Redemption Falls

by Joseph O'Connor

  For music Jeddo Mooney showed a particular facility, and also, perhaps curiously, for languages. By the time he was eighteen he had French enough to make a way, could read a children’s psalter in Spanish, conjugate simpler verbs in Latin. Gradually he lost the drawl and whaang of Louisiana; his vowels became flatter, and he came to speak like a princeling. He still could be eccentric, although, as with many perceived eccentricities, Jeddo Mooney’s, if considered, spoke volumes. Somewhere along his path, he began to refer to various members of his adoptive establishment by fondly familial designations. Peter McLelland became ‘Uncle’, his widowed sister ‘Aunt Winfield’, their aged mother ‘Abuela’, the Spanish term for a grandmother; though I imagine she must have been uneasy with such an induction. That formidable old lady disliked what she termed ‘the primitive tongues’ and would grin rather bleakly when subjected to them. But the boy’s curious habit was to name everyone in the household a relation, and, by all accounts, nobody objected. The cook and the housemaid shared titular aunthood with practically every female who remained more than an hour on the premises, while the groomsman, a Michael Sweeney, of the County Roscommon, was named affectionately ‘Uncle Mikey’ or ‘Mickser’. Sweeney, for his part, referred to the youth as ‘Little Cuz’. A genealogist visiting the house would have been perplexed.

  Some notoriety about events in the Territory still persisted; there was talk of a disreputable journalist writing a muck-raking book about them. It was put to the boy by a concerned Peter McLelland that he might consider changing his name. He adopted, with gratitude, the surname of his protector, and with it went out into the world. In time he would graduate from a college overseas, would marry and have three children, whom Peter McLelland idolized. I have been told that that strict old gentleman, who spoke rarely of his affections, had come to regard his ward almost as a son.

  As for Lucia-Cruz McLelland, certain readers will know her history. The loss of her and O’Keeffe’s child – she died at five months, María-Elena – brought an anguish from which I think she never quite recovered. But other griefs she overcame with the dauntless love of life that everyone who knew her was touched by. She was among the first women to receive a doctorate from Harvard University, and became one of thestellae minorae of American poetry: initially under the pseudonym Charles Gimenez Carroll, and later, as a translator, under her own premarital name, the revelation of which she was often to regret, for she truly had no craving to be recognized. She published two capable novels –Gramercy Park andThe Rivers (a third,Ricardo Connolly , she rewrote many times before ultimately destroying as unsalvageable) but poetry brought her the kind of small celebrity then available in American letters. Her translations of the lyrics of that great Nicaraguan, Félix Rubén García Sarmiento, known to aficionados of literature as Rubén Darío, became the standard texts in English. Her method of dealing with praise was to ridicule it utterly. It was her habit to read every sentence of a commendatory review mentally inserting the word ‘not’. I think she felt admiration to be a dangerous drug; especially when dispensed to a writer. But that may have been something of a pose, of course. Perhaps marriage had taught her self-protectiveness. A sketchy biographical monograph of her was published in 1910. As its author, I do not especially recommend it.

  Men always loved her, and she adored them, too. There were affairs that would have made Floria Tosca seem a model of prudence. She received many proposals, one from Darío himself, who, though many years her junior, stormed her with polysyllabic declarations of ardor. (‘As he did with almost every woman he knew,’ she often said. ‘Especially after his marriage.’) She married again, briefly; the relationship was not happy. For private reasons, I do not wish to give an account of it here. O’Keeffe was the husband she was meant to have, she came to feel, and as she aged she became rather Latina and old-fashioned about such matters. Strange to say, perhaps; but in many ways I think of Lucia as the most intensely traditional Roman Catholic I have known.

  In her later years she had a close companion with whom she would go walking or attend recitals. A widower, he had been a cavalry officer in the War. I believe it was an intimate and tender friendship, but when it became clear that he, too, entertained wishes for legalization, he was gently but purposefully dismissed. He was the Lieutenant who had questioned her at the Fort Stornaway Tribunal. Lucia used to call himEl Interrogador .

  She died, eleven years ago, at Wexford, Ireland, a city she visited three times, and whose people loved her dearly. Her last thoughts were of James O’Keeffe, that most elusive man. She felt he was in the house. She seemed happy. She requested to be lifted to a window-seat he had often mentioned – from where, in childhood, he had watched the American grain-ships in the harbor – and it was there that she passed away, tranquilly, without much pain, in the November of her ninety-third year.

  XIII

  There are very few veterans of O’Keeffe’s brigade living now, but there are some still among us, and they should never be forgotten. They congregate every year on the Fourth of July and march down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square Park. There a blessing is given and Drum-Taps is played. There are speeches, of course. An aged cannon is fired. Former Confederates sometimes attend, old Irishmen in grays and drabs, clutching sandwich-bags and rosaries; uneasy in this northern city. I have heard the rebel yell in Washington Square Park as the enemies grit false teeth and shake hands.

  When the official ceremony is over, those Con O’Keeffes who feel able – a surprisingly considerable number, given their age and ill health – gather again into formation. They process down the Broadway to Battery Park, a tortuous walk in a Manhattan July. Past dime stores and shoe-shines and tattoo parlors and barrooms, through the dirty grit of high summer. Past those vertebrate turrets that are the glory of our architects – and of all of us, for they speak of indomitable New York. Passers-by stare. Some of the storekeepers offer water, but I have rarely seen a marcher break step to accept it. They are old, but they walk, and some are in wheelchairs. Many are amputees; others are blind. The young sometimes go with them – great-grandchildren, I suppose – leading the old by the hems of their uniforms. At the time of the War, these frail men were children. Now they seem childlike again.

  By the walls of the Battery, a silent prayer is offered. It is always silent, I do not know why. A wreath of lilies is blessed and thrown into the harbor, from where so many of their hungry forefathers first set foot on America. They sing the martial written for them in the American Civil War, reputedly by Lucia, but really, I think, by O’Keeffe:

  We are marching for the Union in the blue and in the green;

  All are sworn to loft in gallant hand the sword of honor keen,

  Etcetera.

  The last time I witnessed these rites, in July last year, a hurrah was given out for a small brotherhood of Americans who had gone the previous winter to fight Fascism in Europe. Some Irish were among them; others would join them, at Jarama, at Zaragoza, at Madrid and Valencia. Heroes to some, villains to others, they were sometimes called Communists in the press. They organized under the banner of an assassinated revolutionary. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

  XIV

  Strange stories continued to adhere to the memory of O’Keeffe. In 1902, at Wichita, Kansas, a dying Alabaman thief made a confession to a preacher that he had pulled the wounded Governor from the Missouri still alive, but had strangled him an hour later when he realized who he was, and buried him in a mound of stones. This baroque was said to have occurred four miles downriver of Fort Stornaway, in a narrow rocky inlet where the Alabaman had been prospecting for silver. Federal marshals were summoned to the fading hobo’s bedside, but he recovered unexpectedly and withdrew his declaration, insisting he had been in the grip of a delirium when he made it and had no recollection of ever having seen the Missouri. Troopers were sent anyway, to reconnoiter the site he had mentioned. No body was found, and no grave.

  More weirdly, there is the story of the Missouri Mummy. In 1904, two sweetheart
s were keeping company near the northern bank of the river at Fort Meade, when the boy lost his footing, slipped down a bank, and happened upon a gruesome find. What appeared to be a human body wrapped entirely in muddied bandages was lying in a leaf-filled hollow at the foot of an undercliff. A post-mortem revealed that the corpse was that of a middle-aged man, five feet ten in height, ‘with a prominent chin’, but there was no way of knowing how long he had lain there, nor how he had met his demise. The remains had been eviscerated before being swathed in the cloths, a practice believed common among certain native peoples. The story ripped around the territory that O’Keeffe had been found at last, that the initials ‘JCO’K’ were still discernible on a laundry tag, but there was absolutely no proof of anything so cinematic. One detects the seasoning touch of some western newspaperman. The Mummy was stolen from the hospital where it had been examined by the coroner and was later said to have turned up in a traveling carnival of gypsies. They exhibited it, reportedly, at twenty cents a time (a buck was the cost of being photographed with it sitting on your lap) before eventually, when the flies and the road-life took effect, dumping it in the Ohio River. That is a shame. I should have liked to buy it for my collection. But it might have been a purchase too far for my wife.

  ¿Quién Sabe?as Lucia’s least unknown poem is entitled. And I will leave you with a strange story of my own.

  A good many years ago, I will not say how many, I was in the little town of San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, for a purpose I prefer not to disclose.

  San Juan is a tiny but not unattractive pueblo, on a horseshoe-shaped cove near thefrontera with Costa Rica. In my memory there is a volcano on the northern horizon, stark, black, still smoking after two hundred years, but perhaps I am confused – I have no notes by my hand. The night is very late as I write.

  There are fincas and coffee fields and the huts of campesinos, and there is a priest’s house that is said to be haunted. Nearby rise the headwaters of a mighty river that flows hundreds of miles eastward, into the Lago de Nicaragua (Mar dulce, the locals call it – ‘the sweet sea’) then on through treacherous jungle, through mangrove swamps never mapped, all the way east to the Costa Atlantica, the region of that nation where the people are black and speak English with a vaguely cockney inflection. Not Mestizos or Indians, they are the descendants of Caribbean slaves. Bluefields is the name of their town.

  From that Mosquito Elysium, so the San Juan people told me, once a year would come a boat bearing a strange old ‘Caudillo’ – their word for a knight or an owner of lands, although it can also mean a strong man, a ruler. He was old as Adam’s father, in their colorful parlance. His face bore a million lines. His spectacles were much remarked upon, for their lenses were the blackish purple of deadly nightshade – they appeared to have been fashioned from the bottoms of wine bottles. He would be carried through the town in the arms of his servant, to the cantina of a moneylender on the Calle Masaya in the smugglers’ quarter. There he would pawn a purseful of gemstones. Uncut Missouri sapphires.

  Every year it was the same. A clutch of Yogo sapphires. He seemed to have an inexhaustible supply. He was not paid their worth – the moneylender always swindled him – but every year without fail he returned. He signed no paper, requested no receipt, never once haggled, always accepted the offered robbery. Indeed, he did not speak at all to the pawnbroker or his wife, leaving all verbal intercourse to thesirviente . This done, he would be carried to the whitewashed church and rest in its coolness an hour. No one ever saw him kneel; he would sit upright as a tombstone, crumpled sombreiro in his lap. A couple of notes from his billfold he would give to the servant, who would hand them to the Padre or place them in the poorbox.Para los niños y las mujeres que tienen hambre , the box was marked. For the children and women who are hungry. And once – so it was told me by a person who knew – the servant asked a nun who was placing malinche flowers on the altar could he beg a cup of water for his elderly master, who was greatly distressed by the heat. The good woman found a pitcher and gave it to the servant, who blessed her, and no more was said. That night, as she was sweeping the aisles of the church, she found a handkerchief that had been left on the offertory table. It had been carefully folded, placed under a prayerbook. It contained fifteen one-hundred-dollar bills.

  He and his man were ‘como Quijote y Sancho Panza’. Ancient and slow and comical in their seriousness. He wore a dress-sword in a rusting and shabbily tasseled scabbard; the black lace gloves of a Don. Even the beggars stared as he was borne through the hot dust, perspiring in his ebon-black broadcloth. Dogs and yapping children would attend the curious progress, back to the jetty and the panga-boat. He would be propped by the servant on its bowed old bench, sword across his knees, black lenses on his face; then both men would take up the heavy oaken oars and wordlessly push for the east.

  The people could never understand why he came all this way. The voyage was so dangerous. The jungle could kill you. Why not send a messenger, some littlechacho from Bluefields, who would happily do this errand for a few cordobas and a carouse? His answer to that question was the only instance anyone could remember where he had uttered a sentence in the town.

  ‘Un hombre con acento cockney no es de fiar con el dinero.’ A man with a cockney accent is not to be trusted with money.

  He would be due in a month or so, so the cantina-keeper told me; for usually he arrived in July, before the rains came on. Perhaps I should wait, if I wanted to meet him?Un mes. Dos meses. No más, hombre . I considered it seriously. But I did not wait. It would probably not have been him. I would have been disappointed.

  I prefer to imagine him among the shanties of Bluefields, gazing out on the Atlantic, dreaming of Dulcinea. Tilting at the beacons with his unholy stare, getting drunk on Los Flores rum. A fancy, I know. Rhetoric, nothing more. There is little doubt that he died in the Missouri.

  The ballad of War does honor to the departed. This has been a story of some who endured. Lucia-Cruz McLelland, who is buried in Ireland; Elizabeth Longstreet, who is buried in Africa; and silent Jeddo Mooney, a boy who changed his surname, whose silence is broken by having been your narrator:

  Jeremiah Daniel McLelland,

  Professor Emeritus, Columbia.

  1, the Fifth Avenue, New York.

  Christmas Eve, 1937

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I thank my beloved Anne-Marie Casey, my editor Geoff Mulligan, my book agent Carole Blake and screenwriting agent Conrad Williams, both at Blake Friedmann Literary Agency in London, and Jewerl Ross at Silent R Management, Los Angeles. In 2005/06 I was a Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers; I thank the staff, the librarians and my colleagues for endless kindnesses, and Gary Forney, Jon Axline, Lenore Puhek and staff at the Montana Historical Archive for their hospitality during a research trip I made to Montana in December 2005. That state is an infinitely more welcoming and beautiful place than the fictional and somewhat differently located Territory described in this novel. I thank Patricia Normanly for sending me unpublished letters of an Irish soldier who died at Gettysburg, Rachid Diallo for his bookletTime Travellers: the American Civil War, James Kincaid (Univ of Southern California), Declan Kiberd and Anthony Roche (Univ College Dublin), staff of UCD Library, John M. Hearne, Ruan O’Donnell (Univ of Limerick), and Justin Furlong (National Library of Ireland). For translation assistance: Julia Carty, Miryam Delgado, Anthony Glavin, Eanna O’Lochlainn, Dr Seán Ó Riain, Hugo Hamilton and Kevin Holohan. I am greatly indebted to my father Seán O’Connor, Monica Casey, Eimear O’Connor, Judy Finnegan, Richard Madely, Amanda Ross, Natalie Fox, Beth Humphries, Madeleine Keane, Briony Everroad and Rosa Bruno, and to Peter Ward, who designed this book with such skill and care. ‘Cochise and Johnny Thunders’ is a rewriting of ‘Morrissey and the Russian Sailor’, recorded by ConnemaraSean-Nós singer Seosamh O’hÉanaí (Joe Heaney) and others. ‘Western Thunders Blues’ is influenced by Huddie Ledbetter’s ‘Out on the Western Plain’ (ex
quisitely recorded by the late Rory Gallagher). Derek Warfield and David Kincaid have recorded Irish ballads of the Civil War. The Works Progress Administration recorded interviews with former slaves in the 1930s;The Emergence of Black English: text and commentary , eds. Bailey, Maynor, Cukor-Avila, includes transcripts and discussions of the many questions they raise. Some orthographic elements of the transcripts appear in the recollections of Elizabeth Longstreet.

  Unless otherwise indicated, photographs are on glass, wet collodion, from the Library of Congress collection ‘Selected Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865’ (call-numbers below), mostly created ‘under the supervision of Mathew Brady’. I thank Kathryn Blackwell at the Reference Section. The Library of Congress advises that there are no known restrictions on publication. Page 1: ‘Petersburg, Va. Row of stacked Federal rifles; houses beyond’, April 3, 1865. lc-b811-3229. P. 17: Originally titled ‘Candidates for the Board of Education Opposed to Reading the Bible in Schools’. Viewable at www.assumption.edu/acad, credited asHarper’s Weekly , ‘1850s’. P. 61: ‘Chattanooga, Tenn., vicinity. Tripod signal erected by Capts. Dorr and Donn of U.S. Coast Survey at Pulpit Rock on Lookout Mountain’, 1864? lc-b811-3661. P. 103: ‘Petersburg, Va. Confederate fortifications with chevaux-de-frise beyond’, 1865. lc-b811-3302. P. 118: ‘Unknown location. Embalming surgeon at work on soldier’s body’, between 1860 and 1865. lc-b811-2531. P. 159: ‘White Oak Swamp, Va. View’, between May and August 1862. lc-b811-2601. P. 191: Photograph of drawing of slave punishment apparatus. lc-usz62-31864. P. 233: ‘James River, Va. Butler’s dredge-boat, sunk by a Confederate shell on Thanksgiving Day, 1864’, lc-b811-2550. P. 283: ‘Erin Go Bray’, print, published by William Holland, London, March 1799. P. 379: ‘Portrait of Boy Soldier.’ Morris Gallery of the Cumberland, Nashville, Tennessee, between 1860 and 1865, re-photographed 1961, Elsie G. Redman, lc-b8184-10573. P. 408: ‘Nashville, Tenn. Fortified railroad bridge across Cumberland River’ by George N. Barnard, 1864. lc-b811-2642. P. 437: ‘Portrait of a soldier group’, between 1860 and 1865, re-photographed 1961. Copy of undated photo made by lc of tintype. G.K. Holmes, Cornwall Bridge, Conn. Photographic print. lc-b8184-10694.