Days Without End

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

It’s John Cole tells Rosalee and Tennyson I got to keep the dress on. I tole him all recounts in our private bed of what occurred and including every small matter and every great. I tole him all and recounted the sad end of Starling Carlton. John Cole says in human matters there often three things rivalling. Truths fighting one with another. That’s the world, he says. Lige Magan loved that sweating man and it grieves him sore that he is dead but John Cole don’t tell him I ended him. John Cole would of fought by Starling Carlton and often did and would of stood between him and harm but it were wrong in his careful estimation to want to end Winona. Darkly devilish wrong. John Cole tells Lige we don’t know what’s coming but it’s best now if Thomas McNulty not here. Rosalee don’t make no mountain out of it. Tennyson don’t seem to care. Still talks to me but now like I was a woman. He very polite and lifts his hat when he see me. Morning, ma’am, is his way of talk. Morning, Mr Bouguereau. That’s how things go on. That mourning dove been getting peachier and peachier but she still resident. John Cole been sneaking her titbits from his dinners. That ain’t no crime.

We’re tucked in the house till spring and outside rages all the usual blather and violent tempers of storms. John Cole took Winona for a pupil and he got two books bought to help him called The American Lady’s and Gentleman’s Modern Letter Writer: relative to business, duty, love, and marriage and An Improved Grammar of the English Language. She going to be writing and talking like a emperor. The drifts pile up against the barn. Covers the rough graves of Tach Petrie and his boys that was dug for their long sleep. Covers the sleeping roots of things. The outlaws, the orphans, the angels and the innocents. Covers the long woods.

Then from the woods as spring ascends we hear the other wood doves call. General Lee cocks her head. Co-co-co-rico, looking for a mate before the year is older. When her wing heals I’ll let her go for sure. Co-co-co-rico. Looking for each other, like the shooting stars. Like the Tennessee owls. Like every damn thing.

Come proper spring we hear some news from far Wyoming. Captain Sowell been killed by hands unknown and in the absence of an accuser Major Neale been released. We hear he’s honourably discharged and gone home to Boston. To hell with the army that locks him up I guess. We don’t know what happens to his charges and we don’t know nothing about the looking into of the death of poor Starling. Maybe the German don’t count for much. We look at this from all sides like General Lee when she gazing upon an item and we hope we may consider it good news. John Cole mighty troubled since it seem to him that Silas Sowell was sorta right. Indians ain’t vermin to be burned out of the seams of the coats of the world. Witness is his old great-grandma inside of himself. Riding the caboose of John Cole. If I wasn’t no sharpshooter we’d a never seen none of this trouble maybe, says Lige Magan. Never meant to shoot no girl. That long long ago, says John Cole, that long long ago. Lotta goddamned water and a lotta goddamned bridges since then. Major was calling for me to stop and I heard him, why in hell did I go on with it? says Lige. You just forget about all that, says John Cole. I thinks about it every night of my days, says Lige, I surely do. I didn’t know that, I says. Yep, he says, every night of my days.

We’re going to put in crops of wheat and corn this year and give the land a rest from tobacco. Gives you a shorter year too. Ain’t none of that curing in barns and grading and the rest. I hitch up my skirts good as any country girl and work aside the men. Winona runs the wagon in and out of town for this and that and looks like the townspeople of Paris growing accustomed to seeing her about. Stop seeing just an Indian and start seeing Winona. John Cole reckons the young boy behind the counter in the dry-goods store’s sweet on her. He says it won’t be the worst thing if she gets connected to commerce. She ain’t going to be marrying yet, I say, in time-honoured motherly fashion. Then lo and behold don’t she gain employment clerking for the goddamn lawyer Briscoe. She got the best copperplate in the county, he says. Comes out on his gig to see us. Guess it don’t look too disreputable. A white couple and an old army man. Nice black folks. That’s what he sees I guess.

One evening in the summer me and John Cole was sitting out on the porch watching the shadows lengthen on things. Lige was asleep on his chair. Those crazy whippoorwills giving over and over the same little song. Winona working in the kitchen on Briscoe’s accounts. Queer how you sitting there and before you see them you know someone’s coming. Way over along the river track then they appear, about a dozen men riding. The new dark buffets them and yet over to the westward a huge trembling sun still burns herself out in the ashen sky. Pale colour of a bird’s egg marks the upper heavens. You gotta give the world credit for beauty. The riders ride forward steady. Just coming along like they knowed the road. Soon enough we see they’re army. The jackets that once we weared ourselves and the rifles stuck in their scabbarding. Looks like two officers and a bunch of boys. Well goddamn if that don’t look like Corporal Poulson in the distance. That’s what I say to John Cole. Lige Magan stirs in his slumbers and comes awake. He don’t say nothing. We got rifles as usual lying along the porch but not that no one would see them. A colour sergeant and two corporals don’t fret much to see army. On they come. Then John Cole standing just as you might on account you wanting to greet. Leans against the porch support just easy and dandy. Pulls at his hat. It’s hot and his chest been sweating into his shirt. Just hoping then I’m shaved and trimmed as good as I need. Run a finger over my cheek to check. Anyhow the dark has reached our porch and sits in in bundles with us. Whippoorwills drop silent. Far off a summer thunder rolls along the hills. It’s not a storm will reach us I reckon. Too far away. Got to stop my hand from greeting Poulson because in this guise I don’t know him. Then that tack-tacketing of hooves and approach of horses never quiet. Don’t know the other fellas unless one or two but faintly. Can’t recall.

Evening, says Corporal Poulson to John and Lige. Ma’am, he says, and lifts his hat to me. What’s your business, Corporal? says Lige, as friendly as a Quaker. We’re on deserter business, says Poulson. Rode down from St Louis. This here Sergeant Magan, this here Mrs Cole, says John Cole, and I was Corporal Cole, I believe in your own regiment, that right? You just the men we looking for, says Poulson, just the men. It’s our melancholy task to seek for Corporal Thomas McNulty, deserter. And we was told he might be here ’longside you. I knew that man and he were a good man but fact is he left before his time. And you know the penalty. So, I’m thinking, this ain’t about Starling Carlton. Goddamn major never signed my papers afore he were arrested. So, have ye seen him here or no? Maybe he out working or the like? God knows we don’t want to combobulate ye. But we’re duty bound. We got a list of nigh-on thirty men ducked out. The colonel wants it cleared. How can we fight our wars otherwise? You can’t, says John Cole. I’ll bring you to your man. So John Cole gives me a start saying that. Is he about to give me up? Yank up my skirts and show my balls? John Cole goes down the steps and Corporal Poulson dismounts. I thank you kindly for your help, he says. It ain’t nothing, says John Cole. Should I be ready with my gun? says Poulson. No, no, says John Cole, he’s quiet enough. So then he leads them through the sheds and round the back he brings them to the little boneyard. Stops at one grave with its blanket of summer-withered grass. Nods his head to Poulson. There he lies, he says. Who that? says Poulson. Corporal McNulty as you was saying. That him lying there? says Poulson. I guess it is, says John. How were he killed? We was jumped by bandits. These other beds is where three of them abide. Thomas killed all three. Protecting his home. That sure sounds like the boy I knowed, says Poulson, a decent man. That’s sad, he says, and saves us a grisly job, God knows. It do, says John Cole, it do. You ain’t marked the grave? says Poulson. Well, we know who lies there, I guess. I guess you do, says Poulson.

Then Winona come out and has missed the whole thing being buried in Briscoe’s sums. She got a big shocked face when she see’d them. But the meekness of the troopers calms her fears. That night they bed down in the barn and by morning they are gone.

That were quick thinking, John, says Lige. I’d a drawed out the guns and tried that way.

So now Thomas McNulty was dead official-wise as far as we can see. He lived a short life of forty years and now he was gone to his rest. That was our thinking on the matter. I was strangely sad for I was pondering on his wrestling with wars and the fights of general life. I was thinking of his hard origins in Ireland and how he came to be an American and of everything put against him that he pushed aside. How he had protected Winona and loved John Cole. How he strived to be a faithful friend to all who knew him. One tiny soul among the millions. I was lying side by side with John Cole that night in the bed thinking about myself like I was dead and here’s a new person altogether. John Cole musta been in the same frame of mind because he says we got to get the monumental mason in Paris to write a stone: R.I.P. T. McNulty. And set it up back of the barn. Just to be sure.

It was time to give General Lee her freedom. I let her go the next morning because it was summer and summer was a good time for her to try her fortune in the trees. She flew off straight from the wickiup she had lived in. Went like a blurry arrow for the woods. Couldn’t be a free bird fast enough. The healed wing carried her good.

Guess there must be an address called Fool’s Paradise. On that exact spot in Tennessee. A few days later the letter carrier brings a letter from Paris. We see at the bottom that it’s from Corporal Poulson. I read it through and bring it in to John Cole who is cleaning out the boiler in the barn for to go again next year with the tobacco. He got most of the soot on himself and he’s coal-black. His hands is worser than a scuttle so he tells me read the damn letter. I am cold now in the blasting heat of the day that moils about even in the dark barn. So I reads him the letter. First worse thing is it’s got my name on it. Corporal Thomas McNulty. Dear Corporal McNulty, it says. Well you must oblige me by allowing that you must think me Henry M. Poulson the biggest fool in Christendom if you think I did not see plain with my eyes that that bearded lady was yourself. Well I carried my boys away since I did see also with my eyes those rifles racked along the porch and by God if your friend Mr Magan does not look like a shooter. I saw you fight brave and well and you have a long association in the army of these states and as you may know I fought for the Union even though I was a Southern boy and I know you also set your life in the balances of liberty and evil. It was not my intention therefore to make outlaws of your friends as you would be if you were to fire upon lawful officers. I ask you therefore and I might also say I beg you to put on your britches like a man and come into town where we are waiting to pluck you. By reason that you have things to answer as I believe you will allow. I am, sir, your most humble and obed’t servant, Henry Poulson, corporal.

He writes a good letter, says John Cole. What the hell we going to do? Guess I’ll just go in and do what he saying, I say. What? No. You ain’t, says John Cole. This is something I got to sort out, I say. They ain’t coming after me for poor Starling. I can ask Major Neale to come speak for me. I was on a short commission and he was going to strike my papers but they took him. He’s cleared now so he’ll speak for me. It’s just a misunderstanding. They’ll see. Hang you high more like, says John Cole. They shoot deserters mostly, I say. Yellowlegs shoot, bluecoats hang, says John Cole. Either way, you ain’t going. But I ain’t making no outlaw outa Winona, I say. If I stay, Poulson comes. That stops his talk. We could go on the run, he says, the three of us. No, sir, we could not, I say. That be just the same thing. You a father, John Cole. Then he’s shaking his black head. The soot drifts down like a black snow. What you saying, you going to leave now and leave us here without you? he says. I ain’t got no choice. A man can ask for an officer to speak for him. I bet seven silver dollars the major will do it. Well, he says, I got to clean out this boiler. I know, I says. So then I’m pulling away from the darkness of the barn to step into the burning air. You’d swear God had a boiler going somewhere. The light grips my face like a octopus. I feel like I am a dead man right enough. I ain’t got no faith in that gone-crazy major. Then I hear John Cole’s voice behind me. You get back here as quick as you can, Thomas. We got a lot of work to do and can’t do it light of hands. I know, I say, I’ll be back soon. You goddamn better be, he says.

It’s more in sorrow than in anger that I take off my dress and put on the clothes of man. I smooth out the dress and brush it down a while and then hang it in the old pine chest that Lige Magan’s mother owned. It still got her farm dresses in it. Rough old things she wore in her time. I guess Lige looks in there and then his mother lives again a moment. Times when he was little clinging to those hems. Well I must report that the tears fall fully. I ain’t indifferent. I ain’t a stone. I’m sobbing like a fool and then Winona comes into the square of the door. She’s standing there like a painting of a princess. I know she’s going to do proudly in her world. The fierce light that was in the yard has crossed into the parlour and now tries to leak into the bedroom. It gives her slight form a soft white glow. Winona. Child of my heart. That’s how it was. I was wretched ruined now. Got to go into town, I say. You want me to run you in? she says. No, that’s fine. I’s going to take the bay horse. I might have to take the stage to Memphis later. You can fetch the horse in the morning. I’ll tie her at the dry-goods store. Sure thing, she says. What you doing in Memphis? Going to purchase tickets for the opera John Cole likes. That’s a brave plan, she says, laughing, that’s a brave plan. You be good now, girl, I say. I guess I will, she says.

So I ride into town. That little bay horse goes on nicely. She got the best walk of any horse I ever owned. Just clipping along with a tack-tack-tack on the dry earth. Sweet life. I was sore in love with all my labouring in Tennessee. Liked well that life. Up with the cockcrow, bed with the dark. Going along like that could never end. And when ending it would be felt to be just. You had your term. All that stint of daily life we sometimes spit on like it was something waste. But it all there is and in it is enough. I do believe so. John Cole, John Cole, Handsome John Cole. Winona. Old good-man Lige. Tennyson and Rosalee. This lithesome bay. Home. Our riches. All I owned. Enough.

On I ride. Nice day for a hanging, as folks say.