Days Without End

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

POULSON AIN’T A bad fellow. But something alters when there’s a bunch of men and one of them is in chains. I guess that’s true. They got a converted ambulance in Paris town and we’re set to ride up to St Louis in that and then entrain in a army caboose to Kansas City. All gonna take a few days and at the start I seem to be jesting with the other boys but then them chains confer a bit of silence on me I guess. Poulson says I’m to be tried at Fort Leavenworth. I ask him if Major Neale know anything about it and he says he hisself don’t know but because of my good service they’ll surely look for mitigations. I dearly hope so. Just in that moment I believe I might have the luck and suddenly I got a thought that I might be heading back down to Tennessee. If you ain’t ever felt a feeling like that I can’t describe to you how it’s just like your head was a melon full of sugar and water. I ask him can he send a letter and he says he don’t see why he can’t. Says they’ll likely call the major anyway seeing as how he was my commanding officer when the crime took place. Alleged crime anyhows, he says. Desertion. What’s the penalty for that if guilty? I says. I guess they shoot you mostly, he says. In the caboose the fellas is mostly playing cards and making jokes and they’re just trying to make each other laugh and guffaw like all soldiers do and the train is making haste to Kansas City.

When we get to Fort Leavenworth I ain’t feeling so optimistic as the fella said. The wrist chains have eaten into my flesh and the leg chains are trying to catch up with the wrist chains. I’m thinking it would a been better to make a run for it with John Cole and Winona. I was brave starting out but I ain’t so brave just now. My body is tired and Poulson and the lads is just eager to check in their saddles and gear and have a carouse I guess. They deserve it. It was a long trek and they ain’t done nothing wrong. Poulson says he gets thirty dollars for the capture. Fair enough. He gets me signed in too like a bit of extra gear and then I’m sitting in my new quarters like a new-bought dog and I feel like howling. But I don’t. Ain’t no future in howling. I’m wondering can I write to John Cole and get him to come straight up with Lige and bust me out of here. It’s a giant fort and the place is milling with troopers and other sorts and what look like raw recruits and all the biblical multitude of hangers-on. I’m going up for trial in a couple weeks they tell me and till then I can eat the duck soup and be quiet. God damn it. They call me Corporal which in the circumstances has an ominous ring to it. Little man that turns the keys says I’ll be alright but I guess he says that to all the glum-looking boys.

I don’t know nothing that’s going on since I’m tucked away like a bale of tobacco in the dry-house. So when the big day she comes I’m just mighty relieved to see Major Neale sitting in the room when I’m shunted down to be tried. They got a big long shiny table and a few officers looking pretty at ease and Major Neale is shooting the breeze with a captain when I come in. Turns out to be the ‘president’ of the court martial. Guess I’m someone called Corporal T. McNulty, Troop B, 2nd Cavalry. That’s who they say I am anyhow. I just don’t mention Thomasina in that moment. The charges is read and now I must allow the officers tuck in their legs somewhat because until then they was tending to keep them stuck out in front. The papers make a nestling sound and something in the room gets smaller. I guess it might be me. Desertion. And then they describe what they think it is I done and then they ask what the plea is and another man says Not Guilty. Then Major Neale speaks for me and he’s explaining about the temporary service he hooked me up in due to his daughter being rescued through means of my kindness. Something along those lines. Then he’s bumping up against his own arrest and he mentions Captain Sowell in a hard sorta voice and he’s asked about Captain Sowell and there’s a very queer stirring in the room. Like someone dropped ink in a glass of water. The major says he don’t know nothing about Captain Sowell only that he died. But he makes an effort then to haul the enormous train engine back on the track and says it was on account of all that what was happening to him that he was obliged to neglect the papers that would of discharged Corporal McNulty in the usual way. He said Corporal McNulty at great peril to his own self helped him in a time of urgent need and went a long way in a down payment of hope against his despair at that time. Then I see how much worse the major’s skin has gotten. It’s red as a crab’s foot. Not because he’s embarrassed but because he ain’t well is my suspicion. So then the president of the court he asks if there’s another witness could add something to this story and the major says he don’t know. So then the major brings it all a bit further in the wrong direction and says with an angry voice that it was Captain Sowell accused him with another witness of cruelty in his campaign against the Sioux that took and killed his own dear wife and one of his daughters and took his other daughter Angel captive. When he says this his face is now purple so it must be not only sickness.

Captain Sexton – now I hear his name proper – is just as flamed up now as the major and he don’t like the major’s high tone not one bit. I come all the way out from Boston to help my corporal and speak for him and I ain’t on trial here. I never said you was, says the president. God damn it, says the major, that just what it feel like. And bangs his right hand on the table. The papers and the glasses jump. Who was this other man that went witness against you? says the president and Major said some damn German called Sarjohn. Oh, says the captain, I know that man, is it Henry Sarjohn you mean? Yes, says the major. Henry Sarjohn is lieutenant of scouts at Fort Leavenworth, he says, why, I think I will call him. So Captain Sexton pulls the plug on proceedings till Sarjohn can be called. Good holy Jesus.

If the president had called Beelzebub I couldn’t of been more alarmed. One man on God’s earth I didn’t want putting eyes on me was that Sarjohn. Why in the name of tarnation did he have to be in the damn fort? I guess he could of been a hundred miles away and still called. Tarnation. So I’m eating soup and shitting it out another few days. A man can have noble thoughts and they roosting there in his head like a row of birds but life sure don’t like to contemplate them sitting there. Life’s gonna shoot them birds. Then they have everyone back including the German. Henry Sarjohn is a lieutenant now by God and they say the scouts is mostly half-breeds around here with Irish fathers and Indian mothers. That’s suppose to be amusing but I just don’t find it so. Major Neale don’t attend which I am told is his right as a retired officer and then the president asks Sarjohn his side of the story and what the hell happened to Sowell. So the little German tells us what happened which was, he don’t know. They got up a case against Major Neale and the major was detained and then Sowell was found killed and then the case was thrown back by the court. That’s all he knowed about it. Then he looks at me as hard as a rook. He puts his head in real close. God damn it – I nearly spake aloud though I am forbid. For that man’s breath smells of things that are dead. And then he says, and that’s the man that killed Captain Carlton. Who? says the president, real surprised. Captain Starling Carlton, I seen it, says the German, and I been keeping an eye out this long time. I knew I’d know him when I seen him plain, and there he is. This weren’t good for the temperature of the court and it weren’t good for me. I am took back to the cells while they goes on talking I guess and then in a few days another charge is laid against me and this time it was of murder. The court believed me guilty of the charge. That’s what they said.

I guess I was. I don’t know how many loved Starling Carlton and even if it were only a few I was one of them. But he was lifting his hand against Winona. I don’t see any other way round that no matter how often I go back in my mind and look at it. Captain Rufus Sexton says the court has decided I was guilty and so I am to be laid in chains and took out when the time was right and shot for my crime. No one speaks for mitigation because who there could speak for it?

They was fearsome days then. I am allowed to write John Cole and tell him my news and he comes up from Tennessee but as a condemned man they ain’t of a mind to let him see me. I am sore sorry about that but at the same time since I carry John Cole inside I reckoned it must not be allowed to make no odds in the long run. I imagined him near me and I imagined I kissed his face. I imagined he said nice things to me and I imagined me saying back I thought he was the best man I ever knowed. I weren’t leaving the world without saying one more time I loved John Cole even if he weren’t there to hear it.

Bitterness eats the bitter. But if I was a murderer I’d a liked to kill that German. Just saying that because it’s true and accurate. He was doing his duty as he saw fit to do, some might say. I’d say he is a damn meddler and I will leave it at that. Who killed Captain Silas Sowell deceased, I wonder? No one knowed and my guess was no one ever will. As John Cole said, he had a point of view and that got to be honoured. You can’t go in and be slaughtering everyone like a passel of King Henrys. That ain’t the world as it was made to be.

Now the sentence was gave and the summer was sitting outside my window. A huge jewel of sunlight hangs high on the wall. And I remembered oftentimes riding through such heat with a longing in my heart just for what the days of life ahead might bring, nothing else. I did hear them every Friday bringing down men. I would be shot as the sun came up, ‘with musketry’, as they decree. There’d be a day without me and then a night and then forever more. Life wants you to go down and suffer far as I can see. You gotta dance around all that. A child must come out to dance and dance around all obstacles and dance in the end the creaky quadrille of age. But. I was trying to see how it all happened and how everything came to that point and I was trying to spot the moment I was maybe pushed from the true path but I couldn’t see nothing like that. What did I do truly? I saved Winona. There was comfort in that. If I could of saved her without putting a sabre into Starling’s face I would of.

I wrote to John and I wrote to the poet McSweny just to say farewell but a letter come back from our old comrade Mr Noone that the poet McSweny were R.I.P. and he was sorry to hear I would be also soon – he didn’t use just them words. John Cole wrote me a letter would tear the heart out of a hangman, and tucked in with it is one of them famous missives of Winona. She has put in a sprig of some wild flower. Copperplate writing. Magan’s Farm, Paris. June 3rd, 1872. Dear Thomas, we are sure missing you in Tennessee. If only the army will let you come back we will kill the fatted calf says Lige Magan. He has harrowed the near fields and he sure misses your touch with those rascal horses. In the meantime there is only time to say I love you as a consequence of John Cole is champing at the bit to get to town. I miss you real bad. My heart is sore. Your fond daughter, Winona.

I weren’t going on too bad till I got that.

I don’t know but most likely I was forty years of age. That’s early to go but plenty died in the war younger. I seen a lot of young men go. That ain’t the point so much until it’s you going. I know I got a number on the prison roster for men to be shot and sooner or later it go up. Well, the day creeps closer. A printed notice is nailed to the door. You wouldn’t believe the sweating caused by that. My heart is weighed down by pain and longing and it just ain’t no fit state for a Christian. Even the rat who flits along the wall feels sorry for you then. You ain’t worth nothing to yourself. You ain’t worth a Lindenmueller cent. My head floods with fear and my feet are icy. Then I’m howling. The jailer comes in. His name is Pleasant Hazelwood, I guess he’s a sergeant. Ain’t no real use caterwauling, he says. I’m rocking like a drunkard back and forth. Fear burns my belly like a nest of Mexican chillies. I’m shouting at him. Why ain’t there no God will help me? Ain’t no man neither, he says. I run against the wall like a blind rat. Like I might find a gap. Everything gone from me. I stand there with my breast heaving. No battle is worser than this. Sergeant Hazelwood stands in close and twists his hands about like two newborn pups and then grips my arm. I seen a thousand men just like you, he says, it just ain’t so bad as you think. Kind old bugger and him as ugly as a moose. Kind of a angel sent to me in the guise of a fat turnkey smelling of shit and onions. But it ain’t helping. Not truly. The devil’s franked my ticket and God ain’t in it. How can I make my peace with Him if He ain’t there? I plunge down again into violent misery like a rock thrown into a torrent.

One evening shortly after very late I get a visitor. I know it ain’t John Cole but Sergeant Hazelwood gives me notice. Says a gent is here to see me. I guess I don’t know too many gents unless they’re officers. Sure enough it’s Major Neale.

Well he ain’t a major now, is he? Come in in his beautiful suit that some tailor in Boston has laboured over. He’s looking much better. The few months has done him good. Tells me Angel is going real well at her schooling and he wants her to go on to the university to please her mother. Alright, I says. He has a big bunch of papers with him. He’s gone back to all the fellas was in the battle and asked each and every one what they knew or saw. Finally he says he gets to Corporal Poulson. He kinda has the same account as the German Sarjohn but there’s a difference. He says Corporal McNulty were trying to stop a Indian girl being killed. That old Starling Carlton’s blood was up and nothing would do him but to shoot her with his pistol. A-course, yes, I’m thinking, since he were trying to follow your damn orders, the loyal old bastard – but a-course I don’t say that aloud. Poulson says he sees it all and keeps his mouth shut till the major asks him. That’s the army way. Whatever you say say nothing, just in case. So Major Neale goes over to Washington and takes up the case there. And then he goes down to the head of the army of the Missouri. Well, he says, slowing down now in his account, they can’t stop your sentence. Laws don’t allow it. When he says this my heart drops to my boots. But, he says, they can commute it to hard labour for one hundred days and then you will be freed. The major says if I don’t mind breaking stones a while then that’s what I can do. I says, Major, sir, I thank you, I really do. Don’t be thanking me, he says, I thank you. You saved my daughter the only one remaining to me and you fought like a dog in the war and your service under me was always exemplary. I says I am sorry his wife is gone and he says he is too. He lays his right hand on my shoulder. I ain’t washed in a month but he don’t flinch. And he says he will always remember me and if he can ever be of service to me again in the future I know where he is. Well, I don’t know where he is but I don’t say nothing because that just what people say. Another thing I don’t say aloud is, Are you the boy that killed Silas Sowell? I say I sure will be glad to get back to Tennessee where my people abide and he says he’s certain they will be glad to see me.

So I am one hundred days making big stones into small stones. In the time of the hunger in Sligo a lot of men did that work, trying to earn the pennies to feed their families. It were called Relief Works. Well, I am feeling mighty relieved. I am happy to strike down at those stones and my fellow prisoners are mighty puzzled at my happiness. But how could I been otherwise? I am going back to Tennessee. The day come when all my work is done and they kit me out in a set of clothes and they set me on the road outside the prison. The clothes is tattered but give me my modesty, just. Set free like a mourning dove. In my exultation I forget I ain’t got a bean of money but it don’t concern me and I know I can rely on the kindness of folk along the way. The ones that don’t try to rob me will feed me. That how it is in America. I never felt such joy of heart as in those days traipsing southward. I never felt such pure charge and fire of joy. I am like a man not just let loose from death but from his own discomfited self. I don’t desire nothing but to reach our farm and witness the living forms of John Cole and Winona step out to meet me. The whole way sparkles with the beauty of woods and fields. I had wrote I was coming and soon I would be there. That’s how it was. It were only a short stretch of walking down through those pleasing states of Missouri and Tennessee.