A Thousand Moons

by Sebastian Barry

  Boys called nightriders might be expected to be found in their beds by day. Now here was the little city told of to the colonel lying up on a clearing by the old river. I was halted on a wooded rise above the scene. A smaller creek rattling in on gleaming dark stones made a ford of the main creek below the cabins. I kept off with my three hundred paces but I could no longer see the colonel’s men. They had maybe crept down into the small oaks tangling up the riverbank on this side. It was difficult to see. The aspect of the so-called city – just in truth a half dozen ramshackle throw-ups – was strangely serene. There was a clutch of toiling women washing big white sheets upriver. They were hitting the twisted cloth against the black rocks and even from a distance I could see the dirty suds fleeing downriver like so many waterbirds. I could even hear the voices of the women talking, chatting away, seemingly as happy as ever women were to be together at such tasks. The work eased by gossip and laughter. I felt a sort of sorrow to see it. Not only because it put me in powerful mind of our own Lakota village in the long ago but because I was an Indian girl who could never have spoken so at ease with those laughing women. Their dresses hitched to their waists and their legs gleaming wet. Helpless, happy laughter. No certificate of travel could gain me entry there, and I was sorry for it. There was an enchantment in it that burned into me, though I was stilled there on my mule ready to go down and do them perchance mischief. I sat in my manly clothes and longed for something I had no lingo for, English or Indian. I don’t know even now what that was.

  As I thought these curious thoughts suddenly the undergrowth erupted with riders below me. The colonel cried out an order and raising his sword plunged down onto the ford, deep enough where he entered. He was giving room to his eager men behind. The ford might have been two feet deep with a strong sluggish water on it. The horses’ legs were slowed, the men hallooed and kicked forward, the river was trying to gainsay them. Out of the cabins indeed in their nightshirts blossomed the sleepy nightriders. It was that moment when two stories come together: the story of what the colonel wanted to do, and the story of those dreaming men. And to join them required that cacophony and turmoil. Eagerness and sleepiness made all the one in the boil of the moment. They had no sentries set it would seem. All was surprise and havoc and calling. A big man had run out from a cabin and was standing now in the centre of their rough compound, his nightdress billowing like a dismantled teepee, roaring orders. Big raging roaring loud-bellowed orders that the distance made almost comical. The women washing sheets leaped from the water like the petals of an exploded flower and their dresses dropped long to their ankles and I thought I could see them gathering rifles into their clutches. Now rifles and guns began to fire with a violent pock-pock though I stood so far away. I saw the fiery flashes. I kicked my mule forward.

  As the little trail went down it entered a deep stand of trees and I couldn’t see the cabins now. Though I thought I was keeping them square to my face even so when I came out of the trees again I was fifty yards downriver of the mayhem. I saw bodies lying on the river meadow and I saw others wounded maybe dragging themselves to whatever safety could be devised and I saw Colonel Purton’s men storm the far bank with a tremendous fusillade and some with repeating rifles were riding Indian style without reins and working the breechblock and the trigger with both hands and firing, firing as if God had ordained this fury of firing. No effort had been made to get surrender from these men. No surrender maybe thought likely. It was smother them with the force of numbers, two hundred men against fifty souls, batter into them with a three-sided sickle of horses, engulf, dismay, destroy. The smoke of gunpowder rose from the melee. It might have been a clement morning mist along the peaceful river only for the great caterwauling of voices and the horrible screeching of wounded horses. I had seen just this before, but from inside a Sioux village. Inside the terror, at the heart of it. And everything I loved up to that moment about to be cancelled off the earth. As if bogus lives. Kill them all! And I sat there astride the mule like someone not there at all, but somewhere else, somewhere far away on the plains of Wyoming, but also, someone exactly there, living, gasping for breath, terrified. Then this strange girl came blazing from the undergrowth, dressed so vividly in a bright yellow dress that even in my great fright I noted it, bringing up her musket as if it was part of her own body, as if it had her own blood running through it in veritable veins, and fired it at my body. I felt the bullet tear into my right arm, I was only half leaning down to the Spencer rifle, I was just on the point of grasping it, when the bullet battered into my arm, battered into it, and I hauled up the Spencer, I knew the bullet was sitting in its little grave, and I fired blindly, something rose through me like a fire, my own blood was burning, it was the fiery pain of battle, and the pain pitched me down into blackness. No, no, now I was awake again, wide-eyed. That was a strange quick blackness. Did a minute pass? A moment? My enemy was now lying out across a riverside bush, also very strangely. I didn’t know if I had killed her. Or even shot her. I couldn’t see blood. She was a black-haired dark-skinned girl so beautiful the creek below wanted her. Her two legs remained on the bank, but the whole rest of her was depending on the kindness of that bush not to drop her down. Her head was furthest away, only four feet from the surging creek, which was full of spring rain. She was trying to bend back to safety with her two arms outstretched. We could hear the kerfuffle of the battle upriver still going on.

  ‘Hey, mister,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Suppose you could grab my hand?’ she said.

  ‘You shot me,’ I said, and I could see my own blood trickling down from my shoulder, though not as much as I expected.

  ‘I did,’ she said, ‘but, I can’t swim.’

  ‘Maybe you best drown then,’ I said.

  Then the bush lurched down an inch, two inches.

  ‘Jeez Christ,’ she said, and closed her eyes. ‘Hey, mister?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry I shot you.’

  ‘If I save you now maybe you go and get your rifle and shoot me again.’

  ‘As God my witness, I undertake – I ain’t never going to shoot you again. My rifle done fell in the river. Please, mister, take my hand.’

  ‘I ain’t no mister,’ I said.

  ‘I know, you just a boy.’

  I planted my boots on the edge of the bank and leaned over to grab her right hand. Then I had her hand in my hand. It struck me that she might be tricking me and about to drag me in with her. There was quietness upriver now, except for some hallooing, and the sound of horses scrabbling up scree. I hauled on her. She was so light she came easily, but the bush was against her intention, and down she spilled into the current, her yellow dress starting quickly to sink and drag her to her doom. She let out a screech like a hawk going down on its prey. But I had her fast. She got her boots back on the slippery earth, and was like a person running for their life, her legs blading and flashing with effort. With all my strength I dragged her up, and then sat down abruptly myself. I had hauled her back with my injured arm and it was a daisy of a pain now.

  ‘You took a bullet?’ I said.

  ‘I took no bullet,’ she said. ‘I took a big fright. That a big noisy gun you got.’

  Then she lay on her side panting. She was like a pony that had galloped a few miles too far.

  ‘Thank you – boy.’

  ‘I ain’t no boy either,’ I said. I didn’t even know why. What was it to her if I was a girl or a boy? A girl herself attached most forcibly to a gang of marauding killers. But I did say it.

  ‘What you?’ she said.

  ‘I a girl,’ I said. ‘Winona.’

  *

  She undertook then as a mere kindness or a thank you for saving her skin to walk back along the way with me. I didn’t know how to get back to any road otherwise. She stuck the offending Spencer back into its holster. She took the reins and led the weary mule.

  ‘Guess we had our own private battle back there,’ she said
, but this didn’t seem to need a reply.

  I couldn’t detect any sign of the militia. It was late afternoon towards evening now and there were whippoorwills that side of the county too by all accounts. I told her who the men were that I had ridden in with and whenever there was a gap in the trees or the ground rose somewhat, she would go up on her tippy toes and try and get a view back towards her wickiup village. She didn’t seem anxious about anything now. If it had been Lige Magan’s place I would have been hurrying back and damn any girl, bullet or no. I could almost see the yellow dress drying on her what with the Godgiven heat in her body.

  ‘Well, I’ll be,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Don’t think Zachary Petrie were expecting that.’

  ‘You someone’s daughter?’

  ‘I someone’s daughter. Ain’t everyone?’

  ‘Someone in that camp?’

  ‘I Peg,’ she said. ‘My mother were riding with Quantrill, you know? She dead a long time. She were a camp woman. My father were a scout for Quantrill. He dead too.’

  ‘You Indian?’ I said. That would make sense, I thought – with the dark hair and dark skin and the – the beauty of her.

  ‘I am. What, you don’t like Injuns?’

  She knew well what I was. It was meant to be humorous. It was. We both laughed. But it’s painful to laugh with a bullet wound in your arm.

  Then she found a new gap and went up on her tippy toes again.

  ‘Mercy me,’ she said, mostly to herself. ‘I don’t think he were expecting that.’

  For some reason too dark for me to understand she was the kind of person you might be inclined to tell things to. Don’t ask me why. So I told her all my trouble and I felt a damn sight better for doing so. And I told her about Jas Jonski and how dark all that was. She was pensive for a long time, and then she said:

  ‘I guess he done it alright.’

  This I heard with a strange interest but I didn’t have long to ponder it. We came round a huge mossy boulder and there on the ground was a big black bear. She must have been three hundred pounds in weight. Round as the same boulder and black as a kettle. Well you don’t go trying to shoot a creature like that, you got to scare her away. A huge head swung to look at Peg, still leading the mule. Their noses, her nose, the bear’s nose, and the mule’s nose, were not three feet apart. The mule didn’t like that, no more did Peg. A black bear is a softer soul than those grizzlies out on the western plains. A grizzly likes to attack first and think later, if bears do think. But this bear had that taken-aback look, closely matched by Peg’s. It was a tricky situation for the bear. Who to express anger to first? The mule reared up and down I came like a sack of sweet corn. Peg raised her arms and roared, trying to scare off the great animal. Then I stood at her side and roared too. The movement forward seemed to decide the bear. Or maybe it was my blood she smelled. She swung a paw at me so quick it seemed not possible to avoid it. A claw caught in Thomas’s old trews and took them off me like they were a dress. Maybe they weren’t too solid in the first place. Now I was naked as a child from waist to boots. The mule backed off and Peg forgot to let go – she was dragged back ten feet in the beat of a moment. I roared and leaped about, that was what you had to do, bears don’t like you to stand your ground. Not to their liking. An ignorant person might have tried to use the musket. I could have sworn she looked at me deep in the eyes for a long long minute. Maybe I imagined that. She could have killed me easily enough. Crashed after Peg, killed her, and just as nimbly could have killed my poor mule, now in a panic the size of a barn. As suddenly as we had come upon her, she was gone, leaving an enormous dark clamorous space where she had been, like an after image in the eye.

  I expected to see a long cut from that claw but there wasn’t a scratch on me. I was gazing down at my naked legs. Peg calmed the mule and tied him and I am sure was also expecting a wound beyond her management. But I was whole, save the bullet wound still seeping into my shirt, now my only item of clothing. The trews were ruined, they had ripped from the crotch right down the legs, both sides, you could have used them as a raggedy sail.

  We were shaken. But the world was full of bears all told and why should we be amazed? Peg looked at me and caught my eye and she laughed again. She had bent down to pick up my little pearly pistol and was handing it to me. She started with a little trickle of laughter and then she was laughing like a drunk in Zollicoffer’s. I hoped the bear didn’t think we were laughing at her.

  ‘You can’t go up on the road like that,’ said Peg, ‘you just can’t.’

  I was horrified at the thought. To ride even in the darkness naked to my boots. With a dozen men to pass. I didn’t look like a boy now, it was plain to see.

  Suddenly Peg was pulling off her yellow dress.

  ‘Give me your shirt,’ she said. ‘I need your shirt.’

  ‘What you doing?’ I said.

  ‘I ain’t got to show my modesty but to these trees,’ she said. ‘I’ll take you to the road and then turn myself for home.’

  She stood now in the starry darkness, in only a pair of scanty bloomers.

  ‘Give me the bloomers,’ I said. ‘You can keep your dress.’

  ‘I ain’t sending you home in bloomers,’ said Peg. ‘Put it on.’

  So I took off the shirt, groaning a little I will allow, and gave it to her and then I drew on the yellow dress. Luckily the dress had no arms or I would never have got it over the wound. We were the same sort of shape so it fitted as though it were my own. I found a good pocket for the señorita gun. Then she picked up the trews and wrapped them around her waist, as some sop to decency.

  ‘Guess you got the best part of the bargain.’ Then she contemplated me for a few moments. ‘Guess you a girl now right enough,’ she said.

  Now I could feel the weakness leaking into me from the bullet wound. She helped me back up on the shaken mule, and myself and the mule shook along together.

  When she got me up nearly onto the eastern road to Paris she gave me back the reins and looked at me. I was near to fainting. In some distress I dismounted. There was so much blood from my arm now. The wound had suddenly decided to bleed copiously. She tore a length of cloth off the ruined trews, and wrapped it round the wound and pulled it tight. Her eyes intentful, even fearful. She didn’t say anything else, and helped me mount again. Then she nodded her head and turned around, and went back the way she had come.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Once out on the road alone with the light now giving up the ghost and the torn blankets of dark and half-dark falling everywhere, I started to feel that wound like all soldiers must after a few hours pass. The first rush of strength subsiding and the pain growing ever more violent and netherworld, until you wonder you never gave greater thanks every moment of your life that had passed without such a burden. It weighed me down with its strange sense of violation and awfulness. It was a disgusting thing, the mealy-mouthed cousin of courage. I had no sensations in me other than it, it hurried everything else away, claiming me as its own. Only the pain, only the pain. Then when I got right to the middle of the pain, I couldn’t even breathe there. My chest was full of gasps. The road waved from side to side like a great run of water in a deep culvert. The browns of night mixed eagerly with the new blacks coming down. Every star was a shooting star. The moon rolled about prodigiously. Then everything was total black, total pain. I was half fallen from the mule because my spine had turned to cotton. I had my cheek against the mule’s muscled neck. If I was dying I wondered would I bear the same pain in the land of Death, would I carry it over, would it come with me greedily? Wanting me so much it couldn’t leave me? I heard a queer music along the trees and lifted my head with great weariness and stared but there was nothing there to make that sound. I thought I must be dying because a molten gold light seeped out of the black woods. It was like a huge creature. It took me and burned me in a golden bluster of pain. I saw my mother walking across the gold, her legs in golden grass.
My heart burst forth from my chest like a hare, happy with love, and raced towards her. I had escaped my suffering body and soon I would be in her arms.

  *

  When I woke to the world again every last speck of the gold had evaporated and my mother no doubt returned to her ancient story, beyond my ever reaching her. I thought I knew the room where I lay but could not tell exactly where it was – in what house or district. The walls were bare wooden boards and the bed was a little narrow iron thing. A small window entertained a dismal light. I heard a cock crowing some way off, and the sound of carts passing distantly outside, and the muffled underwater sound of folk going about their business – all many yards off, I thought. I was as weak as a newborn child. But with waking, fears awoke too. I fished down along my clothes for my little lady’s gun but it was nowhere on my person. I was looking for the waist of my trews. Of course, I thought, I am in Peg’s dress. That bear sent my pearly gun flying. But hadn’t Peg handed it back to me? Was I still in my boots? No, I was barefoot now. No knife either.

  Then the door opened and Jas Jonski entered, followed by a ghostly gentleman with a big leather bag. The ghostliness was only an impression maybe, but given greater force by the sudden flood of dread that engulfed me to see Jas. Worse than that bear. The very truth of the matter was, my body was terrified of him, even if my mind would not show me why. My desire to fly, to flee, was infinite. If I had not been so weary I would have been grateful to be allowed to burst out through the flimsy walls. I saw in my inner eye the planks fall down and the people outside gasp at my wondrous escape. This failure to attain freedom wrenched at me, but my body became so still I suddenly entertained the idea I was indeed dead. That Jas Jonski had only my killed body in his keeping and that the ghostly gentleman was the undertaker Luther Carp. No person that saw Luther Carp in the streets of Paris could fail to have a shiver go through them.