Days without End
Thomas McNulty, an 11-year-old survivor of Ireland’s Great Famine, and 14-year-old John Cole, who fled his father’s played-out New England farm, meet under a Missouri hedge. The ragged boys quickly find a job at a saloon where, surprisingly comely in dresses and makeup, they dance with miners who haven’t seen a proper woman in months. After two years the saloon keeper kicks Tom and John out, saying they “aren’t kids no more,” so they join the Army in 1851.
The gold rush is on in California, and miners are complaining about the Yurok Indians they are shouldering aside. They want them routed out, so the cavalry is dispatched. When Tom and John are ordered to rush Indian villages and slaughter the occupants, they follow orders. Orders take them back east to defend the Oregon Trail’s migrants from Indian attacks, but they take it hard when a Sioux warrior’s wives and children are slaughtered in an attempt to kill the chief.
John is 28 when he is dismissed for illness. Tom accompanies him, along with an eight-year old Sioux girl, Winona, who took a shine to Tom. They return to entertaining at saloons and put Winona to learning her letters, but then the Civil War rears up and the Army beckons again.
Days Without End, by the prize-winning Sebastian Barry, is a western novel beyond compare. Mr. Barry’s beautifully fluid first-person narrative takes readers on a lush but unsparing tour of the long-vanished Native Americans’ world and Civil War battlefields. At the same time we bear witness to the endurance of Tom, John, and Winona’s makeshift, but loving family. I couldn’t recommend Days Without End more.
