Redemption Falls

by Joseph O'Connor

  Sometimes, near dawn, when the hangover stirs him, the Governor hears footsteps downstairs near the front rooms. His wife, he assumes. Or maybe the cook. Or the boy, who seems rarely to sleep. Lucia walks the house in the dead hours of night. Rearranging the pictures. You can hear her.

  Apart from the store-cells at Alder Gulch Mine, the house is the most heavily fortified den in the Territory. The locks have been imported, were advertised as unbreakable; the iron front door has been barged up the Missouri, so heavy that the steamer captain charged the government a levy, and an ox was required to haul it by the muddy road from Stornaway. No intruder could enter that Bastille of a house, except love, which laughs at locksmiths.

  Love Laughs at Locksmithsby who is it now? Boucicault, maybe? Lever? Lover? The Governor’s memory for playwrights is shot. Once, he knew soliloquies fromThe Tempest andOthello . Scarcely a quatrain now.

  A word in the title of a formulaic old nonsense, which once he saw with a girl. They had chuckled conspiratorially at the excesses of the actors, the foolish singing, the cloddishness of it all, the dreadful blarneying that had been inserted for the New York crowd. Everything about the presentation was wrong, too large. Any delicacy the piece ever possessed was smothered out. It was a night in Manhattan; the Astor Place Theater. Not long after they met.

  The eddying Hudson, in that summer of sunsets. Dirty gulls in the slipstreams of the barges. New Jersey over there, on the green, glossy banks. A blind Connaught ballad-singer keening on the toll path: ‘Revenge for Connemara’. And there was a grove by the walkway, a kind of Lovers’ Lane, where servants and soldiers were sometimes seen to go. They had laughed in a knowing way as they approached that salley glade. She had never been in such a hideaway, she said.

  ‘I suppose Signor O’Keeffe has been, often. He is quite the hummingbird, I dare say. Signor O’Keeffe has sipped often at the roses.’

  ‘I have been in love, yes.’

  ‘That is not quite the same.’

  ‘I suppose it is not.’

  ‘Shall you always agree with me?’

  ‘I hope – I know – that I shall always admire you.’

  ‘Signor O’Keeffe, ladies and gentlemen, and his hopes.’

  Her evening dress was low-necked, falling off at the shoulders. Her hair in chrysanthemine curls. A small, jeweled crucifix in the cleft between her breasts. She took off her shoes, walked barefoot in the flotegrass at the edge of the sunken track. And a washerwoman kneeling on a wet gray stone whipped the river with a wet gray shirt. He was walking with the most beautiful girl in New York. She was wearing an anklet of gold.

  Blake. John Wilmott. A manuscript of Catullus. An eastern ‘Book of Marriage’ she had found in her father’s library. She would like to own a Vermeer. (She would one day own three.) The paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi.

  ‘You have been with many women? In the sense of a lover? I have never been with a man. Do you mind me speaking to you like this? My sister Estafanía, she claims to have been kissed. I do not think she has been kissed. She is a fountain of nonsense. But I think she should like to kissyou ; she has told me she should. Perhaps you would be interested, would you?’

  The sound through the trees of the slap of the shirt on the wet gray road of the river.

  And suddenly not laughing. And the taste of her mouth. Her mouth on his neck, her hands in his cloak: hard knob of her hip-bone in its caging of hoops, the chain of her cross against his tongue. He came very quickly; it had been a long time since he had known intimacy, and her own pleasure followed and she clung to him, tremoring, and all of it had shocked him and thrilled him in equal measure: her murmuring to him how, and where, and slower; the down of her mound, a forbidden word she breathed, the soak of her sex against his palm. He had tried to speak afterwards. She had told him not to speak. – Only know, I am not sorry, she whispered.

  Signor O’Keeffe, (you so-called blade), (you nuzzler among the roses): I feel you should know that you have imperiled the soul of an innocent girl (of a very good family) and caused her (you Bluebeard) (you Occasion of Sin) to transgress against a number (i. e. one) of my commandments, by your demonically Celtic tongue. She reflected upon this matter last evening while alone. And again this morning she reflected. It really is too bad, this immoral reflection, for she is finding it difficult to sleep any more; and so, I might add, is her startled Confessor who has recommended ‘cold baths’ as well as an Appalachia of Aves and ‘long and vigorous walks’. The poor, dear girl is quite undone…Your undoing has been her undoing.

  Gentle, beautiful sir. Is it noisy where you are? She sends you love in this night of thunderstorms on Manahatta and wishes she could kiss your eyelids to sleep. Like this – I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. Yours very faithfully. God.

  The Governor has editions of collectable novels among the possessions he brought from the east. Many are love stories. Most dissemble. He had thought he would read in the long winter nights of the north-west. His plan was to study, to know more of poetry, not to drink so much – if only that could stop. So much reading yet to do, and writing also, if he could recover his shaken confidence. A chronicle of his experiences in the War, perhaps. He has a sense that the memoirs of Generals will prove marketable in peacetime.

  The memoir has not happened. The publisher rejected the introduction. It will never happen now; he has long since drunk the advance. The orders, the dispatches, the diagrams of battlefields, the lists of the dead, the descriptions of wounds: interred in the lumber room gathering dust in their piles; he cannot bear to open them, nor even think of them any more. Thirteen elegant octavo notebooks he ordered from St Louis, with watermarked parchment and morocco bindings. His name blocked out in gold leaf lettering on their spines; the title apologia on their covers. They are still coffined in their wrappings, their pages uncut. His memoir has nothing inside it.

  How wonderful that would be: to remember nothing. To be blank, and the road still before you. What would he do differently? Nearly everything, perhaps. What comedies would he see with his future wife? Christ, those notes she used to send. Her look across a ballroom. That night at the house – there were important guests – she had summoned him from the dining table pretending a difficulty with a servant, led him into an ante-room, closed the door behind her with a smile. Be seated, Signor. This will not take very long. You should probably unfasten your cummerbund. And looking at her across the table, ten minutes later, as she endured the Bishop of Brooklyn’s disquisition on Milton (‘blindness is a tradition among great men of letters’) he could not quite believe what they had done.

  And all night long, that Easter at the summerhouse, when you were alone together, for the servants were away. The book from her father’s library spread open against the bolster. Inked illustrations of mauve-skinned sultans, glitter-eyed princesses kneeling over divans, their saris and girdles unknotted. Her lips sending you slowly senseless as she turned the heavy pages. Her smile as she said:you must wait. The sweetness and boldness of those long-gone nights. The fierce joy it brought you to please her. Hummingbird, she said. Your tongue was a wing. She had never thought such pleasures possible.

  This one is called ‘The Stallion Covers his Mare’. And this one ‘The Banquet for Two.’ Oh, I see you like that one. Quite hungry, are they not? You have not feasted enough, sir? But the night is so young. We have many more chapters to study.

  The salt of her shoulders. The tang of her sweat. Her fringe in her eyes as she rode you. Her nipples growing harder the lighter your palms touched them. The bud of her navel. You were weeping. Her thumbs brushed your tears and she kissed you on the mouth with such tenderness, and she whisperedmi vida . And the scarlet of the sunrise as she gasped ‘make me die’. And her eyes meeting your own as she clenched.

  ‘Governor? General?Are you listening to my point, sir ? This town is in danger of dying!’

  He meets the irate glower of the businessman who is addressing him. Former owner of two dozen slaves. He hol
ds lands in the Territory, wants something to be done. They all want something to be done.

  About the outlaws, the Indians, the rumors of taxes, the prevalence of drunkenness, the prostitutes everywhere, the need for a better school, the murders on the highway, the cold, the heat, the flies, the mountains. Yes, even the mountains. They are soimpassable , someone says, as though the Governor had caused them to appear in the night, could level them by proclamation.

  The businessman is in full flow and others are making little noises of approbation like small woodland animals observing a nut-fall. Many of them are Vigilantes – the Governor knows this, and they know he knows, but no one ever states it. One of them, an insurance man from Alpharetta, Georgia, is also an expert in torture. His wife is among the handsomest women in the Territory. They have three sweet children: two boys and a girl. He goes often to church, gives alms to the poor, and he has made men scream for death. And once, as a game, they had made a man scream for his own son to be killed – anything, anything, to make the pain stop. In the end, they killed both of them: innocent son, guilty father. Placed their corpses in a profane conjunction.

  The insurance man nods grimly as the businessman rants. The soaring price of flour! Dead horses on the street! Rats in the alleyways, the size of pups! And something must bedone about this wretch Thunders and his gang. ‘A countryman ofyours ,’ he snaps at the Governor, who refuses the bait, though it is difficult to do so. He has a sudden startling image of the businessman being bull-whipped by a slave. He wonders if he should tell him how pleasing a picture it is – how many tickets would be sold for such a diverting show. It would be one way to raise monies for the rebuilding fund, perhaps. The Governor could arrange for bagpipes.

  Marshal John Calhoun enters the office like a shadow. There is trouble at the house. Mrs O’Keeffe is upset. A carving knife is missing from a dresser in the kitchen. The cook feels she has been accused of stealing and resents it. The Governor retorts that he is busy, has no time for trivialities, and the marshal leaves as quickly as he came in.

  But Calhoun cannot solve it and the Governor knows he won’t try. The marshal is a lawman, not a housekeeper. O’Keeffe departs the noisy meeting, pleading a troublesome prisoner at the jail. He will return in an hour, he promises. The eruption of feigned shock is almost amusing. He is gone before it coheres into language.

  And he trudges the mucky laneway that forms Patrick Sarsfield Street, past dancehalls, the new chapel, an assayer’s, the forge; a notorious billiard hall, the Drynaun Dun, that somehow survived the storm. The smell of fresh paint, of new-sawn logs. Chickens and stray dogs investigate the mud. There are storefronts advertising comestibles, iron goods, guns. Many premises sell strongboxes; we are in gold country.

  A prostitute slouched on the rim of a horse trough nods desultorily at the Governor – he nods back. A cowpoke dicing on a windowledge by himself, waiting for the Palais des Plaisirs to open. The morning is cold, liked iced wine. The wind sheers at you in these latitudes. Even the Koötenais complain of it.

  Flimsy as a page, that butternut boy. He would blow away in a breeze. The uncomprehending stare, the skeletal fingers. But also the vaguely patrician mien. Little lord of urchins.

  He ran away last week, for the fourth time since his arrival. Perhaps he will always run. A boy like that does not want a home; it is nothing but a cruelty to keep him. That might be true, but what can be done with such a thought? A meadlowlark flutters from a guttering.

  The second time he did not return for six full days. Calhoun said he saw him half a mile from St Hubert, alone on the crest of Union Ridge. He ran when the marshal approached him, disappeared into the forest, and Calhoun, who learned his tracking from the Aboriginals of Tasmania, who evaded a hundred redcoats by his skill at obscuring trails, could find no print to follow. A French fur-trapper discovered the boy in a worm-eaten oak, half dead from cold, delirious. He carried him to his shack near the coulée at St John, nursed him as best he could. The trapper had a map torn out of an almanac on his cabin wall. The boy had pointed to Canada, tried to pronounce some glottal words, and the trapper had put together, by the interpretation of gestures, that the child had been headed north toward the Missouri Breaks, fixing to slip across the line for the Saskatchewan River, when the sickness he’d been fighting had overwhelmed him. He was gone in the morning when the trapper returned from the brook. He had stolen a billycan and the map.

  Vinson saw him that Friday near the tarn at Cleggan Cross, spearing frogs with the split of a fencepost. But when Vinson advanced and called out his surname the boy jumped into the water and swam hard away, and Vinson is unable to swim. He might well be ‘a Melungeon’, Calhoun believes, an Appalachian whose ancestry is white, black and Indian, for his coloring is unusual, and he is fast on his feet, more nimble than most white children are. (‘Lissom little feller,’ so Calhoun puts it. ‘Could picture him dancin for minstrels.’) But the Governor does not think he is Indian or Melungeon. He moves with a certain pantherine grace. It’s the fear of being caught.

  Perhaps the thought is correct. He wants only to run. Then why does he always come back? The Governor stops. Hand on his gun. The old feeling rises – he is being followed. Two miners in the street ahead of him are staring at something behind him. There is a skill in the reading of such looks.

  He waits for the challenge. It does not come. No pistol shot this time.I am alive. One day, Duggan laughed, you will swivel on your heels and a whole shute of English will be waiting with a noose. And that, my southern lush, will be a fine hour for the movement. We’ll see how you’re hell-raking, then, Prophet!

  Muero. I die. Make me die for you again. I love you to the end.Mi marido .

  Toward Tone Street he trudges, shoulders hung low, making quietly along the street to the Freundschaft Hotel. A couple of jolts, that’s all. Poppyseed afterwards. Camouflages the smell. Anyway, it isnone of her business .

  Wild Traveler. Double. Put it on the tally. He dregs it in one swallow. Another. The barkeep looks apprehensive, has been ordered by the Widow, his employer, not to advance credit to the Governor any more. His account is too large, too long unpaid, and there have been incidents when he has liquor on board. But the barkeep, an Irishman who lost a hand at Antietam, cannot find it in his will to refuse.

  Afternoon turns to evening. Shadows lengthen. The mines and placer-diggings close down. Cowmen throw glances at the inebriate in the corner. He sits with his back to them, staring out the front window, on which surface is painted, in carmine and blue, the figure of a harem-girl dancing an improbable can-can. He is on his second bottle. His pistol on the table. Was once a Union General, one droverman claims; but another says this cannot be so.

  Oh, sure it’s so. That’s the Blade O’Keeffe. Led the charge at White Oak. Bravest bastard in all the War. Not like one of these political Generals. He was never afraid of a scrap.

  ––Lost his nerve, I heard.

  ––You don’t know beans.

  ––Heard tell he was frit as a runaway coon.

  ––Go over and tell him.

  ––You sayin I wouldn dare?

  ––Got ten says you don’t.

  ––Twenty says I do.

  ––I’m a up you a fifty.

  ––Robbed a poorbox last night?

  ––Man was never a coward; play it on the level, is all. Fought his weight and come back for more.

  ––Not the way I had it.

  ––So go over and tell him.

  ––Wouldn waste bootleather.

  ––Hundred scrips says you’re frit.

  ––No gamblin allowed on this place, barks the Widow, from behind the tattered curtain, behind the bowed bar.Cut it out, you sons of bitches, or there’s flies in your eyes! She is counting the takings. A disappointment.

  More drinkers drift in. A fiddler arrives: Prince Floyd Louvaine,roulez, mes filles, C ajun get to lovin, he theDuc de Paris . The girls begin working the tables. From time to time a drinker follows a
girl up the crooked stairs. The fräulein goes first; that’s the rule in the Widow’s. The conversation continues, becomes wilder, louder, as though its subject has left, as though they are talking of a deadman. Even back in those days there were whisperings about the drinking – was his stallion shot from under him as he led the zouaves at Fredericksburg, or was its rider the worse for liquor, as some claimed? They say his temper was vicious, drunk or sober. If anything, the whiskey calmed it. But his common soldiers loved him, despite his lordly remoteness, his fightinest rages and high-tone ways. A former slave remarked, as the General rode through Tennessee: ‘Yonder go a phantom. That body aint his.’

  He arrived in the Territory a year ago – was it two? – carrying all its legal papers in one pocket of his frockcoat. A draggle of his veterans was his only retinue, a dozen hardscrabble Pats. ‘The Apostles,’ folks named them, or ‘Jimmy Keeffe’s Jews’. War-toughened Bowery-boys, some had Union medals for bravery; others had jailhouse tattoos. Every one of them carried a stiletto, ‘an Irishman’s toothpick.’ They rode low in the saddle like plainsmen. You had to be Irish-born to be one of his entrusted, with kin still in the old country, traceable on both sides. It was a means of control. You transgressed at your family’s peril. His supporters back in bogland would see to it.

  ––That’s bullshit on lies. Where you heared that trash?

  ––Had it from a party who knows, is all.