0525427368 by Sebastian Barry

never seen the like before, I guess the east is getting very forward and all sorts of new things are shooting up. Also she favours these little Mexican jackets, she must have ten of them because every day is a new colour. As a one-time professional girl I can’t help wondering what her underwears may comprise of. In my day it was all frills and satinised cotton. There’s something sleek about her, like a trout moving through the water. Her hair is glossy as pine-needles, pitch-black, and she wears a diamond-spangled net over it, like she was ready for business. She carries one of them new Colt guns in her belt. She’s better armed than we are. Guess we think Mrs Neale is top-notch alright. It warms my heart to see how much she is kind to the major. They link arms about the place and she talks like a geyser. Every little thing she says has grammar in it, she sounds like a bishop. I seen the colonel meet her for the first time and he stammered like a schoolboy. I don’t blame him. It’s like being bathed in flames just looking to her, and I ain’t even that sort of man would like to kiss her. It’s like meeting a bit of sharp weather. Blowing against you. She’s a peach among women, I guess. There’s other officers’ wives in the fort and even the sergeant has an old nag of a wife for his sins, but she ain’t like that. There’s leagues for everything, doubtless.
It’s strange how close I watch her. But I want to find out something. I want to see how she wears her arms, how she moves her legs, little things no one else gives a damn about maybe. Guess I was fascinated by her. How she held her chin up when she talked. How she flashed her eyes without knowing maybe. Like she had candles in them. She has a bosom like a small earthworks. Smooth, defensive. Them Mexican jackets was stiff with stitchings all across it. Made her look like something soft and good was being armoured up. I had in my days of being a girl considered the phrase ‘feminine mystery’ because I had been obliged to try to turn my hand to it. Here was the sockdolager of goddamned feminine mystery.
Goddamned lady, says John Cole. Guess she is.
Caught-His-Horse-First must of gone down into Mexico or Texas raiding because we don’t hear nothing about him for a long time. Things just go on. Lot of life is just like that. I look back over fifty years of life and I wonder where the years went. I guess they went like that, without me noticing much. A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards. I ain’t got no argument with it, just saying it is so. Two years, three pass by, and only change I can put a clock on in my head is the major’s two girls. Babies that Mrs Neale pushed out. She pushed them out and then was going about the fort as usual just a day after like she was a squaw with work to do. Twin girls but they didn’t look just alike because one had black hair and other sand-yellow like the major’s. I can’t even recall this momentwhat they called them, they was only little anyhow. The black-haired one was nicknamed Jackdaw later on account she liked to steal shiny things. No, I do recall their names of course I do. Hephzibah was the black-haired girl and the fair one was Angel. I couldn’t forget Angel. Major would be on his porch cooing at them in the cot. Why shouldn’t he, they was his.
Then news came in from our new scouts which was a good set of Crow Indians from over Yellowstone direction that Caught-His-Horse-First was seen riding north-west of Laramie. So they follow him up there and after a day’s riding he enters all unknowing he is being watched into a new village, about thirty wigwams the Crows counted. Sergeant must of been waiting for that because he has a requisition order for a field gun already dated back a year so he furnishes this to the ordnance quartermaster who is a man more