A Thousand Moons

by Sebastian Barry

  ‘I ain’t saying it was Jas,’ I said.

  Then I was not there. So Rosalee told me. I fainted back onto the floor and Thomas McNulty scooped me up and then Rosalee said I was carried to my bed – the deep warm bed I shared with her – and I was told that Lige Magan took that as gospel and went into the linen room and let Jas Jonski loose. Jas Jonski went and got his shaky horse and fled away.

  *

  The lawyer Briscoe turned up a while later. Joe Sugrue brought him out in the buggy.

  That was the best buggy in Henry County. My guess was he had needed that for his grand wife and now all he had was the grand buggy that used to carry her grandness.

  Well I just plumb cried when I saw him coming in because that was the state I was in.

  He came in the door like a spoon is put into a bowl of grits. The dark room took the gleams off his face. Rosalee Bouguereau battered the coffee pot on the stove with unusual clumsiness. She was excited to see such an important man.

  He was content to sit in an old oak chair that Lige Magan supplied for him, near the stove. Because the hoarfrost had been raging all night along the sere meadow grasses. He kept on his fur hat and his fur coat all the same. He spoke for a little about the weather and asked Lige Magan how the planting was going and he commented on the parlous state of everything in Henry County and Lord would it ever find its feet again and then having given its due to convention he said what he had come to say. He said he had heard disturbing news about his employee as he called me and thought he was obliged and obligated moreover to come out and have a look-see what had occurred.

  ‘Well,’ said Lige Magan, ‘you see she got a big fright and no mistake.’

  ‘I heard. Joe Sugrue told me and I was very annoyed to hear it,’ he said. ‘But those numbers won’t tally theyselves and I would be obliged if Winona could come back to me instanter.’

  I was standing a bit caught-out centre floor and I was making all the effort that was in me to comport myself. You can’t be a geyser of tears all your life.

  ‘She got to have some recompense in law,’ said Lige Magan.

  ‘An Indian ain’t a citizen and the law don’t apply in the same way,’ said the lawyer Briscoe.

  ‘Is that what you say?’ said John Cole, very quietly, but with a nice dash of menace in it.

  The men were looking at each other and taking that in, I suppose, and John Cole was looking like he might go on fire any moment soon as a next step after the menace.

  ‘Now is the time for being peaceful and living quietly. You are old men, just like me,’ the lawyer Briscoe said. ‘What the hell age are you, Lige, does even God know?’

  ‘I don’t believe He does,’ said Lige, inclined to lift towards laughter, but stopping it best he could.

  John Cole, who was somewhat in the shadow of this encounter, shifted on his boots – very like a horse that feels the need to shift his weight in the byre.

  ‘I ain’t but forty years old,’ said Thomas McNulty, though in truth he didn’t know what age he was exactly. ‘And I believe some wicked person …’ he went on, and then floundered.

  ‘You believe what?’ said the lawyer Briscoe sharply.

  ‘I believe some wicked person got to be brought to account for what he done to Winona,’ Thomas said, ‘since you asking’ – suddenly finding the words.

  ‘I believe that too,’ said Rosalee Bouguereau. The lawyer Briscoe stared at her a moment. Was he surprised? No. Just then Rosalee had finally gotten the coffee to her satisfaction and had brought it with a cup hooked on her finger to him.

  ‘I say we find out who did the deed and go and shoot that man,’ said John Cole.

  Thomas McNulty and Rosalee looked in agreement. Thomas McNulty opened his hands as if to say, how about that, Mr Briscoe?

  ‘Ain’t anyone else drinking coffee?’ the lawyer Briscoe said. No one answered and he allowed Rosalee to fill his cup.

  ‘You got molasses?’ he asked her, quietly, like he was suddenly in another place with her, like we weren’t there just then.

  ‘Ain’t you got some of that New Orleans molasses?’ said Lige Magan to Thomas McNulty, anxious despite everything to give his visitor what he craved.

  ‘I poured it away,’ said Thomas McNulty roughly.

  ‘You like cane sugar, Judge?’ Rosalee said.

  ‘I do, I do,’ said the lawyer Briscoe. ‘And I thank you, Miss Bouguereau. I ain’t no judge by the by.’

  Then Rosalee fetched the sugar and tipped a little in and the lawyer Briscoe drank his coffee.

  While he was drinking he didn’t speak. Nor did anyone else. Each in our different brains turning around what had been said and what had not been said.

  I didn’t know what I needed to hear. When a flood goes through a farm there’s so many trees down and then the crops themselves if they are up are pressed down too. The worst flood will be the whole kingdom of every last field needing to be ploughed over all again and then harrowed afresh and maybe you are too late in the year to get in another sowing just that year. So maybe in the aftertime of that flood and after you have dried out your clothes you will see that you will not eat next year just as good as you did this year. But what is plain as your face is that you have to meet the great force of the flood, or the tornado, or the great storm, with an equal great force. To build up what has been torn down and to put back in their places what has been rended from their places and parted from their hooks.

  The lawyer Briscoe went on quietly with his coffee drinking.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I need to say a few things about Tennyson Bouguereau. Since it was that they beat him. It was to do with it being him that held Jas Jonski captive a little while. That’s what was said later, a black man holding sway over a white man. That’s what those ignorant people called uppity. There were many folks in Henry County couldn’t hear that and not want to punish him. They knew how to do it.

  I was sure Jas Jonski wasn’t afraid to proclaim his innocence in the town. He was part of that crowd of young men his age who went blazing about. Blazing about and yammering nonsense.

  I remember in the old days on the plains how all the young Lakota boys went about together too. I suppose young white folks are the same. A girl is a more solitary thing. Even so I remember the three days spent dancing when a girl got finally her ‘moon’. I don’t remember the Lakota word but it meant moon. I remember the singing and dancing and there was great pride in the young women. When I got my moon first, I think I was twelve or so, I wasn’t with my people, I was up with the poet McSweny in Grand Rapids, while Thomas McNulty and John Cole were away at the war. The poet McSweny was a black person like Rosalee and he was a famous doorman at the theatre up there but when I got my moon I thought I was going to die and he did too. He was about ninety years old at the time so he might have known better. But we were two ignorant creatures there in that house of his. He went running for Doc Ganley that lived some doors along and the doc came running back with him and when he saw how it was with me, he laughed. The poet McSweny was instructed in this aspect of the world and was obliged to cut one of his old bedsheets into bandages for me. That’s how that went along. There was no dancing or singing or women that knew what to do.

  Jas Jonski was young like all the young that ever lived, white or black or red. I didn’t know at that time if it was him that saw Tennyson Bouguereau when he was in town. I supposed it might have been. Our wagon was found half heeled into the woods and poor Jakes our best mare shaking and sad in the harness. As I remember it was not so far from the lawyer Briscoe’s house, so some men led the horse and wagon down there and I think they thought they had done their duty then. They hadn’t even paid any heed to the unconscious body of the poor black man strewn right there on the road.

  If you wanted to have a picture of sorrow a travelling photographer might have taken a daguerreotype of Rosalee Bouguereau’s face when that news came. I rushed to her and drew her into an embrace. She wept and wept.

  ‘
It’s alright, Rosalee, hush now,’ Lige Magan said, ‘least he ain’t dead.’

  That night John Cole and Lige Magan came back with her brother. They had ridden off on mules after hearing the bad news from the Sugrue brothers and now they came back with the same mules hitched to the back of the wagon and the big tin lamp pouring its light onto everything. Jakes the mare was still trembling. A horse is a knowing person. And Tennyson Bouguereau’s poor broken body lying in the bed of the wagon. His handsome face swollen with bruises and blood and his clothes that he always kept so neat like the raiment of a beggar-man.

  So that’s why I wanted to say things about Tennyson. Tennyson Bouguereau was famous, among us at least, for his skill with a rifle. Lige Magan said many times about how Tennyson set up a blade of grass one time and walking back fifty feet then turned with his Spencer and shot the blade of grass into two pieces. Lige Magan was in a position to appreciate that skill because he himself had been a sharpshooter in the army but never as sharp as Tennyson. Tennyson Bouguereau had a natural God’s ability to do it. Of course as a former slave he could only bear arms in great privacy. Just for a while everything had been looking better for those slaves. They had downed tools on farms they didn’t like to work on any more. They had got the vote, well, the men had. They could look a whiteman in the eye and talk to him straight as an arrow. Just for a while. Now it was heaving back the other way. Farmers thereabouts had no one to work their farms if the black workers wouldn’t stay. Everyone was getting crazy about it. Big bursts of violence would be told of, and evil things done and said. The fact was, Tennyson Bouguereau was quite the prince of a man. He would have helped anyone if anyone asked or was in need of his help.

  He couldn’t read or write but he could draw your face on Rosalee’s nice paper and he liked to draw robins in the yard and the only reason I knew what the sleep-all-day whippoorwill looked like was because Tennyson had captured one – on that paper.

  The men who beat him didn’t care much about all that. Whitemen in the main just see slaves and Indians. They don’t see the single souls. How all are emperors to those that love them.

  We had to eat scraps for our victuals that evening. Rosalee cleaned her brother off of all stains and she had Lige Magan help her put him to heal into the narrow bedroom at the back where Tennyson slept. I saw her fix his hair with some pomade that John Cole possessed. Tennyson didn’t have a single word to say. He was robbed of all his words. She begged him to say who had done the deed but he just stared back like an affrighted child. I saw a long bruise as dark as land just ploughed that was darkening even worse where some implement had hammered at his skull. She got me to crush up the flower-heads of hyacinth that she had gathered and dried in the spring of the previous year and that she always gave to me when I had my moon and she put some of that in the water that she washed him with, so he smelled then a bit like spring. She was trying to wash the violence off of him.

  *

  Now Rosalee was the sad one and I was the soup maker. My care for Rosalee was a little charm to me. A human person finds a little medicine in another’s sadness. So I found. But it’s not so strange because the world is mysterious anyhow.

  She was confounded to see her brother so ill-treated. It brought back all the terror of older times to both of them when they never knew if they were to be sunk in servitude forever or free. There were bitter truths to taste despite all, that was for certain.

  I come from the saddest story that ever was on the earth. I’m one of the last to know what was taken from me and what was there before it was taken. That’s a weight of sadness has crushed many a head. Ever seen a drunken Indian, ever seen an Indian in rags? That’s what happens when a king is heaped with sadness. It isn’t just that though. We thought it was all riches and wonders what we were. We knew it was. Just how it was possible to be so happy as a child. A world that has made itself good for a child is a good world. It wasn’t just that that world was removed. But that the order was so often given, Kill Them All. Ask Thomas McNulty, he heard it plenty. He went and obeyed it. John Cole too. That wild boy Starling Carlton. Why, Lige Magan. Didn’t matter if it was a baby or a girl or a mother.

  Just the touch of a whiteman, just the very approach, was the herald of death.

  We set a great value on each living one of us. But the white people’s value set on us was not the same measure. We were nothing so to kill us all was just the killing of nothing so it meant nothing. It wasn’t a crime to kill an Indian because an Indian wasn’t anything in particular.

  I know these things so I am writing them down.

  *

  Tennyson Bouguereau was a sort of a citizen now so maybe someone beating him was a crime. Didn’t they fight that whole war about that? You would think so. That was why the poet McSweny told Thomas McNulty and John Cole they best be going fighting. Or maybe just Thomas was looking at the poet McSweny and seeing what a remarkable soul he was. I mean, a king too, and desolate enough, but such a man with a light of gold around his old head. He was like those paintings of Jesus Christ with the gold ring on top. The poet McSweny. Thomas and John Cole were gone a long stretch that time and I needed to be near them. I wasn’t cured of life then and maybe I am not now. But then not, for certain. But the poet McSweny with his dark narrow face and his river-stone eyes, he bestirred himself on my account and schooled me and scolded me and did all the work of a mother.

  How was I so lucky to have those good-as-women men? Only a woman knows how to live I believe because a man is too hasty, too half-cocked, mostly. That half-cocked gun hurts at random. But in my men I found fierce womanliness living. What a fortune. What a great heap of proper riches.

  Now even with Tennyson Bouguereau laid up and maybe more so because of that, the men were out harrowing the earth that was just then loosening to spring. The mules had been given their strengthening feed and the old black rack of harrows tied to them and off they went acre after acre turning our dark earth. A mule is a happy boy with a belly of oats in him. You’d expect a mule to laugh then he looks so set up.

  Of course the only boy who could go into Paris for provisions now was Lige, just for the moment. Handily there were five dry-goods stores in Paris so Mr Hicks lost our business.

  ‘Just can’t be looking at that streaky Jas Jonski,’ said Lige.

  ‘Because you might kill him,’ said John Cole quietly.

  I was just out on the porch to fetch in some underclothes I was drying for Rosalee when I caught sight across the rough acre of a horse and rider. I was pierced through with alarm. Rosalee and Tennyson weren’t the only ones made jumpy. If ever ducks were sitting it seemed to me we were those ducks.

  Whoever this was coming, he wasn’t alone. I saw a straggle of other men bumping on their ponies. My own men were two wide fields off northward. If I had climbed the roof I could have seen them, with the black mules in miniature, and their black figures small as weevils. Tennyson’s rifle was always in the parlour – apart from the fact it was such a handsome gun someone had etched the name LUTHER on the breechblock, a mysterious but distinguishing mark – so I fetched that and then I took up my position again on the porch with the Spencer for an ally. I knew how to fire a rifle well enough even though it’s a big gun for a girl.

  It was Sheriff Flynn was the front rider. I didn’t know if that was good or bad. He wasn’t a person I knew in particular. I would see him go by, clacking his boots along the boardwalk in town. And three men with him. Three scraggled-looking sorts. He was riding at the front just as easy as you like. He was in no hurry to reach me. In no hurry in all the world.

  Sheriff Flynn finally reached me and astride his horse was on a level with me where I stood on the porch.

  ‘You go in and get Elijah, honey,’ he said.

  I never in my life heard Lige given his long name. I never in my life was called honey. He didn’t even seem to see the Spencer rifle. I was holding it aslant in my left hand but he didn’t seem to see it. I wasn’t even sure it had bullets in
it. I was thinking, maybe it doesn’t, because, well, I didn’t know. I knew these boys would shoot me as easy as a rabbit would be shot along the margin of the lands. Quick as that. I felt the piss run down my legs under my skirts. I didn’t want anyone seeing that. My body was afraid but my heart was high enough. It was anger for Tennyson made me brave and I thought indeed that Tennyson’s rifle would have great medicine in it. It was Tennyson’s great pride that he owned it and even to touch it gave me courage.

  I didn’t make any reply to Sheriff Flynn. Because I didn’t know to speak or not to speak.

  Sheriff Flynn was a rough dark man but his cheeks were shaved around his moustache and he was likely forty years old and I expect the women in town thought he was handsome enough. His deputies were a bag of ratty men. I knew one of them, now seeing them closer. Frank Parkman. He was a bosom pal of Jas Jonski’s.

  It was surprising to me how much I could be thinking thoughts as I was standing there, not answering Sheriff Flynn.

  Sheriff Flynn dismounted and climbed the steps of the cabin and on reaching me on the porch raised his right hand and I think now was going to shake mine. That was so unexpected I thought first he meant to strike me and I jumped back and tripped over the rifle and down I fell. I got to my feet again immediately. You have got to show a bear or a coyote you are not afraid. The rifle went skittering across the boards. I reckoned if I tried to get it he would shoot me. For the purposes of shooting he had a brightly polished pistol in his belt and that meant he was what Thomas McNulty called a kittoge.

  ‘Elijah in there?’ said Sheriff Flynn.

  ‘She thinks she going to get whupped,’ said Frank Parkman, laughing.

  ‘Shut your damn mouth, Parkman,’ said Sheriff Flynn. ‘Or I’ll whup you, you damn fool.’

  But he didn’t go on with that. Because just now Thomas McNulty and John Cole came around the cabin, and around the other side came Lige Magan. They were all three covered in black soil from the harrowing. They were wearing boots of black soil but of course they weren’t real boots. They were coming in for their supper after the long long hours of work.