Days Without End (Days Without End #1) - Sebastian Barry Page 0,82

laughing then. I ain’t laughing, I ain’t laughing. If I still got a heart it’s breaking.

Trying to figure out this plan. We going to give Winona to her uncle and then take back Angel Neale. What happens to Winona after? They think she’s going to don Sioux skirts and speak Sioux again? Not sure folks are thinking about Winona. I know they are not. Starling Carlton just loves his blessed major and will effect all in his power to succour him. Of course he will. Major the fairest man I ever met but he been filleted out with the knife of grief. Men I knew well in former days still in the company and it’s so strange to be clad in blue again. Little Sarjohn he rides out ahead and bobs about on his mule like he know what he’s doing. Those familiar hills now dressed in the lace and shawls of winter. Even in distress the land seems to solace you. Guess the black truth is it crosses through our hearts.

Starling Carlton leads my old company and I got my corporal work to do. There’s a strange yellow-faced fella called Captain Sowell who leads Company A. Looks like his cheeks were shaved from wood and he got Dundrearies just like Trooper Watchorn years ago. Man’s got a thorn bush each side of his nose you’d say. Starling Carlton ain’t inclined to speak to me so I don’t ask him nothing. I doubt if he trusts me but I ain’t planning nothing but to keep Winona safe. Now she’s ordered up beside the major who’s mounted on his fine black mare. When you see a horse like that you know you been riding a sorry nag all through Nebraska and Wyoming. Her coat gleams in the silvery glamour of the snow-light. It’s a long time since I rode with the major and all the old medicine of loyalty floods into my heart. Suddenly I feel sorely four or five sorrows. The loss of old comrades in times past. The dead in battles. The murder of Mrs Neale, a gentle woman. Somewhere in the back of all that are other matters. The shady ghosts of my family long gone by in Sligo. Sligo. A word I hardly even sounded in private thought in a decade of years. The filthied dress of my mother floats behind my eyes. My sister’s pinafore ruined by Death. The thin cold faces. My father lengthwise like a smear of yellow butter. A stain. His tall black hat as crushed as a squeezebox. Sometimes you know you ain’t a clever man. But likewise sometimes the fog of usual thoughts clears off in a sudden breeze of sense and you see things clear a moment like a clearing country. We blunder through and call it wisdom but it ain’t. They say we be Christians and suchlike but we ain’t. They say we are creatures raised by God above the animals but any man that has lived knows that’s damned lies. We are going forth that day to call Caught-His-Horse-First a murderer in silent judgement. But it was us killed his wife and his child. The first Winona. And many more that were kin to him. Our own Winona was wrested from these plains. We took her like she were our natural daughter. But she ain’t. What is she now? Plucked all two ways and there she is dressed as a drummer boy in the cavalry of the United States and easily laughing. She pleased to her soul to be answering the hurt of the major because the major’s wife once showed her kindness. Winona, the queen of this o’erwhelming country. God damn it but a corporal best not weep. And John Cole lying in our bed at home and wondering what I’m doing. Ain’t I treasoned him and gone back on my true word? The world ain’t all just grasping and doing. It’s thinking too. But I ain’t possessing the brain to think it all clear. A snowfall made mostly of dark gaps and wind starts to fall on my black folly. The companies ride on with a German jackanapes in front. But no man such a jackanapes as me.

Caught-His-Horse-First don’t straight off show his face. His boys are waiting at the back of a deep glen. Trees on slopes so steep you wonder how could they manage there. Dark evergreens rushing up towards the sky as if a kinda fixed fire. A cold crowd of silver birches