Days Without End

by Sebastian Barry

  Bert Calhoun dies but he ain’t the only one. The winter drear with her icy soul’s come in now and there ain’t a stick of wood. Half the prisoners don’t got shoes no more and all of us is missing bits of clothes. We ain’t got a coat between us being summer and fall soldiers. That’s the cold then eating your skin like rats. They’ve opened a wide long pit in the east corner and every day the dead are tipped in there. Maybe thirty a night. Maybe more. We ain’t got no goddamned food except that lousy cornbread. We get three fingers of that a day. Swear to the good God no man was ever conceived could live on that. Week after week go by and we praying Mr Lincoln will exchange for us. That’s how it used to be done. But Lieutenant Sprague delights to tell us that Mr Lincoln says he don’t want no skeletons back. That’s us. He don’t want to exchange Reb prisoners all plump with Northern grub for no Union skeletons. No good to him no more, says Homer Sprague. And he laughing again. We such a source of fun. A river-source of fun. We lying there week after week. No point moving about except to drag your sorry backside over for a shit. The sinks. Such a stink you never could imagine. Nothing ever cleared out. I swear you could read the long dread history of cornbread in them sinks. Now the nights drop far below the limit of the gauge. We all sleep like a nest of slugs tucked tight together. We take turns on the outside of the pile. You might die in the night from the frost against your heart and many do. Over to the pit with them. After six months we don’t care as much as we did. We’re trying to live but we have a sneaky care to die. Handsome John Cole, Handsome John Cole. Dan FitzGerald’s a man of bones. John too. Myself too. It’s nearly crazy how thin a man can get and still breathe and move. In the south corner are Reb prisoners in a special hut and these boys are tried and taken out and shot. Their own boys so what chance we got. Mr Lincoln, please send us news. Mr Lincoln, we done beared arms for you. Don’t leave us here. Lieutenant Sprague must of been spawned by the devil because he laughs and laughs. Maybe he laughing because otherwise he would tear out his hair and go mad. I guess maybe so. They got precious little to eat theyselves so it’s skeletons minding skeletons somewhat. They ain’t withholding food, they ain’t got any. I swear I see guards han’t got no shoes either. What crazy war is this? What world we making? We don’t know. I guess whatever world it is is ending. We come to the end time and here it is. Just like the goddamn Bible says, says John Cole. How come we lying here and guarded and inside four walls and the camp lying within this wooded land and the dogs of winter biting and scraping at our limbs? What in tarnation for? John Cole just for eternal badness keeps an eye on Carthage Daly. He don’t speak for him and he don’t speak against him but he inclined to share his cornbread because the guard don’t give Carthage one tiny morsel. Not a crumb. John Cole sharing a moiety of nothing. Tears his cornbread down the middle and when no one seeing passes it to Carthage. I watch this day after day for three four months. Got to say it is a marvel how the mortal bones stand out. I can see his hip bones and his leg bones where they thicken at the knees. His arms just whittled branches from a dried-out tree. Long hours we lie close and John Cole lays his hand on my head and leaves it there. John Cole, my beau.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE COLDEST WINTER in the history of the world they say. I guess I believe it. John Cole says if something don’t happen very soon by the good Lord he going to die. I say that John Cole will never die and he signed the dotted line on that so he must oblige. But I can see he ain’t good. He’s shitting water and we have to crutch each other when we trying to go east to the sinks. But we are two boys among thousands. No one gets a ticket to the ball. Noble boys that won in fierce battles and maybe cowards too with their coward’s deeds hid in the dateless mists of war all equal under the sun and moon of Andersonville. Homer Sprague who I guess is the king of this demented compound he famishing too. Queer to see. All the guards and the Rebel boys on picket skinnying up. By God. There ain’t nothing in the South they say. Union burned every crop in the fall and burned the land and burned the shelters of these folk. And yet they tell us fallen men of great victories and Richmond han’t fallen like Vicksburg did. They could tell us any damn history and we wouldn’t know the truth of it. They seem to believe all the words in their mouths. It hurts us to hear of such things.

  But has this fair world ever seen this long tallystick of suffering? We got boys here from all corners, mostly eastern men but also some of those states that rub up against Canada. We got farmers, coopers, joiners, settlers. Merchants and sutlers that served the Union cause. They all the same citizen now. Harrowed by hunger and ploughed through by sickness. We got splendid examples of dropsy, scurvy, and the pox. We got ailments of the chest, of the bones, of the arse, of the feet, of the eyes, of the face. Huge vicious rashes of redness mark a hundred faces. Bodies painted with ringworm, lice bites, and a million bugs. Men so sick they are dying of death. Strong men to start that are hard to kill. When you get your scrap of food you got to stuff it down your throat quick march or it will be stole. No cards hardly, no music hardly, only silent stubborn suffering. Men lose their sense and they are lucky. Men are shot for wandering over the death line which is just a row of white sticks near the boundary wall. They don’t know where they are. Men stand mute and crazy looking in the mouth of tents with long beards and whiskers. Just stand all day for weeks and weeks and then lie all day. The blacks, Johnny Reb just clean hates these boys. Forty lashes on a wounded soul. Just walk up and shoot them in the head. John Cole he starts to speak but I hushing him time after time.

  Then Abe maybe he get a rush of guilt I don’t know and a bunch of Rebs was let out in Illinois and flushed back south and we in a batch of equal number sent northward. Mr Lincoln right about something because we just rags and bones. Thousands left behind in Georgia glimmer in our dreams. Dan FitzGerald don’t get his walking papers and we are obliged to shake his hand in farewell. A boy that come through seven types of slaughter. All those faces never rescued and consigned to death. We lie side by side in open carts and feel our leg bones knock against each other like some strange music. Once we get to Union country they put us in ambulances that clop-clop north. The destitution of the war marks everything. Looks like we want to rub out America. Farms in ruins and blackened towns. Guess the world ended while we was away. John Cole’s quiet face looking out through the flaps of the ambulance. His black eyes like river-stones. Those ain’t constant tears just rheumy eyes. I guess that’s it. What we was seems broken on a wheel but still we long to reach Winona. That’s what we got. Mr McSweny’s moved further up the river because the gypsum mines are taking land. He got a place on four poles on the river-bank. Two rooms and a porch to watch the day. Winona she is twelve maybe more and she say nothing when she see us and her face say all she needs. The boys carry us in and put us in our bed. John Cole’s face so thin you can see quite clearly how he will look in the grave. We’re sorta dead men looking to come back. There are six doors of mercy they say and we are hoping to find one open to our touch. We got the strength of eggs. Mr Noone come in and looks at us and by God he cries. Right there by the filthy waters. John Cole he laughs then and says, Titus, it ain’t so bad. By God, says Mr Noone, I know, I cry easy. All the blackface men and women pledge pies and cakes. They going to spoil us into strength, that’s certain. Maybe you can show us in an act, says John Cole. The Incredible Skeleton Men. I ain’t doing that, says Titus Noone, I ain’t. Of course you ain’t, says John, abashed. I ain’t, says Mr Noone. Major Neale he writes and says he reads we got out and sends his best wishes. Says he found Mrs Neale and his girls all well back a year and they send their best. He says the war has took the spancels off the west and it’s all a great ruckus of trouble. Starling Carlton back in harness and going on well, made sergeant now in what the major calls the real army. Guess there’s the real and the unreal right enough. Everything like a goddamn dream there by the river in Grand Rapids. Months where Winona strives to haul us back. Day comes when we pull on clothes and John Cole laughing at how we flap. It’s co
mical. Slowly we build back to men and not ghouls to fright a child. More months and then we’re sitting at the eating table and then out on the porch in healing sunlight. Beginning to feel the proper itch of life. Turning our heads to plans. One morning we walk slow as turtles to Ed West’s barber shop to shave our beards. Man, we don’t look like John and Thomas, no. Not the ones we knew. Look old and strange though we ain’t even thirty far as we know. Any man in his rights to curse this world but we find we don’t so much. Looks like we be stitched at our sides me and John Cole for a start. That’s plum. How come we got Winona from the storm of life and she says the same and says she’s so glad to have us home. That’s better music than leg bones knocking in a cart. We set to go on. Why not.

  A man may judge by this eating of the riverbank by the mines that Grand Rapids doing good so long as the drear war rages. Day comes when arms are laid down and then there is cheering in our narrow city but then also we know that hundreds will never come back and there ain’t no call for what the place was making formerly. There is a silence like a peopleless forest such as was found one time along the old Missouri river itself now so clogged with human matters. Everything makes a mighty pause, the little stores are still, the streets become the walkways of the old. Mr Noone must close his doors and his sparkling tribe disperse. Titus Noone looks puzzled, hands deep in his pockets. Surely he loves his players most of all and it pains him to his marrow to give them their marching orders. But no citizens no cents.

  There’s a half-blind preacher in a temple called Bartram House and I don my best dress and me and John Cole go there and we tie the knot. Rev. Hindle he says the lovely words and John Cole kiss the bride and then it’s done and who to know. Maybe you could read it in their holy book, John Cole and Thomasina McNulty wed this day of our Lord Dec. 7th 1866. In the euphoria of war’s end we reckon a craziness is desired. God don’t mind we know because that day of deep winter is clement, clear and bright. Then as if a token of God’s favour we get a letter from Lige Magan. We been sending missives back and forth while we putting meat back on our bones. He’s struggling with his farm. The men that his pa freed been killed by militia long since but two. His whole country ruined by war and like a waste of ghosts. The coming year lies heavy on his mind and how he to burn the land alone in January? Been set in grass six years and now it ripe for baccy. If we not otherwise engaged could we come and help him in his hour of need? He says all his cold district is a swamp of mistrust and he trusts me and John. Going to be hard years but maybe we could feel there were something to win. He got no kin but us. If we come he hoping we got good pistols and also further states that rifles would be wise and a hundred rounds per soul army-style. Fact is that they calling him just a scalawag like his pa and fact is he is. John Cole reads the letter to me on the porch by the river. We muffled to our eyes with old sack coats and our heads encased in old bearskin hats. Our breath is flowing out like lonesome flowers that die on the air. The deep river runs cleaner now the mine is halted. Winter birds sing their wise old songs on withered river posts. Winona in her winter dress and she as glad as a rose. Old Father Time seems to be looking on with his scythe and sand-clock. Mr McSweny listening while he smokes his seven-cent cheroot. This Tennessee baccy, he says. It good.

  We cast an imploration on Beulah McSweny to come with us but he says he ain’t testing the patience of the South towards his kind just now and anyhow how would Mr Noone thrive without him? John Cole treks up to Muskegon where the army unloading ten thousand mules and horses now the late war is done and buys four mules for nothing. We have wrote back to Lige and he is mighty pleased we coming and he says to bring mules for ploughing if we can get some. Says horses being eaten now and Tennessee starving. Going to take a week get down there. Maybe two. Depending what we find. Beulah gives us ten two-dollar Erie and Kalamazoo notes he got saved. Can’t take that from you, says John Cole. John, he says, you might as well. We also got five gold coins and two five-dollar bills which is everything we got after army service and a little bit owed by Mr Noone when we left to go to war. It ain’t no Yankee fortune. The fourth mule will take our slender stuff. Winona’s spare dress and my private dresses except the moths been into them somewhat. The dress I were married in goes back to Mr Noone’s prop-master. John Cole asks the seamstress Miss Dinwiddie to sew the gold coins into the fancy bit below the bodice of Winona’s daily dress. It’s to keep them hidden but Winona smiles and says her grandfather did just the same in the long ago when he were riding out to war. Mighty medicine, old Spanish coins sewn into his war dress.

  That night we drink more whisky with Mr Noone and company than was wise. It was a sweet time. Mr Noone makes a speech about the old days and new days to come. Farewells and promises of eternal friendship pass our mouths and make our faces sombre.

  Looks like we’re ready to go south. You could drop a plumb line from Grand Rapids and it would pull down straight to Paris, Tennessee, so we going strict south by the compass through Indiana and Kentucky, says John Cole. Mr McSweny nodding now like we are talking about something he will never have to think of again. He says the best thing is take care of Winona. Mr McSweny be a hundred years old maybe but he ain’t too old to feel the pain of parting. Guess Winona rooted deep into his heart just like she done with us. Guess Winona feels like something special in the world. A sort of boon and award for being alive. Beulah McSweny holds out his grizzled brown hand and shakes her smooth hand as brown as polished pinewood. Thank you for everything you done, Beulah, she says. The poet McSweny looks down. I guess you don’t need to thank me, he says. No, Beulah, I do, she says.

  Since we got them cheap mules we ain’t going to be able to catch them trains in a Memphis direction. Can’t put four mules on a stagecoach neither. But we don’t mind it. We’ll go along easy and not bust their wind. Be glad to show Winona all that country, John Cole says. Guess we discover that the worst roads in Christendom go down through Indiana. Ain’t they got shovels? says John Cole. Dire mud to put boots of black on the mules. All the same they look busy in the Indiana towns, astir with themselves. New-looking places. And all to us a nameless country though I expect everything has a name but we don’t know them. Sometimes we ask a name of a river as we cross just for the hell of it but it makes no difference since we passing through. Our business is going south. Folk look out at us under the hatbrims like we was not very desirable creatures. We traipsing down main street of a dozen podunk places and in one or two Winona gets filthy words thrown. One big boozy red-faced charlatan soul one place laughing at us and saying looks like we travelling with our whore. Ain’t that unusual. John Cole not being easy with talk like that stops his mule and slowly dismounts and starts to walk over to the great galoot. Well, he runs like a fat rabbit and squeals too. You just got to answer a bully, says John Cole. That will do it. Then he comes back to us and swings his leg again across his black mule. Nods his head and we go on. Maybe we go a little faster just in case that brave boy got friends. Winona though looking proud like John Cole did the right thing there. Guess he did. Lot of what they call civilisation in Indiana we notice. Theatres. Which makes us sad that we ain’t lookers no more. Old men afore our time but we still have a hankering for the work we done before. I still feel the sadness of not donning no dress. Always remembering the strange silence in the crowd and things without words hovering in the air. Crazy nights. Queer way to make a living but we made it all the same. I’m wondering if Lige Magan grows good eats could something of the bloom of youth return? It might. Mr Noone never said a word about it but we knew what the trouble was. Beauty lives in the faces of youth. No going round that. Never was a hag yet that men desired. I don’t mind being a matron now if that’s our fate. Guess it comes to every woman by and by.