by Pete Hamill
That was when Bridget Riley began to feel like a whore. Not from opening her thighs. From opening her heart and having nothing enter. And so she didn’t even mind when the earl bought her for oats and potatoes, because (she thought) maybe her sisters would survive the long starvation and maybe one of the horses would live and maybe her father too. And after all, she’d be warm and she’d be fed.
“I didn’t love him, and most of the time didn’t even like him,” she said. “But sometimes he made me laugh. Sometimes he made wicked remarks. Sometimes he would sing some music-hall song, and act it out. Sometimes he juggled with dinner rolls.”
He felt anger make a move, remembering the earl as he juggled outside the public house in Belfast, then tried to picture him juggling for Bridget Riley. He heard his father’s voice: They say he has charm.… He said nothing and the anger seeped away. They paused beside a frozen stream and he chopped a hole in the ice and they knelt down to drink. Together above the water, they smelled of perfume and cow shit and fresh sweat, soap and pine and dirt. Her face was flushed, her hands raw from the cold.
She opened the wide bag and lifted out a small bundle of men’s clothes and told him to get rid of what he was wearing since the English soldiers would be looking for someone dressed in burlap and smelling of cow shit. She giggled when she said these things and laughed out loud when he replied that he could never wear clothes that were worn by the Earl of Warren. Her voice turned angry and she told him that he had no choice, if he wanted to live.
“You’ve murdered one man, and possibly two,” she said. “Surely to God, the earl’s men want you dead. And just as sure, they’ve told the soldiers. They’ll all be after you and happy to hang your Irish bones from a tree limb. If they don’t burn you instead, nice and slow. Don’t make it easy for them.”
She paused then and added in a solemn voice: “Besides, they didn’t belong to the earl. He was a bigger man than you.”
Cormac surrendered to her logic (and his growing fear), stripped off his own clothes, and donned the new ones, including a long black overcoat. She smiled up at him and told him he was now a fine figure of a man. And while he shoved aside some rocks and hid his old clothes, she dug deeper into the bag and brought out two small loaves of bread and some salted pork and a few figs, and said that she wished they could have a spot of tea, but that was, of course, impossible.
They ate in silence, while Thunder took long drafts of water from the hole gouged in the icy stream. Bridget Riley seemed lost in her own thoughts, her eyes unfocused, chewing steadily. For a moment, he felt that he must protect her, that he must first help her get back to her home place before he went off on his own journey. Then he saw himself taking her with him. If the earl had gone to America, they could go to America. There he would keep his vows to the Irish tribe. And free Bridget Riley from the man who had bought her for two sacks of oats and three bushels of potatoes.
It was almost dark in the empty world, and they watched the sky change and black clouds race and the moon begin its climb. She touched his cheek. He touched her hair. Then she was standing above him, her body blocking the moon, looking around their little thicket (as if trying to remember each naked tree). She shook her head. “We’d best go,” she said. “Before it’s too late.”
He could not tell what she was thinking as they resumed the ride through the empty land, heading for the West. Is she afraid of feeling anything for me? Are some other feelings moving in her? She seems much older now than when I saw her in the silky bed in Carrickfergus. Older than I am. Old as caves. She shows a hard face to me, and then feeds me and warms me and clothes me. The earl’s possession. The earl’s woman. And she seemed able to read his thoughts.
“Sure, he’s already gone,” Bridget said.
As if she knew that he was seething with the unseen presence of the earl.
“Then I’ll find another ship,” he said.
Her voice was weary.
“For God’s sake, get off it,” she said. “Stay where you belong. Find yourself a woman and a house and—Jaysus, why do you care for him anyways?”
And so, moving under the arc of the moon, he told Bridget Riley the bare bones of his story, and how the earl and Patch had taken the horse, this horse, and killed his father, and how he must avenge that act, no matter what it took. She listened and then breathed out heavily, making a small puff of steam.
“You’re terribly bloody young,” she said. “Aren’t you?”
He didn’t reply. But she talked then in a casual way, as if discussing someone she had read about in the News-Letter. The earl had long spoken of going to New York, but surely not to stay forever. Just to open a branch of his business. “Which is, of course, the slave business,” she said. “Aye,” Cormac said. “I know.” The earl would rave sometimes about the fortunes to be made in America, she said, and how foolish it was to pay strangers a commission to handle his New York business when he could make money at both ends of the trade. “He needs New York,” she said. “It’s a growing market, after all.” He could feel her nodding behind him, bumping against his shoulder. “Now I understand better why he left so quickly,” she said, and then told him even more.
“I was home—if you can call it home—the night he killed your father,” she said. “I just didn’t know it at the time.”
She told him how the earl came back to his unfinished mansion that night (Thunder whipped and shoved by eight men into his stall), his eyes jittery, ignoring her for the brandy snifter, running his hands through his hair. He slept only three hours and then rose in a colder mood. He had his manservant pack some bags and load the black coach. He told Patch to guard the house and say nothing to anyone who came calling. Then he and the manservant (a Londoner named Marley) took the coach to Belfast.
“He never said good-bye, the cold bastard,” she said. “He told me I’d be taken care of, to stay where I was, and if he was delayed in New York, he’d send for me. Bloody liar that he is.” She paused. “The last thing I heard him say was to Patch: ‘Get rid of that bloody horse.’ ”
He might have been telling her a tale, she said, when he mentioned New York. He could have gone to London or France. But he was probably on his way to America.
“If you want him badly,” she said, “you’ll have to cross an ocean.”
They arrived at last at a crossroads. Off to the left, back from the road a hundred yards, there was a collapsed church. The stone walls remained standing, but the roof was gone, another victim of the long winter.
“I know the way from here,” Bridget Riley said abruptly, backing away from Cormac, prepared to slide to the ground. She was ready to walk miles to what might only be a place of death. Dead father. Dead hearth. He thought: I’ve just begun to know her.
“Please stay with me,” he said.
“I can’t,” she said. “You have something in your head, Cormac, that’s more important to you than I am. You’ve got America. You’ve got murder.”
“I can manage both,” he said.
“Sure, you’d just lie with me and leave me,” she said, and laughed. “Another Irish bastard.” She smiled. “Better I leave you when it’s me doin’ the leavin’.”
She eased herself down off the horse and gazed at the road that hooked back north. A few streaks of reddish dawn appeared to the east.
“Let’s rest a bit before you go,” Cormac said. “I can build a fire.”
Her face went blank, then tight.
“I’d best be going,” she said.
She ran her fingers along Thunder’s mane, slung her bag over a shoulder, looked at Cormac, and smiled. Then she turned. He slipped off the horse and grabbed her hand. She pulled it away from him and walked off. He watched her get smaller as she climbed a rise. She waved a hand in farewell but did not turn her head. Then she was gone.
27.
In the grove, fed and warmed by a fire, Cormac told his story to the men. There was much fury about the killing of Fergus, but no tears. Their huge hands cle
nched spears and muskets, eyes first blazing and then going dead, cursing the earl, cursing the English. They told Cormac that he’d done the right thing, laying his father on a blazing pyre, properly helping his passage to the Otherworld, where they’d be certain to meet again. And he should not worry: They would track down the men who worked for Patch (for they had their own men in Belfast and every other town) and kill them. They asked Cormac to describe those men again and again, and at his urging brought forth paper and charcoal for him to draw their faces from memory. They knew at least two of the faces; the men with those faces would surely not survive.
He told them too about the gold coins his father had buried for him, and the earrings and the copy of the Dean’s book. He told them about the sword and showed it to them, and they examined it with almost religious reverence. They listened as Cormac spoke and murmured in Irish and spit out bitter words, and then they stood and sipped from goblets and shook themselves loose in the night air, and then once more admired Cormac’s sword, hefting it and saying that Fergus of the Connor was a great maker of swords, like his father and his father before him and the many Connor fathers all the way back to the years before the conquest. As Cormac finished eating and talking around the fire, one man began to croon a sad tune and the others joined him, and when they were done it had become a song of resistance and defiance and ultimate triumph.
While they talked and sang, the women worked on Thunder’s wounds, rubbing them with an oily unguent that smelled of spring mint. They promised Cormac (when he strolled away from the fire, looking for Mary Morrigan and not seeing her, and afraid to ask after her) that if Bran was alive (they were sure he was) and made his way here to the grove (he knew the way), they would care for him for the rest of his life and then make certain that he eventually joined Fergus O’Connor in the Other-world. They giggled at Cormac’s new clothes, which were baggy and wrinkled but at least (one woman said) not hairy with the skins of wolves. Then the women retreated. The men sat with Cormac in silence, and then one of them, burly and red-haired and named Fintan of the Hills, said: “You must go to find the earl.”
“Aye.”
“You must hunt him to the ends of the earth.”
“Aye.”
“You must erase all of the men of his line.”
Another said, “Until no man lives that carries his seed.”
“Aye.”
“And, of course,” said Fintan of the Hills, “you will have to go to America.”
The question was how and when. Not all were sure about the location of America, except that it was over the sea to the west. A grizzled older man just back from the western coast said that a ship was leaving from Galway in two days’ time, bound for America and specifically for New York. Not Canada. Not Jamaica (he said, as if reciting a litany). Not Charleston or Philadelphia. Saying the names of places in a language that was as foreign as the places. This ship’s bound for New York, he said. The voyage took eight weeks (he’d heard this from one of his men in Galway City, but the others couldn’t believe a voyage could last for eight weeks, unless it was a voyage to the moon). The grizzled man said that if Cormac left on Thunder before the morning light, he might arrive in Galway in time to board the ship. All agreed he must try. So did Cormac.
They explained the roads and the hazards. None, not even the grizzled man, knew the price of the passage. They did know Galway. They described a city with white houses and Spanish women (for Galway traded with Catholic Spain even if Belfast did not) and a wide road through the town leading directly to the quays. He was warned: There was some risk. English soldiers could be waiting to arrest him at the ship if word had spread to the ports about the killing of Patch. The earl’s own men could be waiting too. Cormac must pause and look hard at what stood before his eyes, and read the signs of danger. But there might be greater risk in staying, both for Cormac and for the tribe. All these possibilities were minor. There was one dominant reason for departure: the debt of honor that could only be satisfied in New York. Cormac Samuel O’Connor must satisfy his father’s spirit by killing the man who had killed him.
And so it was agreed that Cormac should sleep a few hours and then hurry to Galway. In the town, he could release Thunder and someone (one of their men) would make certain that the horse found his way back. The horse, they said (as his father always said), knows the way.
Excited, sad, angry, feeling very young and very old, anxious to leave and desperate to stay, Cormac went off to sleep in Mary Morrigan’s cave. He hoped she would be there. He heard a lone horse move off through the forest, vanishing into the west. In the cave, as his eyes adjusted, he saw Mary Morrigan huddled under her mound of furs, her head turned away from the smoldering fire. He undressed in silence, feeling awkward, strange, altered: and finally curled beside her. Her body was cold as stone. Her eyes were closed. He thought: She’s dead. He touched her face and then kissed her withered lips. This time there was no change. Tears leaked from her shut eyes.
“Don’t,” she whispered. “You smell of a whore.”
The scent of Bridget Riley was on his skin, put there by their long ride together, intensified by the heat of the cave. She must have also smelled the remnants of his desire. He rose, shivering in the cold, and retreated to a mound of pelts and burrowed into them and tried to sleep. Behind him was the blank wall of the back of the cave, furry with damp. He could see the mound near the fire that he knew was Mary Morrigan. Sleep was broken by jagged images of the past three days: his father taking the steel ball in the chest; fire rising from a pyre; the head of Patch bouncing on steps; Bridget Riley’s red lips and white teeth and one bared breast; his father again (laughing); Mary Morrigan’s cold neck; his father (urging him to run); the horses galloping for freedom; his father staring at black clouds; icy rain; barns; the smell of shit; Da.
Then nothing.
He wakened to a fluttering noise and a thin, high-pitched wail and reached for the sword. In the dim light above the guttering fire, he saw a shiny crow beating its wings. Darting forward. Darting back. Beating glossy black wings against the smoke-tinged air. While the high-pitched wail filled the cave, louder and louder. It was not the wind, because nothing stirred except the crow. He didn’t move. It was surely the banshee.
Then, from the bundle, the other Mary Morrigan rose in her nakedness, full-breasted, round-bellied, hair falling in the dim rosy light. She started walking toward Cormac, but her eyes didn’t see him. She was smiling. Following the crow. His heart froze. He could say no words. She walked past him, her hips swiveling, going to the blank back wall of the cave.
The crow vanished first.
Into and through the rock.
And then Mary Morrigan turned, gave him a small mute wave, walked straight at the wall, and vanished.
Cormac lay very still in the emptiness. The high-pitched wail was gone too, leaving a loud silence. Her clothes made a formless pile beside the fire. He knew where she had gone, and now it was time for him to begin his own journey. He dressed quickly.
28.
The world was windless and thick with fog. Thunder bent into the task of taking Cormac to Galway, head lowered, great muscles straining on the rising slopes, then relaxing as they descended into depressions in the land. The horse seemed to know that an irreversible choice had been made. For Cormac. For him. A decision based on blood. And though Cormac whispered to him in Irish and English, he seemed to know that he had no say in the matter. They kept moving west and south to Galway City.
Sometimes they heard men talking in the fog, the sound amplified by the stillness. The words were never distinct. Each time, Thunder paused, alert and silent, until the loud blurred voices faded. The fog thickened. Cormac felt them climbing, then descending, but saw nothing through the fog. Away off: the sound of rushing water. A stream coursing over rocks. But Thunder stopped and wouldn’t move. Cormac nudged him, ordered him to go ahead now, we have little time, horse. He did so carefully, his ears alert, not so much showing fear as an immense
reluctance. Finally they pushed through tattered fog and saw the stream and Cormac knew why Thunder wanted to avoid this crossing.
The stream was thick with corpses. Almost two dozen of them. Jammed against boulders to form a human weir. The glistening current had ripped flesh from exposed hands and arms and faces and washed bones to an ivory white. A dozen fleshless skulls grinned up at them, the scoured heads jutting from shredded clothes. The arms of one corpse were wrapped around the remains of a child whose body still carried strips of blue flesh. Like the family in the farmhouse. Cormac thought: When was that? Two weeks ago? A month? Five years?
A dozen yards downstream, the smashed timbers of a raft were jammed against rocks. He thought: They must have been fleeing to the sea, to a town, to houses, to fish, to a place, another place, someplace better than the place they’d left. He thought: They were full of prayers and fear. And then came the heart-stopping moment, the careening raft turning the bend and ramming against those boulders. Destroying heads and bodies and drowning the rest. He thought: Here they are before us: nameless and lifeless, from no place anymore, arrived at a final place whose name they never learned. The weather is surely warmer now than on the day they died. Smell them. Smell the sweet, corrupt stench that can’t be cleaned by the rushing stream. Not now. Not for a hundred years.
Thunder abruptly became his own navigator, jerking to his left, moving upstream a few hundred yards from the bodies and their rotting odor. He crossed at a broad, shallow place where boulders had been ground by the years into pebbles. On the far side, Cormac dismounted and they drank from the icy water. Cormac paused at first, afraid, wondering if there were other corpses upstream, poisoning the rushing waters. But Thunder took deep drafts, and he trusted the horse’s judgment and his knowledge and followed his example. Slaked, exhausted, he opened a coarse canvas bag and fed Thunder some oats.
Then he untied the thongs of the leathery sack his father had hidden for him. He fingered his mother’s spiral earrings, remembering her voice and her smile. He hefted The Drapier’s Letters, thinking it would be fitting, a kind of prayer, to read some lines of Swift as a way of remembering his father. He pushed open the clasp. And stopped. Folded in the pages were sixteen one-pound notes, ornate with the printing of the Bank of England, and a folded letter. The letter was addressed to Cormac and was written in his father’s careful hand.
