Days Without End

by Sebastian Barry

Children may feel epic and large to theyselves and yet be only scraps to view.

But nature will have his way and bit by bit the bloom wore off us, and we was more like boys than girls, and more like men than women. John Cole anyhow in particular saw big changes in them two years. He was beginning to give giraffes a run for their money, height-wise. Mr Noone couldn’t find dresses to fit him, and Mrs Carmody couldn’t stitch fast enough. It was the end of an era, God knowed. One of the happiest works I ever had. Then the day came when Mr Noone had to speak. And we was shaking hands then in the dawnlight, and tears even were shed, and we were going to be just memories of diamonds in Daggsville. Mr Noone says he will send us a letter every feast day of St Thomas and St John and give us all the news. And we was to do likewise. And we lit out with our bit of dollars saved for our hoped-for cavalry days. And the queer thing was, Daggsville was deserted that morning, and no one to cheer us away. We knew we was just fragments of legend and had never really existed in that town. There is no better feeling.

only say it because without saying I don’t think anything can be properly understood. How we were able to see slaughter without flinching. Because we were nothing ourselves, to begin with.

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

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

guess Winona don’t have too much to do and I bought her three dresses in St Louis as we came through so she has a wardrobe to her name. Nice flouncy pink dress is my favourite. I guess I like dresses just as much as she does. The girls in the shop put her underthings together without me looking because they said to look away, and we got her shoes and all too.

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

In the darkness as we lie side by side John Cole’s left hand snakes over under the sheets and takes a hold of my right hand. We listen to the cries of the night revellers outside and hear the horses tramping along the ways. 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.

The stage clears and we hear the music that Mr Noone has assigned us starting softly on the piano. For a violent moment in my inner eye I see my father lying dead in Ireland.

Now there rampages through me a thrill such as might be got otherwise only from opium. I might be one of the footlights, with a burning wick for a heart.

John Cole all spit and polish approaches from the far side of the stage and we hear the men draw in their breath like a sea tide drawing back on the shingle of a beach. He approaches and approaches. 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. Slowly slowly he edges nearer. He reaches out a hand, so openly and plainly that I believe I am going to expire. The held-in breath of the audience is not let out again. Half a minute passes. It is unlikely any of them could of holded their breath like this underwater. They have found new size in their lungs.

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. Then the lungs of the audience giving out, and a rasping rush of sound. We have reached the very borderland of our act, the strange frontier. Winona skips off the stage, and John Cole and myself break the spell. We part like dancers, we briefly go down to our patrons, we briefly bow, and then we have turned and are gone. As if for ever. They have s...

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.

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. God knows what stories she seen and been part in. Savage murder for sure because we caused it. Walked through the carnage and the slaughter of her own.

You could expect a child that has seen all that to wake in the night sweating and she does. Then John Cole is obliged to hold her trembling form against him and soothe her with lullabies. Well he only knows one and he does that over and over. He holds her softly and sings her the lullaby. Where he got that no man knows not even hisself. Like a stray bird from some distant country. Then he lies on her bed and she pushes in tight against him like you might imagine bear cubs do in the winter hide or maybe even wolves. Tight in, like John Cole was that bit of safety she is trying to reach. A harbour. Then her breathing slowly lengthens and then she is snoring a little. Time to come back to bed and in the darkness or the helpful dim of the candle he looks at me and nods his head. Got her sleeping, he says. You sure do, I say. Not much more than that needed to make men happy.

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 out in wars. We ain’t saying no laws in Washington. We ain’t walking on yon great lawns. Storms kill us, and battles, and the earth closes over and no one need say a word and I don’t believe we mind. 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.

Every month if the paymaster’s iron cart finds us we send ten dollars to the poet McSweny for Winona Cole. She’s back working blackface for Mr Noone so she got her own fortune if three dollars a week be ever a fortune. Our fortune is twenty-and-some letters from Winona tied in a shoelace. She sends us all her news in her nice handwriting. She hopes for our return but she don’t want us to get shot by a) the Rebels or b) the colonel, for desertion. She says she hope we got victuals and that we get a good wash once a month as she always insisted.

Got to say it is a marvel how the mortal bones stand out. I can see his hip bones and his leg bones where they thicken at the knees. His arms just whittled branches from a dried-out tree. Long hours we lie close and John Cole lays his hand on my head and leaves it there. John Cole, my beau.

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. In the euphoria of war’s end we reckon a craziness is desired. God don’t mind we know because that day of deep winter is clement, clear and bright.

Winona’s spare dress and my private dresses except the moths been into them somewhat. The dress I were married in goes back to Mr Noone’s prop-master.

Flowers draw bees and gold draws thieves.

We ride at the back of the companies and Winona’s tucked in close to us. You sure, I say, you sure? I can run us out of here easy, just give me the signal. I sure, she says, and gives me her smile. Goddamn it, I say. Didn’t they give you a drum with that uniform? I say. No, they didn’t, she says. She’s laughing then. I ain’t laughing, I ain’t laughing. If I still got a heart it’s breaking.

Suddenly I feel sorely four or five sorrows. The loss of old comrades in times past. The dead in battles. The murder of Mrs Neale, a gentle woman. Somewhere in the back of all that are other matters. The shady ghosts of my family long gone by in Sligo. Sligo. A word I hardly even sounded in private thought in a decade of years. The filthied dress of my mother floats behind my eyes. My sister’s pinafore ruined by Death. The thin cold faces. My father lengthwise like a smear of yellow butter. A stain. His tall black hat as crushed as a squeezebox. 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.

What chokes my throat is love. I ain’t saying love for them but for her. I don’t care if she ain’t my daughter but all I know is the fiery feeling.

Killing hurts the heart and soils the soul.

Each day we find a quiet spot and wield the razor. Forgot to bring the strop so it slowly blunts. Cuts lines and nicks across my face like I was breaking into yellow fever. Winona daubs me good.

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.

Maybe I took the fortune of my sister when all those times ago I saw her dead. Still as a scrap of seaweed. Her thin legs sticking out. Her ragged pinny. I had never seen such things nor suspected there could ever be such suffering. That was true and it will always be true. But maybe she crept into me and made a nest.

It’s like a great solace, like great sacks of gold given. My heart beats slowly I do believe. 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.

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.

IT’S JOHN COLE tells Rosalee and Tennyson I got to keep the dress on. I tole him all recounts in our private bed of what occurred and including every small matter and every great.

John Cole tells Lige we don’t know what’s coming but it’s best now if Thomas McNulty not here. Rosalee don’t make no mountain out of it. Tennyson don’t seem to care. Still talks to me but now like I was a woman. He very polite and lifts his hat when he see me. Morning, ma’am, is his way of talk. Morning, Mr Bouguereau. That’s how things go on.

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.

All that stint of daily life we sometimes spit on like it was something waste. But it all there is and in it is enough. I do believe so. John Cole, John Cole, Handsome John Cole. Winona. Old good-man Lige. Tennyson and Rosalee. This lithesome bay. Home. Our riches. All I owned. Enough.

The clothes is tattered but give me my modesty, just. Set free like a mourning dove. In my exultation I forget I ain’t got a bean of money but it don’t concern me and I know I can rely on the kindness of folk along the way. The ones that don’t try to rob me will feed me. That how it is in America.