Mastuh a Irishman. O’Hora his name…Wolf got more nature than O’Hora…Do ever thing but kill you…Cause he paid for you, see. You a dollar to O’Hora. You was livestock…Want you in his lust; pick his harvest; tend his children; rawhide lash for the rest of it…Yes, his wife mustof knowed. Knowed ever thing he done…Then ride along to chapel on his chestnut bay. And hisGlory Be to Jesusand his Holy Queen Mary.Any of his kin gets [to]hear what he done, then bow their head for disgrace.
He got killt in the Civil War by Nathan Hook that was a runaway off the Hawkes plantation. Nathan Hook come back in the Union army out of Maine and he shot O’Hora dead in the orchard by Sioux Creek. And I seen that with these eyes. Cause I could see that time. O’Hora was his natural father, is the truth of what happen…so that me and Nathan Hook was blood.
But I wont speak of that…No, sir, I wont…The Lord see all things…I shall stand at the Mercy Seat…The Lord know what happen in Marianna, Florida…It good and it wicked in ever creation…But the wheat shall be flail from the chaff come the harrowin. You always got to gather what you sow…And I believe that’s the reason the General took me in the house…I believe he was shamed what his countryman done…And we didnt never talk of it…But I knowed he was shamed…You could see it in his ways…And he was right to be…And he save my life that time of the storm…Cause them Mississippians was fixin to kill me…And I never knowed why, cause I done nothin on Mississippi…They wouldn even know my name.
CHAPTER 8
THE DARLIN OF ERIN
A poster-bill published in the south not long after O’Keeffe’s arrival in
America, some years prior to the central events of this narrative
PROUD CITIZENSof GEORGIA!
The Committee of Saint-Patrick-in-Exile is honored to propose
AN EVENING WITH
“O’KEEFFE OF THE BLADE!”
ERIN’S ROBINSON CRUSOE!
NEWLY COME TO THIS FREE LAND FROM BANISHMENT!
APOLLO THEATER, MACON,
FRIDAY, JULY 23RD 1852 AT EARLY CANDLE LIGHTING
Musical Interlude by the Sullivan Pipe Band
Young JAMES C. O’KEEFFE, of the REBEL COUNTY of Wexford, the democratic HERO of Hibernians the world over, of late arrived to this Republic from his YEARS OF CRUEL EXILE, will LECTURE for ONE NIGHT ONLY on his remarkable experiences: his DEATH SENTENCE in Ireland, its commutation on the GALLOWS, his DARING ESCAPE from England’s dungeon-isle of Tasmania, his subsequent SHIPWRECK in the CANNIBAL-INFESTED Pacific, his fortuitous RESCUAL by good-hearted mariners, his ENTHRALLING ADVENTURES in breasting the wave to New York, and his BRAVEST HOPES for OUR MOTHERLAND!
“The Blade” is the greatest orator in the United States at the present hour. In the whole English speaking world, it is attested by knowledgeable men, that only Mr Dickens can run him a race. In the six fleeting months since he has found shelter on our shores, his reputation, already famous, has flared like a COMET. A MOST TREMENDOUS INTEREST is expected to be shewn in this lecture, which has MESMERIZED already the MULTITUDES that have heard it, at New York, Brooklyn, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Memphis, New Orleans & Atlanta. “Surely the cause of Liberty has no more passionate singer than this PRINCELY & HANDSOME SCION OF ERIN.” (New York Tribune)
An expeditious acquisition of tickets is fervently advised. Mr O’Keeffe has NUMEROUS ENGAGEMENTS & cannot revisit the Cotton Lands soon. In order that the fullest capacity may be permitted to gain the hall in safety, ladies are delicately requested to abstain from the wearing of hoops & gentlemen to attend without swords or side-arms. Do not forgo this ALL-SURPASSING OPPORTUNITY. Be THRILLED by AN IRISH HERO with a BRILLIANT AMERICAN FUTURE.
Admittance: $4 (Circle, Parterre, & Boxes): 20 c (standing).
No Negroes
CHAPTER 9
I’LL GIT ON HOME TO HEAVEN BYE-M-BYE
We return to Redemption Falls and the runaway drummer-boy
Early in the New Year, 1866– Breaking a lock – A handful of papers
A lady of Spain – A quarrel
In the crawlspace beneath the floor of the Governor’s house: this is where the Christ-killer sleeps. Bent up between the struts, curled like an ampersand. His world reeks of earth and wet boards. It is a little, he imagines, like living in a coffin, as Mamo said the monks once did.
Guilty Brother Mooney: his rottenwood dreams. He supposes they will find him, whip him from the town. Maybe they will hang him – or worse. He must be careful moving about. It is important not to be detected. He has seen what frontiersmen are capable of.
At night he steals out, conducts a bleary raid for food, doing skirmish with the foraging mongrels. He has a map of the colony and its possibilities in his mind. The zones where he must never go.
He has learned that it is worth trying the ash-cans behind the Shoogawn Saloon, a certain whorehouse to the west, another to the north. The grocer throws his rottings in a heap for the pigs. The gunsmith’s wife feeds the robins. But there is little enough to eat in such an outpost in winter. The Negroes sometimes give him a mite.
He is swimmy-headed now, plagued by cold and constant sweats. His headaches are numbing, his thirst. He dreams about tributaries he has never seen: rivers with Indian names. And Mamo saidRappahannock means ‘place of the souls’ but it might mean something else, or it might mean nothing. Just as nobody remembers the place-names of Connemara, the Indians, too, forget.
Disordered thoughts. His mother in buckskins. A buffalo grazing on Beale Street. By day he stays hidden, wrapped in a shroud of tarp. Sucking on nuggets of ice. But stillness is hard for a boy that age. He worms around his prison, finding bricks, bits of slate. An ancient grindstone. A sack of old shirts. Over there, beneath the trapdoor, he found the leather-strapped valise. Pert and neatly made, like a doctor’s.
But once – you can see this – it was an assay man’s satchel. The lock small and rusted. It cracked apart easily. The rust tasted ferrous as blood on his fingers. Maggots throng out of a pouch.
A sock of old papers: withered; gnawed. Some have been chewed to lace. Others are in pulp, a mash of blackened tissue. There are scribble-blocks, jottings, cuttings from newspapers. Quoins of threadbare journals. A mildewed handbill for ‘A RALLY’.A broadsheet of a ballad with an antique notation: the crotchets black diamonds on a four-lined staff.
He does not read perfectly but he can figure a way. He tries to remember his letters. It is his pleasure to read, at least his way of killing the time, while he waits for the safety of darkness. Reading, Mamo told him, could save you your life. A poorman got to know how to read. Cause a rich one, it don’t matter can he read or no. He’s already elected. Period.
A is for Arkansas
B for bread
C is for Catholic
D for dead
E for Eliza
F for Fist
G for the girl done learnt me this
The boy does not recognise the man who lives in the house. That wreck upstairs – ‘The General’ folks call him – he must be an admirer of O’Keeffe, the child thinks. Because these flitters of papers – there are dozens in the bag – are concerned with the doings of the hero. Maybe he is a writer. A scholar. A story-maker. Cause he don’t got the haught of a true-life General. He is lardy and old and he waddles like a fatboy and his eyes are red pennies and he stinks. The stench of his breathing that night at the mine – he skunked of rotgut and pish. And he talks like a noble in a pantomime of Englishmen. Probably they call him ‘General’ as a mockery.
Eliza’s Pa was a story-maker, so Mamo used to say. A composer of come-all-ye’s and ballads. Died up in Brooklyn. Got the cholera, Mamo said. But the boy is not certain this is true.
Come all ye sons of Erin’s land; attend my lay a while;
Tis of the valiant Con O’Keeffe, that fought for Erin’s isle.
They clepped him out to the Demon’s Land, from there he scaped a way,
To liberty and loving hearts, on the shores of Amerikay.
Eli
za and Mamo – they often talked of O’Keeffe. Knew songs of his feats, his brilliance. A champion, Mamo said; the equal of Robert Emmet. He laughed at death on the scaffold. When Ireland is free, a Republic like America, when nobody is hungry, and we can all go home again, it will be owing to saviors like ‘The Blade’ O’Keeffe who were willing to give their all. But the turncoats of Ireland will despise him when that happens. They will always be afraid of his name. They will say we were freer in shackles and filth. They would like the whole island to be their workhouse.
Once, at Fredericksburg, the boy saw him at a great distance, in the vanguard of his New York zouaves. ‘Ironfighters’, people called them: the pride of the Potomac. There was nothing the Con O’Keeffes would not do. Jeddo Mooney had watched dumbstruck from the crest of a hill as they charged the Georgian lines below. No hope of success, not a crab’s in a skillet, but onward they had rushed, into thunderstorms of bullets, toward the killing ground of Marye’s Heights. They advanced the way other battalions retreated: headlong, hurtling, as though speed might save them. But it did not save them. Nothing did. Their war-cries and the rolling of cannon.
Faugh-a-balla!Fontenoy !Sarsfield !Clear the way ! The barrages, the volleys howled them down. A man decapitated. A man exploded. Still the survivors came staggering. In twos and threes. In posses. Alone. Backing into the gunshot like seamen into rain. It was the kind of bravery that is terrifying.
A dragoon vomiting his entrails. A Stars-and-Stripes on fire. A color sergeant shot through the eye. Caps waved in farewell as the reinforcements came up. A creek in the meadow running scarlet. Two horses, capsized, tangled in their reins, hoofing in terror, gashing at each other’s hides. A bugler, as though sleepwalking, totters towards the salvoes, which hack pieces from his body as he walks. Bleeding from his arms. Red streaks down his sleeves – but he fags across the field like a cold man toward sunlight – until finally the bullets make him kneel. Raises his instrument above his head as if to gestureenough . His right hand is blasted off: a rag. He tries to stand up. You saw him run towards the enemy. Then dancing in the riddle of his death.
The field that night. Bonfires in the ditches. Smoke gushing out of a pigsty. The Reverend’s cassock livid with blood. Bile on his hands and his prayerbook. The ruins of a trooper blown into a tree. Impossible sights. Unseeable things. Men weltering in their blood. Lighting illuminating the vultures. Rats gnawing at—no, that cannot be remembered: you cannot admit that picture to your mind. Sinews stretch and break. Father of all rats. The pulp carried away by the winner.
The reeks and the shrieks and the screeching gullies. A body, fetal, its knees to its chest, its hands clasped stiff to its boot-soles. A Galwayman from Brooklyn had beseeched the boy to finish him; and when the boy had croakingly answered that he could not do such a thing, the Galwayman had implored him to find a revolver so he could do the sin himself.
And when this fight is over, lads, a sweeter yet we face.
Far across the foaming billow where our mother yet awaits.
We’ll down the Saxon tyrant, boys, evict the ancient thief,
And we’re marching on to Dublin, then, with General Con O’Keeffe.
‘Con’, the ballads call him, though his given name is James. ‘The Blade.’ ‘The Scabbard.’ ‘The Rapier.’ ‘Ireland’s Prince.’ It’s all those names but it’s only one man. Hard to know what to call him – what to say when you meet him. Perhaps, the boy reasons, the old tub of guts upstairs has met O’Keeffe. Maybe they are relatives, former comrades. Every handsome man has an ugly twin, so Mamo said. See him in the pier glass on a Good Friday morning. He collects these shabby relics as though planning a museum. Perhaps he is a maker of ballads.
She dressed all in her true-love’s clothes and away to war did go,
And longed to see the seaport towns of Canadee-eye-oh.
A boy in the mud, with the fieldmice and the spiders, and a clutch of tattered papers he does not understand. He heats a stone with a candle stub, scrapes a hollow in the loam, as they showed him to do in the War. Survive, play it pebble, we shall all survive, and the south shall rise again. Sometimes he hears rain, the wind racketing in the boards, the crunch of a snow-load tumbling from a bough. At other times, the peculiar silence of a freeze: birdless and elemental.
He wombs himself in a tarpaulin and waits for the blow-over. Come February he will strike out for Canada. Any sooner, you would die on the road to the north, for the snow has obliterated field and road, and the border posts, he has heard, are closed. Walk across a snowfield, you don’t know what’s beneath. Some drifts are the height of a house. There are lakes in whose depths live weird bears and weird elks. The Koötenais version of Heaven.
Once, during the War, a comrade told him about Canada. A country where they care for the Irish. Aint gottem these no-count bigots like here in the states, tellin ever one he don’t belong. Irishman liked, herespected up there. They know he a slogger, a man of honest toil. If he like him a drink and a little roola-boo, why, nobody care: Canuck take a drink his self. He’s a kin to an Irish: he know how it go. Not like these Mayflowerin Methodists.
Down here in the states, so the soldier said bitterly, Pat don’t count for a rat. Want Pat to do his fightin for him, build his roads, sink his caissons: get fucked and die quiet in some ginshop. Pat nothin but a coolieman prayin the beads. Nothin but a slave in a scapular. When they trenched that canal down the hell of New Orleans, it was Irish they put to the gullies. Wouldn’t put no slave in. Cause a slave cost him money. But a Irish cost him nothin but pennies a day. Sweat eleven hour in darkness, like a hog in the dugout; when he die, or go crazy, or the trench fever break him, here come-up another hundred to beg for his place. Canajun don’t treat no Christian like such. He shake you by the hand and pony up the tin. Montréal. Nova Scotia. Ontario. Ever part. They got ice floes and igloos: all manner of wonders. Man could have him a time up there.
So the boy has a picture of Canada in his mind. A land of well-paid work, all you can handle, of time-and-a-half for laboring Saturdays, of plentiful vittles and rivers of beer and pretty little French girls with them sultry eyes, singing ‘O Le Beau Soleil’. No wonder his father took off into Canada. No wonder he never come home.
He sleeps with a gun in his twelve-year-old hand: a deadman’s Colt repeater. He took it from a body he stumbled upon in the street on the night he tracked the hoof-prints into town. It is a weapon he knows. He has fired a repeater often, but you need all your strength to steady it. So heavy, the Colt repeater; his forearms so weak. Make you feel like you’re aiming a lump-hammer.
In the master’s step he trod,
Where the snow lay dinted.
Heat was in the very sod
That the saint had printed.
It was track those prints or starve where he was: freezing in the slags at the mine. There was risk and it was high, but to stay was a certainty. Starvation, so Mamo told him, was not a death for a human. Do anything you must. I saw them die in the famine. Break any commandment. Do not starve.
So he staggered through the thundersnow, along a mile of broken road, hunting the tracks of the Federal horses. And even as he ran, the tracks vanished before his eyes, annihilated by slops of sleet.
I am murderer now. The brand of Cain. Mark of the beast on my hand. The Mississippi brothers were not the first he had killed. Not the first set of killers; not the first set of brothers. The two at Fair Oaks had been brothers, someone told him. Backstabbing bluebelly Lincoln-loving bastards. They needed killing bad.
‘P.J. Foley’ on the barrel of the repeater. Graved with something sharp like a brad-nail. He tries to make an anagram of P. J. Foley but it always comes out as a nonsense.
Eleven men. Not counting Mississippians. And those are the ones he is certain of. Might well have been more. Probably were. You couldn’t watch the track of a bullet as it belched from your gun, hurtled towards a charging battalion. Eleven was his total – they gave him eleven cheers. That night in the camp at Shar
psburg. They threw him in a horse-blanket, tossed him eleven times; there were eleven slugs of popskull, eleven kisses from a whore. He was the bravest son-of-a-bitch in Dixie, they told him. Bravest in the whole world round. Your Momma and Pa would be proud if they knew. Lincoln gonna hang you high, boy!
Then an officer had come in – Captain O’Neill of the Shreveports – saying the carouse was a disgrace, and the thing it celebrated a scandal. Wasn’t proper or Christian to have a child do such things. He had made a scolding speech – are we savages? Are we redskins? Do we wish to dishonor our cause? No child can be permitted the taking of arms; that is wrong and will always be wrong! If it happens again, you will all be cashiered.Have you men no sons of your own ? Drunk, weeping, the boy had been led away. Made to surrender the weapon. Warned to follow orders.
He had thought following orders was what he’d been doing. The enemy come, you gun him. He wanted your country, your ‘way of life’. Affront your womenfolk, forage your planting, eat out your substance, defile your sister, set you down to slavery in God’s own land – no mercy should be given such a monster. Not a sin to kill the man that wronged your blood brother. Padre Guillaume had told them plain. Not a sin to kill a traitor, a deserter, a spy, a corrupter of boys, an enemy. Invaders, aggressors – all these could be killed and the Savior would understand. ‘I come not to bring peace, but a sword,’ He said. Saint Peter cut him off a Jew’sear !
Dismas, Gesmas, Christ in his boot-spurs. Right now they were burning in Hell. Harran the coachman would look down and spit on them, safe at the throne of the Lamb. And his spittle wouldfizz on their white-hot tongues. And the cherubs and putti would smile.
It was they had led the posse that strangled John Custis Harran, the boy’s protector, a bumbling whiskied coachman, who had never done a harm to a soul but himself. Bandannas they were wearing, as they stripped him and beat him, but the boy recognized them uncovered. Their swagger, their leanness, their bantam-cocky strut; the way one of them had of smoothing his tresses – his weird and glimmering eyes. The things they did to Harran – the boy saw them all – would not have been deserved by Satan.
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