Later in the day, I walked three leagues out of town, bringing only my theodolite and a couple of books. I intended to scout out a number of elevated vantages, which might serve as expedient points from where to commence a triangulation.
I was looking through my scope, and by that means I noticed, about a quarter of a mile away from me, I think north by northnorthwest, three men riding the crest of Aerly’s Hill. They looked like Five-Points hooligans; all were clad in black. Each was copiously armed, more than any miner needs to be, with bandoleers, machetes, short-handled shotguns and sawn-downs. More remarkable (so I now saw), one of the trio was a woman. Or, rather, a girl of about twenty.
They paused as I watched them. Both men dismounted; one of them urinated on the trail. The girl then dismounted. She had on canvaschaparejos and a rough-cut cloak. In her hand was a long-blade knife.
She hunkered and picked up a glove-ful of earth. There was conversation between her and one of the men, the other remaining silent I think. She stood up again abruptly. There appeared to be a quarrel. The girl and her adversary exchanged vigorous shouts but I could not make out their words. The other man was making placatory gestures.
They mounted up and rode away toward the north in a body.
I mounted quick as I could and commenced to follow. They were headed in the direction of Redemption.
Vinson reins his mare. Twists his head like an owl. Staring over his shoulder at the track they have just ridden. It is arched by a tunnel of low-grown cottonwoods. He looks panicked. His horse gives a whinny.
‘What matter?’ asks McLaurenson.
‘We’re dogged,’ Vinson says.
‘Wean’t dogged. Who’s to dog us out here?’
‘I’m tellin you, we’re tailed. Look at the birds over yon.’
A rising of crows in a cloud from the woods. Raucous. They whirl like ashes.
‘Cougar,’ says McLaurenson. ‘Coyote may be.’
‘This far over? And no water in thirty mile?’
‘Whut are you – ’
‘Listen!…’
The crows croaking dully as they circle above the forest. Eliza says nothing, only heels at her horse. They have a ways to ride this evening and cannot afford delays. But she has a sense – inexplicable – that Vinson is correct.
She looks back down the trail. The birdcalls have ceased. A disc of dusty daylight at the end of the tunnel.
‘Ride on,’ says McLaurenson. ‘Aint a body back there.’
Vinson is staring at her as they go.
At a quarter after four, the boy is witnessed in Tone Street, leading James O’Keeffe’s horse, which is lame. He goes into the cobbleyard of Johnny Boylan the blacksmith, who will testify that the boy seemed ‘his usual self. Quietlike. But he didn’t look troubled.’ Boylan and the child come out to the street, where the horse is quickly examined before being brought into the yard. The boy crosses to Corish’s, where he buys two apples. Corish will say ‘he looked fine’.
He walks back to the house and unties his pony from the hitching-post. By now it is twenty minutes after four. He is asked by Elizabeth Longstreet to do an errand at the grocer’s but he gestures that he has just now returned from the town, is unwilling to go back there again. The errand is not urgent, so that she does not scold the child. He heads away from the house by the north-eastern lane, not riding the pony, but leading it.
Two former slaves see him as he passes the field where many of their fellows have their shelters. The wind blows his hat off. He chases it; picks it up. He is feeding an apple to the pony.
‘Jeddo,’ says the voice. ‘Tis me. Your oul pard.’
The boy stops and looks at him. The Yankee sheriff. But different now. Thinner. More frightened. Like a scarecrow of himself, to be burned on a bonfire. A traitor about whom there will be songs.
‘Were they askin where I go to? In the town? I suppose they were. See, I went to see a pard of mine. Would you like to come and meet him? His house is up yonder. He got a visitor you’ll want to see.’
Always watch the eyeballs, Mamo used to say. You can tell they’re lying by their eyes.
‘It’s a someone you’ll want to visit with. Up above in the hills there. It’s your skin-and-blister, Jeddo. It’s Eliza.’
The pony is wandering away, trailing his lariat in the grass. Wind moves the rushes in the streamlet. The Great Smokecloud Mountains look true to their name, for their slopes are gray and vaporous.
‘Don’t you care to see your sister? She’s after coming a fierce way. Will you go by and take supper with me, there’s a good boy?’
The child does not move. Because Eliza is not here. She is in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on the other side of the moon. But this lawman knows her name. Can he read your secret thoughts? Like a faery ill-met on the road.
‘Lookat here…I got someone else. Someone you int seen in a long time. Wants to see you again, son. She’s over there in yon trees. Shure, she’s heartbroke to see you. So I told her I’d ask you…It’s Mamo, son…She’s after coming back…She wants you.’
In the meadow by the cow-byre a farmer is girdling elms. Come the spring he will burn them. The grass is flat and yellowed.
As though drawn on a rod-line, the child walks towards the forest. Vinson puts an arm around him. No tears.
CHAPTER 65
I SHALL HAVE THE PLANTATION OF THOSE GODLY FIELDS
Found painted on the schoolhouse door at Redemption Falls on the morning after the boy’s disappearance
HYPOCRITS I AM HERE
I SEE EUERY THING YOU DO
RAISE A HAND TO TAKE THE BOY FROM ME
AND I WILL SLAUGHTER EUERY MALECHILD IN
REDEMPTION & TO THIS I TAKE OATH THAT I WILL
MURDER EUERY LAST OF YOUR SONS & THEIR
BLOOD SHALL BE ON YOUR HANDS
TAKE NOTE THAT ALL WHICH ASSIST
IS GUILTY & PUNISHED
I SEE EUERY THING YOU DO
YOU ARE HYPOCRITS
-MK1025-
CHAPTER 66
LES ADIEUX
The lonely death of Patrick Vinson – His funeral – Lucia’s return
They found Patrick Owen Vinson at Willowcreek woods. He had received a single gunshot to the head. At first the searchers reckoned that he had taken his own life, but his onetime friend, Marshal John Calhoun, pointed out that no man ever shot himself in back of the head. He had been victim of an execution.
He was buried in the churchyard at Redemption Falls, his casket afforded military honors. O’Keeffe himself gave the oration at the chapel, though he had not slept in days, was exhausted from searching for the stolen child. Patrick Vinson had been his comrade in the War, he said. A good and brave man, he had fought the lion’s fight. The Governor had seen Patrick Vinson run into a burning hospital-barn in Virginia and save sixteen soldiers from death. Some were Confederate prisoners. Some were Union loyalists. Two were former slaves. Four were children. He had carried two infants across a river in Tennessee because he could not bear to leave them parentless.
He was born in County Louth, in the Cooley Mountains. His parents had died in the Famine. Aged six, alone, he had stowed away on a packet to Liverpool. He had spent many years in English prisons. In the winter of ’58 he made a way to New York. He had worked as a waiter at Brooklyn. He had scrimped to bring an aged uncle and aunt from Ireland where they were living in desperate straits in the Cavan poorhouse. He had been the first Irish-born immigrant to enlist for the Union, rising quickly to the rank of Corporal.
He and O’Keeffe had later had differences – it could not be denied. But the rumors about Patrick Vinson were wrong and cruel. Traitorship was unimaginable in the heart of such a fighter. If Vinson was a traitor, so was every man.
The congregation of nine attended in silence to the Governor. When it came time to take the coffin from the chapel to the hearse, nobody volunteered to do this honor. O’Keeffe and Orson Rawls and the priest and an altar-boy carried the remains to the empty street. Out o
f loyalty to O’Keeffe, John Calhoun then joined the funeral procession. Those five were the only mourners at Patrick Vinson’s graveside. The Stars-and-Stripes from his casket was never claimed. Nobody knows what became of it. In the coming years his tombstone would often be defaced. Memories proved long in the Territory.
Late the following night, from the south-eastern trail, a woman rode into Redemption Falls. She looked weary and pale, for she had been traveling since dawn and was unaccustomed to the roughness of the Territory’s roads: its want of bridges, its unmarked fords, its tracks through burnt-down forests.
He was alone at the table, back to the door, as she entered with the slow-moving cook.
‘General,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Stróinséir a ta ann.’ His Gaelic for a visitor. A stranger.
For some time he did not move. Then he montioned for Elizabeth to leave. He reached out a hand to the bottle on the table and unsteadily filled a glass.
‘Have you come here to gloat?’
‘Con – please…’
‘You are happy now, I suppose. Your wish has been granted…You must tell me the saint to whom you prayed for deliverance.’
‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘Nobody would have wished harm to the child.’
He stood, went to the fire, tossed a log in the flames. She was surprised by the cleanliness of his clothes. She had been expecting to see him broken, but he was clear-eyed, neat. He had shaved off his beard. He refused even to look at her. He sat at the table; began writing.
‘Is there news, Con?’
‘Of what?’
‘Of the boy, of course.’
He continued at his paperwork. Unfolded a parchment bearing a diagram. She watched him crosschecking figures in its margins. Other documents were sifted while she stood in the firelight. He pressed his seal into an envelope.
‘Might I have something to eat?’
‘Are you addressing me? Or a servant?’
‘I am hungry, Con. I only wanted – ’
‘Elizabeth will give you something. If we have it. In the kitchen.’
‘The kitchen?’
‘That is correct. I am working here at the table. My work is important. It cannot be interrupted by inconsequential disturbances. Was there some other matter before you let me alone?’
‘Might I stay here the night, Con? I have been riding since early.’
‘Wherever the Hell you want. I could care less what you do.’
Elizabeth was not there, but had left mutton broth on the stove. Lucia ate alone at the servant’s table. The soup was sour; there was no bread. She climbed to her old room, found a nightgown in a drawer. Bare soles on the rough-planed floorboards. She heard him some time later, entering the cave of his room. The quoits of her bed as she turned in it.
She slept for a while, but shallowly, uneasy. There were many boxes in the room; piles of books, old cartons. She supposed he was using it to store unwanted things. They seemed to draw the goodness from the air.
‘Lucia,’ he called. ‘Would you come here a moment?’
There were clothes on his floor. Spider webs in the windowframes. A gun-belt hanging on a peg.
‘I apologize,’ he said, without meeting her face. ‘Thank you. For coming back. It cannot have been easy. I am grateful to have you here tonight.’
‘It is not a matter of gratitude.’
‘Yes, it is. To me, it is. I hope you have been well. I am very sorry for what has happened between us. I was lonely without your company. I should have said that when you came. Forgive my stubbornness if you will. I have not been very well. It was bloody of me.’
‘I was lonely without yours. Your company, I mean.’
Perhaps suspecting merely courtesy, he made no reply for a moment. Wind racketed a door downstairs.
‘Would you stay a while in the room? I have not been sleeping very well. If the idea would not disgust you. I expect it would.’
‘Of course it would not. How can you say such things?’
‘Would you come closer to me, Lucia?’ he asked.
Unfamiliar nakedness. The loneliness of being in a body. The picture we refuse of our parents, our ancestors, of people who lived long ago, who were not like us, who did not have our feelings, whose desire is so frightening because it is that from which we came. And there will one day be an anonymous poem where this moment is approached: its disquiets, its misgivings, a woman’s breasts being kissed, his fingers in the lacings of a nightgown full of metaphors, for the body is a fund of metaphors in the hands of a versifier, who knows how afraid it makes us. Broken in war. Touched in love or want. Longed for in the night. Imagined in the street.This living hand , wrote her most beloved poet.I hold it out to you.
There is gracelessness, for they are unaccustomed to reading one another any more. No rhyme, no meter; nothing scans. A candle overturns and extinguishes on the dresser as they clunk like the couplets of a youthful sonnet. His hands are ungainly, as though bandaged in apprehensions. The dresser scrapes the floorboards as he kisses her abdomen, but he has forgotten how to pleasure her, and she has forgotten how to feel, or to trust, or even to know what pleasure is. The thing he is doing is too intimate now, and the mirror against her arching back feels cold and strange, so that the feeling is an incursion, unreal as shaking hands with a spouse, and with her hands she asks him to stop. He rises to her mouth but he seems reluctant to be kissed himself. Somehow he has opened his clothes. So strange to touch his neck, the cleft of his collarbone. To be intimately touched herself, to be touched by him in any way at all. He turns down the wick of the lamp.
In the dark they kiss untidily, and his sex tastes of ashes, and he maneuvers her wordlessly into a way that does not especially please her, but she remembers how fiercely it arouses him and she permits it. And there is a tentativeness, if that is possible, as well as a desolation, in the silence and then in his sounds. And it surprises her, before long, how he remembers the way that was always best for her, and asks shakily if she would like that now. But her pleasure, as it begins to rise, seems too much for him to be part of; he is too quick, and it hurts, and she is dazed with dissatisfaction as he finishes. He himself does not seem very satisfied either. The rhythm of his breathing; he is feigning sleep. It has been almost nine years since she last shared a bed with him, the only adult on the earth with whom she has ever shared a bed. What stirs in the cauldron of his head as he breathes? How unknown, that body now.
Sea-flower. Anemone. Coral. Australia. A shark’s fin cutting water. An enemy. In drifts of a dream, she sees him alone on the island and somehow she is there with him, they are sleeping on the stones.
‘…Con?…’
His breathing.
‘…Would you like…Are you tired?’
That hour you watched him swimming. A night you did not sleep at all. Was that love? Does the body remember? The words cried out, or whispered, or withheld. Intimacies of lovers. Unwritten verbs and nouns. A night you awoke to his touch and he wanted you both to be silent; and all night long you were silent together, except for those seconds when it was impossible to be silent. Those days when you were new married, before everything changed. Those hours you walked together in Washington Square Park scarcely able to wait for the nightfall.
Looking down on the dot of the bed from a stupefying height; then dropping toward it suddenly through interstellar space. Around her, as she plummets, hurtle ribbons of light, which are palpitant, somehow, with the earth-aromas of their bodies. Elizabeth and Winterton coupling in a stagecoach. A hospital ward in the War.
She awakens with a judder to find that he has lit a candle on the dresser. She looks at the clock. She has been asleep three hours. His white, flaccid shoulders; his untied hair. The body of a man past the midpoint of a life. As though everything he feels – has ever felt, perhaps – has enwrapped him like a caul of unwanted flesh. Faded scars of Tasmania across his back.
‘Do you think the boy is dead, Lucia?’
‘– Con…You must sleep.’ r />
He nods without turning.
‘Yes.’
‘You did your best for him, Con. You must never think – ’
‘I cannot…seem to speak of it. I am sorry.’
‘Are you sick? You look pale. Won’t you come away from the window?’
‘Not sick. I am very thirsty.’
‘Can I fetch you some water?’
‘You’re not tired.’
‘It would only take a moment.’
‘Thank you.’
She rises, puts on her nightgown. He does not look at her as she does. The house through the darkness, the ghosts of the kitchen. The guillotine of an ancient mangle. Something scuttles by the door. From the press she takes a jug of water left to cool by Elizabeth, who is sleeping in her chair by the embers.
The palliasse in the corner. Its blanket triangled, as though the kitchen were to be inspected by a sergeant. The boy’s trousers and a shirt folded neatly by the pillow. A book he was reading; face down.
‘Lucia?’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you think we should not have married? I should value your complete honesty. Has it been a very great mistake?’
‘I suppose…I have sometimes been confused. You are not an easy person to be married to…And I am not an easy person to be married to, either.’
‘We did not know each other very well. When we married, I mean. Perhaps we should have waited longer, as your father would have wished.’
‘Perhaps…That would have been wiser…I suppose all married people must have such thoughts from time to time.’
‘Do you think so, truly?’
‘I don’t know…Is that strange?’