Days Without End

by Sebastian Barry

The captain hisself he died of fever, when we reached Canada we were a ship without a steward. Into the fever sheds with us and that’s where hundreds died. I’m just writing all this down. The point is, we were nothing. No one wanted us. Canada was a-feared of us. We were a plague. We were only rats of people. Hunger takes away what you are. Everything we were was just nothing then.

They just couldn’t live with the thought of Indians and they went out in parties and scoured through the hills and tried to kill them. They could of captured the men and put them to work sluicing and digging if they had wished, that was California-style law. They could of took in the women and children for slaves and concubines but at this time they preferred just to shoot what they could find.

Now in these different districts, the sun came up that bit earlier, more eagerly, more like the baker putting fire into his bread-oven, in the small hours, so the women in the town would have bread bright early. Lord, that sun rose regular and sere, he didn’t care who saw him, naked and round and white. Then the rains came walking over the land, exciting the new grasses, thundering down, hammering like fearsome little bullets, making the shards and dusts of the earth dance a violent jig. Making the grass seeds drunk with ambition.

The moonlight not able to flatter him because he was already beautiful.

Every last man, young and old, wants John Cole to touch my face, hold my narrow shoulders, put his mouth against my lips. Handsome John Cole, my beau. Our love in plain sight.

We sign up for the three years and everyone believes this war will take no more or we ain’t Christians at all. Most of the privates sign for ninety days. Want to do their duty and then go home proud men.

I know you will, says the major, in his nice colonel’s uniform.

He says when they opened the hatches in Quebec they drew out the long nails and the light came into the hold for the first time in four weeks. All they had gotten on the journey was water. Suddenly in the new light he seen the corpses floating everywhere in the bilge-water and then the dying and then everyone to the last a skeleton.

Goddamn corpses. That’s because we were thought worthless. Nothing people. I guess that’s what it was. That thinking just burns through your brain for a while. Nothing but scum.

The wolves will come down after a few days from the mountains when we are gone and start to dig through the stones we’ve piled up. Nothing more surer than that. That’s why the Indians put their dead on poles. We put them in the dirt because we believe it to be respecting. Talking about Jesus but Jesus never knew nothing about this land. That’s how foolish we are. Because it just ain’t so.

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 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.

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.