The great old houses had crumbled into rubble. His comrades were dead. Tara was gone with the wind. The warriors, poets, and women he knew had vanished. He learned from strangers that almost three hundred years had passed since he left with Niave of the Golden Hair. He sobbed for all that was gone and turned his horse to return to his much-loved woman in Tir-na-Nog. Then he saw a famished woman on the road, apparently dying of thirst. Touched by pity, distracted by his sense of loss, he leaned over awkwardly to give her a drink, slipped from the horse, and landed hard on the earth of Ireland. Before the old woman’s horrified eyes, Usheen instantly withered into bone and skin, giving off the sweet, sickening odor of death and decay.
Cormac asked Mary Morrigan to tell him that story over and over again. Where was Tir-na-Nog? To the West. Was it an island? Yes, she said, it’s an island. But sometimes it’s under the sea, she said, and sometimes it’s in a far part of the Otherworld.
“Can it be in America?” Cormac asked.
She looked at him in a dubious way.
“Why do you ask that?”
“So many people are leaving Belfast for America,” he said. “Maybe—”
“No,” she said, her voice as old as tombs. “I don’t think it’s in America.”
T
hen came the night near the end of his second summer in the Irish
grove. Cormac noticed Mary Morrigan staring long and hard at the fire in a kind of absolute solitude. Her shawl was pulled tight against her lean, hard frame. He asked what was the matter. She didn’t answer. He waited. Over two years, she had taught him to wait. Finally her voice rose whispery and distant from someplace deep within her.
“A bad time is coming,” she said in Irish.
Her eyes remained fixed on the low orange flame spurting liquidly in and around the burning logs.
“There’ll be starving and wailing and killing,” she said. “You’ll hear the banshee cry in the night.”
She poked the fire with a blackened oak stick. The flame stirred. Sparks danced into the air but had no way to reach the stars through the roof of the cave.
“You’d best get ready,” she said. “It’s coming.”
Later, her words made him toss and shift beneath the thin muslin blanket in his place in the darker recesses of the cave. He kept thinking of Joseph and his brothers, the warning to the Pharaoh, the horrors of the bad time: the tale coming to him in his mother’s voice. The cave felt damper, colder. He knew Mary Morrigan’s prophecy was true; she didn’t lie. And that meant he must warn his father. Mary Morrigan would speak her truth to the tribe, but Cormac must tell his father. He was coming in the morning, to bring his son back to his life as Robert Carson, son of John. He knew his father would come for him, because whenever he said he would do something, he did it. He wondered whether Mary Morrigan would tell the tribe the tale of Joseph and his brothers. There were no Christians in this holy grove, and no Jews other than Cormac, and he was only half Jewish. These were the Irish. And Cormac was Irish, and a Jew, and he knew the tale. He thought: Shall I tell the tale of Joseph to Mary Morrigan? Shall I tell the Irish tribe? And what, after all, did she mean by her prophecy? Will plagues come first, arriving tonight as I fight against sleep? Will they start in the city of Belfast and follow John Carson into the forest? And will plagues be followed by locusts and boils and hunger?
All those calamities from the Christian Bible, spoken softly and carefully by his mother or bellowed by the Rev. Robinson: They were coming. They
must
have been what Mary Morrigan called the bad time. They must. But although Cormac knew the words of calamity, they didn’t put pictures in his head. What, after all, was a boil? What did a locust look like? His mother had tried to explain them to him. A boil, Rebecca Carson said, was a great shiny swelling on the body, pale yellow, bursting with disease. And a locust was an insect like a grasshopper that came in great clouds of its fellow creatures to eat the green off the face of the earth. Turning now in the damp, peat-smelling darkness of the cave, trying to convert words into vivid pictures, he wished his mother were there to describe them better to him. He wished she could rise from the place where she was buried, only a few hundred feet from this cave, emerge from the emerald light of the Otherworld, and explain to him what she knew and the truth of what she’d seen and whether it was like the truth of Mary Morrigan. And if the plagues and the boils and the locusts were real, if they were part of that bad time coming, he wanted his father to be safe from all the badness. And, yes, he thought: I want to be safe myself. I want to live a long time, to see what happens to everyone, to discover what happens to people I don’t yet know. Thinking, as he remembered the rules set by Mary Morrigan: I need to earn my way to the Otherworld. I need to build my courage. I need to forge my passion. I need to avenge all unjust acts committed against family and tribe. I must learn to live with the pain of the world until my time comes. Then I will see my mother. Then I will see my lost brothers. He fell asleep trying to imagine the sound of the banshee.
Then he was awake. An hour later, or three hours, he could not tell. The fire dozed, and in its light he saw the leathery face of Mary Morrigan very close to his own. Her grainy fingertips touched his cheek. She was kneeling beside him.
“You’re a good lad,” she whispered.
And then leaned down and kissed him.
She shuddered. So did he.
Then, with a wind rising beyond the cave mouth, rustling the trees before it, her hard, granular skin fell away, vanishing into the dark orangey air, and Cormac O’Connor was afraid. Looking down at him was a woman with an oval face framed by thick ringlets of black hair, eyes lustrous and hungry. He smelled pale roses. Her full lips widened into a serene smile. He touched her face. To see if it was real. And to still his trembling hand. Her skin remained the color of leather but was now smooth and pliant. Dark-skinned woman. Dark Rosaleen of the old, sad Celtic song. She moved his blanket aside and played with the bone buttons of his coarse blue shirt.
No words were spoken. She eased out of the ragged clothes of Mary Morrigan, naked now in the firelight, shifted above him and his tense, sweating body, and held in her dark smooth-skinned hand her smooth full dark-nippled breast, and offered it to his mouth. He took it. Hard-nippled brown-nippled dark-skinned woman. Suckling him. Dark-skinned woman with hair falling like a black flower from her head, as he tried to suck all she knew, all she was offering, all she could give him. Her soft smooth kneading hand, damp and cool as the dark air, found his bursting cock and slowly smoothly moistly firmly she began then to move him out of himself, out of that place, out of time, into the future.
H
e told his father none of this, of course, when he came for Cormac
in the morning. Nothing about the wetness and the tightness and the milky taste of Mary Morrigan, nothing about the scent of pale roses seeping from her flesh, nothing about the rising midnight wind and the whipping sound of trees and the long, deep stranger’s roar that had come from within him and the caress of hands and the taste of tongue and lips and hair: and nothing either about the dark, emptied sleep that followed.
From his place in the morning trees, he saw Fergus O’Connor, his fierce-limbed father, drive the cart into the grove, and the men of his Irish tribe rushing to greet him while Bran leaped from the seat and bounded forward to greet Cormac. The dog was jumping and leaping and licking his hands, his tail whipping the air, then gestured with his head for Cormac to follow him to Thunder. His father waved, signaling with his hands for Cormac to stay back for now, follow the dog, his face saying, Wait, son, I must do something first. Cormac understood. Following Bran to the horse, he looked around, but Mary Morrigan was nowhere in sight. He wondered if she’d told the men what had happened in the night (for in the time of feasts they spoke of all things) and then thought that she had not. And then wondered if it had happened at all, if it had only been a dream. Then, thinking: No, it was not a dream. I can smell her on me. The scent of pale roses.
Bran and Thunder broke his thoughts. The great horse was slick from the journey, his black coat streaked with white foam. Cormac loosened the harness, hugged Thunder’s massive head, and led him to the hidden stream, where all three drank together from the silky current. The water was the color of the sky.
Through the trees he could see the men now unloading crates from beneath a false bottom Fergus O’Connor had added to the cart, using one of his father’s tools to open each in an almost reverential way. Suddenly they were all holding new muskets. Then Fergus was showing them how the guns were used. This was what he needed to do first, Cormac thought, and he didn’t want me to be part of it. Men use muskets. And I’m not yet a man. Da must know that a bad time is coming.
The men moved into the forest with the guns, and Fergus came to fetch his son, to hug him, to drink sky-colored water with the boy and the horse and the dog. Then they all gathered with the others for a small feast of eggs and bread, bacon and vegetables, washed down with icy water from earthenware mugs. The other women brought the food, young women, golden-haired, long-gowned, their bodies hidden. In his mind, Cormac could see their breasts and bellies and hidden hair. But none were made of the stained dark skin of Mary Morrigan, who was still nowhere in sight. The men grew flushed and excited, skin reddening, nostrils flaring, but not because of the women.
“Let them come now
,” one said. “
Let them come, and we’ll be ready for them.”
Another said, “
Aye, let them come, and we’ll fight them with their own weapons.”
All talking abruptly, breathily in Irish, while Fergus said nothing. He had done his work, kept a promise to deliver the weapons; what was to happen with the guns was in the future. Cormac asked him where he’d gotten the guns. He answered that it didn’t matter. He said he hoped they’d never be used, that they would rust in their hiding places, because he hated the guns, which were mere machines.
“But we must be ready,” he said, “if the English come for us.”
Then they were leaving, Fergus exchanging somber embraces with the men and polite, grave nods with the women. Thunder was harnessed to the empty wagon. Cormac still could not see Mary Morrigan, and he ran through the trees to the cave, but she was not there. He felt that this was not right. Not right, after what had happened in the cave. Not right, to just go away without a word. All summer she’d been his teacher, of language and music and stories. And in the cave… He returned, breathless from running, to the cart. Bran hopped up between them and his father uttered a word in Irish and Thunder stepped off.
Then at last Cormac saw Mary Morrigan. She was high on the slope of the hill at the mouth of the cave. He stood up in the wagon and waved. She made a small, sad, finger-curling signal with her ancient hand, and then was lost behind a screen of trees. As he sat down, his mind filled with images of dark and pliant skin, the flesh of roses.
“It’s all right, son. She’ll be here when you come back.”
“I hope. Because she says that a bad time is coming.”
All the way home, they talked about what Mary Morrigan had told Cormac. “We must be ready, Da, ” Cormac said, and his father answered, “Aye.” The boy reminded him of his mother’s story, the tale of Joseph and his brothers and how the Pharaoh listened while the Hebrews did not. “Aye,” he said, “I remember it well.” Nodding, listening, his face heavy with memory. Rebecca seemed to be with them on those roads: Rebecca to the father, Ma to the son. Dark hair and sweet voice and still dead in the rain and mud of Belfast.
“Well,” Fergus O’Connor said, “if bad times are coming, we must prepare.”
“Would
she
know all this?” Cormac said. “Our Mary Morrigan?”
“Yes.”
“Suppose she’s wrong?”
“About such things, she’s never wrong.”
A
t home that night, they began to prepare. Fergus made a list (as if
dictated by his mother) of the tasks they’d share and the things they must store. Food most of all: potatoes, oats, corn, salted bacon, cooked beef, limes against the scurvy. And turf to keep the hearth alive.
“We’ll get through it,” Fergus said. “No matter what form it takes. Now, get ye to bed, for we have much to do on the morrow.”
In the dark room where the horse’s skull was buried in the mortar, Cormac thought of plagues and locusts and his mother, imagining Joseph’s face and the Pharaoh’s voice, and then saw in the blackness Mary Morrigan beside him, with her damp hands, her voice whispering Irish words in the light of a fire, her tight, fleshy cave enclosing him and her smooth skin pressed against him.
In the morning they began their tasks. Cormac rode Thunder to town on the first of many trips to buy candles, bacon, lime, biscuits. A produce wagon arrived late in the day with a special order of turf and another wagon brought sacks of oats. Together, father and son moved furniture to make room for the turf and the oat sacks against the inside walls of the house, and then ordered more. Every day, Da worked furiously in the forge, making horseshoes and sickles to earn money and handing some of the work to his son. At school, Robert Carson said nothing, as always; reticence had become his way, the truth of his thinking and of himself, buried in restrained talk of games or discussions of the stories in their schoolbooks.
One afternoon he did remind his friends about Joseph and his brothers, hoping they’d understand what he meant; but they discussed it only as a good story. The Rev. Robinson was teaching more quietly now, with fewer rants about Moloch and the Whore of Babylon (for he was older too), but Robert Carson said nothing to him about the bad time either. In truth, if boils and plagues did arrive, he would feel little sorrow if they went at the preacher. Perhaps he would emerge a humbler man, one who questioned his brutal God. The warning was Irish; the Irish would do what they must to survive.
Each evening now, after a hard and exhausting day in the forge, John Carson stood outside the house, looking for signs in the sky and the sea and the movement of birds. Inside, when they became Fergus and Cormac O’Connor, they talked beside the hearth. Fergus gave his son any news that might be connected to Mary Morrigan’s prophecy. Hints of bad times came from customers in the forge, from travelers with damaged axles, facts decoded from the oblique reports in newspapers. In Belfast and Derry, groups of men had been making midnight raids on certain houses, searching for disguised Catholics. The incidents seemed isolated. Fergus said he thought they were not. “They are signs,” he said, “and must be read correctly, like the tracks of wild animals.” He explained that these actions were caused by a kind of fever that would lie dormant for years and then suddenly erupt. A fever in the brain. A black fever in the heart. “Good men are taken away,” he said, “never to return.” Cormac asked if these raids were the bad time coming. His father nodded at that possibility.
“We must be very careful,” Fergus said. “Whatever you do, don’t speak Irish in public. Not a word. Give them no excuse. Create no suspicion. They are worse than fools. They are murderous fools.”
Sometimes they spoke of life and death, and how death came to every man. And how some forms of death were unacceptable. He didn’t mean the death of Rebecca. That was, when all was said and done, an accident. It was carelessness made deadly. But it was not murder.
“And murder?” Cormac asked. “What is to be done about murder?”
The older man gazed into the fire, his eyes smoky.
“In our tribe,” he said, “the murderer must be pursued to the ends of the earth. And his male children too. They must be brought to the end of the line.”
A pause.
“That’s very harsh, isn’t it, Da?”
“Aye,” he said. “But murder is harsh too.”
In the blue black hour before dawn one morning, Fergus woke his son, telling him to dress and follow him. He was carrying the map case and a small leather pouch tied with a leather thong. In the forge, Cormac watched as his father stuffed the matted sword into the case. He handed the boy a spade and took one for himself. They eased outside and flattened themselves against the shadowed side of the house, wary of being watched. Bran was with them, silent, so dark they could see only the whites of his eyes. They all paused, sorting the sounds of awakening birds and small animals in the darkness. Bran growled but didn’t bark. Then, as an inky cloud veiled the moon, they hurried across the open space to the hawthorn tree. Together, they removed a rectangle of sod and then dug a narrow, shallow trench. Fergus laid the leather bag down first and it made a dull clunking sound, so that Cormac knew it contained coins. Then Fergus placed the encased sword on top of the bag. The clouds passed, and in the sudden moonlight the leather bag was darker than Mary Morrigan’s skin. To Cormac, it looked, in fact, like a lumpy leather pillow for the sword, and for a moment he saw his mother again, lying in her piece of the Irish grove with the things beside her that she would take to the Otherworld.
But he also knew that this was not a burial; it was a preparation for this world. As they covered the bag and sword with heavy earth, Cormac longed for the sweet earth of Mary Morrigan’s cave and the taste of her earth-colored breasts and the scent of pale roses.
“If anything happens to me,” Fergus whispered, “come here and retrieve these, son, and take them on your journey.”
“I understand.”
Fergus didn’t say where that journey might take him, but it would surely be away from their small piece of Ireland. In silence, they fitted the sod perfectly upon the trench, tamped it down, returned the spades to the forge, and went to prepare breakfast. They were sure they hadn’t been seen. If they had, Bran would have warned them. As they reached the house, a morning wind blew hard off the sea.
One evening a week later, with the days edging toward Christmas, Bran began barking loudly in his deepest baritone, and there was a fierce hammering at their door. Bran told them: This is danger. Fergus dropped his newspaper and pointed at his son.
“Get ye in your room,” he ordered, “and stay there.”
“Da, I’m sixteen, I—”
“Now,” he said.
Cormac did as he was told, leaving the bedroom door open a few inches so that he could see what was happening. The main room was illuminated by only one candle and the low, dull fire of the hearth. Cormac’s heart was fluttery. Bran kept barking. Fergus placed one stool on top of another, leaving three blunt legs facing the roof. Those legs were now the height of his anvil, within reach of his hand. The knocking on the door was harder, muffled voices louder. Carefully, Fergus opened the door, holding Bran by his leather collar. Cormac glimpsed gaunt, pale faces and the flickering of torches.
“What do you want?” Fergus said.
“We want to search this house,” said a hard, burred voice. The speaker moved closer to Fergus, and Cormac could see the man: short, bull-necked, the apparent leader.
“Why?” Fergus said.
“We’ve reason to believe you’re a papist. A hidden Catholic. A Catholic with a Protestant mask.”
“You’re wrong,” Fergus said, and chuckled.
“You’re lying, mister,” the bull-necked man said.
“That, I’m not,” Fergus said, his voice darkening.
“We’ll see to that. We’re going to search this papist hole. Step aside.”
Cormac saw his father’s fingers curl around a leg of the stool. “If you take one step into this house,” Fergus said, “I’ll break your bloody head.”
The bull-necked man stared at Fergus for a long moment. Cormac knew what he was seeing: eyes as cold and gray as steel. Squatting in the darkness, Cormac reached under his bed for the length of iron he used for his exercises, and remembered the horse’s skull buried in the wall of this room long ago. He thought: Give me what I need, horse.
“We’ll see about that,” the bull-necked man said, as if by talking tough he could ease his own doubts. He turned slightly, eyes on Fergus but speaking into the torches. He said dramatically: “Billy?”
A taller man, younger, with a hat pulled tight over his eyebrows, stepped into the doorway to the side of the bull-necked man. He was nervously holding a pistol in his left hand, pointing the long silvered barrel at Fergus. Cormac’s father didn’t move.
“You’re breaking the law,” Fergus said calmly. “Just pointing that pistol at me is a crime.”
“ ’Tis a far worse crime to be a secret papist,” the bull-necked man said. “Your crime is treason.”
Now Cormac could see the pistol and the forearm but not the face. The man was stepping back to take aim. Cormac slipped out of the bedroom, gripping the iron bar, moving quietly along the wall toward the door. His father’s attention was focused on the men, and on controlling the angry Bran.
“You’re all very brave and sure,” Fergus said, “when you’re holding that gun on a man.”
“We’re following God’s orders, papist.”
“Sure, God wouldn’t have the likes of you pathetic bastards doing his work,” Fergus said.
Cormac thought: He must sense that I’m approaching the door, out of the sight of the men, but he won’t move his eyes my way. I’m sure he isn’t blinking.
“If you’ve naught to fear, let us in,” the bull-necked man said, a tremor of uncertainty in his voice. “We’ll know in two minutes if this house is fouled by the Whore of Babylon.”
“Now I understand,” Fergus said. “You’re an expert on whores.”
“Stand aside,” the man said angrily, “or you’re a dead man.”
“Ach, go home, will ye? Go home and hammer your wives—if you’re tough enough.”
“Billy!”
The unseen Billy cocked the hammer, and then Cormac swung the iron bar, pivoting on his left foot, hurling all his weight into the blow. Billy’s hand must have splintered into many pieces (Cormac thought) because he screamed and screamed, the way an injured baby screams, over and over, his voice fading into the darkness. The gun fell with a clattering sound, and Fergus placed a foot on it, gesturing to his son with an open hand without ever taking his eyes off the group of gaunt Christians. Cormac tossed him the iron bar. He squatted and with one blow smashed the pistol. Then he stood and kicked the pieces across the threshold. The men looked whiter and gaunter now, their eyes as tentative as the flames of their torches. The bull-necked man was wide-eyed. Out behind the others, Billy the gunman was whimpering.
“You can pick up those pieces, you bloody idiots,” Fergus O’Connor said. “They’ll fit right well now up your arses.”
Then he slammed the door shut, flipped the latch, released the furious Bran, winked at his son, and smiled.
“Thank you, lad,” he said.
As the enraged Bran barked and leaped and scraped paws against the door, they could hear God’s messengers murmuring and talking outside, their voices rising and falling like jangled music. They must have known (Cormac thought) that the house with its stone and plaster and slate roof was immune to fire from outside. But they didn’t sound interested in storming the doors to charge into the house with their torches. The sound of Billy’s voice moved above and through the other voices, a whimpering and groaning thread of pain. And then they went away.
Fergus O’Connor exhaled. So did his son. “They’ll be back,” the father said.