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…”