Redemption Falls

by Joseph O'Connor

  Jugglers and tumblers. A fire-eater. A band. Belles in gray sashes with peacock-feather fans. Mummers, drummers: a bearded lady. St George and the Dragon dueling in masque. And as sundown comes reddening the columns of Arkansas, on limps the parade of beaten survivors, the Johnnies come marching home. And they wave to their mothers, who weep and run, and they pose for photographers, thumbs stuck in belt-loops, and those without arms cradle their stumps like sick birds, and a veteran comes rolling himself along the boulevard in a bowl while flare-bursts and firecrackers and rockets’ red glare crackle through the dusk-darkened clouds. And you wish you were in Dixie, hurray, hurray, and the pipes are a-calling for Danny Boy, and all of it as watched by Eliza Duane Mooney as though it had anything to do with her.

  Beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly. Everyone is screaming. You might almost think they won. The speeches are defiant, hailed by gunshots and roars (God Bless the Confederate States of America!), which the conquering officers must surely have forbidden, but obedience goes the way of the Catherine wheels. She picks a few pockets but the pickings are scanty. There are only a couple of dollars when the reckoning is done. Scarcely enough for a bed and a meal; and anyway she is whipped from the inns.

  The rain don’t quit for four long days and the levee is fixing to break. Sewage in rivulets dribbles from the gullies. Muleteers arrive from deep in the backlands, the out-country no one has mapped. Prisoners are unchained in order to sandbag the banks. A screed of a spiritual from the porch of a pox-hospital, commingling with the stench of urine.

  Some time I feel like a motherless child

  So far away from home.

  The alleys are colder than those of Baton Rouge. Hoboes gamble for deadmen’s clothes.Pocketa-pocketa says the train in her head, its music bubbling up through the mud. Urchins sleep in busted drains, fumbling at the cold as though it might be persuaded to blanket them. She walks the richer street, where there are trees, porches. Through the windows she sees families– she assumes they must be families, for the children resemble the adults but are graver, more formal, and little is being said at the tables as they eat. But they do not truly eat: they fork and pingle, gawping at the home-come fathers. You should never look at a child through a window at night, for his growing will be stunted if you do.

  The twister skirls up. She shuffles though a downpour of frogs. She plucks them out of her hair, her pockets, her bundle: they feel like palpitating hearts. Such a rain is not possible, not in this godforsaken world, but miracles happen in the Indian territories and the faithless call them plagues.

  Often in the towns she glimpses her mother. A shawlie begging, a nightwalker plying, a crone on a rummage for scraps. You can brew secret herbs to help grow you a baby and others to put one away. And she wonders why her mother did not put her away, if she knew how it was done, which she did. Perhaps for love; perhaps fear of retribution. Are love and fear cousins, like hunger and gloom? For the Irish are besotted with that moonshine of mambo, with their faeries and she-ogues and pookas and pishogues and druidry and evil eye. Bogeymen, cluricaunes, morrigans, will-o-the-wakes. The skies over Carna rustle thick with flapping craythurs: like living in a bat-cave over there. They came over on the coffinships with the keening and the jig steps. They roosted up the masts dropping guano on the famished, and the faithful are wading in faeryshite yet: they were gusted across the billows by the reeking breath above them as it roared the oratorios of vengeance. They are in it right up to their wishbones, she feels; their hobbledehoy Irish holes.

  That voodoo they bring, that shriek of the keening. Your way of looking back, of saying you never left. When her belly is full, which it sometimes is in Fort Smith, for that camp-town abounds with pregnant trashcans, she swears that the future, if there is any future, will not be like the past of her mother. But when hunger returns, the gloom holds its claw, and she knows there is no prospect worth having.

  A bedsheet draped sideways on the gable of a grain store, russet-stained, as though commemorating a wedding night. She approaches, for it is lucky to kiss the hem of such a relic. But the closer she advances, the clearer she sees. The blemish is not a bloodstain; it is a daub of red words.Be RENT ye Stars and Stripes!

  She awakens in a scutch-yard where pullets are scratching. The moon is half-full, wearing bruised purple eyes. The night smells of rain, of goats and fresh dung. She has no recollection of how she came to be here.

  ‘Won’t you come in the house?’ asks the farmwoman tearfully. ‘We don’t got us much. But we can give you a plate of food.’ The woman might be forty. She is wearing a muslin pinafore. There are little dots of red where her cheekbones come to a point. A goat-eyed husband materializes with a loaf, which he proffers. ‘Take it. Go head. You bless us if you do. I’m John Cory. This my wife. In’t no cause to be scared.’ There is Irish in his talking. His woman is a Swede. How beautiful, her yellow hair in the lamplight.

  A trio of gaunt children creep forth from the shadows. The tallest girl is hefting an infant in swaddles. ‘Rest you a while. An’t no one harm you here. You can sleep in the haggard, you don’t want to come in the house. But you’re welcome on our place. We thank God to know you.’ She is unnerved by uncomplicated kindliness, having encountered it so rarely. While the Corys are sleeping, she limps from their haggard, leaves the loaf on their door-stones, and walks on, hungry.

  The mileposts are mostly wrong: they were turned around in the War and nobody has twisted them back. No signboard or marker announces any town. Direction stones have been ripped up or whitewashed blank. It is as though the shamed continent has been stripped of its name, disowned by the warring parents. She estimates her co-ordinates by the track of the sun –this is her attempt, but like all simple things, it is difficult. It rises in the east, sets in the west. After that, like Mamo said, you’re alone.

  Twas early, early, all in the year;

  The greenleaf all a growin;

  When come Trickin John from the Chickasaw Bluffs

  To wed with Barb’ra Allan.

  Some days, her going is straight as the rhumb of a ship. Others she tacks. She veers. She gybes. She will cross private plots, will risk any dog, to keep to the course she has set. But sometimes she is adrift; rudderless as a wreck. Six long days are lost in a circling that wends her back to the crossroads where the wrong choice was made. And the devil is said to haunt the junctions of Kanzas, but nobody appears, not even a goat. She stands in the X with a lodestone in her hand, begging the night for a clue.

  The blisters on her heels are pullulating; they reek. She tears strips from her hem as wrappings. Every footstep she limps, the shorter comes the garment. She pictures herself naked except for toe-rags and a fig leaf. Wandering the gardens of dust.

  Two dots coming towards her from out of the north. The Gypsy and Barbara Allan? The girl is riding her beau’s strong back.How pleasant, the sweethearts of spring . But as the distance between them narrows, she sees they are not sweethearts.When pretty birds sport and sing .

  The soldier is being carried, his whole head is a globe of bandages, with only a slit for his mouth. His comrade stares wordless at Eliza as they pass. The mummy on his back is weeping.

  When she dreams, she sees faces, thousands of them: multitudes. They remind her of an ants’ nest she once disturbed behind the cabin: a gloop of spherical jellies. Not bodies, only faces– eyeless, diaphanous– and occasionally a tadpole-ish limb. She does not know who they are or anything else about them, yet she has the idea that they are somehow connected to her. They are asking her to do something, but she is not sure what. She is not sure what shecould do. Nothing, probably.

  In a woodland near Marais de Cygnes, taking haven from a rainstorm, which came on as suddenly and terribly as a rage, she happens upon a skeleton, still wearing its Union blues, slumped over a cannon-wheel as though kissing it goodbye. Fledglings are nesting in the bust-apart ribcage. A snakeskin coiled around a knuckle.

  She tugs one of the boots from its calcified stub b
ut it is weather-stiffened and useless and she flings it in the river. There is a letter from a sweetheart in the dead man’s clutch-sack, scrawled on the back of a torn-out flyleaf. She scans it and blushes. She takes his gourd.

  Dear Pat. I wish you were with me this night. I long for a touch of you. I am your boldest girl.

  Water tastes sweeter when drunk from cedarwood. She sips, then slugs, but her thirst cannot be slaked. It wakes her in the mornings like a mouthful of boiling sand. She can look in the face of hunger, having never not been hungry. The thirst is the truer murderer.

  I have on me that dress you like for to write this. How I wish you would. I think about that night. God forgive me on Sunday I wanted you so bad. My breasts are grown heavy for the treasure you sowed in me. Where are you gone Pat? Why do you not.

  Decorous capitals of the rip-maimed page:

  From the gibbet of a curlicue, a hanged man dangles: scribble of a fatherless child.

  That day, or the next, she is not quite sure, she realizes who the dream-faces are. All the people she will never know. A needle of grief slides into her spine for the unbefriended pismire.

  She is standing on a granite outlook gazing down on a cornfield. A ripple of wind moves steadily across it, diagonally, slow, a rolling wave of shadow, a sight so staggeringly beautiful that her eyes spurt tears.

  Every fourth Sunday she pins a red flower on her smock, for Mamo said it quells womanly pain. She rests up, and sleeps extra, and chews fistfuls of wild comfrey. They do not dull the ache but they render it bearable, like an unwanted remembrance that must somehow be accommodated. Monday at dawn she starts walking again. There will not be many more Mondays, nor dawns, nor flowers. She is nearing the end of her life, she feels, and many more miles to go.

  Westward over Kanzas. New signboards appear, their capitals lurid as wounds. Hamilton’s Creek. Gargery’s Mountain. Logan’s Ford. Pederson’s Hollow. Cronin’s Landing. Sheperton’s Ridge. Buckley’s Plot. John Anderson’s Firth. Who are these Kanzans that own the handiwork of God? Has any other country such place-names?

  My race is run, beneath the sun;

  The gallows for Richard Lee;

  For I did ruin that innocent child

  Whose name was Rose Dupree.

  She finds a candle stub on the road near Mute Creek, Kanzas. You never kill the spark that lingers when you blow out the wick, because long as it glows some sinner in purgatory is given a respite from her tortures.

  Spring will come again. The trees will be leafed-out. The world will be a dapple of apple-blossomed light. The corpses in the furrows will molder to loam, and wheat will put forth from them, and there will be food enough for everyone, and the stooks of blond-haired corn shall be lofted like idols, and the lion shall lay by the Lincolns. There are moments when it is possible to believe there will be peace in the valley. But they do not come plentifully any more.

  She is skilled with the slingshot, can drop a bird from the sky. But you must have a care what creature you eat in strange country. She scorches them on her fire, blackens them to the guts, but they taste like scorched rats: rancid, raw-chickeny.

  If you disturb an ants’ nest, the adults gather the eggs and flee. Return a minute later. The spawn will have vanished.

  The refugees wonder where is she walking to. This cadaverous madwoman in her ash-dusted rags, who leaves footprints of blood, whose limbs are begrimed, whose face looks as though it has been forced through a mangle before being sutured back on to her skull. She carries a pound of dirt on her clothes. This barefoot nobody: what can be her story? And why is she padding for the wilderness of the north country? Got nothin up there for a manless woman. Nothin up there for no one.

  A carny propositions her in a ghost town near Blackwell. He will pay a Union eagle dollar but what he wants she cannot make herself do. A compromise is agreed by which she will accept a Barbado doubloon; but his pleasure once achieved, if pleasure it was, he refuses to pay, says he never wanted it at all, so she slashes his throat and leaves him gurgling blasphemies, and now, as he dies, he has something to want.

  Glintings in the distance. What can they be? Are stars raining down on the land like frogs? As she nears to the flickers, she sees what is happening. A sight she must be imagining. Carters heft sheets of glass from a waggon, roughly, hurriedly: the odd pane falls and breaks. The overseer shrieks that they are not to be broken, they cost the Master a dollar a dozen. They are passed hand to hand along a chain of men, who are spackling them into the ribs of a greenhouse. She stops. She watches. Plates of shining glass. And each bears the face of a soldier.

  They must be the ones who did not come back, who never returned to pay the photographer. Farmers. Husbands. Old men. Boys. The sun burns hard through their reticent smiles. In a year they will all be burned away.

  Strange languages are heard beyond the sheughs at night, from the dark unseen where the waggons pitch camp. The mischief-calls of children, long masculine harroos, the clanking of cauldrons being thrivelled with heavy ladles. A boy runs into the boreen near what is now La Junta, Colorado; at that time the place was nameless. He gawps at her, bugeyed, as though startled by a hag. He backs away, dreadfully, thumbing the cross on his collarbone, and scurries over a dike with a bleat for Mamacita.

  That night, her own tombstone appears to her in a dream: a chunk of blackened mahogany bristling with coffin nails. Gardenias snaking through the mausoleum’s cracks. Hammer in your spike, her ghost performs a hoodoo.Je Vous Salue, Marie . Fruit of thy womb. She died to make men holy. Let us die to make them free.

  The murderess awakens, already walking. How can you dream when you’re awake? Her gaze ranges ahead, perpetually ahead, fixed on the vanishing point, the unreachable horizon. Locusts click around her: a telegraphy that says: ‘This road will never end.’ But there cannot be locusts at this season of the year. Where do they go in winter?

  The sunlight smarts her eyes. It blinks through the elms. At a crossroads near Bitter Lake she sees her long-dead father, lurching through the plantings with a crossbeam on his back and a convict slavering at his heels. But when she gapes again, he has turned to a scarecrow: wind-buckled, crippled, in a threadbare frockcoat, with a spade handle for shoulder-bones and a clog for a left foot. ‘M’ is stamped into the clog.

  The ruins of a plantation house burning in her memory. A Corinth collapsing in alabaster dust. It falls slowly, seen from this distance, buckling in on itself, while the wrecking crew and the Captain observe from the tobacco field– but one defiant pillar emerges from the mortar-cloud, enrubbled up to its waist. Burnt cotton in the air. And rooks. And scorched banknotes. Strange confetti, those gallowsblack angels. And she pictures a story dragging on the boreen behind her, tailing back to Louisiana like a train. Miss Havisham I am. I stopped my clocks.Cause my sweetman done me wrong.

  And one dawn she awakens with a chemise in her hands, having no intimation how she came to possess it. It is like a piece of costuming for some theatrical presentation: braided, sumptuous, with rosettes of chenille. Did the magi stop in the night? Why did they stop? She reefs it asunder; swathes her seeping feet. It is glued to the whelks of her wounds.

  She is outside a roofless chapel on Christmas Eve morning. Its bell clonging leadenly. She can feel it hurt her teeth. She approaches with caution, as an Apache towards a shyster, and peers through the doorway for the homily.

  The snow falls slowly into the transept: feathers of snow-white snow. The congregants in greatcoats under skeletal umbrellas. Shivering. Hunched. Defiant. There is no organ to accompany them, or, if there is, no one is playing it. Only the zizz of a goatskin tambourine, placking out a funereal cadence.

  O

  God our

  CHINK

  In ages

  past

  our

  CHINK

  for years

  to come…

  She prays for those she will never know: for her mother, the child, the dead President, the ants, the boys who were brave and afr
aid in the War, the boys who slaughtered the innocent. And the preacher dons a stovepipe to hurry home to his gruel. The Reverend Baron Samedi. In his gun-hand he carries the key of the church; a prayerbook under his oxter.

  Saint Jeddo. Pray for us.

  Father in Hell. Pray for us.

  John Cory. Pray for us.

  Rose Dupree. Pray for us.

  In the morning, as she is shaken from the preacher’s rusting bed, he weeps that he cannot afford what they agreed. The tithe-plate was so poor. The people are sopoor . Everything they planted was foraged. He presses into her hands a pair of work boots. Belonged to his son. In an asylum in California. Lost his legs at Pechacho Pass. Tried to take his own life. Won’t never be coming home.

  The preacher is gray in the face with guilt. She must go before anyone notices.

  It is still dark as she winters out. The snow crisp and brittle; as though communion wafers have been spread beneath her soles. A whirling of sleet. Wearing her payment is an agony. In the end she tries to hurl them over the shoulder-bone of an oak, but her throw is weak and they catch on one of its fingers where they dangle by their laces. Bootfruit.

  The first light comes; a cold, hard dawn. Out of the mist loom giants. She is facing into the mountainland.

  She is an ant on a map. She talks to herself as she walks.

  And I cannot face her. I cannot face her.

  For this walk is for my redemption.

  PART II

  REDEMPTION FALLS

  EXECUTIONYARD,BRIDEWELLGAOL,WICKLOW,IRELAND

  22NDNOVEMBER1848

  …Lord Antrim interrupted the prisoner to warn him of his obligations as a gentleman, of the good name of his father and family. Did he renounce, even yet, the path of arms, he could receive a less terrible death.

  PRISONER:No sermon on a patriot’s duty is required from puppets of Monarchy. Here is my body. Butcher it if it amuses your Lordships. But repudiate my nation? Forbid it, Almighty God. Revile the rapier? I shall never, sirs: Never. It will slash the slaver’s knot which binds us to an alien crown, which strangles my countrymen in the chokehold of hunger. I kiss its redeeming hilt and touch it to this unworthy breast. Come: you may now slaughter me; but you will never be rid of me.