Redemption Falls

by Joseph O'Connor

  On the wall is a watercolor print ofThe Broad-tailed Hummingbird , with the rose-magenta throat patch of the male. Every room at the Plains has an identical picture, thus Monsieur Gauthier informed her proudly. He bought thirty of them from an Irish pedlar, a quarter the piece, is proud of his bargain but prouder of his taste. He would like every room to be identically furnished. The pedlar, he smiles, knew nothing.

  The poem about the photograph has taken her two days. The form is difficult. Even now, she is not certain the piece is finished. Strange, the word ‘finished’, for it means completed but also dead; or doomed to die, or sentenced. Or the climax of sexual pleasure. It means so many things. Should the poem be entitled ‘The Finishing’? It is not completely bad – one or two of its images want to live – but there is something she does not care for in its tone. A want of absolute clarity. A vagueness that sinks it. A poem should be like a snow-grain, clear and cold; unique, worth looking at again. Or a root-strand of the poet’s hair in a phial. It has business to exist if those standards are met. But her efforts are only rearrangements of things already said. Mirrors held up to mirrors.

  Once, in Florence, at the Giardino de Boboli with Mamma, she saw the statuary Michelangelo intended for the mausoleum of Pope Julius. Night-time, stormy, near the end of the season; the gardens had only been opened because Papa knew someone, or paid someone. Lightning over Fiesole. The sputtering of rain on umbrellas. Slabs of butternut stone, austerities of mass. She had tried to make sketches but her hands were shaking as she drew. It was difficult to make the shapes, she was so moved.

  The pieces were said to be unfinished; Buonarotti had abandoned them. Or perhaps he had died before being able to complete them – she could not remember now what theProfessore had said. In the pearl-like rain, four studies of slaves. The sound of the rain smacking marble. Ghosts seemed to press at the surfaces of the stones as though frantic to escape their interiors. Those fingertips and lips. The suggestion of a limb. That shape in the seam? Was it a crown? The firstThe Young, as though writhing in his torments, was awkwardly stooped, uncontoured, too smooth – ‘which may explain why he is considered “the young” ’, theProfessore said, with a smile at Lucia, who was sixteen. And thenThe Awakening , as a petrified explosion, caught in its struggle to wrench out of its own limits.The Bearded was scrupulously worked, Michelangelesque about the torso, other extents left blank except for a quarryman’s rough chisel-hack. Then the slave known asAtlas – the one that had moved her to tears. Only the slightest indications of eyes and nose, but the stance indicating he was steadying himself under some terrible weight. And since there was no world visible above his faceless head, no planet of stone, no gravities of nations, it had seemed to Lucia that it was his head itself (something held in his head, some colossus crushing mind) that was the burden he must bear forever. ‘Atlas,’ said theProfessore , ‘perhaps more than the other prisoners, seems to express the energy pent up in marble. Sad, my friends, that these wonders were never completed.’ But it had occurred to Lucia that theProfessore was wrong. They were not uncompleted. They said everything required. Their maker had found the only language in which to speak of such a subject. Completion would have rendered them useless.

  The waste-basket by her desk contains many abandoned drafts. There is perhaps only one reason why this one will be preserved. That reason is approaching on the road from the north, will be here before nightfall, though she does not know it is coming. The man who went to India with his bride to make maps. The scholar of triangulations clops closer.

  The couple upstairs are honeymooners from Rhode Island, awaiting the stage into California. She sees them walking the town, always beautifully dressed, the slim-waisted girl in her trousseau of bustles, and her groom, a minister of religion, in frockcoat. At night, you can hear the percussion of their bed. And once, as she lay in a weltering sleep, a whimper of powerless pleasure from the cathedral of their room. Raw western dawn; the silence of the Plains. She was weeping as the small death came. Everything living wants to escape the body. It is why there are poems, and stories, and songs, and drink and churches and oratorios and children. Why marriages last. Why marriages happen. Why people go on being married after love has burned away. Because we cannot be alone in the stone.

  She leaves the Plains Hotel, walks the riverbank a while. Out, out, past the extent of the town, and slowly through the rushes towards the forest to the north where solitude is a sharp, cold pleasure. The boots are too big for her – she had to borrow them from Monsieur Gauthier, for the store in the town has no ladies’ boots in stock. The weather does not change; the dawns are still late. The snows are not melted; the Missouri is low. She can hear it in the night from her bed at the Plains. No steamships are returning from the east.

  Forest-peace is calming. She moves through the pines, where the hummingbirds, in the summer, pitch their homes and harvest grubs. She would like to see an American hummingbird but that will never happen. By the summer, when they come, she will be gone.

  On a stump-top, the graven shape of a diamond. Garlands and religious pictures have been placed in the mulch, and rosary beads weighted with pebbles. A thirteen-year-old girl, daughter of the blacksmith, saw the Virgin appear on that tree-stub. The girl, Judith Purefoy, is whispered to have Cree blood. Stockmen bring her to sick cows; she is said to be able to heal them. Humans, too. Tooth-ache and colic. Weakness of the nerves. Fragility of the lungs. Menstrual aching. Barrenness.

  She is thinking about her husband, that shipwreck of a house. Is the boy still with him, she wonders. Do they eat together in the evenings? Has the child learned to talk? What do they talk about? Has the roof been finished? If only he had come to her; asked her to return. She would not have accepted, it was too late for that. But his asking would have meant that some screed could be rescued, a memento of all they had hoped for.

  She walks back to the town by a different route, circling by Tiernan’s Paddock. The struts of a new chapel are rising from a cornfield. St-Mary-the-Virgin-in-the-West.

  To the Stage Office again. The manager is sympathetic – a dapper little Glaswegian who whistles as he saunters the town – but the position remains as he previously described it. The passenger route is suspended. Murders on the highway. There is no way to leave the Territory, at least for the moment, and anyway, there are no drivers now. Since Harran was lynched at Redemption last Christmas, few men will face the risk of the job. The manager sees no future in the stagecoach business. He is thinking of opening a saloon.

  The clank of a bent cowbell. She makes a way toward its call: along the new-built street, over the stile in the stone wall, through the feathery grasses of Loman’s Meadow, the hems of her skirts knocking mushroom spores into the air. In the distance Three Giants Mountain with its trinity of peaks. The mauve of snow on the slopes.

  By the time she arrives, the barn is almost full. Old Loman is on his feet, with the slateboard behind him. His students are mostly men, but today there are three women, and a cluster of children in rags. He is talking to them of the alphabet, how it is the key to all knowledge. There are twenty-seven people in the barn today. Only two of them have never been property.

  She helps him to distribute the battered, spineless primers, with their drawings of apes and bees and cows – all through the bestiary to zebras. The children look up at her. A girl touches her dress. They chant a way through; it sounds like a prayer. Old Loman practically sings it, in a faltering tenor, clicking time on the slateboard with his walking stick. A boy calls her ‘Mistress’, which subservience makes her uncomfortable, but Loman has advised her not to make an issue of such nothings. What they call us does not matter. She must try to understand this. Our pride must be left at the door.

  Lucia: I do not care what you do, nor where you go, nor whom you go with, nor what should befall you. You may walk into a lake for all I would care. Your disloyalty is no surprise, since I have long been accustomed to it, but your arrogance and presumption are beyond belief. It is a very
great respite to be delivered of your pathetic mewling. Go to Hell and take your threat-letters with you.

  She paces the aisles of box-crates which do duty as desks. Fly-zizz. Sun-glint through the roofbeams. What, in truth, would she like the boy to call her? Lucia? Mrs O’Keeffe? Mrs General? Changeling? Are all those women the same?

  In the corner is her camera, cloth thrown over itself; like something hiding, ashamed. It had been her intention to make photographs of the school and its students. The thought seems intrusive now.

  An old man rises from the mound of sacks where he sat. He is the age of her father, she realizes. His clothes hang limply. He leans over a cane. As a boy, he was beaten so ferociously by his owner in Tennessee that he lost the hearing of one ear and went lame. She has seen him in the town shining boots for the bossmen, on the corner of Second and Foley. He progresses as far as ‘o, p, q’ – ‘stout man, Jonathan,’ Loman encourages – but suddenly becomes confused and gapes up at the roof as though consonants might be roosting in the rafters. A few of the younger men, and two of the children, raise their hands to offer the solution; but Loman commands them to remember patience, and the old man mumbles: ‘ess?’ The teacher corrects him and assists him to the zee. He sits back down on the cairn of sacks. There is a murmur of approbation.

  The boy in the photograph, did he know what he was fighting for? Had anyone ever told him? Were there moments when he realized? It occurs to her now that perhaps he himself could not read. Can his parents read his tombstone, if he has one?

  At the close of the lesson, a spiritual is sung. Loman, a Quaker, is not supposed to like hymns, but she finds it affecting to see him lilting quietly along with those who believe in the power of the alphabet to free. And like any other God, you would have to doubt it sometimes. But today, in the barn, it is believed.

  No more auction block for me,

  No more, no more.

  No more auction block for me,

  Many thousand gone.

  No more peck of corn for me,

  Now my Jesus set me free.

  No more auction block for me,

  Many thousand gone.

  At the hotel, she reads over the poem again. It seems drained of any life it ever had. My poem about a corpse is a corpse, she feels. As she goes to tear the page, she happens to look out of her window. And down in Laforge Street, the impossible.

  A dust-covered man on a dust-covered bay.

  He is wearing a hood, like a Venetian during carnival. His movements are familiar as he heels his mount’s flank and pats her on the veiny neck, cajoling. The horse appears exhausted, is slickened with runnels of sweat.

  But it cannot. It is not possible.

  She rises from the bureau.

  She is aware of the pumping of her blood. As though swimming in cold water.

  The first impulse is to vomit. The second is to run. But where would she run to? The forest? The barn? She watches as he dismounts, ties the reins at a hitching post. He bends towards a trough, dips his gloved hand in the water. He raises its sopping wetness toward the face she has kissed. As he does, he pulls off the hood, as if this were a moment in a cheap play. In a way, she realizes, it is.

  She is dreaming. Yes. She has dreamed of him before. Writhing like the wraiths in those altar-blocks of stone; his hands, and his unmarked child. A mosquitozits . You can dream a mosquito. But no; there is no fragrance when you dream. Those wildflowers wilting in the jug on the bookshelf. The sickly redolence of their petals.

  Could she reach the lobby before he enters? What would she say to the clerk? I am not here today. Tell that man I have departed. Tell him I wasnever here. You have never heard my name. You will know him by his face; he was burned, is disfigured; I am not here, do you understand? I will give you twenty dollars.

  She rushes to the bureau, pulls open its drawers. It is ridiculous. She is searching for currency. Poems. Notes. A cup of blackened coins. A twist of withered orange-peel. Abandoned letters to her husband. She must get away immediately. She will go to the Lomans. Let me hide in your roof until he goes someplace else? I want no man, at all.

  She returns to the window. He is talking to Sheriff Arkins, who is pointing out the hotel on the corner. She flinches from the light as the two men look up. It is as though they have heard her pulse.

  The saddlebags over his shoulder.

  Theting of the desk-bell.

  The Irish maid’s footsteps on the staircase.

  She looks in the mirror, awaiting the knock. She thinks of a prisoner in the death cell.

  CHAPTER 63

  SURVEILLANCE

  An incident in the tea-room is witnessed by a spy

  By the time I could get there, they were at a table near the window. I sat as close as I could without alerting suspicion. (Believe she may already suspect as has been asking at the desk what sort of salesman I am, where from, et cetera. May be necessary to replace before long.) Could not always hear their words. Noted what I could on back of menu. Wrote them up immediately afterwards, as follows: (X is him, O her. **** is where I could not hear them.)

  X:Who are all these biddies?

  O:Why are you come here?

  X:Lucia: do not affect. We are grown-up people.

  O:You wrote me you were to marry. To go to Indiana (?) in the spring.

  X:Our engagement must be ended. It was not fair to the girl. It would have been wrong to continue a deception born of hurt.

  O:You ******** to your fiancée?

  X:Do not lecture me on broken promises.

  O:******* ********** ********* *************

  X:We had not the intimate feelings that spouses ought to have for one another. Such marriages do not last. One would have thought you of all people **** **** *****.

  Here they talked heatedly approx one minute. Could hear nothing owing to boys in street. Then:

  O:For pity’s sake, there was never any fiancée. Do you think me a damned fool? Your intention was to stir me to jealousy.

  X:You are suddenly expert on my intentions? Then know, Lucia, that my intention is that you leave this Territory with me.

  O:Will you ****** ***** your mouth? There are people in the room.

  X:Then let us go to another where we can be alone.

  O:Are you quite insane?

  X:I meant only to talk.

  O:Can you not see that there would be gossip? This is a respectable place. ********* your voice for pity’s sake.

  X:Respectability, now. From the free-thinker herself. I can think of several occasions when your respectability *** ***** ****.

  O:Stop it. I warn you.

  X:Feelings you confessed to me. Do you wish them repeated? Because I remember the words, I could never forget them. You were not playing the Carmelite, then. *** ****** *****.

  O:I do not wish to be alone with you. I do not know why you have come here. I understand that you have feelings, but the time for that has –

  X[mighty sore]: How dare you? How dare you? You will never know what I have lost for you. You can never know my feelings. By what right do you dismiss me? The nights I have wept and thought to end my life –

  O:Let go of my hand. You are hurting my hand.

  X[with paper from coat]: Read that, Lucia. You wrote those words freely. You wanted to write them. You wanted me to read them. You know it is true, it is a matter of gravity. If it is a sin to ***** *** **** then the sin was ours the both. You may attempt to deceive yourself but it cannot be changed.

  O:If once I was mistaken. I do not want you now.

  X:That is a falsehood of the kind I had never suspected to see in you.

  O:It is the literal truth. I am sorry, you must go.

  X:Then you will change your mind. I have upset your equilibrium. I have come to you too suddenly. You will change your mind in time. *******

  O:Never. You are deluded. I do not know **** **** *****. You must leave this place immediately and never return. If ever you cared for me, I tell you, do as I ask.

  Her
e the proprietress approached their table, perhaps alerted by looks from other patrons.

  P:Is everything quite well, Mrs General?

  O:Quite well, thank you, Madame Gauthier…Captain Winter (?), a family friend…He was just leaving, as it happens…You might show him to the door.

  The man appeared riled as he stood from the table.

  X:I will never leave this Territory without you, Mrs General. I make you that promise. No matter what else. I have come too far. And so have you. The time for deceptions is over.

  He looked at me as he left. But briefly, I think. I was reading a newspaper. He went away.

  CHAPTER 64

  I SHALL SEE MY DEAR MOTHER AGAIN

  From Winterton’s journal – The fate of an immigrant family – The fear of a pursuer – The resurrection of a ghost near Redemption Falls

  [Several pages have been torn out and the manuscript resumes as indicated]

  …told me that he had once ridden into the Yellowstone Valley, and of some of that region’s astonishing sights. The bones of enormous creatures, and their many-toothed skulls. A cataract so immense that its plunge was surely fifteen hundred feet. And he had happened upon a trail-waggon, entirely ruined, the skeletons of its poor passengers still sitting in the buckboard in gnawed tatters of clothes, the reins of the stolen horses yet held in their fingers. The telling seemed to affect him for there were tears in his eyes as he spoke. It was evident, he said, as he had examined their meager belongings, that these wretcheds had been immigrants from his homeland.