“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.