Days Without End (Days Without End #1) - Sebastian Barry Page 0,8
the red rivers bursting their banks everywhere, till we were sloshing in God knows what and the dry earth was suddenly turned to noisy mud. The Shawnees ate the lights raw. Their mouths were sinkholes of dark blood.
Only Trooper Pearl looked sad as a sad baby not to have killed. But he got the first cut around the fires that night, the raw meat spitting and blackening in the flames. The men hunched around, talking with the gaiety of souls about to eat plentifully, with the empty dark country about us, and the strange fabric of frost and frozen wind falling on our shoulders, and the great black sky of stars above us like a huge tray of gems and diamonds. The Shawnees singing in their own camp all night till at last Sergeant Wellington rose up from his blanket and was desirous to shoot them.
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