A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry

Author:Sebastian Barry [Sebastian Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571333400
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2020-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

I am sure if we had a lively sense of our danger Jas Jonski did too of his own, for his own reasons.

What did I think about Jas Jonski? I thought now he was the one that hurt me as only a man can hurt a woman – break into her like a murderous thief and bring a killing insult to her heart. I took Peg as the attorney for the matter. I had told her the story and she had opined. Why should a girl as lost as me be given that great authority? I did not know. But I had taken the measure of Frank Parkman and somehow couldn’t account him.

I had no other suspects that I knew of. Whiskey had drowned the memory but the soul of the memory lived on in me. It beat inside me.

As so much time had gone by I was beginning to be horrified by a sense that what had happened to me was a nothing, a nothing served upon a nothing. It was a strange potent thought that wormed into me, that went to the nest of my best thoughts and started to rampage there. That thought weighed down on me to crush me. I thought while in the grip of it that even if I spoke clearly now and said to the men what I thought Jas Jonski had done I would be surprised and mazed by their answer. That they would sit there nonplussed and unbeguiled and wonder why I had taken the matter so to heart. A small little thing of no account that all girls had to bear in the general affairs of the world. That it would mean nothing to them and that the word nothing would be much in their mouths as they applied it to me. Under this thought I perished time and time again. I shivered in my sense of dreadful smallness. I heard them laughing at me and looking at each other in mocking amaze and then I imagined them turning from me and never speaking to me again in the same deep loving manner for which I held them famous in my heart. That they would consider me defiled as the preachers might say and that not even Rosalee could sew me good again and that not even a spring and summer could redeem that filthy winter. That now I would be a bargain of no price and just a slave’s linsey of no value and now the whippoorwill would never sound for me again nor would Thomas McNulty show me his motherly kindness nor John Cole his fatherly concern. That they might want then to deposit me on the road as a Confederate dollar of no worth to be picked up by any wanderer, that I was to be a thing discarded and no one ever sent for my retrieval. That in breaking the tiny door into myself Jas Jonski had left the house of myself ever open to the winds, to the howls of the storms, and the ransack of any passing marauder.

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