Days Without End

by Sebastian Barry

Anyway Death likes to make a stranger of your face.

Let me call them our dancing days. Why the hell not. After all we was only children obliged to survive in a dangerous terrain.

I was freed, like those slaves were freed in the coming war. I was ready for anything. I felt dainty, strong, and perfected. That’s the truth.

We knew we was just fragments of legend and had never really existed in that town. There is no better feeling.

They perished like stray cats, no one caring much. But the whole town was perishing.

The old ships started to bring ruined people to Canada, people that were so hungry they might eat each other in the holds.

The mind is a wild liar and I don’t trust much in it that I find there.

And then we quietly fucked and then we slept.

We wanted the enemy stilled and destroyed so that we could live ourselves.

It’s a dark thing when the world sets no value on you or your kin, and then Death comes stalking in, in his bloody boots.

Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in that moment. Hard to say what I mean by that. You look back at all the endless years when you never had that thought. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life.

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.

Silence so great it hurts your ears, colour so bright it hurts your staring eyes.

Blue line of men, look lively, for Death is a fickle friend.

No fighter on earth as brave as a Sioux brave.

unknown future distil into our bones. Guess you ain’t lost your looks anyhows, says John Cole, staring at them in the half-light. Look pretty good to me. You reckon? I says. I like the way you look anyhows, he says, and kisses me.

I guess I like dresses just as much as she does.

Things that give you heart are rare enough, better note them in your head when you find them and not forget.

He ain’t aiming for no comedy skit. Wants me to be as splendid kitted as a high-born woman. Alright.

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.

They know I am a man because they have read it on the bill. But I am suspecting that every one of them would like to touch me and now John Cole is their ambassador of kisses.

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 have done something we don’t understand neither and partly do.

But for a minute they loved a woman that ain’t a real woman but that ain’t the point. 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.

Point is, whatever ages we be, we’re young. John Cole is the best-looking man in Christendom and this is his heyday.

Tight in, like John Cole was that bit of safety she is trying to reach. A harbour.

But I am easier in the dress, that’s all I can say.

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

Ain’t going to be any America unless we fight for it, he says. I ask him that night to fill me in.

NOTHING TOO TRICKY about dying for your country. It’s the easiest item on the menu.

The light is John Cole and all the copiousness of his kindness.

The first cousin of an order is chaos. Cousin chaos himself.

No one wants to do it and everyone does it.

All this in the gathering darkness. Was it madness to attack at twilight or genius?

But if God was trying to make an excuse for us He might point at that strange love between us.

Our fortune is twenty-and-some letters from Winona tied in a shoelace.

I don’t mind being a matron now if that’s our fate. Guess it comes to every woman by and by.

Still I’m finding a man can wear trews and be womanish still.

This where it going to end then I don’t want to live without Winona and John Cole.

I just can’t find the words that John Cole would need me to find.

I am dizzy with visions of John Cole. I wonder am I betraying this man most dear to me.

Killing hurts the heart and soils the soul.

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.

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.