¿Quién Sabe?as Lucia’s least unknown poem is entitled. And I will leave you with a strange story of my own.
A good many years ago, I will not say how many, I was in the little town of San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, for a purpose I prefer not to disclose.
San Juan is a tiny but not unattractive pueblo, on a horseshoe-shaped cove near thefrontera with Costa Rica. In my memory there is a volcano on the northern horizon, stark, black, still smoking after two hundred years, but perhaps I am confused – I have no notes by my hand. The night is very late as I write.
There are fincas and coffee fields and the huts of campesinos, and there is a priest’s house that is said to be haunted. Nearby rise the headwaters of a mighty river that flows hundreds of miles eastward, into the Lago de Nicaragua (Mar dulce, the locals call it – ‘the sweet sea’) then on through treacherous jungle, through mangrove swamps never mapped, all the way east to the Costa Atlantica, the region of that nation where the people are black and speak English with a vaguely cockney inflection. Not Mestizos or Indians, they are the descendants of Caribbean slaves. Bluefields is the name of their town.
From that Mosquito Elysium, so the San Juan people told me, once a year would come a boat bearing a strange old ‘Caudillo’ – their word for a knight or an owner of lands, although it can also mean a strong man, a ruler. He was old as Adam’s father, in their colorful parlance. His face bore a million lines. His spectacles were much remarked upon, for their lenses were the blackish purple of deadly nightshade – they appeared to have been fashioned from the bottoms of wine bottles. He would be carried through the town in the arms of his servant, to the cantina of a moneylender on the Calle Masaya in the smugglers’ quarter. There he would pawn a purseful of gemstones. Uncut Missouri sapphires.
Every year it was the same. A clutch of Yogo sapphires. He seemed to have an inexhaustible supply. He was not paid their worth – the moneylender always swindled him – but every year without fail he returned. He signed no paper, requested no receipt, never once haggled, always accepted the offered robbery. Indeed, he did not speak at all to the pawnbroker or his wife, leaving all verbal intercourse to thesirviente . This done, he would be carried to the whitewashed church and rest in its coolness an hour. No one ever saw him kneel; he would sit upright as a tombstone, crumpled sombreiro in his lap. A couple of notes from his billfold he would give to the servant, who would hand them to the Padre or place them in the poorbox.Para los niños y las mujeres que tienen hambre , the box was marked. For the children and women who are hungry. And once – so it was told me by a person who knew – the servant asked a nun who was placing malinche flowers on the altar could he beg a cup of water for his elderly master, who was greatly distressed by the heat. The good woman found a pitcher and gave it to the servant, who blessed her, and no more was said. That night, as she was sweeping the aisles of the church, she found a handkerchief that had been left on the offertory table. It had been carefully folded, placed under a prayerbook. It contained fifteen one-hundred-dollar bills.
He and his man were ‘como Quijote y Sancho Panza’. Ancient and slow and comical in their seriousness. He wore a dress-sword in a rusting and shabbily tasseled scabbard; the black lace gloves of a Don. Even the beggars stared as he was borne through the hot dust, perspiring in his ebon-black broadcloth. Dogs and yapping children would attend the curious progress, back to the jetty and the panga-boat. He would be propped by the servant on its bowed old bench, sword across his knees, black lenses on his face; then both men would take up the heavy oaken oars and wordlessly push for the east.
The people could never understand why he came all this way. The voyage was so dangerous. The jungle could kill you. Why not send a messenger, some littlechacho from Bluefields, who would happily do this errand for a few cordobas and a carouse? His answer to that question was the only instance anyone could remember where he had uttered a sentence in the town.
‘Un hombre con acento cockney no es de fiar con el dinero.’ A man with a cockney accent is not to be trusted with money.
He would be due in a month or so, so the cantina-keeper told me; for usually he arrived in July, before the rains came on. Perhaps I should wait, if I wanted to meet him?Un mes. Dos meses. No más, hombre . I considered it seriously. But I did not wait. It would probably not have been him. I would have been disappointed.
I prefer to imagine him among the shanties of Bluefields, gazing out on the Atlantic, dreaming of Dulcinea. Tilting at the beacons with his unholy stare, getting drunk on Los Flores rum. A fancy, I know. Rhetoric, nothing more. There is little doubt that he died in the Missouri.
The ballad of War does honor to the departed. This has been a story of some who endured. Lucia-Cruz McLelland, who is buried in Ireland; Elizabeth Longstreet, who is buried in Africa; and silent Jeddo Mooney, a boy who changed his surname, whose silence is broken by having been your narrator:
Jeremiah Daniel McLelland,
Professor Emeritus, Columbia.
1, the Fifth Avenue, New York.
Christmas Eve, 1937
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank my beloved Anne-Marie Casey, my editor Geoff Mulligan, my book agent Carole Blake and screenwriting agent Conrad Williams, both at Blake Friedmann Literary Agency in London, and Jewerl Ross at Silent R Management, Los Angeles. In 2005/06 I was a Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers; I thank the staff, the librarians and my colleagues for endless kindnesses, and Gary Forney, Jon Axline, Lenore Puhek and staff at the Montana Historical Archive for their hospitality during a research trip I made to Montana in December 2005. That state is an infinitely more welcoming and beautiful place than the fictional and somewhat differently located Territory described in this novel. I thank Patricia Normanly for sending me unpublished letters of an Irish soldier who died at Gettysburg, Rachid Diallo for his bookletTime Travellers: the American Civil War, James Kincaid (Univ of Southern California), Declan Kiberd and Anthony Roche (Univ College Dublin), staff of UCD Library, John M. Hearne, Ruan O’Donnell (Univ of Limerick), and Justin Furlong (National Library of Ireland). For translation assistance: Julia Carty, Miryam Delgado, Anthony Glavin, Eanna O’Lochlainn, Dr Seán Ó Riain, Hugo Hamilton and Kevin Holohan. I am greatly indebted to my father Seán O’Connor, Monica Casey, Eimear O’Connor, Judy Finnegan, Richard Madely, Amanda Ross, Natalie Fox, Beth Humphries, Madeleine Keane, Briony Everroad and Rosa Bruno, and to Peter Ward, who designed this book with such skill and care. ‘Cochise and Johnny Thunders’ is a rewriting of ‘Morrissey and the Russian Sailor’, recorded by ConnemaraSean-Nós singer Seosamh O’hÉanaí (Joe Heaney) and others. ‘Western Thunders Blues’ is influenced by Huddie Ledbetter’s ‘Out on the Western Plain’ (exquisitely recorded by the late Rory Gallagher). Derek Warfield and David Kincaid have recorded Irish ballads of the Civil War. The Works Progress Administration recorded interviews with former slaves in the 1930s;The Emergence of Black English: text and commentary , eds. Bailey, Maynor, Cukor-Avila, includes transcripts and discussions of the many questions they raise. Some orthographic elements of the transcripts appear in the recollections of Elizabeth Longstreet.
Unless otherwise indicated, photographs are on glass, wet collodion, from the Library of Congress collection ‘Selected Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865’ (call-numbers below), mostly created ‘under the supervision of Mathew Brady’. I thank Kathryn Blackwell at the Reference Section. The Library of Congress advises that there are no known restrictions on publication. Page 1: ‘Petersburg, Va. Row of stacked Federal rifles; houses beyond’, April 3, 1865. lc-b811-3229. P. 17: Originally titled ‘Candidates for the Board of Education Opposed to Reading the Bible in Schools’. Viewable at www.assumption.edu/acad, credited asHarper’s Weekly , ‘1850s’. P. 61: ‘Chattanooga, Tenn., vicinity. Tripod signal erected by Capts. Dorr and Donn of U.S. Coast Survey at Pulpit Rock on Lookout Mountain’, 1864? lc-b811-3661. P. 103: ‘Petersburg, Va. Confederate fortifications with chevaux-de-frise
beyond’, 1865. lc-b811-3302. P. 118: ‘Unknown location. Embalming surgeon at work on soldier’s body’, between 1860 and 1865. lc-b811-2531. P. 159: ‘White Oak Swamp, Va. View’, between May and August 1862. lc-b811-2601. P. 191: Photograph of drawing of slave punishment apparatus. lc-usz62-31864. P. 233: ‘James River, Va. Butler’s dredge-boat, sunk by a Confederate shell on Thanksgiving Day, 1864’, lc-b811-2550. P. 283: ‘Erin Go Bray’, print, published by William Holland, London, March 1799. P. 379: ‘Portrait of Boy Soldier.’ Morris Gallery of the Cumberland, Nashville, Tennessee, between 1860 and 1865, re-photographed 1961, Elsie G. Redman, lc-b8184-10573. P. 408: ‘Nashville, Tenn. Fortified railroad bridge across Cumberland River’ by George N. Barnard, 1864. lc-b811-2642. P. 437: ‘Portrait of a soldier group’, between 1860 and 1865, re-photographed 1961. Copy of undated photo made by lc of tintype. G.K. Holmes, Cornwall Bridge, Conn. Photographic print. lc-b8184-10694.
Any Civil War source-list must include Shelby Foote’s masterpieceThe Civil War: A Narrative, and Ken Burns’ magnificent PBS documentary on the conflict. A chronology, by Don Harvey, of all the war’s engagements, is at http://users.aol.com/dlharvey.Redemption Falls is a work of fiction, taking license with historical and geographical fact, and making no claim to textbook reliability. More than a hundred thousand Irish immigrants participated in the war, but the Irish Brigade of these pages is not the famous 69th New York and Jeddo Mooney’s contingent is not based on any one real battalion. Students of Irish history will have noted that elements of James O’Keeffe’s curriculum vitae have echoes in that of Thomas F. Meagher (see the latter’sMemoirs, Comprising the Leading Events of his Career Chronologically Arranged, With Selections From his Speeches, Lectures and Miscellaneous Writings, 1892), but O’Keeffe is as fictional as everyone else in this novel and is not a camouflaged version of any real person. Well-researched works on TFM and his friends include Gary Forney’sThomas Francis Meagher , John M. Hearne and Rory T. Cornish, eds.,Thomas Francis Meagher ,The Making of an Irish American , Thomas Keneally’sAmerican Scoundrel , William H. Lamers’The Thunder Maker , Kirk Mitchell’sFredericksburg , Lenore Puhek’sThe River’s Edge , Reg Watson’sThe Life and Times of Thomas Francis Meagher and Richard S. Wheeler’sThe Exile . Other works on Irish combatants include Susan Provost Beller,Never Were Men So Brave: The Irish Brigade During The Civil War ; Frank A. Boyle,A Party of Mad Fellows: The Story of the Irish Regiments in the Army of the Potomac ; William J.K. Beaudot, ed.,An Irishman in the Iron Brigade: The Civil War Memoirs of James P. Sullivan, Sergt., Company K, 6th Wisconsin Volunteers ; Joseph G. Bilby,The Irish Brigade in the Civil War: The 69th New York and Other Irish Regiments of the Army of the Potomac; William Corby,Memoirs of Chaplain Life: Three Years With the Irish Brigade in the Army of the Potomac ; James P. Gannon,Irish Rebels, Confederate Tigers: The 6th Louisiana Volunteers, 1861-1865 ; Ed Gleeson,Rebel Sons of Erin: A Civil War Unit History of the Tenth Tennessee Infantry Regiment (Irish) Confederate States Volunteers ;Commanding Boston’s Irish Ninth: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Patrick R. Guiney, Ninth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry ; Lawrence Frederick Kohl, ed.,Irish Green and Union Blue: The Civil War Letters of Peter Welsh, Color Sergeant 28th Massachusetts Volunteers; Daniel George Macnamara, ed.,The History of the Ninth Regiment: Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, June 1861–June 1864 ; John Mahon,New York’s Fighting Sixty-Ninth: A Regimental History of Service in the Civil War’s Irish Brigade & the Great War’s Rainbow Division ; Kelly J. O’Grady,Clear the Confederate Way!: The Irish in the Army of Northern Virginia ; J. Vincent Noonan,Forty Rounds: An Irish Regiment in the Civil War ; Philip T. Tucker,The Confederate Irish .
Deepest thanks to my beloved sons, James (7) and Marcus (3), for tolerating their father’s absences during the writing of this novel, and for providing him with frequent demonstrations of the rebel yell. To them, the last hooraw.
EPILOGUE
LAFANCIULLA DELWEST
In the lonesome Gulf of Mexico, some say his bones are drifting, Amid the gloomy shoals below, where Lorelei are shifting. Now seaweeds kiss the lipless mouth of freedom’s slaughtered suitor. As now he is, so shall we all – written on the water. Oh sorry deed, and wicked seed, oh night of shame and woe, When Mooney murdered James O’Keeffe, all on the banks below. And some they calls him Satan’s son or Savage Jedda Wild. What wrongs we wrought, what sins we taught, To raise a devil’s child.
From ‘The Ballad of James O’Keeffe and the Devilboy Jedda Mooney’.
Collected Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1889
The real war will never get in the books.
Walt Whitman
CODA
From the notes of a collector – His reflections upon a remarkable woman – His interest in the written word & in the compilation of archives – His belief in the revolutionary future
Professor J. Daniel McLelland
Winter, 1937
I
It is a curious fact – so it seems to an old man – that so many fictions about war are love stories. Forgiveness returns. Johnny finds his girl. The brothers, who fought in opposing armies, clasp hands and limp homeward to the meadow. Aura-Lee was not raped. The meadow is not a cemetery. Johnny does not scream in the night.
Perhaps unease is so great, and memory so harrowed, and the truths of the war so intensely disturbing, that we need to find a method of framing the story that will allow for the triumph of hope. So love conquers all. Redemption is possible. The peaceable kingdom is restored. War, in a story, is only an interruption, a fleeting deviation from the order we have made, and it is quickly atoned for, as though it had never happened. Because it did not happen. It only seemed to.
All one’s life one has admired them: these fairytales of war, with their well-deserved happy or not unhappy endings, where the good are rewarded, or, at least, die young, and the agonies are rendered so discreetly. Billy is brave. Screeches become prayers. Scenes conclude early, before the amputation has begun. Words such as ‘odor’ are tactfully employed for what happens when Billy is destroyed. Thus the love story is a way of forgetting what has happened. As such, it is one of the reasons why wars become possible, for it says that a war can come to an end, when it cannot, except by provoking another one. Water becomes steam; ice melts to water; and a war only shape-shifts, like a witch.
II
My wife is obsessed by a puny Austrian thug whom she sees in the newsreels at the movie theater on 23rd. She says he hates millions, hates even his own citizens: Jews, Communists, trade unionists, intellectuals. Since my wife is a Jew, and since I have certain affiliations, she worries incessantly aboutmein kleiner Schickelgruber ; claims to hear his saw-like shriek in her dreams. I love her, but she is the kind of woman who agonizes about these hate-filled nobodies. She has too much time to think.
What if he invades these United States? His forces are growing. How should we defeat him? I advise her not to fret. I speak slowly, loudly. The workers of Europe will tear him down by next month – we can always trust the workers, history shows us this – Europe detests a tyranny, history shows us this, too – and the newsreels will feature some other pathetic shrieker soon, and the world will spin on through space.
III
Decrepits of our age, my wife’s and mine, are admitted to the movie theater at reduced cost in the afternoons. It is America’s equivalent of the Inuit practice of putting the aged into the wilderness to die. I do not care to go; it makes me feel old as a mummy, and I am uneasy being in darkness, especially during the daylight hours, so few of which can remain to me now. I have always preferred daylight to dusk or dawn. I could never have been like my aunt, a poet.
Lenin predicted that the cinema would be the paramount art of our century, but on this the Comrade seer was uncharacteristically myopic. The fug of cigarette smoke floating over the stalls, purpling in the light-beam, shifting, re-forming, is more remarkable than anything depicted on the screen, and, in its way, more beautiful and true. Foolishness, sentimentality, the commodification of violence. Black
ed-up eye-rollers banjoing Mammy. For this carnival of barbarisms, I am invited to pay? Vladimir, what were you thinking?
My wife weeps quietly at the melodramas of love. But I do not weep. I think weeping unmanly. I make use of her absences – her afternoons with Al – to travel down other roads.
IV
We are fortunate, my wife and I, to have been bequeathed a fine house and an income more than adequate to forestall its dilapidation. The resources of Croesus could not prevent our own dilapidation, but still, as I tell her, we fight the fight. We have servants, nurses, valets, laundresses, grooms, maids, physicians, bottle-washers. The more help we have, the dirtier the house. I do not know why that should be so. But it is.
Some years ago, the Head Cook took on the duty of hiring the staff; but either she has no idea of what she is doing, or else – my wife chides me that my theory is mean – she wishes to employ every one of her block-headed cousins. There are days when I see Irish people lurching up and down the staircase and have not the faintest inkling who they are. Ghosts? Tradesmen? The Tuatha de Dannan? They glare at me as though I do not belong beneath this roof. They ask me whoI am!
On days like that, especially when my wife is out at her movies, I come up here to my roost, to the loft-room I call my study. It is hidden behind a bookshelf with an ingenious hinge. One is safe in here from all Celtic invaders. I like the compactness; I find small rooms comforting. A man can have too much breathing space.