by Pete Hamill
“Is it still a secret?” he said. “Our own true names?”
“Aye, among us it is. And will remain a secret, lad.”
“Why?”
“Because this is a country where religion can be dangerous. They will kill you for having one. Or for having the Old Religion, which to some is like having no religion at all.”
“You mean…”
“I mean that the name Carson was taken by my father to keep us alive. It was a mask, lad. A way to live, to work, to eat, to get educated. It will remain that way, perhaps for a long time, but I believe you must know all this, and say nothing to anyone but me.”
The boy tried to think of himself as Cormac but he still felt as if he were Robert. His legs and hands trembled. This was the most his father had ever said to him at one time, aside from talk of horses and iron. Cormac or Robert, he felt as if he had suddenly grown up.
“And where does the Samuel come from in my true name?”
“From your mother. Her true name was Rebecca Samuels. She wanted the name to live in you.”
“Do we have a religion?”
“Aye,” he whispered. “We call it the Old Religion.”
He was about to explain when they heard Bran barking. Then there was a knock on the door. Da looked at it warily and signaled with an open palm that the boy should be quiet. He stood up and went to the door. Bran was barking more fiercely.
“Who is it?”
They heard the muffled voice of the Rev. Robinson. Da opened the door.
“Yes?”
“May we come in?”
Behind Robinson stood three other men, their faces familiar from Sunday services. All wore dripping coats and fur hats. Bran still barked, making feints and passes at them, unnerving them.
“Of course,” Da said. “Do you want some tea?”
They stepped in, smelling of rain and the waxy sulphur of chapels. Da hushed Bran, telling him to remain outside. The dog growled with hostility and suspicion.
“No, thank you, Mister Carson. No time for tea. We’ll be brief.” The boy thought, in a secretly excited way: My father’s name is not Carson. His name is O’Connor. Fergus O’Connor. And I’m Cormac Samuel O’Connor. Not Robert Carson. He watched as the man he knew was Fergus O’Connor placed himself between his son and the visitors.
“Well?”
“We’re quite sorry about your wife, Mister Carson.”
“Thank you.”
“But we have a question for you,” Robinson said.
The boy’s father—His name is Fergus O’Connor—looked at the preacher in a blank way. He seemed to know the question before it was uttered.
“It’s about her burial, I suppose.”
Silence for a long moment. Her name was Rebecca Samuels. She was a Jew.
Robinson said: “She was not buried in our churchyard.”
Fergus O’Connor folded his arms across his chest.
“True?” the Rev. Robinson said.
“You know that’s true.”
“Where is she buried?”
“In the West,” Da said. “According to her wishes.”
The visitors looked at one another, as if the blacksmith had confirmed something for them.
“That leads to another question, Mister Carson.”
“Ask it,” he said, the muscles in his bare forearms moving. “Are you Catholics?”
“No.”
“You’re sure? Because it’s very suspicious that—”
“I told you that we’re not Catholics. You see us every Sunday at your chapel. You—”
“There are many hidden papists here,” one of the other men interrupted. “Full of treason, the lot of them.”
Cormac Samuel O’Connor moved around to the side, watching his father.
“I’ve answered your questions.”
“But I’d like—”
“Good night, Reverend Robinson.”
Fergus O’Connor unfolded his arms and opened the door. Then he bowed slightly, making Robinson’s face twitch. The faces of the other three knitted themselves into angry furrows.
“Try to stay dry,” Da said. “And don’t fear: I’ll control the dog.”
13.
Cormac Samuel O’Connor learned that he and his father were not unique. Everywhere, men and women changed their names and embraced strange gods in order to live. The Spanish did it, and the Muslims did it, and the Jews did it. In Spain, the Jews became conversos. Christians became Muslims and later, after the fall of Granada, Christians again. And so in Ireland, where Christians killed Christians during the wars of religion, Fergus O’Connor’s father changed his name, and the name of his children. And, many centuries earlier, so did the family of Rebecca Samuels. But such a conversion was always a lie told in order to live. It was the making of a mask. And sometimes, in order to survive, a mask was not enough. Sometimes a man must have a weapon.
14.
Late on the afternoon after the visit from the Rev. Robinson and his posse, Fergus O’Connor began to make the sword. He did this with Cormac’s help, describing each step in detail. While rain fell steadily from a dark sky, Bran sprawled on his belly, his eyes alert to danger or absorbed in watching the process. Thunder was led in from his stable to watch. The boy had seen John Carson make hundreds of sickles, and many knives, but he had never before made a sword. Now Fergus O’Connor was making a sword.
He went to work as if he had made hundreds. He began with three old iron horseshoes, laying them on the fired grate of the forge until they turned white, then lifting them with wide-mouthed tongs to the anvil. There he straightened them, lengthened them, braided them together. They formed the core of the sword. “They’ll make it light in weight,” Fergus O’Connor explained, “and easier to swing many times without tiring.” Then he melted the steel, flecked with iron, and applied it smoothly in three heats to the core, folding it over three times, welding again, dressing it with glancing hammer blows, molding it, packing the steel around the core, adding a groove down each side, forming a perfect point.
Between each welding heat he scoured the blade with a paste made of charcoal, the ashes of straw, and fine Lagan riverbank clay. He held it up with the clamps, examined it in a piercing way. “The danger,” he said, “is oxidation and scaling.” Then he covered it with a thicker paste, adding polishing-stone powder and salt. He stripped this off the edge, exactly one sixteenth of an inch, and returned the emerging sword to the fire. When it was cherry red, he withdrew it, wiped away the coating, and drowned it in oil so sizzling that Bran barked.
While the blade cooled, he made a sword guard from rolled-up bars of iron and steel, welding the roll together and then flattening it so that it would protect the hand. He used shears and chisel to shape it into an elegant metal flower.
All of this was done in a day, Fergus O’Connor working with a sense of urgency, glancing out at the road as if wary of being seen. When the sword had cooled but was not cold, he used a needle-pointed burin to etch two figures into the broadest part of the sword, just below the handle.
Two spirals, thin at the top, curling around, then widening at the bottom. Like sea serpents. One on each side. Matching the spiral earrings of Fergus O’Connor’s wife.
There was little traffic that day; the weather was too fierce. Da delicately sanded the etched markings, then passed the rough paper to his son for more sanding while showing him a hunk of white bone he had long saved, part of a wolf killed in the mountains.
“This will be the handle,” he said. “The grip. We’ll be finished by tonight.”
“It’s very beautiful, Da.”
“Aye,” he said, “but it’s not meant to do beautiful things.”
He told Cormac to go home and lay out the makings of dinner. He’d be home soon. Bran followed the boy back to the house and watched as he chopped onions and potatoes, and peered into jars of unlabeled spices, trying to remember what his mother had done on all those days when the two of them were here together. At one p
oint, as he dropped the vegetables into a pot of water, Cormac Samuel O’Connor begin to shake.
Thinking: She’s gone.
Thinking: Da needs her. I need her. As do Bran and Thunder. The O’Connors need her. But she’s never coming back. She’ll never turn her head suddenly from this hearth, with her spiral earrings flashing.
And then he forced himself to stop.
Thinking: Not now, not ever. No tears. No sobbing. Now you’ve got to be a man.
Thinking: You are no longer little Robert Carson. Not Robby or Bobby or Rob. You are Cormac Samuel O’Connor, from the days before Saint Patrick. You’re the son of Fergus, not John.
When his father came home, he had the sword in his hand and smiled in a proud way. He whipped it in the air, making five or six cutting movements in a few seconds, and then smiled again, as if at himself. Cormac thought: He has a wonderful smile.
“We’re not done,” Fergus said. “But it’s what I wanted. Light and hard and tempered.”
They took turns polishing the blade, using a file crosswise on its flat sides, emery cloth for the fine edges. The boy could see his face in the polished steel and thought: You are Cormac. The cutting edge was like a razor. He glanced at his father, staring into the fire. And he is Fergus.
“Let’s eat,” Da said.
15.
Over the next few years, Cormac received three separate educations. All were happening at the same time, but in separate places. As young Robert Carson, he heard one version of the tale of the world at St. Edmund’s, the one about the civilizing glories of the British Empire. Jesus, of course, came first, the Redeemer of sinful Man, the son of God whose gospel of love was tempered by the vehemence of the Old Testament. But the mission of Jesus also explained the mission of Britain. With God’s blessing, he and his schoolmates were told, the British were expanding all over the earth. To America. To the Caribbean. To distant India. Taming barbarians. Bringing law to the lawless. Saving savages from the idol worship inflicted by the Whore of Babylon who ruled in Rome. They heard about brave Sir Francis Drake and his daring battles against the corrupt Spanish and treacherous French and even Cormac O’Connor, safe behind his Robert Carson mask, found those tales thrilling. He kept his questions about the moral point of the story to himself. Clearly, said the Rev. Robinson, God had chosen Britain to civilize and pacify the world, creating both a national duty and a personal mission for every God-fearing Protestant. And God had truly smiled on his blessed people. Hadn’t God created a monstrous storm to defeat the Spanish Armada? Hadn’t God helped the British build the greatest fleet of naval vessels in the world? This was all clear to the Rev. Robinson, although not quite so clear to the boy. The Rev. Robinson insisted that in Ireland, and particularly in the valiant North, fearless English armies (with help from the Dutch) had waged a righteous struggle to break the papal yoke, the tyranny of Rome, the Whore of Babylon, and in the process rescued Christianity itself.
“And the battle might never be fully won,” he said, turning to blow loudly into his soiled, pebbly handkerchief. “We each have the obligation of eternal vigilance! Watch the man next door!”
Cormac was certain that Robinson glanced at him while speaking these words, but he absorbed the glance in his newly chosen role of spy. This was a secret personal performance that transformed many of his days into exciting patrols of enemy territory. He covered himself so well that to all his schoolmates he remained young Robert Carson, gifted at writing and drawing, a poor fellow whose mother had died, but who was, like each of them, an heir to the grandeur of English civilization. There were no questions from his friends, no suspicions (uttered or suggested) that he might actually be Cormac O’Connor, son of Fergus. The Rev. Robinson might have had his suspicions about John Carson, but he never transferred them to the blacksmith’s son. If anything, after that first taming year when he used the Punisher so freely, Rev. Robinson seemed to approve Robert’s growing mastery of ritual speeches about the moral missions of English monarchs and the debased perfidy of the Catholic Spanish and French. Cormac had a good memory and as Robert Carson he had the ability to infuse his speeches with emotion. Without a plan, the boy was serving a partial apprenticeship as an actor.
This personal form of espionage required much discipline, because unlike his schoolmates, Cormac O’Connor was learning other histories. To begin with, Irish history. “Our present,” his father said, “is also our past.” They talked much about the Penal Laws, which still existed today, in their Ireland; the O’Connors were saved from their brutality by the success of their disguises, by being Carsons. But the vicious Penal Laws were destroying thousands of innocent Catholic men, women, and children, those without disguises, those too full of defiance and pride, and were rooted in the immediate past.
“They were imposed,” Fergus O’Connor explained, “only thirty years before your birth, Cormac, and are one reason why you’re called Robert and I’m called John. They are the creation of the kind of men who take, sell, and keep slaves.”
Under these laws (which Robert heard recited at St. Edmund’s too, as the rules of eternal vigilance), no Catholic could vote or hold public office. No Catholic could study science or go to a foreign university. Only Protestants could do such things. No Catholic could buy land or even lease it. No Catholic could take a land dispute to court. If a Catholic owned land from the time before the Penal Laws, he couldn’t leave it as in olden times to his oldest son; he must divide it among all his children, so that each plot would become smaller and smaller, and poverty would be guaranteed within three generations.
The most absurd of the Penal Laws stated that no Catholic could own a horse worth more than five pounds. Any Protestant could look at a Catholic’s horse, say it was worth six pounds, or thirty pounds, or a thousand pounds, and take it from him on the spot. The Catholic had no right to protest in court. In a country of great horses and fine horsemen, the intention was clear: to humiliate Catholic men, to break their hearts.
“If you can break a man’s heart,” Da said, “you can destroy his will.”
That was why they must remain Carsons to everyone they ever met. When they rode Thunder through country lanes or city streets, they must be Protestants. “Even poor Thunder must be a Protestant horse,” his father said, and laughed in a dark way. But he’d told his son that they were not Catholics either, so what did they have to fear? “Sick bastards,” Fergus O’Connor said. “In this country, they think that if you’re not Protestant then you must be Catholic, even if you’re not. It’s a sickness, a poison of the brain.”
And so Fergus began telling his son the longer story too, the one not told in school. They were part of that story, as the hidden grove was a defiant remnant of unconquered Ireland. Unconquered by either Rome or London. In the schoolroom at St. Edmund’s, the boy learned the names of English kings and English heroes. He read the Magna Carta. He recited English ideals. But as his father told him the story of Ireland, his mind also teemed with Celts and Vikings, informers and traitors, and murder after murder after murder.
As Fergus O’Connor ate greedily each evening (his manners grown coarser after the death of his wife), he sketched the history, relating the brutal story of Oliver Cromwell and the vast slaughters of unarmed Catholics, and then leaped backward in time to the arrival of Strongbow on May 1, 1170, as the result of the treachery of Irish nobles. He told his son about how “that bitch” Elizabeth I was really a heartless killer, and how her father, Henry VIII, encased in fat and pearls, was even worse, killing two of his six wives, along with thousands of Irishmen, while imposing his own version of Christianity on the islands. Such words always came from Fergus with a sense of growing outrage, as if each new telling of the tale drove fury through his blood. For Cormac, the Irish tales were like those in the Bible, full of heroism and cowardice and martyrdom—and, too often, exile. And in the Irish story, the result was always the same: the English stealing Ireland for themselves, acre by acre, for its wood and its crops and its cheap labo
r, and for its fine horses too, while insisting that this grand robbery was something noble.
Cormac heard his father explain how the unarmed Ulster Irish were beaten back off the good land into the rocky hills and the stony mountains, the good land handed to the likes of the whoremaster Chichesters, while poor Protestant settlers were brought from Scotland to work the land and pay rents to the English. “They were made into slaves,” Da said, “and thought they were free.” After a while, when the British perfected the use of religion as an excuse for cruelty and theft, the Irish began to think that being Catholic was the same as being Irish, which of course it wasn’t.
“The Irish were here before Jesus Christ was even born,” he said. “So were their gods.”
The evening monologues of Fergus O’Connor were in startling contrast to his silence when he was playing John Carson. The words came in streams, rising and falling, emphasized with his long fingers, or by hands balled into fists. Still, in all that he said to his son, he insisted there were men in Ireland who cared for true justice.
“There’s a fellow in Dublin, the Dean, they call him,” he said one night. “Jonathan Swift. You must read his Drapier’s Letters, son. I have them in a bound book, hidden out in the stable. He’s a man with justice in his heart. A Protestant, but an Irishman first. And you must begin reading the newspapers. The News-Letter here is run by fair men. The Dean writes for the Dublin Journal, and I have some of those hidden here too.”
“Why do you hide them, Da?”
“Because of the bloody injustice here, lad. Some writers expose the injustice, and just reading about it will make you a suspect. And whenever there’s trouble in Ulster, every suspect dies.”
“Are we suspects, Da?”
The older man paused for a long moment.
“I think we are,” he said.
16.
On Sundays, father and son trudged to St. Edmund’s to inhale the odors of an orderly piety. Each wore his mask. For a solemn hour, Fergus and Cormac O’Connor played John and Robert Carson. An hour later, all sermons absorbed, all visions of Hell behind them, they mounted Thunder and trotted into the glens behind the Black Mountain. There, beyond observation, Sunday after Sunday, with a kind of religious intensity, the father showed his son the power of the sword.