulder and the other on the shoulder of the man next to him, and they all joined together, the men and the women, making a full circle, almost sixty of them, their backs to the stone columns. For Robert, the word they had become we, and them had become us. The old woman stood in the center, gazing intensely at the ground beneath her feet, and began again to chant. The rest of them responded, but because the boy didn’t know the words, he whispered: Ma. Ma. Ma. Ma. And Rebecca. Rebecca. Rebecca. Then the old woman began to sing, a reprise of the opening minutes, and everyone was quiet. Her pure, ethereal voice seemed to rise from the bowels of the earth and reach to the roof of the sky. When she was finished, Bran howled once more from his place on the edge of the woods. And then they were finished. Robert knew that a piece of his life was over.
There were some final embraces and whispered good-byes. Th
en Da and Robert walked to the wagon. Bran refused to sit in the back where Rebecca Carson had lain, cold and alone, on roads where trees talked to men. The dog squirmed between father and son, and they started for home, the talking trees uttering baritone farewells as they descended from the hidden places of the mountain.
After a long silence, Robert found strength to talk to his father.
“So we’re not Christians, then, are we?”
“No.”
“Are we Jews, then?”
“No.”
“Is it Catholics we are?”
“No.”
“What are we then, Da?”
“We’re Irish, son,” he said quietly. “We’re Irish.”
TWO
The Arctic Heart
My comfort and my friend,
Master of the bright sword.
’Tis time you left your sleep;
Yonder hangs your whip.
Your horse is at the door….
—EIBHLIN DHUBH
NI CHONAILL,
“THE LAMENT FOR
ART O’LEARY,” 1745
12.
That night, facing each other before the hearth, the father told his son their true names. They were O’Connors, not Carsons. Da’s true name was Fergus O’Connor. His son was Cormac Samuel O’Connor. The O’Connor name went all the way back through history, the father said, back before the settlers arrived from Scotland a century earlier, back before the Normans, back before Saint Patrick arrived with his lonely Christian God and before the Viking invasions, all the way back, in fact, to the arrival of the Celts.
“We’ve lived a long secret,” the father whispered, as they stared at the hearth and sampled the stew that they had made for the first time without the loving touch of Rebecca. Bran was out by the dark barn, in the company of the sleeping Thunder. To the boy, the stew had a strange, alien taste.