I guess I was. I don’t know how many loved Starling Carlton and even if it were only a few I was one of them. But he was lifting his hand against Winona. I don’t see any other way round that no matter how often I go back in my mind and look at it. Captain Rufus Sexton says the court has decided I was guilty and so I am to be laid in chains and took out when the time was right and shot for my crime. No one speaks for mitigation because who there could speak for it?
They was fearsome days then. I am allowed to write John Cole and tell him my news and he comes up from Tennessee but as a condemned man they ain’t of a mind to let him see me. I am sore sorry about that but at the same time since I carry John Cole inside I reckoned it must not be allowed to make no odds in the long run. I imagined him near me and I imagined I kissed his face. I imagined he said nice things to me and I imagined me saying back I thought he was the best man I ever knowed. I weren’t leaving the world without saying one more time I loved John Cole even if he weren’t there to hear it.
Bitterness eats the bitter. But if I was a murderer I’d a liked to kill that German. Just saying that because it’s true and accurate. He was doing his duty as he saw fit to do, some might say. I’d say he is a damn meddler and I will leave it at that. Who killed Captain Silas Sowell deceased, I wonder? No one knowed and my guess was no one ever will. As John Cole said, he had a point of view and that got to be honoured. You can’t go in and be slaughtering everyone like a passel of King Henrys. That ain’t the world as it was made to be.
Now the sentence was gave and the summer was sitting outside my window. A huge jewel of sunlight hangs high on the wall. And I remembered oftentimes riding through such heat with a longing in my heart just for what the days of life ahead might bring, nothing else. I did hear them every Friday bringing down men. I would be shot as the sun came up, ‘with musketry’, as they decree. There’d be a day without me and then a night and then forever more. Life wants you to go down and suffer far as I can see. You gotta dance around all that. A child must come out to dance and dance around all obstacles and dance in the end the creaky quadrille of age. But. I was trying to see how it all happened and how everything came to that point and I was trying to spot the moment I was maybe pushed from the true path but I couldn’t see nothing like that. What did I do truly? I saved Winona. There was comfort in that. If I could of saved her without putting a sabre into Starling’s face I would of.
I wrote to John and I wrote to the poet McSweny just to say farewell but a letter come back from our old comrade Mr Noone that the poet McSweny were R.I.P. and he was sorry to hear I would be also soon – he didn’t use just them words. John Cole wrote me a letter would tear the heart out of a hangman, and tucked in with it is one of them famous missives of Winona. She has put in a sprig of some wild flower. Copperplate writing. Magan’s Farm, Paris. June 3rd, 1872. Dear Thomas, we are sure missing you in Tennessee. If only the army will let you come back we will kill the fatted calf says Lige Magan. He has harrowed the near fields and he sure misses your touch with those rascal horses. In the meantime there is only time to say I love you as a consequence of John Cole is champing at the bit to get to town. I miss you real bad. My heart is sore. Your fond daughter, Winona.
I weren’t going on too bad till I got that.
I don’t know but most likely I was forty years of age. That’s early to go but plenty died in the war younger. I seen a lot of young men go. That ain’t the point so much until it’s you going. I know I got a number on the prison roster for men to be shot and sooner or later it go up. Well, the day creeps closer. A printed notice is nailed to the door. You wouldn’t believe the sweating caused by that. My heart is weighed down by pain and longing and it just ain’t no fit state for a Christian. Even the rat who flits along the wall feels sorry for you then. You ain’t worth nothing to yourself. You ain’t worth a Lindenmueller cent. My head floods with fear and my feet are icy. Then I’m howling. The jailer comes in. His name is Pleasant Hazelwood, I guess he’s a sergeant. Ain’t no real use caterwauling, he says. I’m rocking like a drunkard back and forth. Fear burns my belly like a nest of Mexican chillies. I’m shouting at him. Why ain’t there no God will help me? Ain’t no man neither, he says. I run against the wall like a blind rat. Like I might find a gap. Everything gone from me. I stand there with my breast heaving. No battle is worser than this. Sergeant Hazelwood stands in close and twists his hands about like two newborn pups and then grips my arm. I seen a thousand men just like you, he says, it just ain’t so bad as you think. Kind old bugger and him as ugly as a moose. Kind of a angel sent to me in the guise of a fat turnkey smelling of shit and onions. But it ain’t helping. Not truly. The devil’s franked my ticket and God ain’t in it. How can I make my peace with Him if He ain’t there? I plunge down again into violent misery like a rock thrown into a torrent.
One evening shortly after very late I get a visitor. I know it ain’t John Cole but Sergeant Hazelwood gives me notice. Says a gent is here to see me. I guess I don’t know too many gents unless they’re officers. Sure enough it’s Major Neale.
Well he ain’t a major now, is he? Come in in his beautiful suit that some tailor in Boston has laboured over. He’s looking much better. The few months has done him good. Tells me Angel is going real well at her schooling and he wants her to go on to the university to please her mother. Alright, I says. He has a big bunch of papers with him. He’s gone back to all the fellas was in the battle and asked each and every one what they knew or saw. Finally he says he gets to Corporal Poulson. He kinda has the same account as the German Sarjohn but there’s a difference. He says Corporal McNulty were trying to stop a Indian girl being killed. That old Starling Carlton’s blood was up and nothing would do him but to shoot her with his pistol. A-course, yes, I’m thinking, since he were trying to follow your damn orders, the loyal old bastard – but a-course I don’t say that aloud. Poulson says he sees it all and keeps his mouth shut till the major asks him. That’s the army way. Whatever you say say nothing, just in case. So Major Neale goes over to Washington and takes up the case there. And then he goes down to the head of the army of the Missouri. Well, he says, slowing down now in his account, they can’t stop your sentence. Laws don’t allow it. When he says this my heart drops to my boots. But, he says, they can commute it to hard labour for one hundred days and then you will be freed. The major says if I don’t mind breaking stones a while then that’s what I can do. I says, Major, sir, I thank you, I really do. Don’t be thanking me, he says, I thank you. You saved my daughter the only one remaining to me and you fought like a dog in the war and your service under me was always exemplary. I says I am sorry his wife is gone and he says he is too. He lays his right hand on my shoulder. I ain’t washed in a month but he don’t flinch. And he says he will always remember me and if he can ever be of service to me again in the future I know where he is. Well, I don’t know where he is but I don’t say nothing because that just what people say. Another thing I don’t say aloud is, Are you the boy that killed Silas Sowell? I say I sure will be glad to get back to Tennessee where my people abide and he says he’s certain they will be glad to see me.
So I am one hundred days making big stones into small stones. In the time of the hunger in Sligo a lot of men did that work, trying to earn the pennies to feed their families. It were called Relief Works. Well, I am feeling mighty relieved. I am happy to strike down at those stones and my fellow prisoners are mighty puzzled at my happiness. But how could I been otherwise? I am going back to Tennessee. The day come when all my work is done and they kit me out in a set of clothes and they set me on the road outside the prison. 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. I never felt such joy of heart as in those days traipsing southward. I never felt such pure charge and fire of joy. I am
like a man not just let loose from death but from his own discomfited self. I don’t desire nothing but to reach our farm and witness the living forms of John Cole and Winona step out to meet me. The whole way sparkles with the beauty of woods and fields. I had wrote I was coming and soon I would be there. That’s how it was. It were only a short stretch of walking down through those pleasing states of Missouri and Tennessee.
About the Author
Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. His novels and plays have won the Costa Book of the Year award, the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year, the Independent Booksellers Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. A Long Long Way (2005) and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture (2008) were shortlisted for the MAN Booker Prize. He lives in County Wicklow with his wife and three children.
Also by the Author
fiction
THE WHEREABOUTS OF ENEAS MCNULTY
ANNIE DUNNE
A LONG LONG WAY
THE SECRET SCRIPTURE
ON CANAAN’S SIDE
THE TEMPORARY GENTLEMAN
plays
BOSS GRADY’S BOYS
PRAYERS OF SHERKIN
WHITE WOMAN STREET
THE ONLY TRUE HISTORY OF LIZZIE FINN
THE STEWARD OF CHRISTENDOM
OUR LADY OF SLIGO
HINTERLAND
FRED AND JANE
WHISTLING PSYCHE
THE PRIDE OF PARNELL STREET
DALLAS SWEETMAN
TALES OF BALLYCUMBER
ANDERSEN’S ENGLISH
poetry
THE WATER-COLOURIST
FANNY HAWKE GOES TO THE MAINLAND FOREVER
Copyright
First published in 2016
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2016
All rights reserved
© Sebastian Barry, 2016
Map: ‘United States at the Period of the Civil War 1861-1865’ from The Century Atlas by Benjamin E. Smith, published in New York, 1899
The right of Sebastian Barry to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–27703–2
Sebastian Barry, Days Without End
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