Redemption Falls

by Joseph O'Connor

  No globe will ever know what happened in that latitude: the visions, the voices, the nights of rabid terrors, the spasms of abject screaming, the compacts with devils. Kill anyone I love, only I beg you let me live. Any crime I will do. Any evil you command. How you saw your dead child. Your sisters. Catharine. How you set out to sea in James Grimesley’s coffin, propelling it with the oars of your blaspheming hands. A quarter-mile you managed before it sundered to its boards. His torso: a lobster-pot on the black wet shale.

  One midnight you awoke – you had always been a skeptic; anhomme du monde was Duggan’s sardonic phrase – to a figure staring down at you through lidless sockets. This one was different. But you felt no terror. You knew who it was. It knew you.

  ––Did you crack my shins? it wanted to know. How did you shuck me? Did I taste?

  It asked if you would care to take a mosey to a gin-shop. At Deptford, it said. The molls there was righteous. They would let you do anything. They would attend to you in threes. And you answered – Christ help you, it is almost funny – that you intended no offense but were married and a Catholic, and the ghoulish thing grunted, like a boar idly belching, and trudged back down the shingles toward its bed. There was an arrow lodged in its spine. You saw that very clearly. With an ebony shaft. Red and turquoise feathers. And when it came to its place, it lay down on its belly, with the promise that it would be waiting when you changed your mind.

  In the coming days and weeks you would see it many times. It was squatting on the rock when you inched there for water. It was hovering over the surf with the wings of a goshawk. It was playing an ivory flute, and it nodded, as flautists do, to indicate that it could not speak until the jigue was completed, for it respected the tune more than the importance of speaking, and might lose the air if it addressed you.

  You were still raving about Grimesley when you regained consciousness in the bunk. They said you had been doing so for nineteen days. The name had become a kind of colloquialism among the Portuguese who found you. Some of them assumed it yours.

  You had no recollection of rescue. None has ever returned. All you know of your salvation is what you were told by your saviors: they had run in close to the reef in pursuit of a flipper-shark and had noticed, through a scope, a strange animal on an atoll. It was apelike, gray, could stand erect and lurch, but it seemed to prefer to crawl. They watched it forty minutes. The Second Mate sketched it. It threw handfuls of its own filth at the pelicans.

  As they approached, it showed no sign of noticing their presence, not even when they fired a pistol volley over its head. It sat down on the stones. Perhaps it had died of fright. The Bos’n crunched up to it. The ape did not stir. It stank of rancid fish; all around it were sucked kelpy-bones. From the palm of its paw drank a scorpion. Near it, on the stones, a man’s salt-rotted clothes. Then the cabin boy noticed it blink.

  Your flesh had been so scalded that it was suppurating, scorched, your swollen tongue so inflamed, it had burst like a rotten fruit. The heat had burnt the crests on your coat-buttons into your abdomen. To have a sheet laid on your body was an asphyxiating agony.

  You were ninety miles off Cape Horn: they would set you ashore, for there was a seamen’s hospital there and its surgeons were capable. You managed to beg to stay with your rescuers – thus your gurgling scream was interpreted. For weeks you could not speak. Your lips felt as though sutured together. When your bowels moved, the debris was terrible.

  There was a priest on board, a little chubby-faced Galliego, who ate chicken-wings and butter and drank like a docker. He spoke hardly any English but would sit by your bunk for hours, praying his breviary, or bathing your wounds. At nights he sometimes sang to himself when he thought you were asleep, with tenderness, in Latin, his eyes closed tight, as though the psalmist’s entreaties resurrected in his mind some Maria he had disappointed for God-love. As your speech stuttered back to you, he would hold your hand. ‘Tranquilo,’ he whispered. ‘Mi hermano.’

  He read to you in the nights, from Lope de Vega, and you rolled across the gorges of the Atlantic. At the onset of Lent, for a penance he stopped drinking. He shaved you, cut your hair, clipped the talons of your toenails, jesting of his thirst, of his biblical parchedness, that he would permit himself to be sodomized for a pipe of amontillado. He asked if you were a Catholic, if you wanted to pray. Perhaps you would like to make Confession. He had the intuition, he said, that there was a deliverance you wanted. A burden you needed lifted.

  You did not know the words in Spanish for some of your sins. You did not know the words in any language. You spoke what you could. He said nothing, only nodded, as though all you were saying was forgivable, explicable; but when it came to the wrong you had done James Grimesley, you were barely capable of speech. He told you not to be concerned; you had broken open no grave. It was onlyun duende , a sprite of the mind. Such dreams were common enough amonglos marineros del mundo. Seamen told too many stories.

  He was in a position, personally, to assure you of your innocence, since the Captain had asked him to come in and bless the rock, for it was reckoned unlucky by sailors not to hallow the grave of a mariner, especially one who might have died without receiving the sacraments. The mound was thick with mosses. Clearly it had never been disturbed. You were mistaken, he insisted. You needed rest.

  Only one strangeness, he said, reaching into the placket of his cassock.

  They had found it stuck in the grave like a conqueror’s flag.Una flecha it was called in Spanish.

  ‘¿Y como se dice en inglés?’he asked.

  Red and turquoise feathers. An ebony shaft. You were weeping. ‘An arrow,’ you said.

  You stand in a house on a mountain in America, holding that arrow in your hand. And you wonder, still, if you starved on that rock, or drowned in the upheaving that conveyed you there – or died many years ago on the scaffold in Ireland; and if everything since has been your Demonland.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE WEST’S AWAKE

  FEBRUARY 1866

  We return to Redemption Falls – Lucia recollects her arrival in the town

  The Governor’s absence & then his return – A vivid editorial

  The hope of reconciliation – A sound from a locked-up room

  It begins for Lucia as a haunting in the night, a sense that the house is uneasy.

  Strange sounds mix with the wind in the rafters: scrabblings; shufflings; a catlike wail. At first she tells herself it is an infestation of vermin, though of what kind she is not sure. Opossums? Prairie dogs? The bestiary of the west is mysterious to Lucia who loves Fifth Avenue and fancies it rat-free.

  And it comes again. That plangent mewl, so faint as to be almost inaudible. She elbows herself up in bed, gropes dry-mouthed for the candle. The rasp of the flint-box. A spunk of flaring light. Can it be, she wonders, merely a troubled imagination? There is much to be troubled about now.

  Two faces gaze dismally from the shifting shadows. An iron-hard man. His steely woman. Her candle flame refracts on the lacquer of the oils. The faces have tributaries of cracks.

  Her grandfather grasps a length of chain in one fist, the other resting on a bible as though it wants to float away. He looks like her father: the same uncomplicated sternness. ‘Keep to thy Word!’ is the family motto, the only one on record at the Office of Heraldry to include an exclamation point in its text. Her grandfather, lost in Canada, ate his dogs in the snow, having beaten them to death with a seal-bone. Several of her relatives would do well in a tale. She will write one of her grandfather in Ontario.

  But who would believe it? Her family, their country: could such a tale ever be written? Her difficulty is not to blare the colors so as to force the reader’s attention; it is to damp the tones down, so as to make the story at least credible.

  If she left, she would feel obliged to take her things: her furniture and pictures, the books – all those books. He would burn them, she knows, if she left them behind, or dump them into the sludge of the Missouri. She
pictures him watching them drown like unwanted pups. He will always be owned by his rages.

  His letters had complained of the Territory’s plainness, the bluntness of the houses, the monotony of the mountains. (‘Even their speaking is devoid of color. They are most unusual Americans. They are islanders, somehow.’) She had pictured a home full of beautiful objects; an oasis of civilization in the bewilderness.

  The first steamship of the season had brought her into the Territory. Forty nights on board, the only woman of her class. For the first week out of St Louis the sailors had bothered her. Outdoing one another in counterfeit offers of assistance. Would Madam wish this? Would the Lady like that? If there is any little service theSeñora would like performed. A wurst with breakfast? Some sugar in your bowl? And then they had grown tired of her, or perhaps just accustomed. By then it had been made clear to them by the pilot, an Irishman, that Mrs General O’Keeffe was off-limits.

  They watched as she stood by the railings at dusk. Their figurehead, so it seemed to the fanciful. The most beautiful woman in New York, it was said. They wondered if the rumors were true.

  The edginess of the pilot whenever they docked for ‘wooding up’. His men scanning the hillsides, rifles trained.

  Down the river from the west into which she was headed came vessels freighted low in the water with gold. Iron-clad, slow-moving, squat as gorged slugs, their decks were patrolled by Federal troopers, guarded by cannons and marksmen. They burned in her dreams, those armored ships of treasure, while war-cries scorched the air. One night she opened her porthole and saw a vast monitor glide past in the moonlight. Black from stem to stern, masked sentries along her railing. So strange an apparition that at breakfast she asked the pilot what it had been.

  ‘You saw nothing,’ he told her.

  ‘I know that I did.’

  ‘You saw nothing,’ he insisted. ‘You were dreaming.’

  The shadow of the boat on the melongreen water, the coffeebrown water, the mud. Its whistle-shriek echoing in the birdless ravines. Blended spokes of the pilot’s wheel.

  She began notes toward a novel, then a collection of tales, working long, lamplit hours locked away in her cabin. By the time they reached the Territory she had the bones of five stories, and one almost completed piece – she called it ‘Demonland’.

  The men he had sent to accompany her from Fort Stornaway seemed to resent her immediately. Or perhaps it was her belongings they resented. Fifteen crates of books: a daguerreotype machine and glass plates, trunks of Parisian dresses, hatboxes, a mannequin. They had stared at their cargo and then at its owner. A teamster was snickering with the sailors.

  At home in the east, a man rarely looked you in the eye. Out here they looked where they wanted. She was still on the steamboat, had not even set foot on their Territory. What was left unsaid – nobody had to say it – was that she had failed before even beginning.

  Guns everywhere. Smell of cordite and belched porter. The dust-gray men all armed and munitioned as though about to enter battle with Satan. Pistols, rifles, bandoleers, knives. They clanked when their horses moved.

  All the road from Fort Stornaway, seven days and nights, she had been ignored by the silent men. Hardly one syllable. Then hardly a look. Her menses had come on the second day. The ache was bad, exhausting. She had asked where was her husband. Was there a servant, a maid? How long would the ride take? Were there inns along the way? Shrugs and tight grins were the usual response, a finger pointed toward a filthy doorway at dusk. Then one man muttered a word she could not make out – she did not have to make it out, she knew what it was – and his comrades chuckled dryly as on they rode.

  Through the rock-land, the nothing; the high, silent canyons. She had been horrified by this godforsaken Gaza. The waterless stone-fields, the withers of heat. So intense, you could not pick up a metal fork by noon. You supped from a bowl like a dog. The pain of looking at anything in the hours after noon, when the light blazed on surfaces of quartzite scree, and the heat made you feel you were griddling. The clicking of cicadas: ominous, constant. The grime of the lodging-houses. Buffalo meat for supper. Then the barefoot, dirty children on the outskirts of the settlement, lobbing stones at the wildcats in the midden-heaps. An Indian watching as they rode into Redemption Falls, his face as lined as a mountainland map.

  The house, she felt certain, was a practical joke – a humiliation of the newcomer by the men. They wished, she thought, to see how she would react; their silence was a rite, a further initiation. It was smaller than the stables at her father’s Manhattan mansion. A cabin, unfinished and roofless. She had made the mistake of laughing at it, desperate to be regarded as a sport. But none of the men had laughed.

  She could barely understand the cook, a Floridian former slave whose vowels were drawled, whose consonants were dropped, and who mostly didn’t speak at all. But it was communicated to the intruder that her husband was not here. He was away harrying Indians into the Badlands. They had attacked a waggon-train of immigrants, he had resolved to deal with them mercilessly. There was no word as to when he would return.

  For days she had waited for him; the days became weeks. She began to fear he was dead. The cook said he probably wasn’t. Nothing we could do if he was. One time, he had remained on the trail two months, had ridden down to Kanzas, then into the Indian Territory. You never got much about what the General was doing. Better not to ask him. He don’t like getting asked.

  In the street they stared, as Inuits at a peacock. Children pointed. Even pigs and roosters seemed to stare. An old man with a beard so long it went around his neck like a scarf – he spat in the dirt as she passed. An urchin with a weed for a hatband, in ragged velvet knickerbockers, asked if he could have a lick of her hand. When she asked him why, he said it was the color of cinnamon, and three passing miners guffawed like macaques and one of them tossed him a coin.

  Obscenities were daubed on the gables of the house. She did not weep as she painted over them, would not be seen weeping. She knew the artists were watching.

  Summer rains came on. The house let in water. She did what she could to bale it. She and the cook distributed pans to collect the leaks. Buckets. Chamber-pots. Fruit jars. Canisters. The house plinked all night. She dreamed of Japanese music. It would have been easier to sleep in the Bowery.

  When the rains blew away, and the sun returned, she attempted to brighten the mildewed rooms, hanging pictures, spreading tapestries, arranging bibelots and wildflowers. The cook was pressed into assisting the effort. Recipes for new dishes were discussed and rehearsed. But the cook was no cook – she could barely boil milk – and Lucia came to wonder in her lonely bed why Elizabeth Longstreet had been hired.

  Spores appeared on the immigrant furnishings: powders of black-brown mould. Puffballs sprouted in the pleats of her gowns. The carpets all had to be burned. She made a great pile of them out back on the prairillon. It smoked for two days, emitting an evil acrid stench, and the corner-boys quipped that the Indians would be watching, made jokes about what lewdnesses the smoke-clouds might be suggesting. An infestation ofcucarachas invaded the kitchen – the stomach-turning crunch of their shells beneath your soles. Pieces of the house fell off.

  Wainscots, facings, doorknobs, bits of banister. The house was an old man’s body. Rot started eating the staircase, the floors. Damp chewed a way into the eaves. The teeth of a pianoforte yellowed and blackened. She wrote a sonnet called ‘Impotence’ but burned the finished script. Anauto-da-fé , perhaps.

  She advertised for a mule so that she could put in a garden. When none proved available she purchased a hand-plough in St Hubert, a heavy item, bulky, designed for a strong man’s use, ‘a good buck nigger,’ the seller advised ‘and don’t you go ruin him on meat.’ In a pair of her husband’s old britches and a miner’s shirt and canvas work-gloves she stitched up from a sugar sack, she hauled it up and down the Federal plot, until stones and twisted roots gave way to small furrows, in which she sowed carrots and corn. She found
a textbook on irrigation, spaded out trenches for water, fetched barrels from the arroyo, laid the hose-lengths herself. Her Manhattanite’s hands became calloused, rough. Men quietly watched her working.

  Sopping with sweat, caked in wet red clay, she labored alone in the fields. Every pace of gubernatorial land she fenced alone, posting, wiring, rail-splitting, measuring, learning those frontier skills through necessity and error. She raised up the enclosures. The elk tore them down. She raised them again, staked them deeper. The town often awoke to thepock pock of her hammer and sank into its duskfears to the rasp of her sawing. They watched her work the plot, this millionaire’s daughter, who had never so much as watered an orchid before. No profit would come of her efforts, they said, for the government plot was cursed. Beneath it were the bones of a Pend d’Oreilles brave. No joy would ever bless that conqueror’s house. No child would be conceived there, or live there.

  The straps of the plow wore grooved cuts in her shoulders. These soon became septic: stripes of raw pain. Elizabeth Longstreet found her retching by Considine’s Creek, hallucinating with a fever, sun-scorched. She carried the Governor’s wife in her long, strong arms, back to the hulk of the uncompleted house, to that lichen-reeking room, to that bed of creaking quoits, where she stripped her and salved her with a secret unguent once used to heal the wounds left by whips. Face down Lucia lay, flesh singing with pain, her naked back the wettish purple of deer meat. The fever burned wildly and it broke on the third night. She never went to plowing again.