Redemption Falls

by Joseph O'Connor

  I look at my documents. I think about our children. I am not religious, obviously, but I have my thoughts. Atheism itself is a kind of faith. I find it a profound consolation.

  I stare out of the little window at the streetcars and taxicabs; at the messenger-boys and misfits and the policemen sweating into their tunics. And – yes – guilty, Officer – the pretty girls, too. Man does not live by bread alone!

  I imagine the avenue as it must have looked in the past – a pasture, then a hunting track, then an undulating road – Manhattan was once hilly, but no one remembers that. Why would anyone have cause to? Wilderness. Field. Lane. Highway. Then the long, splendid boulevard, the ribbon of macadam, along which the young of our city marched away to the War. As they will, I suppose, in the future.

  V

  When I open up my boxes, a smell of the long-ago arises. Fungal. Old parchments. A suggestion of sealing wax. The past breaks in the air like an exploding spore. It fills my waning eyes. I breathe it into my lungs. I fancy that I can sense it puff through my blood. Vlad, you old impaler, I think of it as my opiate. As the movies are to my wife.

  My pastime, I suppose. A rich man needs a diversion – otherwise he grows idle and dies. Some millionaires amass paintings, others rare furniture, antiques. Odd, what we shore against the inevitable. My pursuit has been to collect as much as I can nose up of James O’Keeffe and the boy Jeddo Mooney, those long-forgotten actors from America’s Civil War, who somehow contain in themselves, so it seems to their collector, everything larger of war.

  I have articles, memorabilia, broadsides, maps, etchings, sketches, balladry, photographs. I believe I own a copy of every text that ever mentioned them in the public prints of the United States. And I have other materials, too, of a more private nature. Journals. Personal writings. Correspondence and so forth. Even highly secret papers, classified documents. Every door can be opened, provided, of course, that one is willing to pay the price of admission. The trick, as with all quests, is finding the door. Usually it is just where you thought it would be.

  I am ridiculous? Fixated? My wife has found an ally! Is it any more preposterous than collecting butterflies or beer steins or the heads of shot quadrupeds or – Heaven help us – stamps? My wife insists it is. She thinks me morbid, obsessive.Et tu , respected Reader: what do you collect? Books, do you tell me? My wife likes those. But I do not share her enthusiasm for the invented story; its neatness, its pretenses, its want of contradictory grain. Twain, the great contriver, put it remarkably well. Little wonder the truth is stranger than fiction: Fiction has to make sense.

  I catalog my papers. It gives me pleasure to look at them. (Viennese explanations are possible, no doubt.) Yes, the inks have faded now; many of the binding-ribbons are frayed. It grows stiflingly hot in my cubbyhole in a Manhattan summer. Humidity is not good for old-fashioned paper, which often was made of cotton-rag and sometimes hemp; beaten, mashed to pulp, and then molded into quoins. Paper, alas, is a living material. Like all living things, it will die.

  VI

  My collection includes forgeries – I suppose that is inevitable – but only a couple and even those are not entirely without interest. There is always a little dishonesty when money is offered for old things. It should not bother us too much. It speaks to human enterprise. And I am glad to have his medals, most of which have been certified genuine, though many are so verdigrised as to be almost illegible now. Sometimes – I blush – I have pinned them to my dressing-robe and saluted myself a moment in the pier glass.

  I rummage these withered foolscaps – they are like an octogenarian’s skin – foxed, mottled, stippled with age. I have compared them to my own skin as a matter of fact. There are days when their contents seem sharp as wounds, and others when their meanings retreat. Those days are hard. One feels somehow alone. It is as though they treat of people who never existed: a runaway boy and those who tried to love him. O’Keeffe, I think, would have found them a fascination, would have pored over every nuance, for he was greatly attuned to language. He loved the arrangement, the deployment of words, the things they can suggest without ever directly stating. He was a man who knew well how a character is constructed. It is a pity he never completed his book.

  Look at these packets of nothings. Stooks of decaying paper. Often my wife implores me to consign them to the trash. They have caused more quarrels between us; she grows testy when I mention them. Better you should have married a library, she says. Better you should have married ajunkshop . But women rarely make good collectors, in truth. They do not appear to experience that need.

  ‘The past is a far riverbank,’ Lucia once wrote. ‘We know it is there, for we can see it, and are close to it. But the water makes it always unreachable.’ For me, that is not so. My papers are the stepping-stones. A precarious traverse – but possible.

  At the end of a session of study, I box them. Soon I will be boxed, too, and stored away. The attic will be empty, except for the spider-webs. I will gather the dust that I am. My regret, before the silence, is that I never walked the squares of that faraway capital to which I have long yearned to make a pilgrimage. But by the time my wife acceded, already we were too old. The journey would have been dangerous that winter. In any case, once there, I would have found it difficult to return. I thought of it as my elephant’s graveyard. I do not believe the reactionary newspapers, though friends tell me I should. But I cannot, so sometimes we quarrel. To have ever breathed the air of man’s future made flesh, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – ah, beloved, I tarried too long. But to know you are there and will always be there has consoled my faithless dotage.

  VII

  As for Winterton’s fate, I wish I could tell you more of it. Ernest Dean was the name of the border guard on the Canada side who noticed a miner crossing stealthily with a pack mule. The beast was weighted heavily with rough canvas sacks. Gold, said the miner. He had struck lucky. Prospectors did not commonly have a fine Bostonian accent. This one was acting suspiciously. When challenged, he overcame the guard, tied him up (‘apologizing as he did so’) and walked calmly into the Canadian night. The fugitive’s face was described by hapless Dean as showing the marks of numerous burns.

  It was revealed some years ago that he had been married at least twice: legally, in Cuba, as Peter John Williamson, then bigamously in Chicago, as William Paul Harris. A cartographer trained in the British Army, he had managed to flee Scotland when about to be arrested for the poisoning of a woman in Glasgow. The wounds he bore were not sustained during the American Civil War, at least not in any battle with southerners. On the infamous night of July 13th, 1863, he was attacked by a mob of New York-Irish immigrants. Angered by the proposed draft, by which they were disproportionately affected, they had burned a Negro orphanage and committed many other horrific crimes. Union soldiers and black New Yorkers were savaged by the rioters. They had been lynching an elderly porter when Winterton intervened to stop them, in his uniform but alone and unarmed. They kicked him unconscious before setting him alight. The riot would not be the last time in the American story when those who felt powerless turned their hatred on the weakest and the innocent would be murdered in the streets. One of the most shameful atrocities in the history of Irish-America, it does not feature, to my knowledge, in Irish balladry.

  Elizabeth Longstreet remained in the Territory almost seven more years, working mainly as a laundress in Edwardstown. In 1872, she married Prospero Leavensworth, a freed slave of Texas who had been a soldier in the War. For some years she had been completely blind, so that she had never seen Prospero Leavensworth, a fact she would often make jokes about. He was a kindly and quiet man, and their marriage was happy. They migrated to Liberia, on the west coast of Africa, where Leavensworth established a small enterprise exporting palm oil. Their son, Theobald Wolfe Leavensworth, was born and raised in Monrovia, at the age of twenty-six becoming a doctor in the city, then a member of the Liberian Government. His mother, an elder of the Presbyterian Church, was given
a lay-chaplaincy among women patients at Monrovia Asylum, a position that cannot have been easy but which she described as ‘the deepest blessing’, and in which she did remarkable things. She died in November 1928. In the year of her death she had been interviewed by a Reverend William L.R. Trees, who possessed the only Edison recording machine in Liberia. The transcript abounds with theyassuhs andlaud-hab-murcies that are not unusual in such documents when the speakers are black. Most of these I have taken the liberty of silently retranslating, leaving only a few examples of the original transcriber’s work – more as an illustration of how such transcripts were constructed than of how standard Southern-American English was ever spoken. I have a photograph of her above my desk, and one brief letter. It is signed: ‘Free at last: Elizabeth.’

  Jeddo Mooney remained in the Fort Stornaway jailhouse for almost eighteen months after the night he shot his protector James O’Keeffe. His hands were shackled; the lawmen gagged him with a leather strap. Some whipped him when there was nothing else to do. Twice he was half-hanged from the roofbeams of the jail. The three men responsible were later disciplined.

  Every couple of weeks they would trolley him to the home of a minister of religion in the town. He refused to have the boy in his church, though the collection plate would have been heavied by such an appearance. The Reverend would read from the Bible as the boy lay on the carpet; his wife would vamp hymns on the pianoforte. Their redemptive effect was limited, but the boy enjoyed listening to the stories, many of which were about warfare and cruelty and murder, and were thus the kind of narratives to which boys liked to listen in those distant, more literate days.

  He became – how to term it? – a sort of amusement to the intrepid of the Territory, who would bribe the more corruptible of the guards to be allowed to see him. A dime bought you two minutes, a quarter twenty. Had you paid them ten dollars, they would have allowed you to skin him alive. His very name became a byword for wickedness in the locale. The phrase ‘As bad as Jeddo’ appeared in local speech and fiction. ‘Crazy as Jailhouse Mooney’ was a variant.

  Sundays, especially, were popular for visits. The devil-boy drew a good house on the Sabbath. He would toss his evil head and flash his angry eyes; this would be greeted as that moment in the zoo when the crocodile suddenly blinks from the mud. It was still a few decades before America had the movies. Frontiersmen had to make their own fun.

  Somewhere among my collection I have a daguerreotype of the boy, made by unknown persons during his imprisonment. He has been stripped and hooded and is kneeling in a latrine. There are worse picturings, too, but I do not like to think of them. Some I have destroyed. I love my country. In any nation founded on civil war, monstrous things become possible. We have only to look at Ireland to know it. Kill your brother and there are few deaths unimaginable.

  VIII

  I have wondered what would have happened had the Confederacy triumphed. I suppose that this whole land-mass would be a South America now – Washington a São Paulo, Pennsylvania a Buenos Aires – which a handful offamilias would rule as a fiefdom while the masses grubbed the sewers for their leftovers. The slums andfavelas would be vast, I would have thought; would stretch from the Everglades to Alaska. American soldiers, often the children of immigrants, have done brutal and terrifying and unforgivable acts. Others have done great and courageous acts. I am humbled by those who fought with honor, often knowing their death was a certainty. Had they not, my country’s emblems would be the bullwhip and the branding iron, and the giantess standing sentry over the Verrazanno Narrows would be known as the Statue of Tyranny.

  IX

  Mother Russia. Britannia. Cathleen ni Houlihan. Strange, how our nations are embodied as women, when our women suffer so much of cruelty. An atonement, perhaps. Or a further cruelty. Yet the emblem of our better angels is a woman. Walking roads she does not know, out of nothing but loyalty. Seeking out the child she yearns to be here, but all the time knowing he is lost. There will never be a statue of Eliza Duane Mooney. A sculptor cannot represent blood.

  X

  It was Marshal Ignatius Gilchrist who saved the boy from hanging. (‘Sixguns Iggy,’ he was called in the War, a nickname he would loathe to the end of his life, once suing a newspaperman who had printed it.) He testified on oath that O’Keeffe was already close to death when the child had fired on him that night. Nor was it provable that the boy had discharged the shot which punctured the Governor’s abdomen. It could not have been provable, for the boy had not done it. O’Keeffe was fatally shot by Cole John McLaurenson, who died less than sixty seconds later, with the last of his comrades. Many songs would be sung about his deeds in the west. Some of them seem ten feet long.

  Attorneys came from St Louis with portmanteaux full of law books. Doctors, professors, magistrates, reformers. Justice Carney himself wrote a passionate treatise on the boy’s case:The Speechless Child of War . The autographed MS is in my collection, of course. One notary journeyed all the way from Boston to the Territory. He was a plump-faced, jolly, slightly malodorous man, who grew ever more jocular as he drifted further out of his depth. Sadly, as he made his way back home to the east, he was murdered during a stagecoach robbery for which no one was ever indicted.

  It is doubtful, in any case, that he could have helped the boy much. There might have been an acquittal to charges, had they ever been laid. But it was made clear to the child often, and for reasons he understood, that he would never live to see adulthood. The law might not know how to deal with his crime. But there were other modes of justice on the frontier.

  XI

  Eliza Duane Mooney was buried at Judas’s Field, a pit used by slaughtermen for the dumping of knackered horses. No priest was available, or none would come to such a verminous outskirt. Neither was there a headstone to mark her place of rest, nor even a few dollars’ worth of government coffin. She was wrapped in the rags of a Confederate banner, which one of the lawmen had recently confiscated from a miner; then thrown in the trench, and burned. These obsequies her only brother was forced at gunpoint to watch, and then he was returned to his cell.

  That night, the boy had a dream of his mother and Louisiana, of the black metal porticoes of the French Quarter in New Orleans. It seemed that he saw her on a Mardi Gras morning, tossing handfuls of confetti, in a nimbus of streamers, when she was young and hopeful for her American life. But since he never saw her that way, he knew it was a dream. He was never in New Orleans with his mother, or anyone else. It was always the city in the distance.

  XII

  A hard history. A tale of war. Then came the act that ennobles this bleak tale, shading it, perhaps, to a love story.

  On a hot June morning in 1868, the boy was informed in his cell that a gentleman had come forward to take him for legal adoption. A Yankee industrialist, he had been advised not to involve himself; indeed had been so advised by everyone he had asked. But he had disregarded his counselors. He was a stubborn sort of man. The rich can afford to be obstinate.

  The party left Fort Stornaway at midnight, the boy and five guards, each marshal armed like a gladiator. To restrain the dangerous prisoner, they used a chain made for runaway slaves. It choked you if you attempted to move. His ankles were manacled. He wore handcuffs and a hood. He was shackled by his waist to three cannonballs. He was incapable of speech, but they gagged him anyway, and often stubbed their cheroots on his face.

  They traveled by night, always by night, as Americans slept, unknowing. There was a fear of rioting, if people saw the identity of the passenger. Reconstruction was not a happy time for our country.

  He was delivered to an attorney’s office in Utica, New York, and there met the representatives of his protector. He was taken into a prosperous household at New York City, where he lived for a time with the stable-grooms. A bout of scarlet fever brought about his removal. The doctors said his death was a certainty. He awoke to the gaze of two people to whom he had never spoken a word but who had nursed him back from death. Estafanía McLelland an
d her father, Peter. Difficult individuals the both, in numerous ways. But they would not see a child die in a stable.

  Lucia was in Spain when the boy almost died. On her return, she agreed that he remain in the house, where he worked for some years in the kitchens or the cellars, rarely being permitted upstairs. Sometimes he saw Lucia through the rails of a gate. He was told not to address her if he did. He blacked her shoes. He groomed her horses. He slept under the protection of her father. You do not believe this, I know; the boy did not either. Nevertheless, it happened. There were stranger acts of compassion in our country in those years. Not forgiveness, perhaps. But mercy, perhaps. A sense of responsibility, clothed often in silence; but no less real for that.

  Habited in adequate clothes, fed three times a day, given a bed in which to sleep, shelter from the elements, he presently regained the power of speech and became, if not happy, more controlled. Maurice Hall, a Scotsman, a butler who attended libraries, took him under his wing and the child proved a quick-witted student. But when that kindly man died, the boy took it hard and some of his old ways returned. Peter McLelland insisted a tutor be found for him. None lasted long. Their charge was too mercurial, given to fits of raging insolence or tearfulness. No scholarly gentleman saw any hope for his betterment. It was Lucia who accepted the role.

  Every weekday they worked in her private library, at books and parchments, old musical scores. Always they were alone, at Lucia’s insistence. She would have no helpmate, not even her father. Her brothers were not permitted to enter. Slowly he learned, this boy who had caused her great pain. Patiently, resolvedly, she helped him. That room in Manhattan saw remarkable solidarities as the seasons gave way to years. Did she forgive? We must suppose so. She did not speak of her feelings. Nor ever, so far as I know, and I have studied all her surviving papers, did she commit her private motivations to paper. These are complicated questions. Perhaps she wanted forgiveness herself. Those from whom we seek mercy are sometimes not the ones who can give it, but since they are present in our lives, we ask them. An onerous burden. We see ghosts in one another. But when I picture her guiding that boy from the darkness he inhabited, I believe that human life is worthwhile.