have the time & the quiet of the Guardhouse that I can write of how my brother & myself come to be in such a tight spot as we are in now with you Sir breathing down our necks like I do not know what kind of beast in the forest.
I think it strange & sad it comes to this but I will do it anyway & it will be an account of sorts but it will not be a diary or story for my children to read or their children or for myself to look back on when I am old & grey. No. I will write it for you Sir. For though you surely will not recall it we met once before myself & my brother & yourself & at that meeting you did save us from certain harm or death indeed in a place called the Slaughter Pen at Chickamauga in Tennessee. I am in your debt Sir. We are in your debt & because of this you will have my record of events when a different man sent to hang us would not.
But do not expect this to be an easy record of my guilt because I have learnt that a man can be convicted of a thing by law & feel nothing about it one way or the other in his heart while guilt can eat him alive for a thing different altogether even though this may be something that the law will never know or care a thing about.
I tell you Sir things may be different altogether to how you might reckon them. Or perhaps things are exactly as you imagine them to be. It does not matter for if I have the time & lamp oil enough for it I will try to lay things out for you. As you know yourself we have a saying a shanockal as we call it in the language of home we both share which goes Ni few dada scall gan udar. I do not know how to write it properly but it means in English that a story told by a man with no knowledge of it is a worthless thing. So I say to you that while you may of heard stories about what happened that night in Sutler Kinney’s shebeen well all such tales are worthless things nothing but nonsense & gossip & slander.
But I do know the story worth telling. Perhaps it is only myself & my brother Tom who know it in full. Most of the others well they are no more of this world May God Give Them Rest. (Some of them but not all.)
So you will have the truth of things but I must first beg you Sir to forgive my poor show of letters here for I am not a learned man. Our father would only allow his children go to lessons when their labouring was done & since then I have only the back East newspapers & borrowed books for a school master so you must go easy with me.
Is it strange that I feel in my heart I should write this in the tongue I was rared up with that is as gwaylga or the Gaelic? I feel it is wrong that I cannot do it but the Master did not teach us to write in it while mother & father could not write anything in any language for they had no schooling. And though the Master’s Irish was lovely & fine for a foreign man from Tipperary he always said that we had enough of the Rough Tongue at home & what we should acquire was the language of the conquering Crown if ever were we to get on in the World of Men. For the Gaelic is fine for songs & yarns but it will get a body nowhere at all in the Courts of Law or at Market the Master did warn us more than once. He fell down to the bloody flux in ’46 or ’47 so that was the end of my schooling but he gave me enough English to write this I do hope.
All of which is a fine joke because for all the Bearla we now speak you may see here in these pages how well my brother & myself have got on in this World of Men because for the poor man there is no language not even the Queen’s Own English that will keep his neck from the