A Thousand Moons

by Sebastian Barry

  We were already cutting sand lugs and so it was myself and Peg with the big knives chopping the finished leaves and Lige and Thomas dragged them to the wagon. A sand lug is as heavy sometimes as a stone, there’s a deal of hauling and cursing to harvest them. Maybe Peg looked like only half a girl in body weight but she was strong, I would aver. She might have wrestled a mountain lion and made it wish it had kept to its mountain.

  When you hold a person in high regard it is a great pleasure just to gaze on them, just to look at them moving through the normal air of a day, just to notice how they have a habit of this or that, the turn of a hand or how maybe the person, this person that you revere, turns up their chin, or raises their arms to put a tie on their hair. Even their anger can be a kind of strange elixir. Their strength is like something good said among people.

  *

  Just as I had done for Peg, it was a preacher called Jodocus Troutfetter who wrote a letter for Jas Jonski, even though as far as I knew, he had gone to school in Nashville. He was always writing at Mr Hicks’s store, long lines of orders for this and that. Maybe that wasn’t the same thing as speaking your heart. Speaking your heart is the devil of a business. Straight talking might do the job for Peg but the reverend wasn’t so minded. I kept this letter because there was something in it that put me in mortal fear – I didn’t understand it, maybe, and then, I did:

  My dear Winona Cole,

  This missive is being written down by the Rev. J. Troutfetter at the express direction of Mr Jas Jonski Esq. of Paris, TN, originally of the city of Nashville. Though indeed I have my letters, I fear I might not by my own means express the truth. Dear Winona, pursuant to the love I feel for thee and in reference to our recent desire for a worthy betrothal in the Methodist church of Paris, TN, I hereby and to thee declare that my wish and love remain intacter and that if there have been events to draw regret from a human heart I profess to possession of same and wish in all amplitude & greatness of spirit to REPEAT and REINSTATE my vow to love thee and marry thee before the gathered congregation of the elders, ministers, preachers, and members of the above said church.

  ‘For a man may sin and yet be brought to good.’

  Again and again I say to thee I have only REGRET for any harm you believe done to thee, for which harm I hereby allocate a sense of PENANCE & SORROW and hope you will see fit again to GATHER ME TO THY BOSOM and altogether UNITE with the fond and remorseful undersigned, JAMES HENRYK JONSKI.

  Then he signed it, and scribbled in what looked like his own hand: Please Winona I do love you. Maybe he thought that was the clincher. Maybe he meant everything he said.

  He had sent it to me at my place of work, viz. the lawyer Briscoe’s. I read it at my little table newly set up in the barn. When I looked up from the pages the lawyer Briscoe’s head was cocked sideways, looking at me. He didn’t say anything, he didn’t ask about the letter, though he might have, if he assumed it was on his business. If you can hide the fact that a bladed wind is blowing through you, I did. I felt as small as a wren. I felt the world was just a great boulder pressing on my body. It might be as well to give way to it, to let it crush me, I thought. The religious lingo was a blade to slay me. For a moment I felt I would have to marry him not because there was an ounce of me that wanted to, but because of the official terms I had been addressed with, like a treaty paper between Washington and the Sioux.

  On the way home I gave it to Lige and asked what he thought of it and he read it right there with the reins loose on the mare’s back and the animal shuddering with a desire to head home.

  ‘The Reverend Troutfetter – don’t believe I know that fella,’ he said, and folded the letter and put it back in its cover. ‘You read that to John Cole. He’ll know what to do.’

  The land was trying to loosen itself from the royal heat of summer. The mare plodded along. When we were within a hundred yards of the cabin I leapt down from the traverse and ran along the track to the house.

  *

  John Cole was very sombre as I asked could I read the letter to him. Of course he was so weak he couldn’t even raise his head. Thomas McNulty added to the hump of his pillow an old army jacket and then John Cole was ready to assist me.

  I was afraid to have Thomas listening in the room because he was still able-bodied and I still had a terror of him going off to town in rage. The rage of Thomas McNulty was very simple. It happened seldom but when it did it was like the anger of the righteous angels. He knew the absolute menace of the world. He knew it was a place so knotted with evil that good could only hope to unknot a tiny few threads of it. But he was a man that believed in the great freeing possibility of the untoward good outcome of matters. He would give his life for that. In fact he thought he was obliged to and many times nearly had. My safety was the second article of his religion. The state of John Cole, to which he brought soups, and the first berries of fall, and warm water so he could bathe him in the bed, was the first. After all without John Cole he wouldn’t have been inclined to see a purpose in life. They had walked in destitution through ruin and destruction many times. They had found this verdant haven with Lige Magan, their old comrade in arms. It was all the one. Where John Cole abided, there was to be found Thomas with his simple heart. Their love was the first commandment of my world – Thou shalt hope to love like them. We have all to meet many souls and hearts along the way – we are obliged to – we must pray we can encounter one or two Thomases and John Coles on that journey. Then we can say life was worth the living and love was worth the gamble.

  Thomas was quite content to let me alone with John Cole, indeed he was. Indeed, he said, he thought I should be alone with him.

  ‘I just go and feed those damn mules,’ he said. ‘I’ll feed them good oats for the work on the morrow.’

  Then he was just on the cusp of going and then it seemed to me he was hoping I would change my mind and tell him not to go and then when I did not, he went.

  So I read the letter to John. He nodded and nodded the while. He was listening hard. When I finished I looked at his quiet face and thought again that for a rough boy who had walked out of New England as a child and was the great-grandson of an Indian and as poor as ever man was he sure was a fine-looking person. He could have run a country if anyone had so asked him. His head was missing the inch in its width that maybe a normal head would have – it was narrow, like a little gap between dwellings. He was a shadow person – a place of shadows. All as gentle as a child with me and all as fierce as a buffalo in battle. John Cole, the keel of my boat. Thomas the oars and the sails.

  ‘I do know how that strike me,’ he said, his words as sombre as his face. I could hear the strange moisture of his illness trying to stop the words in his throat. He said nothing for a long while. He was struggling to surface from a deep deep pool of difficulty. Then his face opened again like that spot in the woods touched suddenly by stray sunlight.

  ‘It strike me as a confession,’ he said at last.

  *

  Weeks went by and then Colonel Purton in all his military glory arrived at the farm. I could swear he had added more braid and silver to his uniform as if to suggest the grave anxiety he felt, an anxiety clearly expressed in his strange dark face. He was like a man just awoken from sleep. His very words seemed heavier to him, and slower. I was beginning to wonder had something assailed him, an apoplexy or the like. Sure enough his left arm seemed useless to him, and he rode with the reins gripped oddly in the right. He had never been out to Lige’s before but of course Lige knew him well enough. Lige liked to know the people he was expected to talk to. The colonel had ridden down to the house in the company of twenty militia men, single file like a black snake. With all the turning about of recent events Lige Magan was inclined quietly to prop a rifle on the porch, as if it always rested there. It was just near noon and the sun was at his most endowed. Such a blaze of light covered the ragged acre even though we were stepping deeper into the year. The men had been in for a feed and had larrupped down without
discrimination anything even only cousin to food that Rosalee put in front of them. We were in the midst of the main harvest and there was plenty to do, a fact that sat in our faces too, giving us that stunned idiot look of harvesters.

  Tennyson the previous night had gone off in the darkness towards Paris. Lige Magan had given him one of the mules despite a mule being a more needed creature than a man. But Tennyson had undertaken to send the mule back with a boy for twenty cents. Oh yes, a good mule was gold. Anyhow we had walked out to track with him into the wagon road. He had had his possessions in saddle bags across the rump of the mule and his Spencer was concealed under a cloth. We didn’t know what a college would make of a new student arriving thus but needs must in that ferocious time.

  I don’t need to itemise the grief of Rosalee in losing her brother though as Lige Magan said, ‘they didn’t build Nashville too far from Paris.’ This was small sop to Rosalee. Being a person of infinite feeling she tried her best to contain those feelings in her breast, she tried almost to bursting. She had accepted the wisdom of Tennyson trying his hand at ‘Fisk’ – the name of the college. There was no doubt he was a beautiful singer. And as people who had earned their livelihood from the hall in Grand Rapids, that is to say, Thomas McNulty, myself and John Cole, in the long ago, we felt a strange envy of Tennyson’s adventure. But here was a place where the whirring blades of our story might cut him to pieces. There, in unknown Nashville, he might flourish and blossom. He was certainly a rose among men. We had walked back in silence all the same to the cabin.

  So now we were a good man short, the best worker Lige had, and Lige was wanting to get back out into the tobacco crop.

  Nevertheless Lige didn’t feel he could leave the colonel and his men sweltering in that furnace noon, so everyone trooped into the parlour till it was just bodies wall to wall. Rosalee asked Colonel Purton would he take anything to drink or eat and the colonel begged of her water for him and his men.

  As she went out on this errand I heard her mutter to herself: ‘What a terrible stink of men.’

  ‘We like kittens burning on a bonfire,’ he said.

  He looked like no kitten that ever a cat had spawned.

  ‘We was sad to hear about Sheriff Flynn going to Jacksonville,’ said Lige.

  ‘For all I can see I the only true authority left in this forsaken county,’ he said, ‘unless you like to take your orders from renegades and rebels.’

  ‘So Frank Parkman, he don’t get your vote?’ said Lige Magan.

  ‘Frank Parkman? Not when he signs up young Wynkle King as his deputy, not when he does that, no, sir.’

  ‘Well that don’t sound like much of a protection against the evils of the world,’ said John Cole, recently ‘risen from the dead’ as Rosalee put it, but still weak.

  ‘What going to be the outcome of all this?’ said Lige. ‘You got a notion of that?’

  ‘Outcome is, I can get no notice of intent from the governor nor anyone other. Outcome is, Aurelius Littlefair a goddamned judge of the US circuit court. Outcome is, every freedman best watch his back, or,’ he said, accepting a mug of spring water from Rosalee, ‘her back. That the outcome.’

  ‘Ain’t Tennessee this long time in the Union and all that settled?’ said Thomas McNulty, in his most serious voice.

  The colonel leaned back in his chair in so much as he could in such a crowded company.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  Some of the militia men laughed, not because it was intended to be humorous, but just maybe at the bluntness of the colonel.

  ‘Anyhow,’ the colonel said, ‘I come out with other things of import. That young boy Jas Jonski been killed.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I was trembling then. As if all the story of Jas Jonski was an electric eel and it had stung me.

  Did I feel a moment of sorrow for him? I did. Maybe a few moments. But then I asked myself, why was Colonel Purton going to the trouble of coming out to tell us this? Dread flooded into every crevice of my body. In an instant Peg stepped an inch closer to me. I could feel her tense body in a long seam against mine. It was as if someone had tipped a cup of poison into my mouth. I pushed out through the men because I felt my belly boiling. Out on the sere grass I vomited up my vittles. I bent over like a bow and vomited. I was panting like a hurried mule.

  ‘You white as a whiteman,’ said Peg, standing gingerly by me, her hand on my hot back.

  ‘I can’t – talk,’ I blurted, and vomited again.

  There’s nothing elegant about vomiting, that’s a fact.

  Colonel Purton came out after us as if maybe he was thinking he had best keep the rabbit near since he had the rabbit near. But the truth was I had no idea what was in his head. Shades and shadows were his business. Quiet creeping along shadow-frequented ways. He said to Peg he would be much obliged if he could have a few words with me alone. Peg asked me with a look if that was all right, I wordlessly said it was. So I sat down on a withered old stump and tried to wipe the vomit off my face as best I could. My hair was still kept short so at least that wasn’t dreeping with the stuff.

  The colonel surprised me by kneeling down beside me – as if he meant to propose marriage. That was not what was on his mind of course. It brought his head just about level with mine. I thought he meant to seem harmless by so doing. I can’t say he succeeded in that.

  ‘You like to wear them trews,’ said the colonel, ‘I remember. But I know you a girl. You Winona Cole, John Cole’s daughter. I talking to the lawyer Briscoe and he telling me about you. And oh, he don’t care to say too much, because he has the discreet manners of a lawyer.’

  He shifted on his knee. I guess the ground was a little hard and hot for him, and his knees weren’t young.

  ‘Jas Jonski he killed about midnight last night. Someone just stuck a knife into him. Stuck a knife in maybe twenty times. He all covered in blood of course. No matter, he maybe died at the first strike, Dr Tharpe says, he don’t know, but he supposes. Long thin blade into the heart anyhow, one of them. Very, you understand, missy, precise – expert you might say.’

  He was looking at me all the while to see how I was reacting. I wasn’t exactly smiling but I wasn’t not smiling either. I thought, you have got to keep an even keel, Winona. You have got to remember how dangerous the world is and that here is a mighty patch of danger and you have got to live through it. Be wise, Winona, and live through it. Trouble always comes and no use wishing it didn’t. Thing is, to get through it – and out the other side. If there is another side.

  ‘I guess I was told by someone that you like to carry a knife? Many Indians do maybe. You carry one?’

  I bent to my right boot and pulled out my knife and held it out to him.

  ‘That a long thin blade, right enough,’ he said. ‘Can I look closer at it? You don’t mind?’

  I nodded and he took the sharp thing and then he held it closer to his eyes and squinted and I guess he thought he saw something there.

  ‘You see this, missy – just a mess of red along the blade? You see that. It hard to see.’

  ‘That blood,’ I said.

  ‘That blood, that right, whose blood though?’ he said. ‘Whose?’ he said again, sounding like one of our familiar owls.

  ‘That me skinning rabbits for Rosalee. She bring them in and then I skin them. Peg don’t like to skin, she don’t got the knack of it.’

  ‘But you do? You an expert with the knife?’

  ‘Not so bad.’

  ‘You not thinking that this the blood of that boy Jas Jonski?’

  He said it like a bit of idle talk, real easy.

  ‘No. I ain’t thinking that because it ain’t. I don’t care for Jas Jonski maybe but I ain’t inclined to kill him either. I never killed no one.’

  ‘You killed the famous Fat Man worked for Tach Petrie. I heard you did. You killed him, with your little señorita gun.’

  ‘That were in a battle. In a fight.’

  ‘You think love ain’t a fight?
In my experience, love, love the biggest fight there is, right enough.’

  Then he seemed to turn away from this thought.

  ‘I want to believe you, missy, but in my line of business belief’s not worth much. The lawyer Briscoe say you a clever person though, I grant you, his best boy, he called you – even though you a girl.’

  Then Colonel Purton laughed a strange metallic laugh.

  ‘Lawyer Briscoe know me as well as anyone.’

  ‘Oh, yes, he vouches for you, he does. And I say to you I like that man. He as straight as a mason’s plumb line, he is. No doubt. So, missy, let’s say you the innocent party, then let’s ask ourselves, all right, if it weren’t no bright clever Indian girl in a pair of boy’s trews, then who? Here’s a few names. Now you the friend of all these people here,’ and he gestures towards the cabin behind him, ‘so I don’t expect you to speak against nobody. I will say the names and I will look in your pretty brown eyes and you will tell me what you thinking just by some small movement. You ready?’

  ‘I don’t know who might have done it.’

  ‘That’s fine, that’s fine. Now – Tennyson Bouguereau. How about him? He were seen in town last night.’

  ‘That’s because he was staying with his friend before he catch the train to Nashville in the morning early.’

  ‘He took a train to Nashville?’

  ‘He did. He going to a big college there. The lawyer Briscoe got that for him. Likely he don’t go killing a man afore he catches a train.’

  ‘The lawyer Briscoe, huh?’

  ‘Yeh, a boy just brought back the mule this morning. Gave him twenty cent for the work.’