Redemption Falls

by Joseph O'Connor

  It weighs thirty-four and a half pounds. To run while wearing it would be difficult. Soon it would be cripplingly painful. You might manage a couple of miles before finally you collapsed; a strong man, young, might make more. But in the end you would be defeated by the crush of the weight, which, although it would not kill you, was too much to carry for long. This was the genius of the chain’s design: it acknowledged your mercantile value.

  We do not know the name of the man who designed this apparatus, who rode home to his wife and told her he’d had a good afternoon at the drawing board, that the muses of metallurgy had smiled on his efforts that day and that all familial worries were consigned to the past just the moment he registered the patent. But we know that it was forged at Annapolis, Maryland, by the Semper Robustus Ironworks Company, for their trademark is stamped into the hasp. Fourteen thousand of these contrivances were purchased in the decade before the War. One investor in the company tended towards abolitionism, it was said; but the profit motive is semper robustus.

  Chains are employed in topographical surveying, for jewelry, in prisons, on ships. On farms, in manufactories, by hauliers and armies. The Semper Robustus Company made every kind. Links of lapidarian smallness, invisible without a clockmaker’s loupe. Bridge-links the size of a bull. Its principal’s grandfather had forged the gargantuan chains that saved New York from the English in the revolution. Strung across the Hudson, they weighed three hundred tons. No Royalist ship ever dared test them. The name of that hero was Alastair McLelland. Grandfather of Lucia-Cruz.

  How the McLaurenson gang came to possess a Semper Robustus shackle-chain, we cannot know now, and I suppose it does not matter. It seems unlikely that they would have purchased it. Perhaps they stole it. But they rode with it, always, from the days of southern slavery, when a runaway could be bootied, cashed in. And with this they chained Eliza Mooney, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, fixing the clasp about her neck and clicking closed its deadbolts, and tethering her to the earth of her homeland at night like an animal requiring breaking. There were eleven in the gang. All gave their assent, for the shackle would have been difficult for one man to attach. Perhaps some only watched, or looked away to the horizon. But a chain always links the many.

  Semper Robustus. Always Strong. In this noose of dependable iron was she starved and made to suffer, sometimes by one of them, often by more. They drew lots, her fellow citizens, to decide their turns with her. Occasionally they played poker or dice for her. At other times they wrestled as though she were a scrap of fat in an orphanage, while others took bets on which rapist would prevail. The nights of a freeborn American body in the republic of liberations.

  By day, they led her with them on their peregrinations through the mountainland, that wild and unknowable realm. If she fell, she was dragged. If she fainted, they would wait. Smoking, talking, quietly cursing the heat, nattering like men on a dusk-reddened porch. Of their homes in the south, of their children and wives, of the girls they left behind them. All had been soldiers. Perhaps they talked of the War, though for some reason I find that unimaginable. And when she had drifted back up from the kingdom of the nightmares, they would ride on again, implacable desperadoes, hauling the booty that was Eliza Duane Mooney, who had never done a harm to any of them.

  In the end came the day when one of them objected. John ‘Liscannor’ Murphy. Dandridge, Tennessee. A cellar-digger, before the War. Wasn’t Christian, he said, to treat no woman like such. They’d had their funning. Come time to let her go. They were married men, too, their comrade reminded them, and the woman could have a disease. They did not even bury him; only left him to the wolves, a bullet through each of his hips.

  In Galway, Mamo told her, they used to tether a dog in a boreen to prevent the sheep from wandering. No ewe would cross a track if a dog was there, for she’d know, somehow – it was in her nature to know – that the mountains might fall and tumble to the sea, but the nature of a dog don’t change.

  There are days they leave her tethered and ride away toward a town. The collar-band gnaws at her when she stirs. Her head flames with pain. Escape is impossible. She has watched them ride back and argue over the plunder. Most of them are drunk by nightfall.

  She limps down to the stream. The water is cold. She kneels on the bank and rinses her shaking hands, which feel old, like dirty canvas, withered and stale; then she drinks from the water, which is sweet and woody to the taste – though, lately, the chain seems to have inculcated itself into all tastes. Everything has a tang of cold wet iron, astringent, like blackberries on the turn. A rat floats past on its back, like a human. She wonders how it would cook.

  She blows the embers into a glow, fixes coffee in a can. Yesterday’s grinds; their taste will be vinegary. While it boils she squats in the nearby brush. She is accustomed to it now, has been living rough all this time. She spits in their coffee and hopes it is poison. The choke-chain grinds on her scars.

  She prays her incantations to the crucified God, then to Papa Bon Dieux and his acolytes. Gu, Sakpata, Damballah, Legba. John Brown the Holy Warrior; the seven sons of Mawu. Satan himself receives her benedictions. But none of the divinities is listening. He said he would wed me, so loving and bold. But my true love betrayed me, for the one who had gold.

  She realizes, if they kill her, that she will be buried in the chain-and-collar, because no one will think it worth the hard effort of removal, and anyway the lock is too complicated, too efficiently made. In a hundred years’ time, or a hundred thousand, a skeleton will be unearthed with a thirty-four-pound chain about its neck, and a bracelet of hair around the stem of its wrist, and the diggers of that future will wonder what offering was this. What deity was appeased by its destruction?

  Their leader speaks rarely. That is part of his authority. He sleeps up a tree, like a bird or a bat, having lashed himself to the mast of a bough. He once killed a child so as to punish her father. There are no words for his fishlike stench.

  And then, as the days pass, she realizes he is not leader but lieutenant. His name is not Cole, it is Thomas or Tommer. He is brother of the leader, who has departed the gang, though Eliza does not know why, or to where he has gone.

  Around his neck, a gold medallion in the shape of an owl. It is heavy, jewel-encrusted, too big for a man, like something a Russian duchess would wear. He stole it from a stagecoach at Vinegar Hill. Often, he uses it to beat her.

  There are times when it is difficult to damp down the pictures. A bush bursts into flames. A rock gives a scuttle. At such moments, she tries to concentrate on something graspable. A snakeskin on a rock. A buzzard in the sky. A memory of Jeddo’s face one Good Friday morning when there was something to eat and drink. The terrible fervency of his hope that morning. Not long after Mamo went away.

  She is shaken awake and carried to the campfire. They have been drinking again. This is dangerous.

  ‘Beg,’ commands Thomas McLaurenson. ‘Say me the right word, you’re free.’

  Tonight’s firelight game. And she does as she is ordered. He allows her supplications, while he pares his fingernails with a knife. Choral bleats, dismal mewls from the men as they watch. Blank-eyed, sucking on their jugs.Yaw Irish. Yaw Irish. I come owda de Nought . Her northern accent amuses them.

  ‘You are Irish,’ she continues quietly. ‘I am Irish, too. My people come from Galway. Let me go and I won’t tell. Your own mother come from Galway, I heared you say that before. I never even seen you, I swear it.’

  ‘Never even seed me?’

  ‘I swear to the Virgin.’

  ‘You never heared lyin’s a sin, girl?’

  Their laughter glimmers briefly like redness in blown coals. One of them is twisting his wedding ring.

  ‘I’ll do anythin you want. Only let me go away.’

  ‘You’ll do anythin I want cause you don’t got no choice, bitch.’

  She will not weep before him. But it is hard not to weep. The beatings are always ferocious if she weeps.

  ‘I am ma
rried,’ she blurts. ‘My husband up in Canada. Any man touches me, he’s an adulterer.’

  The fire spits pathetically. He looks at her a long time. She has a picture of his mind as a pool of writhing alligators, over which, on a rope, she balances.

  ‘Think I’m stupid?’

  ‘It’s the truth.’

  ‘What his name?’

  ‘Patrick Mooney.’

  ‘Oh, Mooney. That is pretty. Where Mooney at now, bitch?’

  ‘Montréal he’s at. He’s workin on the docks there. He was in the rebel army. Like youse.’

  Patrick Mooney, who never lived, hobbles into the camp and stands in the firelit circle. His father from Carlow. His mother from Gweedore. An aunt shot dead a landlord and was hanged. The foot he lost at Manassas, where he murdered seven Yankees and was mentioned in dispatches for his valor. Her words give him life as he limps among the shadowed host, displaying his wounds, all he suffered for the south, the medals of his lesions, the ribbons of his tears, pleading mercy for his wife, and the men seem to know him and they want to shake his hand – all except for Thomas McLaurenson.

  ‘Mooney give you no ring, bitch?’

  ‘Had to sell it. I was hungry.’

  ‘Aint that the livin shame, boys. Bitch be hungry.’

  ‘Please let me go…Please let me go.’

  ‘Git you here. Where y’be goin? Don’t stand. On your knees, bitch. You crawl. Cause I don’t care to see you on your hinds.’

  His bony scuffed knees through the holes in his pants.

  ‘Hold me out your left hand. Where the ring use to be.’

  She does as commanded. He watches her hand. And her hand is tremoring badly and he looks at it a long time, as though the hand of a woman is strange to him.

  ‘You believe, girl?’

  ‘Church believe?’

  ‘Got some other kind?’

  What kind of question? And what is the correct answer? But before she can think of any answer at all:

  ‘Cause the Spirit gemme a wisdom when I come in the world. Mo ask you one time. And you listen real true. See Iknow when I’m lied to. Got the giff for a liar. So you look mein the eye an you speak me the truth, bein two minutes from now, you got a bullet in your throat. Hundred-twenty seconds save your eternal soul. And I want that you die just as clean as a angel. Cause you sure didnt live too clean.’

  He unholsters his revolver, calmly loads it from his waistcoat pocket.

  The ratchety whirr as he rotates the barrel. He rises from his squat, touches the maw to her jugular. There is a piece of leaf in his beard.

  ‘You married, girl?’

  ‘…No.’

  ‘What you say?’

  ‘I aint married.’

  ‘Get up.’

  She stands.

  He spits in her face.

  And his next act, I will not write.

  Not because I am afraid to – my fear is not the reason – and not because I believe such things are better unknown; but I have already done too much to preserve in language a man that should be permitted to rot.

  ‘Disrespect me again, you’re cut up to shreds. Understand I aint lyin. Cost me more to take a breath.’

  She bleeds into the earth. The fire fizzes quietly. The men quiet as statues in its light.

  ‘Turn you in,’ Thomas McLaurenson tells them.

  They do not move.

  ‘Turn you sons of bitches in. Or you’re next.’

  Patrick Mooney is weeping into his bloodstained hands. For shame; for having failed her; for all that was lost. His dragonfly’s life has flitted to its close. He returns to the blackness he came from.

  CHAPTER 38

  WESTERN THUNDERS BLUES†

  What was the wildest battle

  Ever shook old Tennessee?

  That made the mountains rattle from Fayette to Bloody Lea?

  When a bunch of greenbroke yankee dogs

  Rode into Johnny T.

  Saida whoo-yip , Johnny.

  Come-ah-kie-kie; yucca yucca yay.

  From the Mississippi delta

  To Savannah by the sea;

  From the banks of Tuscaloosa up to Californah-ee,

  He rocked an rolled like thunder,

  An he rode out wild and free.

  Saida whoo-yip , Johnny.

  Come-ah-kie-kie; yucca yucca yay.

  His Daddy was the chaparral, his Momma was the sun.

  His brother was a gallows pole, his sister was a gun.

  His given name was fury. His eyes was diamond stones.

  He laughed at judge an jury an he chawed on lawmen’s bones.

  From Suarez up to Tucson town

  An back to Mexico –

  Thefederales chased him

  But they hadda watch him go.

  Hischica told him:Corazón , I think you know it well:

  For a thimble of yo heartsblood sweet, they’d ride through the gates of Hell.

  They shot him up in Tombstone.

  Out the window he did crash;

  But a bullet ’tween the shoulders

  Couldn’ quit my Johnny’s dash.

  Rode laughin’ from the Forbes Hotel

  Singin’ “Boys, How Sweet is Life!”

  On back of the marshal’s big black horse

  From the bed of the marshal’s wife.

  Saida whoo-yip , Johnny.

  Come-ah-kie-kie; yucca yucca yay.

  CHAPTER 39

  REVENGE, REVENGE, THE OUTLAW CRIED, WITH THE SIXGUN IN HIS HAND

  Pishkun at New Lochaber – The Indians hunting buffalo

  Eliza Mooney’s mark

  Sometimes, late at night, she hears them talk of their departed leader. Will he ever return? Is he dead? Gone into Mexico? Why is there no word of him after all this time? He left them, she gathers, to raise recruits in the south, diehard rebels still willing to fight. Yet that was many months ago. Perhaps he is in jail. He will return, they insist. He must.

  But it is late spring now. Because the flowers are in bloom.Flores para los muertos .

  An overlook of granite. Below them a floodplain.

  ‘Quiet,’ says Thomas McLaurenson.

  The sound begins. Like distant thunder. Or a muffle of drums in a dream. Now dust rises up from the treetops in the middle distance. Whoops and screams. A punctuation of gunshots. And the ground itself trembles. And the rumble is inside you. What dragon is coming from the east?

  From a defile in the rocks bursts a blueblack flood. Snorting. Stampeding. Charging towards the cliff edge. The bulls blackly massive, the cows and calves ocher, the smallest being trampled by their elders. Wolf-men running after them, shooting, waving hides: harrying the stragglers toward doom.

  They plummet with the strange slowness of heavy things falling: black shaggy boulders, feet working the air, or they topple, scraping hooves on the walls of the canyon, as though salvation is yet possible to the intrepid. Behind them fall more, landing hard on the fallen, and the mournful and agonized bellowings arise, and the echoing crackle of rifle fire. A calf lands backways on a jut of the ravine, which sags, and crumbles, dropping its burden to the kill-pit. Thomas McLaurenson watches from his perch, unmoving, with a watch in his hand.

  With his boot-heel he has scraped a crude map in the shale. It seems to show a section of river. She hears the word ‘rapids’ being spoken to one of his lieutenants, a butcher called McNeill out of Nashville, Tennessee, who yawps barrelhouse rollicks when he’s drunk on beer and Thomas Moore laments on whiskey. He sings out his tears, fingers clawing at the air as though meaning could be squeezed from the shadows of night, and his fellows all look like they envy his gift for the maudlin murder of a song. Eliza Mooney does not know it, but that scratching in the gravels is the preparation of fourteen deaths. A feat is planned in the Mountain Territory. A patriotic butchery.

  ‘What you gawpin at, bitch? Fix breakfast for the boys.’

  She fills the pan from the creek, sits it on the low, dull fire. Frog-eyes is leering a
s he whittles a bough. She turns from his scrotal face. Mutton-breath and Tierney are sawing down a shotgun. McIvor is shaving O’Leary.

  Noon sees them ridden to a high, flat mesa, their bivouacs blooming in the stones. She is commanded to wash their clothing, which stinks, as do they. A pile of it is thrown on the shingles near the campfire. It is hard to wash out blood – you have to scrub with a tawstone. A cauldron is flung at her like a bell.

  She fixes up a dry-line with a knotted length of lariat. She hangs their wet clothes, so heavy that they need no peg. They confer while she works. There are more maps, bits of paper. An argument begins about dates.

  In the distance she sees a waggon-train progressing through a valley. She counts the yellowed canvases: there are seven: no, eight; and a cavallard of yellowbrown horses. Vessels on axles, crossing an ocean of green, and the grass growing up to the buckboards. One waggon is trailing a Stars-and-Stripes banner. The canvases pink in the sunset.

  If you could only shout for help. But it’s too far down the valley. And even if they heard, or saw, or suspected, what would they do for Eliza Mooney? They would not want trouble: that’s the way of the world. They would say it was the shriek of a bird.

  A straggler has stopped. Probably a buckled wheel. She watches as the riders emerge. Two men and a youth. They are hunkering by the wheel. And Mamo used to say the heart was a wheel: once bent, can’t never be ment. The lead waggons have not seen what is happening behind; they go trundling on westward, toward the declining sun.

  Suddenly she is running, dragging the chain in her wake: its thirty-four pounds feel doubled by fear and it clunks like a mallet as she bolts. There is no chance she can make the grassland, the gorge is too steep, and the links are already catching on the butts of the stones. She stumbles. Rises. Phelim Tierney grinning behind her. A whiplength of rope in his hand.

  ‘Pullin a little hard on the bridle, an’t you, filly?’

  She seizes her chain and swirls it – it spins, it whoops – and smashes him across the right ear: a hammer. A strange image in her mind, of a sunflower cut down, its splash of ardent flame, its tough, thick stalk, and the slash of a machete, that bite. He falls, beam-ended, clutching his blood-spattered cheek like an actor that got slapped too suddenly. She seizes a knob of granite, beats him hard about the face, gouging at his eyes, smashing it into his teeth. Her grip on his windpipe, as though it were a serpent. Forcing the stone down his maw. She screams ‘Die!’