by Pete Hamill
He scratched a match against stone and smelled sulphur. Then he lit the newspapers and the torn, crumpled pages of the books. Flames exploded from the dry wood. His father lay dark and still upon the orange mound, and Cormac backed out through the Western door. In the barn, he ignited the bundles of wood and paper, thinking: Nobody else will ever live or work in these two buildings. They will vanish from this earth, as my mother vanished, as my father does now. I will go away, but I will not vanish. He felt the last of his fear rising out of the fire, the sparks scattering into the sky. He ran toward the dark, distant hills.
From the slope of the first hill, he could see the buildings burning like torches. He was certain that the torches were gripped by those who were escorting his father to the Otherworld.
24.
He awoke in the stale, dry straw of an abandoned barn. From the barn’s murky interior, he saw a small farmhouse, its chimney toppled, one shutter banging in the breeze, the sagging carcass of a cow propped against a stone wall. In the dim light before dawn, there were no signs of human beings. He stripped the rush matting from the sword and clenched the wolf-bone grip, turning it over, running a finger over the smooth finish of the blade. He could feel it speaking to him: Go, it said. Go and do what must be done.
Then Cormac opened the leather satchel, loosening its long thongs. The interior smelled of earth. He removed sixteen gold pieces, his mother’s spiral earrings, and a new leather-bound copy of The Drapier’s Letters. Nothing more. He thought: This is my inheritance. My father is speaking to me. He is saying that all I might need in the fearful world is money, a memory of my mother, and the Dean. Oh, my father…
Cormac opened his shirt and used the bag’s leather thongs to tie the satchel across his stomach. Then he pulled his father’s fur hat tightly onto his head, gripped the sword, and took a deep breath.
For a few minutes, his stomach gnawed by hunger, he foraged in the barn. He found some stray oats for the vanished cows and horses, and gobbled them down. They were not enough. His stomach growled and contracted, but there was no other food. He thought of boiling straw but saw no water. He stared out the door at the farmhouse. Nothing stirred. No smoke drifted from the chimney. Holding the sword, he sprinted to the house. He used the sword to gently prod the door. It was open. He slipped inside.
Three bodies were lying in one another’s arms on the bricks in front of the hearth. A man, a woman, and a child. The flesh of their faces and hands was white as snow and falling away like paper exposed to wind and rain. The child looked a hundred years old. The man’s skeletal hand gripped a Bible. The woman’s eyes were shut tight against the certain darkness. The shutter banged: ka-tock, ka-tock-tock. Something scurried in the darkness, unseen, tiny, with nails like hooks. Cormac backed out, his skin pebbling, and turned in flight to the woods.
He walked in a wide arc around Belfast. By late afternoon, he was exhausted, his legs heavy, his stomach screaming, his throat parched. He saw patches of virgin snow in the blackened woods and chopped off pieces and ate them. He sucked bark torn from a tree. Then he saw a long, low building, once white but grayed now by weather and famine, with two farmers going in and out and tendrils of blue smoke rising from a chimney. From behind a low stone wall, he watched for a long time. Then the smoke disappeared, and the men came out of the main door and trudged together to a road that would take them home. Cormac could hear their voices for a while after they were out of sight, and then heard nothing except the wind in the trees. When the sky darkened, he sprinted to the door. It was locked. He kicked at it in fury, once, twice, paused, then again, harder, and the door burst open.
A dairy.
With butter churns and cheese vats and four cows in stalls, mooing and swishing their tails.
A vision of heaven. The air was heavy with the aroma of food and animals. Two scrawny cows stared at him from a stall, and he found a small kitchen area, with a counter and a cold teapot and a wooden box that held two loaves of bread. They were hard as rocks, food for animals now. But he sliced them with the sword and shoved the pieces into the fresh butter and chomped them, gobbled them, his hands trembling. He could not risk a fire to make tea, but he grabbed hunks of cheese and shoved them into his mouth. He grunted. He felt the food make a move, rising, demanding escape, but held it down. He made sounds that were neither Irish nor English. No meal had ever tasted better.
When he was gorged, he stood there for a long while, holding the edge of a table, belching, panting, feeling the great wads of food filling his emptiness. He went outside and relieved himself as a fine rain started to fall, cold and laced with sleet. Inside again, he ate one final wedge of cheese and then fell upon one of the rough tables and went to sleep in the mooing, tail-swishing darkness.
Hours later, he was wakened by the sound of rain hammering on the roof. A blanket of rough burlap hung on a peg beside the stalls. The cows didn’t seem to mind that Cormac took it for himself; he thought they looked pleased to have his company. He cut a hole in the center of the burlap and pulled it over his father’s fur hat so that it hung across his shoulders. It hid the lump of his leather satchel. It concealed the sword. He thought: I have donned my cow shit–smelling burlap armor.
Then he closed the door behind him and ran into the driving rain.
25.
Around midnight, out past Carrickfergus, Cormac reached the edge of the estate of the Earl of Warren. He was about six miles from Belfast. The cold rain was falling steadily as he moved through the trees, peering at the property. Two white-brick gateposts marked the entrance; a freshly painted golden arch above them was marked with the same W that was emblazoned on the black coach. But there was no fence to the sides of the gateposts and no guards. The estate was not finished, the gate new. Through the rain, in the distance, he could see a big house, painted white, two stories high. The windows on the ground floor were a dim orange from candles or gas lamps burning on the inside. Off to the left was a large stable with a fenced corral behind it and cleared fields moving to the horizon. Cormac angled through the woods and then trudged across a soaked field toward the stable. Watching, remembering. He had arrived at his destination; he must know how to leave.
Thunder picked up his scent through the rain and whinnied in greeting. Once, twice. Like a signal. The whinnying stopped as Cormac came closer to the barn. Thinking: I would know that voice anywhere (for it is a voice). Thunder is alive. Here. My father’s horse. My horse now.
The barn door was unlocked and he slipped inside, leaving the door ajar behind him. A way in, a way out. A lamp burned dimly to the right, and in the light he saw Thunder. There were a dozen stalls, filled with horses and piles of hay, but Thunder was alone in his own small jail. Some of its slats were hanging loose from his resistance. Cormac turned down the wick of the lamp and went to his horse. He opened the stall’s gate, and the horse nuzzled him in a wet, frantic way while he ran a hand over his coat and felt the welts from a whip. More than a dozen small ridges of flayed horseflesh, some of them open. Thunder didn’t care. He bounced. He shuddered in joy. He shook his great mane. Other horses made soft pleading sounds.
Then Cormac heard a voice behind him.
“I say, what’s this?”
The man was small and wiry, holding a whale-oil lantern. Cormac recognized his face from the road where his father was killed. He gripped the sword.
“I’ve come for my horse,“ Cormac said. “And for the Earl of Warren. You understand why. You were there, you bastard.”
The small man shook his head and smiled a toothless grin and gazed out through the open door. Thunder stomped at the earth, warning of danger.
“Ach, sure, you’re too late, lad,” the small man said in a soft, reasonable way. “Sure, the earl’s gone off. To America, they say. I suspect—”
He suddenly whirled with a pistol in his hand. Cormac swung at him with the sword. The way his father had taught him: short, quick.
The small man’s pistol hand came off with the pistol in it
. Blood spurted, and he tried to scream in a shocked way. The lantern fell. Cormac picked up the pistol and smashed the butt into the small man’s nose. He fell to his knees, blood streaming now from his nose, staring wide-eyed at the pumping blood from his wrist, gripping his forearm to try to stop the flow, gazing at his lost hand, at the door, at Cormac. Stunned. Wordless. Cormac kicked him in the face, and he fell over on his side, with the blood still pumping. Thunder whinnied again, ready to leave, but Cormac wasn’t finished. He jammed the pistol into his belt, beneath the shit-smelling poncho, and then moved from stall to stall, releasing the other horses from the Earl of Warren’s wooden cells. Cormac thought: Maybe they’re each worth more than five pounds. Maybe each will find its way home.
Finally he picked up the lantern and went to the door. Horses raced past him into the rainy night, clumping and breathing hard. Thunder waited. Cormac hurled the lantern into a pile of straw. It burst into flames.
Then he mounted Thunder, without a saddle, and they raced around the corral with the frantic horses, who were plunging now through a gap in the corral fence into the Irish night. They rode to the big house. When Cormac glanced back, he saw the handless man crawling out of the burning stable.
The big house was built in the style of many others in Ireland: to create an image of power. About twenty marble steps rose from the earth to a gallery framed by Doric columns. Cormac raced toward the house, urging Thunder up the rain-slick stairs, his steel shoes clattering.
The front doors burst open, and four alarmed men came out. They were led by Patch, who was barefoot in a long gray night-shirt and carrying a shotgun. He was the only man with a weapon. And he wasn’t wearing his patch. One eye socket was a black hole; the other glittered. Patchless Patch.
He started to say something.
Cormac cut off his head.
Which bounced and rolled down the marble stairs. For a moment the headless body stood upright. Then it fell chest down. Without urging, Thunder pounced upon the body, stomping at it, while the other men scattered into the rain. Cormac took the pistol from his belt and fired a shot after them. Thinking: That will bring out the earl. The men ran into the rain-drowned darkness.
For a long, blurry moment, the world seemed red. Red house, not white. Red blood mixing with lashing red rain. Then the red was gone, and Cormac urged Thunder into the house, through the open doors, to find the earl.
The rooms on the first floor were empty of furniture or paintings. The fireplaces were cold. Piles of lumber were stacked against walls. The earl clearly had not yet furnished his grand mansion. An uncarpeted staircase rose to the second floor, with a chandelier hanging in the stairwell. None of the candles were lit, but the device glittered with crystal and cut glass. Up they went. Horse and rider.
Before them were a dozen doors, some of them open. In one, a table was covered with whiskey bottles and jugs and fancy glasses, obviously the lounge where Patch and his men had been drinking earlier in the night. Cormac dismounted and kicked open the other doors. Empty. He arrived at one near the end of the hall where an oil lamp was burning on a side table. He flipped the latch and entered a kind of suite. Dressers and an armoire and dozens of mirrors. A second door leading to a bedroom. Someone was under the covers of the canopied bed.
“Come out of there,” Cormac said, gripping the sword. There was no movement.
“Come out or I’ll chop you to pieces.”
The covers came down. A woman’s face appeared. Red-haired, pale, trembling, about fifteen. Irish.
“Who the hell are you?” he said.
“M’name’s Bridget.”
“Are you the earl’s whore?”
She turned her head, her eyes wet.
“Aye,” she said.
She turned to gaze at Cormac.
“I had no choice, sir. Didn’t me own father sell me to him during the great cold?”
She buried her face in the pillow, a picture of shame. Cormac didn’t trust the image he was given. And he knew the earl was gone, headed for other parts until any talk of murder had drifted away, or until Patch and his men had hunted down the only witness.
“And where is the great earl?”
She turned to him again.
“Away,” she said. “Left for America for a while, says he. Two days ago. A boat out of Galway, he said to me. That’s what he says, of course. That’s what he told me. He could be in Dublin, for all I know. He could be in London. But I think maybe ’tis America.”
There were plates beside her bed and an empty wineglass and a piece of bread. Cormac came closer and took the piece of bread.
“I should kill you,” he said. “Whorin’ for that English bastard.”
“Then you’d better kill me father too,” she said angrily. “He put me in this bed.”
She looked weepy again. He lifted a half-eaten chop from a plate and gnawed at the bone.
“Would you like to have me?” she whispered.
She rose like an offering to a sitting position, showing him one full, rosy breast above the line of her nightgown. Yes, he thought, I’d like to have you. Yes, I’d like to slide into those smooth sheets and enter your body. Nipples. Hair. Wetness. Sleep.
“I can’t,” Cormac said. “I must go. And you should too. Now. Get dressed, pack, and go home. Before they come back.”
“You mean Patch?”
“Patch is dead.”
“I don’t believe it. Not Patch.”
“His head is out there on the steps,” Cormac said. “I put it there.”
She moaned. Cormac started to leave but then felt pity for the girl. If the men came back with a platoon of redcoats, they’d probably kill her too.
“Get ready now, woman,” he said, “and I’ll take you into the forest. You’ve got ten minutes. Then I’m burning this place to the ground.”
He took the reins and led Thunder to the staircase and then down to the door. Awkwardly, delicately, the horse afraid of slipping on the stairs made by men. Cormac told the horse to wait. Then he took the stairs two at a time, reached over, and cut the four chains that held the chandelier to the ceiling. It fell with a ferocious crash, scattering glass and crystal over the oak steps. Thunder pawed the wooden floor, as if saying to Cormac: You’re taking too much time. Outside, the rain was still falling. Cormac saw Patch’s legs jutting awkwardly and naked above the marble steps, aimed at the front doors. He found dry matches in one dead fireplace and went through the main floor, making small piles of wood, chopping planks into kindling with the sword. Thinking: Our house is gone, the home of the O’Connors, and now it’s your turn. Thinking: Patch’s men must be nearing Belfast now, or at a guard post, alerting the militia. Thinking: Hurry.
Suddenly Bridget was coming down the stairs, leathery boots clicking on oak, dodging around the smashed chandelier. She was dressed in a long, fancy dark blue coat, a fur hat, leather boots and gloves, and carrying a velvet bag about three feet long. The wages of sin. She looked smaller than she had in bed. Her eyes were jittery with fear, made worse when she glimpsed the headless body of Patch. Cormac boosted her onto Thunder’s back and handed up her bag, which was light and must have contained clothes.
Then Cormac went back inside to the piles of wood. If the Earl of Warren did come back to his grand mansion, he would find only ashes.
26.
They rode and rode into the gray morning light, into rain, into hills; finally, as the rain faded off, into forest again. They were heading west. He thought: There is blood on my sword, from the small man in the stable, from the severed neck of Patch. I’m now a different man. I am sixteen and I have killed. What’s more, killing Patch was too easy, too final, too personal. And too savage.
Cormac barely knew Patch and had killed him as easily as Patch had killed his father, and with about as much feeling. Thinking: No, that’s not true, I did have feeling. Before I cut off his head, there was true rage. Rage is a feeling. But when it was over and his bald, one-eyed head was rolling down those marble
steps like a fruit that had fallen off a wagon, I didn’t feel what I wanted to feel. I wanted to feel clean. I wanted to feel that I’d closed a small circle. Now, riding to the West, to where the dead go, to where the sun sets into the ocean sea, I don’t feel either emotion. I’ve closed no circle. I’m not clean.
And what of this young woman, the earl’s whore, who said her name was Bridget Riley? She was behind him on Thunder’s bare back, gripping Cormac’s waist with her small pale hands. Her bag was strapped across her shoulders, her weight thus disproportionate to her size. He could feel her hands on his stomach. He could feel through all the layers of wool and shit-smelling burlap her hard breasts upon his back. He felt her breath on his neck. While they rode on, pressed together, he listened to her whispered tale, her story entering him like the warm breath from her mouth.
She told of how her father was widowed when her sixth sister was born and how there wasn’t ever enough to eat and how the Siberian cold came and how the father (tearful, gruff, almost wordless) sold her to the earl for two sacks of oats and three bushels of potatoes. The price of one young Irish woman. She talked about a boy she had loved when she was thirteen (long ago, for she was sixteen now), Richard, his name was, Richard Murphy, and how she had let him have his way (her voice trailing into forest cold) and how he had gone to America and how he promised he would send for her and never did. She told Cormac that she had lost all faith in the Christian God and his commandments (for how could he love us if he sent away the people we loved and let so many others die?) and then had begun to go with other young men (not many of them in that forlorn region) and some older men too (with their wives at home and she in the woods or a wagon with the poteen-smelling farmers) and finally some Englishmen from the barracks (challenging even the old Irish gods with her blasphemy) and how after all of that (and all of them) she had never found one who was like the one who went away to America. Richard, his name was. Richard Murphy.