Free Forever by Pete Hamill

with the clamps, examined it in a piercing way. “The danger,” he said, “is oxidation and scaling.” Then he covered it with a thicker paste, adding polishing-stone powder and salt. He stripped this off the edge, exactly one sixteenth of an inch, and returned the emerging sword to the fire. When it was cherry red, he withdrew it, wiped away the coating, and drowned it in oil so sizzling that Bran barked.
    While the blade cooled, he made a sword guard from rolled-up bars of iron and steel, welding the roll together and then flattening it so that it would protect the hand. He used shears and chisel to shape it into an elegant metal flower.
    All of this was done in a day, Fergus O’Connor working with a sense of urgency, glancing out at the road as if wary of being seen. When the sword had cooled but was not cold, he used a needle-pointed burin to etch two figures into the broadest part of the sword, just below the handle.
    Two spirals, thin at the top, curling around, then widening at the bottom. Like sea serpents. One on each side. Matching the spiral earrings of Fergus O’Connor’s wife.
    There was little traffic that day; the weather was too fierce. Da delicately sanded the etched markings, then passed the rough paper to his son for more sanding while showing him a hunk of white bone he had long saved, part of a wolf killed in the mountains.
    “This will be the handle,” he said. “The grip. We’ll be finished by tonight.”
    “It’s very beautiful, Da.”
    “Aye,” he said, “but it’s not meant to do beautiful things.”
    He told Cormac to go home and lay out the makings of dinner. He’d be home soon. Bran followed the boy back to the house and watched as he chopped onions and potatoes, and peered into jars of unlabeled spices, trying to remember what his mother had done on all those days when the two of them were here together. At one point, as he dropped the vegetables into a pot of water, Cormac Samuel O’Connor begin to shake.
    Thinking: She’s gone.
    Thinking: Da needs her. I need her. As do Bran and Thunder. The O’Connors need her. But she’s never coming back. She’ll never turn her head suddenly from this hearth, with her spiral earrings flashing.
    And then he forced himself to stop.
    Thinking: Not now, not ever. No tears. No sobbing. Now you’ve got to be a man.
    Thinking: You are no longer little Robert Carson. Not Robby or Bobby or Rob. You are Cormac Samuel O’Connor, from the days before Saint Patrick. You’re the son of Fergus, not John.
    When his father came home, he had the sword in his hand and smiled in a proud way. He whipped it in the air, making five or six cutting movements in a few seconds, and then smiled again, as if at himself. Cormac thought: He has a wonderful smile.
    “We’re not done,” Fergus said. “But it’s what I wanted. Light and hard and tempered.”
    They took turns polishing the blade, using a file crosswise on its flat sides, emery cloth for the fine edges. The boy could see his face in the polished steel and thought: You are Cormac . The cutting edge was like a razor. He glanced at his father, staring into the fire. And he is Fergus.
    “Let’s eat,” Da said.

15.
    O ver the next few years, Cormac received three separate educations. All were happening at the same time, but in separate places. As young Robert Carson, he heard one version of the tale of the world at St. Edmund’s, the one about the civilizing glories of the British Empire. Jesus, of course, came first, the Redeemer of sinful Man, the son of God whose gospel of love was tempered by the vehemence of the Old Testament. But the mission of Jesus also explained the mission of Britain. With God’s blessing, he and his schoolmates were told, the British were expanding all over the earth. To America. To the Caribbean. To distant India. Taming barbarians. Bringing law to the lawless. Saving savages from the idol worship inflicted by the Whore of Babylon who ruled in Rome. They heard about