Days Without End

by Sebastian Barry

Man, we was so clean and nice, I wished I could of met myself.

And then we quietly fucked and then we slept.

I am thinking of the days without end of my life.

And it is not like that now.

Gangrene got in and that’s a dancing partner no trooper chooses.

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

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.

mien

We get drunk then and the sergeant is clutching his belly all evening and then everything is blotted out till you awake in the bright early morning needing a piss and then it all floods back into your brain what happened and it makes your heart yelp like a dog. Least Caleb Booth was coming good in the infirmary and that might be a tribute to his innocent belief in the darn permanence of life.

Soldiers coming out of winter have those swimming rheumy eyes of drinkers. Their skins is pale from poor eats.

Troopers have red peckers and God knows what the squaws. Troopers that can’t afford even squaws lie with troopers so that’s more devilment to their equipment.

Me, sharpshooter Lige Magan, Caleb Booth back from the dead, Starling Carlton, Handsome John Cole, we were keeping a little understanding going that we was a special outfit of friends, for the purposes of cards not least.

They link arms about the place and she talks like a geyser. Every little thing she says has grammar in it, she sounds like a bishop.

It’s like being bathed in flames just looking to her, and I ain’t even that sort of man would like to kiss her.

sockdolager

Boethius Dilward

and the horses got to be quiet which ain’t always in the rulebook of horses,

The wigwams are mightily decked and there’s none of the wretchedness you might begin to see in wigwams as you go back towards the east. Out here nothing much of us has touched them.

We are not lovers rushing to embrace but there is a sense of terrifying union none the less, as if courage yearns to join with courage. I cannot say otherwise. No fighter on earth as brave as a Sioux brave.

These are fierce men with the bitterness of useless treaties in their bellies.

harridan

confab

Also he had the mighty civilising medicine of Mrs Neale, a woman who might have been a preacher had she not been cloven. The mixture of beauty and religion in her could make troopers faint with what can only be reckoned love. Maybe lust too.

The river before our fort looked dank and sad, what John Cole called the ‘hairless’ ground all about us worried by stray smears of ice and snow.

There’s no soldier don’t have a queer little spot in his wretched heart for his enemy, that’s just a fact.

choler

We’re holding hands then like lovers who have just met or how we imagine lovers might be in the unknown realm where lovers act as lovers without concealment.

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.

But that ain’t the point. The point is we living like a family. John Cole know he was born in December or seems to remember that month and maybe I remember I was born in June and Winona says she was born during the Full Buck Moon. Anyhow we roll all that into one and on the first of May we have assigned our birthday for the three of us. We say Winona is nine years old and John Cole has settled on twenty-nine. So that must make me twenty-six. Something along those lines. Point is, whatever ages we be, we’re young. John Cole is the best-looking man in Christendom and this is his heyday. Winona is sure the prettiest little daughter ever man had. Goddamned beautiful black hair. Blue eyes like a mackerel’s blue back. Or a duck’s wing feathers. Sweet little face cool as a melon when you hold it in your hands and kiss her forehead.

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

After a few months of doing our damnedest for Mr Noone it just seems natural to be not always changing garb by the hour and there seems to be greater contentment in it for me to wear a simple-hued housedress and not be always dragging on the trews. Outside is one matter, in another. Winona never does say nothing about it. Never seems to see me only as what I am in my face. Whatever that be. I don’t know then and I don’t know now. But I am easier in the dress, that’s all I can say.

She could slit our throats in the night with justice, spray out our blood redly on the linen pillows. But she don’t do that. She sings and we listen and all three are returned to the prairie in our heads. She to her guiltless haunts and us to those moments when in truth we stood gazing out onto all that lonesome beauty.

Only drawback is we are obliged to get me into civvies real quick instanter after a performance and I ain’t able now to leave by Mr McSweny’s door but John Cole got to take me out through the theatre saloon as two anonymous Joes and out along the alley with the heaps of bottles and spittoon slops. Pistol in his trouser belt snug as a squirrel. Because a few of them Johnnies fall in love with the shimmer and downright strangeness of the act. Guess they want to marry me. Or have me.

Meanwhile John Cole says he loves me more than any man since the apes roamed.

Guess we were heads down in our own business, the act and just living and loving and such.

Look like cannon that been eating nothing but molasses for a year. Swole up like a giant’s pecker. They say they’ll be needed under the walls of Richmond but Starling Carlton says there ain’t no walls. So we don’t know what that rumour means.

It is not like running at Indians who are not your kind but it is running at a mirror of yourself.

Muskets are thrown down both sides and the details charge up now not to fire and kill but to stamp out the black acre of lingering flames and tend the dying, the rended, and the burned. Like dancers dancing on the charred grasses.

So dicfferent than Cormac McCarthy!

John Cole is very concerned in his nice-hearted way and two of his privates is dead as poked-out winkles.

Me and John Cole thank God and old Lige Magan and Starling come through and also Dan FitzGerald. Else how we going to play cards God damn it.

Do we got so many souls to be given? How can that be?

Why you fighting then? says Lige. Why, because the major asked me, says Starling, as if this were the clearest fact in Christendom. Why the hell you fighting?

toffs

Holy mother of the Jesus good-natured God.

John Cole come over from his detail and kneels at my side. He leans his head against my right arm at the top and seems to sleep for a moment. Seems to fall into a sleep. Like he was a baby after a lullaby. Suddenly the whole body of men seems to be sleeping. No force will ever rouse us again. Our eyes are closed and we are asking for our strength returned. If we got Gods we’re praying to them. Then it seeps back. No thankful speech of any captain could be so deep as the relief of it.

Lovely

Maybe remembers the old sick days when John Cole couldn’t move a muscle and that Lige danced attendance. Why should a man help another man? No need, the world don’t care about that. World is just a passing parade of cruel moments and long drear stretches where nothing going on but chicory drinking and whisky and cards. No requirement for nothing else tucked in there. We’re strange people, soldiers stuck

Happy to breathe because we seen terror and horror and then for a while they ain’t in dominion. Bibles weren’t wrote for us nor any books. We ain’t maybe what people do call human since we ain’t partaking of that bread of heaven. But if God was trying to make an excuse for us He might point at that strange love between us. Like when you fumbling about in the darkness and you light a lamp and the light come up and rescue things. Objects in a room and the face of the man who seem a dug-up treasure to you. John Cole. Seems a food. Bread of earth. The lamplight touching his eyes and another light answering.

Speaking like they got acorns in their mouths.

Then the rest of us is told to form ranks and then we are told to move and then we move.