A Thousand Moons

by Sebastian Barry

  ‘What you want me to do, Pa?’

  ‘Just seize her, son,’ said the reverend.

  Oh, but, you need to be quick to grab Winona Cole. I leaped back from the door and just about slithered down the stairs. If my feet touched them I didn’t feel it. I ran out into the street and kept running. I didn’t know which Wynkle King was a slave to beer, as the colonel had said, but thought maybe it must darn well be both of them because neither came galloping after me. But I ran till the end of my breath just in case.

  *

  The lawyer Briscoe’s Blackstone said it wasn’t a crime to retrieve something stolen from you just so long as you didn’t break a law getting it back. I would have been happy to break a law getting the rifle back from that scrawny pair of Wynkles – happy to shoot them – happy to skin them. Except maybe he had done me a good turn, the reverend, in his state of innocence. But he didn’t look like he was shaping to do me another good turn any time soon. Question was, as I tramped back to the lawyer Briscoe’s site of catastrophe, where was the rifle? Had I been standing near it? Was I going to have to sneak back some dark night when hopefully father and son might be downing whiskey in Zollicoffer’s? I shuddered at the peril of that. My mind could easily show me the going wrong of it. I almost felt the damp hands of the reverend seizing me.

  Of course he had said he had sold it to Zach Petrie.

  Going home in the cart with Lige Magan I thought I had best tell him about Wynkle King.

  ‘Everyone know the reverend,’ said Lige. ‘He a lying lowdown thieving braggart. A poultice of a man. You lucky he didn’t cook you.’

  ‘Cook me?’ I said.

  ‘That why they took the collar off of him. Why, it is said he dined off his enemies. He were a chaplain at the Injun Wars. Now you can do a lot of things in the army as I know but you can’t eat an Indian.’

  ‘Lige.’

  ‘Yep, took a young girl and ate her. Cooked her good first. With some nice herbs. Did ten years for that.’

  ‘Lige Magan, you teasing your own friend’s daughter?’

  ‘Well, I – maybe just a little bit.’

  ‘Lige?’

  ‘Yep?’

  ‘Fact is I done lost Tennyson’s rifle and I want so bad to get it back. I seeing myself go in to him with it in my arms and his face lighting up with joy to see it.’

  ‘Winona, that poor man don’t have such a lighting in him now,’ said Lige, shaking his head.

  ‘Ain’t he?’

  ‘No, he don’t know Tuesday from Tallahassee.’

  My right arm clenched of its own volition and my hand tamped down into a vigorous fist. I almost thought my wound would open in my shoulder such was the force of it. It was a gesture that wanted vengeance on those that had so inconvenienced Tennyson in his admirable life.

  ‘Colonel Purton ain’t done yet, no, he ain’t,’ said Lige Magan. ‘He made a brave assault upon those desperate men. While you were gone he came talking. Says he lost three men but took down seven of theirs – even if a woman was among their number. Anyway, rebel women just as murder-minded as men, I notice. I do notice that. Well, I see your regard for Tennyson, and I share it. Always said if he went before I would bury his rifle in with him as a keepsake for the next world.’

  Like he might need it in heaven for hunting but what would you hunt in heaven?

  ‘He still drawing his drawings good, I seen them,’ I said, as much to calm myself as anything.

  ‘Maybe so, but he don’t know Tuesday from Tallahassee.’

  ‘I still like to get that rifle back. Ain’t there fifty dollars in that gun?’

  ‘I expect. But he never paid no fifty dollars for it.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, my father the late lamented Luther Magan, he gave it to him when the war ended. Said he was going to need it. I guess he was right. Right about most things.’

  ‘I guess he was your good old pa?’ I said, spotting this small door in Lige for a sentimental moment and desirous of entering there for a reason that was obscure to me. Otherwise he was as hard as flintstone all the while. But fact was we loved Lige Magan. And I liked to see him sentimental if only the one rare time in his life.

  ‘My pa?’ he asked, though it seemed to me it was not a question to me but to himself. I waited to hear his answer, but he didn’t say anything else.

  *

  Now we had come up to Whit Monday and that was a day that Lige Magan gave as a holiday. No soul was to stoop to work that day. Lige set his Rotary firewater on the table for any to drink that wished.

  Thomas McNulty was accustomed on Pentecost eve to kill a suckling pig and hang it and allow it slowly to bleed its blood into a bucket. Then on the holy Monday up stepped the wizard Rosalee and made her blood pudding. And Lige lit the wood fire in the yard and ran a long iron spike through the pig and then he stood there like a sentry turning the spit.

  Like a picket against the burning of the meat.

  This was a joyous day even for those that didn’t have joy inside them. A mortgaged joy that even mournful folk could borrow. Then you saw Lige Magan risen with his fiddle and the lovely calm close of that summer day. And the wood saved from the woods all round burning brightly, and its first shadows like children leaping in the yard. It was the day for beginning all again and though it was in the aftertime of Leavenworth when he was seldom in his dress, Thomas McNulty on Whit Monday donned his dress. Because the thing that Rosalee most craved to see was the old dance he used to dance in Grand Rapids when he was so handsome and beautiful that hard miners asked for his hand.

  Which was a thing I saw for myself. They would come like a gaggle to the stage door, looking for the beautiful woman that had beguiled them so. And Thomas going out past them not even glanced at, in the man’s attire he put on to walk home in, a smile on his lips.

  Now in his age he could never be so fancied but there with his friends and the man who so loved him we revered him. We watched his lonesome dance. His feet were still small in his patent shoes and the metal beads on the dress still threw light onto his painted face. John Cole was stood at the window while the night fell all around him. Years fell away and maybe to himself he was young again and Thomas was young and they were in their heyday of hope and enterprise.

  The pig was eaten with solemn joy and Rosalee sang an old song in a lingo she herself didn’t know but had earnestly learned at her grandmother’s knee. Oh, stately Rosalee. And if Tennyson’s part was no longer his fabled singing, still and all there was something of a song in the way he watched his sister. And when Lige had pulled a few glasses from his whiskey, then the fiddle was let free. And I shook my sorrows from myself and showed what I knew of the world in a wild Lakota dance. And it was all freedom, that Pentecostal Monday, when love was palpable between us. And the way that John Cole touched Thomas’s back as the two of them stood watching in the long shadows of May.

  *

  Well, the lawyer Briscoe if anything he seemed to be granted new life by the catastrophe. Maybe he relished a tide he could push against. Anyway, he said, this recent madness was likely the knife to lance the boil. He meant the mad boil of hatreds then current in Henry County. He was a buoyant optimist when other folk were sinking stones, certainly. Joy over despair. It was a tactic of war and courage, like not crying out when your enemy tortures you. Among the Lakota there was a society for young men which obliged them to say everything in its opposite meaning. If they wanted to say I love thee, they said I hate thee. They even walked backwards. They tied their headdress feathers to their ankles. It was a kind of magic and the lawyer Briscoe practised his version of it. He had saved his bed, his bible and his book of roses and he was ready to start again. That was how it seemed.

  A man deserted by his grand wife and never having sight of his children maybe has learned something at the hem of misfortune.

  I marked my sheets and orders were sent out in every direction. A clerk of works is a harried soul. A house was a huge web of numbers and I marvelled
at the true army that had to be mustered to raise it back into the sky. Numbers for this, numbers for that.

  Judah Mundy the little foreman struggled against the workmen who were not inclined to work. That made him swell with anger. Like a dead sheep in the sun on the side of the road. He planted his boots in front of men twice his size, spitting venom in their faces – or at least in the direction of their faces. They gasped at his passion.

  ‘If you get fifty cents a day for a job you best go do it,’ he said. ‘Goddamn lazy sons of mountain cats.’

  ‘Goddamn lazy sons of mountain cats,’ he hissed again at the trembling white eyes. He didn’t have to hiss at the freedmen, who were plumb glad of the work.

  ‘The foreman remembers the man who works to his limit, and that is the worker’s fame and fortune. No one loves that man who lurks in the woodshed shying off work, because his slack must be taken up by others.’

  Such was his little homily.

  In a few weeks the site was cleared of everything that spoke of Zach Petrie’s inferno – the cinders, the charred spars, the thousand items buckled by heat, the tottering beams, the injured walls, the sooty furniture.

  The lawyer Briscoe hesitated now and then. He gazed on the ruined body of the huge dresser in the kitchen.

  ‘Fifty years of service,’ he said in a laden voice.

  Its shelves which had displayed jelly moulds and pots like thieves of light and sun-bright pans for big fishes and roasts were roasted to charcoal themselves, all the wood burned biscuit thin. Lana Jane Sugrue stood at his elbow crying softly and twisting her tiny hands as if a supplicant witness for the accused.

  He weighed up the force of its history in his heart and the blackened calamity it now was and ordered it to be taken out onto the lawns. It tottered in a state of shock at its sudden exposure and was executed by axes and burned.

  It was all numbers, that house building. Numbers like little songs, like little birds. A small heaven of numbers. The lawyer Briscoe made me feel somehow that things would improve and my heart would heal and we could look back with fortitude on what had befallen us – and forward to the future with the proverbial measure of hope. But then of course there was no past, present, and future, as my mother knew. There was only a hoop turning in tightly on itself, over and over. Truth lay in a hole so deep no boy could dig a well to it. So deep no mule could enter its caverns with a lanthorn on his head.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  During this time Tennyson Bouguereau took down all the drawings in his room and made a little bonfire of them behind the cabin. His sister was distraught.

  ‘You come and talk to this stupid man,’ she said to me, ‘since you the only living soul he heeds.’

  ‘He heeds you before all, Rosalee,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe long ago, maybe long ago, but now that he is an idiot, he looks to you.’

  I didn’t think he was an idiot but I said nothing to that. I did like to sit with him and talk and I was sure he had understood the attack on Zach Petrie was for his sake. Well, I wasn’t so right about that either.

  Over the days following he began to make other drawings. Now the big jackrabbit was drawn attacking what looked like a man. Rosalee brought me in to see them all pinned about the room as before. She shook her head and was on the edge of tears.

  ‘I think his head going to explode and then I be picking up his brains,’ she said.

  That evening we were resting on the porch and Thomas McNulty was telling Lige Magan stories that Lige already knew and so relished all the more because of that – they were stories of their time in the war. I went to Tennyson where he sat alone and apart in the far shadows. I told him that when I was little in Wyoming there was always a man that drew what they called a Winter Count, which was a sort of history in pictures of what had happened to the tribe that year. I told him that the Lakota had no writing so the skill to make those pictures was very important. I asked him was there a story in his pictures of the jackrabbits and the men. Behind my words there was a certainty that this hurt man was not crazy. All I really meant to do was prove that for Rosalee and set her mind at rest.

  Tennyson got up and beckoned me to follow him. He picked up a lanthorn where it hung on an ancient hook and I went with him to his room. There he shone the light on his pictures one by one and then looked at me as if he thought any fool could read what they said.

  ‘Why is the jackrabbit attacking the man?’ I said.

  In answer he straightened two fingers and put them to his top lip. I was none the wiser. Then with something of the scurry of a vexed child, he went to his table and put the other hand into his store of red, and rubbed it into one side of his face. Then he put the fingers up again and then made a gesture of savage blows. When I still didn’t understand he stood there like a hunting dog that had been run till it could run no further. He seemed so tired suddenly his legs could barely hold him up.

  That night I lay in bed with Rosalee deep in sleep curled up against my spine. I couldn’t find the thread of slumber. I was thinking and thinking about Tennyson. Then slowly I began to get drowsy, and must have been at that strange gate between sleep and waking. Suddenly I thought I understood. Jackrabbit = hare. Hare + the two fingers raised = harelip. Red paint on Tennyson’s face = port-wine stain. Harelip + port-wine stain = Colonel Purton. If he meant Colonel Purton was the jackrabbit, who was the other man?

  It was the small owl-ridden hours of the night but I was so stirred by these revelations and inspirations that I climbed away from Rosalee and slipped through the quiet cabin to Tennyson’s room. I had no qualms about going in and waking him, I was so strangely agitated. I shook his shoulder and he awoke with a serene expression on his face. The moon was helpful with its light in the little window. He knew I was neither thief nor murderer.

  ‘Is the jackrabbit in the drawing a man with a harelip and a red stain on his face?’

  Well, he made no response at first. Maybe he was sweeping the debris of sleep off his thoughts. Then he screwed up his eyes and nodded.

  ‘And who is the other man, Tennyson, who is that?’

  Tennyson took a hand slowly out of the sheets and sacks and slowly slowly raised it and then at last pointed at his own self.

  ‘You?’ I said. ‘The jackrabbit attacked you? The jackrabbit hurt you?’

  And he nodded again. Then he turned over and went back to his snoring.

  I returned to my own bed, pondering, wondering.

  If Colonel Purton had attacked Tennyson Bouguereau, well, why did he do that? If it wasn’t Aurelius Littlefair, who now lived in my thoughts as a fiery demon, then why did Sheriff Flynn say it was, or why did Wynkle King say it?

  The owls in the woods behind went on with their calling. The owl when he calls fluffs out his beard like a little man. Now and then one screeched like a captive girl, and screeched again.

  *

  When a Sunday came and that lie-abed Christian world was at rest I folded the yellow dress and wrapped it in an old square of paper that Rosalee had saved and tied it about with baccy twine. I didn’t want to cut a new length so I used an old piece blackened by tobacco. But it was Peg’s dress, I told myself, and I had no use for it. And if I could get to Petrie’s camp, I told myself, then Tennyson’s Spencer might be somewhere about.

  Those were the reasons I gave myself for going. The true reasons were hidden from me I do not doubt.

  I guess my favourite mule had forgiven me for abandoning him because he took the saddle and bridle without complaint. Since the world is its own master the day was paying no heed to anything but its own effort to light the sky. Glimmer by growing glimmer that wide old sky of Tennessee turned soft blue. Not a cloud dared dirty it. I could feel the sunlight start to raise the hairs on my arms. The underbrush and little oaks seemed to crackle with invisible flames. There was something in the journey that made me happy. But I had no words to say what. Because in truth it was a dangerous journey, a stupid one. My mind would not let me think so. I had the par
cel lashed to the pommel. It bounced there slightly like an unleavened loaf. That was my courage somehow. I thought of the yellow dress nesting in the parcel, folded, clean, and neat.

  Soon I had passed the lawyer Briscoe’s and gazed at the works so far for the new house all stilled and strange. Piles of timber lay under sacking in numbers I actually knew. Upturned heaps of lime and pallets of shingles. I supposed the lawyer Briscoe was asleep on his fine bed in the barn – his hill of a belly rising and falling. And somewhere nesting in new niches, Lana Jane, Virg, and Joe. I heard the chapel bells competing on the warming air in Paris to hasten the citizenry into their Sunday best.

  I skirted the town and got up on the eastern road, looking for the place in the trees where I had last seen Peg.

  I sneaked along, disturbing nothing in the forest and hoping the mule would take his cue from my silence. I could skirt a sleeping bear and never touch its dreams. It seemed as I went that all the incomings and changes of the whitemen passed away. Would I not be obliged to parley with the Chickasaw of the forest? They might kill me just as quick as a whiteman. Or if I was clever like my mother and could enter by the narrow doors of their friendship all would be well. Straight is the gate but once inside I would find generosity.

  But the Chickasaw were only motes now in the corner of an eye.

  At last I saw where my mule had tramped out those weeks ago, disturbing the ground a little, myself swaying in the saddle with my wound. This was the opening to Peg’s secret way and I was intending to thread backwards along it. The little parcel with the yellow dress speaking to me without saying a word. The slight jingle of the metal in the bridle, the soft creak of the saddle under me. Such a great king of creatures is a mule. An emperor and a friend. This fellow was a devil for a thimble of molasses or a sweet apple. Lige Magan’s ragged orchard gave a hundred sweet red apples which he hoarded in the apple room. An apple is a long-lived soul. I was thinking these thoughts and every few paces I was thinking, Peg, like the word and thought of Peg was a repeated note in an old song. All the birds of the wood were very glad of the summer – as the morning burgeoned and opened its hands, they went firing among the new leaves like the gentlest of bullets. Greens against greens, half-seen fires of feathers, a busyness and bluster that delighted me as I walked the mule along. All the while the bird-blue sky reached down to me through the branches, the soft light of the sun rested on the turns of metal and the polished leather. The mule’s great ears like a crazy gunsight.