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

by Sebastian Barry

Sometimes you know you ain’t a clever man. But likewise sometimes the fog of usual thoughts clears off in a sudden breeze of sense and you see things clear a moment like a clearing country. We blunder through and call it wisdom but it ain’t. They say we be Christians and suchlike but we ain’t. They say we are creatures raised by God above the animals but any man that has lived knows that’s damned lies.

Something in John is calming right enough. For me over these long years he’s sacred. I never think bad of John, just can’t. I don’t even truly know his nature. He a perpetual stranger and I delight in that.

We like mother and child right enough and that’s how it plays. I give thanks for that. Maybe in my deepest soul I believe my own fakery. I suppose I do. I feel a woman more than I ever felt a man, though I were a fighting man most of my days. Got to be thinking them Indians in dresses shown my path. Could gird in men’s britches and go to war. Just a thing that’s in you and you can’t gainsay. Maybe I took the fortune of my sister when all those times ago I saw her dead. Still as a scrap of seaweed. Her thin legs sticking out. Her ragged pinny. I had never seen such things nor suspected there could ever be such suffering. That was true and it will always be true. But maybe she crept into me and made a nest. It’s like a great solace, like great sacks of gold given. My heart beats slowly I do believe. I guess the why is dark as doom but I am just witness to the state of things. I am easy as a woman, taut as a man. All my limbs is broke as a man, and fixed good as a woman. I lie down with the soul of woman and wake with the same. I don’t foresee no time where this ain’t true no more. Maybe I was born a man and growing into a woman.

Now in St Louis we see changes since the old times. Vast wharf-houses as tall as hills. All the freedmen sprung up here like a crop of souls and near every face you see along the river be black and brown and yella. There ain’t nowhere their work don’t touch. They doing the hauling and the hooking and the roping. But they ain’t looking so much like slaves no more. The boss men is black and the shouting roars out of black lungs. No whips like heretofore. I don’t know but this looks like to be better. Still, me and Winona don’t see one Indian face. We ain’t lingering to find out the weevils and the bad worms in these new visions. But we flick through and there were something there don’t offend though in all truth St Louis smacked into desolation by the receding war and shell-ruined houses here and there still these times even if a-building. Sense of two worlds rubbing up. Am I American? I don’t know.

Now healing from the sights of slaughter my fond Winona blossoms back to talk and she like a flower now that scorns even spring. A famous flower that likely blooms in frost. A lovely child with her scented breath and up from her limbs rising a smell of life and beauty. I guess she might be fifteen years, my daughter, but who can say. I call her my daughter though I do know she ain’t. Let’s say my ward, my care, the product of some strange instinct deep within that does rob from injustice a shard of love. The palms of her hands like two maps of home, the lines leading homeward like old trails. Her beautiful soft hands with tapering fingers. Her touches like true words. A daughter not a daughter but who I mother best I can.

Ain’t that the task in this wilderness of furious death? I guess so. Got to be. My breast is surging with a crazy pride to be bringing her back homeward.