Redemption Falls

by Joseph O'Connor

  He became – how to term it? – a sort of amusement to the intrepid of the Territory, who would bribe the more corruptible of the guards to be allowed to see him. A dime bought you two minutes, a quarter twenty. Had you paid them ten dollars, they would have allowed you to skin him alive. His very name became a byword for wickedness in the locale. The phrase ‘As bad as Jeddo’ appeared in local speech and fiction. ‘Crazy as Jailhouse Mooney’ was a variant.

  Sundays, especially, were popular for visits. The devil-boy drew a good house on the Sabbath. He would toss his evil head and flash his angry eyes; this would be greeted as that moment in the zoo when the crocodile suddenly blinks from the mud. It was still a few decades before America had the movies. Frontiersmen had to make their own fun.

  Somewhere among my collection I have a daguerreotype of the boy, made by unknown persons during his imprisonment. He has been stripped and hooded and is kneeling in a latrine. There are worse picturings, too, but I do not like to think of them. Some I have destroyed. I love my country. In any nation founded on civil war, monstrous things become possible. We have only to look at Ireland to know it. Kill your brother and there are few deaths unimaginable.

  VIII

  I have wondered what would have happened had the Confederacy triumphed. I suppose that this whole land-mass would be a South America now – Washington a São Paulo, Pennsylvania a Buenos Aires – which a handful offamilias would rule as a fiefdom while the masses grubbed the sewers for their leftovers. The slums andfavelas would be vast, I would have thought; would stretch from the Everglades to Alaska. American soldiers, often the children of immigrants, have done brutal and terrifying and unforgivable acts. Others have done great and courageous acts. I am humbled by those who fought with honor, often knowing their death was a certainty. Had they not, my country’s emblems would be the bullwhip and the branding iron, and the giantess standing sentry over the Verrazanno Narrows would be known as the Statue of Tyranny.

  IX

  Mother Russia. Britannia. Cathleen ni Houlihan. Strange, how our nations are embodied as women, when our women suffer so much of cruelty. An atonement, perhaps. Or a further cruelty. Yet the emblem of our better angels is a woman. Walking roads she does not know, out of nothing but loyalty. Seeking out the child she yearns to be here, but all the time knowing he is lost. There will never be a statue of Eliza Duane Mooney. A sculptor cannot represent blood.

  X

  It was Marshal Ignatius Gilchrist who saved the boy from hanging. (‘Sixguns Iggy,’ he was called in the War, a nickname he would loathe to the end of his life, once suing a newspaperman who had printed it.) He testified on oath that O’Keeffe was already close to death when the child had fired on him that night. Nor was it provable that the boy had discharged the shot which punctured the Governor’s abdomen. It could not have been provable, for the boy had not done it. O’Keeffe was fatally shot by Cole John McLaurenson, who died less than sixty seconds later, with the last of his comrades. Many songs would be sung about his deeds in the west. Some of them seem ten feet long.

  Attorneys came from St Louis with portmanteaux full of law books. Doctors, professors, magistrates, reformers. Justice Carney himself wrote a passionate treatise on the boy’s case:The Speechless Child of War . The autographed MS is in my collection, of course. One notary journeyed all the way from Boston to the Territory. He was a plump-faced, jolly, slightly malodorous man, who grew ever more jocular as he drifted further out of his depth. Sadly, as he made his way back home to the east, he was murdered during a stagecoach robbery for which no one was ever indicted.

  It is doubtful, in any case, that he could have helped the boy much. There might have been an acquittal to charges, had they ever been laid. But it was made clear to the child often, and for reasons he understood, that he would never live to see adulthood. The law might not know how to deal with his crime. But there were other modes of justice on the frontier.

  XI

  Eliza Duane Mooney was buried at Judas’s Field, a pit used by slaughtermen for the dumping of knackered horses. No priest was available, or none would come to such a verminous outskirt. Neither was there a headstone to mark her place of rest, nor even a few dollars’ worth of government coffin. She was wrapped in the rags of a Confederate banner, which one of the lawmen had recently confiscated from a miner; then thrown in the trench, and burned. These obsequies her only brother was forced at gunpoint to watch, and then he was returned to his cell.

  That night, the boy had a dream of his mother and Louisiana, of the black metal porticoes of the French Quarter in New Orleans. It seemed that he saw her on a Mardi Gras morning, tossing handfuls of confetti, in a nimbus of streamers, when she was young and hopeful for her American life. But since he never saw her that way, he knew it was a dream. He was never in New Orleans with his mother, or anyone else. It was always the city in the distance.

  XII

  A hard history. A tale of war. Then came the act that ennobles this bleak tale, shading it, perhaps, to a love story.

  On a hot June morning in 1868, the boy was informed in his cell that a gentleman had come forward to take him for legal adoption. A Yankee industrialist, he had been advised not to involve himself; indeed had been so advised by everyone he had asked. But he had disregarded his counselors. He was a stubborn sort of man. The rich can afford to be obstinate.

  The party left Fort Stornaway at midnight, the boy and five guards, each marshal armed like a gladiator. To restrain the dangerous prisoner, they used a chain made for runaway slaves. It choked you if you attempted to move. His ankles were manacled. He wore handcuffs and a hood. He was shackled by his waist to three cannonballs. He was incapable of speech, but they gagged him anyway, and often stubbed their cheroots on his face.

  They traveled by night, always by night, as Americans slept, unknowing. There was a fear of rioting, if people saw the identity of the passenger. Reconstruction was not a happy time for our country.

  He was delivered to an attorney’s office in Utica, New York, and there met the representatives of his protector. He was taken into a prosperous household at New York City, where he lived for a time with the stable-grooms. A bout of scarlet fever brought about his removal. The doctors said his death was a certainty. He awoke to the gaze of two people to whom he had never spoken a word but who had nursed him back from death. Estafanía McLelland and her father, Peter. Difficult individuals the both, in numerous ways. But they would not see a child die in a stable.

  Lucia was in Spain when the boy almost died. On her return, she agreed that he remain in the house, where he worked for some years in the kitchens or the cellars, rarely being permitted upstairs. Sometimes he saw Lucia through the rails of a gate. He was told not to address her if he did. He blacked her shoes. He groomed her horses. He slept under the protection of her father. You do not believe this, I know; the boy did not either. Nevertheless, it happened. There were stranger acts of compassion in our country in those years. Not forgiveness, perhaps. But mercy, perhaps. A sense of responsibility, clothed often in silence; but no less real for that.

  Habited in adequate clothes, fed three times a day, given a bed in which to sleep, shelter from the elements, he presently regained the power of speech and became, if not happy, more controlled. Maurice Hall, a Scotsman, a butler who attended libraries, took him under his wing and the child proved a quick-witted student. But when that kindly man died, the boy took it hard and some of his old ways returned. Peter McLelland insisted a tutor be found for him. None lasted long. Their charge was too mercurial, given to fits of raging insolence or tearfulness. No scholarly gentleman saw any hope for his betterment. It was Lucia who accepted the role.

  Every weekday they worked in her private library, at books and parchments, old musical scores. Always they were alone, at Lucia’s insistence. She would have no helpmate, not even her father. Her brothers were not permitted to enter. Slowly he learned, this boy who had caused her great pain. Patiently, resolvedly, she helped him. That room in Ma
nhattan saw remarkable solidarities as the seasons gave way to years. Did she forgive? We must suppose so. She did not speak of her feelings. Nor ever, so far as I know, and I have studied all her surviving papers, did she commit her private motivations to paper. These are complicated questions. Perhaps she wanted forgiveness herself. Those from whom we seek mercy are sometimes not the ones who can give it, but since they are present in our lives, we ask them. An onerous burden. We see ghosts in one another. But when I picture her guiding that boy from the darkness he inhabited, I believe that human life is worthwhile.

  For music Jeddo Mooney showed a particular facility, and also, perhaps curiously, for languages. By the time he was eighteen he had French enough to make a way, could read a children’s psalter in Spanish, conjugate simpler verbs in Latin. Gradually he lost the drawl and whaang of Louisiana; his vowels became flatter, and he came to speak like a princeling. He still could be eccentric, although, as with many perceived eccentricities, Jeddo Mooney’s, if considered, spoke volumes. Somewhere along his path, he began to refer to various members of his adoptive establishment by fondly familial designations. Peter McLelland became ‘Uncle’, his widowed sister ‘Aunt Winfield’, their aged mother ‘Abuela’, the Spanish term for a grandmother; though I imagine she must have been uneasy with such an induction. That formidable old lady disliked what she termed ‘the primitive tongues’ and would grin rather bleakly when subjected to them. But the boy’s curious habit was to name everyone in the household a relation, and, by all accounts, nobody objected. The cook and the housemaid shared titular aunthood with practically every female who remained more than an hour on the premises, while the groomsman, a Michael Sweeney, of the County Roscommon, was named affectionately ‘Uncle Mikey’ or ‘Mickser’. Sweeney, for his part, referred to the youth as ‘Little Cuz’. A genealogist visiting the house would have been perplexed.

  Some notoriety about events in the Territory still persisted; there was talk of a disreputable journalist writing a muck-raking book about them. It was put to the boy by a concerned Peter McLelland that he might consider changing his name. He adopted, with gratitude, the surname of his protector, and with it went out into the world. In time he would graduate from a college overseas, would marry and have three children, whom Peter McLelland idolized. I have been told that that strict old gentleman, who spoke rarely of his affections, had come to regard his ward almost as a son.

  As for Lucia-Cruz McLelland, certain readers will know her history. The loss of her and O’Keeffe’s child – she died at five months, María-Elena – brought an anguish from which I think she never quite recovered. But other griefs she overcame with the dauntless love of life that everyone who knew her was touched by. She was among the first women to receive a doctorate from Harvard University, and became one of thestellae minorae of American poetry: initially under the pseudonym Charles Gimenez Carroll, and later, as a translator, under her own premarital name, the revelation of which she was often to regret, for she truly had no craving to be recognized. She published two capable novels –Gramercy Park andThe Rivers (a third,Ricardo Connolly , she rewrote many times before ultimately destroying as unsalvageable) but poetry brought her the kind of small celebrity then available in American letters. Her translations of the lyrics of that great Nicaraguan, Félix Rubén García Sarmiento, known to aficionados of literature as Rubén Darío, became the standard texts in English. Her method of dealing with praise was to ridicule it utterly. It was her habit to read every sentence of a commendatory review mentally inserting the word ‘not’. I think she felt admiration to be a dangerous drug; especially when dispensed to a writer. But that may have been something of a pose, of course. Perhaps marriage had taught her self-protectiveness. A sketchy biographical monograph of her was published in 1910. As its author, I do not especially recommend it.

  Men always loved her, and she adored them, too. There were affairs that would have made Floria Tosca seem a model of prudence. She received many proposals, one from Darío himself, who, though many years her junior, stormed her with polysyllabic declarations of ardor. (‘As he did with almost every woman he knew,’ she often said. ‘Especially after his marriage.’) She married again, briefly; the relationship was not happy. For private reasons, I do not wish to give an account of it here. O’Keeffe was the husband she was meant to have, she came to feel, and as she aged she became rather Latina and old-fashioned about such matters. Strange to say, perhaps; but in many ways I think of Lucia as the most intensely traditional Roman Catholic I have known.

  In her later years she had a close companion with whom she would go walking or attend recitals. A widower, he had been a cavalry officer in the War. I believe it was an intimate and tender friendship, but when it became clear that he, too, entertained wishes for legalization, he was gently but purposefully dismissed. He was the Lieutenant who had questioned her at the Fort Stornaway Tribunal. Lucia used to call himEl Interrogador .

  She died, eleven years ago, at Wexford, Ireland, a city she visited three times, and whose people loved her dearly. Her last thoughts were of James O’Keeffe, that most elusive man. She felt he was in the house. She seemed happy. She requested to be lifted to a window-seat he had often mentioned – from where, in childhood, he had watched the American grain-ships in the harbor – and it was there that she passed away, tranquilly, without much pain, in the November of her ninety-third year.

  XIII

  There are very few veterans of O’Keeffe’s brigade living now, but there are some still among us, and they should never be forgotten. They congregate every year on the Fourth of July and march down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square Park. There a blessing is given and Drum-Taps is played. There are speeches, of course. An aged cannon is fired. Former Confederates sometimes attend, old Irishmen in grays and drabs, clutching sandwich-bags and rosaries; uneasy in this northern city. I have heard the rebel yell in Washington Square Park as the enemies grit false teeth and shake hands.

  When the official ceremony is over, those Con O’Keeffes who feel able – a surprisingly considerable number, given their age and ill health – gather again into formation. They process down the Broadway to Battery Park, a tortuous walk in a Manhattan July. Past dime stores and shoe-shines and tattoo parlors and barrooms, through the dirty grit of high summer. Past those vertebrate turrets that are the glory of our architects – and of all of us, for they speak of indomitable New York. Passers-by stare. Some of the storekeepers offer water, but I have rarely seen a marcher break step to accept it. They are old, but they walk, and some are in wheelchairs. Many are amputees; others are blind. The young sometimes go with them – great-grandchildren, I suppose – leading the old by the hems of their uniforms. At the time of the War, these frail men were children. Now they seem childlike again.

  By the walls of the Battery, a silent prayer is offered. It is always silent, I do not know why. A wreath of lilies is blessed and thrown into the harbor, from where so many of their hungry forefathers first set foot on America. They sing the martial written for them in the American Civil War, reputedly by Lucia, but really, I think, by O’Keeffe:

  We are marching for the Union in the blue and in the green;

  All are sworn to loft in gallant hand the sword of honor keen,

  Etcetera.

  The last time I witnessed these rites, in July last year, a hurrah was given out for a small brotherhood of Americans who had gone the previous winter to fight Fascism in Europe. Some Irish were among them; others would join them, at Jarama, at Zaragoza, at Madrid and Valencia. Heroes to some, villains to others, they were sometimes called Communists in the press. They organized under the banner of an assassinated revolutionary. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

  XIV

  Strange stories continued to adhere to the memory of O’Keeffe. In 1902, at Wichita, Kansas, a dying Alabaman thief made a confession to a preacher that he had pulled the wounded Governor from the Missouri still alive, but had strangled him an hour later when he realized who he was, and buried
him in a mound of stones. This baroque was said to have occurred four miles downriver of Fort Stornaway, in a narrow rocky inlet where the Alabaman had been prospecting for silver. Federal marshals were summoned to the fading hobo’s bedside, but he recovered unexpectedly and withdrew his declaration, insisting he had been in the grip of a delirium when he made it and had no recollection of ever having seen the Missouri. Troopers were sent anyway, to reconnoiter the site he had mentioned. No body was found, and no grave.

  More weirdly, there is the story of the Missouri Mummy. In 1904, two sweethearts were keeping company near the northern bank of the river at Fort Meade, when the boy lost his footing, slipped down a bank, and happened upon a gruesome find. What appeared to be a human body wrapped entirely in muddied bandages was lying in a leaf-filled hollow at the foot of an undercliff. A post-mortem revealed that the corpse was that of a middle-aged man, five feet ten in height, ‘with a prominent chin’, but there was no way of knowing how long he had lain there, nor how he had met his demise. The remains had been eviscerated before being swathed in the cloths, a practice believed common among certain native peoples. The story ripped around the territory that O’Keeffe had been found at last, that the initials ‘JCO’K’ were still discernible on a laundry tag, but there was absolutely no proof of anything so cinematic. One detects the seasoning touch of some western newspaperman. The Mummy was stolen from the hospital where it had been examined by the coroner and was later said to have turned up in a traveling carnival of gypsies. They exhibited it, reportedly, at twenty cents a time (a buck was the cost of being photographed with it sitting on your lap) before eventually, when the flies and the road-life took effect, dumping it in the Ohio River. That is a shame. I should have liked to buy it for my collection. But it might have been a purchase too far for my wife.