by Pete Hamill
In late morning, with the doors and windows open to air out the horse-smelling house, Fergus hitched Thunder to the cart and told Cormac to join him and explained to Bran that he must stay behind. “There’s smoke coming from the chimney,” he told the dog, “and that’s good. We don’t want strangers believing there’s nobody at home. So you must stay inside, Bran, and bark your head off if anyone comes.” The dog listened unhappily but accepted his duty. He went inside, and Fergus locked the door behind him. Then they started west.
“We need a wagonload of wood,” Fergus told his son. “We need food. There’s only one place to find both.”
For hours they traveled to the secret country of the Irish. Death was everywhere: more dead cattle, more dead humans, more dead wolves. They crossed a stream and saw a dead swan wedged in ice against boulders. They arrived at the grove before dark. Whistles and howls echoed through the cold-stripped forest, and then words in Irish and Fergus answered and then the guards appeared, wrapped in thick furs, thinner, grimier. They nodded and smiled and moved father and son forward into the sacred grove. They saw a huge cauldron on a mound of burning logs, with smoke and steam and sparks rising into the dark air.
“You see, Cormac,” Fergus said. “It’s a time to rejoice.”
And so it was.
The women were smiling in their furs and woolen shawls, and dogs barked, as if demanding news of Bran, and someone was playing pipes in the darkness beyond the fire, and Cormac could hear the steady beat of a drum. Then Mary Morrigan appeared, her eyes welling with tears. She had been right; a terrible time had come. As predicted. But she said nothing now about her prophecy, took no vain comfort in the proofs offered by so much desolation. It was enough that her own part of the Irish tribe had been warned, and had survived. She was thinner now in Cormac’s eyes, frailer, as if the seven arctic weeks had reduced her to bone and gristle. She gripped Cormac’s hands in her callused fingers and he wondered where that other woman had gone, the woman who was also Mary Morrigan, the woman with the soft flesh and gripping wetness. He thought: Perhaps this Mary Morrigan, withered and dark, was only a mask for the other, her face and body and clothes worn the way he and his father wore their Protestant masks in the world beyond the grove.
But Cormac could not ask those questions, and they might never be answered if he did. Mary Morrigan slipped away, to preside over the chanting and the drum and the thin bird voice of the flute moving through the darkness as if trying to be joyful. They sat at the fire and ate boiled beef while Fergus listened to the terrible accounting. Seventeen Irish men dead, twenty-six women, thirteen children, along with nine horses, eleven cows, fifteen sheep, and twenty-one dogs. All pigs had survived. At least two of the women had died from some English disease they picked up in Belfast while foraging for food. After their deaths, it was decided that nobody could go again to the city until the terrible time had passed. The bodies of the dead had all been burned to protect the living. Fergus and Cormac listened to all of this in silence. Cormac wondered which of the Irish he’d known in his Celtic summers were now dead, and thought that it was unfair that he was alive and they were dead.
“Perhaps now the dying is over for a while,” Fergus said in Irish.
“Perhaps,” said Mary Morrigan, staring into the fire.
That night Fergus and Cormac slept with some of the other men in a hut made of rough logs. Cormac longed for the cave of Mary Morrigan but remained beside his father and the other men, more than a dozen of them, along with some dogs and a cow, while distant singing, full of lament and mourning, drifted through the midnight grove.
They rose early to a damp, fog-bound morning. The air was warmer, the earth still spiky with ice. Their cart was already piled with firewood and sacks of oats. They embraced each of the Irish who were not already out foraging. Mary Morrigan, one of a group of women, waved a small farewell. And then they started back. For a long time, Fergus was silent.
“Too much death,” he said after a while. “Too much death. Too much death…”
Cormac wanted to console him, but he knew it wouldn’t help to say that he was alive and Thunder was alive and Bran was alive and Mary Morrigan was alive.
“Well,” Cormac did say, “maybe they’ve all gone to the Other-world. Where it’s warm, Da, where they want for naught.”
“Maybe,” he said, without conviction. “I hope…”
They rode for hours, saying little, with Thunder’s hooves clip-clopping on the frozen path, his hot breath making white clouds and his breathing as steady as a clock. Fergus had wrapped his face in a dark blue scarf, and Cormac buried his own face in the collars of his coat. His mind, thrummed by the rhythm of horse and loaded cart, eased into a dark, private cave with a fire burning low and his face hot with flesh and hair.
Then Thunder slowed.
Cormac was alert, his heart moving faster. Thinking: Something is not right. Thinking: Thunder should not be moving slower. Not yet. He knows the way. And we’re at least six miles from home.
But the clip-clop, clip-clop became something else.
Clip.
Clop.
Fergus was fully alert, his eyes wide, pulling the scarf down to his chin. He glanced back. There was nothing behind them. But the road ahead curved to the left and then vanished behind a hill. Cormac thought: Whatever danger Thunder senses, it lies beyond that curve.
“Get ready to run,” Fergus said.
They moved slowly around the curve.
Clip.
Clop.
Clip.
And there in front of them were six men on horses, one holding the gathered reins of two horses without riders. They were stretched across the road, blocking the way, as still as death. Each of the men was armed with a pistol. Fergus and Cormac knew two of them. One was Patch, his bald head covered with a fur hat. The other was the Earl of Warren.
Fergus tugged on the reins, and Thunder stopped about thirty feet from the fence of men on horseback. Nobody moved.
There were dense brown thickets on each side of the road, and a drainage ditch to Cormac’s right, its surface frozen.
“Are you looking for the road to Rome?” the earl said, smiling in an amused way while the others laughed. His abrupt English accent was sharp and hurting, with an odd feminine pitch to its tone, as if squeezed by the cold. Cormac remembered the day of his mother’s death in the mud of Belfast, when the earl’s voice was uncertain and trembling. That voice was gone. After the brutal Siberian winter, he seemed harder now, dressed for command in a long black coat, heavy wool scarf, broad-brimmed hat, high polished boots. He did not seem to remember Cormac. The boy who had once flailed at him so bitterly was now a young man of sixteen.
Fergus whispered again to Cormac that he must prepare to run. The young man’s heart thumped in fear and anger.
“I won’t run,” he said.
“You’ll run if I say so,” Fergus insisted, not moving his lips.
The earl nudged his gray stallion with his knees, and the horse moved forward. Thunder shuddered and tensed, as if challenged. Cormac saw Patch jam his pistol into his belt and slide a musket from his saddlebag.
“You must run,” Fergus whispered in Irish. “If you don’t, there will be no witness, and nobody to avenge what might happen.”
“Is that Latin you’re speaking, my proud blacksmith?” the earl said. “Listen, Patch, listen to them talk Latin. Can’t manage the King’s English, but listen to them spout the old Latin.”
Fergus said nothing. Cormac could feel tension coming off him like bristles.
“That’s a lovely horse you’ve got there,” the earl said. As he came closer, Cormac noticed for the first time that the earl had a diamond cemented into his right bicuspid, worn like a badge of fashion.
Fergus stared at the earl.
“I’d say he’s worth about eight pounds,” the earl said. He turned to Patch. “Don’t you think, Patch? About eight pounds’ worth?”
“At least, milord,” Patch said,
grinning. “P’raps more, sir.” The earl looked at Fergus for a long, calculating moment. His doughy face was very still.
“I want the horse,” the earl said.
“The horse is not for sale,” Fergus said.
“Is that so?” the earl said.
“Yes.”
“My good man, I don’t think you understand me. I want that horse.”
The diamond glittered when he smiled.
“You see, this blasted famine has killed a lot of horses. Including many of my horses. So we’re buying horses. And that horse, dear fellow, looks to be worth at least eight pounds.”
He gestured with the pistol in a weary manner while he talked, his gun hand flopping loosely. Then, with a sigh, he slipped the pistol into his belt, as if deciding that even two Irishmen must understand that they had no way to resist. He took some coins from his coat pocket and slapped them together. Cormac wondered if he was about to do his juggling act. Patch and the others seemed impatient. Then, coming closer, the earl adopted a harder tone.
“And since it’s well known that you’re a papist, and since the law of this land clearly states that no papist can own a horse worth more than five pounds, and since—”
“I know the law,” Fergus said. “It does not apply to me. I’m not a Catholic.”
“Of course, what else would you say? But we have reason to believe otherwise, don’t we, Patch?” Cormac heard the coins slapping. “And, of course, sir, you can always go to argue your case in the assizes.” He turned to his men. “You lot, unhitch the horse, and Patch, you—”
And then Fergus shoved Cormac off the seat and said, “Run!”
Cormac hit the frozen ground and rolled into the iced ditch and what he saw, rolling and hurting and flopping on the brown drainage ice, were a series of jagged moments: Patch’s horse bucking in fear, and his father’s face in fierce resistance, and the earl moving to the right, and Thunder rearing: huge; enraged, striking at the earl, at his horse’s gray head, blood suddenly spouting from the horse’s split brow, and the earl wide-eyed, and a last glance at Cormac from his father.
And then Patch fired the musket.
“No, you fecking idiot!” the earl screamed. “Don’t—”
The noise of the shot echoed in the emptiness. Birds rose and cawed and beat their wings. Horses whinnied.
Then Cormac glimpsed his father sprawled back awkwardly in the seat of the cart. His eyes were wide, staring at the sky. His body made the effort to rise, but a great crimson stain seeped from his chest. His scarf was slippery with blood. All of this glimpsed in seconds. And punctuated by the thin, panicky voice of the earl.
“God damn it all!”
“He’s twitching, milord,” Patch said.
“Then finish him off, you bloody fool! And find his son! He’s a fecking witness. And we can’t—”
Then, as Cormac rolled into the thicket, frantic, panicky, terrified, enraged, pushing belly-flat under the needles of the briar, as Bran always did, he looked back, and saw the earl’s extended arm, his finger pointing, and then Patch gripping a pistol, and heard a smaller explosion as another ball was buried in his father’s body. And the earl’s voice: “The horse, Patch, calm the bloody horse! And take the oats and the firewood too, and—where’s that other one? The young one. Find him!”
Cormac had rolled into a frozen creek, screened from the road by dense walls of trees, and was up now and running.
23.
The following hours assumed the feeling of a dream. He was running and falling and wailing in rage and running again. Avoiding all roads, hamlets, and farmhouses. At one point, he bent over in pain as if a knife had been shoved into his side. And when the pain was gone, and the world was silent, he rolled his body into a ball and cried. In the cold silence of the bruised Irish twilight, he saw his father at the forge, muscles like cables in his arms, and heard his laugh when he was happy, and remembered the way he struggled for control when Rebecca died. Thinking: They’ve killed him. Shot him down on a road to get his horse. The bastards. The dirty, cowardly bastards. Now only I am left. And he heard his father talking: In our tribe, the murderer must be pursued to the ends of the earth. And his male children too.… He listened for the sounds of horses, for Patch and the other men, for the thin, panicky voice of the earl. Nothing. And heard Mary Morrigan speaking to him: If an unjust act is done in the family of a man or woman, it must be avenged. That is the rule.… He rose then in a crouch, sheltered now by the seeping darkness. Thinking: I have my tasks now. Things I must do, or live, and die, in shame.
It was dark when he reached the O’Connor part of the world. He huddled under the bridge that the carriages crossed on the road to Dublin. Now his grief and rage were replaced by fear. He trembled with that fear, afraid the earl and his men were waiting for him. His bowels loosened. He dropped his trousers, hoping he would shit out all his fear. Then was newly afraid that the stench would betray him by drifting to the nostrils of ambushers. But as he paused in the silence, Cormac felt better. Colder. In something like control, with the clarity of emptiness.
His fear didn’t vanish. But the mixture of overlapping fears worked within him like fuel. Fear, and its brother, rage. He was sure they would try to get away with everything. The killing itself. The theft of Thunder. And if the horse appeared in the earl’s stable, he could merely say that he bought it from a passing Irishman. How was he to know the passing Irishman was a bandit and a horse thief?
Except that a witness was still alive: Cormac himself. They would try to find him and kill him too. Then nobody would be left to tell the tale. Or to settle the account. He thought: I need to kill them first. And there was something else: He must stay alive to make certain there was a proper end to this story. The rules of the tribe moved through him in the voices of his father and Mary Morrigan. But now it was Cormac’s story. He was a Celt. He must honor the code of his tribe. To do so, he must live. For as long as it would take. He told himself: I must use my fear to stay alive. If I die now, in these cold woods and dark fields, then this long day will be only another brief chapter in the story of the Earl of Warren. And I will never be allowed to pass into the Otherworld, to join again with my people.
Away off he heard dogs barking, but none of the voices belonged to Bran. Cormac was afraid to call to him, afraid of revealing his presence to anyone who might be watching. He fought down an image of the dog with his throat cut. There was no moon. And although a wind was blowing from the sea, there were no leaves to rustle on the nude trees. He listened. He heard no human voices. Before him was an emptiness. He waited, trying not to breathe. But as his eyes adjusted to the dark, he could see the house better. The doors were open. The half door. The full door. Crouching low, he scurried toward the house that had been their home.
His father’s legs were jutting across the threshold.
Now he didn’t care who might be watching. He rushed toward his father in the darkness and fell across his bloodied chest and wept as he had never wept before. The blood of Fergus was wet, but his body was like ice. His blood was on Cormac now, on his shirt and fingers, and he sucked the blood off his hands, his father’s blood, his own blood: and again heard him say Run! And again heard him say, We’re Irish.
And then, his mouth slippery with his father’s blood and his hands sticky, there in the moonless soundless dogless motherless fatherless night, Cormac knew what he must do.
He stepped past the body into the dark house. There was no light, no ember or spark from the hearth, and he could feel in every bone one more bitter truth: The soul was gone from the house. The Earl of Warren had killed it. In the darkness, nothing was where it was supposed to be, where it had been since the beginning of Cormac’s remembering. He moved now like a thief in a stranger’s house. Then, rolling on the floor under his foot, he felt a candle. He found matches scattered on the floor like twigs and lit the candle.
The house had been savaged. Chairs, crockery, pots: All were smashed into bits. Curtains and clot
hes had been sliced with knives. The beds were slashed, the floor littered with straw and goose-down stuffing. He smelled urine and saw a puddle against the western wall. The secret house of the O’Connors, that masked house of the Carsons, was mutilated and dead.
He didn’t care now if the house was being watched. Let them come, he thought. I’ll die fighting. He placed the candle in an iron bucket and then started dragging ruined furniture to the center of the room. He stuffed the mound with newspapers and the slashed pages of books. With the disemboweled Alexander Pope. With the assassinated Jonathan Swift. He found loose pages ripped from his green notebook and then the gutted book itself and added them to the pile. When the pile was two feet off the floor, he returned to the corpse of Fergus O’Connor.
Cormac reached under his father’s armpits and dragged him into the house. Grunting and heaving, breaking pieces of wood beneath his feet, afraid now of time and the arrival of strangers, he hauled the corpse to the top of the pile. His father’s icy muscled arms flopped to the sides. His wide, startled eyes faced the ceiling he had made with so much skill and love. Cormac folded his arms across his chest and closed his cold eyelids.
Then he blew out the candle and hurried into the night. There was still no moon. No sounds. No Bran. In the barn, where the anvil lay toppled on its side, Cormac piled mounds of wood against the walls and throughout the tool room. His father’s tools were scattered and some were gone, plunder for the true bandits who worked for the earl. But Cormac found what he was looking for: a spade. At the base of the hawthorn tree, he began to dig in the icy earth until his spade bumped against the lumpy leather bag and the case that held the sword. He slung both over his shoulder and ran to the house. Above him, clouds were moving more swiftly. He could see the dangerous shimmer of the emerging moon. On the doorstep, lying like a small animal, was his father’s fur hat. He lifted it. Then pulled it onto his head.
In the dark interior, he faced the pyre.
“Good-bye, my father,” he said out loud. “I shall not forget the man you were and what they did to you. And I will see you in the Otherworld.”