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 one of those ships in the darkness. I am telling this best I can. It’s long ago, before America. I was among the destitute, the ruined and the starving for six weeks. Many went overboard, that’s how it was.
The captain hisself he died of fever, when we reached Canada we were a ship without a steward. Into the fever sheds with us and that’s where hundreds died. I’m just writing all this down. The point is, we were nothing. No one wanted us. Canada was a-feared of us. We were a plague. We were only rats of people. Hunger takes away what you are. Everything we were was just nothing then. Talk, music, Sligo, stories, future, past, it was all turned to something very like the shit of animals. When I met John Cole that’s who I was, a human louse, even evil people shunned me and the good had no use for me. That’s where I started. Gives an idea of the victory meeting John Cole was. First time I felt like a human person again. And that’s enough of that, I say, I don’t want to say no more. Silence.
I only say it because without saying I don’t think anything can be properly understood. How we were able to see slaughter without flinching. Because we were nothing ourselves, to begin with. We knew what to do with nothing, we were at home there. I almost wasn’t able to say, my father died too. I saw his body. Hunger is a sort of fire, a furnace. I loved my father when I was a human person formerly. Then he died and I was hungry and then the ship. Then nothing. Then America. Then John Cole. John Cole was my love, all my love.
Let me go back to my beginning time in the army. We reached Fort Kearney, it was just near one of the new mining settlements, in a northern part of California that was mostly wilderness. Wild knotted country, said to be full to the brim with gold. Indians owned it, Yurok people. Maybe it wasn’t Kearney, I forget, Kearney is an Irish name. The mind is a wild liar and I don’t trust much in it that I find there. To tell a story I have to trust it but I can issue a warning like a ticket master issuing a ticket for a western-bound train that will be obliged to go through wilderness, Indians, outlaws, and storms. There was a local militia made up of the townsmen and some of the miners scattered about on the claims. They just couldn’t live with the thought of Indians and they went out in parties and scoured through the hills and tried to kill them. They could of captured the men and put them to work sluicing and digging if they had wished, that was California-style law. They could of took in the women and children for slaves and concubines but at this time they preferred just to shoot what they could find.
In Fort Kearney that night when we dusted off the bunks and had our grub, the townsmen came in and told us of the latest awful happenings from the Indians. There was a miner they said on the far edge of the settlement and the Yurok had stolen his mule. The way they told it it was the finest mule ever seen in the world. They stole his mule and tied him down in the dust and whipped his face a little. They told him he was digging in a graveyard and he must desist. These Yuroks were not big in stature but little men. The townsmen said the women were the ugliest women in creation. There was one New England man called Henryson said this and he was laughing about it. The major listened patiently enough but when Henryson said about the women he told him to shut up, we didn’t know why. Henryson shut up obediently enough. He said he was glad to see the cavalry there. It was a boon to the town. Then we felt quite proud. Well pride is the fool’s breakfast.