Redemption Falls

by Joseph O'Connor

  The acid-yellow stink in the streets revolts. The Gods of sewerage go unobserved here.

  In all the immense continent of North America, I do not believe that there can exist a wilderness more woebegone and storm-swept. Death Valley would seem a Parisian garden beside it, the wastes of Alaska a pleasure dome. There is but one gazetteer, and this unfinished; it was commenced by a Piedmontese Jesuit – this we are told – who ventured into the badlands to convert the indigenes. A fur-trapper happened on his skeleton six months afterwards, lashed to a tree, manuscript wedged betwixt its ribs. The epistle was published within the month (of course), dismayingly unproofed, & in many pirated editions. It is frightful, blowy stuff, an ecstasy of adjectival slobbering. Perhaps the killers were literary critics.

  Awesome this MASEJTY, these catedrals of rock, the falls of her cataracts, diamond-rainbow’d, thunderous, cascading as though from the cerulean haevens. Witness, Traveller!, and know thou art DUST. Astonishing landscape! Psalmody of mother nature! Hosanna the TERRIBLE GRACE of thy Creator!

  Poor reverend Punchinello, if ever he existed. As to which, I may say, I have the misgivings of doubting Thomas. Show me the wounds, friend, show me the wounds, else re-scabbard your exclamation points. Yet maybe he did. Unfortunate Loyolan. If his saint gazes down from some zone of the hereafter, may piety console for the want of his royaltiesin secula seculorem, Amen .

  The veracity of his words I am forced to concede – of some of them, at any rate – precision, Quasimodo! – but I cannot find it in my constitution to care for such a very wilderness. Its beauty is exhausting; its scale too epic, its shapes too uneven for the admirer of our griddedout American cities, where even the baffled immigrant, still finding his land-legs, may discover an immediate way. In any case, the word ‘landscape’ should be reserved, exclusively, for paintings. It is decidedly not a cartographical term.

  I am told that, in the summer, the sun pummels this country like a steam-hammer, that beasts drop dead of thirst, and men see visions that madden them; but with a mean temperature of 86 degrees and a half – the data are patchy, nonetheless one can estimate – one cannot help but wonder can it be truly that severe. Tonight, with the crusting of glaze-ice on the mere, and the plangent mewling of the chinook in the sequoias, such tales, at least to me, seem scarcely possible to credit. I imagine they are told in order to perturb the interloper, for the Redemptionites, like all colonists, love to do that. It appears to give them pleasure to disconcert the outsider. Or perhaps it binds them tighter, for they themselves are outsiders, and always will be strangers, did they live here a hundred years and stamp Pappy’s cognomen onto every last pebble. They like to watch us dance within their circle of horrors. Well, that is all right: Quasimodo can dance a little.

  And many of these fictions boast a recurring protagonist. The Governor ‘drinks blood.’ He ‘lay with a savage-woman’ at Tasmania. An ‘Houngan’, a druid of the vudoo cult, schooled him in Louisiana to call the dead from their graves. He is an eater of hashiesh. His presence sickens livestock. He is ‘Grand Cyclops’ of a sect of behooded apostles, which congregates on Gallows Mountain to chant ‘the black Mass.’ A cyclopaedia of spookery the Governor has inspired: County Wexford’s most infamous warlock!

  Damn this racked body, how I wish I could escape it. The bowel spasms which I suffered at San Francisco are come at me again, now I am into this Republic of stones. My temples smolder. Myfingernails throb. (Can that be possible, or do I hallucinate more?) It seems to me, now, that my very eyeballs sweat. I am almost disinclined to display myself in the street downstairs, so perpetual the extruding of my fluids. The widow advises that I must takeein Schluck Wasser , but yet, when I do, it tastes fetid completely, of liquefied gun-smoke or wrung-out rags. This pain behind the sinuses, it scours and scalds; this thirst will not be slaked. Drank one of the barbiturics I had of the wheelwright. Little effect. Think I was swindled. Doubtless, some witch of the locale could concoct me a medicament.Die Witwe speaks often of puissant herbs, would herself have been formerly candidate for the kindling. She has taken rather a fancy to my person, I believe, & often smiles (I think it is a smile) benevolently (I think it is benevolence) as I shuffle her ominous corridors. Remarkable, I have found: how some women admire a hideous looking man. Dear Christ, for the reassuring tedium of the east, where trails are straight and widows wartless.

  Here we shiver tonight, in this crater of blasted gulches, encircled by fastnesses and reeks so colossal that their pinnacles disappear into veneers of stratocumulus. Some of the higher peaks have never been scaled. Most of even the lower have no track the fleetest mule could go. How ever they are to be triangulated, measured accurately, eludes me. But a solution must be contrived, and it will be.

  If, as in epochs long immemorial, before ever Christian illumined the Paganlands with the LAMP OF GOSPIL TRUTH, those crags were to groan and quake them but an inch, all trace of mortal intercourse with this unfathomed dominion should be obliterated, fossilized in ghostly remembrance.

  Ghostly, indeed. As though ghosts remember anything. Suffering such bilge, such agitated strainings, one would imagine the Enlightenment had never occurred. Oh, scrupulous Mercator, you would loathe it out here; you would hate what itdoes to those who describe it. And yet, when one walks a league unaccompanied in this country, one approaches a comprehension of why description crumbles to cliché. Land is like music, for it resembles nothing but itself. We can only speak about it in translation: for this reason we have poets – also, as it may be, maps. This mountainplace is a fugue of despair and fracturedness. But I shall make of it Bach…†

  …Today, in the austere foothills that outcrop west of Arroyo de Maria, I stopped to replenish my gourd and correct some calculations in my notebook, when I observed, in the creek, gliding out of the osiers, a strangely shaped fish with silver-scarlet scales, which belonged to no genus my amateur biology could name. Its little graceful ballet of the shallows quite enchanted, and I sate me on a boulder to attempt to sketch it. So still was the scene, so silent the surrounds, that one fancied one could hear even the minuscule bubbles as they lipped and broke asunder in the brook.

  Foolish, foolish. Allowed my thoughts to wander toward her. Our time at New York. Certain hours we trudged together. Like a schoolboy and his first sweetheart on some glum little tryst and no money to go in someplace out of the rain. Funny little habit, that she would never say my name aloud. Often wondered why not. But she never would tell. An intimacy too far, perhaps.

  Since my descent among the Redeemed on Monday afternoon, not a trace of my prey in the town. No one mentions her, ever. She is like a bad smell. No one answers any question, whether subtle or blunt. She does not leave the house or appear in its windows. Not even to the chapel goeth my saint.

  Had hoped not to alarm her; to communicate that I was come – perhaps – sweetest thought – even to meet away from scrutiny; to beg one last time would she hear Quasimodo’s case. I could wait no longer. I must go to the residence tonight. The bubbling of the stream was not softer than her laugh. The thought of her lips was as a drug-dream.

  Suddenly there was a plunging of water – no, a fantastic explosion! A big male eagle, as beefy as a chimp, had swooped, and seized my piscine model in one of his talons, and already wheeled away, even as I sputtered and spat. Drenched, I watched the lordly animal ascend towards a distant summit, now beating with steady might, now borne sidewise on the windstream, until it and its quarry were infinitesimal specks, and the glare of the sunlight on the snow-silvered fleetings meant I could watch no more. What a death!, I thought, if death must come. But then I saw something just every degree as startling.

  High on a granite precipice, half a mile into the skies, a thread of purple smoke was rising in the air from some eyrie. A tiny man was up there: a human ant. I saw the glint of his scope as he studied me.

  What hideaways must abound in those clefts and giddying canyons. Imagine what the eagle’s cold eye reflects! Desperadoes and their hoards.
Deserters from the war. Mountain-men whose collation of favorite choice is the liver of a strangled Blackfoot.

  I’ll be the man to lead the van,

  Beneath the flag of green.

  Then loud and high, we’ll raise the cry:

  Revenge for Skibbereen.

  Down here in the colony, the settlers look like the savages: craggy, resentful, whipped. Not every one is bad; indeed, most appear industrious – but few enough inhabitants of such a dolorous outpost are not on the lam from something troublesome. In this I do not condemn them. Nor do I differ from them. It is an American entitlement, to go where one will. To resume one’s story over if the plot does not thicken to one’s taste. This should be the motto of our reconstructing Republic: The maps are not agreed. The atlas is unfinished. It contains so many extents that are consolingly blank. Come hither, pretty pilgrim: fill me.†

  Prussian, Irishman, Frenchman, Hollander: all Europe is here, in bedraggled embodiments, with Confederate sniper, Union dragoon, disgraced overseer and manumitted slave. Huckstresses, mountebanks, carpenters, card-sharps; Chinamen, gold-diggers, dealers in insurances. None is what he appears. All wear a mask. The slave-catcher now the gunsmith, the defaulter the churchwarden, the wife-poisoner sells millinery, the bigamist now a bachelor. The butcher, who avows himself long a friend of the Union, danced a jig at the news of Lincoln’s slaughter. The meats in his window are every day arranged in such a manner as to form the bloodied characters ‘S. S. T’ – many who pass can decipher their covert meaning.†Aye, all possess knowledge of some secretive variety. They nod at one another like disciples of a craft. Even their children seem withered by knowledge. They glower up as one rides past, ironed out of innocence, somehow. And the Governor lords it over this rubble-strewn Lilliput, ‘high on ze goose’, as the widow’s parlance has it, despised by nigh on everyone he subjects. In this, at least, he fulfills a useful function. They prattle of him like Hottentots in the shadow of Baal, as tribesmen presided over by Nobodaddy. Truly he brings unity to this cavalcade of the murmurous. Having now made his acquaintance, I understand some of the stories.

  His residence is set apart, at the northern periphery of the settlement, a two-story log-house with cut-stone chimneybreast, in a section whose shabby groggeries and suicide saloons are rumored nearly all to be brothels. Erected by navvies on a government contract, it was burned, & then bombed, before the builder was murdered by secessionists. Over its lintel is nailed the bleached skull of some long-extinct thing. A bannerless flagstaff stands sentry in the yard. All hail, thou lonesome totem.

  Amulatresse , I presume a cook (she had bile on her apron), hauled open the front door, which is cast of studded iron, and at first seemed disinclined to concede me admission, even when I presented my cartede-visite and rain-spattered papers of credential. She and Modo traded incomprehensibilities for a considerable time. Indeed, she appeared not to understand the English language, or, at least, my eastern manner of speaking it. Presently I became aware that Nubia and I were chaperoned. Out of the dimness behind her, I could detect the unmistakable rhythm of breathing. Some weighty presence was holding its counsel in the black, one sensed, and would not be the first to speak.

  ‘Governor?’ I ventured. ‘Is that you, sir, within?’

  No salutation came back from that lightless recess.

  ‘My name is Winterton,’ I said. ‘I am on Federal Government business. I am come to see the Acting Governor. Is he in the house at present?’

  The world exploded white! Terror squirted through my spine. The creature I had reckoned a man lunged forward from the gloom and sank its fangs into my glove, uttering a chain of petrifying snarls. I tore back from it, cursing, almost pissing with shock. Thank God, it had a shackle affixed to a clasp about its neck; but the ghoul tested the fetter severely as it strained toward my torso, maw dripping beads, ’til it was choking. Here was an extraordinarily massive and grubby dog – an Irish wolfhound, I think its breed is called. It had the dimensions of a small pony, of the kind used down pit-mines in England, and its eyes were the jasmine of butter gone rancid. Worse, the thing had a tumor on the side of its cheek, a furuncle or pustule of livid ruddiness, the size of a possum’s head. No carnival of capering, God-abandoned freaks ever boasted such a dollar-maker.

  ‘Duggan,’ spoke a male’s voice from the darkness behind the brute. Instantly it slunk down into a supine attitude, though it sustained an inhospitable scrutiny.

  ‘I am not wounded,’ I managed to call out. ‘It is nothing. A graze only.’

  From the passageway loomed the silhouette of a thickset man, his left hand clenching a twist of the fiend’s chain in preparation – whether for restraint or release was not quite clear – the other clutching a stump of guttering tallowflame, the light of which refracted itself over his visible flesh.

  ‘General O’Keeffe, sir?’ I asked.

  He gave me a meaning look.

  ‘Who wants to know it?’ came the sullen rejoinder.

  Here loomed before me ‘O’Keeffe of the Blade’. Old England’s sworn foe; Young Ireland’s banished hero. How many bitter nights had I prayed for his snuffing, that one, only one, of the millions of bullets that flew in the War would free her.

  His face is dark, almost Romany-dark, with black eyes quite sunken, although with a penetrative, distrustful glimmer, and a flaccid gray mustache that makes him look somehow defeated. The hair is a web of chaotic dirty curls, thinned severely at the temples, Apache-braided at the rear. There is something of Davis, the crushed rebel president: the deeply graven frown-lines, the air of lugubrious dignity. He holds himself stiffly, a degree too erect, as a boxer attempting recuperation from a painful beating & not wanting to show himself whipped. The line of the nose is strong, vaguely Roman (lends hauteur), but the jowls quite slack like those of a bloodhound. He is not corpulent, exactly, as has been reported in the dossier, but perhaps five sizes stockier than in the wartime daguerreotypes, and wearier of countenance, and a little oily looking. The handsomeness is still evident (the ghost of it, at any rate); but the Governor has aged markedly since coming into the Territory. Did I not know he was forty-three, I might have added a decade to his span. His shirt was disarrayed; he wore no coat or stock. The leggings were of buckskin and were remarkably unclean. He had on him a firearm in an underarm holster: a Remington 1859, I am certain, from the shape and length of its butt.

  ‘Captain Allen Winterton, sir, of the Corps of Cartography. I wrote you to say I was coming from Washington.’

  He regarded me intensely, as though I had uttered some affront to him. Cerberus clanked over and commenced investigating my snow-flecked boots, now my cuffs, now my private person. A stomach-churning odor arose from its pelt, of ash and grease and dampened filth.

  ‘I wrote you several times, General, but received no reply. Perhaps my dispatches failed to reach you. I am informed that there have been difficulties in that regard.’

  ‘In which regard?’ Now he watched me assessingly.

  ‘With the mail. I mean with mail robberies. With the savages and so on.’

  For what seemed endless moments he remained soundless as a Hindoo fakir. And an eerie sensation stole over me, soon, for which I can record no rational support, of impending violence of some fiercer kind than before. Putting plainly, I felt certain he had in mind to murder me then and there; and I realized I was thinking of ways to escape him. As though choked in the grip of a medium’s presentiment, or magicked into a scene from some syphilitic’s screechmare, it seemed that I saw myself fleeing through snow-blown ravines, with the Governor and his familiar in ravening pursuit. I can only put it down as some fleeting delusion my lately suspected fever had enkindled. It is odd (as we know) what the mind can do. Illness, I find, can sophisticate a thing.

  ‘Are you armed?’ he asked morosely, and I came back to myself. Now I could detect the curdled reek of whiskey on his breath.

  I said that I bore a small pistol and unfastened my greatcoat to reveal it. His eyes
did not stray southerly to take in my gun, but remained glued (their jellies rheumy) on my own.

  He uttered a phrase in some weird language to the observing lacquey, whose only acknowledgment was an unfathomable nod; then turned about and hobbled back toward the interior quarters, trailed by the low-tailed, dismal hound, which paused now and anon to lick at the naked floorboards or push its dripping snout into crannies in the walls. I was not certain whether or not I was intended to go after, but since the cook did not shut the door against me, I mustered courage and entered.

  I had not taken two paces over the door-stones when she commenced gesturing at my belt, in a manner of greatest insistence. I understood her to mean that I was to surrender her my weapon. This I did soon, for she was most persevering. I held it in her direction but she did not at first accept it. Suddenly, I apprehended that the woman was having some difficulty in seeing, and I was sorry for having erewhile thought badly of her.

  Venturing down the corridor in the Governor’s wake, I approached and entered after him into the house’s core: a spacious if ascetic room, lit but dimly by candles and by the sputtering flames of a log-filled fire. Fuliginous and rank, the air all about us, and tainted very heavily with a choking redolence of scorched dust. Over the inglenook hung a work in oils, depicting a naval scene from the Revolutionary War; but zagged across the canvas was a faint smudge of dribbled magenta, as though a measure of hock, or a spurt of gore, had bedashed those cangled frigates. A Cheyenne head-dress did its wan best to decorate a pilaster, its feathers withered down to blanched-out stalks. There was a hideous example of the taxidermist’s crime: a jackrabbit-head with the antlers of a young stag fixed on. Around this nightmare’s neck depended a string of wolf’s teeth. How vicious we are to the animals.

  At the core of thestudio squatted an unvarnished oaken table, substantial in appearance, though its plank-boards deeply excoriated, and defaced extensively by the spherical taints observable on the surfaces of bars in low saloons. As well, I noted an assortment of jagged abrasions in the tabletop, as though it had at one time been employed for butchery. Around it perched a half-dozen finely made chairs, which looked to this untutored eye to be Louis-Quatorze and brittle. An uneasy polygamy, these courtly Mademoiselles, with the uncouth old frontiersman they surrounded.