T
he cholera passed, and the ragged people vanished from the roads.
In school and pulpit the Rev. Robinson intoned against the sins of the victims, and how they must have somehow failed God or he would not have chosen them for death. On the way home from Sunday services, the boy’s mother fumed.
The nerve of that bloody-minded, snot-nosed fool,
she said.
How dare he? How dare he say that those poor people died because they were sinners, or Catholics, or people who had fallen away?
Meaning, of course, how could the Rev. Robinson accuse her own two sons, the boy’s lost brothers, of some mortal sin that caused their death before he was born?
“Cholera’s a disease,” she said as they walked together as a family. “It comes from man, not from God.”
John Carson listened, saying nothing.
Robert didn’t know what his father was thinking, but he now carried within him the secret his mother had given him. The secret of being a descendant of Noah, a hidden, shadowy Hebrew, a private thing that was a gleaming, glittering,
large
secret. When he again read the Bible after receiving his secret, or heard his mother telling the old tales, the book became a kind of biography. Their story, and his story. The Hebrew tale was passed to him across thousands of years, from a world of sand and palms, where murder and betrayal were part of the story, and heroism too. It had been passed to him in the dark, wet northern hardness of Ireland, which itself was a kind of miracle. He held the secret within himself, never mentioning it to his father or his friends. He polished it. He burnished it. “O Noah,” he often whispered in the dark. “O Abraham. O Joseph with your coat of many colors. I am you too.”
Then, on a day of frail, misty rain, as he sat alone inside the door, Robert heard a tremendous barrage of hoofbeats on the wooden bridge. The sound rushed into his head, to stay forever. He hurried outside, and saw for the first time the black coach of the Earl of Warren. The coach was immense to his young eyes, tall as a house, polished black with silver adornments and a large W emblazoned on its doors above a coat of arms. The metal-rimmed wheels were a blur, the undercarriage bounced violently, and it was heading up the road to Belfast, drawn by four frothing brown horses, whipped by a fierce man with a patch on one eye. Out front were three horsemen in scarlet jackets. Three more followed the coach. Robert ran to look closer. And saw for the first time, peering from the dark interior of the coach, the sallow, fleshy face of the Earl of Warren. Alone. His eyes glittering as he glanced at the boy.
Then the black coach was gone.
And the boy saw his father standing in front of the forge, watching it go.
O
ne Friday evening, his father packed tools in a leather satchel,
slung it over his shoulders, said a quick good-bye, and walked up the slope into the hills. Robert felt like weeping. That Sunday, he would be nine. His lucky number. The ninth day of the ninth month. And Da walked off without discussing his return. He could be gone for a night or a week. He could be absent on a birthday made even more important by that number nine. All through Saturday, Robert worked at his lessons and played with Bran near the stream and swept out the forge and helped feed peat to the hearth. He never mentioned the birthday to his mother. On Sunday morning, he went to St. Edmund’s with her and saw his friends but didn’t mention his birthday to them or explain why his father was not in church. I am nine, he thought, but to say a word would be a sin of vanity.
Through the day, a rain fell upon their part of Ireland, now hard, then suddenly weak. His mother didn’t mention the birthday either, acting as if it had completely vanished from her memory. When the rain eased to a steady drizzle, Robert leaned over the half-door, gazing into the dark line of forest.
Then, as the rain began again to drive hard, he saw his father coming from the woods. The boy’s heart tripped. His father was riding a beautiful black horse. Robert burst through the door and ran through the rain to greet him.
“Happy birthday, son,” Da said, and smiled, sitting high in a rough saddle.
He reached down and scooped up Robert with one hand and jammed him in the front of the saddle, where the boy ran his hands for the first time through the horse’s lustrous coat. It was September 9, and his father had come home with a horse. His horse. Their horse. On his birthday.
Together, they trotted to the front door, where Rebecca stood smiling in a delighted, conspiratorial way. Bran barked loudly until he saw John Carson dismount and then swing the boy down, holding him beneath the arms, whirling him and laughing louder than the storm. A rumble of distant thunder came from the south.
“Thunder,” Da said. “We’ll name him Thunder.”
“Yes, yes,” Robert said. “Thunder! Yes, Da, thank you, Da, oh Da, oh Da, thank you.”
Then all of them stood in the rain and ran their hands over the wet ebony coat of the horse named Thunder, who shuddered in delight. The boy would always remember the feel of muscles rippling in the shoulders of the horse, the grooves of his neck and buttocks and thighs. There were cables of tendon drawn like lines from his knees to his hocks. The horse looked at them with liquid black eyes as the rain pelted them all. Looking as if he knew that he had found his home.
Robert’s heart was beating hard. A horse. Here in the gray sheets of Ulster rain. After the beef stew and the slice of apple cobbler and the toasting with icy water; after the hugs and the vows of more and more birthdays and a wonderful year to come at school; after his father hugged him again and again; after he saw tears welling in his mother’s eyes; after all of that, they walked Thunder to the tool room of the forge, where he gobbled a huge bucket of oats and then folded his legs and lay down upon the straw.
“He’s yours now, lad,” Da said.
“No,” Robert said. “He’s ours. Forever.”
In the morning, an hour before Robert left for school, and while the rain eased into mist, Da showed the boy Thunder’s hooves, the central cleft, the sole, the wall around it, and explained how the shoe was shaped to fit around each hoof like a sheath. “When you come home,” Da said, “we’ll make him some fine shoes. The two of us. Now, away with you.”
Robert learned very little at school that day. While the Rev. Robinson droned on and on, the boy’s head was filled with the beauty and power of the horse. When school ended, he ran all the way home. Da was in the forge. He smiled at Robert and stepped to the anvil, and without a word began shaping new shoes, with the boy’s help, adding a fine line of brass as a trim between the hoof and shoe. The new shoes fit perfectly; it was as if John Carson had been preparing for this piece of work for many years, and of course, he had. Then one hoof at a time, gently using nails and calks, he attached the wonderful shoes. The lines of brass looked like gold.
That night they planned the fence that would mark the limits of their land and become the free home of Thunder. Since they had never owned a horse, they never before had need of a fence. Two nights later, some of the burly strangers appeared at dusk, carrying wood and tools, and began hammering and singing and drinking. When they heard the sound of horses in the distance, they went silent and vanished into the darkness until the horses or coaches had passed. Four of them, in fact, were always in the darkness. Robert tried to help with the fence, but was sent off to bed, where his mother told him to dream about lands of milk and honey.
When he awoke at dawn, the strangers were gone and the fence was finished. It now marked the limits of everything that was the Carsons’: the house, the forge, the hawthorn tree. Over the following weeks, he and his father made a trough for oats and a one-horse stable in the space between the back of the forge and the hawthorn tree. And every day, in the early morning or after school, Robert rode Thunder. Sometimes his father got up on the horse too, the three of them looking suddenly as if they were one creature, and the man showed his son the tricks of control. Within weeks, Robert could ride with a saddle or without, using the bridle or making the horse stop or turn with the pressure of his knees. Da taught him to talk to Thunder always, because, he said, the horse understands.
It’s your tone of voice,
he explained.
The tone of your voice. Just tell him what you want, and he’ll know. Be kind to him, be gentle, and when you need him, he’ll know how to be fierce.
Thunder became the happiest of Robert’s duties. His father put him to work cleaning and oiling the hard rough leather saddle, doing the work each day until the saddle grew softer. He showed him how to wash Thunder so that his coat glistened without the presence of the sun. He could not leave a trace of soap on the great black coat, for it would irritate Thunder’s skin and make him flake. Thunder loved the feel of fresh water, as Robert did, and rain, as the boy did too, and the feel of a coarse towel drying him in the stall. And the horse loved them to talk to him: whispering to him, running fingernails along his long flat brow. Every morning before breakfast, the boy looked into the horse’s deep, intelligent eyes and spoke in low, loving tones and the horse answered with the love in his eyes.
O
ne Saturday afternoon, Da took Robert for a ride into Belfast.
Down the road past the butcher and the fishmonger, and deeper into places the boy had not seen on trips with his mother. He explained to the boy how they lived in an area called Stranmillis, which ran down to the banks of the River Lagan, which in turn flowed into the Lough, the immense harbor that dug into the land from the east. He told the boy that the name Belfast came from an Irish phrase:
Beal Feirste,
which meant the Mouth of the Sand-Banked River. These were the first words Da spoke directly to him in Irish, but he added no others. He was too busy explaining geography to the boy, pointing out Cave Hill and Divis and the Black Mountain, all rising above the Sand-Banked River, then gesturing across the shimmering water at a distant castle called Carrickfergus.
“That was built before there was a town,” Da said. “To guard the entrance to the Lough. And before that, the Vikings were here, the Norsemen, building forts and houses and eating the fish, which were thicker here than in all of Ireland.”
His knowledge astonished the boy as they followed a smaller river called the Fearsat, a slow, leaky tributary of the Lagan. Soon the embankment itself was paved and flagged, with Thunder’s gold-trimmed shoes making a clacking sound, and they were in Castle Street, the river still moving sluggishly to their left. They passed many shops run by linen merchants. Da named the bank and the post office and the ruin of the original castle of the Lord of Donegal. A large crowd milled about in front of the Market House, talking and smoking and gesturing, and Da said that much of the town’s business took place there, usually out of the rain inside the building. As they moved, Castle Street became Front Street, and his father told Robert the names of smaller streets feeding into it: Ann Street and Rosemary Lane, Pottinger’s Entry and Wilson’s Court, Crown Entry and Winecellar Entry, with men and women and horses moving steadily in and out of the lanes. Da carefully explained all of this to his son, and to Thunder too, as if wanting to give each of them the essential geography in which they lived.
As they rode, they attracted some attention. Young boys looked up in awe at the black stallion, its massive rider, the boy in front of him, for Thunder had never been seen before in the town. Women paused and widened their eyes. Men nudged one another and whispered.
They arrived finally at the waterfront, where a hundred masts rose beside Donegal Quay. There for the first time Robert saw ships in full many-masted sail, and docks covered with crates and boxes and barrels. Rough men unloaded cargo as they watched: sugar and tobacco from America (his father told him), along with hemp and pitch and tar and timbers, all for the building of new ships. Cotton and silk, spices and dyes from Asia. Salt and wine, silk and fruit from Italy and Spain. The workingmen paid them no heed. They had seen fine horses before, and strangers too. Their hooded, squinting eyes seemed to have already looked at all the strange people and things offered by the world.
Da told Robert where the ships were going, and the names sounded like the words of a fairy tale. Liverpool and London. Cherbourg and Marseilles. Bilbao and Morocco and the Canary Islands. And yes, America. For the first time the boy felt the tug of the world beyond the world he knew, moving in him like a tide.
“Those buildings are full of men who live off the sea,” Da said, pointing at the low brick houses that lined the far end of the immense waterfront square. There were chandlers making candles and coopers shaping barrels. There were wheelwrights and sextant makers and stevedores. But he called his son’s attention to the second-floor offices above the shops. “Those are the companies that run the ships. They have the power here. Usually,” he said, “there’s a group of rich men who pool their money and share in the profits of each voyage.”
“And the sailors, Da? The men on the ships? Do they get rich too?”
“Never,” he said. “They die. Or they live. The voyage begins, the voyage ends. If they come back alive from the sea, they get paid. They never get rich.”
Many of the storefronts bore names elegantly lettered on signs above the doors, and through panes of glass Robert could see men in business suits, some wearing wigs, waving paper, sipping tea, writing with quill pens, or talking to clerks. One such business was called the Royal African Company.
“Do they sail to Africa too, Da?”
“Aye,” he said. “To our eternal shame.”
“And what do they trade for there?” Robert said.
“Men.”
“Men?”
“And women and children too.”
“What?”
“Slaves,” he said. “They go into the Gold Coast and the Gambia River and they hunt men. And then they take them to America and sell them the way some men sell donkeys.”
“Do they come to Belfast too?”
“No. They just have their offices here, son. They sign the papers and send the ships to Africa, and they pick up their cargoes and then sail on to America. Then the slaves must work for nothing for the people who buy them. They become property. Like dogs or horses.”
He nudged Thunder and they trotted closer to the offices of the Royal African Company. Coming out of the front door, engulfed by six other men, was the Earl of Warren. He was taller than he had seemed in the dim recesses of the black coach, but his body was fleshy, like his face, and soft under his clothes, unlike the lean men of the countryside or the men who worked the ships. He paused for a moment, surrounded by other men, including the man with the eye patch who drove the black coach. He said something, smiled, and they all laughed. Small boys in ragged clothes began to arrive, as if this were a daily ritual, and then from side streets came two women in rags, one of them using a tree limb as a cane.
The earl took from his pocket three small balls, red, white, and blue, and stepped back, an amused look on his face. He planted his feet wide apart and began to juggle the balls. And Robert noticed the change that came into his face. The earl looked younger, like a mischievous boy in a schoolyard, his brow furrowed in concentration, his mouth smiling without showing teeth, and his eyes beginning to sparkle as he moved the balls into a blur. Then, one at a time, he snatched the balls from their flight, smiled broadly, and took an exaggerated bow.
The group around him cheered and Robert wanted to cheer too. He’d never seen a man do such things before, to stand and make people shout in thanks or clap their hands in delight. The scary face of the sneering earl who’d passed their house now vanished. He saw only the smiling man who could juggle. And then another side of him: The small boys crowded around him, and he put a coin into each of their hands, wagging a finger at those who pressed too hard. Then he called the two old women to him and used fingers to pry more coins from a vest pocket and gave one to each woman. The crippled woman bowed in reverence, the other curtsied. The earl said something and looked concerned about the health of the women, while the men nodded in approval.
Then the earl led the way to the corner and went into a public house. Through all of this, Da was silent and still. He explained the function of the public house to Robert in an amused way: “They go to a publican and order courage by the pint.” But he said nothing about the skill of the juggling act or the giving of alms. He and Robert looked at the man with the eye patch, waiting outside the front door, arms as thick as thighs folded across his chest.
“That’s one of your slavers,” Da said as the small crowd dispersed, and he turned Thunder to go back. “Not the boyo with the patch. His commander. The Earl of Warren. The juggler. The man handing out the ha’penny pieces. English, he is, and he doesn’t even know that he’s insulting Irish people with his public charity.” He shook his head. “They say he’s full of charm.” He humphed. “They say the women love him.” He sighed. As they trotted away from the wharves, Da explained that the earl traded in linen and land. “It’s said that he’s buying choice lots out by the river, knowing Belfast will grow. And the
News-Letter
says he’s bought land in America, without ever seeing it. Land in New York, the
News-Letter
says. But mostly it’s the African trade that brings in the money. They say he wants to become the richest man in Ireland, and maybe he will. He’s done very well for himself. Out past Carrickfergus he’s bought a huge demesne, with a mansion and stable and huts for his help….”
“And does he have slaves working for him?”
“Yes, but not from Africa.”