Days Without End

by Sebastian Barry

  One evening in the summer me and John Cole was sitting out on the porch watching the shadows lengthen on things. Lige was asleep on his chair. Those crazy whippoorwills giving over and over the same little song. Winona working in the kitchen on Briscoe’s accounts. Queer how you sitting there and before you see them you know someone’s coming. Way over along the river track then they appear, about a dozen men riding. The new dark buffets them and yet over to the westward a huge trembling sun still burns herself out in the ashen sky. Pale colour of a bird’s egg marks the upper heavens. You gotta give the world credit for beauty. The riders ride forward steady. Just coming along like they knowed the road. Soon enough we see they’re army. The jackets that once we weared ourselves and the rifles stuck in their scabbarding. Looks like two officers and a bunch of boys. Well goddamn if that don’t look like Corporal Poulson in the distance. That’s what I say to John Cole. Lige Magan stirs in his slumbers and comes awake. He don’t say nothing. We got rifles as usual lying along the porch but not that no one would see them. A colour sergeant and two corporals don’t fret much to see army. On they come. Then John Cole standing just as you might on account you wanting to greet. Leans against the porch support just easy and dandy. Pulls at his hat. It’s hot and his chest been sweating into his shirt. Just hoping then I’m shaved and trimmed as good as I need. Run a finger over my cheek to check. Anyhow the dark has reached our porch and sits in in bundles with us. Whippoorwills drop silent. Far off a summer thunder rolls along the hills. It’s not a storm will reach us I reckon. Too far away. Got to stop my hand from greeting Poulson because in this guise I don’t know him. Then that tack-tacketing of hooves and approach of horses never quiet. Don’t know the other fellas unless one or two but faintly. Can’t recall.

  Evening, says Corporal Poulson to John and Lige. Ma’am, he says, and lifts his hat to me. What’s your business, Corporal? says Lige, as friendly as a Quaker. We’re on deserter business, says Poulson. Rode down from St Louis. This here Sergeant Magan, this here Mrs Cole, says John Cole, and I was Corporal Cole, I believe in your own regiment, that right? You just the men we looking for, says Poulson, just the men. It’s our melancholy task to seek for Corporal Thomas McNulty, deserter. And we was told he might be here ’longside you. I knew that man and he were a good man but fact is he left before his time. And you know the penalty. So, I’m thinking, this ain’t about Starling Carlton. Goddamn major never signed my papers afore he were arrested. So, have ye seen him here or no? Maybe he out working or the like? God knows we don’t want to combobulate ye. But we’re duty bound. We got a list of nigh-on thirty men ducked out. The colonel wants it cleared. How can we fight our wars otherwise? You can’t, says John Cole. I’ll bring you to your man. So John Cole gives me a start saying that. Is he about to give me up? Yank up my skirts and show my balls? John Cole goes down the steps and Corporal Poulson dismounts. I thank you kindly for your help, he says. It ain’t nothing, says John Cole. Should I be ready with my gun? says Poulson. No, no, says John Cole, he’s quiet enough. So then he leads them through the sheds and round the back he brings them to the little boneyard. Stops at one grave with its blanket of summer-withered grass. Nods his head to Poulson. There he lies, he says. Who that? says Poulson. Corporal McNulty as you was saying. That him lying there? says Poulson. I guess it is, says John. How were he killed? We was jumped by bandits. These other beds is where three of them abide. Thomas killed all three. Protecting his home. That sure sounds like the boy I knowed, says Poulson, a decent man. That’s sad, he says, and saves us a grisly job, God knows. It do, says John Cole, it do. You ain’t marked the grave? says Poulson. Well, we know who lies there, I guess. I guess you do, says Poulson.

  Then Winona come out and has missed the whole thing being buried in Briscoe’s sums. She got a big shocked face when she see’d them. But the meekness of the troopers calms her fears. That night they bed down in the barn and by morning they are gone.

  That were quick thinking, John, says Lige. I’d a drawed out the guns and tried that way.

  So now Thomas McNulty was dead official-wise as far as we can see. He lived a short life of forty years and now he was gone to his rest. That was our thinking on the matter. I was strangely sad for I was pondering on his wrestling with wars and the fights of general life. I was thinking of his hard origins in Ireland and how he came to be an American and of everything put against him that he pushed aside. How he had protected Winona and loved John Cole. How he strived to be a faithful friend to all who knew him. One tiny soul among the millions. I was lying side by side with John Cole that night in the bed thinking about myself like I was dead and here’s a new person altogether. John Cole musta been in the same frame of mind because he says we got to get the monumental mason in Paris to write a stone: R.I.P. T. McNulty. And set it up back of the barn. Just to be sure.

  It was time to give General Lee her freedom. I let her go the next morning because it was summer and summer was a good time for her to try her fortune in the trees. She flew off straight from the wickiup she had lived in. Went like a blurry arrow for the woods. Couldn’t be a free bird fast enough. The healed wing carried her good.

  Guess there must be an address called Fool’s Paradise. On that exact spot in Tennessee. A few days later the letter carrier brings a letter from Paris. We see at the bottom that it’s from Corporal Poulson. I read it through and bring it in to John Cole who is cleaning out the boiler in the barn for to go again next year with the tobacco. He got most of the soot on himself and he’s coal-black. His hands is worser than a scuttle so he tells me read the damn letter. I am cold now in the blasting heat of the day that moils about even in the dark barn. So I reads him the letter. First worse thing is it’s got my name on it. Corporal Thomas McNulty. Dear Corporal McNulty, it says. Well you must oblige me by allowing that you must think me Henry M. Poulson the biggest fool in Christendom if you think I did not see plain with my eyes that that bearded lady was yourself. Well I carried my boys away since I did see also with my eyes those rifles racked along the porch and by God if your friend Mr Magan does not look like a shooter. I saw you fight brave and well and you have a long association in the army of these states and as you may know I fought for the Union even though I was a Southern boy and I know you also set your life in the balances of liberty and evil. It was not my intention therefore to make outlaws of your friends as you would be if you were to fire upon lawful officers. I ask you therefore and I might also say I beg you to put on your britches like a man and come into town where we are waiting to pluck you. By reason that you have things to answer as I believe you will allow. I am, sir, your most humble and obed’t servant, Henry Poulson, corporal.

  He writes a good letter, says John Cole. What the hell we going to do? Guess I’ll just go in and do what he saying, I say. What? No. You ain’t, says John Cole. This is something I got to sort out, I say. They ain’t coming after me for poor Starling. I can ask Major Neale to come speak for me. I was on a short commission and he was going to strike my papers but they took him. He’s cleared now so he’ll speak for me. It’s just a misunderstanding. They’ll see. Hang you high more like, says John Cole. They shoot deserters mostly, I say. Yellowlegs shoot, bluecoats hang, says John Cole. Either way, you ain’t going. But I ain’t making no outlaw outa Winona, I say. If I stay, Poulson comes. That stops his talk. We could go on the run, he says, the three of us. No, sir, we could not, I say. That be just the same thing. You a father, John Cole. Then he’s shaking his black head. The soot drifts down like a black snow. What you saying, you going to leave now and leave us here without you? he says. I ain’t got no choice. A man can ask for an officer to speak for him. I bet seven silver dollars the major will do it. Well, he says, I got to clean out this boiler. I know, I says. So then I’m pulling away from the darkness of the barn to step into the burning air. You’d swear God had a boiler going somewhere. The light grips my face like a octopus. I feel like I am a dead man right enough. I ain’t got no faith in that gone-crazy major. Then I
hear John Cole’s voice behind me. You get back here as quick as you can, Thomas. We got a lot of work to do and can’t do it light of hands. I know, I say, I’ll be back soon. You goddamn better be, he says.

  It’s more in sorrow than in anger that I take off my dress and put on the clothes of man. I smooth out the dress and brush it down a while and then hang it in the old pine chest that Lige Magan’s mother owned. It still got her farm dresses in it. Rough old things she wore in her time. I guess Lige looks in there and then his mother lives again a moment. Times when he was little clinging to those hems. Well I must report that the tears fall fully. I ain’t indifferent. I ain’t a stone. I’m sobbing like a fool and then Winona comes into the square of the door. She’s standing there like a painting of a princess. I know she’s going to do proudly in her world. The fierce light that was in the yard has crossed into the parlour and now tries to leak into the bedroom. It gives her slight form a soft white glow. Winona. Child of my heart. That’s how it was. I was wretched ruined now. Got to go into town, I say. You want me to run you in? she says. No, that’s fine. I’s going to take the bay horse. I might have to take the stage to Memphis later. You can fetch the horse in the morning. I’ll tie her at the dry-goods store. Sure thing, she says. What you doing in Memphis? Going to purchase tickets for the opera John Cole likes. That’s a brave plan, she says, laughing, that’s a brave plan. You be good now, girl, I say. I guess I will, she says.

  So I ride into town. That little bay horse goes on nicely. She got the best walk of any horse I ever owned. Just clipping along with a tack-tack-tack on the dry earth. Sweet life. I was sore in love with all my labouring in Tennessee. Liked well that life. Up with the cockcrow, bed with the dark. Going along like that could never end. And when ending it would be felt to be just. You had your term. All that stint of daily life we sometimes spit on like it was something waste. But it all there is and in it is enough. I do believe so. John Cole, John Cole, Handsome John Cole. Winona. Old good-man Lige. Tennyson and Rosalee. This lithesome bay. Home. Our riches. All I owned. Enough.

  On I ride. Nice day for a hanging, as folks say.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  POULSON AIN’T A bad fellow. But something alters when there’s a bunch of men and one of them is in chains. I guess that’s true. They got a converted ambulance in Paris town and we’re set to ride up to St Louis in that and then entrain in a army caboose to Kansas City. All gonna take a few days and at the start I seem to be jesting with the other boys but then them chains confer a bit of silence on me I guess. Poulson says I’m to be tried at Fort Leavenworth. I ask him if Major Neale know anything about it and he says he hisself don’t know but because of my good service they’ll surely look for mitigations. I dearly hope so. Just in that moment I believe I might have the luck and suddenly I got a thought that I might be heading back down to Tennessee. If you ain’t ever felt a feeling like that I can’t describe to you how it’s just like your head was a melon full of sugar and water. I ask him can he send a letter and he says he don’t see why he can’t. Says they’ll likely call the major anyway seeing as how he was my commanding officer when the crime took place. Alleged crime anyhows, he says. Desertion. What’s the penalty for that if guilty? I says. I guess they shoot you mostly, he says. In the caboose the fellas is mostly playing cards and making jokes and they’re just trying to make each other laugh and guffaw like all soldiers do and the train is making haste to Kansas City.

  When we get to Fort Leavenworth I ain’t feeling so optimistic as the fella said. The wrist chains have eaten into my flesh and the leg chains are trying to catch up with the wrist chains. I’m thinking it would a been better to make a run for it with John Cole and Winona. I was brave starting out but I ain’t so brave just now. My body is tired and Poulson and the lads is just eager to check in their saddles and gear and have a carouse I guess. They deserve it. It was a long trek and they ain’t done nothing wrong. Poulson says he gets thirty dollars for the capture. Fair enough. He gets me signed in too like a bit of extra gear and then I’m sitting in my new quarters like a new-bought dog and I feel like howling. But I don’t. Ain’t no future in howling. I’m wondering can I write to John Cole and get him to come straight up with Lige and bust me out of here. It’s a giant fort and the place is milling with troopers and other sorts and what look like raw recruits and all the biblical multitude of hangers-on. I’m going up for trial in a couple weeks they tell me and till then I can eat the duck soup and be quiet. God damn it. They call me Corporal which in the circumstances has an ominous ring to it. Little man that turns the keys says I’ll be alright but I guess he says that to all the glum-looking boys.

  I don’t know nothing that’s going on since I’m tucked away like a bale of tobacco in the dry-house. So when the big day she comes I’m just mighty relieved to see Major Neale sitting in the room when I’m shunted down to be tried. They got a big long shiny table and a few officers looking pretty at ease and Major Neale is shooting the breeze with a captain when I come in. Turns out to be the ‘president’ of the court martial. Guess I’m someone called Corporal T. McNulty, Troop B, 2nd Cavalry. That’s who they say I am anyhow. I just don’t mention Thomasina in that moment. The charges is read and now I must allow the officers tuck in their legs somewhat because until then they was tending to keep them stuck out in front. The papers make a nestling sound and something in the room gets smaller. I guess it might be me. Desertion. And then they describe what they think it is I done and then they ask what the plea is and another man says Not Guilty. Then Major Neale speaks for me and he’s explaining about the temporary service he hooked me up in due to his daughter being rescued through means of my kindness. Something along those lines. Then he’s bumping up against his own arrest and he mentions Captain Sowell in a hard sorta voice and he’s asked about Captain Sowell and there’s a very queer stirring in the room. Like someone dropped ink in a glass of water. The major says he don’t know nothing about Captain Sowell only that he died. But he makes an effort then to haul the enormous train engine back on the track and says it was on account of all that what was happening to him that he was obliged to neglect the papers that would of discharged Corporal McNulty in the usual way. He said Corporal McNulty at great peril to his own self helped him in a time of urgent need and went a long way in a down payment of hope against his despair at that time. Then I see how much worse the major’s skin has gotten. It’s red as a crab’s foot. Not because he’s embarrassed but because he ain’t well is my suspicion. So then the president of the court he asks if there’s another witness could add something to this story and the major says he don’t know. So then the major brings it all a bit further in the wrong direction and says with an angry voice that it was Captain Sowell accused him with another witness of cruelty in his campaign against the Sioux that took and killed his own dear wife and one of his daughters and took his other daughter Angel captive. When he says this his face is now purple so it must be not only sickness.

  Captain Sexton – now I hear his name proper – is just as flamed up now as the major and he don’t like the major’s high tone not one bit. I come all the way out from Boston to help my corporal and speak for him and I ain’t on trial here. I never said you was, says the president. God damn it, says the major, that just what it feel like. And bangs his right hand on the table. The papers and the glasses jump. Who was this other man that went witness against you? says the president and Major said some damn German called Sarjohn. Oh, says the captain, I know that man, is it Henry Sarjohn you mean? Yes, says the major. Henry Sarjohn is lieutenant of scouts at Fort Leavenworth, he says, why, I think I will call him. So Captain Sexton pulls the plug on proceedings till Sarjohn can be called. Good holy Jesus.

  If the president had called Beelzebub I couldn’t of been more alarmed. One man on God’s earth I didn’t want putting eyes on me was that Sarjohn. Why in the name of tarnation did he have to be in the damn fort? I guess he could of been a hundred miles away and still called. Tarnation. So I’m
eating soup and shitting it out another few days. A man can have noble thoughts and they roosting there in his head like a row of birds but life sure don’t like to contemplate them sitting there. Life’s gonna shoot them birds. Then they have everyone back including the German. Henry Sarjohn is a lieutenant now by God and they say the scouts is mostly half-breeds around here with Irish fathers and Indian mothers. That’s suppose to be amusing but I just don’t find it so. Major Neale don’t attend which I am told is his right as a retired officer and then the president asks Sarjohn his side of the story and what the hell happened to Sowell. So the little German tells us what happened which was, he don’t know. They got up a case against Major Neale and the major was detained and then Sowell was found killed and then the case was thrown back by the court. That’s all he knowed about it. Then he looks at me as hard as a rook. He puts his head in real close. God damn it – I nearly spake aloud though I am forbid. For that man’s breath smells of things that are dead. And then he says, and that’s the man that killed Captain Carlton. Who? says the president, real surprised. Captain Starling Carlton, I seen it, says the German, and I been keeping an eye out this long time. I knew I’d know him when I seen him plain, and there he is. This weren’t good for the temperature of the court and it weren’t good for me. I am took back to the cells while they goes on talking I guess and then in a few days another charge is laid against me and this time it was of murder. The court believed me guilty of the charge. That’s what they said.