Redemption Falls

by Joseph O'Connor

  A moment in a card game when the stake is increased, or in chess, when a seemingly mistaken move is made but you wonder is a trap being set. A lonely, cornered rook. The battlements in his eyes. The room is very quiet. He nods.

  The Governor pushes the ledger across the paper-strewn table, and the butt of a carpenter’s pencil. The child leans on the page – he is left-handed, a ‘cithogue’ – and the tip of his tongue protrudes very slightly as he writes. He scratches down his letters with the punctiliousness of an infant, though they are jagged, and too heavy, almost forcing through the paper, and his capitals queerly loom among the lower-case characters like adults that don’t belong in the schoolyard. From the Governor’s vantage they are upside-down. An Australia requiring interpretation.

  He takin back his book.

  He turn it round.

  He lookin at that forwhile.

  Good for him to know it. Cause it got to be known.

  Then he gawkin at me foolish like he caint even read.

  ‘What does this import?…I do not understand…Can you explain what you wanted to say?’

  He lookin it again. Long and hard, Fatman. You dont like the peaches, dont shake the tree.

  And all my friends, of old estate, I bid you good adieu. I’s bound for gold and glory, boys, across the billowin blue.

  ‘What is going on?’

  ‘We have a visitor,’ the Governor says.

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘He cannot speak.’

  ‘Perhaps he is frightened.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Lucia.’

  ‘Must you profane before him, Con? He is only a boy.’

  ‘I will speak as I wish to in my own damned house.’

  Con, she call him.

  She plumbcrazy as himself.

  Her own name Cleopatra O’Grady.

  Jesus blood, this some asylum they got em out here. Fatboys gettin wallpapered. Swedes weddin Noggies. Quadroons dazzled up like Diamond Lou. Gin-sucks decked as Generals.

  ‘What is to be done with him, Con?’

  ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘He cannot remain here.’

  ‘I invited your suggestion, Lucia.’

  ‘Can’t we give him some money and send him along?’

  ‘Where in the name of Christ would you send him along to? It is two degrees below freezing. He has no place to go.’

  ‘How do you know he has no place to go?’

  ‘If he did, don’t you think he’d have gone there?’

  She scootches over nigh. She lookin in my face. Her hair smell nice. Like fruit.

  Like a fruit make you feel better to eat it: yeah. Eyes the black of bilberries. Long straight nose. Jewelstore hangin round her neck.

  ‘He an idiot?’ she go.

  Nerve of the bitch.

  ‘I do not know whut he is,’ go fatboy.

  Aint a barrel of shit in a coat, that for sure. Aint a flabber-assed, stinkin-breathed clown of a gawm dont even know his owndamn name.

  ‘You hear me?’ she askin.

  ‘He aint deaf,’ fatboy snappin.

  Wouldn surprise none if she knock me up the head. She do, she gonna know plenty about it.

  ‘Surely you do not intend for him to remain at the house?’

  ‘He can sleep in the kitchen. Clearly he needs a square meal. Probably a doctor. He looks feverish to me. In a few weeks’ time we shall see what might be done. I shall ask in the town for who he is.’

  ‘Elizabeth will not like it. A boy in the house.’

  ‘Elizabeth’s estimation is of precisely no consequence in the matter. She will do as she is ordered and like it.’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or go if she cares to. I do not take commands from my servants. Neither shall I take them from you.’

  ‘So Elizabeth may pitch her chances with two below zero?’

  ‘Since when did you care a tuppence what Elizabeth does? Her shortcomings are your unending conversation since you condescended to come here.’

  ‘I came at your invitation. Your summons, more like.’

  ‘And I must have been deranged when I offered it.’

  ‘Perhaps I should leave, too, then? Is that what you would prefer?’

  ‘As you wish. There is the door. Shut the latch on your way.’

  ‘You have treated me as the filth of your boots since I arrived at your behest to this place. And now you intend, without so much as a by-your-leave, to bring under this roof –’

  ‘What of it? What of it? Do you want my living blood, woman? What do you want, Lucia? To evict the child to his death? Well, go on, then. Put him out. Does it square with your sanctimony? You and he together can go to Hell for what I should care.’

  ‘Con,’ she go. ‘He cryin,’ she go. ‘Con. The child be upset.’

  ‘I wouldn hardly blame him. You talk like he aint even here. Quit starin at him, for Christ sake. Give him breathe-room.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ she go. She touch the side of my face. ‘I didn mean to distress you. Please dont you go to cryin. Looky here is my hankerchief. O no, dont do that. Here now: lemme give you a hug.’

  She smell sweet, sweet, sweet. Like the inside of a candystore on Easter Sunday mornin. Heard a Irish feller say he watch her through the window one night when she strippin off her duds to turn in. Thing that Arkie done told me I couldn hardly believe. Bubbies the size of the Mountains of Mourne an sloebuds you could hang a damn coat on. Sucka them boyhos and Abraham Lincoln would sell his own momma for a Mammy. Two cannonballs down the seat of her drawers. Schinkels all up to her wishbone. Turn a feller plumb to stone, a body like she got. But she hand it back to you limp.

  ‘There now,’ she go. ‘Please dont you be cryin. You feelin a little better?’

  I nods.

  ‘Poor little lost lamb. Aint you the handsome boy too.’

  ‘That one lamb need a dippin,’ go fatboy.

  Scoot me up to get runnin but he catch me by the scruff. He haulin me out, full chisel down the cookhouse, and him and the skivvygal rippin the duds off my back. Skivvy fix a bath, water hot as hellfire. Soap in my eyes. She scrubbin like a torture. Water gone black in a lickety spit. Smoke rise up. Fatboy laughin.

  ‘Ah believe, Elizabeth Lawnstreed, we done gut us here a rebel.’

  Honeywoman dont say shit.

  Wifey mooey in with a armful of duds. Dunno where she got em. Dont care to neither.

  He look at her fowhile. She give him over the pants. He toss em to the skivvy. She say me to put em on.

  I shakes my head. Wants mown duds back.

  ‘These ones is clean,’ go the skivvy.

  I shakes my head. Points my jacket. It’s mine.

  ‘Well now,’ fatboy go. ‘Lookee here.’ He comin sore.

  Got to do what I’m order. That’s all there is about it. Appreciate when folks be makin a Christian effort. You puts on them clothes or so help me to Jesus I will tan you from here to St Hubert.

  I shakes my head like a bitch in the rain and he loaded for bear by now. Fairly got smoke comin out of his head. Look like he fixin to choke me.

  He open up the door to the wind and snow.

  ‘You wants you to freeze? Then way you fag to freeze. You think anyone give one damn what in all creation you do? You do what you wants. I could care less, you pup. Take a rod to you presently, you see if I dont.’

  He hufflin off like the trick got her knee felt in church. An wifey go runnin right after. Honeywoman say he dont mean nothin by it. Aint nobody gwine cane yuh. He all piss and vinegar. But I cane yuh my self an you dont let me dry your hide.

  I stands there drippin like the drover got drowned. She dryin me all over the store. Head. Legs. Petzel. Ever place. Drying my possessions like she do it ever day.

  ‘You got nothin I aint seen. Hold you still.’

  Water in the tub all black as the mud. You drank that for liquor you would croak.

  ‘Well now, liddle feece-dog, har yu?’ go the honeywoman. But she do
nt care one jitney, it aint nothin but jawin. Got nothin I care to say, is all. She can blow it out her fluke for a breeze.

  First time in my life I got storeboughten clothes. I’m duded like a Cajun gone whorin. She gimme mug of milk. I dont want it. Set it down. He still aint my blood. That’s all.

  Any shit-house comin to cane me get a minnie in the smig. Wont vex me none to murder again.

  CHAPTER 19

  THE PLUCKY LITTLE DRUMMER-BOY COME OUT FROM LOUISIANNE†

  A onetime comrade remembers the boy – Tat-a-tat

  The handsome captain – A faceful of grit

  And, behold, there was much ado and great carriage: and the bridegroom came forth, and his friends and brethren, to meet them with drums, and instruments of musick, and many weapons.

  1 MACCABEES,9: 39

  And when night stirs the poplars he stalks across my mind – that haunted, lonesome shade of a child, with his drum on his hip and his livery in tatters; breasting pitifully to attention as the bugler played Reveille. Or at Sparta, Tennessee, asleep in a busted horse-trough; arm about his drum as though it were a mother.

  Around him the soldiers blasphemed and haggled. Wounds were tended, faraway sweethearts serenaded, the pulchritude of the lady, one often suspected, being in inverse proportion to her proximity. Lice and ticks were hunted from their epidermal hideaways, sometimes flaunted as trophies, or dropped in a comrade’s coffee-can, while those evil buzzing gallnippers which botanists call musquitoes kept us cussing like Lucifer’s angels. The Generals of both armies were abjured as flaming idiots, which in some cases they miserably were. A trooper might yodel while two sharpshooters danced a hoedown. Men will do childlike things in a war, where comradeship is the only mercy.

  I recall seeing him school himself in the art of drumming – how he came by his instrument I do not recall: I believe it was a Union prisoner found on a reconnoiter: I know it had an emblem on it, a crest of becrossed rapiers. Here he came at any rate, over a field of broken habilement, battering twenty to the bar on his punctured captive. From that sundown forth, and early of the mornings, the camp rang loud with the rattle of his apprenticeship. Long-rolls. Double-drags. Ratamacues! Paradiddle clatterings. Sudden, hard whomps. That abducted Yankee drumhead had rebellion sockdoggled into it, till it thundered the glories of Dixie at the little shaver’s command. Many a weary warrior blued the air at this dinning, for of profaners we had a veritable professorship. I dare say there were abler musicians in our Confederate ranks; but none was more passionate for his craft.

  I seem to see him, always, etched in black and gray, as a ragamuffin graved in the frontispiece of a tale, an innocent in the adult slum. He had that peculiar look of purity ill-used. A silence hung around him; seemed to follow him, faintly: as the aroma of autumn from an old forgotten coat, or of lake water at night in winter. What I mean is that his presence made the men around him silent. But recollection tinctures fact with folly and fantasy. In truth, he was but an ordinary boy.

  Jeremiah O’Moody was my diminutive hero’s name. There was Louisianne in his accent, for that was his birthplace, and her twang commingled queerly with the mellifluous brogue of Ireland, from whence his Celtic elders had hailed. Often, one heard him hum a snatch of a lament: a high-lonesome keening that would still you by its beauty. Seraphic, his voice. Cold and pure as mountainwater. You heard it float that tune and you attended. Some of the men swore a hole that it was an Appalachian air, or a Shenandoah melody of the Blue Ridge Mountainland; but those many, like myself, familiar with Erin’s balladry, schooled in that canon from father’s knee, knew full and right plain what it was. It was a song of broken vows and lovers’ betrayals. The old Connemarans hold, that if you sing that lay, your enemy dies before its finis.

  How he had come among our number, not a one of us knew. He had no mustering paper, no card, not even a uniform, but one he had surely taken from a fallen comrade. It fitted him poorly because the boy was so small. Knee-high to a milkstool, he was not yet in his third lustrum. Aged no more than eight or nine when he came among our ranks, he would be a veteran of the bloodiest war ever to benight his homeland, before even he had advanced into youthhood.

  Too young to have enlisted, he must have slipped in to the march with us at Memphis or joined it someplace else along the road. Many boys did the same – far too many, and too young. A hundred thousand children would drift into the armies, in that gallant and terrible era when all beacons seemed extinguished. Their story has never been told. Perhaps it should not be. Better for our nights were they forgotten.

  Barefoot he came on, in the threads of a street Arab, unremembered O’Moody of Baton Rouge. A kindly Dublin quarter-master, himself a father perhaps, procured the child a pair of brave little boots. I know not how, nor from where they were had. But wearing them seemed to pain him more than being barefoot did, so that presently he gave them away. A little piccaninny girl received this endowment of the drummer. If still she gathers the cotton near Tupelo, Mississippi, it is my wager that she remembers him yet.

  It was my private habit to read a little of poetry in the evenings. The writings of Khayyám the Persian I found a salve to the spirit, when the night came hot, and the soul hurt of bloodshed, and a man had a longing for home. A selection of his Rubáiyát, an anniversary gift of my wife, I kept in my vest pocket throughout all the War. The doomed gorgeousness of the East, the love-bowers of roses, the melancholy music: these for some reason comforted. For the man in the chains of war – for all men, as it may be – truer solace is not drawn from the tawdry resolution, but in thelacrimae rerum admitted with truth; the cold and beautiful world as it is, redeemed by the sacrament of description. I recall the boy approaching me one dusk outside my tentquarters and inquiring of me modestly what volume I had. I was surprised that he could read, indeed affected by his curiosity. He asked me: ‘bein’t them songs?’ for they appeared to him asballades . I replied, which was all truth, that I was ignorant on the question of whether, in antique days, they were sung; but the notion seemed to please him that they might have been. I heard him the next evening, alone and singing quietly, in that unearthly soprano, as he tended the ruins of a campfire:

  O fill the Cup: – for life must fleet;

  How Time is ice beneath our Feet.

  What horrors he saw while my own sons were safe. What obscenities harrowed his boyhood. Men dying of sunstroke as we force-tramped the south, frizzling like straw left close to a fire. Soldiers, horses, officers’ servants, drowning in the mud of the Dismal Swamp as we approached to the Rappahannock. A hospital-tent burning, full of abandoned and screaming wounded. The rampaging diseases, the dysenteries and fevers, and the disease that is hatred, which thrives in all wars and survives in the body come surrender. A major on horseback charging a fleeing slave, slashing him across the eyes with a cutlass.

  His drum was shot from his grip by a sniper at Wauhatchie. In the coming days and weeks he tried to learn the semaphore, but that was not his gift, nor ever would be. For, although he was quick-witted, more than some of his seniors, he was too small for his signalings to be seen. Another drum he fashioned, little prince of percussions, from a cracker-box of tin that he hammered into a cask, and the hide of a put-down horse. ‘The skin of Mary Lincoln,’ some of the men remarked. Gallows humor abounds in an army.

  He beat his Frankenstein creation on ramparts and marches, at funerals, on drills, on musters and retreats, through mighty grists of rain and the cottonland scorch, in floods and droughts and southern dust-storms. Those tornadoes yet blow through the mind of your chronicler, those tempests, and the boy’stat-tat-tat . He beat it when a farmboy was executed for desertion, when two more were put to death for an act that was never named. Prisoners were shot. He lammed it for the prisoners, as they swooned or stood manly or wept or tried to run, as they cursed us or begged for their lives. And at times the men about to shoot them were very afraid, and their carbines swayed like wheat-stalks in a November wind, so that the fallen, still beseechi
ng, through mouthfuls of blood, must be finished by the Duty Captain’s pistol. All this the child witnessed in time of war. I cannot hear a drum-roll without seeing that boy. His eyes glazed like moonstones as he beat.

  Our chaplain, Père Dumoulin, a man of indefatigable decency, would set him to work on a Sunday: processing through camp with fervent purpose, rapping a tattoo to announce the imminence of Mass. Of that, one strange detail remains in my mind. There was no bell to signal the moment of consecration, so the boy wouldthrump his drum when the sacrifice took place and we Catholics would incline our heads.

  Little of the sacred in life did he find. Once, I saw him walk out of a mountain of battle-smoke sobbing like the infant he was. I hurried to him and knelt, fearing he had been wounded or worse. That gulping, frightened boy hugged this stranger’s frame to his own and quaked with tears of abject terror. That is something you do not forget, though you live to a hundred. And I would myself have wept; but I was ashamed to.

  His face was of ineffable sadness, brown as a pecan, and handsomely made, beautifully complected, as though his mother might have been a fine-countenanced Portugee or what the Cubanos call ‘a moro’, meaning a Moor. Where that lady was now, not a one of us had notion. It was believed he had no father in this world.

  ‘You mean your Pa is gone-on?’ I heard a lieutenant ask him once.

  ‘Nawsuh. Never had me no Pa.’

  ‘Then your Momma? We all got us a mother. Where she at, Little Drumstruck?’

  He shrugged his stick-like shoulders and gazed up at the clouds, his fingers thrumming quietly on his drumhead.

  At Champion Hill, our standard-bearer was smashed by a minnie ball, that dreadful wrecker of men. As the bearer sank in his blood to the sludge of the field, the boy tottered forward and grasped the spattered banner. That was the last morning I would ever see him weep. To see him not weep was more frightening.

  And I wish I had never seen what I witnessed soon thereafter. Relieved of the colors, the boy seized a weapon from the ground, and with it killed an advancing Federal who was only a little older than he. He shot him through the stomach, and, as the poor lad fell, finished him in ghastly manner with his own blunted bayonet. This I saw. This I record, for this is what happens in war. He was hurrahed by many comrades – to my shame, by me, too – but it was the worst thing I ever saw.