A Thousand Moons

by Sebastian Barry

  I remember well the day he came home after his long time in prison and I don’t believe in all the history of the world there was ever so happy a face atop a body as Thomas McNulty’s face that day. He had walked down on his own the five hundred miles from Kansas.

  For our part John Cole and myself had walked half the road to the town because we knew Thomas McNulty would swing right of the woods and avoid Paris and reappear like a very buck at the trees’ edge.

  I don’t know if you ever saw a man take another man in his arms but if you haven’t I can tell you it is a touching sight. Because men are fixed to be so cold and brave, in their eyes. Maybe that afflicted Jas Jonski, but not my two men. They took a grip of each other by the ragged trees and maybe Thomas McNulty was clothed worse than any forest weed, and John Cole to a stranger’s eyes was as rough as a ditch, but I knew the story of them in particular and so I could justly suspect the fierce force that burned through them, from one breast to another, in the fever of that embrace.

  I suppose if I had had an ambition for Jas Jonski it would have been that he loved me as well as that.

  Then Rosalee holding me in her arms.

  I guess the world can be sad enough.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  We heard of people hungering elsewhere. The whole south had been burned in the last year of the war and it was sometimes said only weeds could flourish after that. And then the whole wide world went to hell. No money in the banks. What else were banks for but to have money in them? And the Paris Invigilator spoke of counties where great crowds of freedmen walked blindly about and ravishments and murders itemised and no one seemed to know when the good turn in things might come. We’d had a president called Andrew Johnson who had been all for saying he was poor dead Lincoln’s emissary on earth but really he loved those old beaten rebs. That’s what Thomas said. And those beaten rebs were rising, rising all the time.

  It wasn’t my first time finding the world all flood and fire or my first time to enjoy good days either. Or for outside things to break against a happiness. My own mother when I was a very little girl worked to heap me always with happiness. It was a blessed thing to be a child among my people. The grown women kept the camp and the men hunted and fought and it was our small task as children just to bob about and be happy. That much I remembered clearly enough. We ran about between the teepees and there was nothing to fence us only maybe the temper of an ill-tempered dog. In the winters the foul storms kept us spancelled in our tiny spaces but what was that to us? And we got the long strips of dried meat and snow was melted on the fire. And in the deepest section of the year our teepee must have been like a secret cone inside the big snow, only the wisp of smoke traipsing on the surface to betray where we crouched. My mother’s head held good stories and she told them to us as we leaned into her legs for warmth. We had our own language in those times and I can still feel her voice murmuring, her breath a little tempest on my face as I looked up at her. Her arms rested along our backs like fallen branches forgotten there and she uttered her stories. Of wonders and strange times. By being able to make each moment in a child’s measure good she made us feel the possible long country of eternity. Many’s a time I wept against her knees because I was so happy.

  My mother had the fame of great bravery among our tribe. One time when all the men were away a band of Crow who were our enemies came roaming near our village. It was just the women and the children and the old ones. Those Crow were going to take what they could and kill us or whatever they wanted to do. My mother broke from our little group and walked out to the edge of the ground where the Crow were gathered. She greeted them in a friendly way and started to talk to them and soon they were talking pleasantly and so somehow by the magic of her courage that moment of disaster was turned away. People talked about that moment as a sacred thing and she was held in great reverence because of it. Three or four times she was asked to ride with the men to war because they believed she had a special power. They put a man’s clothes on her and off she rode. She had this way of knowing where the enemy was in a landscape even when they were hiding. There wasn’t a man on this earth could have snuck up on her. Many said to me there was no one ever like her. In that way she was a story herself.

  Another story she told was one she called The Fall. A great sickness had come to us, she said, a thousand moons ago. Almost everyone died. They fell down and just hours later were dead. Oh, how we feared that story. A thousand moons ago was her deepest measure of time. It was the same measure as Thomas McNulty’s ‘a hundred years’. A wandering preacher asked him one time, ‘When didst thou come to America, Thomas?’ ‘A hundred years ago,’ was his answer. For my mother time was a kind of a hoop or a circle, not a long string. If you walked far enough, she said, you could find the people still living who had lived in the long ago. ‘A thousand moons all at once’, she called it. You could not walk so far, she said, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. She had all sorts of notions that pleased us greatly as children, and frightened us too.

  But the soldiers killed her of course and they killed my father and my uncles. They killed my sister, my aunts, they killed a lot of people. They must have done, because everyone was gone. It was just me then, it felt like.

  We were nothing to them. I think now of the great value we put on what we were and I wonder what does it mean when another people judge you to be worth so little you were only to be killed? How our pride in everything was crushed so small it disappeared until it was just specks of things floating away on the wind. Where was my mother’s courage then? Was it dust too? We thought the world was called Turtle Island but it turned out it was not. What does that do to your heart, what did it do to mine?

  Nothing, nothing, nothing, we were nothing. I think about that and think it is the very rooftop of sadness.

  But maybe that was why Thomas McNulty and John Cole loved me, because I was the child of nothing.

  Only a few of us little children seemed to escape the massacre to be extracted like thorns from that life and put suddenly into another. Then Mrs Neale taught me my English in the fort and then she gave me to Thomas McNulty when he asked for me. Mrs Neale asked me would I go. And even if I was a little lost girl, and he was a rough soldier, I liked him. I remember sitting there all tidy and small in front of Mrs Neale, making the decision. Yes. They were just going to bring me along as a servant. Maybe she would have given me to them no matter what I said. But I don’t know because I said yes. Mrs Neale had a liking for Thomas and she trusted him. I can see now that lots of Indian girls were taken for wicked purposes. That crazy man Starling Carlton, why, it was well known that he was a thief of children, and would bring children off the wild country to people for reasons that were so dark no season of the year and no night of storm could match them.

  No, I think it is true I couldn’t remember the slaughter. I truly don’t think I could.

  Now here was a second thing I couldn’t remember and it had just happened to me.

  In the midst of this Jas Jonski appeared after a couple of weeks. He came clattering up the track on an old horse he must have begged off his friend Frank Parkman at the town livery. Of course I had not been near the town ever since and I suppose he might have been waiting for me to reappear there. Who knows how his mind was working. It was a late spring day of narrow sunshine with plenty of cold still in it. My trembling had stopped to the naked eye but the very sight of him atop that sorry horse, his red face swaying about, didn’t do me good. I wasn’t agog to see him again anyhow. Far from it. I stood in the shadows of the parlour and watched him approach, digging his spurs into the sides of the grey mare. The men had been out since five but only as far as the tobacco barn because they were doing work there so they were only a hundred yards off the house.

  Rosalee was cleaning Tennyson’s rifle and the gun was lying in sections on the kitchen table and there was a thick smell of oil in the room.

  ‘Who coming up the track?’ she said, though she hadn’t even looked up
. I guess she heard the ruckus of the hooves. As I say every stranger was a fear in prospect.

  ‘It that boy Jas Jonski,’ I said.

  Rosalee abandoned her brother’s gun and went to the window, peering out. She looked out fiercely then looked back at the dismantled gun as if she would have liked to have the use of it.

  ‘You wanting to see him?’ she said.

  ‘Not so much.’

  ‘You tell him yet about that wedding?’

  ‘I ain’t said a word about nothing to him.’

  ‘You want me to tell him he must come another day?’

  ‘I want you to tell him never come.’

  As she passed me then she laid a hand on my back in kindness and then went forth into the chill light of the morning. She stomped down the steps and now Jas Jonski was maybe forty feet from her, and I could see him struggling to tie his mare’s reins to the stump-post. But that mare was a devil for tossing her head. Rosalee was able to get all the way to him before speaking.

  Rosalee was a big woman and it looked like there were two of her to Jas Jonski’s skinny one. I could see him smiling his smile, and laughing his little tin laugh, and I saw him lay a hand on her back just as she had done to me. He somehow indicated ownership with his careless touch. But unlike me, Rosalee made a firm step back and she widened her arms and I don’t know what she said but I saw Jas Jonski pout his lips and was looking at her like she peed on his shoe. If she wasn’t a slave any more to him she was still a lowly person. Then despite his small size he pushed her out of his way imperiously and started towards the house. Me and the house.

  Well I retreated back through the parlour and out into the yard there that fell away from the back wall and I ran through the winter-raddled weeds swift as my fear emboldened me and nearly tore off the latch of the wicket gate in the great door of the barn. Lige Magan was a few feet in and he had the huge rake and was raking tobacco dust and the general dust that gathers everywhere on this earth, and I could see Thomas McNulty and John Cole on the upper reach of the tobacco houses, caulking chinks with mud and mortar out of heavy buckets. Lige would burn all that dust against the bad mould and little mushrooms that lurked in a taken harvest. I didn’t see Tennyson Bouguereau. No, I saw him, he was sharpening the harrows in a far corner. All late winter they had ploughed the frozen earth till the plough blades screamed. Soon it would be the turn of the harrows.

  I was damp now in my dress and I was shaking and I ran across the floor and up the big ladders to John Cole like I was still a little girl and I wrapped myself round him. So much for seeing to things myself. His hands and lap and arms were caked in mud. He printed himself on me. The ten mules stooked in there under the ladders against the cold shivered on their ties and stepped back a few steps on the hard ground.

  John Cole begged of me what was amiss and I told him that Jas Jonski was at the house.

  ‘You need to drive him off,’ I said.

  ‘Why’s that now?’ said John Cole.

  I said I didn’t know exactly but that I would be mighty obliged to him if he would go out and say as much to Jas Jonski and also would he say to Jas Jonski not to bother about coming again.

  Thomas McNulty was covered in mud head to foot and when he came over he banged his two hands on his breast and banged his two legs and banged his backside just to urge it off but he didn’t get far with that and then he looked at me.

  ‘I’ll go out and talk to him,’ he said, his voice as grim as I ever heard.

  ‘You do, Thomas,’ said John Cole.

  Now Lige Magan had made his way up the ladders after me. Lige’s father put Rosalee side by side with his own son at school. Only in old slave times could that have happened. That was long years ago. Maybe Rosalee was the only black woman in Tennessee knew Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Tennyson her brother could neither read nor write so her skills were rare skills. The point is, I never did see even Lige Magan reading a book in the time I knew him but he must have got some of the wisdom Rosalee got. Anyway he stayed Thomas McNulty from going.

  ‘I think best thing is I go down and bring his orders,’ he said.

  He meant bring orders to Jas Jonski. The world was all army to Lige.

  When I think about it, we were poised for danger there in Henry County, with three men that had fought for the Union, except, that was the point. They were soldiers through and through. Tach Petrie found he couldn’t budge them, and he had five, six men to command, they being hardened men that used to wear the light blue jacket.

  Lige Magan went down into the dusty bowel of the barn again and plucked up his rifle. With a little hasty glance up at us he pushed on through the wicket and the wicket banged and the darkness came back into the barn. Our faces were turned towards where we imagined Lige Magan was crossing the yards to Jas Jonski.

  A minute, two minutes passed. Had we even breathed out? Then there was a great bang and Thomas McNulty looked startled and he looked at John Cole and then tried to make a decision to stay or go and then he must have thought he’d better go in case that Jas Jonski had got a gun after all – and he hurried away.

  Then there was silence for a long time. Not a sound came up to tell us anything.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘So he the one that did it?’ said Lige Magan.

  We were in the cabin at that familiar table. Rosalee Bouguereau sat at my side, and Thomas McNulty the other. Thomas McNulty had his arms crossed and was gazing at me, nodding his greybeard face. John Cole was standing at the window but if he was looking out the queer blind stare in his eyes denied it. Tennyson Bouguereau wasn’t there, he was in the linen room yonder with Jas Jonski.

  ‘He didn’t say that,’ said Thomas McNulty. ‘He said it weren’t him. He said why in the name of tarnation would he come out if it was him who done it. That’s what he said, just now. Even when you put your rifle under his chin, Lige, he swore it weren’t him.’

  ‘Then I guess we have to beat him till he tells the truth,’ said Lige Magan, just flaring up. ‘He looked guilty to me. Why, he was all fixed to make a run when he saw me come out. Was going to run like the guilty right enough. When I fire that shot he stopped like a statue. Then he’s looking back, all white face. Then you come, Thomas, and then I ask him that question, and he don’t say nothing, and the piss running down his trews, and then I ask again, with the help of the gun, and right enough he say he didn’t do nothing. He says he never even knew nothing had happen. Waited ten days to hear from Winona and not a word. His fiancée he called her. Came out just to see what was what.’

  Lige Magan looked at Thomas McNulty with that particular look that meant, Well, what you say to that?

  But Thomas McNulty didn’t answer. He put a hand on my sweating back. I was crying like a spring rain. I was shaking. Shaking again. I felt sick as a poisoned person. Thomas McNulty was paying heed to that talk of mine, that strange talk with no words that was pouring out of me. I never felt so sad, sick, and scared. Even when I was trying to get home with Lana Jane Sugrue’s brothers. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, not to itemise. I didn’t want to hear any more talk. I wanted everything to go back to where it was before, me and the white dress, and working for the lawyer Briscoe, and thinking about kissing Jas Jonski.

  ‘Well, we got to know what to do,’ said Lige Magan, the anger gone out of him as quick as it came in. ‘Can’t leave him tied up in the linen room if he ain’t done nothing, goddamn it.’

  ‘We spring him if we believe him,’ said John Cole firmly. ‘I don’t know if I care to believe him. He just a skunk.’

  ‘You care if Sheriff Flynn come out here with twenty deputies and knock everything along to hell,’ said Lige Magan. ‘We just got to know what happened.’

  He was looking at me then. I was seeing him through the cascade of tears. I didn’t know what Rosalee Bouguereau had said to them even. About the torn parts. All that. I never even kissed that boy. Did he tear me like that? Was it him that did that? I was screaming at myself inside of myself, s
creaming with my mouth open so loud. Not that they saw that. But Thomas McNulty was a wise old person, he could feel things happening to other folk, I think he could.

  ‘See, if you don’t remember nothing,’ said Thomas, to Lige Magan, ‘it don’t mean it don’t done happen, that’s a fact.’

  ‘I going to put my girl into her bed and I going to give her my rabbit soup,’ said Rosalee Bouguereau, angrily too, scraping back her chair and standing up. ‘Look at this girl. She can’t even sit.’

  I could feel myself melting away. I thought I was like water but I had no cup to hold me. How small I felt. World didn’t care, I knew that. The world outside what we were at Lige’s place. World wanted bad things to happen to Indian girls. That was what I was thinking, when I was thinking. Mostly I was trying to hold up my melting head. Hold my melting arms, my melting legs. I was just a girl, wasn’t I? I was so glad for Rosalee being there, a kind woman like that.

  But they were all kind. It was just they didn’t know what to do and they had known a thousand times what to do in bad times. That was why they were still alive and I was still alive. I was still alive and now I feared I was dead somehow. I thought someone had killed me right enough. How was I ever going to rise again? How would I get my limbs back? How would I be happy again, foolish happy as you need to be in this life? Stand on the porch of a spring morning and feel the cold in the sunlight but also the rumour of summer? What a foolish little child I had been – but that was the best sort of character to hold, in all the history of the world. A foolish little child loved by all who knew her unless it was an ignorant farmboy seeing just only an Indian’s black hair in the town. Maybe it was a foolish farmboy that hurt me, maybe it was. I was peering and peering back now, trying to bursting to see that. Oh, if it wasn’t Jas Jonski maybe there was a hope for me in that.