Redemption Falls

by Joseph O'Connor

  XII. 11. 66

  Arrived back here 11 last night, too fatigued to continue southerly. Widow answered my pounding: same quarters, lower charge. Fell asleep with my clothes on, even my boots. Did not awaken for nine hours.

  Scorching head-ache when I arose, as though I had been hard at the barkjuice, or smoking French cheroots – which surprised me for I had indulged neither vice the night preceding. But body is as body does. Drowned my head in cold water. Did not do.

  Saw the Gov and the boy passing below my window. Holding the lad by the hand. Heading southerly, slowly. To the schoolhouse I suppose, for the boy was carrying a string of books. O’K paused to buy him a pear from a stand outside the grocer’s. (Corish his name. Unusual.) As he looked up, the Gov saw me – I have very little doubt of it – but feigned, for some reason, not to have done so. A number of passers-by appeared to laugh at the duo as they went. The G is so large, his ward so small, that their juxtaposition is indeed rather taking, in its way. Poor old broke-down waggon.

  Wrote my notes and a letter and accounted my money and considered what is to be done. Not easy; but several reasons for optimism, after all. One must steady one’s eyes on the prize.

  Tried to say a prayer but it was difficult, difficult. Was thinking on poor Papa. His anniversary today. Such a good good man, by any and every measure. Worked tirelessly hard for us, never a thought for himself. And when Mama was ill. All those nights at her bedside. Wish we had been in the way of better friends. But one never thinks of such matters when young and selfish. Always seems there will be time to atone.

  Descended to the purgatorio of spitballs that is entitled the Dining Room. Had it entirely to myself but for the flies and other crawlers. (Menu being happily eaten by a biscuit-beetle.) A slattern came in and regarded me morosely. She looked like a person, if such a one exists, professionally employed to frighten children. I requested of it sustenance. It shambled away rattling its chains (not really). I must not exaggerate; it is foolish.

  Strange giddiness; but it is the enemy. Difficulty in killing it. Thought of seeing her again, I suppose. Still, one must be prudent of demeanor and go about quietly; for recklessness, truly, could undo.

  Before leaving, a few days ago, I had pinned on the staging-post outside the hotel a notice soliciting a number of helpmen. No answer had come in regard to my plea. This most inconvenient; indeed downright irritating. Too frequently, alas, it seems that our American citizens, rightly the envy of the world in multifarious ways, yet have much to learn when it comes to recognizing what is in their – our – better interest.

  They – we – are like infants sometimes.

  They – we – need a boot up the britches.

  At my breakfast, which was ghastly, a congealment offrijole beans and eggs (this concoction has been my daily visitation since coming into the Territory), I asked the Widow to make certain there had been no applications. She returned moments later, having inquired of unspecified lesser daemons, with no information that might sweeten the bitchdrool served me as coffee, but wielding a placard which she intended to display in the saloon window of her premises. On this specimen of intrepidity she sought my opinion. Here is how it read, verbatim:

  Drunk for a dollar. Dead drunk for three. Clean straw to lie on.

  Told her I esteemed it a piece of real poetry. That did not seem to much gratify her, but she put it up anyway.

  Breakfast digested, or at least not yet regurgitated, I betook myself to see the editor, a Mr John Knox Trevanion, at the offices of theRedemption and Edwardstown Epitaph , and discussed with that gentleman, who is Scottish by birth, the numerous requirements of my coming endeavor and how he might assist me to fit them. Specifically, I asked if he would consider a proposal: viz, to print for me on his presses a number of poster-bills, which might be pasted about the town and environs.

  Mr Trevanion is leader of the O+O men in the County, a fact one is not supposed to know, though everyone seems to.†It was odd, indeed, to be conversing with an executioner. They say his particular skill is with knots. His fingers were plump and often moved about on his inkblot, in a manner that called to mind a spider or crab. Scuttling tarantulas and a tartan cravat. A blackwatch beetle; balding.

  He was at first a little obstinate, which surprised me greatly, and indisposed to converse candidly on the reason for his position. But presently, he became a shade less obtuse. I had been observed, so he told me, entering the Acting Governor’s house.

  ‘What of that?’ I asked mildly. ‘One wished to see him, after all.’

  The Governor was not much admired in these parts (Mr Trevanion said), which was every degree as enlightening as if he had confided that King Henry the Eighth, decsd., London, was not much admired in the Vatican. The reason why he had been sent here was not at all apparent; he had never administered anything efficiently, including himself. It was his, Trevanion’s, view, and that of his paper, that any friend of James O’Keeffe was an enemy of Redemptionites.

  ‘You misunderstand,’ I replied. ‘One could hardly name oneself his friend. One is in the employ of the Federal Government, as he is; that is all.’

  ‘Is it, sir?’ asked the Scot, in the blunt fashion of his country. When a Caledonian of Mr Trevanion’s sort addresses you as ‘sir’, unless he is a waiter or a ghillie (and commonly even then) he is making it plain that he despises you.

  ‘I have met the gentleman only once and the meeting was brief.’

  ‘Pontius Pilate met the Savior of the Universe only once,’ retorted Mr Trevanion. ‘A great deal of treachery can be accomplished in one brief meeting.’

  I looked at Mr Trevanion. Mr Trevanion looked at me. I was thinking of the numerous great men of his homeland: the surgeons and scientists and colossi of the intellect, the thinkers and philosophers and jurors and poets. And then I was thinking of Mr Trevanion.

  The townspeople were not happy with my presence among them in the Territory, said the Missing Link. It was rumored that my mission could cause them certain difficulties. It would meet staunch resistance; I may as well know it. It would kick at a nest of hornets.

  ‘Why, sir, maps do not instigate difficulties,’ was my amused rejoinder. ‘If well-made, they solve them, or at least make solutions the clearer.’

  ‘No map is wanted here, sir,’ Mr Trevanion said coolly. ‘We live tolerably well without one.’

  At this assertion, I own I was astonished, completely. How could knowledge of our Republic, the measurement of her form, ever be regarded suspiciously, rather than welcomed with gleeful gratitude? This is proof, were it required, that our people need urgently to shake themselves out of certain regrettable peculiarities. I said that the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain was our motherland’s greatest glory (‘motherland’ was a mistake, I could see that immediately) and that no less a titan of letters than deathless Wordsworth had floated its praises in the comet-streams of Pegasus.

  ‘Of?’

  ‘Pegasus,’ I clarified. ‘The wingèd horse. The figure, the emblem of poesy.’

  Mr Trevanion said the matter was not so simple as all that. Out here in the west, I would find that the horses were wingless. (Prim, tight smile. Christ, poor Morag at the hoosie. Imagine its dawn-lit pawings.) The only Wordsworth with whom he was acquainted had been a sharpshooter in the War, whose boast was of dispatching more Yankees than had Jesse and Frank James. Mr Trevanion was in regular contact with this poet of the Winchester, he added cryptically. If ever I wished to see a display of marksmanship at close hand.

  Here in this Territory, what a man owned was his. Often, he had crossed the world for it; commonly had fought for it; and his property, or any claim he might have to same, was not properly the business of any other person or agency. Such had been the situation obtaining for a number of years; it would be a most foolish government that would license its representatives to set foot over the fence-lines of a freeborn citizen, still less to record anything which might be found there. It would be, as it were, to put a hand in t
he fire, a head in the crocodile’s jaws. Cartography was a euphemism for conquest and thievery; how the burglar inventoried his pickings. There was also, to state it frankly, the question of taxation. The citizens of the Territory were not idiots.

  ‘How do you mean, sir?’ I asked Mr Trevanion colorlessly.

  ‘If we are measured, we shall be taxed,’ the Pict replied. ‘Only a child does not know that this is what maps are truly for: to give assistance to governments in strapping their people. Governments and the sneaks who work for them.’

  ‘Sir – ’

  ‘Sir, nothing, sir. Nothing! They spout fineries in Washington, while out here we fight to endure. There is hardly a man in Washington could point to this Territory on your precious map, yet he wishes to dictate us how to live in it. He crushed down the south, then burned her to ash; when her people were defeated, he ground his heel in their faces. Is this what shall calculate us, sir? This parcel of Judases? Tell your paymasters, sir, to think again.’

  Judas. The Savior. The tax collector. Pontius Pilate. It was becoming quite the biblical day. One anticipated unfavorable comparison to the Whore of Babylon, but that title, one realized, probably was owned by another in the Territory. I had a passable idea of who that might be.

  One was aware (one said) that life could be difficult in the Territory. The desperadoes, for example. The piracy of theHarrison . When one thought on how those unfortunate sailors had been murdered so callously. Truly, it was a monstrous affair.

  Patently I was fascinated by that matter (he countered deviously), for it had come to his attention, and the notice of certain others, that I had been asking many questions about it, in all the town.

  Had I?

  Aye, I had.

  I had not been aware of it.

  It was almost as though I were a marshal, or an agency detective, or an insurance man in the employ of the steamship company. Alas, none of these exhilarating avocations was my own (I chuckled); one had merely been arrested by the event on reading of it back home in the States. Like any honest citizen, one hoped the miscreant would shortly be fetched to justice, of course; but apart from that hope, one’s interest was uninvolved.

  He would never be captured, Mr Trevanion replied. Not while James O’Keeffe held power.

  The certitude I found striking. Why did he feel that?

  ‘Because my enemy’s enemy is my friend,’ he said gnomically. ‘But I will say no more of that man. So do not ask me.’

  He would not be persuaded on the matter of the poster-bills, no matter what argument I advanced to him. A consideration of a hundred dollars, then a hundred and fifty I mentioned. These he refused as though having been offered a brimming spittoon. There was no price on this earth that would persuade him to prostitute his principles (he enjoyed the alliteration, as his type of Scotsman always will). If there was nothing further for the present, he would bid me a good day, for he was preoccupied by the necessity, the regrettable obligation, of having to labor for his bread. Irony, I believe, was being deployed by the Laird Trevanion, of that particularly thin-lipped, self-preening, supercilious, Edinburgh debating-society kind.

  One was tempted to inquire if his unprrrostitutable prrinciples extended to a prractice called frreedom o’ exprression. Instead, I asked him placidly if he did not think that his readership might be entrusted with the ventilation of two sides of a case. His nation, I made myself say, esteemed civilized disputation (when not gutting one another with claymores, I did not say). Why not place my suggested text in the columns of his organ, and counter it, if he wished, in an editorial or introductory? That would satisfy me quite adequately, I said. Unless of course, he were afraid of the joust.

  No flight to the bull ever shafted so sweetly. An outraged squirrel. A chipmunk libeled. The cheek-pouches bulging with winded affrontedness. Celticism wounded is always memorable. He would have meknow , sir; would yield before no calumny; ancient name of Trevanion, doomed charge at Culloden, & cetera. Cornish, Welsh, Manx, Caledonian, Bretons, Hibernians (the worst, the very worst) – the whole predictable box. Moping, self-piteous, skirt-wearing ninnies. Only know where to tickle and they gasp for you.

  Immediately he consented to place the advertisement in his pages:soliciting the application of fifty strong men, miners preferably, or possessing a sound knowledge of the local topography ; these to be drilled by myself in the rudiments of surveying, and some, if sufficiently sharp-witted, in trigonometry. Mr Trevanion appeared surprised by the latter proposition, but my own policy on such matters is clear. Our sad war is over; we must henceforth aspire to newer (to better) manifestations of equality. Cannot a miner be taught to figure his numbers as well as the Harvardian? If not, then all the wars in the world were fought for nothing – so it seems, at least, to me.

  I said that I would also have employment for a number of guides and pathfinders, probably Indians, but at this proposition Mr Trevanion determinedly drew the line. ‘Savages, sir, do not read theEpitaph ,’ he averred. I did not supply the obvious rejoinder.

  His talon, which felt limp, accepted the offer of my hand. And I had a strange desire, the like of which I never experienced previously with a man, to take him tenderly by the sideburns and kiss him passionately on the mouth; not out of desire for congress of that (or any) sort with him, but simply so as to see what he might do. But I did not prosecute this fancy. Perhaps it is just as well. One has rather grown accustomed to respiration.

  He would find me at the Widow’s, he offered in farewell, the wee, sleekit, tim’rous beastie. In a few days, one said. One was going to Edwardstown. With a mickle & a muckle, one made to depart.

  Only this: that as I opened the door, he said something very queer. It was calculated, I feel certain, to disturb.

  ‘You are a gaming man, I believe, sir.’

  ‘I would not put it that way.’

  ‘Six hundred dollars, is it now? Your debt at cards in this Territory?’

  I made no reply, for that was none of his concern.

  ‘The outlaw McLaurenson. You inquired of him to me.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘That man walked the streets of the town this day. I saw him from that window. Himself and a girl. And then I sawyou , sir. You have been ten paces away from him. Have a care how you play, sir. You are watched in this County.’

  ‘Always,’ I said. For I would give him no satisfaction.

  There were men in the street outside.

  CHAPTER 61

  ON LOOKING AT A PHOTOGRAPH BY MR O’SULLIVAN†

  The Finishing

  November snow benedictions the boy.

  In the chill gray smoke, the lost stallion seems ghostlike,

  Or vision of horse. Some ridden-down symbol

  Of bit-grinning fears that gallop through nightmares.

  It nudges its bridle toward where he lies

  Among the reeds. But the boy is still.

  Perhaps a girl expects him, still.

  Watches the road for her homecoming boy,

  Who joked of love but told no lies,

  And laughed on Hallowe’en, so ghostlike.

  Riding now, among the nightmares.

  Not representing. No loaded symbol.

  No banner; no cross. No adult symbol

  Translates the shattered frame, so still.

  Only the crows, black-winged as nightmares,

  Enshroud the broken, beaten boy;

  The pallid prey entirely ghostlike.

  Harvest of hatreds. Watered by lies.

  Come, captains, make oration on the bower where he lies;

  Erect him a stone. Interpret him a symbol.

  He cannot hear. It is we who are ghostlike,

  Who rage in the chains, while he remains still.

  He had little to remember, this barebacked boy,

  But the gifts of the grown in the wrappings of nightmares.

  How do you sleep through the necessary nightmares?

  How do you speak the courageous lies?

&nbs
p; You have no son, perhaps? Have you loved no boy?

  Of what is your own flesh the sentimental symbol?

  Send his mother a medal. Can you know so little, still?

  Look at his face – not living; ghostlike.

  The horse and the soldier. The monochrome ghostlike.

  Metaphors an easier language than nightmares.

  All ordered in columns; in their lines stone-still.

  Words follow orders and hear no lies.

  A bullet smashed him; no high-flown symbol

  Of freedom. No simile. Another boy.

  Look on him, General. See where he lies.

  Unchained, at last, of battle’s hot nightmares.

  The son you had not. Your body. A boy.

  The son you refused me. My body. A boy.

  November,66. Edwardstown.

  CHAPTER 62

  THE SLAVES

  At the Plains Hotel, Edwardstown – A memory of statues

  The visions of Judith Purefoy – An unexpected visitor

  The proprietress’s macaw croakscomment allez vous as it hops disconsolately in its cage.

  And at night there is music from the dancehall across the street. Waltzes, hornpipes; Epsom Reels. It is dismally played – banjos, a fiddle, an out-of-tune piano, a thudding bass drum – but she finds it a sort of consolation.

  Sometimes she sits in the window and watches the men approach. Drifters, plainsmen, bankers in their suits. There is a Judas-hole in the oaken, studded door. A coin to the heavy and he admits you. She has never been inside a dancehall, tried to enter the other night. But the doorkeep would not permit it.

  ‘I wish only to see.’

  ‘No ladies allowed.’

  ‘Do the gentlemen waltz with each other in this establishment, then?’

  ‘No ladies, Ma’am. Rules of the house.’

  The bedroom can become hot, is often airless at night. A reek of food lingers – stale meat, stewed collards. She does not dine downstairs, prefers to eat alone, for in the dining room someone always wants to join you. That salesman out of Poe, with his unctuous eyes and the pearl-handled revolver in his armpit. Frequenter of the dancehall – she has seen him trudge across. An hour or two passes; the men come and go. The laughter of women, but you never see them go in. A separate entrance in the alley, she assumes. Then his doleful return to the hotel around midnight, the click of his boot-heels down the corridor. Watcher of the street. Connoisseur of schoolgirls. She has hung a pillowcase over her keyhole.