Days Without End (Days Without End #1) - Sebastian Barry Page 0,16

the men in the trees was mostly saved. Those roofs too low. We found bodies for the next weeks, lower down, as the flood waters fell. The townspeople came down and helped us with the burying. They hadn’t been so crazy as to build their town in a flood path anyhow. Guess we knew then what had scalloped out that ground. Goddamn engineers.

Then a queer fever went through the camp. Maybe it was yellow fever, something like that, something that liked a lot of wetness. Our cattle were gone of course and all our dry goods were wet goods. The townspeople gave us what they could but the major said we had to go back to Missouri even though the grass would only be coming small on the prairie.

This little tour is done, he said, drily. The major’s wit. It was the driest thing in the camp.

Now winter was tightening her noose on the world everywhere and we were headed back for Missouri. To say we were a bedraggled troop is not quite saying enough. Maybe we were being punished for our shabby acts. There was no game below the mountains this time and soon our bellies were gnawed by hunger. It was weeks of a journey and now we were a-feared of what hunger might do. A hunger knower like myself was a-feared more than most. I seen the cold deeds of hunger. The world got a lot of people in it, and when it comes to slaughter and famine, whether we’re to live or die, it don’t care much either way. The world got so many it don’t need to. We could have starved out there on the badlands, on that desert that wasn’t a desert, on that journey that wasn’t a journey so much as a fleeing eastward. Thousands die everywhere always. The world don’t care much, it just don’t mind much. That’s what I notice about it. There is that great wailing and distress and then the pacifying waters close over everything, old Father Time washes his hands. On he plods to the next place. It suits us well to know these things, that you may exert yourself to survive. Just surviving is the victory. Now that I can no longer exert myself in that way, I think back to that lonesome troop of soldiers, trying to make it back. Desolate, and decimated though we were, there was something good there. Something that couldn’t be extinguished by flood and hunger. That human will. You got to give homage to it. I seen it many times. It ain’t so rare. But it is the best of us.

Now we were praying like priests or virgin girls that we would meet some wagons plying west. Except, by the time they passed us, they might be lean on victuals also of course. But we just gotta see other human faces. Mile upon mile of the sere little bushes of America and the scraggy up-and-down terrain. In the far distance to the south sometimes we thought we could see piled-up square hills, we knew we mustn’t go down there. That was Apache and Comanche country certainly. Boys would eat you for their supper quick as see you. The major knew the lean Apache boys, he had fought with them for fifteen years, he said. Just about the worst devils you will ever hear about or see, he said. He said they was going down regular into Mexico, chewing up farmers. Kill everyone they could find, take the cattle, horses, women and oftentimes children back to their countries. Be gone a month, riding like ghosts through the spectral lands. You could chase after them with men and guns but you would never find them. Never even see them. You’d wake in the morning and there wouldn’t be a horse tethered no more, fifty of them vanished in the night, and the pickets dead as stones where they had been sitting. He said they took you prisoner you would regret it. Take you back to their villages for sport, the women with their little sharp knives cutting you with a thousand cuts, the slowest death in the book. Bleed out on the warm prairie dust. Or bury you to the neck, let the ants eat your face, the dogs gnaw your ears and nose, if the women hadn’t cut them off already. Thing was, a warrior was never to cry out. Show how brave you were by not crying out, that’s what they