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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.
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    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