Redemption Falls

by Joseph O'Connor

  Now you know, Little Red [Rojita]. I have failed in all I wanted. I feel anger and guilt and shame. I try to be brave, but there are moments when I am very afraid of the years to come. I pray to Mama, then. I know she will help me.

  I think you have suspected – I know you have, wise Steffa – that all has not been as it should between C and I. You hinted as much when you saw me good-bye at the station, or I thought you did, and how I longed to tell you everything. Instead, I spoke sharply and spoiled our farewell. Forgive me, dearest Steffa. You deserve a much better sister.

  What I am about to confide must always remain between us; but I know I do not have to ask it, for you would anyway assume it. You are so very good; so slow to pass judgment. I wish I had even a shadow of your merciful kindness. In any case, I do not wish to condemn Con. He is the man he is, a good one in his heart; but I knew, when we married, that being his wife could never be easy. Heaven knows I had been warned of it, not least by C himself, but by others, also – and anyway I knew it. The world thinks him self-possessed, I dare say even arrogant; but nobody can carry the wounds of such a life and be complete. I wish I could write you that I do not love him any more. How much easier that would be, were it true.

  For as long as I can remember, and especially since Mama’s passing, I have longed for the day when God would permit me to be a mother. Con’s avowal, during our courtship, was that he would like us to have an army of children. But very soon after our marriage, he changed. He grew sullener of spirit, more silent and secretive. At length he confessed to me the reason for his darkness. During his time at Tasmania he had married a native woman who bore him a daughter, but the infant had died at eight weeks. The woman, he told me, took her own life some time subsequently, not long after he escaped the colony. He had thought himself recovered from the grief of the loss but could now see that he was not; since marrying again it had returned. Steffa, I was shattered he had never told me of child or mother – and I saw that I had married a man who was in thrall to his secrets, who would always keep them, no matter the hurt to others – yet what choice had I now but a blind hope in providence? But my prayers were not answered. He grew more distant all the time. Men would call to the house for him at any hour of the night. He would not say who they were, nor reveal their purpose, nor open a letter in my presence – and there were many from Australia. We had not been married a season when he told me he could never again be a father, was too broken in spirit, too afraid. It was beyond my understanding, this terrible refusal. I begged him not to sentence me thus.

  Our quarrels grew dreadful. Yet they did not kill my hope. God help me, Steffa, I have been so stupid and self-regarding. I could not take him at his word, preferring a vain trust. Time would assuage the hurts he carried – of this I attempted to persuade myself. Yet all the while he became more ardent, he would not be a father, ceased approaching me as a spouse at certain weeks of the month, denied that this was the case. I wished to ‘trick’ him, he said, to disrespect his wishes, or to cancel ‘by wiles’ what he called ‘our agreement’. Those years, which should have been happy, passed in enmity and vicious words. Worst were his silences: unbearable repudiations.

  There are privacies in any marriage, which God forgive me if I disrespect. But I cannot go on dissembling; it will send me mad. The truth is that Con and I have not lived as husband and wife for nine years, since even before the War, since he started traveling away from me. Our marriage is a shell, a husk of itself. We are a nothing in a crevice. I think we always were. I have come to doubt his reasons for wanting to marry me – even, on occasions, to think Papa correct. ‘Fortune-hunter’ is an ugly, a despicable name, and in saner moments I cannot make Con fit a pattern so unmanly. But always comes the doubt: I must have had something he wanted. If only I knew what it was.

  Some time ago, Steffa, I made a mistake. You will think very low of me. But I must tell the truth to someone. I allowed myself to form a friendship with a person in New York: worse, a patient at the hospital. He was – is – a good and kindly man, an officer in the Corps of Cartography. He endured Hell in the War: unimaginable suffering. His face was so disfigured when he came to the ward that he could not bear to look on his reflection.

  We would go walking together. We spoke of poetry, of beautiful things. He paid me compliments. My vanity permitted them. I think loneliness was part of it but that is no excuse. Before long – I do not know how it happened – our feelings ran deeper than friendship. I should have broken the attachment but to my disrepute I did not. I found, in fact, that I was unable to. I longed for our meetings as blessèd hours, telling myself they were innocent, yet knowing, were they guiltless, there was no need for them to be always kept secret. He began speaking to me as a suitor addresses a girl he loves [una novia]†, made declarations I should never in honor have permitted. But I did permit them. And soon, I returned them. But you yet do not know the worst of what I am.

  One night, it was last spring, he asked me to transgress further: to meet with him privately at a dishonorable place. I knew what he wanted. I knew it very well. I am not so pure as everyone imagines me. He implored me to go to him. I said I could never. He told me he would be there, would wait for me there. The morning came; then that afternoon. I prayed and walked. I went to make confession. The priest, a very old monk, was so kind that I wept. A mistake had been made. Loneliness was not sinful. But the error must not be compounded; the friendship must end. I went directly from the chapel to the place of which the man had spoken, the incense still scenting my clothes.

  In that room we spoke. At first there was nothing more than speaking. I told him that we must part, could go no further with this wrong. But even as I uttered these unfelt negations, I longed for him as a lover, more than ever before. The room seemed a world possessed of its own laws. I wished I were someone else, or that this man was someone else. Or that he was a girl, and I a man, with a man’s capacity for self-forgiveness. We shook hands, in farewell, or so I thought, but soon kissed, and our caresses became forbidden intimacies. Steffa, I felt no shame – and no shame for feeling no shame – but the joy of being desired by another. It was all I could do to arrest the misdeed. I must beg the man to cease. It was only the thought of betraying Con that prevented me from acting on my wishes. The man spoke of love, the forgiving morality of love, was gentle and tender as he asked and asked. Had he asked but once more, I know what would have happened. My sin would have been greater, would have been the ultimate of a spouse. But I know, I became an adulteress that night. My presence placed that unforgivable stain to my account. No – it had long been there.

  In the coming days he wrote to me. I returned his fiery letters. He wrote again. I beseeched him to desist. I told him that I was coming here to be with Con, to whom, for better or worse, I had vowed my loyalty. I had made a mistake, had compromised my word. But the error must be put in the past.

  I had hoped, when I came out, that we might start anew. But the hope was in vain. All our way is eroded. Our quarters here are separate. He has insisted it should be so. We eat, we live – we go about alone, like a broken old bachelor and his spinster sister who roast on the flames of one another’s disappointments. Our days are become reflections of our friendless nights. We hardly speak a syllable to one another any more, nor even sit quietly in a room with the other. I come in; he departs. I go out; he enters. What might have been hoped the intimate friendship of a married couple has been supplanted by cold loneliness in every way.

  I try to content myself with my writing, with walking in the hills. I visit the poor sections, arrant hypocrite that I am, and play in the role of the Governor’s wife; but life here has been dismal with no hope of reprieve. I cannot write anything but dressmaker’s trash, derivative nothings only fit for the kindling. I have tried to speak candidly with Con many times, to ask how I disappoint him and how I can improve. At these moments his rages become absolutely terrifying. No prayer I can contrive reveals any course.

  In the silence of the
night the worst possibilities have loomed around my bed. There is one that came constantly; I know I do not have to name it. So accustomed I grew to wrestling with this terrible thought that, now I have overcome it, I almost want for its companionship, for it would be a relatively simple thing if only it were true; at least it would be understandable. Of course one hears rumors in a place as small as this – there are looks of almost violent sympathy from some of the ghastly women, and snickering comments from the brutish men – but I know Con’s nature is loyal, unlike my own, and faithlessness of that kind he could never countenance. In any case, I believe – forgive me if I speak plainly – that no mistress would abide his mercurial demeanor. Such a woman always wants the best of the man she has taken, not his weaknesses or disenchantments, whatever disappointments he carries. Some event, some doubt, has invaded him like an illness. He is not the man I married. I do not know what he is.

  He wanders the periphery at night like a ghost of the battlements, convincing himself that Indian attacks impend, or that outlaws gather in the darkness. Even the beggars laugh at him, the basest drunkards. They call him vile names and have worse ones for me. He does not seem to notice, only continues drifting the outskirts, gazing on the sierras even as the nightfall obscures them, as though the rocks might come to life with the departure of the sun. Last month he ordered a watchman of the town to be imprisoned, a boy of only nineteen with a mother to support, who left his post a moment to pass some innocent nonsense with a girl. His men whisper that he has a scheme to encircle all the settlement with a moat-and-breastworks, and to construct an iron caging around this whole house. Twice he has mustered the Guard to ride out to the mountains in the dead of midnight, only to return, weeks later, exhausted and sun-sick, with no prisoners taken and no weapons found, and his men ridden halfway to the grave. He walks all night and sleeps half the day, and often it is the dark of evening before he rises. I pass his door at noon to fearful cries from within. His drinking has become – no, has long been – excessive. I have even come to fear that his mind may be imperiled. Steffa, he had the servant remove every pier glass from the house. He told her, so she confided to me, that he could see ‘specters’ in their glasses. She will not be alone with him here any more and prefers to stay at a cabin in the town.

  For a time I thought the cause must be something that happened in the War. I know he saw obscene sights, was responsible for some of them. You and I can imagine, from those dreadful nights at the hospital, what horrors he must have witnessed. He is tortured, I know, for so many of his men having died, and wracked by thoughts of their widows and children. He feels that he abandoned them, betrayed them in some way; was the very worst General in all the War. Every penny of his remuneration goes directly to a fund for them, and much of my allowance for these last several years, and almost all of the capital I have thus far received. (I beseech you not to speak of this to Papa or Attorney Graham. They would crucify me had they any inkling as to the truth of what has happened.)

  His reluctance to discuss with me anything of the campaigns served only to fuel my impression that some unspeakable thing occurred, about which I did not know, and from which he wished to protect me. But when I ask him, tranquilly, as coolly as I can, he roars that my imagination will always be my curse and he had rather fight ten more wars, and lose another brigade, than to go on having to be ‘its victim’. And there is a freezing, steely logic in his outbursts at such times, a pitiless hatred I cannot recognize. He will go again to Panama and this time not return; will go again into Nicaragua or Cuba or Mexico, where he claims to have associates but he will not tell me who they are, nor how they live, nor anything they do. And these threats I dread, for when he went away before, I had not the slightest idea as to when he would come back, if at all.

  Then I must discover more of what happened at Tasmania, that accursed country whose very name I loathe. Some time ago, when I was on my passage out here from the States, I found a way of opening a box of his like a pitiful little sneak. I do not know what I sought: a reassurance, perhaps. What I found was a journal containing certain recollections of Con’s. Passionate, adoring, full of longingly devoted sentiments. I should never have read them. I curse myself for having done so. But I think that he loved his first wife far more deeply than he had told me and perhaps has not mourned for her, and even still longs for her. Steffa, on my life, if a haunting is possible, that poor unhappy woman has crossed the oceans to this house.

  I have heard him call her name from his room in the night, and the name of their poor dead child. It is a chilling sound. I hurry on by. I do not like what it makes me feel. I know that he keeps their anniversaries, even after all these years, and puts on black, and goes to the chapel, telling me he commemorates some relative in Ireland, or a comrade killed in the War. But it is those two sorrowing souls for whom he mourns; and I think he always shall.

  Some time ago a boy was brought here to the house: a war-waif found by C and his deputies at a derelict mine last Christmas. Nothing is known of his parents, not even if they are living, nor where is his country, nor what can be his history. The child is a mute and we think a southerner. It is thought that he was a camp-follower with the rebels.

  ‘What of that?’ you will ask. Must we not remember charity? Oh Steffa, I can see your mild and beautiful eyes and feel your kind reproach. It has scalded me to the soul that the same man who has forbidden me a child could be fatherly to a boy that came out of the night like the rain – an associate of those who would have murdered him if they could – an urchin whose name he does not even know. Too well I am aware that I should be kinder, more forbearing – believe me, I loathe myself for my wretched selfishness – butI cannot bear it more , no matter how I have tried to. I have come to detest the very sight of the poor weird child, who comes and goes, and goes and comes like a spider. The sight of him is a reminder of all that has been prohibited. He appears in my dreams. He is everywhere I turn. As I eat, as I bathe, he comes out of the floor. Every knot in the walls, his eye is behind it.

  Last night we quarreled violently, C and I. Terrible things were said. I told him that the child must leave without further delay. He retaliated that it was impossible, ridiculed my wish, excoriated me for having expressed it. I contended that Con must find him a place at one of the mines, or with some merchant of the town who might want for an apprentice. These proposals were hurled back at me with screams of hatred. He would ratherI myself forsook the house. Why could I not go? Did I not know he detested me? The sound of my voice. My snobbery and conceit. That he would visit – Steffa, he said this – with a woman of the town, before ever again he would come to me as a husband. These, and other cutting terrors he roared, until he drove me by his curses from the room. It is too heavy to bear. I will not bear it more. This is not why I am alive in the world.

  I cannot ask you to lie, but if you could not tell Papa – at least not for the time being – I should be more than grateful; until I discover what to do and how I am to return to New York. I shall write him in a fortnight or so, when I know better what to say. Dear Steffa, pray for your girl. Life is thin.

  The sun is risen. Pray for me, Malinche. And pray harder for Con, I beg you.

  Your loving and sorry sister,

  L

  CHAPTER 47

  SURVEILLANCE

  A stranger in town – A fire burns long in Redemption

  THURSDAY,AUGUST23RD,1866. SECONDWATCH.

  10.14 a.m.O’Keeffe left the residence and proceeded towards the Legislative Office, accompannied [sic] by the boy. There conducted meeting with man identified as Captain James Fitzgibbon, United States Navy, though the latter in civilian clothing. Boy witnessed repeatedly in window of office.

  11.35 a.m.Departed the office and went into John Grady’s Alehouse, taking the boy and the dog in their company. Purpose of Fitzgibbon unclear. Has been in the town approximately one week. Rumors of secret shipment? They were encountered by Patrick Vinson and other disreputables in the Alehouse. Vinso
n started a quarrel about his pay.

  Observer II Notes:at five minutes of noon, three carts drew up before the residence, each driven by a masked man. One took up a sentry position at the southern end of the lane with a pistol forbidding access. His fellows entered the house and quickly set to emptying it of many furnishings, books, a camera & tripod, etc, loading same into carts, directed by LCO’K. Presently Marshal J. Calhoun arrived and challenged man acting as sentry. Tore off his bandanna. The man was a Chinee. Said he had been hired by the Governor’s wife.

  Calhoun entered the house. Left four minutes later and ran toward Legislative Office. At twenty-one minutes after noon LCO’K emerged from the house, tearful. Was pursued by the Negress who was pleading with her not to go. LCO’K entered the second of the carts. All three drove away quickly toward the south.

  Subject did not return from the Legislative Office until ten after four. Visibly inebriated. Extraordinary scene ensued. Over two hours and a half, assisted by the boy, he removed a very large quantity of domestic and other items from the property – books, furnishings, lady’s clothing, hatboxes – made a pile of them to the rear of the house and set it alight, dousing the whole with a flagon of lamp oil. A large painting of a savage, brought by LCO’K, he smashed to pieces with a wood-ax and threw same onto the flames with the rest. Calhoun came and tried to stop him. But he would not be stopped. The fire yet burning as I write.

  CHAPTER 48

  AND HERE IS A RING, A RING OF GOLD, SET WI’ THE PRECIOUS STONE. HE PRAYS YOU COME TO SILVERTON WOOD AND ASK THE LEAVE OF NONE

  A Goodly Priest – An assignation with outlaws

  The traitor Patrick Vinson – A plan to go into Canada