Forever (10 page)
T
he 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 clothes 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.”
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.
H
e 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.
A
round 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.