A Thousand Moons

by Sebastian Barry

  ‘See, I thinking if I can just find out who killed Jas Jonski maybe I find out who killed other folk, or who might kill other folk in the coming future. That how my mind working. Hope you don’t object to me being so open with you. The general state of peace and death is militia business. Now Sheriff Parkman if I may so call him he the one said you were skilled with a knife.’

  ‘I don’t see how he would know that,’ I said.

  ‘He said you threatened to stick a knife in him one time – maybe this knife,’ he said, handing it back to me. I stuck it straight in my boot. ‘That ain’t true?’

  ‘That ain’t even a small bit true,’ I said, ‘I said—’ But it seemed to me too complicated to say what I said and why I said it that time in the livery, since it involved the offering of a kiss.

  ‘Anyhow – all right – let’s try some other names. I going to look in your eyes now when I say them. Lige Magan. Lige Magan hisself. How you feel about Lige?’

  He was watching my eyes like a hovering hawk.

  ‘Not much,’ I said.

  ‘See I know if you think I come close to something your eyes going to hop. Like a rabbit, like one of those rabbits you talking about. Skinning, you said. With your little knife. Well, outside the town you gotta skin rabbits, I know that. So that’s how I’ll skin this rabbit. All right – so let me say the name of that old boy in there, now I don’t know him, but he was a felon, that I know, and I heard other things about him that I don’t know what to say about. Thomas McNulty.’

  He was staring, staring. I was locking my eyes let me tell you.

  ‘Now, how you feeling about – well, I should say first Rosalee Bouguereau, but if I get a hop for her I don’t know but I’ll – I think I’ll cancel Christmas. Anyhow how you feeling about John Cole. John Cole? I don’t get no hop for that? I think I should. Maybe Injun eyes just don’t behave like whiteman eyes. I don’t know.’

  He rose creakily from his knee and rubbed it under the black cloth.

  ‘Anyhow, good to talk to you. I can see how clever you are. I suppose commiserations are in order on the death of your fiancé.’

  ‘He weren’t. He was, but then he weren’t.’

  ‘Well. I have to tell you, missy, that Sheriff Parkman favours you for the crime. But I don’t know if I do.’

  Then he went over to Peg where she was hiding as she thought out of sight in the bushes at the side of the house. And he spoke to her and I couldn’t hear what they were saying. But I could tell it wasn’t just as friendly as my talking to him. He stood over her in an ugly way and waved his fist at her. So then he walked back to the cabin and called out his men and off they went in a sudden pall of grey dust.

  I asked Peg what he had said to her.

  ‘He said he knew who I was and had a notion to whup me but it was just too damn hot, that’s what he said.’

  ‘Maybe he thinking you killed Jas Jonski.’

  ‘Maybe I did. Then he asking did Winona Cole, that you, go to town last night and I told him that you went sleeping not too long after dark,’ said Peg, ‘which was nearly true.’

  ‘It was true,’ I said. ‘You was beside me in the bed.’

  ‘Well, yes indeed, but, we weren’t all the time sleeping.’

  ‘No, that true.’

  *

  ‘Yes, yes, he ask us all the same questions, where was you at such and such a time, and that thunderous crowd of silent militia men watching, watching, goddamn it,’ said Thomas McNulty, looking as glum and frightened as a chicken when the hungry yardwoman sneaks close to try and throttle it.

  John Cole though not yet a recovered man was all the same pacing up and down the parlour like he was trying to race his shadow.

  I knew just why they were so dismayed. For ten years they cared for me and watched over me. Even when Starling Carlton stole me away on his own business, Thomas followed, crossing all the way from Tennessee to Wyoming. We were doing about forty miles a day, he was maybe a little slower and anyway got a late start. He didn’t find me till Wyoming. I wondered how he had suffered, going all that way, not even knowing if he would ever find me again. His heart thumping ten times a day at the thought of failure. And John Cole waiting back at Lige’s like maybe he was going to be thinking Thomas let him down – Thomas just thinking that, and the snake-venom of that thought poisoning his blood. It’s a long way to go and never to question your love. That was the measure of Thomas McNulty. But you can’t watch over your children for evermore. Day dawns when a child has to watch over himself. I knew well I had reached that time some time back. I surely had. Now all I could see was the torture in Thomas’s face and the forced march of John Cole’s pacing. It was a terrible sight to me. But they knew I was in trouble deep. They knew. Colonel Purton had told them too, Sheriff Parkman was of the confident opinion it was me that killed Jas. That’s what he said, over and over, to each of them as he questioned them. ‘I don’t maybe think so, but that what he thinking,’ he said, the colonel, over and over. He that likely struck down Tennyson just to make a signed paper to go get Zach Petrie. More than likely. Pity Tennyson never clapped eyes on him, and could say. Guess Colonel Purton was lucky that way or that was just how things fell.

  Here was the big moment, the moment when I would sort things out for myself. But now here was Peg, my handsome, lithesome, perfect Peg, all run into the equation. I beheld the fright and fear of those I loved and revered and my own heart quailed in my chest. I looked over at my Peg all sweet and hard in the same breath and I wondered at the folly of God that He wanted these things to happen to me when it would have been easier to ignore me, go round me to the next girl, even to forgo me and assign me in the upshot to some whiteman’s hell. I was almost happy to go there if by going Thomas and John would be assuaged and Peg would not be heart-broken. But there are some things that have only a splayed hand of outcomes and none of them good. That’s what it felt like. The deep fear of the buffalo when it’s being ridden down, the hunter close as a thought, and the barrel of a gun on the very cusp of issuing deathly fire. That balancing strange moment before death. The eyes bulging out with terror and anger. That’s what it felt like, in that moment. Maybe the buffalo has her finest moment then, a moment of bright clarity, when all she loves is made plain to her, the prairie, the lupins, the harsh grasses, the long gasp of winter and the sudden bounty of spring. Made plain just in the second before she loses it.

  ‘You the folks I attend to best in this world,’ I said at length, ‘but now I ask you to sit you down at that table and I will try and tell you what I am going to do.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The curious part of that night was the great storm that blew up out of nowhere and walked across our farm. Big lakes of water hung up in the very air were let loose on the dry earth. Long turning rollers of wind drove against the woods and the woods howled in their agony of protest. That was a terror in itself that it would flatten the corn and there was a sense of blessing in the fact that the tobacco was by then nearly all saved, leaf by heavy leaf. It was most of it bound on the big sticks in the barn. That barn was caulked better than the cabin, and now that Colonel Purton was gone off and the land had decided to give itself a mighty drenching, grounding the very dust his horses had raised, the rain found out every little gape and torn spot in the roof where the shingles had curled in the summer sun. It was the drip-drip-drips then, all over the parlour, over Thomas and John Cole’s heads, over Lige’s dusty boots, over Rosalee’s game pie that she had heaved onto the table. She was making a brave attempt to keep everything as ever and always. A woman so ravaged by presages and presentments found it trebly grievous to live through such moments of clear disaster. I thought, she has had enough of them lately – truly she has. No one said anything about the deluge, not a word.

  *

  When years before Thomas gave himself over to the law and was brought up to Leavenworth to be tried for desertion he did it because he didn’t wish to have more guns, outlaws, or lawmen near where I
abided. At the time I was still a child. The first law for Thomas and John Cole had been theretofore flight. All their born days they fled from dangers and when they found new ones they did their best to break free and flee again. But then I was in their care and Lige’s farm was considered a refuge before all in a time when everywhere was danger so it made no odds where you fled to and it was better to stand your ground with some close hearts and a few rifles. Anyhow running is a young man’s game. Though not old in years exactly I knew the weariness in John Cole required a mode of nursing from Rosalee and Thomas – even Lige had mopped that brow betimes – and there was something in Thomas that spoke of age even if it wasn’t written so much in his face. Men with hard beginnings pay cents on the debt that at length burgeon up to dollars. Though accounted a beauty in his youth it was a mortgaged beauty now. The rats of age were gazing on him from the shadows. Therefore it wasn’t a time for running that would bring likely more ruin against their door.

  I instructed them with my sternest voice they were to do nothing on my account. They were to let me do for myself. When Thomas held up a hand to protest, I held up my fiercest sword of words. Peg laughed at my ferocity but I told her also to remain where she was. Nothing besides my own case was more precarious than hers. She being in effect a child of a renegade people.

  *

  If you could make honey hover in the air it would be Peg. If you could take a sliver of the wildest river and make it a person it would be Peg. If you could touch your lips against a pulsing star it would be Peg. The long, soft, sweet, fierce, dancing, piercing, kissed form of her. With all the sweetness at the centre and all her limbs radiating out like the light of that very star and her face like the best likeness of a goddess but also the face of the most desired person in all the history of the world. So that when I desired her and beheld her I melted against her and was no more and not even truly Winona any more for all the long hours of the night.

  *

  I knew it was time to talk to the lawyer Briscoe in a way I had not managed before. In every story, he would say, there is a good man. The grace of the lawyer Briscoe was that he was the good man in his own story.

  As I rode to see him in the aftermath of that storm – half of Tennessee strewn across the muddied road, great wheel-gouges hewn into the soil as carts and wagons struggled to make way as usual – I greatly desired to run, in spite of my own thoughts. It was morning now but the day itself seemed sluggish and reluctant to appear. I began to wonder what it would be like to make that old journey again to Wyoming and try and find Lakota like me who would welcome me back – maybe Peg too. I thought of the journey I made with Starling Carlton and how he pushed the horses till they were well nigh dead and indeed when finally we reached Fort Laramie his own horse so shattered and ruined he shot it. There were trains now if you were rich that would go even from Paris over to St Louis and then across all that strange majesty and length of miles to the high plains. It would be me and Peg on Lige’s worst horses, we couldn’t be expecting Pegasus and Bucephalus. Three weeks of travelling and creatures to be shot along the way to eat and now the year dipping deeper into itself and soon maybe snow higher up and the start of that sharp killing wind across the plains. And glowering darkness of skies and unfriendly moons staring down. And maybe Lakota people not so glad to see a Chickasaw and one that spoke nothing but English and knew nothing of the work of a camp. They might like her skill with a gun, they might. But was there anyone there who would know me? I could not think so. Many years and many battles and everything torn from its old place and all the hunger and outrage and terror of that life.

  The last wind of the storm tossed across the way and a sunlight prickled through the thinning dark.

  Maybe the lawyer Briscoe was half expecting me. Maybe from an instinct formed from what he knew of me and his own lawyerlike self. He sat me down. He asked Lana Jane Sugrue to bring us coffee. We could hear outside the doors of the barn the sounds of Joe and Virg banging with axes trying to clear up from the storm. The new roof was on the new house. An old tree had fallen but out of respect for the work had missed the house. Banging, banging, in a firm brotherly rhythm. Lana Jane Sugrue came back smiling with the cups, and set them down.

  ‘Now, dear,’ she said to me, and then went away again. Going out through the huge barn door she looked like a mouse going through the wainscotting.

  I said I was so glad the house was nearly finished. He thanked me for the work I had done for him. He said he had been fortunate to have such a fine clerk of works. I thanked him in turn. This little conversation had the strain in it of being a thread to something else.

  ‘Colonel Purton said he was talking to you,’ I said.

  ‘He came by,’ said the lawyer Briscoe.

  ‘Then you will know Jas Jonski is dead.’

  ‘He said so.’

  ‘And that Sheriff Parkman thinking I done it.’

  Now the lawyer Briscoe made no answer to that.

  ‘Mr Briscoe, would it be horrible to you if I sit here as your old acquaintance …’

  ‘Old acquaintance, Winona – why, you my friend.’

  ‘Your friend?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  This surprised me greatly, the sudden use of this word.

  ‘I have been made greatly unhappy by circumstances,’ I began, sounding in my own ears like someone far far away, in a novel, in England, say. ‘I not saying anything to anyone except Rosalee Bouguereau, till now. But I have a fear that Frank Parkman will come arrest me.’

  ‘I think he might,’ said the lawyer Briscoe. He abandoned his coffee cup and got up and went to his famous cabinet, happily a survivor of the fire, and pulled down his very best whiskey and poured himself a glass. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘my own nerves have not been the best lately. Greatly disturbed by circumstances, as you say.’ He took a sharp draught of the gleaming yellow liquid. ‘So,’ he said. ‘Your story.’

  ‘You know that Jas Jonski was once my – I was once to marry him.’

  ‘I might have known that,’ he said, ‘certainly.’

  ‘And then I didn’t wish to marry him and then he wrote just recent asking me again and John Cole said there was something in the letter more than Jas intended.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘A confession.’

  ‘To what?’

  I sat there willing my mother into my body, willing her to take me over and give me her famous courage. But all I managed to do was cry. It was not proper crying, it was as if moisture was being forced out through my eyes. The lawyer Briscoe as a substitute for leaning forward to comfort me, leaned back. It worked just as well. Slowly my stupid eyes stopped pumping tears. Slowly I calmed. And then some other thing took hold of me, some kind of fierce command. I felt suddenly as free as a freedman – that I could say anything in this new freedom. My mother, I thought, my mother.

  ‘In the days when he was still my beau he hurt me,’ I said slowly, trying to find the proper words. ‘He hit me and marked my face.’

  ‘I did know that, if you remember,’ said the lawyer Briscoe. ‘That was most dreadful. That carries a penalty of two years’ hard labour if effectively proven. I did advise – restraint. Perhaps I was wrong. I may think now I was.’

  ‘At the centre of this was something much worse, or that seem so much worse to me, and that has caused me—’

  ‘Great unhappiness,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Winona, if we are referring to what I think we are, Blackstone tells us that the Saxons punished this crime with death. These later ages have been more lenient. The whole section in Blackstone makes for very curious reading. Some will say that raptus mulierum cannot occur within marriage, and it is commonly believed that a person affianced cannot experience it, but that such a circumstance comes possibly within the realm of fraud, which is deemed a misdemeanour, punishable also by hard labour. But I have never seen it so carried through. On the other side, you are as a Sioux person technically a prisoner
of war of the new reservations in Wyoming and Montana, and as an Indian at large you may be deemed beyond civil law, or without law. Therefore it will be wholly a matter of outlook, opinion, and the general common law of a district, how much weight will be given this crime against you. Many will say it cannot be a violation.’

  Then he took another draw of his whiskey. He had strangely warmed to this offered thinking as I had heard him so often before, with a client.

  ‘However,’ he said, ‘this is all for nothing, because the truth is, I believe it was a violation. I believe it was a most severe and terrible violation, Winona, and knowing you, an astounding assault on your most excellent and unusual nature. And if I had known I might have with a clear conscience killed him myself.’

  With this passionate speech ejected he stopped and began to weep himself. I had never seen the lawyer Briscoe weeping, even when his house burned down. I sat there in front of him watching the tears flow down his reddened face. Then he made a supreme effort, like a person might try to close a barn door in a high wind blowing against it, and smoothed a hand over his white hair.

  ‘Well,’ he said.

  I could barely speak, but there was more to say, so I tried to say it.

  ‘Frank Parkman on another occasion was told I had a knife – it was I myself that told him – and as it was a knife was the weapon used on Jas Jonski, and Frank Parkman his good friend, I think this is why he believes me to be the culprit.’

  I expected him to ask, and are you? But he did not.

  ‘Although he has not said it to me in person yet, but only Colonel Purton he has said it – and Colonel Purton, I know he is your friend, Mr Briscoe, and a man you give your best whiskey to when he comes, but he is a man I not trusting as good as I might.’

  ‘No man is entirely trustworthy,’ said the lawyer Briscoe, in his best sage voice. ‘No man, alas.’ And his face drifted away a moment to other days, it seemed to me. Then he banished the thought and was back.