––It dont make a bucket of spit where you had it.
––Oh, it make, chum. It make. Else you wouldn be talkin.
As he rode into St Hubert in spurs of etched silver, in Spanish kid boots and a green-ribboned black sombreiro, a trio of Cornish prospectors stared up from their panning. This jumped-up Mick was fixing to rule them. This pigmeat dressed as porco.
––Quieten your talk, fella. He mought hear you over there.
––Aint your funeral what he hears. You his Momma?
––That’s a man gave his all. I’d as soon not hear him insulted.
––I wiped better than that niggerlover off my boots afore now. Better than you, too, if it come to it.
––You don’t shut that reekin mouth a little closern a clam, I’ll fix your flint in short time, you secession bastard.
––You boys, says the barkeep, want to tuck in your shirts. No war-talk allowed on the premises. War’s over.
––Church aint out till the choir done clappin.
––All the same, Square. Not at the bar.
Drovers, saw-millers, dance-girls, the barkeep; they look at the drunkard in the corner. It is as though the air around him possesses a color. You can’t approach him now. He wouldn’t take it good. Miners clank in, dragging picks, sacks of tools. The dentist. The fruiterer. The photographer and his assistant. Skinny Orson Rawls, the burier of the dead, takes the measure of his neighbors as he drinks with them. And the Cajun is murdering ‘La Vuelta del Marido’. The husband’s return from the War.
You watch them blur behind you in the glass of the window. Darker outside. Reflections in the black. Memory stirs the pictures. Other rooms you have known. Dungeon cells. Theaters. An office in Washington. That portrait of Jefferson. That bible on its lectern. Lincoln in the crowded room.
The position of Acting Governor was put to you as an honor by the President. Of course it was a punishment; you both knew that. It had been offered to many failures, none was disappointed enough to accept it. Euphemism was in vogue. It was wartime.
Officials came and went. Markers were moved on vast maps. The President spoke solemnly of trivial things: the balladry of Moore, a book of legends he was reading, the theaters of Washington, an Irish actress he had seen. ‘I have learned, my dear General, that you greatly admire the drama, as I do myself, myself and Mrs Lincoln. One hopes that our American men of letters shall one day give the world something fine in the drama.’ His eyes were cow-sad, his countenance grave, and it had occurred to O’Keeffe, not for the first time, that honesty itself was a kind of act, a performance that gave a reachier punch.
Believemeifallthoseendearingyoungcharms.
Something fine in the drama. Christ.
A Hoosier fraud. So Duggan described him. The President’s acid-etched face. Pockmarked, blistered, like something out of Poe; as though the digs and scratches of the engraver’s burins had already gone to work on the icon. The stories of his kindness were too numerous to be collected; they obscured as much as they revealed. For he was like the whole country, so it seems to you now: kindly and rigid and self-made and dark, hard as a coffin nail, besotted with language. He valued freedom so deeply, he would repress for it if necessary; would bury half his citizens in the meadowlands they had scoped so the other half could live by the law. You think your nightmares terrible? Be grateful they’re not his. What those eyes must have seen in the mirror.
‘Cometh the hour, General, cometh the man.’ So the President spoke, in avuncular platitudes, as though he had committed to memory some compendium of vacuity. He was dead now, the President, that complicated genius, murdered by an actor he was said to have admired, and all sorts of pieties are written about the dead and some eulogies are even true. Nobody had written what you yourself felt – that here was a revolutionary, a giant among the visionaries, who could talk to you an hour, with smoldering sincerity, without ever revealing his purpose. Perhaps that was his greatness, or part of it, at any rate. Perhaps that was what the Republic needed in those years. The subtlety you always lacked.
Larks whirled slowly in the wintry skies of Washington. You saw them through the window as you waited. And the advisors came in and went out so grave and the stenographer smiled like Lucia. She was a pretty girl, Wicklow. Greeted you in Gaelic. The bodyguards seemed edgy, aggressive. Too many in the room, steam rising from their clothes, but more kept coming, the air pungent, too hot. Reek of damp greatcoats, of rain on dirty hair. Too many to be searched. Crowding toward his desk. Messengers, detectives, usurers, spymasters. Manufacturers of weapons. Inventors. To some, you were introduced:one of our brave Irish Generals ; to others only the President and his secretaries spoke. It was not mentioned that the General had utterly failed; that his Brigade had been decimated and then disbanded, that his tactics had been disastrous more often than not, that he had been accused of disregard for his men. Neither did the President make distasteful reference to the final controversy, the incident at Tennessee. The General had allowed himself to interpret evasion as forgiveness, though in truth it was not that, or not completely that; it was merely expediency disguised as tact – another Presidential talent.
In the era of peace, to kill Indians and renegades. To reign by the gun or its threat.L’état, c’est moi , said Monsieur Smith and Monsieur Wesson.Marchons, les sans-culottes . There will always be coercion, so Duggan once told you. It is a question of what the coercion isfor , boy. Constitutions, amendments, fraternity, equality – all is naïvety, undergraduate sentiment; pap for Quakers and mooncalves.People must be FORCED to be free, mon brave. In Ireland, in France, in America, every place. There is only one liberty, you Jesuit popinjay, the kind that sprouts out of a rifle. Spare me your prattle of the goodness of man while the poor are starved like mongrels. And you tell yourself this was not what you came to America for, that you are better than Duggan, no zealot, anidealist , but there are hours when you lust for his certitudes. Did you cross all those waters to become killer, avenger? What have you done? What was it allfor ? Why do you persist in calling Ireland ‘home’ when you have not laid eyes on Wexford for half a life?
This, my home: this desolate shade. Desperadoes, secessionists, dispossessed. New Ireland, Young Ireland. Copy of the old. Mountainous, empty; fueled by drink and old hatreds, a nowhere with commandingly barren scenery of the kind to which fools attach adjectives. A place about which there will forever be arguments, whose people will always know they are living in a laboratory, their talking found exotic, collected by the fossil-men, while the rest of the world, if they notice you at all, see reflections of reflections of your clichés. Only it is larger than the old one, bitterer in winter. Apart from that difference, you are home.
Not even legally the Governor, only the acting one. ‘Acting’, your nickname among the clowns. You hear the word slung at you by the Cajun – ignore it. Acting O’Keeffe, the Emperor of Dogtown.Ici vien Actin, Sainte-Vierge, boys, bow down! You would guillotine every one of them if you thought you could get away with it. And they would do the same to you.
You do not look like a man once received by a President, who twice shook the hand of a legend. You hurried from that map-room almost drunk on your hopes, wishing only that your father could see you. Strange, fierce thought, for a married man. You walked the wet cobbles of Washington. Paperboys bawling: rumors of defeat, the Confederate armies massing to the west. You could hear the rebel cannons in the Potomac valley; see the indigo smoke of their campfires. And it occurred to you, then, that John Fintan Duggan, who saved your life, who was striped for your freedom, might be one of those choking on your name in the scorch, priming the bombs for his sons.
Then you saw her on the corner. The stenographer. Watching you. Her gaze beneath the rim of a parasol. Oh, just home, she said, to her mother’s rooms. Yes, of course you could escort her. Would be an honor for me, General. And her melodious Wicklow brogue, and her humming as you walked, and her hand on your elbow as you crossed by the barricades, and the subtle way
she flattered you, asked all about your War, and your plans, and your past, and Australia. How lonely you must have been, so far away in Australia. Often, as a girl, she had prayed for you. Your picture in her Euclid. Your gallows speech by heart. The other girls had teased her, saying would she not get a boy. God, the things they used to say in the convent at night. They’d havemade a Turkman blush.
Did you see kangaroos? Were the Aboriginal squaws pretty? Was it true they walked about without a stitch on their backs? But surely not completely? Not even a shift? And how, is she allowed to ask, did you escape that isle of horrors? And is it hard for you now, being away from your wife all this time? It’s raining on you, General, won’t you permit me to share the parasol? In which hotel have they quartered you? Is it comfortable there? She passes it every morning, on the way to her work. Maybe some time, she says quietly, she will see inside it.
Her glove brushed your hand as you entered the park, but you just kept talking, talking about nothing, though the whomp in your stomach made it difficult to concentrate, and the closeness of her young warm body. And the girl kept talking, too, about nothing and everything. The coldness of Washington at this time of year, the troopers digging trenches over there near the bandstand. She had once been betrothed. He died at Cold Harbor. She smelt of sweet rosewater. You had never been with an Irish girl. You walked through the park toward the cannons.
And there was a moment when you paused by that nook of dreeping elms, and the drizzle was on her bonnet, and everything was suddenly silent, and you could have, but you didn’t, because you gave your word – but you could have, and no one would ever have known. You walked her to the house, shook formal hands in the doorway. It was the first time you had seen a woman with a house-key.
There was lust; yes. Tempting to dress it in fineries. You had seen so many bodies broken. You wanted to touch one whole. To convince yourself, maybe, that the brokenness would one day end. Or maybe it was lust and nothing more.
‘Would you come in for a minute and meet them? It would be an honor, if you had a moment. My mother is not well. I’ve an aunt lives with us here.’
‘I had better get on to the hotel. I leave early in the morning.’
‘Yes, of course; I’m after detaining you.’
‘Another time perhaps.’
‘I never thought I should meet you. It has been a very great privilege.’
‘The privilege has been mine. Thank you for your company.’
‘You are as gallant as they say. But that would never surprise me. We Wicklow girls are the fine judges of gallantry, I may tell you.’
The smoky afterglow of her smile.
Her stepping from a bed, crossing naked to a window. Her back, her behind; her hand on the glass. Her quiet, low laugh as you kiss her there again, and her fingers in the wetness of your hair.
‘I had better go on inside. You’ll be catching your death. Look at me, stealing your time.’
But you did not move. She met your gaze with her own. Her eyes sea-green in the dusk-light. You didn’t notice it before, but her face is freckled. Her people were from Shillelagh. She says it’s beautiful in summertime. You can almost smell the straw, the sun on new-mown grass. To touch her: a kind of blessing.
‘So is the talk all true? About Tennessee?’
‘I suppose that must depend on the teller.’
‘About yourself and General Sherman. There are various versions.’
‘I am afraid I have done things I greatly regret.’
‘Is that one of them, so? Your regrets.’
‘To strike a superior officer was ungentlemanly; stupid. To that extent, yes, I regret it. It caused hurt to my family. The talk and so on. The Shermans had been guests at our home.’
‘I will always admire you. Always. My father admired you greatly. He used to wonder how you escaped from the colony. It was our story at bedtime. Your escape from the colony. He would have envied me that I had the opportunity of asking you.’
‘It was a long time ago now. I’m not sure I remember. I had comrades. And money. My father sent money. These things are not heroic at all, to be honest. I was fortunate to be selected. Others had a better right.’
‘They say Duggan helped you, did he?’
‘Truly, I must go.’
‘Go safely, then. And thank you.’
‘Good-night.’
You approached and kissed her mouth, which was hot; she half-sobbed. A watchman lanterned past. She inclined her head sharply. You drew your cloak around you both. The beating of your mind. You moved deeper into the shadows of the doorway. You don’t know how long you were there; bodies pushing in cold darkness, mouths conjoined and grinding…Do you feel…the way you have me?…That never…happened me before…Sweet Jesus your hand.You were shaking as she unbuttoned you.I want you to…It’s all right…It’s all right she whispered. You quaked in her arms. She held you a long time. She asked quietly if you had a handkerchief but you didn’t.
And the call of an old woman from the depths of the house. Frightened. Frail. Who was there?
She stepped quickly away, locked the oaken door behind her. Shaken, you walked back to the hotel. You knew, as you arrived, as you climbed to the rooftop, where clustered guests were getting drunk and keeping fearful watch for the enemy, that the hour you had just passed would remain with you a lifetime, but you did not yet know why.
Her sentence would be seven years. The judge advised her to be thankful. Only her plea of guilty had saved her from hard labor. She was spat upon as she was led from the courtroom, she and the other Confederate spies. She would often be attacked in the prison.
It is a time of peace, of brotherly reconstruction. You sleep with a Colt repeater by your bolster. And your wife stalks the house in the cold hours of night and the businessmen fume in the fetters of darkness and somehow like an odor come your dreams of the moonboy and a lament you once heard in a filthy Irish barroom. To the air of ‘The House of the Rising Sun’. A song of New Orleans bordellos.
Brave Lincoln, he lay dying, boys,
With the bullet in his breast;
‘Of all the actors in this town,
I loved John Wilkes Booth the best.’
CHAPTER 31
SURVEILLANCE
A bleak progress witnessed – A fall from a ladder – & the Governor is rescued by an unexpected friend
APRIL4TH,1866. NIGHTWATCH
9.16 p.m.Subject’s birthday. Subject left the salloon [sic] at the Widow’s Hotel and made a way by the wall to the Legislative Office. Was visibly intoxicated & falling about. Was derided by low persons, to some of whom he drunkenly offered violence. Was in a pitiful, wretched condition, close to weeping like a very woman. Was mimicked, disdainfully, in song.
Entered Legislative Office at 12 minutes of 10. Re-emerged to the street eight minutes later with stale-ladder, bucket & rag. Appeared intent on washing the windows but fell from fourth rung of ladder.
Lay in the shit of the street nine minutes. The boy came and assisted him home.
CHAPTER 32
YOU GONNA QUIT ME, SWEETHEART
Elizabeth Longstreet reveals that a thing widely believed of the child was not true
Peculiar child. Yes…You didn know what he be thinkin…Just scootch around say nothin like a spent-hen i’ the yard…Here one time I seen him i’ the black-dark of midnight chawin on a old hambone I save for the dog. I’d fix him a supper – he didn eat none but the leftover. Didn eat enough to make a grasshopper jump…It make you weep to see him. Make a cannonstone cry…To think of him alone i’ the world like that. Nothin harder than a motherless child.
Because that was like a child never got him one ounce of love, not from a body in the world, or never had him no mother. Nor never heard him a kindness or a encouragement for his life…I ast him one time: where your momma get to anyways? Where your people at now? Aint got you no kin? Cause I didn know nothin of how he come up. But he wouldn talk back to you. Wouldn talk back…You wasn in the room w
hen you talkin to that child. It like you a wisp of smoke.
But the curious thing: that wasn no mute…No no…Only somethin in his mind…Cause he could sing just as sweet as ever you heard…Why yes, sir, for certain. Like a bird come the spring. Like folks as got a stammer sing perfect you know…Be singin the old gospels an storysongs you know…‘Jesus Blood Never Fail Me Yet.’…He sing that church make the devil shout the creed…Remember like I heard it this mornin.
Hear him round about the kitchen. In back i’ the yard. Sing any old thing. To his self now I mean…Rhymins. Lullaby. Cubano song. Old nonsense…Them ‘ballade’ he get to singin, like the Quebecois got…Or – whatyou call – the junkanoo like the Creole. Here one time I ast him – cause I remember it real well – how comes it a boy like you keep all them songs in one head? You think I dont hear you? I hear you ever day. Hear you in the night when you singin in your sleep…You mustof a brain the size of Texas in theä. Cause the way he remember all them songs…But never a word…But when he sing it was godly. Only child I ever heard sing a gospel and you believe it…Cause a child caint sing no gospel, my husband always said that…Cause he never lost him a fight. He too young to know the meanin…Sixty, seventy years since I heared that voice. But there’s nights I remember it yet.
An’ uh…sea chaunties too, he got a hundred a those…Was one he get to singin call ‘The Wreck of the Lenoir’. Sad song too…Poor sailors as perish…Went:[subject sings, but voice very frail]
…Up an he stauts, mon capitaine brave,
An a tight little meck was he.
O, a lover had I in the lan’ of Cockaigne
An a widow she is cette nuit, Hélas,
Said a widow she is cette nuit…
‘You Gonna Quit Me Sweetheart.’ ‘Nobody Turn Me Round.’ Long as the blood run warm i’ my vein I wont never forget that voice. Done cut you like a knife. Boy was born for a songster…Got the gift for a song. That’s a grace of the Almighty…Lord anoint us with His blessings, we too vain and sorry to see it…Man dont recognize his gifts never be satisfied in the world…And I sure wouldof wished I could see that child again…Poor little feece-dog…Dear Lord.