Told me the Governor lived separately from his wife (‘a rare beauty’), who had journeyed from the east in the summer to be with him. But the intimate atmosphere between them had not been a happy one, it was whispered. The Governor had a mouth on him. He could be violent by times. He would not raise a hand but his words could be cruel.
‘Oh, dear.’
‘So they say. I never met him.’
The lady had removed to the aforementioned coppertown, a pleasanter settlement than Redemption Falls, since the former was constructed on a peaceful tributary of the Missouri, while the latter, a hellroaring mining camp, had scarcely a Christian in residence, and was infested by doxies, slingers, galoots, and indigenes of the County Limerick. It was currently the Territory’s capital but would surely not remain so for long. ‘Poxbottle’ would be the better name for such a conurbation. Little wonder Mrs O’Keeffe could not stick it.
At Edwardstown she wrote poetry, sometimes painted, and photographed. She was said to be an artistic lady. Moreover, a small controversy was said to have fleetingly energized the town when she had invited a grist-miller of Bremen to model for one of her Grecian studies; and not, as it were, in his Lederhosen. She was not, one might say, a person of narrow convention. Always wanting to kick at the traces. And devil the harm in that, when you thought. The poor woman had suffered so greatly.
‘You seem well informed,’ I smiled. ‘Are you a spy, perhaps?’
‘Sure it’s known the world over. My beau saw her once. Tis said she’s the handsomest creature in all the creation; but lately awful sad, so that she do hardly go out. Don’t hardly ate a biscuit, but above in the rooms. They calls her the Ghost of the Plains, so my man told me that time. For that’s where she stay, the Plains Hotel. Tis said it’s the finest in Edwardstown.’
‘This Edwardstown you mentioned? I do not know it.’
‘Tis a fair piece from here. A week’s ride by any road.’
‘Through Redemption Falls, did you say? I am unfamiliar with your country.’
‘Aye, Redemption, and south on the Carlow road. They do say it’s a town of wonders. But I never seen it myself. But my man was there once. He said it was strikin. Why, have you business down that run of the country, Mister?’
‘No, no, my dear. No business at all. I was speaking out of curiosity merely.’
‘Do you mind and I ask you, Mister, what happened your poor face? Was it something in the War itself?’
I looked at her a while. But something confused me, I think. Presently I became distressed so that she must ask me what was wrong. In truth, I was not weeping for any pain of my injuries. It was that I could not remember, no matter how I searched, how or where I had come by them.
‘Gettysburg,’ I said in the close; and she sympathized.
Found it a very frightening experience.
CHAPTER 57
THROUGH ALL THE GROVES OF JEOPARDY THE LITTLE PRINCE DID WALK
A sighting from Donnelly’s Cliff – A disagreement among newlyweds
‘Wounds of Christ,’ says Eliza.
‘Told you I seen him,’ says Vinson.
‘That’s him.’
‘I knowed it.’
‘That’s him, Cole.’
‘You sure?’
A boy in velvet britches is trudging toward the schoolhouse with a gunnysack of books on his back. He retrieved them from the study of the man who protects him. They are heavy and thick. Their authors were paid by the word. He is unaware that he is being watched from that copse on Donnelly’s Cliff. He staggers under the weight of his booty.
‘What can we do, Cole?’
‘Take him, I guess.’
She hands her husband the telescope. He peers through it a time. (‘Sure don’t look like no kin of yourn to me.’) Vinson, meanwhile, regards her with bleak anticipation, but whatever he might expect is unclear.
‘Take him and what?’
‘Can ride with us, caint he? Take him down to Arkansas when we go.’
‘Arkansas?’
‘Yeah. We’re goin into Arkansas.’
‘But…what about Canada?’
‘I dunno. What about it?’
‘It’s a home the child needs. Not a gun and the prairie. Or sleepin in a saddle and runnin from lawmen.’
‘Aint gonna be like that. Not for long any ways.’
‘Howlong?’
‘Girl – Christ Almighty, if you don’t ask a question. I’ma go down Arkansas, do a thing I gotta do. Some boys I know – why? Is it any your concern? Since when I gotta askyou before suckin a breath?’
‘That aint what you promised – how much more money you need?’
‘More. That’s how. You don’t like it, take off!’
‘And maybe I will! Direct to the marshal. What y’think about that, you piece of grovellin shit?’
‘Keep workin that maw, girl, you gonna know plenty what I think.’
‘Aint afeared of you, McLaurenson, nor any of your ilk. Lift your robbin hand tome , I’ll shove it wet down your gullet.’
His glove to her throat. Slamming her backways against a boulder. Her feet lifted clear of the stones.
‘You mouthy little nothin. Talk tome like some houseboy? Give you a cut of my beltbuckle if you want it! You hear?’
‘Cole,’ Vinson says. ‘She don’t mean no harm by it.’
‘Mind your business! You’re warned. Stand away or get dealt.’
‘Christsake, McLaurenson, there’s a child in the woman.’
‘You told me you want the boy. You want him, I’ma git him. Fix up your mind, girl. Cause I’m tirin of your mouth! I’ma go-down to Arkansas, rob me a train. And that the way it is.’
CHAPTER 58
THE DAWNING OF THE DAY
The Governor dreams of a lady – A backstage priest
The Thunder-makers – Ophelia in Shropshire
He awakens in half-light to see a woman in his casement. Her back to his gaze. Has she returned?
Lucia? Catharine? His thirst is broiling. She revolves in the volutes, as though having heard his thoughts. A curtain-veil of lace obscures her.
Sleeplessness and bourbon and an afterimage from a dream. A meadowlark gliding over furze. If a dream can have a shape, this one seemed to him a conch shell. And he is inside it, somehow. Drifting spirals of coral. The whiteness of its recessed polyphonies.
His mother, he sees now; but she is clad all in rags, like a wretch in an etching of the Famine in Ireland. Her hands tensely cupped, as though holding a butterfly. When she opens them, a minuscule light like a star, and it smolders with blistering clarity as it rises above her palms and moves slowly around the edges of the room. He does not know which to watch, his mother or the light – he feels one of them can tell him something important. There are sounds in the walls: the scrabblings of mice. He finds himself unable to stir.
Unmoving in his chair. Booted feet on the floorboards. The crusting of sleep in his eyes. There is madness in his family. He has always feared it. Dread of the chains and the jacket, and then? A peasant-fear, Duggan said.
‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,’ she whispers.‘Lasciate ogne speranza… ’
Once, as a schoolboy, with the Jesuits in England, he auditioned for the part of Othello. He was not given the role – his accent was too Irish – and was told, instead, to present himself behind the flies. He had wanted to weep for humiliation and anger. The gaiety of his classmates at his retreat.
A Father, a Belgian, onyx-headed and tall, welcomed him to the wings with kindly words. As though here, and not the stage, was the realm of truer miracles; as though to be out of the action was the highest vocation. Strange and dark, this blue-place of drapes. Musk of the mothballs, old priest and blackface.
He showed the boy a skull. Canvas breastplates, a jester’s bells: these were displayed to him with druidical somberness, as though components of a long forgotten sacrament. The more flippant their purpose, so it seemed to the boy, the greater the priest’s solemn
ity as he explained them. Daggers that retracted into their hilts. A trunk of opulent costumes. Trapdoors.
The mysteries of illusion. Bloodlike dyes. Helmets and monstrous masks. Here was a drum filled with tiny stone marbles. If you rattled it, the gush of a rainstorm. A tincture of this compound touched with a heated nail and a fog would result, which could make a scene more enigmatic. People like not being able to understand things straight away. What was life itself, but an appearance not comprehended? And look – a pane of metal, which when shaken with vigor gave out the rumble of thunder. The squawking and parping of an adolescent orchestra, and the scrape of his house-fellows’ boots.
Father Liebhart made the rainstorm and the boy made the thunder; and collegially they watched, through gaps in the curtains, as the capering deluded who thought they were significant revealed themselves as painted puppets. ‘Some only act,’ Father Liebhart murmured. ‘But others make the thunder. You will always be one of those, James.’ He learned an important lesson, that year he turned fifteen. We see what we wish to see, unless we are backstage; in which case, there is nothing invisible.
For no reason it comes back to him, as he eyes the woman in his room. In the shadows of his dressing-screen by the corner nearest the door. She has acquired a garland of lilies from the air and she blows on the embers of their withers. Ophelia of the west. Boy who played her at Stonesglade? But Ophelia is not in Othello. To speak and purpose not. And if all of this is lunacy – as it seems to him it could be – might not madness be a kind of relief?
He swallows. She is gone. He elbows up in his chair. The bed not slept in. The bottle half-drunk. His dog on the floor, asleep.
The skreeking of a chalk-nub on a square of slate. The boy must be awake – on the landing. He howls for him to be silent. The scraping stops. Tumble of stocking-feet down the staircase.
He will describe the troubling dream to Desdemona. And then he remembers. And awakens.
CHAPTER 59
THE MEETING OF THE WATERS
A schoolteacher’s account – Tidings of the boy are requested
It was a Sunday afternoon, I remember, for I had been to chapel that morning and it was the day the banns were read for my younger sister’s marriage. In any case, I am certain it must have been in November. I have reason to recollect the date.
I was walking not far from the town in a place called Farrington’s Meadow, with my fiancé John O’Lee; later my husband. We had had a little quarrel of the kind young sweethearts will have and had gone out walking together to make it up.
We were sitting, John and I, by the meeting of the two streams, when we saw that a young woman was approaching along the track. John happened to notice her and he wondered aloud to me who she was; for between our families we would have known fairly everyone in the County but neither of us knew this girl.
I would say that she was nineteen or twenty, very pale and poorly. She was a pretty girl, you could see that; but she was not in a good way. Her dress was worn to rags and she was expecting a child. It was terrible to see her so poor in that condition. I would have thought she was six months gone.
Well; she came up close to where we were seated on a blanket in the grass, and we saluted her and she bid us a good day. Her accent was strange to me; I could not name it, but there was the states in it anyhow, and something eastern. There were a few pleasantries about the winter sunshine, nothing of consequence. She did not seem to want to continue her walk. I saw her looking at whatever little bits of a picnic we had, and I felt sorry for her, then, and troubled. My sister-in-law was expecting to have a baby that Christmas, and all I could think was how frightening it would be to know want at such a time that should be happy for any young woman. I asked if she would break bread with us, for we had plenty enough to spare and it would bless us to share it, if she wished. She said in her way that she would not care to interpose, but I pressed the invitation and she sat by us.
I could see that John was a little vexed with me for having invited her, but when she sat and took a morsel to eat, after a while I could see that he was glad. If you had seen her, it would have broken your heart. It was as though she had never been given anything in her life. And to be honest, I found it difficult to keep a conversation, it was so sad to see her hunger like that. But John was very kind and could see the way it was with me, and he went to talking away with her, drawing no attention to anything, like any gentle friend. It is a strange thing to say, but actually, at that moment, I could see why I wished to be his wife. There was a German boy in the town who had been paying me attentions; very handsome and amusing and all the girls loved him; but I could see that he would never be John.
Well, the poor mite ate a little and she drank a cup of water. She said her name was Mary Jane and she was going into California. And this did not surprise either John or myself, for we had a great number of migrant people, many of them poor, journeying through the Territory after the War. One took care, I suppose, not to ask them many questions, for often they were leaving a past of which they did not wish to speak. My mother always told us that it was holier not to inquire of them, for to tempt a Christian to lie was the same sin as lying, and in some ways would go worse for the tempter.
She inquired if I was Miss Doherty, the schoolteacher at Redemption Falls, and I said, I suppose surprised, that I was. A shopwoman in the town had mentioned me in passing, she said. She could not recall her name.
She asked me pleasantly about school-teaching, was it difficult and so on. I think I said that it could be trying, but was also pleasing in its way, but that I did not know if I should care to do it after I was married for I should likely have my own family, then. And John made some joke or another about that.
Then she went to asking me about the children and what they were like. She had seen this one and that one as she went about the town. We had a little Chinese girl about whom she inquired. And we had identical twins there, Karl-Heinz and Edmund Schiller. And how would a body know them apart, and so forth. And there was a boy who stayed at the Governor’s and who sometimes attended at the school. Was he a good boy at his lessons? How often did he come? I laughed, for this famous boy was forever being asked about, and I said he was as good as ever he might be. Why did she wish to know it? Oh, it was only that she had seen him hither and yon, she told me, on his way to the schoolhouse, and had wondered what he was like and if he was happy in himself. Did they feed him at the Governor’s and take good care of him there? Did he have nice clothes? Did he sleep in a bed? Was it true he had a horse? Had he doctoring if he was ill? She appeared to know something of General O’Keeffe, and to respect him considerably, which John and I did, too, very much. I said, which was all truth, to the best of my knowledge, that the Governor had come to regard the boy very naturally, almost as a father his son. So his situation was happy, then? I said yes, I thought it was. There was a look I shall never forget in her eyes.
Had he a mother? she asked me, then. I said that he had: a very kindly lady of a well-to-do family. For there were rumors in the town of difficulties in the marriage of the Governor and Mrs O’Keeffe but I did not think it proper to share them.
It seems strange, all this time later, to write it down, but it did not seem so at the time, that she would be curious about this child. The whole of the County was inquisitive about our foundling personality. She was far from the first to have asked of him.
After a while of I suppose half an hour, she stood up and bid us goodbye, for she had an appointment, so she said, at some distance. We wished her safe travel and she thanked us for the food and went off in the direction of the town. I felt that she was distressed for she had departed with an uneasing suddenness. Of course, I did not know why.
A man was waiting for her at the verge of Tiernan’s Woods. I saw him very clearly, although he was so far from me that I could not make out any feature. He was clad all in black, like a priest as it might be. John never saw him but I know that I did.
I said: ‘John, that girl did no
t tell us something. I wish you would go after her and see to her safety.’ But he said that he did not want to do that; I was taking a notion, and besides he was tired, for he had been building a corral the day before with his uncle, and wished to rest and talk.
To be honest (he told me), it was better that she had gone. He had seen that kind of girl during the War. It would not do in the town if we had been observed to address her. I remember asking him, for I was green as an unsunned pumpkin, despite thinking I knew nearabout everything in the world, how could he tell she was that kind. He told me that he did not want to discuss it but felt sorry for her, as any Christian should, for the life of such a girl was entirely without hope. The crime was the man’s, and not the girl’s, he believed. He had seen things in the War that were terrible. It was the first time that John and I had spoken of the War, for I knew that he had come home hurt by it, not in body, but in heart. And I do not believe we ever spoke of it again after that day. He never attended commemorations, or marches, and so on. He used to tell our children that he could not remember any of it. He had a medal, but it lived in a drawer.
And that is all I can tell you. For I never saw her again. John and I remained at the Meadow until dusk was coming on, and then we walked back to the town. We were married not long afterward, rather more expeditiously than pleased our mothers, and our daughter was born nine months subsequent to that day by the river. We were married fifty-two years. He was my treasure in life. Every minute of every day, I miss him.
CHAPTER 60
SOME KILLERS WIELD A SWORD OF STEEL, BUT OTHERS PLY THE PEN
The mapmaker returns to Redemption Falls
An encounter with a hangman – Cartography rebuffed
A commercial proposition – A warning