Forever

1.

There he is, three days after his fifth birthday, standing barefoot upon wet summer grass. He is staring at the house where he lives: the great good Irish place of whitewashed walls, long and low, with a dark slate roof glistening in the morning drizzle. Standing there, he knows it will turn pale blue when the sun appears to work its magic.

The boy named Robert Carson loves gazing at that house, basking in its permanence and comfort. On some days, a wisp of smoke rises from the chimney. On other days, the early-morning sun throws a golden glaze upon its white facade. It is never the same and always the same. He sees the small windows like tiny eyes in the face of the house, the glass reflecting the rising sun. The front door is mahogany, salvaged from some drowned ship along the shores of the Irish Sea, as tightly fitted in that doorway now as any man could make it. There’s a low half-door too, placed in front of the full mahogany door like a snug wooden apron. During balmy summer days, the large door is always open, welcoming light and air into the house. The breeze pushes smoke from the fire up through the stone chimney.

Robert Carson goes in, flipping the iron latches made by his father, whose name is John Carson and is called simply Da. The house is as it always is and as the boy thinks it will always be. A sweet odor of burning turf fills the air. He breathes it deeply, inhaling the ancient burned mud of the swamps beside Lough Neagh, where the peat was cut from the bog. Directly facing him is the jamb wall, running from floor to ceiling along the side of the hearth. A diamond-shaped spy hole is cut into its pine boards so that he and his father and mother can observe the approach of strangers. The boy can only do this by standing on the shoulder of the hearth.

The hearth is at the end of a large main room, but it is the center of the house, the holy place that holds the fire. A wide iron canopy rises above the hearth, carrying away the smoke, and on damp, chilly days the boy sits on one of the hand-carved low benches beside the fire. The family has few visitors, but men always sit on the right, facing the fire, so the boy does the same. The women take the bench on the left, and his mother is always there. Her name is Rebecca, but he calls her Ma. He thinks of them as a unit: Ma, Da, and me. The Carsons. To the left of the hearth is the small iron crane his father made in the forge, with its arms of different lengths, and hooks for hanging pots. His mother moves the pots back and forth, in and out of the flame, while the odors of stews and porridges and soups overwhelm the sweetness of the burning turf. There are two low three-legged chairs called “creepies,” cousins of milking stools. Built low in the days before chimney flues so that farmers could breathe below the smoke. One day he lifted a creepy, examined the perfect pegs that held the legs so permanently to the seat, and hugged it to his chest, thinking: This is ours, this belongs to the Carsons. Back about five feet from the hearth is his father’s own chair, made of woven rush, looking like a throne designed as a beehive. Robert Carson never sits in his father’s chair.

Beside his father’s chair is one of the many wrought-iron light holders that John Carson made in the forge, long iron poles with four arched feet and hooks that hold lanterns for his reading. They never wobble on the flagstone floor, never lose their dignity.

A wide oaken shelf spreads above the hearth and he can see with his eyes shut the objects that occupy its oiled surface: his father’s clay pipes, with their long curved stems, an old thatched horse collar that Da saved from his own youth, a carved wooden cup called a noggin, found in the mud of a bog. Da has told the boy that the noggin is a thousand years old, and Robert Carson is certain that his father is right. To the left, a mound of turf bricks rises off the floor, dried out of dark black bottom mud. The iron tools of the fire, smaller cousins of the light holders, stand as rigid as sentries.

All are part of the hearth, where the fire burns low but is never allowed to go out. As the center of the house, the hearth gives off warmth and food, and is the place to which the Carsons turn in the evenings for talk and even song. On his birthday, while they faced the hearth, his mother told the boy that his magic number would be nine, for he was born on the ninth of September.

“Do you see, son? You were born on the ninth day of the ninth month,” his mother said, “and as you grow up, lad, you’ll learn: Nine will be your number.”

Sometimes on rainy afternoons, when his father is working in the forge, the boy’s mother sits beside the fire to drink tea and eat oat bread while she tells stories. The boy listens silently, the stories entering him in such a way that he later thinks they have happened to him, that he has lived them. Sometimes he drowses, while her voice makes a kind of music. They are the first stories of his life, written on a five-year-old’s emptiness. He is awake and asleep at the same time, listening to the magical words, while becoming through his mother’s magic the people in the stories. The fire burns steadily in the hearth, and his mother tells him that the fire should never be allowed to go out, because if it does, the soul leaves the house.

Da agrees. There were houses in Ireland, he said once, where the fire had burned day and night for more than a hundred years. In this house, he said, it had burned since John and Rebecca Carson moved in, long ago, before the boy was born. Even as she whispers stories, his mother gazes at the fire, as if seeing people or things unseen by others. Robert Carson later learns that before he was born there were two other children, his brothers, who were born and then died in another house. And when they died, Da poured water into the hearth and moved to this place to begin again. Robert Carson tries (after learning this when he is eight) to imagine those lost brothers, but no faces ever come clear. In bad dreams they have heads with shiny surfaces but no eyes or noses or mouths, and those visions wake him from his sleep. Sometimes he is terrified.

To the left of the hearth is the door to the bedroom where his mother and father sleep each night. A dresser stands outside the door, its drawers holding clothes. On its top there’s a wooden tray of knives and forks and spoons, along with a clump of gorse or primrose standing in water in the family’s only piece of delft: a tall vase decorated with tulips. Sometimes the boy traces with his fingers the designs on the vase, and caresses its smooth surface. Above the dresser three shelves are cut into the wall, stacked with terra-cotta plates and cups and bowls made by hand in the Mountains of Mourne. To the left is the back door, leading to the West. The room is dominated by the table behind the chairs that face the hearth, its dark planed top burnished by endless cleanings and oilings.

Sometimes he stares at the back door, the one that opens to the West. He knows that no stranger should ever leave through the back door because he would take with him the luck of the house. He knows too that when there’s a death in the house, the coffin must leave through that same back door, to be taken to the West, to the setting sun and the blackness that follows.

On the ceiling, great beams cut from bog oak form a huge A, supporting the layers of thatch and sod, tied firmly with fir rods, that lie beneath the slates. His father built this house to last. The roof rests on towers of chiseled stone that form the gable ends, each slab thirty inches thick, cut so fine that they fit together without mortar. The walls are brick, stone, cut rushes that had soured, all bound together and made smooth by river mud and lime wash. They are two feet thick. A house built like a fortress. Even when he is alone, he is safe.

2.

His father was a blacksmith. John Carson. A tall, silent, clean-shaven man with fierce cords of muscle in his arms. In his presence, Robert was filled with a sense of the marvelous. His father could lift carriages with those arms and move his mighty anvil without help and swing the heaviest hammer as if it were a fork.

The forge stood about forty yards from the house, at a muddy crossroads beside a stream. A small wooden bridge arched over the stream, part of a post road (the boy soon learned) that carried men and mail on horseback north into Belfast or south toward Dublin. A smaller dirt road moved into the hills behind them or the other way, down to the River Lagan. Sometimes in the night Robert heard horses clattering over the bridge and tried to imagine the places they came from and the places they were going. His father had bought this land because of that bridge and that road. Those horses need shoes, he would say. Those mail carriages need their wheels repaired.

And so he built his forge first, before he built the house, before Robert came into the world, and put a kind of barn around it, with thin plank walls and a roof above it, not worrying about insulation, since in the heat of the forge and the sweat of his labor he welcomed the wind. There was a corner reserved for fuel: wood at first and then coal or charcoal from England. In another corner he piled a scrap heap with broken shears and ruined horseshoes, pieces of undercarriages, even some lumps of bog iron. All to be melted in the heat (“No metal can resist great heat,” he told his son) and then transformed by his marvelous hands into things new and useful and beautiful. In a small room off to the right, he kept his tools: hammers and tongs, chisels and punches, swages and cutters, all hanging on handmade nails. A dozen different hammers: cross peins and straight peins, dressers and chisel makers, round-faced hammers and double-faced hammers, small leaf hammers, soft-faced hammers for cutlery and blunt-faced hammers for making files and rasps, along with hammers that had no names. Five or six sledges leaned against the wall, each head weighing more than five pounds. When he started a new job, he gently caressed each hammer, as if paying his respects, hefting one or two before making his choice. There were tongs too, box tongs and side tongs, straight-lipped tongs and wedge tongs, and a dozen handmade tongs of his own design; sharp-faced chisels, with handles and without; a box full of punches, shaped like hearts or shamrocks, for special decorations; a selection of swage blocks, along with shears and drills and bits. The boy’s mother told him that she and his father lived in that tool room until the day the roof was placed on the house, while a fiddler played and men danced with women until the rising of the moon. That day, or rather, that night, they went into the house and set the fire in the hearth they believed would last for the rest of their lives.

The forge was the heart of the shop, as the hearth was the soul of the house. It was the place where metal was made soft in order to be worked, and his father had built it himself, using a combination of cut stone and brick from a kiln in Belfast. In Robert’s eyes, the forge resembled a kind of unroofed fort, with the fire burning on a cast-iron grate about a foot below the parapets, all of it about thirty inches above the ground and forty inches square. No marauding army could ever breach that fort. Or so Robert thought. A bellows was plugged into a pipe that entered the forge from the rear and controlled the intensity of the fire.

At some point, without ceremony, his father gave him the gift of work. He was allowed to work the bellows, with its three flat boards, its upper and lower chambers, its leather casing forcing air through the small valve at the end. Man’s work thrilled him. His skin pebbled when he saw the fire suddenly brighten from his own efforts, sparks rising in the air, all of them red, racing for the chimney. Then the rough iron slowly turned red, and then white, and when it was white, more sparks danced like fireflies in the heat. The sweat poured off the boy then, from the heat of the fire, from the pumping of the levers of the bellows, from his excitement, and he wanted to stop, all strength gone, and then glanced at his father, working with his tough intensity, and tried even harder to go on.

“I’ll finish that now, lad,” his father said to him at certain moments.

“No, Da, I can do it.”

“Fair enough,” his father said, and smiled to himself.

In those hours in the forge, his father would say almost nothing else.

The smoke and sparks rose from the fire into an iron canopy and then through a metal chimney into the empty sky. On cold, clear winter nights, the boy would sometimes gaze at the distant stars and wonder if they were frozen sparks from his father’s forge. He asked his father about this one chilly night.

“Aye,” he said. “They all go up into the universe, son.”

“Do they ever burn out?”

“Never. When you see a shooting star, lad, that’s a spark trying to find its way home.”

His father’s beliefs were as simple as the things of his life. One of those things in the forge was the great tub he called the slake bath, half a wine cask filled with clear, stagnant water. Across its top were two rods that held a smaller tub—a bowl, really—that contained brine. He needed water to adjust the temperature of whatever he was making, cooling the piece swiftly in the water, or more slowly in the salty brine, and sometimes he would return it to the fire if it had cooled too much.

“The first time you do something,” he said, “it might not be perfect. But you can’t give up. You must try again.”

To Robert, such words seemed to be said that day for the first time in the long history of the world. You can’t give up. You must try again. Important things to be said by a master for whom the most important of all the things in that shop was the anvil. It stood a few feet to the left of the forge, a mighty workbench that to his boy’s eyes was powerful, mysterious, indestructible, and magical. It was the only object in the shop not made by his father, but John Carson loved it with a passion, the way a fine musician loves a grand piano, and he passed that fervor to his son across a thousand different afternoons.

The anvil had come from Scotland and weighed exactly one hundred and seventy-one pounds. The shape was simple and elegant, a kind of small table with a great curved shoulder called the horn. The body was iron, but the face on top was made of steel two inches thick, welded to the body. From the heel to the tip of the horn, it was about two feet long, the face four inches wide. At the heel of the face, slots were punched through to the bottom: the small round pritchel hole, the wider square slot called the hardie hole. With his tongs, the boy’s father could insert hot iron bars in the pritchel hole and bend them into any shape. Or slot his many smaller attachments into the hardie hole. The anvil was nailed to a smoothly planed block of bog oak, which had been driven several feet into the earth floor. A leather strap ran around the top of the oaken base from which hung many smaller tools. Robert swiftly learned that the anvil could sing. When his father struck it with a hammer, the ringing sound rose into the air, and sometimes was answered by the calls of birds.

In all years and all seasons, he could see his father working iron with his back to the forge, using tongs to lift the molten iron from the fire and then laying it in a white lump upon the anvil and with his tools transforming it into a sickle or a horseshoe, a lamp holder or a pot. His long-fingered hands were very quick, and in movement he seemed all of a piece: arms, hands, hammer, metal. Everything was fitted together to create rhythm and ease and power. The face of the anvil, for example, was on a level with his knuckles, the best height discovered by the old ironmasters for swinging hammers without tearing up the muscles of the back. Sometimes he dipped the iron in the water of the slack tub, adjusting the temperature as he worked, his brow furrowed and creased, his legs spread to create a fulcrum, his mighty arms bringing either raw power or fluid delicacy to the task. Sweat poured from him in all seasons. Even in dead winter, his gray collarless cotton shirt turned black. In summer, he often sent the boy to the stream with a pot for fresh water and drank it down, letting it splash over his body and neck before returning to hammer and iron and heat.

When the sun began to set in the west and he was finished for the day, he would hang the bellows on a high hook against one wall, to keep it from small dangerous invaders, then sit a while in silence, and then walk to the house. Six days a week, he scrubbed the smell of salt and sweat from himself with cold water and a coarse cloth. On Saturday nights, after the boy was sent to bed, he bathed in a large wooden waterproof tub lashed with iron bands he’d made himself, the joints so tight not a drop ever touched the flagstone floor.

One Saturday night when Robert was six, he saw his father enter the new room that he was building as an addition to the house, the room where the boy soon would sleep. Da had broken a hole through from the main room and fitted it with a door. Two new walls were already up, draped with canvas to ward off rain, awaiting only their coat of lime wash. But the western wall was not yet finished. Da entered this unfinished room carrying a lumpy burlap package in one hand and a lantern in the other. His tub awaited him about six feet from the hearth, where two huge iron pots of water simmered beside the open fire, but John Carson was not yet ready for his Saturday-night bath. The boy’s mother rested in the bedroom. Robert feigned sleep on his rough bed rigged from a base of stools placed near the jamb wall.

When his father entered the unfinished room, the boy slipped off his cot and eased into the shadows to watch him. His father untied the cords of the burlap package and removed the skull of a horse. Robert’s heart tripped. On one of their walks to Belfast that summer, his mother had shown the boy a horse’s skull off to the side of the road, bone white and sad. The Carsons did not own a horse, and that lonesome skull made Robert whisper a growing desire: to ride a horse. He told his mother that above all he wanted to ride a horse with his father. His mother hugged him that afternoon, and said, “Aye, a horse. I’ll talk about it with your father.”

And here on this Saturday night was his father with a horse’s skull in a burlap sack. Da gazed at the skull for a long moment, holding it in two hands as if it were a chalice, and then in the light of the lantern, he squatted low and began to mix mortar in a tray, thickening it with dry straw. He placed the skull in a hollow place in the wall, and then used the mortar and some kiln bricks to hide it. He was breathing hard. Then he paused, placed his fingertips against the now-blank wall, bowed his head, and spoke for a minute in a strange clotted language.

Robert hurried back to the makeshift cot, and lay awake with his eyes closed and his heart thumping with excitement. A horse’s skull! In the western wall! He heard a smooth click as his father shut the door of the unfinished room, hiding the wall with its new and secret resident. Da’s boots fell separately to the floor. He walked on bare feet across the flagstones and knocked gently on the bedroom door. The boy’s mother whispered words Robert could not understand. Then she was at the hearth, her smell altering the air, and the boy heard her pouring water into the great tub. Water that gurgled. Water that murmured. Eyes shut tight, the boy heard a rustling of clothes, and then Da’s voice saying Ah! as he eased into the water. Then there was another unbinding of clothes. Silence. Then she said Oh!

Robert opened his eyes. Squinting, so they couldn’t see that he was seeing. His mother was standing in the tub, facing his father. Her flesh ripe and flushed in the orange light of the hearth. Her breasts full and dark-nippled. Her belly round with a thick black V of hair below. She squatted and slipped into the water with Da, and Robert closed his eyes in shame and fear. He could hear small splashes of water, wordless grunts of approval, a sighing stillness, a chuckle, then a silence again. The slippery sound of water and soap. Of hands on flesh. A long, soaking silence, like peace. Finally the sloshing sound of a body rising from water, and the boy peeked again. His mother was drying herself with a rough cotton towel, smiling, drying under one heavy breast and then the other. His father rose from the water. Robert closed his eyes.

3.

His father was seldom in the house. He had customers in the shop, travelers, wayfarers, men with horses needing shoes, or men awaiting sickles to be carried to harvests, or men with ruined tools to be ground and hammered into second lives. They called him Mister Carson if they were strangers, or John if they’d been there more than once. Sometimes when the moon was high, the boy saw other men emerge from darkness, great burly men with wild orange hair, their shirts cut from animal skins, and Da stopped work and retreated with them into the tool room. They used the language Robert heard when his father buried the horse’s skull in the wall and they never called him John. At other times, Da borrowed a horse and packed his tools and kissed Robert’s mother on the cheek and then rode off into the hills. He was gone for three or four days, a week. The boy was always afraid that he would never return.

“He has work to do,” his mother said. “There’s so few like him,” she said. “He needs to help people who can’t do what he can do.”

There were no houses near them and no children his age with whom Robert could play, and yet he was not lonely. He often spoke with Bran, their dog, and the dog understood him. Bran had dark red hair and a setter’s long nose, and he understood all of them. In bad weather, Robert was almost always inside with his mother or playing on the leeward side of the cleared open patch that surrounded the slated house. Sometimes, he threw sticks and Bran raced after them, his ears flapping, his legs a blur, snatching the stick with a sudden pounce, then turning, racing back to the boy, dropping the stick precisely at his feet, then demanding that they do it all again. Sometimes, Robert’s mother prepared lunch for his father and the boy carried it to the forge and Da thanked him and hugged him with his hard, sweaty arms and then took the food with his handmade forks and knives and sat under the hawthorn tree and ate in silence, gazing into the Irish distance.

In the house, Robert helped his mother as she prepared food or tended the fire. She told him when to add fresh turf. She taught him to count by numbering the remaining bricks of turf, and then she would make notes on rough paper. She called this the List: the names of foods and supplies that she would need for the week, or tasks to be finished. Peddlers came by in horse-drawn carts, one with huge sacks of potatoes and mounds of fresh-picked vegetables, another with turf, a third with butter and eggs, cheese and milk (except on rare days of high heat), and his mother haggled with them in her teasing way, and bought what she needed and crossed the items off the List. Or they would go to town together for beef and fish. They walked to Belfast on Saturday mornings, passing St. Edmund’s Anglican Church into lanes gradually more crowded with farmhouses and people: Robert’s first glimpses of the world beyond their house. Bran was usually out front, his head high, alert to danger, peeing on stone markers.

On the edge of Belfast, the houses at first were scary to Robert: small, narrow, cramped together, all made of dirty red brick, with wet slate roofs and chimneys poisoning the air with sulphury smoke. From a distance, it was hard for him to believe that human beings lived there, and as they came closer it always felt to him that the clouds had chosen to banish the sun. Robert watched the strange new people: men in dark long coats, collars pulled high under dark cloth hats, women in dark skirts that reached the ground, dark shawls hiding their white wintry faces. Many houses were crowned with English flags, but even they had molted into permanent gray under the steady gray rain and the steady gray smoke from the coal fires. The only flashes of color came from the scarlet jackets of the English soldiers.

One shop sold paper and pencils, tobacco in cans, cigars, and a newspaper called the News-Letter. His mother always stopped there first, slipping her purchases into a deep flapped oilskin bag. On the street, she nodded at some women and murmured with others, but she seemed apart from them, even the ones Robert had seen crowded in beside her in the Sunday balconies of St. Edmund’s. Sometimes a woman touched his hair and exclaimed that it was black as coal and told him he’d grown bigger. But this chat didn’t seem real. In Belfast, the boy never felt part of the people, and, he was sure, neither did his mother. As he waited outside the shops, boys stared at him, at his clothes, at his face. What are ye? they’d say. Papist or Prod? And the boy learned to answer, Prod. Because he thought that was what he was: a Protestant named Robert Carson. The other boys babbled on about Good King Billy and asked him many questions about the glorious Battle of the Boyne, in which some of their grandfathers had been soldiers less than fifty years before, or so they claimed. They demanded from him knowledge of strategy and tactics and the numbers of the dead, the noisy catechism of their triumph. There seemed no use in telling them that he was only six; the knowledge they wanted him to recite was a matter of blood, not age. Bran growled as he sensed their hostility and suspicion: Until the boy’s mother left the paper shop and stepped into the gray drizzle and said to them, Away with ye now, away.

In spite of the hostile packs of other boys, Robert loved gazing into the windows of the shops, filled with objects small and large, in colors that were dazzling midst all the gray and black; or staring at the sheen on the slates of the sidewalks, where the rain gathered in puddles and color sometimes rose from splotches of oil. But it was never his street, the Carsons’ street. It was where his mother went on Saturdays to buy things that she couldn’t get from the peddlers on the road outside their house with its hearth that would never die away.

Beef and fish were the main things she carried away from the town. The butcher was a gaunt, pale man who said little. He took his money with a grunt and wrapped the meat. Always the money first. He never spoke Robert’s mother’s name. No Thank you, Mrs. Carson. No See you about, then, Rebecca. The fishmonger was thinner and smaller than the butcher but was always laughing and saying, How are ye, Mrs. Carson? when she entered. He wrapped the fish before he took the money. Naturally Robert and his mother preferred the company of the fishmonger. Bran, however, much preferred the butcher, although that dour man never once offered him a hunk of stripped bone.

The trip home from Belfast always filled Robert with relief and expectation. Sometimes his mother even skipped along, singing a song, accented by Bran’s sharp barks, all of them happy to leave the grim city behind, to make one final stop at the home of Mrs. Benson, who sold spices and salt. Then they rushed together into the greener, leafier, sweeter-smelling countryside. Bran plunged into wet meadows and rolled on his back, growling in pleasure, cleansing himself of the aroma of rotting eggs that had settled upon him from the coal fires of the dark city. Once Bran spied crows gnawing on grass or seeds. He rushed at them barking, then skidded to a stop as they rose in a black flock. The dog froze for that stunned moment, startled by the gathering of crows into a single giant thing that blackened the sky, in awe of a movement he could not make himself.

At home on all days, Robert loved watching his mother transform the raw materials of their journeys into sumptuous meals, singing all the while to herself, for the joy of the song. She cut meat into cubes, tossed trimmed fat to Bran, added spices and vegetables and water, and within hours, all was ready. She then vanished into the bedroom and washed her face and hands, and always donned the silver earrings the boy’s father had made for her long before Robert Carson was born. They were each shaped as double spirals, with small clips that attached them to the lobes of her ears. They were simple and beautiful, and sometimes she let Robert handle them, and he tried to understand how they were made. Horseshoes were blunt and simple and powerful; he could see himself making them in the forge; but he could not envision the delicacy of these earrings coming from his father’s hard hands.

It was always dark when his father came home, and his routines seldom changed. Each evening, his father washed, and then hugged the boy and whispered words to his mother that the boy could not hear. They ate gloriously tasty stews out of the terra-cotta bowls. Or trout from mountain streams. Or salmon from the sea. His mother broiled the spiced and salted fish on the open fire, basting it with butter, laying the fish out for them with mounds of boiled potatoes upon a plate. All of this done cheerfully, without any apparent effort. Robert loved the way the house filled each night with a new odor, a stirring of the sweet peat fire and the herbs and spices of the food. He would look at his father, see him glancing at his mother. The tall man said very little. But when his plate was wiped clean with an end of bread, he hugged Robert’s mother and whispered his thanks to her and then turned to the boy. A nod. Robert understood and thanked her too. Bran always remained still, a prisoner of discipline and ritual, knowing he must wait his turn. When the humans were finished, he could begin. Each of them saved something for Bran, the skins of fish, some lumps of potato, crusts of bread, and he went to his bowl (made by Da from a plumber’s flange) and ate with a steady, hungry, well-mannered motion until everything was gone. Then he too went over to the boy’s mother and fell to the flagstones before her, thankful and content, licking the last spicy remnants from his chops.

But there was more to Rebecca Carson than cooking, or cleaning, or guarding the life of the fire. Across those endless days when Da was in the shop, she was teaching her son many things. To read, for example, although he could not remember later how she did that. There were few books in Ireland then, but when a new one arrived at the paper shop in town, she would rent it and bring it home and read it very quickly (for each additional day of reading cost more money) and showed Robert the letters and the words and the pictures. They owned a large Bible too, and she read the stories with the boy, or told her own versions of the tales. Robert didn’t like the story of Abraham and his son Isaac because he couldn’t imagine his father taking him to some lonely hill to sacrifice him to God. He liked other parts of the story better, especially the part about Abraham sending a servant to the land of Haran to find a wife for Isaac and how he found one named Rebecca.

“Are you named for her?” Robert asked his mother.

“Aye,” she said, and smiled to herself. “But then there are many people in Ireland named for characters in the Bible. There are Isaacs in Belfast and Jacobs…”

“Is there a Robert in the Bible?”

“I don’t think so.”

And then she shifted back to the story and how Abraham found the land of Canaan and how when his wife Sarah died—there were plenty of Sarahs in Ireland too—he buried her in Hebron and how years later Abraham was buried there too. He was one hundred and seventy-five years old.

“One hundred and seventy-five years old?”

“Aye, and a good man he was, old Abraham.”

“Was he the oldest man that ever lived?”

“No, that was Methuselah. He lived to be nine hundred and sixty-nine years old. Or so the Bible says. And when old Noah died, he was nine hundred and fifty.”

“Will Da live to be nine hundred and fifty years old?”

She laughed out loud.

“I hope so,” she said. “That would be grand.”

And then she returned to Abraham, who was the father of his people and took them out of their endless wandering, their living in tents in the desert, and brought them at last to the land of milk and honey, to Israel.

“And where is that?”

She opened her worn paper-covered Book of the World, which they also owned and had no need to return to the paper store, and on two of its pages there was an engraved map of the world. She showed Robert where Israel was, although it was now called Palestine. She pointed out some of the other lands where the Hebrews had wandered, way out at the end of the Mediterranean, near the rivers called the Tigris and the Euphrates, before they found the land of Canaan. Even on the small map, it was a long way from Ireland, and on days of thrumming rain Robert dreamed of going there, to the dry, bright deserts and the palm trees, and then to rise like a hawk and keep flying above the lines of the map until he could see the date trees beside the River Jordan. He would ask her to repeat the names of the rivers again and again so that he could remember them always, because it seemed to him wondrous to have rivers with names that twisted and turned like the rivers themselves. How could poor, simple, bald Lagan stand up to Euphrates? And the Tigris: Was it filled with tigers? No, she said, it’s a name of a place, I guess, but maybe tigers were named after the river. She sounded very reasonable, but at night, before sleeping, in the room where a horse’s skull was lodged in the wall, Robert could see golden rivers filled with writhing tigers.

Over and over again, he asked her to tell him the story of Joseph and his brothers and the coat of many colors. She told it in different ways each time, and later, when he could read, she had him tell it himself, out loud, while she worked at the cooking. Sometimes it was a simple tale of vanity. When he was a boy Joseph had a coat of many colors and was vain about it, flaunting the coat before his brothers, who wore gray clothes like the people in Belfast. Joseph had ten brothers, and they shunned him because of his vanity. Which is why, when his father sent him to find the brothers in the desert where they were tending flocks, they first thought of killing him, and then sold him to some passing men on camels. By this time, Robert knew that he had two brothers who were born before he arrived, and they had died. But suppose they had lived?

“If I’d been as vain as Joseph,” he asked his mother, “would they have thought of killing me? Would they have sold me to a circus? Or to some black sailing ship down past Sandy Row, bound from Belfast to Spain or Africa?”

“I should hope not,” his mother said. But then she paused and turned her head, as if thinking of those dead boys, her vanished sons, and then went on with the tale.

Sometimes the tale was told as a story of exile. In Egypt, the mightiest country of the time, among its pyramids and glittering houses and its Sphinx staring from the desert, Joseph came to manhood as a slave. A slave is someone owned by somebody else, Rebecca Carson explained in a grave voice. They have to work for that person and don’t get paid. They still have them in America, the slaves, I mean. And a few other places, too… But God had given Joseph intelligence and the gift of understanding dreams. Even the Pharaoh, the name the Egyptians gave to their king, called upon him to interpret one special dream. Joseph listened to the Pharaoh and told him that the dream meant there would be seven years of great harvests and then seven years of famine. When the crops don’t come in at harvest, and the people have nothing to eat, his mother explained, that’s called a famine. Do we ever have them in Ireland? Aye, she said. Sometimes.

Joseph convinced the Pharaoh to store one fifth of all the produce of the seven years of great harvests in warehouses, like the ones down by the harbor in Belfast, only larger and brighter, painted white, and gleaming in the sun. That way, when the bad times came, when the famine happened, the people of Egypt would have plenty to eat. And Joseph was right. The famine came, and the people of Egypt ate, while the rest of the area starved, including the Hebrews.

At that time, years had passed since Joseph had been sold into slavery, and now he was tall and strong, no longer a stranger in a strange land, but a man with more power than anyone else except the Pharaoh. And then one day into Egypt came his brothers. They had come to buy grain to feed the starving Hebrews. They were brought before Joseph and did not recognize him, because now he was tall and strong, speaking Egyptian in a deep voice, even using a translator to maintain his disguise. For Robert, this was the best part of the story. For Joseph did not suddenly speak Hebrew, remind them of their plans to kill him and their decision to sell him, and then have their heads lopped off. He was kind to them. He fed them and gave them drink. He listened to them. He inquired about their father and other members of their family, and thus learned that his father still lived. Some details astonished Robert when first he heard the tale. The detail about how Joseph lived to be one hundred and ten years old. Or the way his father passed away at one hundred and fifty. But each time he heard the tale again, such details astonished him less.

4.

When the boy was a week short of six years old, he started school. That meant shoes each day and knicker pants and a white shirt with a short tie and a new coat to keep off the rain. Now he was up each morning at the command of the clock, to wash, dress, and walk twenty minutes to the schoolhouse. It stood to the right of St. Edmund’s, Church of Ireland, where his father and mother joined the other proud Protestants each Sunday morning at nine o’clock. The church was neat and handsome, with a spare feeling to it inside and out, and a balcony where the women sat apart from the men. Behind the church, surrounded by a neat garden, was the rectory, where the Reverend Henry Robinson lived, attended by a stout, round-faced, cheerful woman who was his housekeeper.

There were about fifteen of them in the one large schoolroom, of different ages and sizes, all boys (for girls were not allowed to be educated). He was called Robert by some, and Rob or Bobby by others. The teacher was the same Reverend Robinson who thundered on Sundays: tall, wiry, with a large beaked nose always dripping in the Irish chill. Through the mornings, as he gave his lessons, the man would blow into his handkerchief and then examine the product as if it were evidence of sin. He wore the same black jacket each day, shiny at the elbows, and knicker trousers, white shirt, grimy white stockings that vanished into buckled black shoes. He stood on a raised platform beside a desk. Ready at hand was a springy birch cane he called the Punisher.

The Rev. Robinson was never happy. Or rather, he never smiled, at least not in front of the schoolchildren. He did seem happy when whipping the Punisher against the tender bottoms of his charges. And he seemed to single out Robert Carson. From the day of Robert’s arrival, he could read without the teacher’s help, which seemed to gall the man in black. Whether called Robert, or Rob, or Bobby, he felt the daily condemnation of the Rev. Robinson’s beady eyes.

The curriculum was simple: reading, writing, arithmetic, and Protestantism. The Rev. Robinson expressed no reverence for anyone or anything except God, Oliver Cromwell, and William of Orange. His holy trinity. At God’s command, and with God’s help (he told the boys, his voice quivering, his clogged nostrils flaring), Cromwell drove the treasonous, idol-worshipping, priest-ridden Catholics beyond the Pale of Settlement; they learned no lessons and rose again, and in 1690, William of Orange arrived on our blessed shores to defeat the same Catholics at the glorious Battle of the Boyne. There were still Catholics among us, he intoned, hidden, secret, the spies of Satan, and it is God’s demand that we convert them to the freedoms and liberties of Protestantism by any means necessary. Robert’s further instruction in theology was of a similar lofty order.

“How can you tell a Catholic from a Protestant?” the Rev. Robinson asked one day.

“By his rotted teeth,” someone said.

And someone else shouted, “By the smell, eejit.”

“Here, here,” the Rev. Robinson commanded. “Don’t call a fellow Protestant an idiot.”

Robert had never heard any of this at home, and so he said nothing. He saved his religious fervor for Bible class. He could talk about Moses and Abraham and Isaac. And about Aaron’s rod, which was a shepherd’s staff, and how Aaron could turn it into a snake, or use it to change water into blood, or to bring down upon his enemies great clouds of lice or fleas or hornets or flies. To Robert, that was another amazing tale. He knew about Joshua and his army, blowing their godly rams’ horns at the battle of Jericho. He knew about Daniel in the lion’s den, and Gideon’s fierce army and the wicked Jezebel (although he didn’t quite understand what was meant by “wicked”), and how Delilah cut off Samson’s hair while he slept, robbing him of his strength. The Rev. Robinson read the line that said “Let my people go,” and told his flock that it was the cry of every honest, God-fearing Protestant when confronted by Catholic riches, Catholic corruptions, Catholic vice, and Catholic power. This bored Robert. He wanted to hear more about donkeys that talked, and rocks that gave water, and chariots of fire; he wanted more about all the thrilling murders in the Bible, and the great men who had many wives. A vein in the Rev. Robinson’s temple pulsed with fury as he roared about the Whore of Babylon, who lived in Rome and called himself the Pope, but he didn’t answer Robert’s question about what a whore was (the older boys giggled or whooped at the question, which allowed the Rev. Robinson to avoid the answer and direct his fury at their knowing laughter). The Rev. Robinson insisted on discussing, in order, each of the Ten Commandments. Young Robert Carson wanted to know if it was true that Joseph lived to be one hundred and ten.

He did make some friends. Billy Painter. Sam Longley. Harry Martinson. Boys like those from town, but better dressed, with faces shiny and scrubbed, bursting with mischief. As time passed and one term gave way to another, and then eased into a summer, and then another winter, Robert discovered that he was good at some things in school and poor at others. He had good penmanship (with a reed pen dipped in an inkwell), and that same talent could be used for drawing. He would draw their house and the hearth and the forge, and pictures of Bran and his friends at school. He never drew his parents. His right hand did what he wanted it to do, and when he was bored he could also use his left. The works of his left hand seemed to come from a different boy: the writing blunter, the drawing bolder. The Rev. Robinson always smacked him with the Punisher when he caught him writing left-handed (“A sure sign of Satan’s presence,” he snarled), so the boy only wrote that way at home. There he had noticed that his father was right-handed, but his mother wrote the List with her left, though completely untouched by Satan and his wiles. He felt proud that he had taken a hand from each of them.

Robert was not as good at arithmetic as he was at reading and writing or even Protestantism. Once he got the hang of Protestantism, it was easy. Catholics were bad, Protestants were good, and the King of England was the greatest man alive in the world. But arithmetic, at first, was more difficult: abstract, without a story.

Seeing this weakness, his mother helped him with his sums, again turning to the turf pile to explain addition and subtraction. But then the boy would cite an example from his father’s forge, as if it gave proof of confused logic. If Da put four pieces of metal on the grid and melted them and banded them together into a sickle, didn’t that mean that two and two made one?

“Sometimes you think too much for your own good, lad,” his mother said, and laughed out loud.

Then one day near the end of the second year at St. Edmund’s, it all came together in some mysterious way. Robert was adding a column of about seven double-digit figures. He looked for the first time at the column as if it were a ladder. In his mind, he climbed up the right side, counting as he went. Twelve. Yes: Write down a 2 and carry the 1. Then he climbed down the other side and had 17, wrote it down and ended up with 172. The trick was to make it a journey, not a story with heroes and villains, Hebrews and Egyptians, just a going from one place to another, counting miles, maybe, or trees, or stone markers, or houses; the climbing of a ladder to the top step and then a climb back down. The boy admonished himself for wanting everything to be a story. And now realized that some journeys were not stories. On some journeys, nothing really happened.

You just kept taking steps. Once he had that in his brain, even arithmetic seemed easy. It wasn’t the same as a story, because it had no meaning, unless you were counting days and weeks and months and years and, eventually, centuries.

5.

The boy was ten when they saw the strange people coming along the roads. Bran smelled them first and barked in his deepest basso profundo voice, running to the edge of the land to frighten them away from the Carson house. These strangers were not like the burly red-haired men who sometimes appeared in the forge. Bran knew those men and their strange language. These arrivals were ragged and thin and shambling, like trees without leaves, their eyes wide with need. The sight of them filled the boy’s mother with fear.

“Come in now, son,” she said. “Come in right now.”

She shouted to her husband down at the forge and then locked the doors and closed the windows. She whispered prayers. She watched the strangers from the window, where Da was shooing them away with a hammer in his hand. If they came near, even the women, even the children, she screamed at them: “Go away, please, for God’s sake, go away.”

Robert had never seen her like this before, she who was ordinarily so kind and generous with everyone who passed, and almost totally without fear. But these people terrified her, and as she held the boy close, she told him some of the story. About how such people had arrived years earlier, when they lived in another house, all of the ragged strangers coming from the west, heading for Belfast, and how they carried with them something called the cholera. And how his lost brothers felt pity for them and ran down with food and water, and these people (or people like them) hugged the boys and thanked them and in three days the boys were dead.

“My poor boys,” she said now, fighting tears, her voice a soft croon. “Those poor good boys. It was my fault too, because I didn’t know, I was ignorant, I told them to bring them the food and the drink. And they did. And they died.” She breathed deeply. “They were your brothers, lad.”

She hugged Robert tightly.

“Well, by God,” she said, “you won’t die.”

And then Da arrived, his work finished early, bending under the lintel of the door. Grave. His face set.

“Don’t worry, Rebecca, ” he said. “They’ll not get in here.”

He held her close to his chest, soothing her, and added. “Well, let’s have dinner. And Rebecca, darlin’? Why don’t you wear your earrings?”

That night in his bed beside the wall that contained the horse’s skull, Robert tried again to imagine the faces of his lost brothers and how they ran down a slope like the slope outside this door, to a road like the road outside this door, and gave food and drink to sickened people. And then died. He tried drawing their faces in his mind. Not the featureless creatures of his night dreams. Faces like his own, or those of his friends at St. Edmund’s or the boys he saw on his trips to town. And he thought: That was not fair. How could God let such a thing happen? If he was so powerful, why didn’t he stop my brothers before they reached the road? Make a storm or an earthquake or a flight of bees: but stop them while they were running down the slope? Robert began to cry.

Then the door opened and his mother was there, wearing her double-spiraled earrings.

“It’s all right, son,” she said. “I’m sorry if I upset you. Don’t cry anymore.”

“I don’t like God.”

“Ach, son, what a thing to say.”

“He let my brothers die. They never did anything bad, I’m sure of that, and he let them die.”

“He works in mysterious ways, they say.”

“I don’t like him.”

“Hush, now.”

They both went quiet. His mother gazed out the curtainless window, to where the trees stood silvery in the moonlight. She listened, fully alert, but heard no strangers moving on the road. Even Bran was now asleep.

“Did I ever tell you about Noah’s granddaughters,” she said, “and how the Hebrews came to Ireland?”

“No.”

“Well, the story starts just before the Flood. The world was full of wickedness then, and God was disgusted with his creations. So he planned a great flood. He appeared to Noah, who was then an old man, and told him to build an ark, a ship large enough to hold men and women and two of each animal in the world.”

“I know that part, Ma. What about his granddaughters?”

“Well, one granddaughter was named Cesara, and she was very smart and very good and kind. But she realized there would not be enough room for her and her woman friends on the ark. So she and her friends began to build smaller boats, seven of them. And sure enough, the rains began to fall, for forty days and forty nights, filling the world to the peaks of the mountain-tops. And Cesara and her friends began sailing to the west, because they lost sight of Noah and his giant ark. Only one boat survived the long journey, which took three years, because there was no land anywhere for them to stop. They ate fish. They drank rainwater. Some died. And then finally the waters of the world began to recede. And they saw land. Green and rich and beautiful. There were only three men left and fifty women, including Cesara. And they sailed for the shore, and it was Ireland.”

“They were all Hebrews?”

“Aye, every last one of them.”

She stared out at the night. The moon was gone. A soft rain was falling.

“They stayed in Ireland, and married and multiplied, and some of them kept the old ways, the old religion, the religion of the Hebrews.”

She gripped her son’s hand, then turned away. He understood.

“Are you a Hebrew, Ma?”

“Aye.”

She held the boy closer.

“Don’t be telling all your friends, now,” she said with a smile. “Some of them are pure stupid about Hebrews. Or Jews, as they call us. Does it make you feel any differently about me?”

“It feels grand, Ma. Sure, you’re related to Cesara. And Rebecca. And Ruth. And Esther too, and all the others. Joshua and Samson and Abraham and Joseph—”

She laughed in a delighted way.

“I don’t count that Samson as any relative of mine,” she said. “He was a bit of a bollix, wasn’t he?”

Now Robert laughed. And then listened to the rain for a moment, spattering the slates.

“This means I’m a Hebrew too, doesn’t it?”

“Aye,” she said, “and a good one too.”

The boy felt as if his mother had handed him a map to a secret treasure. Then she kissed his forehead and whispered: “Sleep now, lad. You’ve school in the morning.”

6.

The 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.

7.

One 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.

8.

One 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.”

9.

They could feel Belfast growing in their direction, even if they could not see it very clearly. Robert imagined the earl as part of that growth, standing on once-wooded hills, juggling, smiling, bowing to applause. On quiet evenings, he heard his father talking to his mother about the people they were seeing more often on the road, with their earthly goods piled in tottering wagons. “They’re being driven out of Belfast,” Da said, “by the bloody taxes.” His voice quivered with anger. By some royal grant, Da said, Belfast was the absolute property of the Lord of Donegal, one of the Chichester family, people who did nothing for Belfast except collect rents while living grandly in London. The taxes were fixed by the local government and then were added to the rents of ordinary people, rising higher and higher year after year.

“Whoremongers,” Da called the people who collected rent and taxes. “The whoremonger Chichesters.” He gestured toward the people with the carts and said, “They’re coming out here to move beyond Chichester’s greed.” Robert didn’t completely understand all of this, such vague words as “rent” and “taxes,” although he was pleased to hear from his mother that they owned their land and thus paid no rent. What Robert did know was that month after month, more houses suddenly appeared, scattered around the once-empty fields. Strangers arrived with saws and axes and chopped down the trees and soon a house stood where woods once marched toward the Lagan. There was more traffic on the Dublin road now, wagons, horses, carriages, and new faces. Twice more, he saw the black coach, once racing for Dublin with women inside the cabin, their hair rising like frost off pale faces. A few weeks later, the Earl of Warren returned alone. The boy wondered if the Royal African Company had offices in Dublin too and imagined the earl juggling for the women and bowing to their applause.

With the growth of the town and the heavy traffic on the Dublin-to-Belfast road, his father was busier than ever, sometimes working by the light of lanterns into the night. But there was one consolation after Thunder’s arrival: Da could ride now to his appointments beyond their little world, and always returned more quickly. While he worked and traveled, the boy’s mother explained in more detail about what it meant to be a Jew, telling tales of angels passing over houses to save the Hebrews from death, and what the commandments meant (as related by Moses, not the Rev. Robinson), and how much they must struggle against the sin of vanity. Robert still hid his secret from his classmates, the private knowledge of being a Hebrew, and in a small way that kept him apart from them. But for a while, he did have more friends. They often walked through rain and drizzle to the Carson house, sometimes gazing in awe at the work in the forge, sometimes bringing little biscuits for the boy’s mother, all wanting to ride Thunder. Robert’s mother always said that by the rules of the house, nobody else would be allowed to ride Thunder, but then she moved quickly to head off any resentment from the boys.

“Come in now, lads,” she always said, “and have a cup of tea by the fire and a nice little sweet.”

Then, one frigid Saturday morning while the boy’s father was off on Thunder to work on a horse made lame by ill-fitting shoes, Robert and his mother set out on foot for shopping. The rain that January morning was heavy, slanting against them as they walked, driven by a mountain wind. On the streets of Belfast in such foul weather, there were no murmured niceties; on such days, they would quickly make their purchases and hurry home. On this day, which was January 17, 1737, after almost a week of rain, the streets were gluey with mud, rutted by the passage of carriages. Robert and his mother hugged the facades of the buildings. She slipped into the fishmonger’s shop, chatting briefly and pleasantly. Robert wandered outside to the street. Across the mud-jammed street, he saw his friend Tommy Hastings and called to him in the driving rain. Tommy waved, then gestured for Robby to come over, pointing at something in a shop window. Robert started across the street, but the mud sucked at his boots. He looked down, and the mud was above his ankles, gripping him like wet mortar. Tommy shouted words that Robert could not hear. Then he heard a noise coming from his left and saw the black coach charging at him from fifty feet away in a blind, slopping, sucking roar, the horses driven wildly, galloping furiously under the lash, the blurred wheels throwing mud everywhere, spattering windows, sending gray brown lumps of muck into the gray slanting rain.

The boy couldn’t move. He lifted one foot, trying to turn, and then another, and the roar was coming, coming, coming, coming.

Straight at him.

Blindly.

And then the boy’s mother was there, grabbing him by the waist, pivoting at once, jerking him free of the mud, and hurling him to safety.

As the horses smashed her into the mud and the steel-cased wheels rolled over her.

Rebecca Carson did not scream.

Her body simply issued a great whoosh. As if all the air and all the life and her very soul had been abruptly squashed out of her.

It was Robert who screamed.

He screamed and ran to her, pulling himself through the sucking mud, and screamed and fell face forward into the mud and screamed and rose and screamed and felt hands grabbing his arms while he screamed and felt the rain hammering him and his dead mother and he screamed.

When there were no screams left, and no voice, Robert sat splay-legged in the mud, holding his mother’s ruined head, and saw through tears and rain that the black coach was stopped a dozen yards beyond them. The door opened. The Earl of Warren put a tentative foot on the runner below the door, brushing in a distracted way at the rain pelting his black velvet coat. He looked at Robert cradling the broken body of his mother. Then the earl sat back heavily in the coach and closed the door behind him. But the black coach did not move. A murmurous crowd was thickening now, with shopkeepers and Tommy Hastings and other boys and men who looked grim. Patch came slopping through the mud.

“Bloody stupid Irish,” he said. “Running in front of a coach like that.”

Robert stood up, moved around Patch, and dashed to the coach, slipping and floundering. He jerked at a door handle. When it opened, the earl stared at him with concern on his face.

“I’m sorry, lad,” he said in a smooth, sympathetic voice. “I didn’t see what happened, but there’ll be an investigation, and there’ll be some compensation. Of course, I’ll pay for the funeral services and—”

Robert leaped at the earl, punching at him, screaming I’llkillyou, I’llkillyou, I’llkillyou, up on the runner now, reaching in and grabbing at his neck, trying to hurt him, to give him pain, crazy and snarling: “You goddamned slaver, you slaver, you cruel rotten slaver.” All of this in a matter of seconds. And then Patch was pulling the boy off the earl, whirling him, heaving him like a sack of potatoes through the rainy air into the mud. Three rain-soaked redcoats were suddenly there. One slapped Robert’s muddy face, making his ears ring. Another raised his rifle butt as if to batter the boy. Then the earl emerged again and shouted: “Stop, you brainless bugger, it’s his mother.”

The redcoat obeyed. Robert rose from the mud and saw the earl peering down at Rebecca’s body, his face a mixture of fear, pity, and surprise. Robert felt his rage seep out of him like rain-water and he fell into a drawn-up ball beside his mother’s body. Now some of the men came from the side and lifted him, and carried Rebecca out of the mud and laid her in front of the fishmonger’s shop. Robert saw the earl wave with a sneer at Patch, ordering him to get up on the coach. Then he slammed the door and leaned out the open window.

“Take her home,” he said in a vague way to the crowd. “And the boy too.” He paused, then added in a subdued voice: “I’ll take care of everything.”

10.

Behind the closed door of the bedroom, Da washed the Irish mud off the body of his wife. He dried her. He dressed her in her best cashmere gown. Standing outside the door, Robert heard him murmur one sentence: “O my Rebecca, O Rebecca, I will see you soon enough.” Da attached her double-spiraled silver earrings. Then he carried her out of the bedroom and placed her upon a pair of planks stretched across the low stools beside the hearth. In the light of the fire and the lanterns, she seemed to the boy to be sleeping. He and his father stared at her for a long while. Outside, Bran began a low, pained, desolated howling.

“Comfort the dog, son,” Da said. “We can comfort each other later.”

And so he did, lying with Bran in the lee of the house as the drizzle fell from the Irish sky. The dog was on his side, lost, forlorn, empty, his eyes wide, his pink tongue flopping over his teeth, his body trembling with hundreds of small breaths. He was as inconsolable as the boy. They huddled together in the dark for a long time.

Then people started to arrive, trudging through the rain, kicking mud off their shoes at the door, entering in a tentative way, saying what they could say, which was not much. Sorry for your trouble, each of them seemed to say. Sorry for your trouble. Some of Robert’s friends came from school, all but Tommy Hastings, who someone said was beyond consolation, blaming himself. But Robert hid from them in the dark with Bran, and walked with the dog through the black rain to the stable to feed Thunder. There the boy begin to bawl again, and Thunder pawed the straw at his feet and Bran let out a long banshee howl.

From the stable, Robert saw the Rev. Robinson coming up the road, awkward and gaunt. He remained hidden in the dark and was relieved that the preacher didn’t stay long. Then everybody was gone. Da called “Son, son, come home now” from the door, and Robert walked slowly back with Bran. The boy didn’t want to enter the house, but in a hoarse, low voice, his father told him to come in and change into dry clothes. “Him too,” he said, nodding at the soaked dog. Bran seemed to understand that they needed him with them that night. He shook off the rain, twice, and followed the boy to his room.

When Robert returned in dry clothes, his father was staring at his wife, at Rebecca, the descendant of Noah. At the boy’s mother. He said nothing. The doors were now closed and locked against the world. But the world would not leave them to their grieving.

There was a sudden sharp knock on the door. Bran barked angrily, as if he needed to take out his anger on someone, anyone. Da only looked weary: another mourning visitor, paying respects. He sighed and went to the door. A thin, trembling man stood there, a scarf tied tightly around his head under a tall fur hat. He bowed in a nervous way. Da barred the way to the house, leaving the man in the dripping rain. Bran barked and barked, while the boy tried to calm him.

“Yes?”

“Excuse me, sir. You’d be Mister Carson, sir, am I right? Mr. John Carson?”

“Aye.”

“Sorry for your trouble, Mister Carson,” the man said. “But I’ve got something for you.”

The man peeled off a kid glove and slid an envelope from inside his coat. He handed it to Da, then bowed, turned, and was gone. Father and son heard the receding gallop of a horse.

The father stared at the envelope, then turned it over. Heavy vellum paper. The deckle-edged flap sealed in red wax, embossed with a W.

He cracked it open with a finger. Inside there was a lone vellum card. He exhaled disdainfully, then showed it to his son. A single word was written with a steel pen: Sorry. Clipped to the card was a ten-pound note.

Da held the ten-pound note between thumb and forefinger as if pinching the tail of a rat.

“Ten pounds,” he said. And for the first time he sounded bitter instead of grieving. “That’s what he thinks an Irish life is worth.”

He walked past his son to the hearth and dropped the bank-note in the fire.

Then he turned to the boy.

“It’s the two of us now, son.”

The boy rushed to him, into his enveloping arms, and then all the caged words burst from him, rushing on a river of guilt, If I’d only stayed by her side, if only I hadn’t seen Tommy Hastings, if only I hadn’t tried to cross the lane, words of anger and protest and revenge, I’m going to find him, I’m going to make him pay, I’m going to get that cruel, slaving pig, and then no words, just bawling. Then sobbing. Hopeless. Empty. Shuddering. And when Da led him to bed and consoled him with whispered words and told him to sleep, because they were going on a long journey in the morning, Robert didn’t want him to leave the room. He wanted him there. He wanted his mother there. He wanted them to tell him stories. He wanted them to sing a song.

But Da closed the door softly and went back to the room where his wife lay cold and broken. Robert heard the sound of turf being dropped upon the fire. And then the doors opened and his father went outside to howl with Bran at the moon.

11.

He was awake before dawn. Robert cracked open his bedroom door and glanced at the hearth, hoping none of this had happened, that he’d moved through a terrible dream, that his mother would be standing there, mixing porridge in a pot. But no: Her body was where he had seen it last, lying on boards beside the hearth. It was wrapped now in a kind of oiled cape, her face barely visible through a tightly drawn green shawl. Da whispered to the boy to dress warmly, for they were going to the West.

In his room, Robert pulled on wool shirts and socks, staring at the wall where the horse’s skull was hidden. Tell me something, he thought. Tell me what this is all about…. When Robert came out, his father lifted Rebecca Carson as if she were a sleeping child and told the boy to open the Western door. They passed through, his father bending under the transom. Thunder was already harnessed to a cart roofed by a small canvas tent. Da laid his wife on rush mats on the floor of the cart. He looked at her for a long moment, as if remembering unfinished conversations, and then went back to place some damp, slow-burning turf on the fire. He emerged with extra blankets, closing the door behind him. Tenderly, he covered her body with the blankets, and then he and his son climbed up on the seat of the cart and started into the bruise-colored darkness, riding to the West. Bran hurried along beside them.

They rode for hours, following narrow paths into dense forest. High trees sheltered them from the rain. They saw no houses, no towns. They climbed and climbed. At one point, they paused and Robert lifted the panting Bran up on the buckboard. It was full daylight now, but still dark among the ancient trees.

Then, from the leafy darkness Robert heard a voice say something in a language he didn’t know. A tree was speaking! His father answered back. Using words Robert had never heard him say. The boy trembled with excitement: There in the cold mist, his father was speaking to trees and the trees were talking back. Every fifty feet another tree talked, its branches moving, and his father answered. Bran was alert, his wet nose quivering, his jaws clamped shut, but he didn’t bark. He too seemed to know the secret language of the trees.

Finally the path ended. A wall of trees and foliage blocked their way. Da waited and said nothing. Thunder shuddered and pawed the ground as if anxious to go on.

And then the trees parted, and they moved forward into a wide hidden grove.

In the center was an immense flat boulder, like a stone table supported on legs chopped from the face of a mountain. There were carved markings on the boulder that Robert couldn’t read. Around the edges of the grove, hidden under the dark spreading branches of alder and oak, he saw tall stone columns rising twelve feet into the air, as if aimed at the stars. Their tops were rounded, their sides finely planed. The hush was eerie, the sound of something that had not yet happened. Thunder shuddered again. Bran growled. A hawk cried from some unseen place high in the sky. Then from the trees came some of the men who had visited Da in the evenings when his mother was alive. Their women were behind them, and some white-bearded men in long dark gowns, all of them speaking that language.

Da eased off the wagon and so did Bran and the boy. The men embraced his father and whispered to him. None of them wept. Four of the women lifted Rebecca Carson from the wagon and carried her to the flat boulder, which Robert now realized was an altar. They laid her out on the altar, applying oils from small jars to her eyelids. Then more men came from the woods with immense torches and jammed them into the ground, one flame at each point of the altar, north and south, east and west. A breeze whipped the flames of the torches, making them look like wild orange hair.

Da took his son’s hand and led him to the head of the altar, where they stood together behind the woman they had lost. At the foot of the altar, an old woman (whose name the boy would learn was Mary Morrigan) began to chant. All the others, women and men, followed her lead. Da knew all the words in the strange language. His son didn’t know the words, so he stared at the old woman, with her creased, ravined leathery face, her blank milky eyes, high cheekbones, steel gray hair. Her hands were brown, worn, still, as if carved from wood. She finished the chanting and then she began to sing in the voice of a child: pure, sweet, high-pitched, and charged with feeling. A pause. Then more chanting, with her words followed by the deeper responses of the others. At some lines, Da squeezed his son’s hand, as if trying to comfort him, responding to the words that the boy didn’t understand. And then it was over. For almost five minutes, they stood together with heads bowed, hands gripping arms.

The old woman came to John Carson and took each of his hands and brought him to a clear spot between two of the stone columns. One of the gowned old men handed Da an oak-handled shovel. He turned the first wet clod of black earth, and then three of his friends joined him. They dug until the lip of the long rectangular trench was almost even with John Carson’s shoulders. Then they paused, their faces blistered with sweat, hands and furs black with earth. A robed man offered each a hand to climb out of the grave. Robert followed his father as he walked back to the altar where the body of Rebecca Carson lay, and a burly man produced a goatskin bag, translucent and plump with liquid. He handed it to Da, who drank of it, then passed it to the man on his right, who passed it to Robert. The taste was harsh and bitter in the boy’s mouth, but he swallowed the liquid and knew to hand the bag to the next man. Robert felt his stomach burning. The old woman was the last to drink.

Then his father lifted his wife’s body for the final time and carried her to the grave. There were rush mats now on the bottom of the trench. Da sat on the muddy lip of the grave, holding the body while his son watched, then slid down with her into the grave. He hugged her tight, his face a pained mask, then laid her on her side on the rush matting, with her arms and legs drawn up. The old woman passed an earthenware bowl full of apples to Da, who placed it beside his wife. To Robert it was clear that this moment was about his father’s wife, not the boy’s mother, but he felt that it could be no other way.

Then one of the old robed men handed John Carson an iron wheel, about eight inches across, with arrows at the cardinal points, and his father rested it against her drawn-up thighs. A sign of the world, Robert supposed, as he inched forward to look down. He realized then that his mother was not wearing her spiraled earrings and he felt better. At least his father would have them as a sign of his loving her. And being loved back.

Finally John Carson grabbed his son’s offered hands and climbed out of the grave. There were no signs of obvious grief: no tears, no sniffles, no choking sounds. He took two more rush mats from the old woman and floated them down over Rebecca Carson’s body. With the spade, he began to cover her. He threw down seven loads of black earth and then handed the shovel to the boy. “Seven,” he said. “Only seven.” The soaked dirt was very heavy, and Robert didn’t want to do this, but his mother was already covered, and so he added earth to earth. Seven loads. And then John Carson handed the shovel to one of his friends, and he to another, until as many as were needed had taken their turns.

Then she was covered, a black mound rising above her grave. John Carson placed one hand on his son’s shoulder and the other on the shoulder of the man next to him, and they all joined together, the men and the women, making a full circle, almost sixty of them, their backs to the stone columns. For Robert, the word they had become we, and them had become us. The old woman stood in the center, gazing intensely at the ground beneath her feet, and began again to chant. The rest of them responded, but because the boy didn’t know the words, he whispered: Ma. Ma. Ma. Ma. And Rebecca. Rebecca. Rebecca. Then the old woman began to sing, a reprise of the opening minutes, and everyone was quiet. Her pure, ethereal voice seemed to rise from the bowels of the earth and reach to the roof of the sky. When she was finished, Bran howled once more from his place on the edge of the woods. And then they were finished. Robert knew that a piece of his life was over.

There were some final embraces and whispered good-byes. Then Da and Robert walked to the wagon. Bran refused to sit in the back where Rebecca Carson had lain, cold and alone, on roads where trees talked to men. The dog squirmed between father and son, and they started for home, the talking trees uttering baritone farewells as they descended from the hidden places of the mountain.

After a long silence, Robert found strength to talk to his father.

“So we’re not Christians, then, are we?”

“No.”

“Are we Jews, then?”

“No.”

“Is it Catholics we are?”

“No.”

“What are we then, Da?”

“We’re Irish, son,” he said quietly. “We’re Irish.”