Текст книги "Days Without End"

Автор книги: Sebastian Barry

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I guess poor Trooper Pearl had the worse fate. The major hadn’t forgotten after all. Court martial and even though the officers presiding had no real notion of what his offence might have been given that Trooper Pearl was a victor in an Indian engagement something about the major’s high moral tone got into proceedings and then Pearl’s goose was cooked. It was me and five other troopers were gave the job of dispatching him. He made a noble end of things. Looking a bit like Jehovah now because he had grown a long black beard in captivity all down his breast. We shot him through the beard to reach his heart. Joe Pearl went down. His father came in from Massachusetts where they was from and took the body home.

John Cole said he might have enough of Indian fighting just presently but we got to serve out our term agreed and we were content to do that because we got to be. We sure getting poorer and uglier in the army but better than be shot, he said.

CHAPTER SIX

YOU CAN BE TIRED all you like of something I guess but the Fates say you got to go back out and rub your nose in it. How come we left cosy Jefferson again to traipse back just next and nigh the way we had come with so much hardship might have been a question. That just the army way. Well we had got three months in barracks and that was a fine endowment. Wise old hands brought their bearskins. They weren’t going to freeze again like the late Trooper Watchorn. Army had no good clothes to give us for the cold. Meant to give us wool jobs but we never seen them. First bloody Sergeant Wellington said we was cunts deserved to die of frostbite. Every man Jack got a printed sheet showing us the saving outfits which was supposed to arrive at barracks instanter. Never damn did. Can’t wear a picture, says John Cole, my beau.

But now was the season for all those hopeful hearts going out to pick up gold nuggets as they thought from the ground of forsaken places. This year more than was seen before. If you ever set eyes on three thousand lily-faced white boys and their families you’ll know what I mean. Was like they was going to a picnic but the meadow was six weeks off and death guaranteed for many. We was told in St Louis to take a northern route because every blade of grass was eaten between Missouri and Fort Laramie. Them thousand thousand horses, cattle, oxen, and mules. Lots of new boys in the 6th, lots of forlorn Irish, usual big dark boys. Joking, all that teasing Irish do, but somewhere behind it the dark wolves staring, the hunger wolves under the hunger moons. We were to augment the military presence in Fort Laramie because there was to be a great gathering of Indians out there on the plains. The major and the colonel is going to ask them to stop killing the goddamn emigrants.

The colonel sends out messengers to every tribe he knows of ever set foot on the whiteman’s trail. Thousands come, driven in by want and hunger. The whole thing is set up a few miles north of the fort in a place called Horse Creek. The colonel puts the army on the lower bank of the river. Up go our rows of tents. The summer sun leans down on everything and bakes the canvas and if you can sleep at night you must be deceased. Nice easy-going river there and not much bother to cross it, and the colonel he ranges the government men and the quick-chance traders over a ways and across the water itself he requests the tribes to be establishing their wigwams. Now there was maybe three four thousand pointed dwellings bedecked in painted skins and banners. The famed Shoshone, the lofty Sioux boys both Teton and Oglala, the Arapaho, the Assiniboine come down from Canada, blazed out in the midday heat in all their finery. Major knows the Oglala because it’s the same crowd fed us in our time of trial. That same chief ’s here, Caught-His-Horse-First. And the noise that come up from the whole lot of them is a tremendous music in itself. A special awning is erected and the officers in their best bibs assemble there on chairs. At length the cloaked backs of the chiefs was seen ranged darkly in the shadows and the sunred faces of the officers sort of bleakly looking out from under hatbrims, everyone starching theyselves up into a mighty fit of seriousness. Big speeches is made, while the mounted infantry and the cavalry respectfully stood off at a distance, and on the other bank the tribes seat themselves in a silence such as you might know just before a thunderstorm, when the land draws in its chest and holds a limitless breath, and across the valley drifts the voice of the colonel. Annuities and food supplies is offered in exchange for the emigrants to be let through. The interpreters do their work and agreement is reached. The colonel looks mighty pleased. We were all thinking that a new day was dawning on the plains, and we was happy to think it might be so. Them Indians is wore out from slaughter and so are we.

Starling Carlton, one of the fellas in our company, says there’s so much hot air in the colonel it’s a wonder he don’t float off. But soldiers like to take the dim view. It cheers them up. I won’t say what the sergeant said of all this, the only truly unhappy man.

Empurpled rapturous hills I guess and the long day brushstroke by brushstroke enfeebling into darkness and then the fires blooming on the pitch plains. In the beautiful blue night there was plenty of visiting and the braves was proud and ready to offer a lonesome soldier a squaw for the duration of his passion. John Cole and me sought out a hollow away from prying eyes. Then with the ease of men who have rid themselves of worry we strolled among the Indian tents and heard the sleeping babies breathing and spied out the wondrous kind called by the Indians winkte or by white men berdache, braves dressed in the finery of squaws. John Cole gazes on them but he don’t like to let his eyes linger too long in case he gives offence. But he’s like the plough-horse that got the whins. All woken in a way I don’t see before. The berdache puts on men’s garb when he goes to war, this I know. Then war over it’s back to the bright dress. We move on and he’s just shaking like a cold child. Two soldiers walking under the bright nails of the stars. John Cole’s long face, long stride. The moonlight not able to flatter him because he was already beautiful.

Next morning was a final gift-giving to the Indians. A man called Titian Finch had arrived with a daguerreotype machine to make a record of these clement days. The tribes is photographed in great assemblies and the major has his picture done with Caught-His-Horse-First like they was old friends. A sunlight as white as a maiden’s bosom floods the country. They have to move real close. A naked Indian and a braided major. They stand beside each other in casual earnestness, the Indian’s right hand gripping the major’s silver-threaded sleeve, as if to alert him to some danger, or guard him from it. Titian Finch bids them both hold still as stones, and for one eternal moment they are there, the very picture of human equanimity and gratitude.

Then these friendly acts were done and the Indians dispersed and we was returned to ordinary days. Nathan Noland, Starling Carlton, Lige Magan the sharpshooter, these was boys of the regiment that came close to us in that time, me and John Cole. Because it was now that John Cole started to show the illness that afflicted him. He was obliged to lie quiet for days because there weren’t one cup of steam in him. Doc had no name for it. A rattlesnake could of trailed across his breast and he couldn’t a done nothing about it. The boys abovementioned was the ones that shown regard for John Cole in his extremity. Handsome John Cole they called him. Got the cooks to make him broth and so forth. Bringing it in to him like he was a emperor. Not to say that Lige Magan and the rest weren’t broken-backed moaning clap-ridden drunken loons betimes. Man they was. Lige Magan I liked best I can say. Elijah was his full name so I guess he was a wonder worker. Nice ox-faced boy of some forty-five years out of Tennessee. His people had hogs there till the bottom fell out of hogs. The bottom was always falling out of something in America far as I could see. So it was with the world, restless, kind of brutal. Always going on. Not waiting for no man. Then John Cole would wax good again and it was like nothing had ailed him. Then down again. Then up again. We was dizzy.

Now it was inching into autumn and those treaty Indians had to make way in their villages for that old murderer called Famine. That filthy dark-hearted scrawny creature that wants the ransom of lives. Because government food that was promised was late or never coming. The major was looking vexed and tormented. His honest heart had made promises, that how he saw it.

It was in the time of noisy weather that the first trouble came. We rode forth to meet it. Thunderstorms busted open the air and threw heaven-cast pails of light over that landscape that had no walls, no ends. God in his farmer’s apron, scattering the great seeds of yellow brightness. The hinterlands beyond the mountains breathing a fiery white breath. Nathan Noland with his tender ears already ruined by years of musket-fire deaf for three days after. Riding in a bruised becalmed gap between that ravenous display and the coming clatter of the rain. Then rain flattening the grasses like bear grease flattens a squaw’s hair. Sergeant Wellington was happy now because Sioux from some village westward had fallen on some strayed emigrants and ripped them from hopeful life. So the colonel had gave him fifty men and said to put a stop to that. Seems it was those Oglala friends of the major but that didn’t stop the order.

First Lieutenant puts us into two companies and he takes twenty men and goes sharp westward by his compass and us and the sergeant set off scouring out a little river ravine where he reckons that village might lie. The watercourse runs for ten miles north-east looks like. The whole country has started to steam because the sunlight is roasting off the rain. The grasses start to sit up again almost naked to the eye. A giant rousing. Three thousand bears throwing off the winter looks like. The stream itself mad as goaded bulls tearing down between its drenched rocks. Meadowlarks larking everywhere looking pleased with themselves and the skeeters in wholesale flocks everywhere. We ain’t feeling cheerful because rocks above you favours the enemy. That’s in all history. We were expecting to see the sergeant’s savages any moment popping up. But we went on all that day and further up the country where there were no streams only the baking silence of the plains. Then the sergeant disgruntled gives the order to retrace our steps and he is cursing that he let the new Pawnee scouts go with the lieutenant. These are very elegant boys in good uniforms better than what I had. But the lieutenant took them.

White men just no good for tracking cross country like this, he said, surprising us. Sounded like praise.

We camped up where our paths had furcated and we slept as best we could in our nightcaps of skeeters. We was happy men to climb out of blankets at earliest dawn. We washed our weary faces in the stream now calmed by the hours passed between. Rains in it must have passed on towards the Platte river and soon enough pour down into the Missouri. Strange to think of all that as we tried to shave our cheeks with blunted razors in the sparkling waters. Handsome John Cole whistling a waltz still residing in him out of New England.

Then we’re just poking about the place there waiting for the lieutenant to come back. Sergeant tells us to dry the lurking rain off our sabres or they will rust for sure. Then we fodder the horses best we can. Ain’t a trooper alive don’t love his horses. Spavined brute is loved. Nothing much to do then. Lige shows his skill at cards again and cleans out Starling Carlton. But we’re only playing for blades of grass, we ain’t got no money till the end of the month, if it comes then. Pawnee scouts were nearly going off last month because their pay didn’t come and then they seen we had nothing either so they calm down. Sometimes when you’re far from the sweet bells of town nothing comes out to you. Feels like they forget you. The goddamned boys in blue.

So the sergeant tells us to mount up and then we ready the horses and then we ride out along the way the lieutenant went, following the hoofprints best we could after the big rubber of the rain. Rain likes to keep things discreet, not show the way. But we go like that, Sergeant cursing all the while. Sergeant has a big hard stomach these days, says it’s his liver. Way he drinks whisky it might be. Youth has gone out of him anyhow and he looks like a old man. Like we got ten faces to wear in our lives and we wear them one by one.

Two miles on we got the shackles of the heat lying on us again, so hot the country begins to shimmer like the desert. We had the sun half behind us to the south which was some mercy. Wasn’t a man among hadn’t had his nose skinned off a hundred times. Bear grease is good for that but it stinks like an arsehole and anyhow we ain’t seen bears for a long time.

Jeez Christ, says Starling Carlton, if this ain’t hot.

So then it got hotter. You can feel your back begin to cook. Pinch of salt and a few sprigs of rosemary and you got a dinner. God Almighty, the heat. My horse don’t like it much and is beginning to stumble along. Sergeant is riding a nice mule he got in St Louis because he says mules is best and he ain’t wrong. We’re just going along while the sun hammers on us without anyone able to stop it. You could arrest sunlight for attempted murder out on the plains. God damn it. Then Starling Carlton just falls off his horse. If he knew when he was born and had a paper it wouldn’t show too many years. Falls clean off his saddle and strikes the powdery earth. So the sergeant and another trooper push him back up and give him water from the bottle and he looks all startled and ashamed like a girl farting in chapel. But we’re too hot to mock him. On we go. Then off in the distance Sergeant thinks he sees something. Truth to tell Sergeant is as good as a scout for seeing things but we don’t like to tell him that. So now we dismount and are leading our mounts and we are keeping best we can to a low line of scrub and other rubbishy rocks that happily snakes off towards whatever the sergeant seen. Feet swole in the boots and now every inch sweating including feels like the very eyeballs.

Quarter mile off the sergeant stops and makes a reckoning. He can’t see nothing moving he says but he sees plenty wigwams there and we can see them too, black shapes pointing up to the stupendous white acres of the sky. He don’t like what he sees. Then he barks a quick order and we’re into the saddles again and we don’t feel no heat now. Sergeant puts us into a double line and then by God he gives the order to charge. Out there in the silent prairie with only the perpetual wind for music and he tells us to charge. Ain’t there an old story about a windmill? But we spur the flanks till we draw little scratches of beaded blood. Horses wake up out of their stupor and catch the atmosphere. Sergeant shouts draw sabres so he does and now we show our thirty swords to the sunlight and the sunlight ravishes every inch of them. Sergeant never has given that order in all our time because you might as well light a fire as draw a sabre in the brightness as far as signals go. But something has the wind up him. Suddenly an old sense of life we haven’t remembered floods back into us. The air of manhood fills our skins. Some can’t help hollering and the sergeant screams at us to keep the line. We wonder what he is thinking. Soon we are at the fringes of the tent town, we tear through in a second, like riders in an old storybook, sweeping in. Suddenly we reach the centre. Suddenly we rein in mighty fast. Horses are flighty, excited, snorting, they’re spinning round so it’s hard to keep a bead on what’s to be seen. What’s to be seen is our twenty other troopers all dead looks like. They’re all dead lying about in the centre of the camp, clumped up, looks like shot really sudden, so that most of the heads are pointing nigh in the same direction. Lieutenant’s head in addition cut from his body. Hats gone, belts, guns, sabres, shoes, and scalps. Nathan Noland with his copper-coloured beard and eyes open to the sun. Tall wiry man from Nova Scotia, R.I.P. Halo of black blood. There’s only two Indians there, dead as dollars. We’re surprised the Indians didn’t take their dead with them. Must be a story there. Otherwise the camp is clean empty. You see the pole marks where the Indians left. Had to go so quick they didn’t pack the wigwams. Kettles still, here and there, with fires under them still. Sergeant dismounts and lets his mule walk off. Walk to Jericho for all he cared. He takes off his campaign cap and scratches his bald pate with his right hand. Tears in his eyes. God have mercy.

CHAPTER SEVEN

WE’RE SCUFFING ABOUT the camp trying to figure out what happened and looking for clues. We don’t know if the Indians are nearby or coming back. Then a trooper’s found in a wigwam where he must of crawled in. It’s like a miracle and for a moment an exultation floods my breast. He has a bullet in the cheek but he’s still breathing. Caleb Booth’s alive, shouts the man who finds him. We all crowd to the tent door. We fetch him a swallow of water and then the sergeant holds up his head and tries to get him to drink but most of the water runs out through his cheek. We found them early this morning, says Caleb Booth. He’s young like me and John Cole, so he doesn’t understand dying. Probably thinks he’ll come through all right. Wants to tell us the history. Says the Pawnee scouts took off for some reason and then the lieutenant rode them right in and asked the chief was he involved in killing those emigrants. Chief said he was because they was moving over ground that was forbid in the treaty and why was that and had he not by God every right to kill them? Caleb Booth said the lieutenant just lost his temper then at the easy mentioning of the Lord and just shot the man standing next nigh the chief. Then the chief calls out and there is a dozen other braves in the tents unbeknownst and they rush out and start shooting and there’s only time to shoot another Indian and then all the troopers are shot. And Caleb lay in the grass face down and keeps quiet. Then the Indians go off in a big hurry and Caleb creeps into the wigwam as the sun starts to rise higher in the sky since he don’t wish to be fried. He knew we would come, he says, he just knew. Darned glad to see us. So then the sergeant pokes around the wound a bit to see where the bullet went and looks like it went right through and out somewhere. Flying like a gemstone over the plains. Sergeant nods his head like someone asked him something.

Digging holes for nineteen men in earth never ploughed is taxing work. But the bodies are already swelling and we ain’t got a cart to carry them home. We gather up all the wigwams and all the bits and pieces and pile them up and then we fire the lot. Lige Magan says he hopes the Injuns can see the smoke and hurry back to save their dirty rags. He says the best thing to do is bury the men and then light out after the killers. Kill every one of them for a change, he says. I’m thinking but not saying that we don’t have the supplies for that and what about Caleb Booth. They could be a day away and what’s more cavalry can never find Indians like that, they’re wilier than wolves. And Lige knows all that as well as me but he goes busting on about doing it. Tells us what he thinks we can do when we find them. Seems to have a lot of plans. More than likely the sergeant can hear him but the sergeant is standing alone now beyond the wigwams. The grass is so baked by the sun that it looks blue, it shines like blue blades beside the sergeant’s old boots. He has his back turned to us and he doesn’t say anything in response to Lige. Lige shakes his head and goes on digging. Starling Carlton has gone puce-red in the face and is panting like an old dog, but he keeps the shovel moving. Bangs his foot down on it and keeps it moving. They say Starling Carlton killed men in his time outside the law but no one knows for sure. Some say he was a child-catcher, taking Indian children for slaves in California. He sure would give you a clatter if you looked sideways at him. You gotta treat him with due caution. He don’t mind losing at cards and has a jolly aspect to him sometimes but you don’t want to find out the thing that irritates him because it might be the last thing you find out. There’s no one on earth would say he’s a polite man. How he carries his big weight out here on a job like this is anyone’s guess and he don’t seem to eat much more than the next man and he sweats like a cut cactus all the time. It’s washing down his face now and he rubs it away with his filthy hands. He digs nearly as good as John Cole, has a little steady knack to his spadework, which is agreeable to watch even as we mourn. We don’t know rightly what to do with the dead Indians so we just leave them. Sergeant comes over suddenly and cuts off their noses because he don’t want them to reach the happy hunting grounds, he says. He throws the noses out onto the prairie like he thinks the dead might rise to try and put them back. He fetches the papers and them little travelling Bibles and the like off of our boys. Wives and mothers to send them to. On we go, then we respectfully drop the men into their holes and then we cover them up with a bedding of earth and every man in due course has a mound of the same earth over him like eiderdowns in a fancy hotel. The sergeant rouses himself and says a few words appropriate to the moment and then he bids us mount up and Lige puts Caleb Booth up behind him because it’s Lige who has the strongest gelding and then we ride off. No one looks back.

Caught-His-Horse-First and his band is pinned up in barracks as the number one criminal. Sergeant pins the notice up himself. Colonel signs the order. Doesn’t take the terror and the sorrow out of it but puts revenge in beside it as a brother. Like cutting beer with whisky. The Pawnee scouts come in eventually but when they can’t give a good account for hightailing it the colonel reckons it’s as good as desertion and they’re shot. The major don’t like it and says scouts ain’t soldiers proper, you can’t shoot them. Apart from that old and useful phrase nahwah which means howdy, no one speaks Pawnee and sign language don’t cover this. Indians look very puzzled, surprised and offended to be shot but they go to the wall with noble mien I must allow. You can’t have nothing good in war without you punishing the guilty, the sergeant says with a savage air and no one says nothing against that. John Cole whispers to me that most times that sergeant he just wrong but just now and then he’s right and he’s right this time. I guess I’m thinking this is true. We get drunk then and the sergeant is clutching his belly all evening and then everything is blotted out till you awake in the bright early morning needing a piss and then it all floods back into your brain what happened and it makes your heart yelp like a dog.

Least Caleb Booth was coming good in the infirmary and that might be a tribute to his innocent belief in the darn permanence of life.

But I was remembering in particular Nathan Noland my friend and John Cole’s. And I remembered John Cole putting a sprig into the hole with Nathan of some goddamn weed he called Wolf ’s-bane but I said it was a goddamn Lupine, don’t he know his flowers? He said he knowed them a heck better than me being a farmboy but we was out in foreign country now and names were not the same here. Wolf ’s-bane was used in New England for poisoning captured wolves, said John Cole. You crushed it up and fed it with meat. I said you can crush that up and try kill a wolf with it but the wolf will bite you because it’s just a Lupine. Then he was laughing. We was sorrowful in the extreme for Nathan Noland and the flower looked good along his bloodied face, Lupine or Wolf ’s-bane or whatever was its name. It was a small stack of purple smoke it looked like lying there and the drear pull of the skin on Nathan’s face was somehow eased a little by it. John Cole had closed his eyes and we was sorry to see his end.

As drear winter returns again we hunker down in the fort and hope our bodies can rise in spring like the bears. Soldiers coming out of winter have those swimming rheumy eyes of drinkers. Their skins is pale from poor eats. Awful endless yards of dry meats from the long cold pantries and maybe for a while potatoes from New York and Maine come out in huge wagons and even some oranges coming back the other way from California. But mostly filthy dreck of things like things dogs won’t eat except in extremities. But Indians too go to ground and God knows how they stretch their goods from fall to spring because an Indian he never plans for nothing. If he got a pile of something he eats it, if he got a barrel of whisky he drinks it. He drinks it till he falls down drunker than a pollen-drunk bumblebee. We’re hoping Caught-His-Horse-First is feeling the same murdering hunger we do. Only the sergeant keeps his swole belly, like a girl six month gone, and of course Starling Carlton never sheds an ounce. The fort is scattered with other Indians, they sit out on the roofs like emperors, and the women work for favours with the troopers. Troopers have red peckers and God knows what the squaws. Troopers that can’t afford even squaws lie with troopers so that’s more devilment to their equipment. Doesn’t do to dwell your mind on it. Major instituted an Indian school for the many children racing about and the offspring of the troopers that have took Indian wives. Most of the three-card tricksters, hucksters, coffin makers, snakebite serum sellers, miracle medicine men, volunteer militiamen, do-anything merchants, and all the candidates for the worst examples of humanity, and so on and so on, hove off east just as soon as the lead dropped in the glass. The major himself went east just nearly alone with a company of ten men because news is he is to be married there to a Boston beauty, so Lige Magan has ascertained, but how we don’t know, unless he reads it in one of those ancient newspapers that crawl out to us with the pilgrims. The buglers and our drummer boys played him out onto the trail and we gave him a friendly cheer for luck. Plenty pilgrims also in the fort putting a lean on the rations, and how many have resolved to return east I don’t know, but nearly every soul here was gone out to California or Oregon and found nothing there they liked, and back they wended eastward, reaching only here before the winter. Guess the Promised Land is draped in hues of grey in the upshot. It’s a hard task to make something out of nothing as even God might attest. Me, sharpshooter Lige Magan, Caleb Booth back from the dead, Starling Carlton, Handsome John Cole, we were keeping a little understanding going that we was a special outfit of friends, for the purposes of cards not least. Starling, heaving with his accustomed fat, in the dead of winter when we might have ate rats heartily enough, we suspected of cheating against himself. Either that or he was losing his famous touch. But our small economy was moving about between ourselves anyhow, our few cents and tokens passing from pocket to pocket and back again, and I remember that winter as one of uproarious laughter. We was on best terms because we had seen slaughter together. Caleb was almost a holy man among the soldiers. He could of taken a collection in his hat every Sunday. A man that comes through murder and horror is a special man, men look at him as he passes and they say such and such about him – there goes Caleb Booth, the lucky man. A lucky man is a man you want fighting near you and he gives the needful sense that the world is a thing of mysteries and wonders. That it’s bigger than you, bigger than all the shit and blood you seen. That God might be in it somehow looking out for you. Troopers maybe are rough souls and the regular padre don’t get much joy out of us. But that don’t say we don’t have things we cherish. Stories that tell another story just the whole while they are being told. Things you can’t ever quite put your finger on. Every man alive has asked why he is here on the earth and what was the likely purpose of that. To watch Caleb Booth come back from the door of death with his mortal wound, well, somewhere in there all mixed up with not knowing was knowing something. I ain’t saying we knowed what we knowed, I ain’t saying Starling Carlton or Lige Magan jumped up and said he knowed something, or anyone else. I ain’t saying that.

No, sir.

Late spring’s bringing the first of the wagon trains and also the major with his new bride. She ain’t riding side-saddle. Kitted out in proper ladies’ britches. In the gates she comes like a message from a far far country, where things is different and people eat off nice plates. Country opens like an enormous parcel and the plains is sparkling with ten thousand flowers and you can feel that first tincture of healing warmth in the days. And across this great carpet of colours has come the major and his bride. God Almighty. He carries her indoors as custom demands and we all stand in front of his quarters and give a cheer and throw our hats into the air. We don’t hardly know what else to do. We feel as happy for the major like it was us that married her. John Cole says he never saw a woman to match her. He’s right. Major hasn’t said a word but the fort gazetteer says her name before she wed were Lavinia Grady so I guess there must be Irish in her anyhow. Major’s name is Neale so I guess she’s Mrs Neale now. I was surprised to note the major’s Christian name because I don’t believe I knew it rightly till that moment. Tilson. Goddamn Tilson Neale. Which was news to me. But that’s how you learn things I guess.