Days Without End: AN IRISH TIMES BEST IRISH BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY

by Sebastian Barry

complete vision of world’s end and death, in those

moments I could think no more, my head bloodless, empty, racketing, astonished. Troopers wept, but they were not tears I knew. Others threw their hats into the air, as if it were a crazy celebration. Others held their heads as if they had just heard of the death of their own loved ones. There didn’t seem to be anything alive, including ourselves. We were dislocated,

that an Indian got a soul just like another man. I would like to tell you how I felt except it was

The grasses were sere and indifferent really, scratching the horizon of the sky with their sharp stems.

how gently some of the men threw.

the usual repartee that means nothing but somehow saves the heart and the day. It became clear

were putting pastry tops on two enormous pies. It

was wretched. Then

This was the section of humanity favoured in that place, the Indians had no place no more there.

Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in that moment. Hard to say what I mean by that. You look back at all the endless years when you never had that thought. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life. And

it is not like that now. I am wondering what words we said so carelessly that night, what vigorous nonsense we spoke, what drunken shouts we shouted, what stupid joy there was in that, and how John Cole was only young then and as handsome as any person that has ever lived. Young, and there would never

be a change for that. The heart rising, and the soul singing. Fully alive in life and content as the house-marti...

That coming wave looked like twenty feet of death. The flood came so quickly you couldn’t have laid a bet on it. You couldn’t a got the book open quick enough to mark the wager. Then

Maybe we were being punished for our shabby acts. There was no game below the mountains this

The world got so many it don’t need to. We could have starved out there

Thousands die everywhere always. The world don’t care much, it just don’t mind much. That’s what I notice about it. There is that great wailing and distress

old Father Time washes his hands.

Desolate, and decimated though we were, there was something good there. Something that couldn’t be extinguished by flood and hunger. That human will. You got to give homage to it.

But the trouble was, Mexican bandits, and rough riding white men of any description, evil outlaws, murderous rustlers, all those wild class of beings that were ubiquitous in that time, they thought they better cut up an Indian when they killed him. Took off the hair firstly, hair was a big thing for an Indian. Scalping. Long silky black hair down to the waist and the skin on top of the head with it. Chop off the head with a machete. Chop off the arms. That didn’t show no respect and no thought either for the warrior’s aftertime. That sort of thing inflamed the Apache, the Comanche, then he was out on a revenge spree. He was going to take your fingers off one by one. He was going to take your toes, and then your balls, and then your pecker. Slowly, slowly. You

Violence both parties

White men doesn’t understand Indians and

vice versa, said the major, shak...

in his even-toned way. That’s what brings the trouble, he says. Well, now we were fearing the Indians just as much as the hunger...

You coulda used John Cole for a pencil if you coulda threaded some lead through him. We

Frostbite the doctor called it, frost carnage more like.

a stone courtesy of that embalmer. But looking dandy enough. It sure took the proverbial cake.

Can’t wear a picture, says John Cole, my beau.

season for all those hopeful hearts going out to pick up gold nuggets as they thought from the ground

of forsaken places. This year more than was ...

every blade of grass was eaten between Missouri and Fort Laramie. Them thousand thousand horses, cattle, oxen, and mules. Lots of new boys in the 6th, lots of forlorn Irish, usual big dark boys. Joking, all

that teasing Irish do, but somewhere behind it the dark wolves staring, the hunger wolves under the hunger moons.

great gathering of Indians out there on the plains. The ma...

The colonel sends out messengers to every tribe he knows of ever set foot on the whiteman’s trail. Thousands com...

The summer sun leans down on everything and bakes the canvas and if you can sleep at night you must be deceased. Nice

Now there was maybe three four thousand pointed dwellings bedecked in painted skins and banners. The famed Shoshone, the lofty Sioux boys both Teton and Oglala, the Arapaho, the Assiniboine come down from Canada, blazed out in the midday heat in all their finery. Major knows the Oglala because it’s the same crowd fed us in our time of trial. That same chief’s here, Caught-His-Horse-First.

everyone starching theyselves up into a mighty fit of seriousness.

a silence such as you might know just before a thunderstorm, when the land draws in its chest and holds a limitless breath, and across the valley

Them Indians is wore out from slaughter and so are we.

Empurpled rapturous hills I guess and the long day brushstroke by brushstroke enfeebling into darkness and then the fires blooming on the

John Cole and me sought out a hollow away from prying eyes. Then with the ease of men who have rid themselves of worry we strolled among the Indian tents and heard the sleeping babies breathing and spied out the wondrous kind called by the Indians winkte or by white men berdache, braves dressed in the finery of squaws. John Cole gazes on them but he don’t like to let his eyes linger too long in case he gives offence. But he’s like the plough-horse

that got the whins. All woken in a way I don’t see before. The berdache puts on men’s garb when he goes to war, this I know. Then war over it’s back to the bright dress. We move on and he’s just shaking like a cold child. Two soldiers walking under the bright nails of the stars. John Cole’s long face, long stride. The moonlight not able to flatter him because he was already beautiful. Next morning was a final gift-giving to the Indians. A man called Titian Finch had arrived with a daguerreotype machine to make a record of these clement days. The tribes is photographed in great assemblies and the major has his picture done with Caught-His-Horse-First like they was old friends. A sunlight as white as a maiden’s bosom floods the country. They have to move real close. A naked Indian and a braided major. They stand beside each other in casual earnestness, the Indian’s right hand gripping the major’s silver-threaded sleeve, as if to alert him to some danger, or guard him from it. Titian Finch bids them both hold still as stones, and for one eternal moment they are there, the very picture of human equanimity and gratitude. Then these friendly acts were done and the Indians dispersed and we was returned to ordinary days. Nathan Noland, Starling Carlton, Lige Magan the sharpshooter, these was boys of the regiment that came close to us in that time, me and John Cole. Because it was now that John Cole started to show the illness that afflicted him. He was obliged to lie quiet for day...

Famine. That filthy dark-hearted scrawny creature that wants the ransom of lives. Because government food that was promised was late or never coming. The major was looking vexed and tormented.

Meadowlarks larking everywhere looking pleased with themselves and the skeeters in wholesale flocks everywhere.

Handsome John Cole whistling a waltz still residing in him out of New England.

The air of manhood fills our skins. Some can’t help hollering

It’s like a miracle and for a moment an exultation floods my breast.

Country opens like an enormous parcel and the plains is sparkling with ten thousand flowers and you can feel that first tincture of healing warmth in the days.

She has a bosom like a small earthworks. Smooth, defensive.

Here was the sockdolager of goddamned feminine mystery.

But now in the far distance we see a land begin to be suggested as if maybe a man was out there painting it with a huge brush. He is choosing a blue as bright as falling water for the hills and there is a green for the forests so green you think it might be used for to make ten million gems. Rivers burn through it with a enamelled blue. The huge fiery sun is working at burning off all this splendid colour and for ten thousand acres of the sky it is mighty successful.

A stagger of black cliffs just nearby rise