It became her habit to go walking out north of the town, in the remains of a spruce forest that had been wrecked by a mining consortium. She would set up her easel, would charcoal or gouache; but these were not her talents. She wrote home to New York, to her siblings, various friends; to women with whom she had nursed in the War. Their replies came slowly if they came at all. The War was over now.
The poems from these months are imitative; showy. She had not yet found a way of seeing the world. Metaphors, some striking, stud the stanzas like jewels, as though to reward the patient reader for remaining on board; but the dazzle fades quickly and what is left is the feeling that she is almost always writing the wrong poem. All the years of reading, the endless hours of study, those descents into the caverns of imagination; but the light she deploys is too narrowly focused. What is illuminated, at times brilliantly, is not worth seeing, while around you, in the darkness, some krakenlike creature stirs. And then came the day when she entered his study in search of a ream of paper.
In his bureau were letters, hundreds, disarrayed, from the widows and parents of his men. Bundles of them in cupboards, in the folds of his books, in drawers, in a lockbox, in the pockets of a coat. She discovered it had been his practice, when informing them of a death, to include an invitation to write him for assistance. They were terrible to read. Every one of them was wrenching.My childeren are hungry…I am entirly widout means…Mi child do not know where his fader is after going…My son is not returnd. Do you now where he is? His name Michael Foly off Red Hook Brooklyn. She came to dread opening any of his books, for fear another of the supplications would howl from it.
She drove out in the landau to make photographs of the Territory. The plate camera was cumbersome but she and the cook managed it. Gulches, abandoned placer diggings, mining works, fords. She photographed Wolfcreek Canyon at the approaching of twilight, the blur of a mountain cougar near a mangled steer. Her portraits of children, particularly of Indians and freed slaves, would be commended for their compositional skill.
High summer was hot. Water became scarcer. The collodion compounds needed to create her photographs would boil like wizard’s potions in their bell jars. It sickened her to be in the tent with those steaming noxious vapors. Her skin became pockmarked, her breathing stressed, her eyes would stream whole days. Doctor Newcombe at Edwardstown urged that she cease her pastime. Her lungs were weak, dangerously susceptible to consumption. Photography could kill her, he warned.
One airless August day as she returned to Redemption Falls – walking, as it happened – through the serenade of cicadas – she saw something striking in the heat-shimmering distance and thought it might make a picture. A fat foreman was standing in the ribs of her attic, as though encaged by its naked beams. Two navvies were with him – builders, she assumed. He was directing them with magisterial gestures. Elizabeth had run up the Stars-and-Stripes that morning. It was furled around its flagstaff in the picket-fenced yard. Near its base, a heavily pregnant mule-deer doe nuzzled at a cluster of chokecherry.
It occurred to her that the house might be a subject to be photographed, that it was not without its beauty, at least not from this angle. Even a thing of brokenness could be made to look beautiful, if only you could locate the vantage from which to observe it. It was true of objects, was true of the self; it might even be true of war. Perhaps she had been too hard on the place and its people. They had endured too much – everyone had. The country was smashed by pain and loss, amputated from its sense of its greatness. The fat foreman looked down from the rafters as he noticed her approach. It was only then that she recognized him.
She had been shocked by his appearance but more by his manner. He seemed diffident, reluctant to speak. She thought he might salute or click his heels, so clipped and un-spousal his greeting.
‘You are here, then.’
‘Yes.’
‘You have everything you need.’
She was uncertain if the latter was a question or a statement.
‘Is something the matter, Con?’
‘You have been writing again.’
‘A little. I have tried a few verses. Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘You have also been experimenting with prose, I gather.’
He handed her a sheaf of close-written pages. There was a rancid smell of whiskey from his breath or his clothes, and the hand with the papers was shaking.
‘You left these on the escritoire for anyone to read. We have a newspaper in the town. Why not submit them for the front page?’
‘Con – ’
‘You read in my private notes. You could not have written this filthy thing otherwise.’
‘The chest was damaged. We struck a sandbar and it fell.’
‘Grist for the mills of a dilettante’s vanity. Thank you, Lucia. I am touched.’
He had left the room before she could apologize.
It was their first night together in almost three years. It passed in a jittery wordlessness. He’d had little to say; she had tried to contrive a conversation. New York. The boat. A painting she had purchased at Knoedler’s. It was coming from St Louis, would be here in a month: it was large and opulent and beautiful. She would speak to the builders about where to display it. They might need to construct a room for it.
‘Builders?’ he murmured.
‘Well: what is the word for them?’
There were no builders here. The builder had been murdered. The men on the roof had been snipers from his old regiment. He’d been asking their advice on fortification.
The more she attempted, the more silent he became, until finally she realized he had fallen asleep at the table and she stole to her bed, alone.
He was gone from the house when she awoke just after dawn. The remains of the supper were on the table, congealed. She drank water in the roof, watching sunrise on the prairie: the glory of the reddening mountains to the north. The haze would burn off but for now it was cool. It would be the hottest day ever recorded in the Territory. When Elizabeth came in, at quarter of nine, she said she had seen him outside a saloon in the town, a low place he frequented that opened early. He’d been pounding on its shutters, she said.
It was there Lucia found him, pacing the sunken boardwalk, swigging the dregs of a bottle. His tread was unsteady, his pace that of a man on a ship. There were dead leaves in his hair, which was now untied and straggling, and longer than she had realized yesterday. A dull purple stain dirtied the chest of his shirt, which was open almost down to the navel. From his shoulders hung a military greatcoat that did not fit him any more. He had belted it around his bulk with a rope.
‘Con,’ she began, ‘it is very early now. I haven’t seen you in so long. Perhaps after we breakfast we could ride out a way. To the river, perhaps, or the Gates of the Pass.’
She was babbling, she realized. She did not know what might come out. She wanted simply to hold him but that seemed dangerous, transgressive. She had the feeling it would result in violence.
‘Go home,’ he told her, quietly. And she did as she was told. She didn’t have the fire for a quarrel.
It was late when he returned to the house that sweltering night, bawling at Elizabeth Longstreet for food.What must I do? What must I do? Is this how a breadwinner is treated now? To beg for a crust in his home ? She locked her door, pushed a chair against the handle. She knelt by her bed and prayed as she sweated.
The weeks that followed were long; tense. Fall came on; the trees turned gold, and the house was still unfinished. She sent Elizabeth to Edwardstown, then to Varina City, seeking out masons and carpenters. Many promised to undertake the work but for some reason none appeared. Deposits were returned to her with not even a note. One tradesman scrawled not wanted across a greenback.
They would dine in silence: graven-eyed Cistercians. Often he would read at the table. The documents came endlessly. They were legislative, she assumed, to do with the incorporation of the Territory. Some citizens wished it to be one of
the re-United States. Others insisted it should be independent. She asked if he needed help; always he refused it. She began to teach Spanish to Elizabeth.
He ordered street signs to be erected. The signs became contentious, were often torn down or altered to read obscenely. His deputies raised them again, made them larger, more solid. Some they surrounded with trenches and cut-wire. He was ordered to come to the courthouse and explain his decision; he refused to be summoned, claimed such a writ was illegal; were it repeated, he threatened, he would arrest the judge and declare martial law the width of the Territory. The streets would be named for the patriots of his homeland. If anyone couldn’t live with it, let him go someplace else.
KNOW THAT I, James O’Keeffe, de facto Governor of this Territory, do hereby raise aPETITION TO THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS , to wit, that the name of this Territory shall henceforth be“NEW IRELAND” & that the place styled at presentREDEMPTION FALLS, Territorial Capital and Administrative Seat, henceforth be incorporated & styled“DUBLIN CITY” & that Irish-born veterans ofTHE UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES be settled here with their dependants & conveyed lands forthwith & that Irish-born veterans of the lately defeated Confederacy be also permitted, with their dependants, to apply, so that a new dispensation may be fostered in the Republic with theTERRITORY OF NEW IRELAND its exemplar.
Editorials were printed about him in the town’s only newspaper. They were scornful, cruel; precisely aimed. A carpetbagger. Janus-faced. A bellwether of fools. One attack was headed ‘The Fortune Hunter’.
She had Elizabeth go about the town and purchase every copy. She burned them before he appeared from his bed. Next morning’s edition had the fifty-pica headline: FORTUNE HUNTER ADVANCES OUR CIRCULATION. IF THIS DON’T CAP THE CLIMAX!
Happy tidings are come for the citizens of Redemption Falls. O’Nero of New Oirland is learning to read! He studies us mighty hard in his windy sty and all of us wish him a victory. (Heaven knows it would be rare as an honest man in his homeland.) Today we print an extra two hundred copies. He may obtain them whensoever he likes. We intend to convey the monies to the widows of Brooklyn, to whose number he has so heroically added by his military brilliance. One matter, at least, for which we may be thankful: that having cleansed the slums of New York of half their Hibernian vermin, who were fool enough to follow a Pied Piper of his uselessness, he has raised the average intelligence of that CONFEDERATE city so that it approaches the national norm…†
Whatis that sound? Downstairs. In the hallway? Should she go to his room and awaken him? And if she went to his room, what might happen?
She remembers them lovemaking; the fierce pleasure he used to give her. His body hard as a bull’s in the consoling dark. A generous lover, aroused by her joy. The coaxings he would murmur, his patient skill. His urgent breathing. His grip.
A scythe-blade of light from under his door. He cannot sleep in darkness. Perhaps he is awake. The cook says that his bed is nearly always undisturbed; he sits all night in that broken French armchair, drinking himself unconscious in his clothes. She crosses the landing, is about to knock – but somehow she is not able to form a fist.
A loon hoots. There is nothing in that room. She knows what would happen if she entered.
She descends the bare staircase – more pictures on the wall: seascapes, cantering hunters, an ancient map of Leinster – her hand groping the banister as she goes. The candle throws shadows in the eaves, across the beams. She calls softly for Elizabeth but there is no reply. She has a cabin near the town – but why would anyone prefer to sleep in a shack? Does she have a man at the cabin? Is she married? Courting? Lately Elizabeth Longstreet seems discontented, sulky. Lucia hopes she doesn’t leave.
Her reflection in a black windowpane causes her to stop. Her hair is loose: she looks frightened. The linen of her nightdress is crumpled, bridal. Its bodice has come open and she can see the curve of her collarbone. On her bosom a silver crucifix. The dark purple of a nipple. The glow of the candle on her skin.
There was a book in his box.The Parisienne Convent . She saw similar ones at the hospital in the pockets of dying boys. She would remove them, discreetly burn them before their weeping parents arrived or the Sister came in on her rounds. Once, she had taken one home and looked at it in her room. What did a man truly want? Girls seen through keyholes, posing in underthings; splayed smilingly in corsets; displaying their draped bottoms to the etcher. Teasing, silly stories of corrupt old abbots and innocent housemaids, or of innocent young priests and corrupt countesses. Girls kissing one another through flimsy lace curtains. ‘Diaries’, more explicit, laid in cell-like rooms, recounting degradations between women and men. Are those depictions what he wishes? Has he forgotten that he owned them? Has he forgotten that she nursed in the War?
Thethrup comes from behind her, from the room across the corridor. She wishes it had not, that it was only her imagination, would prefer to return to her bed. But the sound comes again. Something is moving. She retrieves a loaded repeater from the hallstand.
Oddly – this seems odd to Lucia when she remembers it – she goes first to the front door, checks that it is barred and locked. It is black, massively studded; its metal is cold to the touch. Whatever is in the house did not come through such a barrier.
The room is rarely used: its door is stiff, as though the wood of the door wants to be one with that of the frame, resents the divorce to come. She opens it to an odor of cold and sap. The dull forms of boxes, old pieces of lumber; a globe she once gifted her husband. Something squat – an anvil? Turrets of notebooks. A coil of broken chain on a trunk.
‘Who is there?’ she asks hoarsely. No answer is made.
For what seems a long time she stands looking into the darkness. Everything is quiet, except for a clock ticking somewhere. She is picturing her husband – the French chair in his room. Her father in New York. Her sister. Their mother. Elizabeth Longstreet in a cabin near the town. Ghost-dogs howling at the Ontario night.
A hospital ward in the War.
As she climbs the dark stairwell, she hears, below her, the footfalls as they move across the lumber room.
She stands on the staircase, motionless as a totem. The dawn begins to rise.
CHAPTER 15
AN’ I WISH THAT ABRA’M LINCOLN WOULD SENN FOR ME SOME TIME
From a Volunteer private soldier of the Con O’Keeffes
To: Mrs D. P. Foley, 71 Mott Street, the fifth story back,
14th ward, New York City.
may 30th 1862
alexandria camp virginia
my dear mother
thank y for the parcel y sent with the pies they was most injied by all here & yr son is now the hero of all the camp so he is & the pea soup in the bottles was only powerful & the brack.
i wld v much like to have a cusion if y cld find one for me. there is a lot of sittin in the wet grass which is givin me a pain in a place i wont mentcion. also some good woolen stockins for ive corns on me the size of a house
it is fun bein a soger. the other boys is ginerlly good sorts. there is a rick of them here from every crossroads of ireland. you wd think you was home in new york so you wd. we has to get up aerly. the thing here every day is drill drill & then drill some more so as yu wld be fit to fall out of yr standin by the time it is night & an we cld drill a way all throu the world to austalia before the sergeant wold give us an ease
jas glacken is here whose mother yu know & denis brogan & timmy bolger & his cousin michael eager. also four of the donnelly bros y know the ones who i mean from over beyond in 13th St the ugly thieven baboons. & the first day i was here didn i meet a lad whos people is from claregalway & says i would yu go to god for my fathers from there & we is bunkies now the both of us. john dunnegan is his name. so there is no need to be frettin in yrself at all honest. there is more pats here in this army than is buried in all the groves of ireland timmy says
the sergnt is a contumelious oulf sorry old kerryman. youd want to hear the roastin cusses out of
him. he does rant like the divil but i suppose it is the way of it here in the army & he manes no badness. but it is just what he got to do & we will be the better when he makes us march in step. the wexfordmen is best at it i dont know why
we are in no danger nor trouble i do not want y to be worrit
general okeef come round today & said we was good boys all & wld giv the rebels a thundruss whippin for themselves & a good roar out of an irishman was worser than the bombs of the enmy & we shld be back home soon so not to be afraid but i am sometimes, mamma.
i thnk we are all afraid here exeptin the madmen but we let on not to be. but the other night an i out the front beyond there an i thinkin about somethin & i heard johnnyjoe collins cryin away inside in the tent with himself & it sure enough give me the blue oul feelin
captn conway says the war will not last anoter season i hope not mama i dont want to kill nobody
the vittles here is somethin shockin. youd get better in a poorhouse – all we got is rancid oul bacon not fit for a beggars bitch & coffee made of pease & hardtack biscits that wld crack the teeth in yr head. if we run out of g++d+++ bullets we can use em pat nolan said. he is here too but i wisht he wasnt for he NEVER stops talkin about grace kelleher & i would like to gev him a root in the whereyouknow for it. but never mind i suppose. but i do
youd want to see the boots on me. they are the best i ever seen. & if y dont shine em so as you can see yr face you get the lard cut out of you by oul ievers (the Sergeant)& i hope they might allow me keep em after & you do muss yr jacket at yr peril
the other day we was gievan a party for mrs general okeefs birthday. we had turnkeys blast it sorry I mean turkeys & swinebriskets they costed 4$ & a jorum of rum but i didn take that off course & we sang the shamrock so green & the decay of the rose & then i felt right & sound agin in my self. we sleep in tents did i tell you – we are the right party of mad fellows so we are & the girls is killed lookin at us when we goes through a town & they blowin us kisses an all