‘Assist me, son,’ were the Governor’s actual words. His dying plea was rejected.
‘Yon soul you murdered was Liza-Jane, my sister,’ cried Mooney. ‘She is murdered in the river. Look!’
The girl’s body was indeed now floating near theGrant . She had been shot through the chest and head.
The Governor, close to death, murmured that he did not understand. The boy ranted of a terrible journey she had endured in order to find him. He had had a fever at the hideout. She had tended and healed him. They had planned to go into Canada. She was his ‘only living blood’. Marshals were shouting for the child to surrender, saying no quarter would be given did he refuse. O’Keeffe beckoned them to hold fire, even as the youth menaced him. Indeed, he protected the child from their sightlines.
‘Murdering bastard and traitor!’ screamed the boy. The watchman, Field, was imploring him to lay down his weapon. The child said: ‘I will send him to Hellfire.’
‘Christ’s mercy, then,’ prayed James O’Keeffe. These, we believe, were his last words.
The youth fired on the Acting Governor who stumbled through the guard-rail, falling into the water. Lawmen on the verge fetched a rowboat and flung out guy-ropes, but it was too late to save the Governor’s life. Fatally wounded, he was torn downriver by the current, which was flowing at more than twenty miles per hour that night. Two witnesses would see him attempting to cling to a floating tree-trunk before disappearing beneath the surface near Liberty Falls.
The boy, Jeremiah Mooney, was arrested without resistance and taken to Strathspeigh County Jail. He has been pronounced lunatic by physicians and frequently attempts to harm himself. He refuses to speak, yet is sometimes heard ‘keening’ the name of his sister and ‘Mamo’. As to what should be done with him, it is beyond the remit of this Commission to suggest. There is currently no asylum in the Territory.
Twenty-nine citizens died at Fort Stornaway that night, including John Cole McLaurenson, a prostitute Eliza Mooney, two simple-minded associates who had attached themselves to the gang, all but three men of the Governor’s purpose, and thirteen patients on theGould . Four others later died of wounds sustained in the attack. One man was blinded by the fire.
The Acting Governor’s remains have not been recovered, despite searches, which have continued for many months, of a ninety-mile stretch of the Missouri River, its islands, banks and depths. It is proposed that the effort be now abandoned. God have mercy on his soul.
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. Blacked-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 fin
d small rooms comforting. A man can have too much breathing space.
I look at my documents. I think about our children. I am not religious, obviously, but I have my thoughts. Atheism itself is a kind of faith. I find it a profound consolation.
I stare out of the little window at the streetcars and taxicabs; at the messenger-boys and misfits and the policemen sweating into their tunics. And – yes – guilty, Officer – the pretty girls, too. Man does not live by bread alone!
I imagine the avenue as it must have looked in the past – a pasture, then a hunting track, then an undulating road – Manhattan was once hilly, but no one remembers that. Why would anyone have cause to? Wilderness. Field. Lane. Highway. Then the long, splendid boulevard, the ribbon of macadam, along which the young of our city marched away to the War. As they will, I suppose, in the future.
V
When I open up my boxes, a smell of the long-ago arises. Fungal. Old parchments. A suggestion of sealing wax. The past breaks in the air like an exploding spore. It fills my waning eyes. I breathe it into my lungs. I fancy that I can sense it puff through my blood. Vlad, you old impaler, I think of it as my opiate. As the movies are to my wife.
My pastime, I suppose. A rich man needs a diversion – otherwise he grows idle and dies. Some millionaires amass paintings, others rare furniture, antiques. Odd, what we shore against the inevitable. My pursuit has been to collect as much as I can nose up of James O’Keeffe and the boy Jeddo Mooney, those long-forgotten actors from America’s Civil War, who somehow contain in themselves, so it seems to their collector, everything larger of war.
I have articles, memorabilia, broadsides, maps, etchings, sketches, balladry, photographs. I believe I own a copy of every text that ever mentioned them in the public prints of the United States. And I have other materials, too, of a more private nature. Journals. Personal writings. Correspondence and so forth. Even highly secret papers, classified documents. Every door can be opened, provided, of course, that one is willing to pay the price of admission. The trick, as with all quests, is finding the door. Usually it is just where you thought it would be.
I am ridiculous? Fixated? My wife has found an ally! Is it any more preposterous than collecting butterflies or beer steins or the heads of shot quadrupeds or – Heaven help us – stamps? My wife insists it is. She thinks me morbid, obsessive.Et tu , respected Reader: what do you collect? Books, do you tell me? My wife likes those. But I do not share her enthusiasm for the invented story; its neatness, its pretenses, its want of contradictory grain. Twain, the great contriver, put it remarkably well. Little wonder the truth is stranger than fiction: Fiction has to make sense.
I catalog my papers. It gives me pleasure to look at them. (Viennese explanations are possible, no doubt.) Yes, the inks have faded now; many of the binding-ribbons are frayed. It grows stiflingly hot in my cubbyhole in a Manhattan summer. Humidity is not good for old-fashioned paper, which often was made of cotton-rag and sometimes hemp; beaten, mashed to pulp, and then molded into quoins. Paper, alas, is a living material. Like all living things, it will die.
VI
My collection includes forgeries – I suppose that is inevitable – but only a couple and even those are not entirely without interest. There is always a little dishonesty when money is offered for old things. It should not bother us too much. It speaks to human enterprise. And I am glad to have his medals, most of which have been certified genuine, though many are so verdigrised as to be almost illegible now. Sometimes – I blush – I have pinned them to my dressing-robe and saluted myself a moment in the pier glass.
I rummage these withered foolscaps – they are like an octogenarian’s skin – foxed, mottled, stippled with age. I have compared them to my own skin as a matter of fact. There are days when their contents seem sharp as wounds, and others when their meanings retreat. Those days are hard. One feels somehow alone. It is as though they treat of people who never existed: a runaway boy and those who tried to love him. O’Keeffe, I think, would have found them a fascination, would have pored over every nuance, for he was greatly attuned to language. He loved the arrangement, the deployment of words, the things they can suggest without ever directly stating. He was a man who knew well how a character is constructed. It is a pity he never completed his book.
Look at these packets of nothings. Stooks of decaying paper. Often my wife implores me to consign them to the trash. They have caused more quarrels between us; she grows testy when I mention them. Better you should have married a library, she says. Better you should have married ajunkshop . But women rarely make good collectors, in truth. They do not appear to experience that need.
‘The past is a far riverbank,’ Lucia once wrote. ‘We know it is there, for we can see it, and are close to it. But the water makes it always unreachable.’ For me, that is not so. My papers are the stepping-stones. A precarious traverse – but possible.
At the end of a session of study, I box them. Soon I will be boxed, too, and stored away. The attic will be empty, except for the spider-webs. I will gather the dust that I am. My regret, before the silence, is that I never walked the squares of that faraway capital to which I have long yearned to make a pilgrimage. But by the time my wife acceded, already we were too old. The journey would have been dangerous that winter. In any case, once there, I would have found it difficult to return. I thought of it as my elephant’s graveyard. I do not believe the reactionary newspapers, though friends tell me I should. But I cannot, so sometimes we quarrel. To have ever breathed the air of man’s future made flesh, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – ah, beloved, I tarried too long. But to know you are there and will always be there has consoled my faithless dotage.
VII
As for Winterton’s fate, I wish I could tell you more of it. Ernest Dean was the name of the border guard on the Canada side who noticed a miner crossing stealthily with a pack mule. The beast was weighted heavily with rough canvas sacks. Gold, said the miner. He had struck lucky. Prospectors did not commonly have a fine Bostonian accent. This one was acting suspiciously. When challenged, he overcame the guard, tied him up (‘apologizing as he did so’) and walked calmly into the Canadian night. The fugitive’s face was described by hapless Dean as showing the marks of numerous burns.
It was revealed some years ago that he had been married at least twice: legally, in Cuba, as Peter John Williamson, then bigamously in Chicago, as William Paul Harris. A cartographer trained in the British Army, he had managed to flee Scotland when about to be arrested for the poisoning of a woman in Glasgow. The wounds he bore were not sustained during the American Civil War, at least not in any battle with southerners. On the infamous night of July 13th, 1863, he was attacked by a mob of New York-Irish immigrants. Angered by the proposed draft, by which they were disproportionately affected, they had burned a Negro orphanage and committed many other horrific crimes. Union soldiers and black New Yorkers were savaged by the rioters. They had been lynching an elderly porter when Winterton intervened to stop them, in his uniform but alone and unarmed. They kicked him unconscious before setting him alight. The riot would not be the last time in the American story when those who felt powerless turned their hatred on the weakest and the innocent would be murdered in the streets. One of the most shameful atrocities in the history of Irish-America, it does not feature, to my knowledge, in Irish balladry.
Elizabeth Longstreet remained in the Territory almost seven more years, working mainly as a laundress in Edwardstown. In 1872, she married Prospero Leavensworth, a freed slave of Texas who had been a soldier in the War. For some years she had been completely blind, so that she had never seen Prospero Leavensworth, a fact she would often make jokes about. He was a kindly and quiet man, and their marriage was happy. They migrated to Liberia, on the west coast of Africa, where Leavensworth established a small enterprise exporting palm oil. Their son, Theobald Wolfe Leavensworth, was born and raised in Monrovia, at the age of twenty-six becoming a doctor in the city, then a member of the Liberian Gove
rnment. His mother, an elder of the Presbyterian Church, was given a lay-chaplaincy among women patients at Monrovia Asylum, a position that cannot have been easy but which she described as ‘the deepest blessing’, and in which she did remarkable things. She died in November 1928. In the year of her death she had been interviewed by a Reverend William L.R. Trees, who possessed the only Edison recording machine in Liberia. The transcript abounds with theyassuhs andlaud-hab-murcies that are not unusual in such documents when the speakers are black. Most of these I have taken the liberty of silently retranslating, leaving only a few examples of the original transcriber’s work – more as an illustration of how such transcripts were constructed than of how standard Southern-American English was ever spoken. I have a photograph of her above my desk, and one brief letter. It is signed: ‘Free at last: Elizabeth.’
Jeddo Mooney remained in the Fort Stornaway jailhouse for almost eighteen months after the night he shot his protector James O’Keeffe. His hands were shackled; the lawmen gagged him with a leather strap. Some whipped him when there was nothing else to do. Twice he was half-hanged from the roofbeams of the jail. The three men responsible were later disciplined.
Every couple of weeks they would trolley him to the home of a minister of religion in the town. He refused to have the boy in his church, though the collection plate would have been heavied by such an appearance. The Reverend would read from the Bible as the boy lay on the carpet; his wife would vamp hymns on the pianoforte. Their redemptive effect was limited, but the boy enjoyed listening to the stories, many of which were about warfare and cruelty and murder, and were thus the kind of narratives to which boys liked to listen in those distant, more literate days.