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A Thousand Moons

A Novel

Author Sebastian Barry

Paperback

$17.00 US

Penguin Adult HC/TR | Penguin Books

5.11"W x 7.67"H x 0.7"D | 7 oz | 24 per carton

On sale Apr 20, 2021 | 256 Pages | 9780735223110

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Fiction > General Fiction

“A brave and moving novel [that] has a tender empathy with the natural world.” —Hermione Lee, The New York Review of Books

From the two-time Booker Prize finalist author of Days Without End comes a dazzling companion novel about memory and identity, set in Tennessee in the aftermath of the Civil War

Winona Cole, an orphaned child of the Lakota Indians, finds herself growing up in an unconventional household on a farm in west Tennessee. Raised by her adoptive parents John Cole and Thomas McNulty, whose story Barry told in his acclaimed previous novel Days Without End, she forges a life for herself beyond the violence and dispossession of her past.

Tennessee is a state still riven by the bitter legacy of the Civil War, and the fragile harmony of her family is soon threatened by a further traumatic event, one which Winona struggles to confront, let alone understand. Exquisitely written, A Thousand Moons is a stirring, poignant story of love and redemption, of one woman's journey and her determination to write her own future.

Praise for A Thousand Moons:

“[His characters] may have rolled under the floorboards of history, but in Barry’s capacious, generous imagination, they have a speaking voice. Their lives, often of abysmal failure, anguish, and bare survival, become as heroic as in any classical epic.” —Hermione Lee, The New York Review of Books

“[F]reighted with history and meaning. War’s aftershocks, Native American genocide, African-American slavery, not to mention gender fluidity: all of this Mr. Barry folds into Winona’s narrative with his customary skill . . . Winona is our clear-eyed guide not only to the annihilated past but also to the enduring natural world.” —The Wall Street Journal

“An astonishing first-person performance of a different sort—a high-wire virtuoso mix of Irish and frontier vernacular. Love and war, gender fluidity, an outsider’s piercing take on the foundations of modern America. Near-surreal violence, with moments of great tenderness.” —Kazuo Ishiguro

“Barry prefers moral complication to the righteous simplicities of ‘us’ and ‘them’ . . . the writing brings off Barry’s characteristic balancing act, between the lyrical telling that comes to him naturally and the grubby, tormenting world he wants to show us . . . The politics and power struggles, male brutality and race rhetoric in this novel are imagined with an intuitive, unsparing realism . . . Because of something unguarded in his writing, and his idiom borrowed from ordinary speech and proverbial wisdom, we can trust him to touch the terrible stories from our collective past without betraying them, or turning them merely into clever art. His work reminds us how much we need these rare gifts of the natural storyteller, for reckoning with our past and present.” —The Guardian (London)

“Barry’s atmospheric prose captures the mid-nineteenth century’s language and hardscrabble spirit.” —The New Yorker

“Along with memorable characters and a powerful story line, A Thousand Moons blends bygone language with rich imagery . . . like its predecessor, this novel considers timeless ideas like tolerance and human rights. Taken together, these books stand as a sustained interrogation of this country’s founding ideas and myths . . . Barry’s affection and respect for Winona is palpable. A Thousand Moons is a sincere and well-written novel starring an intrepid, self-sufficient heroine. We can never have too many of these.” —Star-Tribune

“Barry at his powerful, lyrical best . . . Identity, culture, gender and race are examined sensitively through the eyes of Winona, a Native American girl adopted by the cross-dressing Thomas McNulty and his partner John Cole during the American Indian Wars.” —The Independent, “Best Books of 2020”

“One of Sebastian Barry’s extraordinary gifts as a writer is his boundless capacity for empathy, for inhabiting the skin, nerves and mouths of characters the river of history tends to wash away . . . This attention to the stories of individual figures within broader generations has created a humane and textured history of the Irish nation and its emigrant experiences.” —The Irish Times

“Sebastian Barry’s way with language is a constant wonder and A Thousand Moons is another golden thread in his unfolding annal of history’s anomalous people.” —Fintan O'Toole, New Statesman

“Barry understands full well the challenges inherent in his decision to tell Winona’s story. This is a subtle, troubling novel, full of silences, full of pain . . . Barry knows that it is too much to look for redemption in a story like Winona’s, but in his telling he shows that love offers at least a spark of hope.” —Financial Times

“A compelling tale of identity and revenge . . . a journey that is horrifying, thrilling and enchanting in equal measure, all of it rendered in Barry’s uniquely lyrical prose, which seems at once effortless and dense with meaning . . . [P]rose this good is a kind of enchantment, transcending the constructs that are supposed to define us to speak in a voice that is truly universal.” —The Observer (London)

“A poetic sensibility runs through this luminous novel of sorrow and uplift by the Booker-nominated, multi-award-winning Barry. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“[T]his beautifully rendered historical bildungsroman is equal parts thrilling and meditative.” —Booklist

“In Winona, who sees both the beauty and the piercing loss of her world, Barry has created a vivid if didactic heroine . . . [W]ill satisfy fans of the first installment [Days Without End].” —Publishers Weekly

“A page-turner with heart and soul . . . Like all of Barry’s best fiction, it examines life from an angle that makes it look as fresh as a new moon.” —The Times (London)

“A richly poetic read. Barry is concerned again with shifting sexual, personal and political boundaries, with the effects of tumultuous times—of rivalry, lawlessness and fissure—on individuals, families and communities, and with interactions between those on opposite sides of a political debate.” —The Sunday Times (London)

“Barry is an extraordinary descriptive writer. The prose is tightly wound and seems so persistently on the edge of violence that acts of compassion are almost as shocking as those of brutality . . . There’s a quiet glow of brightness – here are unexpected stories of love and respect. But, ultimately, theirs is a world 'so knotted with evil that good could only hope to unknot a tiny few threads of it.'” —Sunday Telegraph (London)

Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. His plays include Boss Grady's Boys (1988), The Steward of Christendom (1995), Our Lady of Sligo (1998), The Pride of Parnell Street (2007), and Dallas Sweetman (2008). His novels include The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998), Annie Dunne (2002), A Long Long Way (2005), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Secret Scripture (2008), which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize, On Canaan's Side (2011), The Temporary Gentleman (2014), Days Without End (2016), A Thousand Moons (2020), and Old God's Time (2023). His poetry includes The Water-Colourist (1982), Fanny Hawke Goes to the Mainland Forever (1989) and The Pinkening Boy (2005). He is the recipient of the Irish-America Fund Literary Award, The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Prize, the London Critics Circle Award, The Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, and Costa Awards for Best Novel and Book of the Year. He lives in Wicklow with his family. View titles by Sebastian Barry

Chapter One

I am Winona.

In early times I was Ojinjintka, which means rose. Thomas McNulty tried very hard to say this name, but he failed, and so he gave me my dead cousin's name because it was easier in his mouth. Winona means first-born. I was not first-born.

My mother, my elder sister, my cousins, my aunts, all were killed. They were souls of the Lakota that used to live on those old plains. I wasn't too young to remember - maybe I was six or seven - but all the same I didn't remember. I knew it happened because afterwards the soldiers brought me into the fort and I was an orphan.

A little girl can suffer many a seachange. By the time I got back to my people, I couldn't converse with them. I remember sitting in the teepee with the other women and not being able to answer them. By that time I was all of thirteen or so. After a few days I found the words again. The women rushed forward and embraced me as though I had only just arrived to them that very moment. Only when I spoke our language could they really see me. Then Thomas McNulty came to get me again and took me back to Tennessee.

Even when you come out of bloodshed and disaster in the end you have got to learn to live. You have to look about you, see how things are, grow things or buy things as the case may be.

The little town near by us in Tennessee was called Paris. Lige Magan's farm was about seven miles out. It was quite a few years after the war but the town was still full of rough Union soldiers kicking their heels, and the defeated butternut boys were a sort of secret presence, though they were not in their uniforms. Vagabonds on every little byway. And state militia watchful for those vagabonds.

It was a town of many eyes watching you anyhow, an uneasy place.

To present yourself in a dry-goods store to buy items you have got to have best English or something else happens. At the fort Mrs Neale had given me my first English words. In later times John Cole got me two books of grammar. I looked at them long and good.

It is bad enough being an Indian without talking like a raven. The white folks in Paris were not all good speakers themselves. Some were from other places. Germans, Swedes. Some were Irish like Thomas McNulty, and only got to English when they got to America.

But myself being a young Indian woman I guess I had to talk like an empress. Of course I could have offered my list of items that Rosalee Bouguereau, who worked on Lige's farm, had written out. But it was better to speak.

Else what was happening was, I was going to be beaten up every time I was in town. It was English kept me from that. Some straggly farmhand might look at you and see the dark skin and the black hair and think that gave him a right to knock you down and kick you. No one saying boo to him for that. No sheriff or deputy neither.

It wasn't a crime to beat an Indian, not at all.

John Cole, even though he had been out as a soldier and was a good farmer, got bad treatment in town because his grandmother or the woman before his grandmother was an Indian person. So that was writ in his face a little. Even English couldn't protect him. Because he was a big grown man maybe, he couldn't hope for mercy just all the time. He had a lovely face as people attested in especial Thomas McNulty but I guess the townsmen could sometimes see the Indian in it. They beat him so bad and then he was just a plank of suffering in the bed and Thomas McNulty swearing he would go in and kill someone.

But Thomas McNulty's shortcoming was he was poor. We were all poor. Lige Magan was poor enough, and he owned the farm, and we were poor underneath Lige.

Poor worse than Lige.

When a poor person does anything he has to do it quietly. When a poor person kills, for instance, he has got to do it very quietly and run as fast as those little deer that float out of the woods.

Also, Thomas had been in Leavenworth prison for desertion, so the uniforms about the town made him jumpy, even though he always said he loved the army.

I myself was lower than Rosalee Bouguereau. She was a black-skinned saint of a woman let me tell you. She used to go out and shoot rabbits with her brother's rifle along the back woods of Lige's farm there. In the famous battle with Tach Petrie - famous to us anyhow, when he and his accomplices had tried to rob us, advancing on our homestead with implacable intent - she distinguished herself by reloading the rifles faster than ever was - so said John Cole.

But she was a slave before the war and a slave is low down in the eyes of white folks of course.

So I was lower than that.

I was just the cinders of an Indian fire in the eyes of the town. Indians in bulk were long gone from Henry County. Cherokee. Chickasaw. Folks didn't like to see an ember drifting back.

In the eyes of the Great Mystery we were all souls alike. Trying to make our souls skinny enough to squeeze into paradise. That's what my mother said. Everything I remember of my mother is like the little pouch of things that a child carries to hold what is precious to her. When such a love is touched by Death then something deeper even than Death grows in your heart. My mother fussed over us, myself and my sister. She was interested in how fast we could run, and how high we could jump, and she never tired of telling us how pretty we were. We were just little girls, out there on the plains, under the starlight.

Thomas McNulty sometimes liked to tell me I was as pretty as the things he thought were pretty - roses, robins and the like. It was mother's talk he was doing since I had no mother then. It was strange that in the old wars he had killed many of my people when he was a soldier. He might have killed even some of my own family, he didn't know.

'I was too young to remember,' I would say to him. Of course I hadn't been, but it came to the same thing.

It used to make me feel very strange listening to him talk about that. I would start to burn from the centre of my body. I had my own little pearl-handled gun that the poet McSweny gave me in Grand Rapids. I could have shot Thomas with that. Sometimes I thought I should shoot something - shoot someone. Of course I did shoot one of Tach Petrie's men, not actually during the famous battle, but another time, when they accosted us on the road - right through the chest. And he shot me, but it was only a bruise, not a wound.

I had the wound of being a lost child. Thing was it was they that healed me, Thomas McNulty and John Cole. They had done their damnedest I guess. So they both gave me the wound and healed it, which is a hard fact in its way.

I guess I had no choice in the matter. Once your mother is taken from you you can't ever catch up with her again. You can't cry out 'Wait for me' when the winds turn cold under a wolf moon and she has walked far ahead of you across the grasses searching for wood.

So Thomas McNulty rescued me twice. The second time, as Thomas ventured back through the battlefield with me in tow, dressed as it happened as a drummer boy, Starling Carlton wanted to kill me, right there. We bumped into him. He was waving his sword and shouting. He said all the Indians had to be killed, it was the major's orders, and he was going to do just that. So Thomas McNulty had to kill him instead. Thomas was very sad about that. They had been soldiers together a long time.

I remembered all of that clearly enough.

Oftentimes as a girl I would cry for no reason. I would drift away and find a secluded spot. There I would let the tears loose and it might be so dark behind my eyes it was as if I had fallen blind. John Cole would come look for me. And he had the sense to put an arm about me and not to ask me to say anything I had no words for, English or Lakota.

John Cole. A lot of his love for me was expressed in practical things. He got me the books with grammar as I said and set to teaching me even though he hadn't too much learning himself. Not just letters but numbers too he taught me.

When Lige Magan thought I was ready he went and asked about employment with his friend the lawyer Briscoe. All that sort of work I did a good while, writing and reckoning numbers. I was so proud to do it.

The lawyer Briscoe had a fine house and a garden with flowers that didn't belong to Tennessee, roses from England mostly. He wrote a book about his roses that was printed in Memphis. It took pride of place in his office.

Ojinjintka means rose as I said. I don't know what sort of rose. Maybe a lost prairie rose.

Not a true rose like one of the lawyer Briscoe's. A rose to my people.

The lawyer Briscoe pressed on me cherished books. I carried them home and read them in the parlour by the stove. The breeze from the meadow touching and touching the pages. Those pleasant evenings when there was nothing to do only listen to Rosalee's beloved brother Tennyson Bouguereau singing those old songs he knew. Myself sunk in thoughts. Those thoughts that books bring to mind.

Of course that was all before Jas Jonski. A boy that never read a book, come to think of it. Could barely write a letter.

1870s it all must have been, after the war, and after Thomas got home from prison. It might even have been the year that General Custer was killed. Or just before.

But all the years went by fleet of foot. Like ponies running across the endless grasses.

Chapter Two

Jas Jonski was the clerk in the dry-goods store. He worked for a miserable ghost of a man called Mr Hicks. The first time I stepped into the store, I knew he liked me.

'You John Cole's daughter,' he said, without a trace of fear.

'How you know I John Cole's daughter?' I said. For my part it was worrying even to be recognised.

He said that last fall he had brought out some heavy supplies in the wagon and he wondered that I didn't remember as he had complimented me.

'You're even prettier now,' he said, brave as you like.

I didn't know what to say to him. In its own way it was like a sudden ambush. I was ready to defend myself. Thomas McNulty said a girl had to be sure and know how to use her knife, how to use her little pistol, all that. I had a thin little steel knife also in the hem of my petticoat, if the gun failed me. It was English steel. Thomas McNulty showed me all the best places to stick in a knife if you want to stop someone.

But every time I went into town for supplies, he was pleasant to me. As if maybe there was someone in town now to trust. There was something between us but I had no name for it. It seemed a good thing. I began to look forward to seeing him and I used to hurry the mules along to get there, much to their annoyance.

Yes, Jas Jonski was very sweet on me and after six months of measuring out cane sugar for me, and all the rest, my wagon lost a wheel and he ran me out to Lige Magan's place, and got talking to Thomas McNulty. Thomas McNulty would talk to the devil so Jas Jonski had no trouble with him. So Thomas McNulty and John Cole began to know who he was. I never saw John Cole look at someone with less admiration.

But Jas Jonski was either blind or in love and he didn't seem to notice. He started to come out to the farm regular and when he found out that Thomas McNulty liked this expensive molasses that came up from New Orleans, he used to bring a pot of that sometimes. He would sit there beaming and talking, and Thomas scooping out the molasses with a twig like a bear, and John Cole scowling and saying nothing. John Cole could take or leave molasses, unless it was the cheap stuff was put into the tobacco after the harvest. Jas Jonski beaming, like a sun that just wouldn't set no matter how dark the evening.

'I like the town,' Jas Jonski said to John Cole, 'but I sure do like all this countryside too.'

John Cole didn't say anything.

The most John Cole would allow of courtship was Jas Jonski walking me ten minutes in the wood. I wasn't even allowed to hold his hand. Jas Jonski's modest ambition was to own his own store and he also talked vaguely about moving to Nashville where he had family. Not a few times he stopped and stood me in front of him and made declarations. It was exceedingly pleasant to see his face colour up with all his fervent protestations. Just like in the story books he protested his love.

Then Jas Jonski thought he might do well to marry me and he asked me about that. I didn't know how old I was but I guess I wasn't yet seventeen. I was born under the Full Buck Moon, that's all I knew for sure. He said he was nineteen. He was a red-haired boy with a burned-looking face all the year, not just high summer.

It was then John Cole got a red face too. Boiled up like a catfish.

'No, sir, madam,' he said.

I was working for the lawyer Briscoe after all which was an unusual occupation for a girl let alone an Indian. I think John Cole was intending me to be the first Indian president.

Well I thought I might very much like to marry Jas Jonski. Just liked the sound of it. I could sort of see it. I had a picture of it in my mind. I hadn't even kissed him yet but I could see my face tilting up for his kiss. We had held hands when we were out of John Cole's sight.

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