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.