A Thousand Moons

by Sebastian Barry

  When the lawyer Briscoe spoke, the words seemed to me to scrape along the floor and reach the jury exhausted and pale, but that might just have been my crazy notion. He spoke well of me and denied the charge and said he would call witnesses would back him up and that that would be that, no doubt, and they would understand that in no manner could I have committed the crime and indeed it must be laid at the door of some person unknown at present. I had never seen the lawyer Briscoe ‘in action’. He was very much the actor, Mr Noone in Grand Rapids would have been well pleased with him. With his roundy phrases and his grave looks. I thought the flat stomach suited him well except he still wore a black velvet waistcoat made to accommodate it, so it hung from him like an extra skin.

  But all still might have been well, I didn’t know. I was just a girl there in enemy territory, that’s what it felt like. When the handsome prosecutor spoke against me, he sounded so certain even I quailed in my seat, as if indeed a person with so foul a deed like a weevil in my soul. John Cole was called to speak for me, and prettily he did so. He could have said everything he needed in a John Cole look, instead he knew he had to expand his usual succinct thoughts. He gave them when asked all my short history and who I was and how he hoped someday to send me up to Dartmouth College where an Indian might ‘larn something rare’, as he put it.

  Then Peg was called. She must have been kept in the corridor. She was wearing an egregious pinny she favoured, I knew not why. The big doors were screeched open by the bailiffs and in she came, small and frightened-looking. And I was shocked to see her not only because I feared for her but also because it was difficult for me to look at her at any time without a kind of shock. All the same I was watching the face of Aurelius Littlefair to see how he would be responding. He gave the mere hint of a grimace but otherwise remained separate and austere from our occasions.

  The lawyer Briscoe asked Peg his questions and she spoke in her simple, strangely cheerful voice. She recounted her tale that she had seen me fall asleep just after nightfall and that I had not woken again till morning. The prosecutor pointed out to her that she couldn’t have known that, since she had been asleep herself. How far was it to the town? Could a person take a mule out quietly from the stable? Were there dogs to bark on Lige Magan’s place? Weren’t you a dear close friend of the accused and bound to speak well for her? Was she not an Indian like me, and were Indians not renowned for their duplicity? Did not the Declaration of Independence expressly refer to her sort as ‘the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions’? Peg said she didn’t know, she had not heard that. The jury looked deeply impressed by her savagery nonetheless and as they knew no Indians in Henry County, were likely very glad anew the Chickasaw had been removed years past. Then Peg was removed too, having answered all her questions with a kind of sweet demureness.

  So then came the two boys who said they ‘seen an Injun girl’ and spoke to her and answered her question about where Mr Hicks kept his dry-goods store, and when the prosecutor asked if the Indian girl was in the courtroom, they said yea, and pointed at me.

  Then the important evidence of Sheriff Parkman was itemised, and he mentioned the fact that he knew I carried a knife in my boot, and that I bore a great grudge against his friend Mr Jonski, and refused to marry him, and had tried to lower Mr Jonski in the eyes of the world by stories and lies, and that such was my hatred, it was no news to the sheriff that I would have killed Jas Jonski. The judge enquired of him had he seen me that night near or around the body, and Sheriff Parkman was not such a barefaced liar as to say he had. But he said he knew of no one who would want Jas Jonski more dead than me, and that all his dealings with me had shown him that I was ill-tempered, savage, and strange.

  Throughout this I was obliged to keep my gaze averted from Thomas, John, Lige, and Rosalee, all of who, maybe even Rosalee, may have been considering an attempt on the lives of everyone there and a quick gallop down to Mexico.

  This all took but two hours of the court’s time. The court clerks were kept busy writing it all down. I thought of the documents maybe copied out and stored in the lawyer Briscoe’s records, for another assistant to find, and ask him, well, who was Winona Cole, what happened to her? And the lawyer Briscoe going to the cabinet for his whiskey …

  The prosecutor made a brief little parley, very satisfied, he said, of my plain and irrefutable guilt, the lawyer Briscoe tried a few Latin quotes, he was convinced of my innocence, assured of it, and he knew the jury would be too.

  He was wrong on that occasion. The jury was sent away for a little and came back so quickly they caught out the members of the public who had strolled off to stretch their legs.

  Aurelius Littlefair gazed down upon me, as if to say, this will teach you for stealing that Spencer rifle. This will teach you for stealing Peg away. Just for a moment before the head juryman spoke, I had a crazy little hope he might say something good. How do you find? said Aurelius Littlefair. Guilty, said the man, looking shocked by his own importance.

  The judge heard the decision of the jury calmly and he opined that I was to be hung at the earliest convenience of the county executioner, viz. the following week.

  I didn’t shiver and shake. I heard nothing and everything. I wondered suddenly what it would be like to feel the noose around my neck. I thought a little thing like my neck would break quickly. I thought of the soldier hacking at my mother. It was just a noble thing what happened to us in America. We were the lost people of Turtle Island. Death was our door to paradise, no doubt. If my sister had been obliged to go before me, I could go too. All the same I knew I was crying quietly. I heard the sobs of Thomas McNulty. I kept my hands in the lap of the yellow dress.

  Many of the public present were cheering, calling, laughing. With a definitive look of There now, Briscoe, the judge rose from his chair and vanished through the wall like a ghost in a story.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Sheriff Parkman was very excited by the verdict and when he brought me back down to the cells it was out with the stool again from the corridor and settling himself down by me as if we were old friends.

  He was just like an actor who had come off stage. Well, there had been applause. He was beaming and elated. In balance I thought this was a worse punishment than the verdict. I looked at him through other eyes. I was another Winona now, a new one. A condemned person, a girl, a boy. I could sense the fear trying to reach me, trying to arrive. Go back, go back, I cried in my thoughts, like the yardwoman driving back the hens with her spears and shields of grain. Fear, fear. Trying to touch me with its poisonous fingers, just like Jas Jonski. I thought, neither will reach me, ever again. I love my Thomas, my John, my Lige, my Rosalee, my Tennyson, my immaculate Peg.

  ‘You don’t remember what happened in the livery, do you?’ said Frank Parkman, foaming with enthusiasm. ‘I wonder why you don’t,’ he said, as if we had been discussing that for a time and he was just continuing on from that topic. ‘I don’t know if I ever had such a great friend as I had in Jas Jonski. A boy that meant no harm, that was full of the joys of life. He were a playful critter, a man after my own heart.’

  ‘Do you mean,’ I said, ‘when I spoke to you and you thought I was a boy and you asked if you could kiss me?’

  It must have been the devil made me say it. I knew he wasn’t one of the souls would be easy in themselves and know their own minds and hearts. No. Well, whatever made me say it, he kept his head down for a full minute, staring at the ground, not a trace of a reaction in his face, as if I had crushed the joy of the verdict out of him. His face was dark because the cell was dark but I could still read him like a set of awkward numbers.

  ‘You a varmint, ain’t you?’ he said. ‘Merciless savages, that what the old declaration called you. That why we fought that war. So varmints like you could be took off the world like the rats and the wolves you be.’

  Then he laughed quietly to himself like he truly apprecia
ted his own words. All in balance again, his sense of joy in things quickly restored. I felt some understanding of him, in a distant far-off way. He was not much more than a boy in a big man’s job. Sheriff. The going away of Sheriff Flynn had brought him into the realm of his dreams. The troubles that afflicted Sheriff Flynn had only been a boon to another man’s rise, and it was curious to me still how Sheriff Flynn had just walked out of my story. It was like the river closing over a drowning head, once down it is gone forever. I remembered the kindness and impulse to good of that gone sheriff, how he had surprised us all with his speeches of justice and right. A ragged group of listeners at a brokedown Tennessee tobacco farm. If you got to kill the Indians, I thought, this was the best thing put in our place. Men like him, Americans. But not so much like this boy. All smiling and lonesome in his heart. Then he struck his lucifer off its tinderbox in his manly gesture and a yellow globe of fire and light was suspended a moment in the dank air and then vanished. In its place was a suspended remnant of false light and then the fumes of smoke coming out of him like an engine. He laughed again, even though he had said nothing and I had said nothing.

  ‘Well,’ he said at length, ‘I won’t be giving you anywhere in the world to be saying that to people, because you going to be hanged, missy. I going to watch you being hanged. The whole town loves a hanging. Aurelius Littlefair, he was the proper judge now to tend to you. You think you so mighty high doing all the numbers for the lawyer Briscoe. He yesterday’s man now. Look at you, missy, with your black hair and your dirty yellow dress and your dirty old coat and clothes. I don’t know what I thought you was and I don’t know why I thought to kiss you.’

  Now Wynkle King came down and got himself a stool and now he was as if ‘proper deputy’ to Frank Parkman, sitting cosy side by side. If I could have cut my legs off not to be so near them, I would. I was wishing I had my trews and not that yellow dress. My legs were bare and I could feel the downy hairs on them stiffen and turn away from those two boys. If he wanted to talk about rats then that was what they seemed to me. But they were rats in the bloom of power.

  ‘This the girl that poor Jas Jonski wanted,’ he said to Wynkle King. ‘Can you credit it? And that killed him for his trouble. Well, well, didn’t I tell you?’

  ‘You did say something about it,’ said Wynkle King, and laughed at his own wit. Yes, Wynkle King chuckled, he was a chuckler, like the lawyer Briscoe, but with a different effect.

  ‘She don’t remember what happened to her in my old livery, no, she don’t,’ said Sheriff Parkman.

  ‘What happen there?’ said Wynkle King, with true interest.

  ‘You don’t remember, do you?’ he said to me again. ‘I not meaning that time you mention and I will be obliged if you say nothing about that.’ And he laughed. Wynkle King wasn’t following him there and I said nothing. If Frank Parkman was inclined to love a man I would not judge him. I had Thomas and John Cole as proof of that.

  Then Frank Parkman leaned in closer, signalling to Wynkle King to lean in also. As if the world was listening and he must be intimate, friendly.

  ‘Don’t you remember that time when in former days I held your shoulders and Jas Jonski, well, he had his fun with you? And we was laughing and just having such a time, and drinking, and you was drinking, oh yes, sirree. And you was saying, Oh, oh, Jas, don’t do that, and we knew what you really meant.’

  Frank Parkman broke out into furious laughter, so much so that Wynkle King jumped in fright on his stool. Wynkle King didn’t laugh. In fact he went very pale and looked suddenly sick, as if he might add in a minute to his bucket chores.

  Well I had my answer to my own mystery at last. Here it was, from the horse’s mouth. I didn’t feel shame in that moment. I felt a conflagrating sense of rightness, like an equation coming out unexpectedly right. I thought, by heavens, they can hang me now but they won’t be hanging a guilty soul. They’ll be hanging a free soul. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Life, Liberty. I didn’t think there was much to do except to be hanged. I didn’t believe the lawyer Briscoe would prosper with the appeal he had promised, not as long as Aurelius Littlefair was looking down on us from his dais. He had burned the lawyer Briscoe’s house and he wouldn’t falter to hang his Injun girl. Who was to say I hadn’t killed Jas Jonski, no one and nothing, except this close-sitting laughing boy, Frank Parkman. I might have killed Jas Jonski. If Frank Parkman had made that speech to me before, and I had known the truth of my own experience in the world, in that tone of mockery or even not in that tone, I might have considered it only just that I shoot Jas Jonski. I was with the Saxons on that, ref. the lawyer Briscoe. Penalty of death. But I hadn’t known and had been so long in my time of fog drifting sere and dark across my thoughts I had at length taken the fog for sunlight. Now the fog was dispersed and the true wide country behind was revealed, like lovely Tennessee when spring shakes out its hair and widens its arms and stretches. And there was a whip of terror in his words but also the putting down of a whip. I thought, if I were a great lion or a bear or even a wolf, since he had called me wolf, just as my mother had been called, I could put my paws around these laughing boys and bite off their heads. I was thinking even now could I gather all my force – not to escape but to tear them from the world?

  ‘Yes, you going to be hanged, sure enough,’ said Frank Parkman, knocking the little black snag of burnt tobacco from his pipe bowl onto the floor, having smoked all the while through, ‘you was seen in town that night, two boys seen you, missy, that was what will hang you, yes, sirree – even though,’ and here he paused like the excellent tragedian he possibly could have been – ‘we know it ain’t you killed Jas Jonski neither.’

  Now we were two faces staring at his face, both me and Wynkle taken by surprise.

  ‘We know?’ Wynkle King asked. ‘How you mean?’

  ‘You remember,’ Sheriff Parkman said to me, his silver badge rattling tinnily as he leaned in even closer, ‘that time you liked to remind me of, when you come so swanky into the livery, like a goddamn little prince? – you remember there was a black horse there, belonged to Jas Jonski’s ma? And I said to you, I don’t know why she come by that horse all the way from Nashville and not by the train or the stage? Why, the reason was, turned out, that poor woman as mad as a newborn foal, she living in that great old place in Nashville, Tennessee Asylum, and she always sneaking out to come see her son, causing ructions and searches with torchlight, like a good mother. But she don’t like no son of hers going marrying no Injun. Why, missy, it was savages like you killed her grandmother, Jas told me, just took her and cut off her nose and generally hurt her till she dead. Out there in Nebraska Territory as was. Now Jas Jonski writes to her and says he fixing to marry you even though you done refuse his plea, and he going to write to you. I mean, missy, his ma thinking, why would a civilised boy do that? Write to you, when he can have you any hour of the day and any day of the month. Just have you and get his pleasure off you and by God there ain’t no need to go marrying scum like you.’

  I was staring at him, staring. Wynkle King was too. Wynkle King was hearing all this as a new speech, I could tell. But his bladder must have been twitching at him too, because he suddenly leaped up, did that little dance that children do when they need to piss, and went quickly away. Sheriff Parkman didn’t even glance at him. But he edged closer yet another few inches – I could feel his breath on my face – maybe glad of the new privacy.

  ‘So she sneaks away out of the asylum yet another time,’ said Frank Parkman, with a sort of delight, ‘and sets off again on some horse she finds and creeps across Tennessee, counting no doubt the miles by the sombre reckoning of the owls, and then all sere and worn she arrives in Paris, the country has eaten into her bones, into her face, she only a ghost,’ he said, ‘and then she goes to the abode of her dear beloved son and in the firm belief and as an act of favour, to release him she believes from his great error and raise him into the realms of freedom, she stabs h
im, stabs him and stabs him, those twenty counted times. Then by heavens she opens his chest with her knife and takes out his heart, the heart of her own son, and she cooks it, there on the little trestle stove he kept to warm his coffee, and she ate it. All just for his sake, all just for his sake – as she told me herself.’

  I heard a faint scuffling in the shadows, but kept my eyes on Parkman.

  ‘So – I’m coming in to see what’s afoot,’ said Frank Parkman, ‘though if ever a man had eyes to see such things I’m a Dutch. I never seen nothing so sad nor strange. I swear to you, missy. I never did. I hope never to see it again. So I bring that poor woman away and clean her up a little, listening all the while to her chatter, how Jas was free now and he would never see hell, no, no, he would be a gold angel lifted into heaven, and hadn’t she done him such motherly service, and now she could die herself a woman contented with her mercy and her deeds. Then I bring her into the terrible old building of the asylum and she’s put in her jacket and all is well, and I feel I done my duty too by Jas, by saving his mother from the gallows. So I get a boy to send a message to Colonel Purton, Well, Purton, or such like, Jas Jonski been killed, I reckon I know who it was, it was that there Winona Cole, the evil Injun girl. Yes, I brought that poor crazy woman back to Nashville, took me a whole long night and day of coaxing and riding along just inch by inch – got her back in her quarters. They was so glad to see that prodigal woman.’