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

by Sebastian Barry

Snow goes then we’re ploughing like our lives depend which they do. Now the four mules are hitched and show their worth and plough forty acres back and forth three times. The land is lined for plants and then the little plants is brought into the fields and one spikes the earth with a peg and another plants a plant and another gives it water and a feed. And Tennyson sings his African songs and when we’re stooped in the trees for midday dinner Lige oftentimes plays the fiddle so that the notes go into the woods to twitch the sleeps of birds. Never work so deep and hard and never sleep so deep.

Flowers draw bees and gold draws thieves.

I don’t have no contract with no God and I ain’t God’s soldier nohow but I’m praying He will guard and keep Winona.

My foe jumps out and runs at me back-bent. Don’t move, don’t move, he says. All hisses and curses. Stands on my hand and says, you move, you dead. Just move that hand one inch, you dead. I believe him. I look up and his dark and bitter face looking down. Strange eyes and face all puckered with scars. Looks like the world’s worst tailor stitched him. Still the guns blasting away and then suddenly silence and then voices. You move, you dead, the man says again. I’m surprised even by his mercy so far. Why don’t he just kill me? But men are strange and killing men are stranger.

Inside we got Lige Magan kneeling to John Cole. First I think he’s dead but he just had his eyes closed the moment I come in. Then he opens them and sees Starling. Jesus, he says, what you doing here, Sarge? He just appeared like a angel, I says. If that’s a angel I ain’t going to heaven, says Lige Magan.

The years fall away and it’s like the first day in barracks with John Cole. St Louis a thousand years in the past. And in my mind’s eye too I see him lying in bed in Tennessee with the hole in his thigh. I see him just a ragged gossoon the first moment I met him under a hedge in Missouri. I am dizzy with visions of John Cole. I wonder am I betraying this man most dear to me. Maybe I am, maybe I am. But I’m also praying for things I don’t even have names for and that sit in the dark of my mind unknown.

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.

We are going forth that day to call Caught-His-Horse-First a murderer in silent judgement. But it was us killed his wife and his child. The first Winona. And many more that were kin to him. Our own Winona was wrested from these plains. We took her like she were our natural daughter. But she ain’t. What is she now? Plucked all two ways and there she is dressed as a drummer boy in the cavalry of the United States and easily laughing. She pleased to her soul to be answering the hurt of the major because the major’s wife once showed her kindness. Winona, the queen of this o’erwhelming country. God damn it but a corporal best not weep.

THERE’S OLD SORROW in your blood like second nature and new sorrow that maddens the halls of sense.

Killing hurts the heart and soils the soul. And Captain Sowell looking as angry as old Zeus and as sick as a poisoned dog. He don’t talk to no one and no one talking to him. The other silent creature be Winona. I keeping her stuck close to me. I don’t trust anyone. What we walked through was the strike-out of her kindred. Scrubbed off with a metal brush like the dirt and dried blood on a soldier’s jacket. Metal brush of strange and implacable hatred. Even the major. Same would be if soldiers fell on my family in Sligo and cut out our parts. When that old ancient Cromwell come to Ireland he said he would leave nothing alive. Said the Irish were vermin and devils. Clean out the country for good people to step into. Make a paradise. Now we make this American paradise I guess. Guess it be strange so many Irish boys doing this work. Ain’t that the way of the world. No such item as a virtuous people.

We’re told we’ll see a hundred stops or so but the train moves like a giant dancer for all its bulk. Out front the snowguard parts the snow just like a ship through blustering foam. The snow thrown up pours back across the roofs and in it comes through glassless windows to be brother to soot and sister to choking smoke.

Crazy thing is I’m cold and wet and sore but I’m growing happy since we moving far from Death. That’s what it seems. Winona loosening too, and laughing now. She just a girl and should be laughing regular. She should be playing maybe if she ain’t too old. Certainly acts the lady and knows how. 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.

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. Maybe that boy that John Cole met was but a girl already. He weren’t no girl hisself for sure. This could be mountainous evil. I ain’t read the Book on that. Maybe no hand has ever wrote its truth. I never heard of such a matter unless from us prancers on the stage. In Mr Noone’s hall you just was what you seemed. Acting ain’t no subterfuge-ing trickery. Strange magic changing things. You thinking along some lines and so you become that new thing. I only know as we was tore along, Winona lying on my breast, I was a thorough-going ordinary woman. In my windblown head. Even if my bosom was my army socks stuffed in.

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.

The drifts pile up against the barn. Covers the rough graves of Tach Petrie and his boys that was dug for their long sleep. Covers the sleeping roots of things. The outlaws, the orphans, the angels and the innocents. Covers the long woods.

Bitterness eats the bitter.

I would be shot as the sun came up, ‘with musketry’, as they decree. There’d be a day without me and then a night and then forever more.

I never felt such joy of heart as in those days traipsing southward. I never felt such pure charge and fire of joy. I am like a man not just let loose from death but from his own discomfited self. I don’t desire nothing but to reach our farm and witness the living forms of John Cole and Winona step out to meet me.