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.
21.
But on this, Fergus O’Connor was wrong. The gaunt men didn’t come back. What came instead was the killer wind.
It arrived on the evening of December 27, 1739, while all the good Ulster Christians were still exulting over the birth of their various Christs. Father and son were reading by the light of candles. Fergus was again absorbed in The Drapier’s Letters, by the Dean. Cormac was reading the poems of Alexander Pope, borrowed from school before it closed for Christmas. He was copying some of Pope’s verses into a folio book, using a new reed pen and ink his father gave him as the season’s gift. In the margins of his precious green notebook, Cormac doodled faces he remembered (Robinson, or the gaunt night visitors) and images provoked by the poetry (hills and streams and ruined castles). From time to time, his father told him to listen to a few sentences from the Dean. Or asked his son to show him the sketches or recite some lines from Pope.
“If some of our more neighborly eejits ever saw that book of yours,” he said with a laugh, “they’d be sure it was written by the Pope in Rome.” He smiled. “And there was a Pope Alexander, you know. A right bastard he was, at that.”