Free Forever by Pete Hamill Page B

could look at a Catholic’s horse, say it was worth six pounds, or thirty pounds, or a thousand pounds, and take it from him on the spot. The Catholic had no right to protest in court. In a country of great horses and fine horsemen, the intention was clear: to humiliate Catholic men, to break their hearts.
    “If you can break a man’s heart,” Da said, “you can destroy his will.”
    That was why they must remain Carsons to everyone they ever met. When they rode Thunder through country lanes or city streets, they must be Protestants. “Even poor Thunder must be a Protestant horse,” his father said, and laughed in a dark way. But he’d told his son that they were not Catholics either, so what did they have to fear? “Sick bastards,” Fergus O’Connor said. “In this country, they think that if you’re not Protestant then you must be Catholic, even if you’re not. It’s a sickness, a poison of the brain.”
    And so Fergus began telling his son the longer story too, the one not told in school. They were part of that story, as the hidden grove was a defiant remnant of unconquered Ireland. Unconquered by either Rome or London. In the schoolroom at St. Edmund’s, the boy learned the names of English kings and English heroes. He read the Magna Carta. He recited English ideals. But as his father told him the story of Ireland, his mind also teemed with Celts and Vikings, informers and traitors, and murder after murder after murder.
    As Fergus O’Connor ate greedily each evening (his manners grown coarser after the death of his wife), he sketched the history, relating the brutal story of Oliver Cromwell and the vast slaughters of unarmed Catholics, and then leaped backward in time to the arrival of Strongbow on May 1, 1170, as the result of the treachery of Irish nobles. He told his son about how “that bitch” Elizabeth I was really a heartless killer, and how her father, Henry VIII, encased in fat and pearls, was even worse, killing two of his six wives, along with thousands of Irishmen, while imposing his own version of Christianity on the islands. Such words always came from Fergus with a sense of growing outrage, as if each new telling of the tale drove fury through his blood. For Cormac, the Irish tales were like those in the Bible, full of heroism and cowardice and martyrdom—and, too often, exile. And in the Irish story, the result was always the same: the English stealing Ireland for themselves, acre by acre, for its wood and its crops and its cheap labor, and for its fine horses too, while insisting that this grand robbery was something noble.
    Cormac heard his father explain how the unarmed Ulster Irish were beaten back off the good land into the rocky hills and the stony mountains, the good land handed to the likes of the whoremaster Chichesters, while poor Protestant settlers were brought from Scotland to work the land and pay rents to the English. “They were made into slaves,” Da said, “and thought they were free.” After a while, when the British perfected the use of religion as an excuse for cruelty and theft, the Irish began to think that being Catholic was the same as being Irish, which of course it wasn’t.
    “The Irish were here before Jesus Christ was even born,” he said. “So were their gods.”
    The evening monologues of Fergus O’Connor were in startling contrast to his silence when he was playing John Carson. The words came in streams, rising and falling, emphasized with his long fingers, or by hands balled into fists. Still, in all that he said to his son, he insisted there were men in Ireland who cared for true justice.
    “There’s a fellow in Dublin, the Dean, they call him,” he said one night. “Jonathan Swift. You must read his Drapier’s Letters, son. I have them in a bound book, hidden out in the stable. He’s a man with justice in his heart. A Protestant, but an Irishman first. And you must begin reading the newspapers. The News-Letter here is run by fair men. The