She wonders should she approach but decides against the gamble. A woman cannot present herself to three males out here in the boonies and expect anything but a mudslide of troubles.
But that night she cannot sleep. She is edgy, confused. What are they trying to say to her? She creeps through the maze of pines toward their camp. She watches, unnoticed as they talk.
Billycans on the ground. Their fire is crackling. Playing cards and spouting nonsense about girls. Two of them have regular sweethearts, the third is only a shaver. The firelight reddening their flesh. They are out of a town called Truro, four and a half days’ ride to the north; were given this work of postering by the marshal. Two bits a day and vittles – beats working, when you figure it. The money will be put toward a wedding breakfast at Moran’s Hotel, for one of them is fixing to marry. The tablecloths normally provided are of red checked cotton, but for two dollars more you can hire ivory silk. The bride would prefer the latter, for ivory silk is prettier. The groom intends to surprise her.
Foxface sips coffee which he frequently spits out, like a boy who would get his ears boxed if he did this at home. Longlegs is tipsy, plucking meekly on his fiddle. Cheekbones, the groom, warms his toes through holed stockings. His boots on a nearby log.
––Brother, you wanna see her in that churchdress she got. Green one with the lace. Declare she’s a picture. You was cold as a wagontire, she’d come you round.
––Listen to it talkin. Big ladyin man.
––I like her sister better.
––Got adog I like better.
––I could eat like all wrath.
––Wait till mornin and breakfast.
––You feel like a dance?
––Come on now, play the game.
––These cards aint too handsome.
––Quit talkin. I’m thinkin.
––Wanna shoot us some birds?
––What you reckon to her mother?
She wonders if they will mention her – they might – but they do not. What would they say if they did? She creeps back to the hollow that will be her bed. A blanket of dead, whitened leaves.
She awakens to a racket of gunfire from the direction of their bower, like the distant slamming doors of a train. It does not alarm her; in a way, it soothes her, for it is part of the music of night on the road and at least she knows where they are. Yeehawing like lusty donkeys, yodelling ‘Sally Johnson’ and ‘The Rakes’. She pictures them dancing. Which boy plays the girl? Will Jeddo ever be married?
The dawnbirds skreeking crazily. First light coming on. She falls back into flickery sleep.
Runnels of rain on the tin roof of the cabin. Jeddo is a bat. He is roosting in the branches.Murcielago : the Spanish word for a bat. ‘Mouse of the sky,’ does it mean? Her mother is close by, but she cannot be seen. A gumbo bubbles in a cookpot. And someone lilts a lullay with a lyric she does not know, queer and dark, in a mysterious language, which Eliza is able to understand though not to speak. It is that warm kind of dream, cosy as a feather-tick, from which you do not want to awaken, though you know you must.
Christ. He is singing. She can hear it so clearly. ‘Revenge for Connemara’.
She rinses her face and hands in the lake. Drinks a couple of mouthfuls, but the water tastes of chalk. The dream putters again. Sparks of the past in her mouth. You forget what the dead looked like. They go into the shadows. It’s how you know someone is dead.
She looks at her mother in the mirror of the lake. Her hair like a tangled thornbush. A catfish flits through the murk of her face. She darts a hand into the ripple, actually touches his tail, but he shimmies away to the osiers.
And the road hard as hobs this early in the morning. A taste like cold ashes in your mouth. Christ, when will it soften? When does it get easier? Why do we not have wheels? In Little Rock, Arkansas, she saw a man on wheels. His uniform clean as a commodore’s. He was begging passers-by with a signboard that read: a dime for my story or a song.
Where are her angels? They must have gotten a bright start. She will gain on them later. She would miss their presence now. Cheekbones is the pretty one. Probably all the girls want him. Tawny and lean, like maybe his oulfella was a Mohawk. (By Christ, another mane-hack, you’d be fairly one yourself.) But his sweetheart, Tova Lunqvist, is the only girl for Cheekbones. They are fixing to marry next month. When he looks at her, he said, he feels his toes curl with happiness; and the other two laughed and derided him. He was enjoying their mockery, as a young man in love will do. They couldn’t see it was making him taller.
She pictures Tova Lunqvist as goldenhaired and shapely, the truest beauty of Truro. She saunters its sidewalks like the queen of the faeries, fanning her face, letting on not to see them: her love-struck, stone-tongued, poppin-eyed apostles and their mongrel dogs on strings. This body is my temple and my chariot, she says; avaunt, you milksop grubbers. Got more chance of puttin your hand in the tabernacle of the Lord. She’d roll em down Main Street like dice. Because a boy as fine-made, he could take his pick. There’s a gallantry about him, despite his hipswinging sloth. Bone-and-horn idle, but he talks real nice. She imagines him breaking a horse.
Tova Lunqvist before the window of the jeweler’s in Truro. Tova Lunqvist on the road beside her. You seen my ring, girl? You seen my dress? You seen my ivory tablecloths?
Heavy, now, Christ, as though trudging through a tarpit. The suck of the road on your feet. Tova Lunqvist glides graceful in her salmonskin shoes. The decorous neckline, the kroner of gold in her earlobes; she sings in the choir on Sundays. And afterward they go picnicking out by the river and he lies in the grass picking his teeth with a twig and she rinses the plates in the waters of Zion and they dry in the sunshine of his compliments.
His cello-brown voice. His lazy, kind come-hithers. He’d give you ribbons that would reach around the world.
And they will live in a house together, Tova Lunqvist and her husband, and they will own a fine featherbed, and platters, and chickens, and their crotchety oul neighbors will visit on Christmas morning to resent what everything cost. As she bends to set out the china that formed part of her dowry, he will notice her blush – her kissable collarbone – and he will smile at her, then, and their children will be caroling, and late that night, when the old Swedes have snuffled home, to yesterday’s gruel heated up by their envy, her hands grasp the slats of the bedstead he wrought, as her lovemoan fills his mouth.
For he’d roust you like a faeryman. He’d have you destroyed with the pleasure. You’d see through his skin as he nussled you. Heaven you’d see, if a Cheekbones beguiled you, and the tongue of him luscious as molasses. Cream-and-whiskey from his pores till he had you swooning astride him; swan-bosomed, love-drunk, swisser-swassering as you worked him; sucking gossam from his hair, and his pointy ears twitching, and his tail wrapping around you, winding you tighter together, and his cloven hooves clicking love-jigs. And you’d circle him, slow as sap trickling sweet from a pine, and you’d ride on his whiskers to the cold, blue moon, and you’d stallion him till the sunburst, shrieking glory-be to Jesus,and he’d tell you he was only getting started . Not like these miserable fuckers of the world with their sweaty-arsed songs of vengeance.
She will thrash him to forcemeat when she gets her paws on that child. Beat him red as the ace of diamonds. She will bawl like a cannon. She will roar up a tornado. She will shriek of the nights she walked the streets of Baton Rouge, begging the doorways for a clue. Rainsqualls smacking the walls of the cabin. His blanket-roll empty as a molested nest.
You found yourself watching through the flap. Rooting every hut in the lane. Peering into tents and hovels. You lay with your eye to a knot in the wall, so that even when you were asleep, you could still be watching, because probably he would return in the dark, like before; he would creep back in while you slept. You stood – don’t you remember it? – at the crossroads of the shantytown and hollered his name to the winds. It was hot the month he went. You felt the sirocco on your
face and the sweat in the small of your back. And you saw yourself from above, a very small animal, screeching like a Mardis Gras fishwife.Jeremiah! I will stretch for you! W’ea you at, Jeddo Mooney? Get you here or I will redden yaw hide! A bitch stared as you hollered. It hunkered and gawped. Pink-eyed. Its tongue like a streamer.
You searched the noisy waterfront, its cockfights and grogshops, its backyard bordellos and flophouses. The fishermen told you they had netted no boy. No dockman or stevedore had seen him. The stallwomen, the cocklers, the watchmen, the whores, the doughboys: nobody had noticed him. You implored the Yankee general who administered the town. He told you to try the waterfront, the stallwomen. You imagine my men have the leisure to turn this cess-heap upside down? Do you know we are at war? They are targets, every one of them. Ask the rebels and traitors to assist, not me. Now get out before I have you arrested.You hunted every passageway, every lane and mugger’s alley. Then the slow-dawning dread, a kind of pregnancy in your mind. This time he will not come back.
You drove him away. The looks from the neighbors. They always feared you anyway. Wolfgirl. Changeling. Crowjane. Swampcat. Say her mother and begetter was cursed back in Ireland for they made the mother’s husband a cuckold. Bastard child of an adultery can’t never be blessed. Come into the world in the shackles of sin, not merely her own but the lusts of the fathers, and those of the unforgivable mothers. Women, men, they glared on your girlhood. They yanked their snotfaced children from out your path, as though you were a schooner in the pull of a reef and your sinking would drag them down. But the men came round the cabin, out back in the night, when they knew your mother was not home. Hear them scratching in the filth like gloomy hens. Thirteen you were, the first time. Didn’t even know his name.Look at me , he told you.That’s right. Make me proud. Cause this is what you for, girl. Don’t you never forget it. Only thing you’ll ever be for.
You saw him at Mass the following Sunday, kneeling before the priest to receive. His wife was beside him. She knifed you with a glower. But you understood her darkness, her hatred of the world, because she, like you, had been the prey of his body, and that would quench anyone’s light. She muttered something to the priest. He shooed you disgustedly from the rail as though you were a dung-fly that might land in the chalice. You were weeping as you hobbled away, over the tombstones in the floor, past the doors of the confessionals, the ranks of tutting matrons, the tables of candles burning redly before the saints, and it seemed cruel to you, suddenly, to burn flames before the martyrs, reminding them of how they were murdered. Soon the priest would contrive a reason to visit the cabin, too. There were rumors of your sinfulness. Grave matter for a girl. You would have to confess. Did you want the fires of Hell? Forgiveness was possible but the confession must be full. Afterward you could not walk for three days.
You saw Mamo advancing the aisle, through the incense and the murmurings, like a banshee perversion of a bride. Shining like a monstrance on a tabernacle door. One hand on her hip, the other wriggling in her pocket, as though about to produce a snake as a trick. She waited for him to elevate the host, to utter the holiest of holy words, and it was then that she cursed him, and her anathema echoed around the vaults, and as the Redeemer of All Histories, who required the death of martyrs, became bodily present in that sanctified space, she raged of the body, of blood, of betrayal, and the husbands tumbled over the pews to engulf her in cloaks, and the women wept or gouged, or tried to strangle her with beads, and you watched it all happen from the back of the church, with Jeddo spitting holy water on your dress.
She stops. Turns. Sunlight dapples. Everything is about to be changed. Look at the face of Eliza Duane Mooney. The last sands of freedom are running. Why was I not there? I could have warned you, Eliza. There are false knights on every road.
The mule grazes lazily in the clearing to her left. O, the saltsmell of frying bacon. And the sweetness of last year’s apples corrupting into the grass. She makes to double back. But everything is so peaceful. Birdwhillow. Foliage. A whippoorwill in the rushes. A waterfall from somewhere in the forest. Because it’s louder than a river, moreconstant , somehow. Perhaps they cut a path to go see it.
Can they be so bad? Is it not worth the risk? They are little more than boys, when you think. Two of them have sweethearts. They are interested in waterfalls. She has heard them talk an hour with no woman in their company – the only test of men, their nature, their elements – and nothing they said seemed dangerous to Eliza Mooney, who knows what danger is. And you cannot fear everyone. And you cannot hate everyone. Because then, you would hate yourself.
She steps off the road. The forest is sepulchral. The syrupy blessing of sap. In the summits of the trees, the light through lace. A squirrel with an acorn in its gloves. The carpeting of pine needles drowsing, spongy. Riding-Hood wandered the glade with her basket, watched by the Arapaho, who say the oaks are the righteous Ancestors. And now, from the copse, comes the aroma of woodsmoke. She can see a tartan blanket. A water-gourd on the ground. A fiddle sitting lonesome on the altar of a rock. The hairs of its bow blowing loosely.
So quiet all around. As quiet as Heaven. Theclicket of their kettle-lid as the water bubbles up. The soft, damp moss on her welted soles. Then the oaks start dancing a jig.
Foxface and Longlegs have been butchered in their blankets. The third, the most beautiful, betrothed of Tova Lunqvist, has been crucified upside-down on a tree. His britches knifed to flitters. He has been slashed-at, disemboweled. The gag in his mouth is bright with blood. On the campfire something leathery is griddling; a sizzle. The flames give a whipcrack spit.
This cannot. I am imagining. This could not. A vision. Now she sees – sweet Christ – that the boy is still alive, because his eyes, when you look, and she runs to him, he is blinking. And his wrecked fingers scrabbling. But what is to be done?
‘Mornin,’ speaks the voice from behind her in the oaks. ‘Don’t believe I had me the pleasure.’
The accent is Tennessee but with an insinuation of brogue. She does not turn around to meet the face.
CHAPTER 36
THE AUTHENTIC WILL & TESTAMENT OF “TENNESSEE JOHNNY THUNDERS”or GO DOWN, YE STARS & STRIPES†
(Sung to the slow Irish air “The Rocks of Bawn”)
My name is Cole McLaurenson, a desperado, me.
Rode out from farm an’ kinsfolk in the spring of sixty-three.
Killed forty-seven Yankee feds an’ their hangin’ judge, James Blighe. But I never once did kill no man that didn’t need to die.
The strangers burnt my only home in the fall of sixty-one.
Come preachin’ “peace an’ union,” down the muzzle of a gun.
Demandin’ our surrenders to his vengeful northern laws,
But he riled the brave defenders of the southern rebel cause.
From Ireland sail’d my parents both, from famine, chains, an’ death;
An’ the dog who’ll rule McLaurenson aint never drawn him breath.
They poisoned up my waterwell an’ slaughtered half my kin;
But I’ll write it out in Lincoln’s blood:The South shall rise again!
They called me Johnny Thunders as I raged across the land;
A terror to all tyrants was this Irish rebel hand.
It scourged the rich an’ flailed the coward: the orphan did it feed.
They seen me come, the Mudsills run, so infamous my deeds.
Now some do take him wife to church an’ plough his rows of cane.
An’ some are force to ridin’ lone through whirlwind, dust and rain.
I druther been an honest man an’ never force to run;
But some, they draw the punishment of livin’ by the gun.
O mothers tell your children, not to fall so gun-beguiled;
For the outlaw is a man of grief, with neither home nor child.
The stain of Cain the murderer is branded ’cross his brow.
He wears it like a crown of thorns. A desperado, now.
I hated n
ot each man I fought, if honest he fought back.
My soul is damn’d for puttin’ of his wife in widow’s black.
But his rulers called us “slavers all,” their “free lan’” we muss join:
While, two-faced as the Pharisee, they lust for the slaver’s coin.
I never owned no man but this! I never owned me slave!
All I had, a patch of dirt, to scrape my mother’s grave.
Now the Boston dogs of privilege come sland’rin’ me an’ mine:
Poison up my water – while he’s sippin’ slave-grown wine.
So come all ye Harvard hypocrites, an’ a warnin’ take by me,
As I climb the lonesome ladder to your sacrificial tree.
When your hangman ask my dyin’ prayer, I’ll give the rebel’s yell:
God bless the homes of Tennessee! The United States to Hell!
O, wrap me in the Stars and Bars; to die were finer sweet
With the banner of my felony to be my windin’-sheet.
Cut a death’s-head on my tombstone, friends,
Have a Fenian keen the pipes:
This Galway air from a Tennessee boy—
GOD D**N THE STARS AN’ STRIPES!
CHAPTER 37
O JESUS BREAK MY CHAIN
Metallurgical matters – Eliza Mooney’s fate at the hands of the gang – A cruel game
It is seven feet long, this zenith of the metalworker’s art. It has eighty-four links, each the width of a man’s thumb, individually guaranteed unbreakable. At one end is a collar-band lined with small sharp studs, at the other a hasp you can hook to the pommel of a saddle. It is designed for the restraint of a runaway slave. Its price: eighteen dollars and change.