Days Without End

by Sebastian Barry

Five days it take to march us down and if ever a spot weren’t worth the walk that’s it.

Our blood slows and youth is cancelled and we feel like aged men full of years.

A stench like it were coming from the arse of the devil.

Heavy crust and smear of filth everywhere that has killed every growing thing.

The journey’s not been good to Dan, his feet are leaking yellow water looks like.

We got splendid examples of dropsy, scurvy, and the pox. We got ailments of the chest, of the bones, of the arse, of the feet, of the eyes, of the face. Huge vicious rashes of redness mark a hundred faces. Bodies painted with ringworm, lice bites, and a million bugs. Men so sick they are dying of death. Strong men to start that are hard to kill.

There’s a half-blind preacher in a temple called Bartram House and I don my best dress and me and John Cole go there and we tie the knot. Rev. Hindle he says the lovely words and John Cole kiss the bride and then it’s done and who to know. Maybe you could read it in their holy book, John Cole and Thomasina McNulty wed this day of our Lord Dec. 7th 1866.

Guess Winona feels like something special in the world. A sort of boon and award for being alive.

linnet.

Passing the time. Just an old widower Indian man by a river whose name we didn’t know.

My heart is full of Winona but also John Cole. How come we got to have Winona? I don’t know. We been through many slaughters, John Cole and me. But I am as peaceful and easy now as I ever been.

Be hard to be in the world without him. I’m thinking that.

That part of the country you see two or three shooting stars a minute. Must be time of year for shooting stars. Looking for each other, like everything is.

Lige Magan’s letter it said to pass quietly around the town of Paris by means of a sheltering wood to the west and when we come out the other side we would reach a creek and then to follow the trail along the bank of that creek westward so we did that.

We’ve put a drummer boy’s uniform on Winona, he says, to show what we think of her.

gainsaying

gossoon

Ain’t I treasoned him and gone back on my true word? The world ain’t all just grasping and doing. It’s thinking too. But I ain’t possessing the brain to think it all clear.

But in my head there’s riots.

gainsay.

the product of some strange instinct deep within that does rob from injustice a shard of love.

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.

Lige Magan loved that sweating man and it grieves him sore that he is dead but John Cole don’t tell him I ended him. John Cole would of fought by Starling Carlton and often did and would of stood between him and harm but it were wrong in his careful estimation to want to end Winona. Darkly devilish wrong. John Cole tells Lige we don’t know what’s coming but it’s best now if Thomas McNulty not

So now Thomas McNulty was dead official-wise as far as we can see. He lived a short life of forty years and now he was gone to his rest. That was our thinking on the matter. I was strangely sad for I was pondering on his wrestling with wars and the fights of general life. I was thinking of his hard origins in Ireland and how he came to be an American and of everything put against him that he pushed aside. How he had protected Winona and loved John Cole. How he strived to be a faithful friend to all who knew him. One tiny soul among the millions. I was lying side by side with John Cole that night in the bed thinking about myself like I was dead and here’s a new person altogether. John Cole musta been in the same frame of mind because he says we got to get the monumental mason in Paris to write a stone: R.I.P. T. McNulty. And set it up back of the barn. Just to be sure.

Nice day for a hanging, as folks say.