Forever Read Free Page A

eased into the water. Then there was another unbinding of clothes. Silence. Then she said Oh!
    Robert opened his eyes. Squinting, so they couldn’t see that he was seeing. His mother was standing in the tub, facing his father. Her flesh ripe and flushed in the orange light of the hearth. Her breasts full and dark-nippled. Her belly round with a thick black V of hair below. She squatted and slipped into the water with Da, and Robert closed his eyes in shame and fear. He could hear small splashes of water, wordless grunts of approval, a sighing stillness, a chuckle, then a silence again. The slippery sound of water and soap. Of hands on flesh. A long, soaking silence, like peace. Finally the sloshing sound of a body rising from water, and the boy peeked again. His mother was drying herself with a rough cotton towel, smiling, drying under one heavy breast and then the other. His father rose from the water. Robert closed his eyes.

3.
    H is father was seldom in the house. He had customers in the shop, travelers, wayfarers, men with horses needing shoes, or men awaiting sickles to be carried to harvests, or men with ruined tools to be ground and hammered into second lives. They called him Mister Carson if they were strangers, or John if they’d been there more than once. Sometimes when the moon was high, the boy saw other men emerge from darkness, great burly men with wild orange hair, their shirts cut from animal skins, and Da stopped work and retreated with them into the tool room. They used the language Robert heard when his father buried the horse’s skull in the wall and they never called him John. At other times, Da borrowed a horse and packed his tools and kissed Robert’s mother on the cheek and then rode off into the hills. He was gone for three or four days, a week. The boy was always afraid that he would never return.
    “He has work to do,” his mother said. “There’s so few like him,” she said. “He needs to help people who can’t do what he can do.”
    There were no houses near them and no children his age with whom Robert could play, and yet he was not lonely. He often spoke with Bran, their dog, and the dog understood him. Bran had dark red hair and a setter’s long nose, and he understood all of them. In bad weather, Robert was almost always inside with his mother or playing on the leeward side of the cleared open patch that surrounded the slated house. Sometimes, he threw sticks and Bran raced after them, his ears flapping, his legs a blur, snatching the stick with a sudden pounce, then turning, racing back to the boy, dropping the stick precisely at his feet, then demanding that they do it all again. Sometimes, Robert’s mother prepared lunch for his father and the boy carried it to the forge and Da thanked him and hugged him with his hard, sweaty arms and then took the food with his handmade forks and knives and sat under the hawthorn tree and ate in silence, gazing into the Irish distance.
    In the house, Robert helped his mother as she prepared food or tended the fire. She told him when to add fresh turf. She taught him to count by numbering the remaining bricks of turf, and then she would make notes on rough paper. She called this the List: the names of foods and supplies that she would need for the week, or tasks to be finished. Peddlers came by in horse-drawn carts, one with huge sacks of potatoes and mounds of fresh-picked vegetables, another with turf, a third with butter and eggs, cheese and milk (except on rare days of high heat), and his mother haggled with them in her teasing way, and bought what she needed and crossed the items off the List. Or they would go to town together for beef and fish. They walked to Belfast on Saturday mornings, passing St. Edmund’s Anglican Church into lanes gradually more crowded with farmhouses and people: Robert’s first glimpses of the world beyond their house. Bran was usually out front, his head high, alert to danger, peeing on stone markers.
    On the