Redemption Falls

by Joseph O'Connor

  He will have reason to recall this night many times. The Christmas of ’65.

  They did not find the boy. Not that they searched too hard. The night was cruelly cold, a vast storm was looming from Saskatchewan. There were reports from the border of catastrophe in the valleys, of snowdrifts so huge they made icebergs of barns. They succeeded, at last, in cutting down the deadman – his end had been terrible, the knot had been tied so as to strangle him, not break his neck – and hefted what was left of him to the undertaker’s house.

  The undertaker, Rawls, was a thin man who blinked a lot. He recognized the victim as a coachman out of Utah: Hourihan by name, maybe Houricane, or Houlihan. He’d been driving the dangerous run only a couple of months, had been formerly with the rebs down in Georgia or Mississippi. Often he rode with a helpmate up top, a whelp who watered the horses and ran errands for the passengers and who wasn’t a one for talking, might even be a mute. Some said the little doagie was Holohan’s nephew, but Rawls thought this was not so, though he could not say why.

  He led the party across Emmet Street to his subterranean stores. There they were loaned a reusable coffin, a contraption of oak boards and sprung-hinged trapdoor for which Rawls had registered a patent. Thence out to Jawbone Hole, a cemetery for the wretched, where they had to hammer at the ice to open him a grave. But the ground proved unbreakable. It refused to yield to its guest. They stood back from the spot and blasted it with their revolvers, and finally the earth was breached by force – the spit of scarlet flashes, the smashing of stones – and the Federal shovels went to work. Snow flurried harder. The half-light was coming. The birds in their nests gave small, dull shrieks. The puttering lantern-flame twisted for its life, as the thing to be interred must also have done. A dog hollered bleakly over a wall. No minister was available, or none was willing to come, so the Governor read from Job while Vinson and Calhoun bowed heads in a replication of mourning. Hailstones smacked the black text as he read, blurring the ancient entreaties to sog.

  The storm hit around eight. The town was battened down. Birds’ feet froze to the surface of Lake Pend d’Oreilles. The wind shrieked for eleven days and nights without recess. Ice cracked the trees. Sleet flew like buckshot. From Lewis and Clark’s Pass down to Rattlesnake Mountain, from Medicine Bow eastwards as far as Devil’s Lake, the tornado circled the Territory, as a cougar spiraling its prey, and then, at the moment when they thought it was dying, it gathered and screamed into Redemption Falls.

  The roof was torn from the schoolhouse on Tone Street. A miner born in Sligo, Paudrig John Foley, got lost in the blizzard trying to find a Dutch comrade, was killed by a flying pane of glass. A preacher’s wife went mad and rode into the fury for Liverpool Falls, convinced she could banish the whirlwind by Holy Ghost power. No vestige of rider or horse was seen again; some said they were taken by the natives, others said they drowned. On the twelfth morning, the tempest raged away towards the east and the citizens unburrowed to the wreckage.

  Their chapel had been shattered, its belfry toppled, the stump wrenched into the whorl of a corkscrew. Slates lay strewn in a hillock beneath, as though fashioned by some fanatical sculptor into the approximation of a landslide. Johnny Thunders and his desperadoes had already been and gone: the altar had been ransacked, the chalices stolen, the little organ that had huddled like an elder by the vestry now shot-up so its pipes emitted wheezes in the gusts. Their marque had been splattered in holy wine across a wall: ‘MK–1025’ and an upside-down skull.

  Pages of bibles drifted on the breeze: children leapt to catch them – they would become a kind of currency. Icicles hung fanglike from boughs and sills, from balustrades and water butts, from guttering and architraves, from every plane parallel to the granite-hard ground. In the whiteout stood sweethearts who had not met in days, eyes streaming in the dazzle, and many silent men.

  Grit-blackened stalactites on the eaves of the courthouse: it had crumpled in on itself like an orphan awaiting a kicking. Ice-capped, wind-whipped, the glass of the town, an American Arctic, unnatural to crunch through: as a wasteland once glimpsed in the smoke of a pipe, a prophecy of white men’s folly. Twin babies were taken from the rubble of Spanish Jenny’s, a house of ill-fame on the eastern outskirt. How they had come to be in such a den, no one ever said. No parent would come to respect the remains. They were buried in Jawbone Hole between a suicide and a slaver, and many years after the Great Storm of ’65, nightriders still reported, as they passed that place of sorrows, the sound of babies weeping.

  There was no weeping on the morning the tempest ended. The townspeople were too shocked, or maybe too hard. Pain had polished them; it had burnished them till they blazed with it. They looked to their Governor. He was not to be seen. Some accused him of having fled on the last stage out; like all Yankee hirelings he was a coward, they said. A party was formed to go up to the residence. Halfway there, it had become a posse. A noose was contrived from the raped chapel’s bell-rope, a blindfold from a tatter of the Stars-and-Stripes banner that had flown, until recently, from the lintel of the Post Office. The storm had not torn it down. The townspeople had.

  They came up to the Governor’s residence, that strange unfinished hulk, tar-caulked pine logs glittering with hoarfrost. His wolfhound was shackled to a picket in the yard: it appeared to be asleep, or perhaps dead. Icicles on the sills were beginning to melt; the windows seemed to be weeping.

  A ribbon of smoke from the solitary chimney – they knew he was inside, and this maddened them more. Behind the metal door that had been cast by a St Louis foundry: paid for by their taxes, by the sweat from their work, by the plunge of their fingers into agonies of water to pan for the glinting gravel that had led many of them there. He was safe as an ingot in the crypt of a bank, or he figured he was – but they would show him.

  Someone roared for him to reveal himself. No reply came back. The people came angrier, in the way of angry crowds, the clever stirring the stupid into ecstasies of loathing, the weak outshouting the strong out of fear for themselves. A woman shouted ‘Yellow!’ A Georgian gave out the rebel yell. Other men of secessionist sympathies soon gave it back – that chilling, vulpine howl-and-yodel of rage, which once had meant the rising of the freeborn south, but now meant humiliation; scores unsettled. The bell-rope was slung over the Y of a cottonwood. The blacksmith’s shop was rifled. Someone brought a mesh of implements.

  As the first of the southerners began flailing at the door, a rifle shot retorted from the casement of an upper room. It shredded the lynchman’s thigh; he gyrated away from the stoop, clutching at the gash and moaning. He appeared more surprised than anything else: it was as though it had never occurred to him that such transgressions might be perilous. Two shots more issued in rapid succession; one chunked into the flagstaff in the mire that was the front yard, the second killed a sow that had attached itself to the mob and had been gnawing with rattish fervency on a thicket of iced weeds.

  A surge of blown snow: misting, blinding. At that moment, the Governor’s cook appeared in the lane, a woman not yet thirty, though she looked a decade older. She was born the legal property of a Gulf Coast planter, bore three of his children by the time she was nineteen, had buried a husband and all of the children before fleeing to the northlands, a contraband. A trio of Mississippi bully-boys observed her approach: they were often reckoned to be brothers, though nobody knew for certain; even they themselves claimed not to know. The eldest had straggling hair and weird glimmering eyes; he was referred to by the wits of the town as ‘Christ’. His brothers, more ugly and less inclined to braggadocio, were known around the colony as Dismas and Gesmas – the thieves put to doom at Calvary. Christ stuck out his boot to stumble the cook and she fell like a tumbled sack. As she lay in the slush, uttering no sound whatever, they chuckled and mocked and tugged at her clothes, and one of them ground a boot-heel between her shoulderblades. ‘Teach you some mancipationnow ,’ he snickered.

  Four shots gulloped from the vantage of the house, so r
apid that no one saw their flames.

  Two assailants were killed before they knew they were hit. Christ was gut-shot. No one approached him. He slunk gaspingly away, the better to die in privacy, for a bullet through the abdomen could mean only one thing, and he knew, from experience on the slaughterfields of Gettysburg, that the thing it meant would be terrible. Some deaths may be approached with a semblance of courage. This was not one of them, and the Mississippian apprehended that. The crowd gave a bellow and surged through the Governor’s fence. ‘Burn out the Yankee bastard!’ a muleskinner cried. A blown-down sequoia was stripped of its branches, the better to employ its shaft as a ramrod. The gunsmith clambered astride it, rending at the boles with his hacksaw. A cleaver was brandished by a Texan.

  A daguerreotypist and his servant scurried hen-like up the lane and commenced hurriedly erecting their apparatus while the hollers grew more violent. Stones were hurled, a rain of bottles. Two citizens went to loosing pistol shots at the house’s brick chimneystack; slugs struck its weathervane, set the copper reaper spinning, blew the chimneypot to a shatter of shards. Now the miners drew ice picks and some brought out mattocks. The photographer’s magnesium flash gave its dull, plosive puff.

  It was then that the Governor materialized in the masts of the roof, like a genie produced by the powder-flash. He looked bewildered, disheveled, as though he had only just awoken. His face was florid; he had clearly not shaved in days. He appeared to be draped in a sheet, like a Roman. He bore no visible weapon.

  ‘This residence is a possession of the Federal Government,’ he began. But his voice was apprehensive, as though he did not want to speak. It was not that he appeared fearful, he never did. More that he was pondering some graver predicament than the one now incarnating itself below him. Lofty indifference was the tone he was aiming at. But it was coming out more like contempt.

  ‘My marshals are here. I have men at your houses. The next to molest this property will have his house pulled down.’ These contentions, at least two of which everyone knew to be lies, were uttered as briskly as the timetable of a train.

  ‘We stretch your nigger first,’ someone yelled. ‘How that be?’

  A cluster of the diehards gave a miserable cheer of endorsement. The Governor waited for it to expire, and then he spoke coolly.

  ‘The gutter-swab that will menace a woman in my hearing has not been born. Come in if you’ve the mettle. You’ll go out feet first.’

  ‘Liar,’ howled a simpleton. ‘Irish coward!’ He was fantastically obese, like a haycock on legs, and was infamous around the mining camp he regarded as home for having gnawed off one of his fingertips in a bet. He grinned around himself now, waiting for collegial approval. When it proved unforthcoming, he took off his kepi and began to beg: a study of almost perfect incognizance.

  ‘Return to your homes,’ the Governor said darkly. ‘I will kill every mother’s soul of you if I am threatened again.’

  Drizzle was falling. The townspeople looked at one another. Some commenced sullenly to drift away. A French Catholic friar had come on the scene – he had ridden into town from the Indian station at Piegan Landing – and was urging the body to disassemble, whispering at some, tugging the coat sleeves of others; others again he was chivvying and scolding. It was as though they were misbehaving novices, not Missouri-watered gunslingers. To a boy he administered a cuff across the face.

  The cook knelt up and stared at her palms and wiped her muddied forehead on the hem of her semmit. Slowly she rose – she did everything slowly, as though time and her body were difficult languages. Not one of those watching assisted her to rise. Perhaps some wanted to, but were afraid.

  She was spat upon and ridiculed as she tilted towards the house. Her expression betrayed nothing; she refused to recoil, even as the spittle struck her patched-up mantle, attached itself in cords to the furrows of her face. A clod of stinking pig-dung slapped the back of her bonnet. Some in the assembly laughed guiltily or heckled, but, at this degradation, a number of the women – disapproving, perhaps, or just frightened to stay – commenced hurrying away in twos and threes, harvesting children to their aprons as they went. Still the cook came on, now into the yard, ascending the squat stairway unsteadily to the door. She knocked on it and waited, as she usually did. It was the Governor himself who unbolted and opened it, having no other servant to negotiate his locks.

  ‘Good-day, Elizabeth Longstreet,’ the Governor said.

  ‘Good-day, sir,’ said the cook, ‘by the glory of God.’

  The simpleton barreled towards her, heaving a crowbar out of his trench coat. The Governor drew a revolver and shot him through the chin.

  The wind gave a whimper. The townspeople stared. Richard Stiles lurched backwards, his right knee crumpling, his shoulders slumping leadenly as though their sinews had been snapped, and toppled down the portico steps into the dirt, and his hands struck the ground like hams. His body was immense; he had at one time been ‘Atlas the Colossus’ in a carnival. His falling was so heavy that it caused the wolfhound to start. Blood came seeping through the giant’s moleskin collar. In the photographs of his remains – elephantine, preposterous: two street-boys cross-legged on the slab of his chest – the blood is a puddle of gray.

  ‘Any other fool?’ said the Governor, quietly. And when no reply was given, he roared the same words. And his howl seemed to whipcrack the cold, cutting air, commingling with the distant agonies of Christ.

  The last of his constituents shambled away through the sludge, back toward the carcass of the town. The overture of a thaw became discernible now, the gurgle in the trenches: plink and babble of drips. Thunder grumbled in the faraway quadrants. Animals nosed from their holes.

  The Governor must have been troubled as he stood behind his locks. Not about Stiles – nobody would mourn him; he had long been a nuisance to the schoolgirls of Redemption Falls, had only escaped a lynching by being punk to a lynchman. What he feared was something else; he would come to fear it sorely: the inexplicable had crept into his life.

  He had been alone – so he had thought – at the house that morning. The killer of the Mississippians had not been him.

  CHAPTER 7

  ALL MY TRIALS

  From the transcript of an interview with the

  Governor’s onetime cook – Recorded in Liberia, West Africa,

  when she was in her one-hundredth year

  …No I ain afret to die…Cause I had times I thought I would…That mornin after the storm I was dead in my skin…And I dont know who killt them Mississippians that time…Got a notion or some about it…But I aint sayin…

  Sir, Elizabeth Leavensworth…born Elizabeth Longstreet…My owner done give me that name…I was born a slave in Marianna, Florida…Cattlestead call The Hurricane…On the Chattahoochee road…But it ain theä no more…Not in a longtime…

  Sailor told me once ago they got a cemetery on it now…Where The Hurricane use to be at…Graves from the war time…Illinois what he said…Make a graveyard in the paddock…By the banks of the Peachblossom…House burnt by the Yankees an then it haul down…With the shambles an the shanties an ever thing else…Eighteen an sixtyfour…Come the fall of sixtyfour…Tear Emerald County all to pieces.

  No ain never went back to Florida. Ain fixin to…No…Florida can burn for all I care to it. I lived me a longtime in Redemption Falls, Mountain Territory…Kept house for a Union General and his wife…And I seen some things when I worked for the General…I seen some curiosities.

  That right, the famous General got him in troublesome later…Irishman…Whom talkin bout. Use to call him ‘The Blade’. An he save my life that mornin certain sure. Be in my grave that mornin if he didnt.

  …Sir, ninety-nine last November…Ain never had me no paper. Mought be older some. Or younger. Gypsywoman told me onetime I see a hundred an two. But I pay her no tension.[unintelligible remark]Ain a body know what comin but God a Mighty…Nobody know it but God.

  My father’s name Zekiel…Yes, sir…In
Africa…I never did know his born name…Man-stealers come in a ballahou out of Charleston…My mother’s name Euterpe…Seventeen an a half…Never seed you a woman as fine as my mother…She born Sapelo Island…in the Sea-Islands of Georgia…Once belong to a rich Apache; dont know how it come…Had a gift for midwifing…Healin sickness of the blood…Folk an beast the both…

  My father didnt[dog barking]hardly a word of English that time…I dont remember much to him…Quietspoke man…Whittle poppets of cordwood…Whet the knives for the house…See him standin at the grinestone…An he turn that wheel all day…Got a scotch heä on his breast from a brandin turn poison…Clovershape marque of The Hurricane…Gone to glory now: must be. Pray for him ever night yet…Him an my mother. An all my gone kin…Hour of redemption I see my mother again. Cause she safe in the wounds of my Jesus…

  …And my father got took from The Hurricane the harvest I turn twelve. Last time ever I seen him i’ my life[unintelligible words].The mastuh lost my father playin cards in Marianna. My father got took away for his debt. Some say he ended in Texarkana but no way to know it. Missippi. Georgia. Any place.

  Seen him scourged into a cage and they chain up the fender. Like he nothin but a shoat pig. Nothin but meat. And he was wagoned away callin out for my mother. But my mother was gone to the well that time. They waited[for]her to be gone to the well.

  She went on five month after, Lord have mercy on my mother. Christmas of fortynine she went on. And then it come to hell for me and my sisters. Cause she always tryin protect us. And now she gone on. And you would cut out your throat you had the courage to do it. Life of a slave aint but death all day…And your dread for the coming of night.