Lord Londonderry donned the black cap, and the awful warrant was read: for hanging, drawing, and quartering.
PRISONER:Thank you, my Lords. You have my consent and my pity.
James C. O’Keeffe
Speech from the Gallows
CHAPTER 2
THE MOUNTAIN TERRITORY: NORTH-EAST QUADRANT
CHRISTMAS EVE, 1865
A man who cheated the noose in a faraway land– A painting
A servant– The town of Redemption Falls– A dream of an island
A house of darksom clay
By midnight it was clear his wife was not coming back. O’Keeffe walked out of the house and stood on the prairie. A northerly was gusting, strong and cruel. Burrs of sleet smacked his face.
Coyotes yipped and whooed in the foothills. The stars: cold stones on the backcloth of night. He felt as though he could grasp them– stir them around. The mule bawled despondently from its stanchion in the field. The air smelt of smoke, of snow.
An object swathed in tarps, rigged to stakes in the rocks. It clattered in the blustering wind. The size of two barn doors, eleven foot by eight: the folly she had brought from the east. Too large to enter the house, to cross any threshold in the Territory, it had moldered all those months in its tethers. Laid lengthways on pine blocks to save it from the damp. Roasted, then frozen, now soaked by the heavens, as the snow seeped its corruption through the wrappings.
He tugged the axe from the woodblock. Its shaft was soaked. He staggered toward the racketing idiocy. He was frightened, he realized, of what he was about to do, ashamed and excited, but mainly afraid, and he wished she were here to observe the sacrilege. He would scatter its shreds to the winds.
Our Heroic Frontierby Edward Fairfax Chapel. Its destruction would give him pleasure.
A thought lurched up in him, so violent and shocking that it made him take pause to see if it was true. He might never see her again. This was entirely possible. She would return to New York, doubtless had departed already; at this moment she might be in the stagecoach for Salt Lake City. He let the thought break over him. He stood in the drenchings of the thought.
The journey would be dangerous. It would be worth it to escape him. Down the dizzying road that wound around the undercliff. Through the high, cold walls of Wolfcreek Canyon.
Snow swirled up. His beard and locks were drenched. From someplace above him, a screech-owl. He seemed to see his father-in-law standing backways to a hearth, boots spread wide, a finger stabbing at the air, a glare of loathing in the diamonds of his eyes, gullet pumping as he delivered a harangue. Never again. Not as long as you live, sir! The hatchet was suddenly cumbersome and he dropped it.
Now, as though awakening, he became aware of the cook, who was standing in the doorlight, solemn as a lioness. ‘General,’ quietly. ‘I need to draw the locks.’ Ignoring her, he turned back toward where the mountains must be. But it was too dark to see them. He had a feeling of trouble from the south.
She was speaking to him again but the wind blustered up ferociously, so that he could not hear what she was saying, and he gestured her away. The truth was that he was afraid he would slur if he replied. He would be exposed in front of a servant.
As though he had caused it to happen, one of the guy ropes snapped. A second gave way with a rent. The painting gave a shudder. Wind rushed underneath. It rose up on a short edge, wind-punched, twisting, buffeted again, banging on the stones; canvas ripping and flailing in the windstream, the glass in the frame cracked to shatters. A wolverine scurried from the dead footprint revealed beneath, hissing at the night as it fled.
The cook was screaming for him to do something; anything. And he realized he was screaming back at her. The thing rose again noisily, trailing tresses of rotted rope, three of its corners bouncing, its wrappings leaking sludge, a single fraying tie-rope the only thing restraining it from wrenching a way to liberation.
‘The crawlspace.’ She was shaking him. ‘The ropes.More rope .’
The word he spat back at her was brutal.
He slithered a way around the wind-slapped cabin, scrunching ice-glazed ruts, through a mere of slush, along the corrugation of frozen mud the lane had become, and onto the road for the town. Broken branches on the road. The windblown grit. The groan of old oaks as he leaned and rolled. Past the shanties and bivouacs where the Negroes lived. A child regarded him from the placket of a tepee.
The town was not far away but it seemed to take a long time to walk to it. The cruciform signboard wedged into a barrel, and its snow-spattered face:R*D**PTION F***S .
And the snow banked up in hard, black mounds. The saloons still stuffed. Roars in Gaelic from their casements. Silhouettes of dancers through the windows of the hurdy-gurdy house. Fiddles shrieking a Virginia reel. A cadaverous whore in the gateway of the saddler’s; a miner in ruins by the pawnbroker’s. And lamplight in the chapel for midnight Mass. They were singing ‘Good King Wenceslas’. And a cowpoke tossing pennies from a balcony at a match-girl, who was dancing in the sludge as she gathered them. It seemed to him now that he was walking through a dream-place, that none of it was real, all connections severed.
In the War, he had made the reading of land his study. Maps told you nothing. Compasses were untrue. Informants, spies were all untrustworthy; how, if you considered it, could they be anything else? How you looked at the vista was the important act. You needed to learn to see. Because one day what you saw would erupt while you watched it. Cannonade would scream from behind that busted wall, death would come hurtling from the innocent forest behind you. You needed to understand light. And there was a certain trick light played when it encountered ice. He had noticed this in the War, one midnight at Seven Pines. A comet had appeared that night before the battle, white as a bandage, as a widow’s thinning hair– and its glow had been reflected in the mirror of the Chickahominy. So silent, the river. So violent, the sky. And it had seemed to O’Keeffe that the world was holy. But the dawn would prove it was not.
An orator’s cliché. The sanctifiable commonplace. And yet, it had gained a purchase on him. Blood was holy. Loyalty. Comradeship. The bread you ate, the mug you shared. These things he had believed– believed them still, perhaps. But, no. He did not believe them any more.
Textbooks called it The Element of Surprise.To startle the enemy is to quintuple your firepower. Nothing shatters his morale, nor crushes his resolve, nor annihilates his tactics, nor destroys his resistance, like the unexpected and brilliantly executed maneuver, preferably performed under darkness. Even half-suspected it is devastating when it comes, for the dread of its possibility has been eating at his courage, slowly but inexorably unmanning him.
Perhaps she had kept to her threat, had abandoned her husband. He was a forsaken man, to be mocked. He saw her in the roiling, jouncing stagecabin, its iron wheels whanging on the ruts of road, through turmoiling billows of sleet. A stone knocked over the edge of the cliff track, falling five thousand feet through darkness.
It would be cold in the compartment; her breathing steam. The driver in bearskins, needing to use his whip. He wondered had she taken a blanket, a gun. He hoped she was dressed for desertion.
Wind thudded his shoulders: a sack of wet sand. Past a huddle of figures colloguing in a doorway. Their conversation ceased when they became aware of his proximity. ‘Judas, turncoat,’ as he shambled away from them. ‘Sleeveen.’ Smell of coal-oil.
She will return to New York, to her father’s palazzo, will lock herself up like a postulant. He will be shamed for the deserted husband he is. The news will drift back to Ireland soon; embellished, like a song repatriating.
He pictures her in the library, in a widow’s mantilla, staring out the bay window at the newsboys and the maimed. The servants come and go. She declines all food. Her father slowly roasts by the hearth.
Somewhere a man is shouting affrontedly:Sie betrügen mich! Ich habe kein Interesse! I get my money, I go! Not before!
The frost-covered hulk of a car
thorse on Fitzgerald Street. It has lain there a fortnight, its ribcage collapsed. He has ordered it removed but nothing has happened. The knacker-man is overworked.
There is no one in the blacksmith’s yard, nor in the shack. He walks the emptied stalls, the dungsmelling forge. A bird watches his progress from atop a keg of shoes. He finds a coil of old reata-rope, an armful of reins. A shackle for restraining slaves.
It is quarter of two when he returns to the house, by the shrubby mile of wood-path he uses this late. The cook’s window is dark– perhaps she went to her cabin. Somehow she has tied the embarrassment down, ballasted it with rocks and logs.
He drinks for a while. The fire is low. Memories of Wicklow Prison, the gibbet being erected over a sewer-drain. The butcher’s knife reddening in the executioner’s brazier, the rasp of the tongs being sharpened. Then the face of the messenger who had ridden hard through the storm with the unexpected order from Dublin Castle. Van Diemen’s Land, Tasmania. Life transportation. A naked man chained to a crag in the sea. The timbers of his rowboat broken in the surf. And he knows that this rock appears on no chart: this speck of dust in God’s eye.
A private advancing over dunes of pebbles, through chokes of cordite fog. He is young, a scrawny trooper on whom the uniform sags, and he falters across the shards towards a breastworks. Around him, the sickening whirr of shells; the earth and trees vomit; walls are tossed. There is music– out of time and very slightly out of tune, as though the bandsmen are the recuperating inmates of a madhouse only playing to impress a committee. And on lurches the boy, gangly in his drabs, stumbling over cairns of the unseen eyes, which lie around the stubbles like the umlauts in the depths of a type-compositor’s drawer. Until out of the smoke before him lurches a youth he seems to know– a neighbor, perhaps, from Galway or Clare. Throwing down his rifle, the other does the same; scorched hands are grasped, and the enemies embrace. They vanish a moment later in a spatter of red. Brained by the one same bullet.
‘General,’ she says. ‘Trouble come at the mine.’
He awakens to the low-lidded gaze of the cook, candle burning lowly in her hand. She has on one of his greatcoats– an old one he had thrown away. Its buttons dulled by verdigris and mold.
‘Time is it?’ hoarsely.
‘Three hour to the dawn.’
‘Fix coffee.’
‘Aint got none.’
‘Boil grinds.’
She remains at his bedside, as though about to say something unwithdrawable. The thing in the tethers is clattering.
He has no recollection of going to bed. How did he get here, he wonders.
CHAPTER 3
BUT I, BEING YOUNG AND MAD WITH LOVE, FROM HER COULD NOT DEPART
An adulterous letter sent to the Governor’s Wife some months before the Christmas that concerns us here– from a man in New York, a cartographer by calling– A shameful establishment is recollected & a plea for elopement made
Water Street,
Brooklyn,
vii 12 1865†
My only mourn’d L–––
A friend, a trusted comrade, who is going out to the Territory has vow’d that he shall place this envelope into no hand but yours.
Forgive me for writing despite my promise that I would not do so– I have tried to keep true but can no longer.
The weeks since you left New York have been the worst imaginable – My aunt has been poorly + grows madder by the minute – I have had orders to lead an expedition to the Georgia Sea Islands, the mapping of which is now deem’d an urgency of such magnitude that we are to commence next month, though I have no men – But worst has been your absence, your terrible absence, so sharp that it feels like a presence.
Yester-evening I was walking alone to a comrade’s funeral when I noticed a maidservant on Elizabeth Street with a soldier – I assume her fiancé: he look’d like an Irishman – The poor man had lost an arm + was blind – But they appear’d so content like any young couple – How wretchedly I envied their freedom.
Your farewell torment’d me – How could you write it? – You command me to forget, I must find another – It is asking flames to freeze – I fume with remembrances of you, in company or alone – I waken in the mornings mumbling to your ghost – Every cry of a newsboy, every street-sound is you – I see you on the Avenue – In a box at the theater – At the mess, with a friend, in my rooms, at the drawing board: In every line of my pen.
My will since you left seems no longer my own – It summons to mind those seasons we had together, when we walk’d + look’d at beautiful things – Can they truly have ended? – How can you dismiss themwith gray and disingenuous words?†
A divorce would bring scandal – this of course I concede – but gossip never endures + even were it to do so – does it matter in the end, can any of itmatte r, the prattle of thin-lips and pokebonnets? – How long can our lives be a lonely rejection, leached of the consolation of love? – Were we born to be stones shaped by coldness as we lie? – Is indifference bearable? – Must convention make us living corpses? – Changeling, I beseech you:think on what you do – We could go away together, to Italy or Paris – I have friends in England – we could make a clean beginning – I, who have had to learn to live with mockery – with the insults of beggars, the derision of cowards – I know how to go about quietly.
I wish you were here tonight – I could make you understand – For I believe to my atom, will never stop believing, that you and I were purposed by fate to be as one, if any two on this desolate star ever were – Icannot stop believing or start hating that thought – You are not free, I know it – God knows I think of little else – but is a hostage to be blamed for the existence of gaols? – It cannot be an indecency to recognize what istrue .
If I thought you were happy with him, you know I would desist – But that is a lie – privately I could never – What I mean is that your happiness would mean certain things, one of which, surely, would be my own grief – But I could not continue hoping against hope for your acceptance if such a hope assailed a contented marriage – If he does not – cannot – love you, he must be insane – but how long must you famish in his straitjacket?
If you could see the city now – it is dreadful to walk the streets – Widows – Orphans. Wound’d men begging – Unending talk of riots + diehard spies – There are tents + shanties all over the Central Park – So many have nowhere to go – Six hundred thousand souls will never have our chance – How can we hurl it on the ashes?
I need to raise a subject – please – I beg you not to stop reading – That last afternoon in New York – you know the one to which I allude – was painful to you I know + such a knowledge is terrible – Perhaps I should not have dared to propose as I did – So wildly I want’d you, I could not remain silent.
You will never know my madness as I wait’d that evening – Would you come? – Would you stay? – I was madden’d by questions – The landlord brought food, I sent him away, so hag-ridden I could not eat – The clock said four – Darkness began to fall – When at last I heard your footfall on the stair – I thought my reason would erupt.
You were so beautiful in the doorway, I could not speak – Even the shame in your expression was beautiful – I felt that my life had been unrolling to this moment, that somehow I had been spared, when others more deserving had not, only so that I could live out those few short hours – My wretched appearance, my hideous aspect – even these horrors I forgot.
I cannever stop remembering those few short hours – They are more vivid than anything I had ever known, more than anything even of the War – Every minute, each second, I have rehears’d a hundred times – What if I had said this? Or that? Or said nothing? – To be alone with you privately – it was what I had craved, since the first hour we met at the ward.
Last week, one night, distract’d like a fool, I returned to that den, that shameful low place, + took once again the same bleak room + wept there like a grieving spouse – It was a rainy night –
I wept in the window – I was reading the verses you gave me.
Down on the Bowery I saw carters + horses – the women like statues in the doorways – Around me, through the walls with their lurid depictions, I could hear the doors open + quietly closing – Then the sounds of low laughter – I need not say more – You know the character of house it is – The kind to which you were once willing to come.
The motes of that sinners’ room, through which you had moved, the filthy air itself seemed sanctified – The nothings you had touch’d as you paced to and fro – The drawer you kept at opening and anxiously closing – The cheap, cracked bowl in which you wash’d your hands – The mirror at which you wept as you told me good-bye – And I slept in that bed which might but once have been ours – had but only you not changed your mind.
The long night I lay there, now stirring, now trembling, now tortured by dream-images of such vividness it was shocking – It seemed – I dare not write what seemed – But I think you know – I know you do.
I was like a shaking boy, not a man, when I awoke, sodden and dry-mouth’d and ravenous – Life and limb would I freely have given, to have turn’d to you then, as lover to lover, in the grimy light of the Bowery dawn, to have worship’d every part of you until you implored me to cease, as a man was meant to do – Do I write it too plainly? –Have you not longed for the same? – The truth is that I am not even now being true – Were I to write what I wish, in the words I truly wish, your blushes would singe the page.