0525427368 by Sebastian Barry

from mopping up. All the tubes in his stomach were rotting and sometimes he had shit coming out of his mouth, like it had lost its sense of direction on the plains of the sergeant’s body. He was still the sergeant, you couldn’t just say anything to him, you had to tread carefully for fear of a savaging. Grizzled old bastard like him don’t go providing death-bed transformations. But at the end what he said to me was, he didn’t know what life was for. He just said that. He said it seemed very short looking back even though it had seemed long enough when he was getting through it. He said he had a brother in Detroit village but it was probably no earthly use writing to him because he couldn’t read. Actually this exchange of words took place one evening late in the fall when the last of the year’s heat was trying to hang on with failing fingers in the wind. The steward had just closed the window butnevertheless the breath of outside lingered on in the wooden room. The cold spaces of the yards between the buildings. The sergeant was now more bones than man. He looked like an old saint carved in a church but he still talked like the foul soul he was. I don’t mean that unkindly. He was a queer sort of a man alright. Mostly cruel and thoughtless but there was the seam of something else unnamed. I was just alone with him looking at his shrunken face in the half-light. The thin eyes glittering yet. His disease had blacked up his face. He spoke about Caught-His-Horse-First and how he hoped we’d get him eventually. I said we sure would keep a weather eye out. I was thinking maybe now our accounts were balanced but I didn’t say that. Then the sergeant seemed to go wandering in his mind a little back to the Detroit of his youth when his brother was beginning to come good in business and then he killed a man. Missed the noose by a mere shadow of words because there wasn’t witnesses. Fell into melancholy, was what the sergeant said. He seemed a different man talking about his brother. Said his mother was a hard old woman and his father were killed in 1813 fighting Injuns along the frontier of those times, Kentucky. Said his only regret was he married a woman that didn’t like him and that he never divorced the harridan and tried for a second Mrs Wellington. The sergeant! Well all this surprised me, let me tell you. But a dying man can just say what he likes. It don’t have to be true.
Then he dies. At least we don’t have to listen to his singing no more, says Lige Magan.
Also at this time Mrs Neale had took in the captured Indian bairns into her school. Turns out Caught-His-Horse-First’sdaughter was called Winona which in the Sioux language means First-born Girl according to Mr Graham the interpreter. She might have been six or seven then but who could tell because their record keeping was about as good as my own crowd in Ireland.
Well I weren’t the only soul thinking maybe the books was balanced between the chief and the blessed army. The sergeant weren’t too long in his humble grave before Mr Graham received some sort of communication and we was told that Caught-His-Horse-First was wishing to give us a visit. The colonel and the major went into confab about it and it was decided to entertain this visit as maybe it might lead to better times between us and the tribes. Everything was awful stirred up and the colonel feared an out-and-out war on the plains, that’s what he said. And the major maybe had his mind back in the time when the chief had saved us on our hungry march and although he was putting the massacre into the mix he was also mindful of the work of the late sergeant in slaughtering the chief ’s wives and son. The major in his heart always strove for justice I do believe and as he had a properly low opinion of man in the main he could allow a great margin of leeway when it was indicated. Troopers theyselves often when about the world were given to sprees and drinking, and there was oftentimes