Yo soy la recién casada,
De mí nadie gozará.
Mi marido a la guerra,
A tomar su libertad.
And that is not quite accurate, because he does not push them out. It is more that occasionally, as he wanders the scoghs of elm, he discovers himself singing with no recollection of having tried to. And always, at that moment, his singing dams up, for the words become unpronounceable again.
He finds an unknown brook. Skims taws across a tarn. He siestas in the grotto near Lake Valentine. He steals the Governor’s empty memoir-books (forty dollars the piece), tears off their elegant bindings, rips their pages to make paper ships. Flotillas of them bobble down to the stream in Redemption, so that the people stand and gawp at them, wondering where on earth they could have come from. He dreams about the Governor’s wife; it is a sinful dream. He is lying with her, trembling, kissing her bare, smooth neck. She takes his spanner-like hand and places it on her abdomen, circling it, slowly, around the ruby in her navel. He wakens, dry-mouthed, in the red heat of the kitchen. Flooded by his dream. Rubs his mouth on his shoulder.
She does not leave for New York. The boy does not know why she stays. A cart comes from a warehouse at Fort Galloway with a harp on board. It is the most preposterously beautiful object Jeddo Mooney has ever seen. Gilt-leafed, shining, painted with miniatures of exotic places. Palma. Seville. The cathedrals of Madrid. Those are the cities of Spain. When she plays it, the shimmering music fills the house. Women are stilled in the lane outside, even the women who detest her. A week or two she plays but then seems to grow bored. It is shrouded in a Koötenais blanket and forgotten.
She knows of his dreams of her. He knows she knows. She looks at him disapprovingly when they meet in the passageway or in the mortifying narrowness of the stairs.
‘Where do you think you are going? What are you doing? Go back to the kitchen, you do not belong up here. Did you mother never tell you, it is impolite to look directly at a lady? When was the last time you bathed?’
He kneels in the mulchfloor of Decatur Forest and sins as the birds caw above him. They see his transgression and inform the other birds, and the nests of Decatur chirrup their admonishment. She regards him across the table as supper is observed. She knows. Her eyes are sad.
‘I would like the boy to have a responsibility. Do you think it a good suggestion, Lucia?’
She hardly bothers looking. ‘Of what nature?’
‘Yardwork, perhaps. Shortening firewood, perhaps. Would you care for that, young Mooney? It is good for a boy to chop wood.’
He nods his assent, since he supposes it is expected.
‘We have quite enough cordwood for the year,’ she says quietly.
‘Well then, is there some chore about the house he could do?’
‘That is why we employ Elizabeth. We have discussed this matter previously.’
‘I am quite aware of what we have discussed. But idleness is not to be encouraged. God knows, he sees enough of it in this house.’
She says nothing. Eats her food. Takes a long sip of water. The boy has the feeling there is a retort in her mind, which she is finding it difficult to keep imprisoned. The Governor crumbles a dye of bread in his fingers. As though about to feed a wintering bird.
‘Mayn’t he run a broom about my study every now and again? Something small of that nature. That is not a part of Elizabeth’s fiefdom, after all. Since we must be cognizant of offending the domestics.’
Saws the elk-meat on her plate. Raises a forkful to her mouth. From a pocket in her skirt she takes a small black book, which she opens and leans untidily against the ewer. He knows it is a prayerbook, for he has looked inside it secretly. Batter My Heart, O God.
‘Lucia? I would appreciate the courtesy of a response.’
‘You have already decided, Con, as you decide all things without me, so I do not know why you put yourself to the trouble of asking.’
‘I thought only to have the benefit of your feelings on the matter.’
‘Another performance.’
‘It is not a performance.’
‘Yes, General. As you wish it. So shall it be done.’
‘Do not address me in that manner. I forbid it, woman.Do you attend me ?’
‘I forgot how a superior is always to be addressed. Thank you for reminding me of my station yet again.’
‘Would you leave us, please, boy? If you have finished your supper. Mrs O’Keeffe and I wish to have a talk.’
He has not finished his supper but he departs the table anyway. He knows what is about to happen and does not want to hear it. Bad enough when he hears it through the walls.
The kitchen is too hot. He pushes off his sheet. A Federal Private is standing by the wall, the bird-of-all-death on his head. Beside him, a black girl, screaming at Jeddo Mooney, a broken, bloodied crutch in her hands.
‘Do not be afraid…You are safe…It is all right.’
The drumming comes hard in its thoraxial cage and the starburst of a candle in his face. The Governor’s voice. Hair in his nostrils. Broken veins of his cheeks. Flecks of steelish gray in his stubble.
‘It was only a dream, boy…I heard you call out…Do not be upset…Stop crying…’
He crosses to the dresser, gropes clumsily for a cup. Fills it from the pitcher. Offers a handkerchief.
He watches while the child dries his eyes and drinks the milk.
‘Where is Elizabeth tonight?’
Jeremiah Mooney does not reply.
‘Are you frightened?…There is no need to be…. It was only a nightmare…We are quite safe in this house…The door is always locked…Do not be afraid…We are all of us your friends…’
He sits on a milkstool and looks at the boy, and the light of the candle is yellower now, and its shadows move in the corners of the kitchen. Wind gusts across the prairie and it billows on the rocks; and a strange thought occurs to the sleepdazed boy. That the music of the wind is not the wind itself but the resistance of the world to the movement of the wind: trees, rocks, houses, pebbles, the prairie, other winds, whole nations.
‘Go to sleep,’ he says, quietly. ‘I will remain while you do. No one is going to hurt you again.’
The Governor walks at night like the zombies of New Orleans. The thud of his boots on the coffinboards. He goes out of the house. Stands on the prairie, smoking. Sometimes he stands there an hour at a time. Sometimes he stands all night. And the wind blows around him – you can see him through the knot in the wall – so that sometimes he sways or lurches in its buffet. But still he don’t come in.
O’Keeffe, they call him, the people in the town. James O’Keeffe. The Blade. And the boy has come to believe, as the settlers believe, as the Governor believes, as his wife believes, that the drunkard alone on the prairie in the wind was once a hero to millions. For everything changes; the boy knows it is so. The body changes. He saw it happen many times. He himself will change, as Eliza changed, and Mamo, and O’Keeffe, and the men in the army, and only the wind stays the same in the end and the bodyless who live in the songs.
One midnight he awakens to the smash of falling crockery, of heavy things being overturned and thrown around the wooden rooms. The Governor is shrieking obscenities and calling her a name that the boy has heard before. A word he has heard used for his sister, for their mother. Often Eliza employed it herself, to blaspheme Jeddo Mooney, and why it should be a curse he does not understand; but he knows that it is, for once, in the army, he saw a man die by the gun when it was uttered. A part of her body. It must mean something else too. Why not scream ‘you face’ or ‘you hand’ or ‘you leg’? Because that would not be as cutting. But why would it not? The boy has seen hands and legs lie in fields. They are terrible, then. He has seen eyes. Has it something to do with the fact of being born? Is that what is so terrible? That you would curse her for bearing you? And when that hard, short word is used by a man in his anger, you know it is time to hide, if you can, because it means he does n
ot care any more what he says, and that point is dangerous in men. But then, the boy realizes that the Governor is alone, that his wife is upstairs – he can hear her moving around the pictures. The unspeakable word is being howled at nothing but the shadows, or a mirror, or the shards on the floor.
Not wise to let him catch you now. If he does, he’ll cuff you in the head, or let fly with a kick, or roast you. The cook paces the kitchen throwing glances at the child. The nights of April grow long.
Gutta cavat lapidem. ‘Dripping water hollows stone.’ Ovid is her companion as she walks the slate hills; his odes of love and timelessness. Below her on the floodplain more territories are staked. Spreading out like a map into the distance. Fields and claims and houses – existences. Promises kept. Solidarities honored. Homes being raised from nothing.
The schoolmistress walking in a quarry with her soldier. Smoke from chimneys. A paddock bladed-out. A watching-tower being built at the summit of the Falls by a man who bought land there, who insists, so they say, that one day there will be visitors who will pay good money to watch the Falls from the dryness of his lightless lighthouse. Brothers on a raft poling slowly across the creek. A bride coming to chapel by boat.
She reads the Talmud and Hawthorne. Donne and William Blake. She writes and rewrites. She makes photographs of the County. She visits the poor families at St Hubert and La Grange. It is best to stay out of the house.
Bedsheets whip in the sluffs of wind. The sails of unspoken ships.
Conor Nolan is born. Handsomest child in the Territory. Miners festoon him with greenbacks. Miss Martha McIlvenny, blonde-haired, vivacious, the beauty of Thomond Street, is married to the man that built the tower. Billy Douglas goes courting Miss Aura-Lee Neville. He stands beneath her shutters singing ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ while she listens and smiles in the slat-light. Lucia O’Keeffe reads difficult poems – dense, packed, ripely succulent with meaning. Explaining those pregnancies to no one.
The mail-stage comes. It brings letters from New York but there are times when she dreads their arrival. A year since the surrender. Many children are born. Many Abrahams and Marys and Roberts and Jeffersons and Harriets and Fredericks, even a Ulysses. News of friends becoming parents is difficult to read, and envy is shameful to feel.
Elizabeth pegs the launderings on a sagging length of lariat. Jacket-sleeves reaching toward the banners of dresses. Invisible bodies writhing.
The child unbegotten by this marriage is nevertheless real. It walks its parents’ rooms at every hour. It touches the walls of that house of splintering planks. She senses its presence among roofbeams. She has an idea of how it might look and of what it would be named; of what sort of adult it would grow to. Like a prisoner on an island to which you only have to swim. It is just across the river. It calls to her.
The moons of its eyes. The ferns of its hair. All it asks is a rescue – to be owned. A chance to come out of the cave of a thought. To live in a body. To ever know what that was like. Its suck. Its heft. Its kittenish roilings. The smell of its scalp. Its unearthly fontanel. Its heartbeat against your cheek as you listened for a croup. The palps of its fingertips at your breast.
Once, during the War, on a hot night in Manhattan, when lightning destroyed a clock-tower but the rain never came, she saw a child receive the news of his father’s death. He plunged to his knees in the hospital corridor, wrists to his face – he was shaking. The silence before the howl, the bellow of animal grief, and the mother, weeping herself, had had to console him, and even the nuns had wept. And Lucia had wanted to say that she knew what this moment was like, had endured something similar when her mother had died; and that the boy was quite right, it was the most terrible thing of life, and you would never recover from it; but that somehow it would be survived. But now she is glad not to have told the child that. There are stranger griefs than the death of a loved one.
Her sister is in love, has accepted a proposal. A cousin in Spain expects twins. Her maid, Honor Connolly, has married her coachman and is pregnant (‘for which I thank God, Miss. I am the happiest girl in America’). It is April in the mountains and the trees are leafed-out, and everything that grows is growing.
‘The world is a wedding,’ the Talmud tells her. But the world is not a wedding. It is a child.
CHAPTER 30
A YOUTH AGAIN I NE’ER SHALL BE TILL APPLES GROW ON THE IVY TREE
A reluctant scholar – Some important personages – The General recalls a summer of courtship – Then alone with difficult memories in a low saloon of the town – A letter from God – His meeting with a President The incident at Tennessee – A lady who is not what she seems
Headache-pummeled, raw-nerved, smoldering for a drink, the Governor looks out of the window of the Legislative Office on Fitzgerald. It is April the fourth, 1866. His forty-third birthday. He has not touched liquor in a fortnight.
The window has been painted shut, has not been washed since it was put in. You need a permit from Washington to hire a scrubwoman. He has mentioned it to Elizabeth, told her to come in for an hour. There is always some reason why she cannot.
He is thinking about Van Diemen’s Land and a onetime friend, the comrade who arranged his escape. They flogged John Duggan two hours that night, until he could no longer stand, gave him six months in solitary, tried everything to break him, bribed him, beat him. Still he told them nothing about the flight of the Blade. In the ballads, he had spat on their thumbscrews.
John Fintan Duggan, the pride of the land,
They scourged him and chained him, and shattered his hands.
‘Screw ’em on, Tasman Devils, screw hard and twist mean;
Ev’ry twist of your screws is a curse on your queen.’
Derry. Presbyterian stock. Tombstone-tough. His father had been a preacher. Duggan had inherited his sobriety, his way with a sulfuric denunciation. He said liquor was the blight of the Irish people:we shall never stand free while luxuriation enthralls us . Always he had chided O’Keeffe for his ‘southern feebleness’, his shady love of pleasure, his ‘Italianness’.You’re a flabby papist fly-boy, you whoreson lush; you’d not meet worse in a year’s travel, so you wouldn’t. And every year on his birthday he had sent O’Keeffe a bottle. He had even managed to do it from the colony.
There was no bottle today. There would not be again. John Duggan was rotting in a prison in Virginia. Both sons dead for the rebels in the War. His house and his plot and his newspaper office burnt; his presses destroyed and dumped in the James; his wife made to pay the costs of his imprisonment. Once, he and O’Keeffe had been thicker than brothers, close enough to trade insults punctuated by laughter. Now, Duggan is an enemy of the American people. Others will be forgiven. Not him.
A vision incarnates through the grimy window. Down in the street. On the corner by the jail. In the hurting gleam of the sunlight. Does not that little guttersnipe look oddly familiar? Is your mind playing tricks on you again?
Where are his new clothes? Why is he not at the schoolhouse? Christ – is that a carving knife in his belt?
Motionless on the boardwalk. Smoking a cigar butt. A smearing of dust across his mouth. Those are not the shoes Elizabeth found for him; they do not match. Battered stetson, too big, like a suet bowl on his head. Is it the moonboy? His double? Or a queer coincidence? Do all boys in rags look the same? The boy gazes up at the Governor and drags on the smoke. It swirls all around him. A thought.
One hand on the knife handle, the other touching the hat brim. The day is not sunny but the brim is visor-low. The Governor recognizes the way the boy stands, a certain way he has of shifting his weight. You see it in children who have long known cold. They move from foot to foot, mashing one shoe with the other. They always want to be moving.
Mooney the moonboy. His still, assessing glance. Saddened as a theater gone dark.
Behind the Governor in the room, men are talking angrily. Vituperative words, bitter raised voices. The argument is of commerce, the cost of rebuilding aft
er the storm last Christmas. Who is to bear it? Will there be a restitution? Washington must be approached without delay for assistance. The sun slides out from behind the ink-smudge of a cloud and Redemption is rinsed in light.
O’Keeffe beckons from the window. There is no response. Perhaps the boy has not seen him, is looking at something else. He raps hard on the glass, his wedding ring cracks it, and the child scuttles away into a dazzle of reflections. By the time the Governor has gained the street – he hastens one end to the other, retraces his steps – the boy can be seen running hard toward the north, scurrying up the stones of Goat-Head Hill.
The town has been rebuilt, but inefficiently, too fast, without architect or mason or even builder. A dozen weeks of hammering. It was like living in an ark. Plans scraped in the street-dust, if at all. Enmities of party and tribe were set to one side, as though they were the fripperies of peacetime. Cockney succored Kerryman, Catholic assisted Pentecostal, Copperheads aided Lincolnites, Baptists helped Chinese. Only the blacks, recently freed by the War, received no assistance from any but their own. Their shacks and scalpeens were put back where they had been, to the last shred of tattered sacking, each warped and broken board, as though their windblown ghetto is scenery in a play at which the nobles are expected at any moment. Last Saturday, when the chapel’s mainframe was hauled and re-raised, the Stars-and-Stripes banner on the Post Office was burned. Life is returning to normal in Redemption. The time is come again to be guarded.
He returns to his meeting but his mind wanders like a beetle. The burghers around the table are ignoring him. They talk furiously at one another, throwing insinuations, resentments. The air is blued with cigar smoke.
Concentration eludes him. Somersaulting thoughts. He would like to sleep for a week, in some dark deep room, windowless, like the cells he has known. Always as a young man he had been able to sleep, whether his pillow was downy or of cold hard steel, no matter what the morning held for him. The night before he was due to be executed in Wicklow – half hanged, cut down, sawn to pieces on the block – he had eaten a supper of hardtack and scrag and slept like a lover contented. ‘Remarkable,’ recalled the chaplain, a Capuchin friar. ‘As though he was merely an actor in a play.’ But those nights have passed. It is as though they never happened. Now the zizz of a fly at the Governor’s chamber-pot can cause him to judder for his pistol.
Redemption Falls Page 18
