Night Watch

The Sharpshooter: Afflicted. The Sharpshooter recalls when he and Eliza fled from Eliza’s father with Dearbhla. Dearbhla was the Sharpshooter’s adoptive mother. The Sharpshooter had wanted to escape to Boston, an abolitionist stronghold, even before Eliza’s father, suspecting the Sharpshooter wanted a relationship with Eliza, bound and branded him. Because of the Sharpshooter’s socioeconomic status, Eliza’s father didn’t think that he was good enough for her. A week later, the Sharpshooter, Eliza, and Dearbhla leave. They make their home in abandoned cabins in the Allegheny Mountains. Eliza was pregnant when they fled but loses the baby. Eliza becomes pregnant again just before the war starts. The Sharpshooter enlists in the Union Army. He figures that since he is going to have a child, that is all the more reason to enlist. He joins the Seventh West Virginia Volunteer Cavalry Regiment. 

The Sharpshooter sets up a bank account in Weston, the closest larger town, and marries Eliza. After three years, he reenlists in 1864. He doesn’t want to go home until the war is won. The Sharpshooter is able to stay alive in the war because his job is to find a place on the outskirts of battles and take aim at Confederate officers. Ulysses Grant, though, doesn’t care about skilled soldiers—he transfers sharpshooters to a different division and issues them standard military uniforms.

In April of 1864, the Sharpshooter travels with the Army of the Potomac. The Army gets caught in thick woods and has to stop for the night. The Sharpshooter wonders if he should travel ahead but worries that he’ll have trouble meeting up with the Army later and might lose his horse as a result. The next morning, he goes out to check and see if there are any Confederate scouts close to the Union Army. He thinks that he can sense footfall, coming from far away, and reports that a sizeable Confederate force is moving toward them. No one else has seen anything, so the Sharpshooter’s report is dismissed.

At noon, they begin marching. As they come over a hill, they’re bombarded by enemy fire. Soldiers fall on either side of the Sharpshooter, who runs down the hill. He fights to advance so he can bayonet all of the murders on the hill. The sight of men dying all around him enrages the Sharpshooter.  As Union forces reach the bottom of the hill, the Confederate Army takes cover in the forest. The two Armies begin fighting in the forest, which is so clouded by smoke that the Sharpshooter can’t see where he’s aiming. Debris from a nearby shell hits the Sharpshooter in the head and knocks him unconscious. Two other Union sharpshooters see him and carry him out of the battle on a makeshift stretcher. 

Dearbhla: A Search. Dearbhla recalls telling ConaLee’s father (the Sharpshooter) not to go to the war. The Sharpshooter, in her memory, says the Civil War is his war, and he needs to fight. They predict the war will only last from winter to spring, and then the Sharpshooter will be able to return as a free man who doesn’t need to hide. After the first six months of the war, Eliza and Dearbhla don’t hear from the Sharpshooter. For a while, Dearbhla can sense his presence, but she hasn’t felt any sign of him since May of 1864. That May, Dearbhla sees a vision of the Sharpshooter in a fire. He is badly wounded. Dearbhla tells Eliza what she saw and that the Sharpshooter needs time to heal. Once he heals, Dearbhla thinks, he’ll return to look for them. 

Dearbhla raised the Sharpshooter on a plantation near the quarters of enslaved people. The Sharpshooter was an orphan, the son of her brother, or that was what Dearbhla was told and what she told others. Dearbhla’s ancestors were Protestant Irish people who had been indentured servants and then tenant farmers. Her mother had practiced “woods healing” too until she passed away. Not long after Dearbhla’s mother’s death, her mother’s friend, Leena, came to Dearbhla’s house with a child. Leena said the child looked white and that he needed someone to take him and look after him. Leena said that the baby’s father was the previous owner of the plantation, who died eight months ago, and that the baby’s mother was an enslaved woman who died in childbirth.

Leena said that if Dearbhla took the child, he might grow up poor, but he would be free. She told Dearbhla to say that he was her brother’s son, and he came to Dearbhla when her brother and his wife died. Dearbhla took the child in. Two years later, the Mistress of the house where Dearbhla worked died in childbirth. The baby who was born was named Eliza, after her mother. When Eliza and the child Dearbhla took in (the Sharpshooter) got older, they became a couple. They were together until the Sharpshooter went away to fight in the Union Army. 

On September 27, 1864, Dearbhla makes her way by wagon to a hospital for wounded Union soldiers in Alexandria, Virginia. Dearbhla is worried that when she arrives, officials will ask for credentials that prove she’s the Sharpshooter’s mother, which she does not have. When she’s in the wagon, it starts to rain and then hail. Dearbhla recalls telling Eliza a week before that she was going to go search for the Sharpshooter. Eliza worried that Dearbhla might be risking death with no guarantee that she will find the Sharpshooter. In the storm, while Dearbhla sleeps, she dreams of ConaLee.

Eliza: End Times. On September 27, 1864, Eliza sits on the porch of her cabin with a rifle. She’s guarding against men, most of them deserters from the Confederate Army, who might try to raid their house. ConaLee brings a shawl to the porch for Eliza to wrap around herself. If anyone comes, Eliza instructs ConaLee to say that she doesn’t know anything about the war. They hear a sound in the distance, and Eliza shoves ConaLee back inside and tells her to hide. Eliza reaches for the rifle, but it’s too late. Two strangers, one a Union soldier and the other a Confederate soldier, are already on the porch and have her rifle. One of them chases after Eliza, and she runs to the chicken coop.

The Confederate soldier holds the rifle to Eliza’s head while the Union soldier sexually assaults her. Eliza then stabs the Union soldier. The Confederate soldier says that he hates rapists but wouldn’t have a problem killing Eliza. He drags the dying man out of the chicken coop and smashes his face with the butt of his rifle. He then tells Eliza to get a shovel to dig a hole for the man and to bring rope so he can tie her up. Eliza thinks of trying to call out to Dearbhla, but Dearbhla is gone, out looking for the Sharpshooter. When Eliza gets a shovel, she also pries a nail loose and carries it with her. The man ties Eliza up and says that she can call him Papa.

Papa takes money from the Union soldier’s coat and then digs a hole to bury him. Eliza thinks that Papa must have stolen the money in Weston and then bought the Union soldier off when he tried to interfere. She thinks Papa intended to kill the Union soldier all along. Eliza plans to get Papa to come close enough that she can stab the nail into his neck. Papa makes Eliza stand on the edge of the grave. He says he knows that Eliza’s daughter is hiding in the root cellar, and Eliza has to do what he wants her to or else he’ll hurt her daughter. He aims the rifle at Eliza and then sexually assaults her.

Papa throws the rifle in the grave. He says he’s going to leave the Union soldier’s horse behind and that Eliza will have to get herself free. He then leaves down the mountain. Eliza works herself free and runs to ConaLee. Eliza blindfolds her so that ConaLee can help her get the rifle from the grave without seeing the dead body. She then rushes ConaLee back inside before filling in the grave. A storm starts just as Eliza finishes. After that day, Eliza always keeps her knife on her. At night, she begins using the nail to cut herself and draw blood on her thighs. She thinks of the Sharpshooter, who has deprived them of something important twice—first by joining the Union Army, and then by taking Dearbhla away from them to search for him.

Dearbhla: One of Many. On September 28, 1864, Dearbhla wakes up the morning after the storm. She recalls the day that she, the Sharpshooter, and Eliza fled. Before they fled, Eliza’s father, the plantation owner, had seen Eliza looking over at the Sharpshooter, who worked in the stables. Eliza’s father considered the Sharpshooter unworthy of Eliza and branded the Sharpshooter with the same brand the Sharpshooter used for horses. A few nights later, Leena’s son, who was in his 50s, came to Dearbhla’s door and asked her to hide him until the people looking for him went by. Dearbhla agreed. The plantation overseer and two others came and dragged Leena’s son out of his hiding place and threw Dearbhla onto the ground.

Eliza and the Sharpshooter had been together at their meeting spot near the river. When they came back to Dearbhla’s house and saw what was happening, they picked up rocks and killed the overseer and one of the other men by hitting them over the head. The third man ran off, so there was a surviving witness who saw that the Sharpshooter and Eliza had each killed someone. The Sharpshooter and Eliza had been planning to leave for a while, but now they had no choice. And unless she wanted to be blamed for what happened, Dearbhla would have to go with them. Leena’s son took one of the horses and set out on his own. Dearbhla, Eliza, and the Sharpshooter took the other horse and fled. 

Back in the present, in September 1864, Dearbhla continues her journey east to find the Sharpshooter. She eventually reaches Alexandria. Dearbhla feels the Sharpshooter’s presence nearby. A soldier stops Dearbhla on the road, and Dearbhla explains that she is trying and find a wounded soldier, the Sharpshooter, in one of the hospitals for Union soldiers. The soldier who stopped her says there’s concern about a measles outbreak, so she can’t go into any of the hospitals. He says he’ll check to see if he can locate the Sharpshooter. But when he returns later, he says there’s no one there under the Sharpshooter’s name. Dearbhla travels farther into the city but then has a vision of Eliza back home. She can sense that Eliza is in trouble. She also thinks that the Sharpshooter is lost and that “the soul of the man he’d once been” is gone.

The Sharpshooter: A Wilderness. After the Sharpshooter is wounded in battle in May of 1864, he is taken to a medical tent. He has a head wound, and the surgeon is sure that he won’t be able to keep his eye. The surgeon sends the Sharpshooter to a hospital in Alexandria. In Alexandria, a doctor named Dr. O’Shea operates on the Sharpshooter. The doctor thinks that the Sharpshooter’s wound will permanently alter his brain if it doesn’t kill him. After Dr. O’Shea operates on the Sharpshooter, he tells the attendant nurse to talk to the Sharpshooter to ensure that his brain won’t atrophy. The Sharpshooter doesn’t have any papers, so he’s marked in the hospital records simply as “Union.” The doctor isn’t convinced that the Sharpshooter will survive more than 12 hours.

Eventually, the Sharpshooter regains consciousness. Dr. O’Shea tells him that he was brought to the hospital after being wounded in the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia. The Sharpshooter can’t remember his name or regiment. He doesn’t remember that he was a soldier. His nurse, Agatha, speaks to him about her sons, both of whom died in the war. The Sharpshooter’s condition gradually improves, and he reads the Bible with Agatha to try and keep his mind active. Dr. O’Shea and Agatha probe the Sharpshooter to try and find any information that might help them identify his name and family. Eventually, the Sharpshooter says to them that it’s no use; that part of his life is over. If he does have family, he says, he wouldn’t know who they are and wouldn’t be of use to them.

Dr. O’Shea says they need a name for the hospital records. Dr. O’Shea then says that since the Sharpshooter can’t remember his name, he can borrow the doctor’s: O’Shea. The Sharpshooter chooses John as a first name, after one of Agatha’s sons who died in the war. One day, John O’Shea (who was the Sharpshooter) says he wants to see his wound. Dr. O’Shea brings a mirror from home. John O’Shea lost his right eye, and Dr. O’Shea says the tissue won’t support a glass eye. John O’Shea wonders aloud if he resembles a monster. Dr. O’Shea says that war is monstrous, not him.

Weeks go by, and John O’Shea becomes an orderly in the hospital and begins renting a room in Dr. O’Shea’s basement. John O’Shea develops the ability to soothe distraught and overwhelmed patients. One day, John O’Shea looks out the window of the hospital and sees a wagon that has gone by the window two or three times. The wagon eventually stops, and the wagon’s driver hands papers to a soldier at the front of the hospital. The soldier comes back, and the wagon driver and the soldier exchange words. Both parties seem angry, and then the wagon pulls back onto the road and drives farther into the city.