Forever by Pete Hamill Page B

did not. “Aye,” he said, “I remember it well.” Nodding, listening, his face heavy with memory. Rebecca seemed to be with them on those roads: Rebecca to the father, Ma to the son. Dark hair and sweet voice and still dead in the rain and mud of Belfast.
    “Well,” Fergus O’Connor said, “if bad times are coming, we must prepare.”
    “Would she know all this?” Cormac said. “Our Mary Morrigan?”
    “Yes.”
    “Suppose she’s wrong?”
    “About such things, she’s never wrong.”

20.
    A t home that night, they began to prepare. Fergus made a list (as if dictated by his mother) of the tasks they’d share and the things they must store. Food most of all: potatoes, oats, corn, salted bacon, cooked beef, limes against the scurvy. And turf to keep the hearth alive.
    “We’ll get through it,” Fergus said. “No matter what form it takes. Now, get ye to bed, for we have much to do on the morrow.”
    In the dark room where the horse’s skull was buried in the mortar, Cormac thought of plagues and locusts and his mother, imagining Joseph’s face and the Pharaoh’s voice, and then saw in the blackness Mary Morrigan beside him, with her damp hands, her voice whispering Irish words in the light of a fire, her tight, fleshy cave enclosing him and her smooth skin pressed against him.
    In the morning they began their tasks. Cormac rode Thunder to town on the first of many trips to buy candles, bacon, lime, biscuits. A produce wagon arrived late in the day with a special order of turf and another wagon brought sacks of oats. Together, father and son moved furniture to make room for the turf and the oat sacks against the inside walls of the house, and then ordered more. Every day, Da worked furiously in the forge, making horseshoes and sickles to earn money and handing some of the work to his son. At school, Robert Carson said nothing, as always; reticence had become his way, the truth of his thinking and of himself, buried in restrained talk of games or discussions of the stories in their schoolbooks.
    One afternoon he did remind his friends about Joseph and his brothers, hoping they’d understand what he meant; but they discussed it only as a good story. The Rev. Robinson was teaching more quietly now, with fewer rants about Moloch and the Whore of Babylon (for he was older too), but Robert Carson said nothing to him about the bad time either. In truth, if boils and plagues did arrive, he would feel little sorrow if they went at the preacher. Perhaps he would emerge a humbler man, one who questioned his brutal God. The warning was Irish; the Irish would do what they must to survive.
    Each evening now, after a hard and exhausting day in the forge, John Carson stood outside the house, looking for signs in the sky and the sea and the movement of birds. Inside, when they became Fergus and Cormac O’Connor, they talked beside the hearth. Fergus gave his son any news that might be connected to Mary Morrigan’s prophecy. Hints of bad times came from customers in the forge, from travelers with damaged axles, facts decoded from the oblique reports in newspapers. In Belfast and Derry, groups of men had been making midnight raids on certain houses, searching for disguised Catholics. The incidents seemed isolated. Fergus said he thought they were not. “They are signs,” he said, “and must be read correctly, like the tracks of wild animals.” He explained that these actions were caused by a kind of fever that would lie dormant for years and then suddenly erupt. A fever in the brain. A black fever in the heart. “Good men are taken away,” he said, “never to return.” Cormac asked if these raids were the bad time coming. His father nodded at that possibility.
    “We must be very careful,” Fergus said. “Whatever you do, don’t speak Irish in public. Not a word. Give them no excuse. Create no suspicion. They are worse than fools. They are murderous fools.”
    Sometimes they spoke of life and death, and how