I vacated the house directly, thinking I had best. He can be contended with by-and-by, perhaps better in the light of day.
On my trudge back here, the tempest began to blow up harder, so that presently I was forcing through flurries of smarting hail. The road was a very soup of adhesive filth and ordure. Miners with storm-lanterns were dragging a terrified horse from a ditch; but the effort proved no good, and they must end its agonies with a pistol shot. This execution I watched. It was sad; very sad. There was a quite tremendous quantity of blood.
Watching, I bethought myself of a line I had happened upon in some poem, wherein love is likened to the star of the north. ‘Constant as a star is my darling dark.’ But the stars are not constant. They flare out and burn up; and the entire of the momentary nothing they sparkle, live always encircled by out-and-out darkness, which encroaches, as it must, until all light fades. A star is merely an explosion seen from a great distance, and, like all distant violence, may be attributed significance. But that is all it is: a cruel event. And we poor fools pen poems about it.
I can write no more this night. I tremble and blaze. The perspiration from my brow drips onto the parchment – blurring.
CHAPTER 51
THE STORMor LINES AFTER QUARRELING NEAR THE SECOND AVENUE
To a dear friend who must be nameless and who asked a greater intimacy than a kiss
A constant star, my lonely dark.
Lightning racks the night.
Lost, we roam’d the cloistered streets,
Escaping worldly slight.
No haven, this forbidden bond
With all its wildest hopes.
‘I wish,’ he whispered. ‘Say my name.’
‘No words,’ the other spoke.
Tender, rousing hands and eyes
Evade the heartless light.
Raveling illicit hopes,
The sheets of rain tonight.
O friend unnamed, I spoke not true;
Now – alone – I storm for you.
Charles Gimenez Carroll [Lucia-Cruz McLelland-O’Keeffe]†
CHAPTER 52
BEWARE, YE RARE AND LISSOME GIRLS, THE COAXING WORDS OF A SOLDIER
The outlaws’ hideout – A strange language – Patrick Vinson makes a mistake that will cost him dearly
A beam of cave-light, dust-filled, opaque, comes coursing through an aperture in the roof far above her and shines like a visualization of the power of God in a prayerbook intended for children. The dripping and gurgling of underground water. A field of eroded stalagmites like unhatched eggs. Lichens on the walls, and the chiselings of a people long moved away or died.
And the bandits, like the undergrounders, have departed, too, in the weeks and months following the robbery. Ridden away for their homes, in twos and fours: her husband’s accomplices in piracy. Back to their families, or to gangs they call brothers – to mountains, villages, campfires, burnt schoolrooms. Yes, one of them is a schoolteacher – or he was, before the War. Come up from Virginia, she thinks.
Each guerrilla took his share, having sworn an oath-of-blood to use it solely for the Confederate cause. Some will purchase arms. There was talk of explosives: a plan to bomb the White House, to assassinate the entire Government. She suspects it was bluster. They are only desperadoes. Some of them will never go home.
She bathes in the rockpool. Weightless; waterborne. The scald of the ice-cold water. The fruit of her womb is ripening in its husk. She feels it rolling inside her. There are two simpleminds to protect her – John Fox Galligan and a Tennessee farmboy called ‘Bubba’ or ‘Dunne’ – and the traitor, Patrick Vinson, who has no place on earth he can think of to go any more. Every time she looks up, he is watching her from the shadows. His peasant’s ruddy face.
‘How you feelin, Eliza?’
‘Whut you care.’
‘Got somethin agin talkin?’
‘Let me alone, Mister. I’m readin a book.’
She has seen him light a flambeau and make into the depths, his light growing smaller as he goes. He feels there must be gold, that the realm is a treasure-house, if only one knew where to seek. He returns, hours later, with not a grain of gold but with tales that freeze the sportings of the fools. A cavern at least a mile away with a dragon-shaped rock. A vault that looksworked , for its floor is smooth as glass. A toadstool he saw, the size of a stagecoach. A ledge to which he climbed with strange runes on its slabs. He copied them onto his shirt-collar with a nub of charred wood. He has forgotten that the natives do not write.
‘…Eliza?…Eliza?…You seen what I found?’
‘Got a bale on you, don’t you? You turn deaf as well as dense?’
‘You don’t want to see it?…That’s a Indian language…Give a ransom to know what it mean.’
‘Mean go and suck your momma’s, cause you aint suckin mine. And get out of my light. I’m readin.’
‘I don’t mean to vex…Real sorry if I did…’
‘Quit lookin at me that way, Mister, or I’m tellin Cole.’
‘Cole aint here, girl…Cole aint never here.’
‘He’ll be back soon enough.’
‘You reckon?’
‘I know.’
His eyes always watching. Taking everything in. That day she slipped on the rock, had to bandage up her knee. Him pretending not to look as she undresses.
‘You was mine, I tell you the one-thing: I wouldn’t never quit you. Be here to take a care of you. Do anythin you want.’
‘You got nothin I want you to do, nor say. Cept get out of my road. I’m readin.’
He does not move away. He does not move at all. He stands by that pillar of flaking, wet limestone, watching Eliza Duane Mooney read. The Governor told him one time – they were arguing violently –: ‘You’re not unintelligent. But you’restupid , Vinson. You will always be stupid. That isn’t the same thing. And you’re never going to change, because a fool never changes once he reaches the age of reason.’ He is wondering whether or not to speak the words in his mind. The sentence with which he could overcome her.
He has carried it a while, a key to a pleasure dome. Anticipating the pleasure of its use. He has thought about the words, the right moment to speak them. Her gratitude, her malleability upon hearing them.
Her dress is dark green. Her feet are naked. There is a tenderness in how she turns pages. She licks the middle fingertip of her smooth right hand, for the flimsies have a way of sticking together in the damp; and the grace, the womanly tact, with which she gently separates them, and her lips moving silently as she reads. The beautiful ribbons in the spine of the Bible. Cave-light on the side of her face.
‘Only I seen that boy,’ Patrick Vinson says quietly, as though somehow uncertain if it is true. And the words float out of the cave of his mind and into the must of the cavern. They can never be unspoken. They are part of the world, like the odor of the lichens, and the plinking of water, and the whiteness of her toes on rock. And the tiny, jagged swellings on the wet gray granite, and the plasterish taste of the air.
‘You got a tintype over there. I heard tell it’s your brother. I seen that boy. I know where he’s at. Aint three days’ ride from there to this. I know that boy. I’m sure on it.’
Eliza looks up at him. The man who played his card. He appears fearful, as though about to be wagered a stake he doesn’t possess. Something is making him tremble.
‘You seen my brother?’
The traitor nods wild-eyed.
‘Name Jeddo. So high. Be sure of it, Mister.’
‘Certain sure, I swear it. Even talked to him a few times. Twas myself found him in April and he making into Canada.’
‘Where?’
‘Canada.’
‘No, where he at now?’
‘Well, see – that’s the matter – Oul memory aint so good this weather…Figured…mebbe you’d help me remember.’
Patrick Owen Vinson, County Louth and Red Hook, Brooklyn. As he dies, he will remember this moment. The instant he
collaborated with the power of coercion and thereby wrote his sentence.
‘That the way it is, Mister? I don’t lay for you, you don’t tell me?’
‘…Eliza…There’s no call…It dont have to be like this…I care for you, Eliza…Let me talk to you, Eliza…’
‘What you want of me, Mister? In the dirt on my knees? Stick it up me like a sow? That what you want?’
‘Eliza…’
‘What piece of me you want, Worm? Say it. I want to hear it. My hand? My mouth? Where my child gonna come out-of? My breast that gonna suckle? Cause I want that you speak it. You so ugly and low you can’t get no woman to touch you but rentin one hates the livin sight of ever thing about you?’
‘It aint rent. That aint right. I never said aught about money.’
Echo of ‘money’. Vowel-howl.
His mouth on her own; his grip on her waist. She snaps away from Patrick Vinson, as from the gush of a fireball. Her back to a wall of spore-puffing moss that sags as she connects with its jellyness. The ball of her wrist wiping his taste from her lips. And sudden as a sting, he sees the family resemblance. It isn’t in the eyes but the curl of the mouth. It’s the way she grits her teeth.
‘You dead, Mister. You know that? One word from me, you gone.’
‘That happen,’ says Patrick Vinson, ‘you never see your brother again.’
‘Cole gonna beat it out of your filthy skull. Then I tie up your noose myself.’
‘That aint gonna happen,’ Patrick Vinson replies, unholstering his Colt repeater.
So heavy, the repeater. Like an anchor in your hand. The effort you put into buying it. The drinks undrunk, the girls uncourted, the nights you stayed home counting pennies in a cigar box, yesterday’s suppers, the worn-down boots, and all of it brought you to this moment in history that will never appear in any record. You would not have thought it possible in your youth, Patrick Vinson, that you would come to be the subterranean man.
Water dribbles down the clefts in the parapets of rock. The mushrooms glistening: russet. The plash of something echoed from those transepts of granite and the chuckles of the simpleminds dicing someplace you can’t see. It is not too late to turn away from this crossroads you have cut, but it is harder with a gun in your hand.
‘Rape now,’ she says. ‘You some playboy, aint you, Mister. You hard with a gun in your hand?’
‘Aint rape! Don’t be stupid. You don’t think so good, do you? You pretty but you don’t think so good.’
‘What I think is, I’m gonna enjoy crushing your eyeballs for grapes. Like grapes, you whore’s leavings. I’m gonna drink their juice.’
‘You don’t understand,’ Patrick Vinson interrupts. ‘This gun int for you.It for me .’
‘Ee-aw-ee-,’ shrieks the cavern behind him. The clatter of a stone onto stone.
His hand with the repeater is shaking very badly, as though he wishes someone would take it away from him. Sweat slickens his cheekbones. He licks his thin mustache. He looks like a prisoner in front of a firing squad, groping for the last precious memory.
‘You don’t come round to my way, then so help me Jesus Christ, I ride out of this hole in short order and straight into Canada. McLaurenson catch me up, I put a bullet through my head. And you’ll never know your whole life what I knowed about that boy. And you’re young. Life gonna be long.’
The fool John Galligan has appeared on the outcrop below, dancing by himself in longjohns. His friend Dunne, or Bubba – who knows his story? – is sawing on an invisible violin. The light-beam alters subtly, as though the unseen sun has been obscured by the hand of God. She hears Vinson’s breathing; strained, uneven. He is sweating like a fungus in heat.
‘I give you choices,’ he says. ‘A yes. That’s all. And I take you to your brother. Your blood.’
Behind him the invisible damned, all the men who ever used her, by force, by currency, by the currency of force, a number so great that she has long stopped counting; behindthem , all the users of her mothers. They live in the blackness. You can hear them in the night. They gabble their strange languages, one to the other, but everything they say comes out the same in the end:Would one more make any true difference ? Because this is what you’re for, girl. All you’ll ever be for. No point in saying anything but yes.
‘I won’t,’ she says. ‘Not for any child on earth. Not for no one’s ever lived, or ever’s gonna live again. Not the child in me now. Not my brother. Not no one. Not Christ and His mother. Not the world. You can make me, I guess. You can try to, I guess. You look like you’re strong. I’ll hurt you ever way I can. And you better be ready to murder me dead. Cause if I live, Iwill kill you. Some day I will kill you, though you live to a hundred and figured you was safe. One night you’ll open a door. Turn around in your bed. I’ll come out of your fuckin mattress. You trust on it, Mister. Cause I won’t say yes, not if you put a bullet through me now. Tell me, or don’t tell me. I say no.’
Stalagmite Vinson. He wishes he could weep. The oak for his coffin is felled already. He hears it fall in his mind.
‘If livin ever meant you was more than a dog – think hard before you put your hand on me, Vinson.’
CHAPTER 53
I’LL NEVER WISH TO TARRY MORE, FOR LOVE HAS FLOWN AWAY
An angry letter from Lucia to her husband
Con: Since you very well know my whereabouts I will not trouble to write them down. Your spies will be able to inform you of my movements. You would be judicious to tell them, should any man impede me, I will shoot him in the head without compunction.
Every day I go to the stage office and ask for a ticket to Salt Lake City. Every day I am refused by the Manager. This morning I was informed that you have issued ‘an official order’ continuing the suspension of all stage routes for a further two weeks. Apparently you are prepared to bankrupt and cripple this Territory if that is necessary to frustrate my wishes.
I give you notice, if no other means of leaving become available by the close of a fortnight, I will make a way out of this Territory on horseback, or on foot, if I must, and I will go through the Indian Territory, or any I choose. The consequences, if any, were a matter for your conscience. You know me better than to believe I would not dare it.
Furthermore, I will tell every person who asks me along the way that I am the wife of James O’Keeffe, who reduced me to these straits for his pride. When I reach New York – if I reach New York – I will write of your treatment in every publication that will accept me. Every newspaper in Ireland will receive a copy of my chronicle, as shall every last one of your friends. Already I have written to my father and his attorney, instructing them to withhold any further payment of my capital. Keep me like an animal in your private Australia and I can assure you, you will pay the cost.
It is nothing less than pitiful that you would stoop to punish me in this stupid and childish manner. You will not succeed in your endeavor; be certain of it, sir. If you wish to fight a war, I will give you one.
Lucia.
CHAPTER 54
OH WHITHER MY LONG-LOST GIRL?
More from Winterton’s journal – He searches the town for his departed love – & sees a stranger who resembles a former comrade of the Governor – Reflections on aspects of one of Redemption’s principal languages – & a new friend is made among the citizenry
5. XI. 66. Redem. F.
Frequent and violent alterations in wind speed and direction.
Find, since the War, that memory is shot. Simplest things flit away. Details in especial. This morning happened to think upon my coming into the Territory and could scarcely recollect route without writing it down. Rather concerning; even upsetting. Dearly hope it passes. Wonder if a doctor could do anything.
Four days and nights abed – pulsingly vivid dreams of her – but the fever has broken now. Queerly sensate after one has been sick of a fever. Purged of many vile elements, or layer of epidermis stripped away. Smells, tastes, even touches electric. One wonders if this is how an i
nfant feels on arrival into the world. Or dying man about to leave it.
Little rickety in the forenoon, still sweating like a hog, with stools not firm, and tongue slick and ashen; but by twelve of the clock was able to face into a walk, and by one to take a glass of pale beer. Found it vivifying, although it tasted disturbingly earthy or nutty. Christ knows what they put in it. Best not to.
Sallied out to Perryville Cross. Made sketch of the ruins. Thermometer has malfunctioned so that I can enter no accurate record. But air very cold & sharp & enlivening. Keener appentency ensued: merely to breathe was a relief. But I could not keep much down.
Town crowded during the morning with Koötenais traders who remained beyond the midday curfew. (Apparently he turns a blind eye to their presence.) Elk-furs, bearskins, some nicely enough got up, trinkets, little fixings wrought by their women. Shabby pinto ponies no one would want to buy. Purchased a coon-hat with ear-muffs from one super-annuated rascal, he was almost quite naked, the cold notwithstanding. Asked me by gestures (at my pistol) could he have bullets rather than coin. Demurred & he looked most chapfallen. Not a tusk had my mercantile in his painted noggin. One wondered how he chewed his meats at supper. His ‘pard’ showed a mawful of blackened broken stubs. Like looking at a thunderstruck graveyard.
Lost a little at Spanish monte in saloon called ‘The Shoogawn’. Considered a hand of poker but resisted in the close. Cheat among the pack, I could see what he was doing. Clever. Would be hard to best him.
Noted a number of striking expressions employed by the whites. ‘Knight of the ribbons’: a stagecoach driver. ‘Blackleg’: a gambler. ‘Bugscuffle’: an insignificant town. ‘Raw-mashe:’ nonsense or (perceived) cant in speech. ‘Gutty’: a street-boy. ‘Jonah’: bad luck. ‘Here’s your mule’ is a sentence they utter very frequently: a phrase, so far as I understand it, possessing no meaningper se but employed as a sort of amiable punctuation. They have many others of these, indeed a remarkable number; the Hibernians have a veritable Websters of them: ‘Who’d be a soldier?’ ‘There it is for you now.’ ‘Shure, what can you do?’ ‘Go on to God.’ ‘Go up the yard.’ ‘Is it yourself I am seeing?’ ‘Mary and Bridget, when you think of it.’ One hears conversations, some lasting a very considerable time, where absolutely nothing substantive is said. One suspects that it is a matter of where the emphasis is placed. Like the cantor in a synagogue, perhaps.
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