Days Without End

by Sebastian Barry

I saw a wayworn trav’ler In tattered garments clad JOHN MATTHIAS

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

You gotta treat a buffalo like a killer, like a rattlesnake on legs, she wants to kill you before you kill her.

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. Talk, music, Sligo, stories, future, past, it was all turned to something very like the shit of animals.

Then my heart shrank in its nest of ribs.

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.

This little tour is done, he said, drily. The major’s wit. It was the driest thing in the camp.

You coulda used John Cole for a pencil if you coulda threaded some lead through him.

Well the major is a new man now and he is as happy as a duck in the rain, I do not lie. It is good to see what marriage can do for a man like him who feels the world as a burden he must carry alone.

There’s something sleek about her, like a trout moving through the water.

Hephzibah was the black-haired girl and the fair one was Angel.

the major's children

I never remember a mother, says John Cole, though he looked like he would’ve liked to remember one.

His skin is made of the aftermaths of smiles.

wrinkled?

They have seen something they don’t understand and partly do, in the same breath. We have done something we don’t understand neither and partly do.

Beulah McSweny

this is a man but my grandmother was named Beulah

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.

Grand Rapids

busy as Jesus at a wedding

Terror is just the cousin of courage too.

It’s nearly crazy how thin a man can get and still breathe and move.

Indiana

My birth state; travel through on way from MI to TN

Joe gazes on the river and says this bank is Indiana and the other bank Kentucky but it might as well be heaven’s shore as far as reaching it goes.

Anyhow something must be done because we know clear as the Latin mass that they going to do more than ask questions.

Latin Mass clear? I don't think so.

Then he seen the gold coins that Miss Dinwiddie sewed and there’s one with a savage dent. God Almighty, he says. God Almighty.

Winona is saved from a bullet

Mrs Neale is gone right enough, he says, and Hephzibah too.

A man that only got noughts to count can’t get 1 for an answer.

The huge cloud surrenders and snow washes down, passing at a swirling angle.

The kind of poetic language that makes this book for me.