Redemption Falls

by Joseph O'Connor

  Frog-eyes and Mutton-breath are upon her before she can kill him. Punches. Kicks. They drag her by the hair. They will murder her now but it has been worth the attempt, for whatever is to happen, whatever cruelties they can contrive, one of them will bear the wounds of Eliza Duane Mooney even to the sewer of his grave.

  Remember me, Tierney, every time you see a mirror. I’ll be shittin on your mother in Hell.

  Her smock is reefed off. She is lashed to a tree. Tierney is reeling like a drunk in a windstorm, the slaughterman McNeill holding him up. Face-broke, lurching. Someone hands him a lasso-rope. The beating is frenzied; but she hurt him too bad for him to be able to stand up long, so that soon he hands the rope to a teenaged compatriot and crawls toward a rockpile and vomits. And the youth flails Eliza Mooney, who is the same age as his older sister, and his fellows gaily cheer their encouragement. His next act is to copy a profaning he saw visited on her before – thus, he joins the world of men. He is fifteen years old, from Lebanon, Tennessee. His home was in a country of cane breaks and cedar. Before the War he was a baker’s delivery-boy.

  Explosions of beer-froth salute Luke Dillon’s translation, though actually they are toasting his death. Then some of his professors stop laughing and colloguing. They have noticed that the afternoon has further possibilities.

  ‘Tommer? Got a fish. Down yonder. Take a see.’

  Thomas McLaurenson and three of his riders mount up in a moment and descend on the valley already shooting. She can hear the whoo-yips of the bold rebel yell, the snorts of their horses being spurred down the rocks.

  She thinks about the waggoners. She prays it will be quick for them. Let there be no woman or girl.

  I will put on men’s garments and away to the War. And my love who deceived me, remember no more.

  CHAPTER 40

  THE CRIOLLA’S LAMENT FOR JOHNNY THUNDERS

  Out early I rode in the groves of Dakota;

  All early I rode in the dawn of the day.

  When I heard a dark lady, a-tenderly weeping:

  Oh whither my Johnny, so gallant and gay?

  All handsome and hopeful, my Johnny so tender.

  All valiant and strong as the sun in the West.

  Oh false-hearted lawman that chased him to Kanzas,

  Oh merciless marshal put the lead in his breast.

  Come all you brave cowboys that rides on the mountain,

  Come bold bandolero and motherless son.

  The hope of the widow, the scourge of the landlord,

  He lived by his lights and he died by the gun.

  All hopeful and handsome, my Johnny so tender;

  And gallant and gay as a star of the night.

  He stole from the rich and he gave to the hungry,

  And never a lady received any slight.

  A dagger of silver he wore in his buckle.

  He rode with a chain all the many miles long.

  And every link held a heart that was broken

  Of a girl he had spurned for the love of his own.

  He said he would wed me in Galveston, Texas.

  Through Galveston, Texas, now lonely I search.

  He said he would buy me a bunch of green ribbands

  For to tie in my tresses by Saint Mary’s church.

  All early I rode in the groves of Dakota;

  The innocent birds whistled hymns to the day.

  And I’ll never forget her, that vision of sorrows,

  Who wept for her outlaw; turned weeping away.

  Weeping away. Weeping away.

  She wept for her outlaw, turned weeping away.

  Then ghostly she vanished, that ebony phantom.

  As shadows of night at the dawn of the day.

  CHAPTER 41

  JOHNNY, I HARDLY KNEW YUH

  The recruiter returns – A drumhead court-martial

  The knife of Lucas Tanner

  One morning, after they have finished with her, they chain her to the ground and strip off their remaining clothing to swim. She lies among the rocks like something dropped from a mountainous height. The sun rises high on the Territory.

  The waterfront at Baton Rouge. Praline sellers. Beggars. Fishers of men. Light glistening on the buoys in St Peter’s Sound. A watermelon thrown from the roof of a gin-shop. And Mamo changed her name, will not even speak the old one. Your name is Mooney now.

  The devil hunkering beside her; left hand on her forehead. He is dressed inchaparejos and the tattered coat of a suit, and his boots are snakeskin and heavily stitched, and there is a garnet on a pin in the stock around his neck, and hiscamisa has a pattern of parrots. His eyes china blue. His hair copper red. His wedding ring finger is missing.

  ‘Cole. You come back,’ mumbles Davey McIvor, awakening in a hammock near the junipers. He was too tired to swim. Must have fallen asleep. ‘Coley, how you been?’ he says.

  The man does not answer. Nor does he turn. His breathing is heavy; asthmatic. A butterfly settles on the band of his sombreiro. McIvor approaches uncertainly.

  ‘Didn’t expect you fore the summer. How you been there, Cole? You get the new fellers? How many you get? Boys was just takin a swim to cool off. It real good to see you there, Cole.’

  ‘Get her clothes before I kill you,’ says the interloper, quietly, as though testing the words for their truthfulness.

  McIvor hastens toward the bivouac over which her smock has been thrown. Brings the rag almost tentatively: an offering.

  ‘Cole – me and some of the boys was just havin us a little kick. Aint no cause to go thinkin we done anythin you –’

  McIvor falls dead.

  Now the gangmen are straggling out of the tarn in twos and threes, in garlands of olive wet lake-moss. He sits on a rock and leans a lucifer to rasp a light. His fists a cup of smoke. Drops the match in a puddle. Fob-watch from the pocket of his black leather weskit. Holds it to his ear like a shell.

  It is hard for naked men to walk over stones. They hobble like pilgrims, up the incline towards their clothes. And some of them call his name in a simulacrum of warmth, as though they have not witnessed the execution just done.

  ‘On your knees,’ he tells the air.

  ‘Cole – ’

  A second gangman dies.

  She watches as they kneel on the gray, mossy stones. Wet hair. Dripping beards. Wet seaweeds between their legs. He walks slowly around the circle, boots scrunching as he goes. Curlews carve a way across the sky.

  ‘I am waitin,’ he says. ‘Who will speak in the defense?’

  ‘Coley – Cole, this aint how it look.’

  From his shirt-pocket he takes a copy of the Wanted poster folded, and from that he recites his aliases and versions of his surname, in the cold, tidy voice of a judge at a trial, as though announcing the names of someone else. Next he reads the charges, repeating phrases that seem to displease him, so that an onlooker might think it was the phrasings he disliked: not the fact of being accused, nor the signified crimes themselves, but something objectionable in language. All lies, say his minions; misunderstandings; exaggerations. Yankee stop at nothing. Breed of slanderers from the womb. That murder never happened. The other was self-defense. Aint a livin one among us ever disrespect a woman. We-all know the rules, Cole. We’re soldiers to a man. This girl over here – we saved her; that’s fact. Got the shackle on her neckwhen we found her near Stockdale. Only naked cause she won’t keep them clothes on her back. She’s crazy as a whiskied Sioux.

  He stops walking. Turns his gaze on Eliza Mooney.

  ‘Show me any man touched you.’

  She points first to Luke Dillon.

  ‘Please, Coley – No – ’

  Luke Dillon dies.

  ‘Who else?’

  Mutton-breath dies. Truncheon dies. Frog-eyes explodes like a bursting fruit, a melon dropped off a gin-shop as a joke. Phelim Tierney’s face in its bandages blooms. Three slugs are needed to finish him.

  ‘Who else? This man here? Be real clear when you point.’

>   ‘It aint true! I never laid hand on her, I swear on my mother. Dirty little bitch be a lyin whore. Take oath on my daughter, Cole, I wouldn do such a thing. Bitch give you the pox if you did.’

  ‘You speakin me the truth, Frank?’

  ‘You knowed it. I am.’

  ‘He speakin me the truth, girl?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘You believe in the scripture, Frank? Cause you need you to pray.’

  ‘That’s a lyin filthy slut, Cole. Take her word over mine? Look at it, for Christ sake! That’s a madwoman.’

  McLaurenson unsheathes a knife. Tosses it toward Frank Brooks. It lands with a dull clatter on the stones.

  ‘Mathew five,’ he says placidly. ‘Twenty-nine, thirty.’

  ‘ – Cole?’

  ‘And thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee. And thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.’

  ‘…Cole…for Christ sake…Quit foolin…Will you listen?…’

  ‘You all sit you straight. And open your eyes. Cause you need to witness what befall the perjurin man. Got to do what you must, Frank. Aint no other way. Or I take oath on the livin sanctification of Christ, I will cut you so it take you ten days to die.’

  Frank Brooks is weeping. Looking to his fellows for help. But they are weeping too, and looking away toward the mountains. Cole McLaurenson takes a stiletto from out of his left boot and pushes it into the embers of the campfire.

  ‘Cole…I saved your hide in Decatur…When the Yankees was comin…You was hanged that night without me, that’s a fact…’

  ‘You was a good soldier, Frank. Don’t be cryin, it’s unmanly. Sit you up straight. Aint no cause to be afeared.’

  ‘…Thank you, Cole…Thank you…I knowed you’d see it proper…’

  ‘You was right, Frank.’

  ‘…Coley…?’

  Frank Brooks dies.

  Eliza Mooney turns away. Clamps her hands to her ears. By the tree-line she sees a posse of maybe forty men. Some are in Confederate uniforms, tattered grays of the south. Most are wearing bandannas.

  ‘Girl,’ says Cole McLaurenson. ‘We aint done.’

  The stones wet and red. Only two men left. They are gibbering at the thing they have seen. McLaurenson reloads one of his repeaters to put McNeil out of agony. ‘God bless you, Jim,’ he says, before administering the mercy. And now there remains only one.

  ‘Tell me not this man,’ Cole McLaurenson says. Gesturing with his repeater at the last of his comrades.

  She nods: yes. That man, too. Your lieutenant was worst of all. There were nights when those other men did not want to attack me. But he stirred them to do it; otherwise they were not men.

  ‘Get up,’ says Cole McLaurenson. ‘You stinkin animal. Or so help me, I’ll cut your throat on the floor.’

  Thomas McLaurenson stands weakly, the color of ash. Damp fringe in the shells of his petrified eyes. Goosepimples flecking his chest.

  ‘Get pants on. No boots.’

  He does as commanded.

  ‘Walk north. Get. Look back at me, you die.’

  ‘Cole – there aint a livin town in two hundred miles.’

  ‘I mean to count to ten, for the sake of your children. You still here I say eleven, you’ll be buried alive.’

  The half-naked killer sets out over the stones, but weaving uncertainly. Where to go?

  ‘That filth is my oldermost brother,’ Cole McLaurenson says. ‘He’s my blood. I can’t murder my blood.’

  ‘Then give me the gun,’ says Eliza Duane Mooney. ‘Cause he aint walkin noplace while I live to draw breath. Or shoot me right now. Cause that’s all your choice. Him and me aint livin in the onesame world.’

  ‘There will be a restitution. There will be an amends.’

  ‘Maybe. Now give me the gun.’

  McLaurenson looks at her. She is thinking of the poster.His cold and merciless stare . Those words do not come close to the deathliness of his expression, its lodes of cruelty seen and done, but it is not in the eyes that such terrors live, it is somehow in the bones of the face. It has all gone into him. He sweats his sins. His hand will stretch out of his coffin like a briar in a ballad of star-crossed love.

  ‘Bless yourself,’ he says.

  She makes the sign of the cross.

  ‘Own the sin. Say it now.’

  ‘I own all of the sin.’

  ‘On your eternal soul.’

  ‘On my eternal soul.’

  ‘And all of its consequence to my own account.’

  ‘And all its consequence to my eternal account.’

  He hands her a repeater. Turns his back from what is coming.

  ‘God have mercy on your soul,’ he says.

  Her first shot misses his brother but it causes him to stop. The second strikes closer; it crunches off a boulder. The third clips his knee. He falls with a scream.

  ‘Cole!…Coley!…Bitch is…shootin me, Cole!…’

  McLaurenson is trudging away from her, down toward the lake, which is blue and gray and green and shadowed, and over on the far bank, a long march of pines, and waterloons are skimming and swooping. He is stripping off his leathers. He wades into the shallows. His knees. His buttocks. His waist. His shoulders.

  She harvests the reddened stiletto from its cradle of cinders. Many notches are grooved in its hilt. The word tennessee graven into the blade, in minuscule Gaelic calligraphy. Many years from this moment, a boy called Lucas Tanner will find it in the rocks, and his father will donate it to a museum in their town, and a senator will make a speech about what this relic truly means, what history can teach us, the importance of forgiveness, and the band will play somberly as the glass case is unveiled. But today it is only a knife.

  And the blade is so hot that she can feel its heat on her face, even when she holds it at armlength. She spits on it, the metal fizzes; the air around the point seems to shimmer. And the day smells of juniper and wildweed and timothy. And he might be the father of the child growing inside her – but that will not spare him. Nothing will.

  Her soles on the stones as she approaches the knee-shot man, who is crawling away pitifully as though possessing a chance, like a natterjack crushed by a cartwheel.

  ‘Look at me, Mister.’

  She shoots him through the left elbow.

  ‘Turn round when I told you, I said.’

  He rolls onto his back. Face flittered by the rocks.

  ‘…I got children…Got a wife…I got money…Have mercy…’

  ‘Beg me, bitch,’ she says.

  And he does as commanded, but his wounds make it difficult.

  She lets fall the repeater. A gun is too good for him. The throb in her palm as it clutches harder on the hilt.

  Near the islands of Lake McKinley, Cole McLaurenson hears the scream. He dives before the second one – he has heard many men die; it gives him no pleasure, never did. It is murky under the water, but there are strange ribbons of light. Your fingers in the silt feel strange, and cold. Water muffles everything except your own breathing.

  He stays down as long as he can.

  CHAPTER 42

  THE GOSPEL TRUE HISTORY OF COCHISE & JOHNNY THUNDERS†

  Come cluster near, sweet nobles fair, I’ll not detain ye long.

  An ye love the sport of gentlefolk, attend me eloquent song.

  Tis of an ancient donnybrook – ’twas fought the other week:

  Where Johnny Thunders, Erin’s pride, did whup the great Cochise.

  Twas near the west of Africa’s coast, in South Ameri-kay;

  Cochise shapes up to Johnny-Jump-Up, this taunting to convey:

  ‘’Tis said you are the fightenist buck; you wears de belt, I see.

  But you haven’t the hogs, yeh scut of the bogs, to fishticuff with me.’

  ‘How now,’ spake Mrs Thunders’ joy, the southpaw strong
and true:

  ‘’Tis I’m the wildest Irish brave, which none did yet subdue.

  Below the belt will punch no Celt, we’ll barney till we cease.’

  With that, he spat upon the gloves, and commenced to clout Cochise.

  Banshee, Comanche, lout and lord: and all did cheer the show.

  Pocohontas came with Cap’n Smith; Napoleon with his Jo.

  Saint Patrick brought the Prince of Wales, and Lot’s wife came with Lot.

  And all did sport as peaceful friends, auld enmities forgot.

  A hundred rounds, they fought their ground, and nation-pride the purse.

  Ten days and nights, they danced the ring, still none came off the worse.

  The sun burnt out, the moon grew a beard, the seconds cried ‘hurroo.’

  ‘By dad,’ the valorous Injun goes, ‘I’ll puck ye black and blue.’

  ‘Me mother was born in the Liberties, boys. Me father come up from Bray.

  I’m a Dubbalin lad; when I ladders you bad, tis double you’ll see for a day.

  For the Liffey is in me veins,’ cries John, ‘Shure there’s Knockmeeldowns in me gloves;

  And it’s when I come out to America, bhoys, the ladies there I loves!’

  Johnny socks! Cochise, he drops! The red-lad he’s thrun down!

  But bets the count, and up to mount a faresome rake of rounds.

  Five hundred years they scrapped in all, and never once a foul.

  Then ‘Thanum an Dhul!’†the Injun squawks, and his squaw she hurls the towel.