The Wreckage of Eden

THE MEXICAN WAR

He will refund us finally

Our confiscated gods—

—Emily Dickinson

–1–

AFTER CHAPULTEPEC, I SUCCUMBED to vainglorious fancies unworthy of a man of the cloth, but even an ordained minister ought to be forgiven one of the lesser transgressions to which youth is liable. Frivolousness weighs scarcely more than a feather on the scale of moral conduct. I was only twenty-four and backward in the ways of the world when I put myself at the service of God and General Winfield Scott. Before that, I had been to Boston and, once, to Concord for a meeting of the Female Anti-Slavery Society. There I’d heard Mr. Emerson and William Lloyd Garrison speak and had caught a glimpse of Henry Thoreau, who seemed a clownish fellow. When I was a small boy, I’d been taken to Philadelphia to the coal wharves on the Schuylkill River, to cheer the striking workers, by an uncle who believed in the rights of man. Much later, I attended the seminary at Gettysburg to learn the ways of God. But mostly my travels prior to the Mexican War had been confined to Hampshire County: I had been as far south of Amherst as the confluence of the Connecticut and Chicopee Rivers, notable for brown bullhead, pumpkinseed, and shad. I’d been north to Greenfield, east to Pelham, and west to Chesterfield, there to view working conditions at the tanneries—also with my egalitarian uncle, who, during his own youth, had been enflamed by Robespierre and the Jacobins. Of the great and sprawling world, only a corner was known to me; the rest was as blank and mysterious as Terra Incognita on old Ptolmey’s map.

When I embarked on my Mexican adventure as an army chaplain, I half-believed that my religious zeal and character would be tested as David’s had been when he went among the Philistines. I did not bear arms against Nicolás Bravo and his swarthy troops, not even so primitive an instrument of destruction as David’s sling. Instead, I carried the Gospels, as the Franciscan friars had amid the Aztecs of Montezuma’s empire three centuries ago.

I refused to admit to myself that the likely reason for my having enlisted in Old Fuss and Feather’s army was conceit. The national pastime of annexation and the personal trial in which I hoped to have my faith and manhood assayed were, both of them, vanity. In truth—by now, I ought to be able to distinguish it from falsehood (except for the lies I tell myself)—I was like a boy parading before a mirror, dressed in his father’s uniform. I’m afraid that even then, in 1847, I was unworthy of my calling. I’ve often wondered if He did, in fact, call me, or if I might have misheard Him. Did He whisper man of God in my ear? Perhaps He meant me to be a farmer—a man of sod . . . or a schoolmaster, bricklayer, or fisherman: a man of the rod . . . hod . . . cod.

I can almost hear you laugh at my simple rhymes. Yours are sometimes odd, Emily! Shall I send you Walker’s Rhyming Dictionary at Christmas? In return, you can send me an ear trumpet, so that I’ll never again misunderstand the Lord’s wishes. If only uncertainty could be so easily removed!

In truth, I feel as hollow as a termite mound.

In truth—in truth—in truth! How I’ve come to loathe the phrase!

On one occasion when we spoke together frankly—frankness is nothing if not intimacy—you said, There is neither an absolute truth nor one true faith. Or do you think that God does not love the Mussulmen or the immodest butterflies, which decline to keep the Sabbath, except as pagans do? I became indignant in the way smug young men will who hear their ideas, acquired secondhand, flouted. I felt myself stiffen inside my seminarian’s black frock coat. My throat tensed in righteous anger. I recall having simpered platitudes, and, when you took no notice, shaking a finger at you as if I were Cotton Mather admonishing a backslider. You called me obnoxious, which I knew I was. I could see myself strutting sanctimoniously on the bank of Mill River, as though I were watching an actor perform in a melodrama. A not very good actor who would and did tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, as Hamlet said. Much later, I realized the correctness of your remark; moreover, it did not cheapen truth, but, rather, it exalted faith by introducing a necessary doubt. When truth is absolute, faith perishes. Religion requires a heresy to oppose if the faithful are to taste the honey of salvation.

Did I believe when we marched into Molino del Rey to reduce the citadel?

The question is better put in what did I believe? Was it God, the sacraments and articles of faith, the union, or merely in the gaze I saw each morning reflected in my shaving mirror? The meaning of that glance was too ambiguous to decipher. I know its meaning now. Nearly two decades later, I can read the lines in my once-smooth face with the canniness of a phrenologist. If you were here with me, you could read it for yourself, Emily. The secrets of a person’s character, like the shining words spelled out by snails on philodendron leaves, are legible to your eyes.

On my face, you would read the weariness, cynicism, and jadedness of a man much older than my forty-two years. A legion of souls was winnowed by war; the kernels were swept into an ash pit, and dry husks are all that remain of youth and high ideals. A young seminarian, I had fancied myself a man of principles, but, like seed sown on stony ground, they did not thrive.

This recollection is fast becoming a confession. Better that you are not here to hear it; otherwise, I might not have the will or courage to make it. In fairness to you, Emily, I’ll make room for your remarks as though I had you before me.

My belief in what have you was tested immediately following the Battle of Chapultepec, accounted a glorious victory for the United States, when thirty San Patricios—named for the mostly Irish immigrants who had joined with the Catholic Mexicans against us—stepped off into eternity or nothingness. The thirtieth of the condemned men, having lost both legs, had to be helped on his way. The gallows was placed where the traitors could watch our marines tear down the Mexican tricolor and raise Old Gory in its stead. The patriotic spectacle was the last thing they saw of earth. (The sky above Mexico City is radiant in September.) The Irishmen didn’t wait alone on the rough platform to hear their final departure called. German immigrants and a contingent of negroes also stood like passengers with train tickets in their pockets.

Clothed in a youthful certainty, like the freshly ironed gown of a seminarian, I was nonetheless troubled by the hanging of those deluded renegades, but there was nothing I could have done for them, except to offer up a silent petition to an equally silent God. I was an army captain under orders, as well as a chaplain. The fit belonged to the United States, the sick and wounded to the army surgeons; only the men’s souls were mine. I applied the balm of salvation, or, if too late for an infusion of grace, I helped to bury the dead with prayer and tenderness. I often watched myself with satisfaction and approval.

You must be appalled, Emily, but you were always stronger than I. When the Christian revival at mid-century thrilled many a soul in Amherst, you were as unwilling to make a show of your faith as a modest woman is of her petticoats. You chose to be shunned, together with a tiny faction of no hopers, rather than be enrolled among the saved, who paraded their faith like a new hat.

Mount Holyoke Female Seminary

Dear Mr. Winter,

Grace refused to visit me—though my classmates swooned in droves, as if at the arrival of a handsome swain bearing Chocolates & Valentines. I would not put on Piety for fashion’s sake.

Emily

While you were wrestling with God and Euclid in South Hadley, I was standing in a scorched ruin in Huamantla, a Mexican town in the state of Tlaxcala, rich in dust, heat, scabby dogs, dirty children, and idleness, which is everywhere apparent among the dusky races. You could have reasonably expected the town to pass into oblivion unnoticed even by its inhabitants, who seemed half-asleep. I would not have been surprised had they lain down for their siesta one afternoon never to awaken. Huamantla, however, was to have a tragedy, although one too sordid for an ancient Greek to have considered worthy of pen, parchment, and the Athenian stage.

On the preceding day—that would have been the ninth of October 1847—soldiers under the command of Brigadier General Lane had ransacked the cantinas and, becoming stupendously borracho, had parted women—señoritas and señoras both—from their clothes. A number of dark ladies had also been outraged, a quaint expression, as though they had suffered nothing more grievous than a rude remark. Next, inflamed by liquor and lust, Lane’s men set a portion of the town ablaze and murdered a number of Mexicans to avenge the death of Sam Walker, a captain in the Texas Rangers.

Huamantla would be buried under history’s grim accrual, which seems to consist largely of broken pots and bones. Soon, our army would pass like a scythe along the National Highway, from Mexico City to Veracruz. In December, we would begin to reap all murdering, thieving Mexican soldiers and rancheros. With the war in its second year, the Polk administration was impatient for a final victory. The greasers, after all, were no match for America’s men at arms, the uniformed archangels of its Manifest Destiny.

But on that blue October morning, standing amid the wreckage of Huamantla’s main street, I was interested to hear a lieutenant of marines belittle the previous day’s massacre. You couldn’t call it that, not according to him. It was nothing next to the Battle of Bad Ax in 1832 or the Cutthroat Gap Massacre in ’33, when two tribes did their damnedest to slaughter each other down to the last redskin.

Huamantla will be remembered as an incident, if it’s remembered at all.

Vacantly, he stared—his name was Pearson—at the broken glass, the charred walls, the bits and bobs that had, like the clay roof tiles, fallen helter-skelter into the now-deserted street. There was a foulness in the air, such as flies love, and the stench of burning wood persisted in the scorched timbers. In my fancy, I could smell the spilled blood of Mexicans seeping into the dust. The blood was dark, like them. Suddenly, my guts knotted, my eyes stung, and my sight went momentarily black, as it will in strong sunlight.

Lieutenant Pearson was eloquent on the subject of mitigating circumstances. What do you expect when the greasers sneak into our garrisons and knife us in our sleep? He took off his cap and mopped his glistening skull. His bald head was unpleasantly moist, his cap rank with sweat. Stinking Mexicans are almost as bad as the Indians, the Chinks, and the niggers.

I had joined the Anti-Slavery Society while in Amherst, and the lieutenant’s bigotry, which had been given emphasis by a gob of brown tobacco spit, made me uneasy. I hadn’t the courage to rebuke him or even to frown in disapproval.

Pearson was a rough sort of man, flinty, irascible, and gloomy. He had the sunburned, weather-beaten face of the rancher he’d been until he lost his wife and children to typhus. He had enlisted in time for the Second Seminole War, with every intention of making an end—brave or ignoble, it didn’t matter—to a disappointing life. Instead, he killed enough Indians and fugitive slaves to earn a battlefield commission.

He put his cap back on and returned the damp bandanna to his pocket.

Let’s get out of the damned sun, he said.

The dry season had come early to the Central Mexican Highlands, and the sun beat down unmercifully on all who dwelled below.

We left the glaring street and went inside a cantina that had survived the pillaging. It was a dirty, flyblown place, but its thick adobe walls allayed the noonday heat. We sat at a table decorated with a sugar skull from a previous Day of the Dead. In Catholic Mexico, I felt like one of the Canterbury martyrs, sent to the stake by Bloody Mary for his faith.

"Whiskey and cerveza!" Pearson shouted to a man dressed in the white cotton blouse and pantaloons of a Mexican peasant. Like soldiers everywhere, he knew enough words in the native tongue to ensure that his appetites could be satisfied.

The Mexican paused in his war against the flies, waged with a rolled-up newspaper. He put two glasses and a jar of pulque on the table beside the sugar skull. Then he returned to his makeshift bar to prepare the corn-brewed beer called "tesgüino" by the natives.

"¿Y el otro hombre?" he asked, whisking into froth an amber-colored concoction.

"Sí, sí. Whiskey y cerveza para mi amigo también," said the lieutenant while the camarero poured each of us a glass of the milky fermentation of the sap of the maguey plant, plentiful in the high country of Tlaxcala. A whiskey will do more good for your soul than prayer, Padre.

I’d managed to keep my pledge of temperance, a difficult moral victory for a man in the army, but I didn’t want to give the lieutenant cause to heckle me. A shepherd should appear to be no better than his sheep if he is to bring them to Jesus. Subtle reasoning worthy of a Jesuit! By the second glass of that most ardent of spirits, each chased by tesgüino, I was extolling my Christian virtues to the lieutenant, who seemed not to hear me.

Anybody who can drink this piss isn’t human! he growled, sniffing at his cup as you would a sour dishrag and then setting it aside with an expression of disgust.

Rare among women, Emily, you aren’t shocked by the vernacular, which, you once told me, is the language Adam and Eve spoke carelessly in Eden before the world grew strict.

Mexicans are human beings! I shouted, loudly enough to scatter flies that had been milling about on the sticky table. The native whiskey had penetrated the rusted works of my Christian principles like a lubricating oil.

Mexicans are no better than dogs, snarled the lieutenant.

I like dogs, I replied stupidly.

You’re lucky, Winter, to have only the soul to worry about. He clenched his teeth, as though he feared his might escape its noxious prison.

You once said that I had a surname fit for an allegory. Remember, Emily? Mr. Winter, his heart, a cinder. You wondered what Hawthorne could make of such a name. Since the war—I mean the latest in our sanguinary history, hardly more civilized than that of the Aztecs—I seem to have grown as cold as a snowman, and as ridiculous. But I’m afraid that my faith has never been more than lukewarm.

In a tongue thickened by pulque and prejudice, the lieutenant railed against martial law declared by General Scott at Tampico. Intended to safeguard Mexican property, the order was disliked by the army and by Secretary of War Marcy, who considered it a weakness.

At Jalapa, they hanged a private in the Eighth Infantry for killing a Mex squaw, said Pearson with a scowl.

I was transfixed by a bright shimmer of oak leaves outside the cantina window and, for the moment, could not break the thread of my stare. I was unused to strong drink. I recall a fierce yearning to be once again in Amherst, where the leaves would be starting on their slow and spectacular end. I pictured you in your front yard, collecting them to press into the pages of a book.

Such a slight young woman! I had thought then.

You’re said to be plain, but I saw a pleasing arrangement of features, a tidy figure, and a fair complexion. You may have possessed none of the so-called feminine graces, but I thought you agreeable, even comely, when you unconsciously struck a pose that did you justice. On that golden, luminous afternoon, your hair shone with a liveliness found, at all wakeful hours, in your amber eyes. There was that about you, Emily: the lambency, archness, and intelligence of your sherry-colored eyes. And when I heard you speak—well, all else was beside the point.

With what art does nature embalm its corpses! you said about the autumn leaves.

The point in the fall of 1847, however, was Mexico and our hatred for its swarthy inhabitants.

We were sent here to kill Mexicans, the lieutenant said with a grimace that revealed chaw-stained teeth. Polk wants it, Marcy wants it, the people want it, I want it, and so, Parson, do you.

He said that or something like it. I was having trouble distinguishing his words because of the flies droning in my head and the sound of your voice, Emily. You had just said something important to me back in Amherst, and I was desperately trying to make it out.

What is it? I didn’t hear you.

You flitted among the leaves, a demure little bird.

Abruptly, Lieutenant Pearson rose, staggered, and knocked over the wooden chair, which had been gaily painted blue. It was then I discovered that my head had come to rest on the table, next to the sugar skull—a memento mori, which Mexicans give their children to eat.

You see how impossible it was. A people who could make light of death and its dread mysteries. A people who believe in Extreme Unction and the sugar skull. Death is unreal there, though the corpses lying in streets and fields from Veracruz to Santa Barbara must have been real enough even for them.

Impossible to make an annual holiday of death! To give children sugar skulls and toy skeletons to celebrate their macabre festival!

The lieutenant threw his empty glass at a lithograph of the Sacred Heart hanging on the whitewashed wall. The noise of its splintering on the stone floor of the cantina rudely woke me from my reverie.

What is it? I cried out.

In my stupor, I’d imagined that General Rea had stepped out of the roaring sunlight and into the dusky cantina to avenge Huamantla. I wanted to protect you from the general, Emily, but my legs were not working the way they should. Besides, you were fading, and then suddenly you were gone—back to your father’s house no doubt.

See this? said Pearson, his voice rising on the last syllable, to finish with an expression of bewildered inquiry.

I gave him what attention I was able while the somnolent Mexican ceased momentarily his campaign against the flies in order to witness the latest idiocy of the gringos. Unsteady on his feet, Pearson unbuttoned his tunic and removed it, as though by sleight of hand, so that I was left wondering how the crumpled garment had gotten from his naked torso to the sawdust-strewn and spittled floor.

"Look! ¡Míralo!" he commanded in the languages of the conqueror and the conquered both. The Mexican leaning against the bar seemed unaware of his defeated status. Instead, he smiled at me from under his bandit’s mustache, as if to say that the lieutenant was loco—crazy borracho.

Pearson’s back was a parchment scribbled over by a rawhide lash for his having violated Scott’s declaration of martial law. Only by the perjury of the captain under whom he served had Pearson kept his commission. He was too good an officer and too skillful with the musket and the knife to reduce to the ranks.

I was flogged for stealing a crucifix! It was a pretty thing, he said wistfully. Not plain like ours.

I had been inside la Catedral Metropolitana in Mexico City, which had been built on a sacred precinct of the Aztecs. It was extravagant, richly appointed and furnished; its decoration bombastic beyond reason and propriety. Standing in the nave, among the Tuscan columns, I’d felt strangely light-headed; I was uneasy in the presence of such pomp. I admit also to having been envious and ashamed. I would have gone to the altar and asked for forgiveness had it been in a decent Protestant church. I was confused,