Days Without End

CHAPTER THREE

IN THE ARMY YOU MEET a dozen men a month came from Ireland but you never hear them talk about it much. You know a Irishman because he has it writ all over him. He speaks some other way and he is not a great man for hair cutting generally and there’s something about a Irish when he is drinking that just ain’t like any other human being. Don’t tell me a Irish is an example of civilised humanity. He may be an angel in the clothes of a devil or a devil in the clothes of an angel but either way you’re talking to two when you talk to one Irishman. He can’t help you enough and he can’t double-cross you deep enough ever either. An Irish trooper is the bravest man in the field and the most cowardly. I don’t know what it is. I seen killer Irishmen and gentle souls but they’re both the same, they both have an awful fire burning inside them, like they were just the carapace of a furnace. That’s what being a Irish does to you. If you cross a Irish for half a dollar he’s going to burn your house in revenge. He will work at that till he drops dead from the desire to do you mischance. I was never no different neither.

I’ll say quickly what happened to me and brought me to America but I don’t feel much in the way of saying too much. Least said soonest mended is the old saw. It’s damnable true.

My father was a butter exporter man in a small way sending butter in barrels out of Sligo port into England. All good things was sent there. Cows, beeves, pigs, sheep, goats, wheat, barley, English corn, beets, carrots, cabbages, and all the rest of the paraphernalia of existence. All that was left in Ireland was the potato for eating and when the potato was lost there was nothing left in old Ireland. She starved in her stocking feet. And she had no stockings. Rags. My father was a better sort of man and wore a high black hat but even that was knocked-about-looking because it had already lived a long eventful life in England. We sent food to England and she sent rags and battered hats. I don’t know because I was only a child. In ’47 the harvest was so bad even my father had nothing then. My sister died and my mother, on the stone floor of our house in Sligo town, in a street called the Lungey. The Lungey meant in Irish Luaighne, which was the kingdom my ancestors was kings of, or so my father said. He was a very living man while he was alive. He loved to sing, he was a dancer, and he loved to make a bargain on the wharf with his captains.

Butter kept flowing in the time of hunger but how it happened that my father fell out of life I do not know but he lost that business and then as I say my sister and mother perished. They perished like stray cats, no one caring much. But the whole town was perishing. On the riverbank, where the port was, the ships were still coming into harbour and embarking, but not by my father’s order no more. The old ships started to bring ruined people to Canada, people that were so hungry they might eat each other in the holds. I am not saying I saw that. But I was thirteen or so and I knew in my heart and soul I had to flee. I crept onto one of those ships in the darkness. I am telling this best I can. It’s long ago, before America. I was among the destitute, the ruined and the starving for six weeks. Many went overboard, that’s how it was.

The captain hisself he died of fever, when we reached Canada we were a ship without a steward. Into the fever sheds with us and that’s where hundreds died. I’m just writing all this down. The point is, we were nothing. No one wanted us. Canada was a-feared of us. We were a plague. We were only rats of people. Hunger takes away what you are. Everything we were was just nothing then. Talk, music, Sligo, stories, future, past, it was all turned to something very like the shit of animals. When I met John Cole that’s who I was, a human louse, even evil people shunned me and the good had no use for me. That’s where I started. Gives an idea of the victory meeting John Cole was. First time I felt like a human person again. And that’s enough of that, I say, I don’t want to say no more. Silence.

I only say it because without saying I don’t think anything can be properly understood. How we were able to see slaughter without flinching. Because we were nothing ourselves, to begin with. We knew what to do with nothing, we were at home there. I almost wasn’t able to say, my father died too. I saw his body. Hunger is a sort of fire, a furnace. I loved my father when I was a human person formerly. Then he died and I was hungry and then the ship. Then nothing. Then America. Then John Cole. John Cole was my love, all my love.

Let me go back to my beginning time in the army. We reached Fort Kearney, it was just near one of the new mining settlements, in a northern part of California that was mostly wilderness. Wild knotted country, said to be full to the brim with gold. Indians owned it, Yurok people. Maybe it wasn’t Kearney, I forget, Kearney is an Irish name. The mind is a wild liar and I don’t trust much in it that I find there. To tell a story I have to trust it but I can issue a warning like a ticket master issuing a ticket for a western-bound train that will be obliged to go through wilderness, Indians, outlaws, and storms. There was a local militia made up of the townsmen and some of the miners scattered about on the claims. They just couldn’t live with the thought of Indians and they went out in parties and scoured through the hills and tried to kill them. They could of captured the men and put them to work sluicing and digging if they had wished, that was California-style law. They could of took in the women and children for slaves and concubines but at this time they preferred just to shoot what they could find.

In Fort Kearney that night when we dusted off the bunks and had our grub, the townsmen came in and told us of the latest awful happenings from the Indians. There was a miner they said on the far edge of the settlement and the Yurok had stolen his mule. The way they told it it was the finest mule ever seen in the world. They stole his mule and tied him down in the dust and whipped his face a little. They told him he was digging in a graveyard and he must desist. These Yuroks were not big in stature but little men. The townsmen said the women were the ugliest women in creation. There was one New England man called Henryson said this and he was laughing about it. The major listened patiently enough but when Henryson said about the women he told him to shut up, we didn’t know why. Henryson shut up obediently enough. He said he was glad to see the cavalry there. It was a boon to the town. Then we felt quite proud. Well pride is the fool’s breakfast.

The sergeant was silent all through, he just sat on a two-legged brace stool and glowered at the ground like he couldn’t wait to hear the end of this deposition and get out there and do what we came to do. What that was seemed to comprise of finishing what the militia had begun. Henryson said they wanted the country cleared and the major said nothing then. He just nodded in his quiet way and his face looked sorta handsome and good, especially against the face of Henryson, which looked quite queer and black, like he had bitten off too many powder caps in his time. Then the townsmen gave the troopers a keg and we drank that into the small hours and played cards and there was those brief fights that you’d expect and men were ill as poisoned dogs.

Me and John Cole, staggering back to the hard bunks but knowing whisky would be our pillow, paused at the designated pissing spot by the boundary wall. There was a picket on the top of the wall, and all we saw was the hump of his dark back. He could have been sleeping for all the back said. The major was just finishing, pulling the strings of his flies tight again.

Goodnight, Major, sir, I said, to his own dark shoulders. He looked back at us. I saluted him as I was bound to do. In his whisky-sodden state his head weren’t quite as moored as usual on his neck. He seemed to be in a sort of fury. He saluted chaotically and shook his head and then turned it upward to the stars.

Are you alright, Major, sir? I said.

It’s a long way to come for a stolen mule, he said, ferociously, like an actor on the stage.

Then he was muttering, I heard the name Henryson, and something about letters to the colonel, and depredations, and murders of settlers, and damn lies. But this speech seemed to be directed at the wall. He was moving about awkwardly, trying to keep his feet on the sodden ground. Three hundred men make quite a bit of mud. And the stench was ferocious, it was a wonder the picket stood it.

It’s a long way to come for a stolen mule, and a whupping, he said, with an emphasis on the last word, like it was something he might like to administer to Henryson.

We helped him back to his quarters and then steered our own way back to ours.

He’s a good man, that major, said John Cole, with all the definiteness of the drunken man.

And then we quietly fucked and then we slept.

Next morning bright early despite the depredations to our bodies we saddled up. It was cold as dark dreams because now it was late in the year and the sun wasn’t just as keen as it had been previously. There was a frost across all that ground and we could see great shrouds of frost hanging in the redwoods that grew thereabouts. Long low hills waved with grasses where the trees had failed or been felled, we didn’t know. We were told we had about fourteen hours’ riding ahead. The scouts seemed to know the way after the instructions of the militia the night before. We were told the militia had rode ahead in the darkness, which vexed the major hugely. He shook his head and cursed civilians. Well our muskets were primed and we had food in our bellies and we were inclined to think well of the enterprise. The sore backs of the long journey west seemed less to the fore of our minds. All that riding grinds down your backbone till I believe you gain for yourself a little store of bone dust in your buttocks. That’s what it felt like. Every rut, every slip of your horse is a jolt of pain. But my horse that time was a sleek grey creature that you couldn’t feel displeasure with. John Cole was mounted on a broken-hearted nightmare right enough. He had to pull the mouth off of her to get his way. The mare had snapped her martingale somewhere in the desert so she was free to saw her head up and down just as she liked. But he put up with it. The horse was black as a crow and John Cole liked that.

The breath of three hundred horses makes a curling twisting mist in the cold November air. Their warm bodies were steaming from their exertions. We were obliged to try and keep formation but the ancient redwoods didn’t care about that. They were parting us and cutting us as if they were moving themselves. You could have tethered fifty horses to the girth of some of them. The curious birds of America were calling among the trees and from the far heights dropped the myriad speckles of frost. Now and then something cracked in the forest like musket-fire. There wasn’t any sense the trees needed us there. They were about their own business certainly. We made a racket of harness, spurs, equipment, things knocking and shrugging from movement, and hooves skittering and clacking on the earth, but the troopers barely spoke a word and for the most part we rode in silence as if by prior agreement. But it was the trees that pressed the silence on us. The major issued his orders with his arms and hands, and these were replicated down the line. Something was going on ahead, we sensed it before we saw it. Suddenly a huge nervousness invaded us, and you could almost hear the bones in our bodies tightening, closing, and our hearts seemed captive in our chests and desirous to escape. Men coughed to clear the spit of fright from their throats. We could hear a great sound of burning up ahead, as if ten thousand starlings were massing there, and through the trees we saw violent yellow and red flames, and a great pulse of black and white smoke everywhere. We came out of the trees at last. The fire was burning at the bottom of a wide meadow. There were four or five big lodges made of logs of redwood, and only one of these was burning, creating the storm of flames and smoke all on its own. The major spread us out across the meadow, as if he might be intending to charge against this conflagration. Then we were told to trot down slowly, our muskets at the ready. The townsmen were everywhere it seemed, running along the length of the Indian encampment, shouting at each other, and soon I saw the figure of Henryson, holding a big firebrand aloft. They were as busy as lawyers whatever was the work. Soon we were close and Henryson came back to talk to the major, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Then we were broken into sections and we were told there were Indians down in the copses to the right. We spurred on our horses and what with the steep decline felt like we were fleeing down the slope. Troopers Pearl and Watchorn were near me as normal, and then the thickness of the smaller trees obliged us to dismount, and a few dozen pushed on into the copse on foot. Then there was screaming and calling, and shrieking cries. We fixed bayonets to our muskets and now rushed forward, trying to avoid the springing undergrowth. Down from the burning lodge the smoke had plundered everywhere, into the copses, into every cranny, so that it was nigh impossible to see and our eyes smarted horribly. We saw the shapes of Indians and stabbed them with our bayonets. We worked back and forth through the milling bodies and tried to kill everything that moved in the murk. Two, three, four fell to my thrusts, and I was astonished not to be fired on, astonished at the speed and the horror of the task, and the exhilaration of it, my heart now not racing but burning in my breast like a huge coal. I stabbed and I stabbed. I saw John Cole stabbing, I heard him grunting and cursing. We wanted the enemy stilled and destroyed so that we could live ourselves. Every second I thought I would feel the famous tomahawk split my Irish skull, or the molten bullet pierce my chest. But nothing seemed to happen except our savage grunting and thrusting. We were a-feared to fire our muskets in case of murdering each other. Then all the work seemed done and all we heard then was the crying of survivors, the terrible groaning of the wounded. The smoke cleared and we saw at last something of our battlefield. Then my heart shrank in its nest of ribs. It was just women and children all around us. Not a brave among them. We had torn into the little hiding place of the squaws, where they had tried to take refuge from the burning and the killing. I was affrighted and strangely affronted, but mostly at myself, because I knew I had taken strange pleasure from the attack. It was as if I had drank six whiskies in a row. Watchorn and Pearl were dragging a woman from the ground and into the trees. I knew they were going to take their pleasure from her. I knew well. Babies that had spilled from their mothers’ arms were now stabbed and killed with the rest. The troopers worked until I believe their arms could do no more. Watchorn and Pearl rutting and shouting, then ruthlessly killing again. Till in runs the major shouting the loudest of all, with true horror in his face, shouting his orders, wild to bring a stop to things. Then we were all of us standing there panting, our cold sweat pouring down exhausted faces, our eyes glittering, our legs trembling, just like you would see dogs do after they have been killing lambs.

Wearily, wearily, we walked back. The townsmen were standing twenty feet back from the flames. It was still a ferocious turmoil of smoke and fire and resins sparking and spitting like some old painting of hell. The troopers massed together, not talking much yet, watching the flames and watching the townsmen. We didn’t know where we were. We didn’t for those moments know our names. We were different then, we were other people. We were killers, like no other killers that had ever been. Then with a huge queer sighing, the roof of the lodge fell in. It collapsed in a great smoulder and shatter of sparks. The sparks rushed into the air above and tumbled there, joyous and black and red. An enormous stormcloud of sparks. Then the walls of the building tumbled, and fierce in the dark worst flames burned the bodies, brave upon brave piled six deep, you could see the ruined faces and smell the roasting flesh, the corpses twisted strangely in the heat, fell and rolled onto the scorched grasses, no longer held by the walls. More sparks flew up, it was a complete vision of world’s end and death, in those moments I could think no more, my head bloodless, empty, racketing, astonished. Troopers wept, but they were not tears I knew. Others threw their hats into the air, as if it were a crazy celebration. Others held their heads as if they had just heard of the death of their own loved ones. There didn’t seem to be anything alive, including ourselves. We were dislocated, we were not there, now we were ghosts.