A Thousand Moons

by Sebastian Barry

  ‘You got it?’ said Peg, beaming.

  ‘I do. I didn’t believe I would,’ I said, the weight of the rifle familiar in my hands.

  ‘That an old Spencer carbine,’ said Aurelius Littlefair. ‘Seen better days.’

  I was surprised to hear him say that. Maybe he was right. Maybe it wasn’t as shining and new as I remembered it. Somehow Tennyson’s pride in it had kept it new in my thoughts.

  ‘Well, I am glad we were able to return your property, I am glad. I am regular glad,’ said Mr Littlefair. ‘It has your name engraved?’

  ‘Not mine,’ I said, showing it to him.

  ‘Is that Luther then that nailed his ninety-five theses to the door at Wittenberg?’ said Mr Littlefair.

  ‘I thinking not that Luther. Luther Magan it’s for.’

  As soon as the word Magan was out of my mouth like a rat from a bolthole I regretted it. Aurelius Littlefair didn’t immediately react. He looked back at Peg a moment and was nodding his head, and then he tapped a finger on the name. I was still holding the gun as if some unknown sergeant had cried out Inspection, Arms. Maybe I strengthened my grip on it then.

  ‘Well, Magan. So Peg, you be friendly now with a boy knows Magans.’

  ‘How so, Aurelius?’ said Peg, not having a notion what he meant by it.

  ‘Luther Magan, father of Elijah – yellowleg, just like those others with him. Traitors all. Let me see, ain’t it John Cole? Ain’t it something – something McNulty, an Irish poltroon? So now, you the young Indian lives with them? I think you are. But ain’t you a girl? By the soul of Tach Petrie, God rest him, I think you are.’

  ‘She ain’t,’ cried out Peg.

  ‘Well, he is,’ said Aurelius Littlefair, quite indignant.

  This was not a conversation I could relish. I had no clear notion what to do but the blood came up into my face and I blushed like a person with heatstroke. Turning away, I naturally brought the rifle with me. Then I more or less burst forth from the armoury, leaping the few steps, and raced away down to the water. I knew it wasn’t going to be much of a plan to try and gallop away from a settlement of renegades armed to the teeth, but I had no other inspiration. I was a girl with a gun and I was running and soon I would vault up onto the mule. That was my glorious plan. I heard someone rushing after me and felt they were about to overwhelm me. I was ready only for an assault. My whole back of me cringed to expect it. Oh Jesus. I would have said that Aurelius Littlefair was a demon of a runner, skinny snake that he was, and would fetch me and fillet me when he did. He would take the skin off my face and boil it in front of me, my eyes rolling in their hollows. I could feel his touch, I could feel his touch.

  But it wasn’t Aurelius Littlefair, it was Peg. I got to the poor mule. He reared back from my worrisome hurry.

  ‘Let me go, let me go,’ I said. ‘You can’t be catching me now. I ain’t willing to be caught.’

  ‘I ain’t running after you, I running with you,’ said Peg. She stared into my face and nodded. ‘I coming with you.’

  If I had been given a choice of what was to happen then she coming with me would have been the rosette, the medal, and the prize. No doubt. Up the slope the camp that had seemed so quiet and empty was now teeming with faces and voices. Aurelius Littlefair was shouting that I was to be stopped. He was shouting at Peg to do that very thing. He knew that once I was among the trees only a forest fire could find me out. I jumped onto the mule’s back and Peg scrambled up after me.

  ‘Go, go,’ I bid my mule, and kicked him on with fury, and he blundered out across the ford of the river, throwing up great fumes and blasts of water, and when he reached the far bank he took the slope like a champion. A mule is a person of great spirit, he will always try and serve you though it bursts his heart. Whether there were bullets after us I do not know nor hear them in memory – but I suppose even Aurelius Littlefair, killer of men and hanger of freedmen, would not fire on that rare and beauteous Peg.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  On setting out I had tied the old holster to my mule in the dim hope it might carry the rifle home. Now it was, such happiness invaded me. The wandering folk that passed us on the road looked hungry and gaunt as ever. Even those on horseback didn’t seem to understand what a high delight it was to be alive. My utmost dream had been to find the Spencer and there it was slugging in the holster.

  At the back of my happiness was the thought that it might be a dangerous thing to be bringing Peg back to Lige’s farm. If she thought so too she made no mention of it. She took my mood into herself and it seemed to us that even the birds of the woods were in accord with our happiness.

  How long had I been so weighed down that I had forgotten this lightness of heart? After all, was I even eighteen years old? I didn’t truly know. Born under the Full Buck Moon. Somehow with Peg behind me I felt I was returning not only to the place of refuge that was Lige Magan’s farm but to a more distant place of safety. Somewhere out on the plains of a country we didn’t know was called Nebraska Territory or Wyoming but thought was called our heartland and a homeplace never to be lost. Where as a little child I had sat in safety with my mother and sister, enclosed in a teepee with all the magical symbols of protection marked inside and out. With all the grasses spreading away in every direction and sometimes the passing thunder of the buffalo and sometimes the silent thunder of the lupins with their clots of blue and purple flames. Returned not in body there of course. Better to say that feeling of simple freedom returned to me across the farmed and wild acres between me and Wyoming. Because I had been allowed by fate to find Tennyson’s Spencer.

  We were coming to evening now when all the colours were made simple in their hearts and all the browns were taken away and one sombre brown alone remained and all the blues. It was as if I had never seen this Tennessee with proper eyes. For Peg’s people it had been their Wyoming. Maybe you could count the remnant Chickasaw on the fingers of a hand. But she in herself seemed to me to be a whole nation. Her beauty was a legion crowd.

  How to say any of this to Thomas and John Cole? I did not know.

  I knew that they might be out with the harrow pulling away weeds between the tobacco rows despite the day being Sunday. Beyond the eyes of preachers and priests. You couldn’t get your hair cut on a Sabbath in Tennessee but weeds and hornworms didn’t observe the holy days. The chapel of a hornworm is the tasty sand lugs. Maybe Lige Magan was topping and looping and so risking the two dollar fifty cent fine. Maybe Tennyson and Rosalee were patiently picking off the hornworms so as not to leave him alone in his disgrace. Maybe the wild animals passing unseen at the margins of the fields understood the urgent imperatives of crops and maybe the sun was so weak now it was engreying the vanishing woods and tempting out the field crickets. With their broken fiddles, as Thomas McNulty once said. I did not know. I did not know. It was a happiness to know nothing but the trotting of the mule and Peg’s hands gripping my sides so tightly I thought she would surely tear my shirt. The warmth of her body now and then tipping against me so welcome I thought she might tear my heart. Tear it and mend it in the one breath.

  *

  Sunday might be a good day for miracles or it might not. In our childish exultation were those little fertile seeds of worry. As we drew closer to the familiar woods and fields even the mule seemed to drag his hooves like a poor man who maybe had started out so sprightly on his gallows walk. Wanting to be brave since terror would not serve him well. Had I committed a daughterly crime by going back to the danger of the Petrie camp? How would I tell them who Peg was without further indicting myself in that regard? And why had I even been so fearsomely fixed on getting back the gun? A wagon of thought that drove itself on and on and myself only the hapless rider. What odds to Tennyson? as Lige Magan had said. And all the possible ruckus I might bring down now on all our heads. Well, I hadn’t stolen Peg, she had stolen herself. She had stolen herself away. And it might be thought that I would be alarmed by that and not have a notion what to do with her next. Bu
t that didn’t trouble me even for a moment. The stream reaches another stream and they mingle their waters as natural as you like, that was what it seemed. There was nothing in the girl astride the mule behind me that I feared.

  We saw storm clouds moiling on the far mountains. But here in Lige’s fields the sun had tried again to bleach bright greens to white. The effort of the day was felt in the relief thereof. Rest indeed. The scrubby land before the cabin, an acre of shallow soil too thin to plough, that was good only for an old mule out to pasture maybe, was the very ground over which Tach Petrie had tried to lead his men against us long ago. And he would have killed us all had we not killed him. That was sure. I heard the evening voices in the house. So their breaking of the Sabbath was done.

  Tennyson Bouguereau was sitting on the porch in his accustomed corner. The redbud tree that someone had planted years ago was neither too dense nor scant. Its big flame of flowers burned without moving. I heard Rosalee talking suddenly loudly and laughing suddenly. It’s a wonder all that talk that goes on in lives and never much considered or remembered. Never prompted too much by actual thought and no matter. Just the merciful birdsong of whatever bird we are.

  I didn’t know how much notice he was taking of me and Peg, arriving on the mule with stolid steps. Just the little thump of hooves on hardened ground. I clambered down in a strange excitement that seemed to include the necessity not to call out to him and hitched the mule and helped Peg down and reached for the heavy Spencer in its holster and dragged it out. Just then I glanced at Tennyson and I saw he had risen to his feet. I walked up to the porch holding the rifle across my right arm. Tennyson forsaking his bower came the length of the porch. He gave no hint of what he was thinking. He walked down the sere old steps. He came towards me quietly. We stopped near each other in the same moment. I nodded my head, and offered him the Spencer. Without hesitation he took it into his possession. He looked at it with the intelligence of the emperor Aurelius and touched the word LUTHER on the breech.

  ‘I thank thee, Winona,’ he said.

  *

  The summer passed and Peg was decreed the finest picker of hornworms off tobacco leaves in the history of Tennessee – according to Thomas McNulty. It only took a day to know Thomas. John Cole was more difficult to know quickly.

  Matters must have been moving and moiling according to their own ghostly rules. The new governor was turning everything about.

  ‘As if yon war were never fought,’ said Thomas McNulty.

  We never had lived all easy in our minds at Lige’s farm and we didn’t expect any change in that.

  We heard that Zach Petrie’s camp over at West Sandy Creek was broken up and he went back with his followers to his great farm west of Paris. It was said it all lay in ruins and he would need a long course of work to mend it.

  ‘Who he get to work that? No one. Ain’t a sensible freedman touch him with a long stick.’

  Late in the summer Aurelius Littlefair was appointed a judge of Henry County. The lawyer Briscoe shook his grizzled head.

  ‘I got to plead a case before a hangman?’ he said.

  Things like that were said in his temporary quarters.

  Now we wondered not only what would happen to us but what would happen to the likes of Colonel Purton. Rumour was the militia was to be disbanded.

  Then in the town a freedman called Imre Grimm, who Rosalee knew because she had heard him speak at a meeting of the Freedmen’s Bureau, was arrested. He was supposed to have attacked the pretty wife of a carpetbagger. Aurelius Littlefair didn’t even get to put on his judge’s suit. A bunch of citizens dragged Imre Grimm out of the jail. John Perry was told to bring his travelling forge. They stoked up the fire and hung Imre Grimm above the forge on a long chain. They cut off his fingers so he couldn’t climb away. They cut off other parts. The whole town came out to see. Children too. When he was dead at length they divided up his blackened body for souvenirs.

  ‘Now truly we are citizens of the devil’s country,’ said the lawyer Briscoe.

  There was other news to hear shortly after. Sheriff Flynn threw in his work as sheriff and upped sticks and went down with his wife to Jacksonville in Florida. The mysterious troubles he was dealing with turned out to be his wife’s illness. She had been consumptive for a long while and now the doc said she would die in another Tennessee winter. It was strange to me how he simply walked out of my story but I was also glad he loved her well enough for that. Yet it was one person less against the flood of Littlefair and his like. The lawyer Briscoe said that Sheriff Flynn had also been told that he would be killed if he didn’t change his tune. The threats had come as a little run of nameless letters. The lawyer Briscoe said that in his opinion it could only have been someone in the pay of Littlefair.

  ‘A homo sacer if ever there was one,’ said the lawyer Briscoe. ‘Any man could kill him now without penalty. And he a judge.’

  When he said things like that I always felt a pang of disquiet for Peg. She had been a child of all that mayhem.

  Next thing we heard, Frank Parkman himself was elected sheriff, though, as Lige Magan said, he wasn’t much more than a boy. This was strange to John Cole, because Frank Parkman had ridden out so often with Sheriff Flynn, and might have been thought to be in cahoots with him. Not so, it seemed. But then no heart was clear, no soul was verified, in those times.

  ‘Less we slaving black men and reining back the war the economy of Tennessee ain’t nothing,’ said the lawyer Briscoe, but he wasn’t saying it to anyone especially.

  In this strange time maybe it was Peg only keeping us from vicious harms. She didn’t have her letters and I undertook to write a note for her to Zach Petrie, saying she was in good order and ‘was in hopes to visit him soon’. Whatever was the reason, and we didn’t trouble to think too deeply to find one, since there was no point, no expected posse of violent intent came to us. It was terribly strange to write a letter starting Dear Mr Petrie.

  We slaved at our crops and the lawyer Briscoe now doubly defiant raised up his house.

  He was intent on doing more than that too. He came out to talk to Lige one open-hearted summer’s day. We sat with him on the porch where there was merciful shade. Peg had a caution against the lawyer Briscoe and chose to stay out of his way – she had set off into the woods with a gun when she saw him coming, thinking maybe to shoot something for supper. He said he had written to the Negro college in Nashville and it was a fact that freedmen of any age could attend there. He said they had a Negro band that travelled about the country raising funds and he thought that Tennyson having such a great fund of old songs might be very welcome there. Rosalee listened gape-eyed.

  ‘My brother he can’t do that, he got an injury,’ she said quietly. Tennyson was out back somewhere but she maybe didn’t know exactly where. His old chair at the end of the porch was empty anyhow.

  ‘He can speak for himself on the matter, I expect,’ said the lawyer Briscoe, in his brittlest voice.

  ‘I speak for him since he can barely speak for hisself,’ said Rosalee, rolling back the ball.

  But Tennyson was strengthening day by day. We had all heard him singing again at his work. He had so many songs, not just the sweet old work songs, but other things, and I loved when he sang ‘The Famous Flower of Serving Men’. He was talking just about the same as before, despite what his sister said. Now for Lige this was in the country of miracles but of course also he needed Tennyson desperately to work the farm with him and the others. It was long hours of struggle as it was. Good struggle, but struggle.

  ‘I can’t say I am so filled with joy to hear you say this,’ said Lige doubtfully.

  ‘We got to take him out of danger,’ said the lawyer Briscoe. ‘He ain’t safe here in Henry County. No, sir, he ain’t.’

  The lawyer Briscoe’s face was even redder than it used to be. It was like the great conflagration had reddened him on a permanent basis. He had said the last words with that rush of righteous anger I knew so well in him. When
his ideas were gainsaid. But he also could ride past that anger and leave it behind for what it was, a toothless snake in the grass.

  ‘I ain’t fixing to leave you worse off than before but that man needs taking out of here, that what I can say.’

  ‘No one of us be safe now,’ said Lige, in the quiet voice of truth.

  ‘If I can say,’ I said, thinking this was the time to say it, ‘I heard it was Colonel Purton struck Tennyson, not the Petries.’

  ‘Where you hear that, Winona?’ said Thomas McNulty.

  Even John Cole laughed as if I had said the craziest thing on the menu.

  ‘I sorry, Winona,’ he said, ‘you snuck up on me with that one.’

  ‘Maybe she heard right?’ said Thomas McNulty, affronted at John Cole.

  ‘That can’t ever be,’ said the lawyer Briscoe.

  Just then Peg came round the cabin with a brace of rabbits on her back. She looked pretty wild with her long black hair and her gun and the rabbits dangling there forlorn of life. The lawyer Briscoe nodded at her. He didn’t say anything about her. But he was looking at her with that head-turned-sideways look of his.

  ‘I best be going. God help an old man in this heat,’ he said.

  Then he was walking down to his buggy and stirring up the horses stunned by sunlight.

  Rosalee was silently crying in her seat.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  As if the threat to Lige of losing Tennyson wasn’t enough, now John Cole went down with the illness that assailed him now and then. He went down to the letter of the phrase – collapsed suddenly midstride as he came back in from the fields. Then it was Thomas McNulty and Tennyson carrying him into his room like a wounded warrior. His face was the white of a lily and all his long thin self as bendy as a pair of trews. They heaved him into the bed. They knew all they could do was wait and attend him.