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

by Sebastian Barry

three dresses in St Louis as we came through so she has a wardrobe to her name. Nice flouncy pink dress is my favourite.

Got Winona’s straight black hair cut nice and bought her combs and a brush, she brushes it all the time at her vanity mirror. Winona. She don’t

as Winona Cole.

morning our old friend Mr Titus Noone come in to view us. The

Mr Noone he still ain’t so old we find. He is as dapper as a mackerel. His black coat shines with strangeness

bluebird-blue cravat flashes also with birdy life, his cufflinks has been fished out of rivers in Australia he tells us, dark emeralds like poked-out

straight lines, black patches, and immaculateness. His skin is made of the aftermaths of smiles. Most likely Titus Noone has come...

guess we remember what he done for us in Daggsville and he remembers maybe that we did not let him down. Things like that sure is a basis for ongoing business. Fagged though she be by

Things that give you heart are rare enough, better note them in your head when you find them and not

So

we leave it there like the last note of a ballad.

Laramie and there was these Sioux men dressed as women and the effect was very strange, some of them was so good-looking, and it made your knees a bit soft to see them. And I been thinking all

Well, says Titus, he could do himself up minstrel fashion and play the wench parts? He could well,

Thomas in his dress, and being as ladylike as a lady, only more so, everything done just so, and aiming for beauty, you know, and he is a beauty, ain’t he! So, says John Cole, after a break for laughter, I was thinking it might bear a try-out up here, in your hall, since you know us, and know we ain’t no fools. And is he going to sing, or dance, or

out-and-out killer beauty, and just see what the audience thought of that. Or, she could be in her boudoir or such,

Soon her little shipshape form is caught in sleep, rising and falling with every small breath so that the bed feels like there must be a troubled brook running through

we are just one atom in a ruckus of a dozen characters daubing the black onto their faces and the little costume mistresses are sewing

The wicks be floating in the oil and make a mist like you might find along a morning valley in the sweet land of Yellowstone.

The crowd is pushed up from zephyr to gale.

Silence more speaking than any sound.

Now there rampages through me a thrill such as might be got otherwise only from opium.

might be one of the footlights, with a burning wick for a heart.

They have seen something they don’t understand and partly do, in the same breath. We have done something we don’t understand neither and partly do.

There was love in Mr Titus Noone’s hall for a crazy foggy moment. There were love imperishable for

a rushing moment.

Thus we inaugurate the best time in the little kingdom we have pitched up against the darkness. Seems

We got a riverside house of four rooms and we got a porch on the street side and it ain’t the best part of town and that’s where we fit like gloves. Like gloves.

The point is we living like a family. John Cole know he

Got her sleeping, he says. You sure do, I say. Not much more than that needed to make men happy.

don’t know then and I don’t know now. But I am easier in the dress, that’s all I can say. Well I would almost attest

talks about slaves and the true and proper love of country and the call of Mr Lincoln. Now we’re dizzy with patriotic feeling and desire. John Cole sitting there wide-eyed.

Scraps of great speeches in Washington reach our little district like the bits of things dropped by feeding birds.

But we got new business with the world and our very hearts are filling with the work. That’s how it seems as we set out upon our war.

The two of them go running at these dancing tunes and it puts a lick of enjoyment into slack times. Not many of them now. We’re poured down slowly

he’s strong as the centre of a river current. He

Anyhows aren’t we going down to show the Rebs where they went wrong. Error of their ways. We got a nice deal of ordnance and it is our wish to show them what it can do. It’s

Small man wouldn’t be much good for fighting but he good for tightening those screws that start to come loose on the engine of a man when

he’s facing God knows what.

Now in the burgeoning noise dozens of shells hit into the enemy, sharding them and shredding them. There is a sense of sudden wretchedness and disaster. Then with a great bloom like a sudden infection of spring flowers the meadow

becomes a strange carpet of flames. The grass has caught fire and is generously burning and adding burning to burning. So dry it cannot flame fast enough, so high that the

blades combust in great tufts and wash the legs of the fleeing soldiers not with soft gr...

you can feel your whole corpse gathered up into one tight fist of fear and fright. Holy mother

regimental banners now better and this damn one at centre coming on has shamrocks and harps just like ours. Usual crazy fucking war.

see are how thin these boys are, how strange, like ghosts and ghouls. Their eyes like twenty thousand dirty stones. River stones I’m

Lace from a million seamstresses. The old heralds of the twilight are

Lace like

It would scare the Archangel. The roar is bigger

than any wind we know and in it is a sort of queer lust and something akin to cruelty. The Rebels

lonesome fools. Otherwise we going to be no one left. In a half hour of slaughter we lose a thousand

Then a thick deluge to speak of coming death. Tramping on and on, barefoot or clacking boot. Our faces round and sere and bleached like the seedpods of the flower honesty. If we had hidden knives we would fillet out these Rebels’ hearts. That the first day and the second. Looking about wanting to rend and ruin if we given a chance. John Cole says he keep seeing floating in his mind the drummer boy McCarthy who done his utmost and died. And then he seeing over and over the coloured men dropped foully into the ditch. Keep your thoughts quiet, John Cole, I say. Then the third day in the thunderstorm we suffer a change. The sun of Death burns our innards and the moon of Death pulls at our blood. Our blood slows and youth is cancelled and we feel like aged men full of years.

three thousand prisoners maybe more. Hard to make