I sat there saying nothing.
‘Where’s that Wynkle?’ said Frank Parkman looking round behind him, and then seeing Wynkle standing there, suddenly, an oily stain on the darkness. ‘You back, Wynkle?’
Wynkle King trod dolefully out of the shadows and sat on his stool as if maybe nothing had changed – he had taken the story of my ravishment in his stride after all – but I wondered if I could see a strange stirring in him. His face twitching with thought.
‘You saying we going to fix to hang this girl but you know some crazy woman did it?’ he said suddenly, with the force of a tree stump busting free in a flooded river. ‘You saying that?’
I saw Frank Parkman’s face flinch with a sort of misery. It was clear he had not meant to be overheard. Then he gathered himself, he tightened himself, almost recklessly, in a monstrous effort to avert disaster.
‘You think we can hang Jas Jonski’s mother?’ he said, like this reaction of Wynkle King’s was a great surprise to him, and even something to offend his sense of rightness, as any man might agree. ‘A poor afflicted woman and the mother of my friend? Someone got to hang for it. Why not this girl?’
Again a silence. In the silence I saw a mouse cross the cell floor, from right to left, as if it had not a care in the world, and showing not a grain of interest in us.
‘Because that ain’t right,’ said Wynkle King, with all the innocent tone of a child. With a father like his maybe he knew what he was talking about. His father who had also eaten human flesh.
‘You never had a good thought, Wynkle,’ said Frank Parkman, almost humorously. ‘Don’t have a good thought now.’
‘I ain’t allowing you – I just ain’t letting you. I just ain’t going along with it. You think I such a wretch? You don’t know me, Frank Parkman.’
‘I know you well enough, you a creeping little Confederate backwater son-of-a-bitch.’
‘Why, who you, the emperor of Nashville?’
Wynkle King had gotten to his feet and the stool went skittering along the cold floor. It was a stool of bare wood, you could see the whittling in it. Sheriff Parkman twisted round as he rose too, so he would be square on to Wynkle King. He dropped his precious pipe and now he trod on it by accident, crushing it to dust, adding to his rising fury. I was sitting there amazed. I didn’t move a hair. I was inclined to put my face in my hands, I knew not why, but I kept them fastened to my skirts. I had heard such terrible things but they had been of the past and now here was a terrible thing brewing right in front of me, inches from my knees. Wynkle King couldn’t help himself, his hand was on his gun and then he was lifting the gun from the holster like it was a great weight. It was like his arm wasn’t able to lift that gun hardly.
‘You never going to shoot no goddamn sheriff,’ said the sheriff, so greatly offended and amazed. ‘You never.’
As if to prove this to its conclusion Frank Parkman got his gun out clumsily enough. He lofted the polished gun to the level of Wynkle King’s chest.
‘You never going to shoot no sheriff,’ he said again, and then there was a violent bang, that bang you get from a gun fired in a small room, that might tear out your eardrums, so the room is echoing with an enormous sound. Frank Parkman’s gun dipped down and then he tried to raise it again, he was struggling so from the force of the bullet into him somewhere. Wynkle King had shot him, but with his last seed of strength Frank Parkman fired, he fired, and I felt the bullet burn into me.
*
I woke in the great yard of the penitentiary. I knew exactly where I was. I had never been there before but I knew it somehow. A huge grey mass of a building reared up behind me. I was dressed in the clothes of a Lakota fighting man. How happy I was to see them on my chest and legs. A great crowd of my people were before me. It was curious to me that my mother was there but I accepted that as strangely possible. I was surprised to find I must have lived a thousand moons. She looked so like me, not as a shadow, but an actual living person. It was wonderful to me how she smiled at me. Caught-His-Horse-First, the great chief, smiled too, as if all his efforts to get me back had at last been successful. Things can turn out so well, just when you least expect it. There were many soldiers there, and two Gatling guns set up, with troopers bent over them like men at big telescopes.
But the people were all talking at the same time, these beautiful Lakota, and some were very old and some were very young. Caught-His-Horse-First was wearing a long wide bib of beads down his chest, it went right down to the ground and swept about when he moved.
‘Are you alive, uncle?’ I said to him. ‘I thought you had been killed.’
‘I wasn’t killed,’ he said, ‘but it might still happen. We don’t know. We were waiting for you to come up.’
‘Come up from where?’
‘From the ground. You were under the ground, walking. Now you are here.’
‘My mother,’ I said to my mother, ‘I was so little when the soldiers came, I want to tell you how I admire you and I am so glad you are famous for your courage. Without that I could not live.’
‘You could live without it,’ she said, ‘but it is better to have it.’
This was all being said in Lakota, I was dizzy from the joy of speaking it. I thought, I never thought I would see them again, how wonderful it is, how wonderful.
‘Look, Ojinjintka,’ she said, ‘the time has come now, and you must stand there and then when I call your name, you must run towards us and then cross the wall.’
‘But how can I cross such a high wall?’
‘I will be there to help you, with your sister.’
So that seemed all right and I understood what she wanted. There were maybe two hundred souls between me and the high wall. The first ones lay down flat on the ground, the next ones were a little higher, and so on and so on, till there was a sort of sideways sea of backs – lovely Lakota backs, and all alive – from me to the wall. And at the wall now I could see, yes, my mother, but also my sister, I was excited to see her, they held each other’s hands, the two women, facing each other, like they meant to lift me in the cradle their hands made, how beautiful she was, my sister, and alive, then my mother called my name, Ojinjintka, Ojinjintka, and then I knew what to do, I knew, I didn’t know how, I started to run, and I stepped on the first people, and then as I crossed their backs of course I was getting higher and higher off the ground, and then I was running at speed, my heart like a hummingbird beating its wings, and I reached for the outstretched hands of my mother and sister.
*
When I woke – when I woke again – I saw Thomas McNulty sitting at the side of the little bed in my dark room at Lige’s farm. I thought his face was raised in pensive mood but then I saw that he was sleeping. Not for the first time in the story of the world a motherly person had fallen asleep by the bed of their child.
At the end of the narrow bed lay Peg, a small figure curled, as warm as a wolf. She wore the ragged yellow dress. Her only blanket was the moonlight.
That the world was strange and lost was not in argument. That there was no place to stand on the earth that was not perilous was just the news of every moment.
That I had souls that loved me and hearts that watched over me was a truth self-evident to hold.
Note of Acknowledgement
The author is indebted to very many books in the making of this story, in particular Indian Boyhood by Charles A. Eastman (Ohiyesa), McClure, Phillips & Co.,1902.
About the Author
Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. The current Laureate for Irish Fiction, his novels have twice won the Costa Book of the Year award, the Independent Booksellers Award and the Walter Scott Prize. He had two consecutive novels shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, A Long Long Way (2005) and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture (2008), and has also won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He lives in County Wicklow.
By the Same Author
fiction
THE WHEREABOUTS OF ENEAS MCNULTY
ANNIE DUNNE
A LONG LONG WAY
THE SECRET SCRIPTURE
ON CANAAN’S SIDE
THE TEMPORARY GENTLEMAN
DAYS WITHOUT END
plays
BOSS GRADY’S BOYS
PRAYERS OF SHERKIN
WHITE WOMAN STREET
THE ONLY TRUE HISTORY OF LIZZIE FINN
THE STEWARD OF CHRISTENDOM
OUR LADY OF SLIGO
HINTERLAND
FRED AND JANE
WHISTLING PSYCHE
THE PRIDE OF PARNELL STREET
DALLAS SWEETMAN
TALES OF BALLYCUMBER
ANDERSEN’S ENGLISH
ON BLUEBERRY HILL
poetry
THE WATER-COLOURIST
FANNY HAWKE GOES TO THE MAINLAND FOREVER
THE PINKENING BOY
Copyright
First published in 2020
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House,
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2020
All rights reserved
© Sebastian Barry, 2020
The right of Sebastian Barry to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Cover design by Faber
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–33340–0
A Thousand Moons Page 19