by Norman Lock
Manzanero had reached the end of his inventory of horrors. The ensuing silence rang in my ears like the sound that follows the ringing of a bell after the last peal has died away and the listener strains in vain to hear its echo. He was waiting for me to say something.
“God be with you,” I said, unable to find any other words in me or in the missal on the shelf of the prie-dieu. My rudimentary Spanish could not unlock its secrets concerning papist sacraments.
My benediction had not satisfied Manzanero.
“Am I forgiven?” he asked sharply.
How in His name could I know? I had no business in a Roman Catholic confessional, no dispensation to intercede on a sinner’s behalf, and no insight—of earthly or divine grant—to see into a mercenary’s heart.
“Yes, you are forgiven,” I said, though I considered him unredeemable. “Go with God.”
And still he was not satisfied!
“What is my penance?” he asked gruffly.
“You will say the Lord’s Prayer twenty times before you sleep tonight.”
“Is that all?”
He seemed offended, as though the penance I had meted out to him was too slight for the enormity of his crimes. I wished I might tell him to hang himself as Judas had done. I wished I might, at the very least, tell him to go to blazes.
“You will not drink tequila for a week—no, for a month. For one month, you will abstain from drinking spirits—and also from women.” What was a month of abstinence to a dozen years of drunkenness and fornication? To murder? “Two months! For two months, you will practice virtue.”
And still he wanted more punishment!
Do you know how Giles Corey, of Salem, answered his judges when they punished his silence by peine forte et dure? They had placed him naked on the ground, covered with boards, and, one by one, they piled rocks on top of him. “More weight,” he said, refusing to plead his guilt or innocence to witchery. Thus did Manzanero that afternoon in la Iglesia de la Nuestra Señora, and I did not know whether to admire or condemn him.
“You will do as Lieutenant Colonel Hitchcock and Captain Walker order,” I said, recalling my purpose in coming to meet Manzanero: to put his conscience at ease, so that he could continue his infamous work for the army, for the rest of his natural—or unnatural—life.
“Sí, I will do as the officers wish.”
“As God wishes,” I said sternly, feeling a surge of authority.
“His will be done,” the penitent replied, crossing himself. “Pray for me.”
I searched my mind for something to say, and could think of nothing more apt than the fifteenth verse of the fifth chapter of the Book of James. It had been intended as a prayer for the sick, not, as in the case of Manzanero, a bad conscience. I said the words anyway.
“‘And the prayer of faith shall save the sick’”—I added the words “at heart”—“‘and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.’”
“Thank you, Padre.”
“Thank you, Señor Manzanero,” I said, without knowing why.
Content at last, he yanked the curtain aside and stepped out of his compartment.
We left the church together and walked toward the garrison. I felt a distinct lack of grace on the dusty street. Some men dressed in the ubiquitous sombrero, white cotton pantaloons, and peasant’s blouse were squatting in a ring while two cocks bloodied themselves to the death with metal spurs tied to their twiggy legs. I hurried into an alley and was sick. Vomit streamed from me like dirty water. I brought up an ancient bile, a nameless hatred, and a grudge against God—God forgive me. I emptied myself until I felt as though I had pulled up a rancid, vile thing as one might a toadfish from the mud with a rusty hook on a string.
Manzanero had followed me into the alley. He gave me a handkerchief with which to wipe my mouth. I was grateful. There was sincerity in the offer and genuine solicitude in the act. Had I misjudged him after all?
He took me to a food stall and bought me a glass of lime juice to refresh my mouth. He offered to buy me a taquito, a native food that I had come to relish, but I could not forget the poisoned meat he’d fed to the dog. He ate a chorizo, like someone who has made a good confession and swallows the body of Christ with gusto.
–4–
THAT NIGHT, I WENT UP ON THE BATTLEMENTS of the Fortress of San Carlos, where we were garrisoned, in order to be alone with my thoughts. To say that I went there to forget them is nearer the truth. One can stand only so much perplexity. Even Christ wept in frustration and—I say the word, though I be damned for it—resentment in Gethsemane. The night was cool, as it invariably is in the Mexican Highlands. I looked out from a coign of vantage onto fields of maize and, closer to hand, at a dry streambed meandering among apple and pear trees. The corn was sere because of the drought, the fruit withered. Providence or a sated Mictlantecuhtli would shortly send rain to the parched fields and orchards and flood the stream. Even now, it was filling the pockets of the clouds on the lee side of the Sierra Madre Oriental.
A pretty figure of speech, don’t you think? Perhaps I should have been a poet, too. We could have riddled each other with guilt and imagined we were happy.
As the shadows merged into darkness, I paced the battlements, stopping to watch the sun bleed molten gold onto the shoulders of the Cofre de Perote, an extinct volcano stark on the horizon. With good reason, the Aztecs had exalted Huitzilopochtli, a warrior who each night fought against the darkness until the sun could once again claim its precedence. Men and women had been sacrificed to him as our own Lord had been done away with on a hill of skulls, to become a symbol, which is both less and more than a man.
In a letter written sometime after Lincoln’s death, you said, “All can seem lacunae when the mind’s a blank.” You might have been talking about that June night in Perote. I was empty, and the world also seemed empty. Perote was not a town in the hill country of Judah, nor did the Star of Bethlehem shine. The light had wavered on the dead volcano until, like an altar candle, it was quenched, signaling the day’s recessional. I was cast adrift in a lightless firmament. Little by little, my eyes grew used to the darkness, which was not absolute as I’d first imagined, but studded with a myriad of stars. The coming of that light had taken an age, and my loneliness was almost past enduring. Leaning over the parapet into the engulfing night, I saw Manzanero’s face like a projection of memory’s magic lantern—a ghostly souvenir of an afternoon in which the profession of faith and the solemn vows of ordination had weakened and the sickness of the world had touched me like blackwater fever.
Manzanero died a month after I’d heard his confession. Whether by a royalist’s bullet or rope or by mortal illness, I never heard. At the time, I wondered if a premonition of his impending death had caused him to seek forgiveness. He only half-finished his penance. I don’t know in which of hell’s denominations his soul is lodged, unless my fumbling intercession saved it from eternal pain. Otherwise, it was, as the Mexicans say, “De nada. For nothing.”
I no longer fear hell as once I did, but atop the walls of San Carlos, I trembled.
“The night is filled with daggers,” you said on the eve before I left for the Mexican War. You’d given me an Indian pipe picked from the woods behind your house, “like a lady sending a fellow to the lists with a chaste kiss and a wish that he returns with his armor like new.” You withheld the kiss, however chaste, and the wildflower I would lose before I had crossed the Río Grande.
I’d have been happy to remain in Amherst, but you did not care to have me near. My infrequent visits and our letters, carried by strangers like writs or notices of overdue accounts, would be sufficient for you. Emily, if you had only asked, together we might have increased the circumference of Amherst or traveled on a lengthening radius to the western territories. We needn’t have stopped until our backs were to the continent. You could have gone even further, on “the frigate that sails the mind’s unfathomable ocean.” Such fancies your mind h
as spun out of nothing more substantial than sea foam! I’d have been content to be a master’s mate, mopping the spilled ink from your desk. I tell you I’d have been happy to watch you hammer words into sense, according to your mind’s peculiar inclination.
The stars above the Mexican hills seemed to have dulled to paste—a crust on the black bowl of space, like dottle in a pipe. The day’s allotment of radiance had been spent, and I wished for nothing more than sleep and its effacement until reveille should wake me to myself again. I was about to leave the battlement, when Captain Walker appeared. He did so with the abruptness of a ghost, which he would become in October, during the Battle of Huamantla. By the light of the greasy torch he carried, I saw the fatal wound. Aghast, I crossed myself; I must have worn a remnant of the afternoon’s mummery on my soul. I can’t explain my apostasy in any other way except that the night had become suddenly uncanny.
“Good evening, Padre,” he said mildly.
The look I gave him was one of both terror and pity.
“What is it?” he said. “You don’t look well.”
I could not take my eyes from the ghastly hole in his chest!
“Chaplain Winter, what is the matter?” he demanded, irritated by my bewilderment.
“I’m sorry, sir, I——I do not feel myself tonight.”
“I hope to Christ you didn’t eat any greaser grub!”
“No, sir.”
“The meat is dog, you know, and God knows what shit they use for fertilizer.”
He leaned his elbows on the crenelated wall and gazed through a thick embrasure at the black sky and still blacker fields unrolling from the fortress toward Paisaje del Cofre de Perote. The summit gleamed eerily for reasons best known to natural scientists or necromancers. I could not rid my mind of the unholy thought that I was talking to a dead man. I wanted to retire to my quarters and ponder—no, forget the day’s events. I was overwhelmed and needed the blankness of a dreamless sleep.
“You did a splendid job of persuading Manzanero of the rightness of our cause.”
I was no longer convinced of its rightness. Not entirely.
Walker turned to me. “You do believe in what we are doing here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Good God, man, we’re doing His bidding! You, more than anyone, should know that. Or do you think He wants his chosen people to occupy only a portion of the Americas? He did not make us rabbits content to scrabble in some meager warren. He bestowed on us breadth of mind and largeness of ambition. He knows that we can make Mexico glorious, the jewel of our empire. Mexico is wasted on the Mexicans. You surprise me, Padre.”
Vexed, he drew me roughly to the embrasure. I shivered at his touch. Was he an honest ghost ignorant of his end, or a diabolical one seeking to enlist me in his racial dream of Manifest Destiny just as I had sought earlier that day to bind Manzanero to it?
I smelled the coming rain in the air. It was an intimation of the unrevealed future that waited expectantly, like the captain’s phantom wound, which would, four months hence, bleed beyond the skill of any man to staunch.
“Look at that enormous plain. When rain comes, it will burgeon with maize and apples, pears and plums; fish will run again in the streams. It is a paradise, the lost Eden, from which our race was cast out and to which we are fated by blood and nationhood to return.”
Down white graveled paths
Walked the bright connubial pair—
Embowered in a fecund Paradise,
Pruned & weeded by Negro gardeners.
His face was close to mine; I smelled the dried sweat in his clothes and the stew he’d eaten for dinner on his breath. Once again, I felt like vomiting.
Walker hissed like the serpent itself, “Jesus would have been seduced by Mexico and California! He’d have eagerly let the devil make Him emperor over them.”
How should I answer such blasphemy? I wondered.
“Well, Winter? What do you have to say?”
Walker demanded an answer, and I was no martyr willing to give him an honest one. I have often thought of Martin Luther, who refused to recant despite the threat of torture. I know myself too well; I’d have renounced faith and God Himself to escape the pain of the Vatican’s inquisitors.
“They are a great prize for our people and a glorious offering to Him, who has given us this rich land to conquer.”
My zealous rhetoric appeared to satisfy the captain. He turned around, and, in his ashen face, I saw the death of many. The words he uttered next could only have come from a dead man who had been made privy to the future. God knows why I had been chosen to hear them.
“America will become fabulously rich, while Mexico will grow ever poorer. There will come a time when, to escape poverty and the violence and corruption born of it, the Mexicans will, by stealth and at great risk, return to their lost territories and, from there, infiltrate into the far corners of America. They will be despised and persecuted and, in their turn, they will hate us. A day will come when we will build a wall to keep them out, one as formidable as the walls of the Fortress of San Carlos. Like dogs digging beneath the rusty gate of Paradise, they’ll try to slip inside. Mark my words, Winter, much blood will be spilled to keep them out.”
I nodded, feeling weak and unwell, as if my blood had been drained.
Walker held the lantern to my face.
“You look like hell, Padre. You should go to bed.”
I said good night and hurried to my quarters, where I quickly undressed, prayed, and snuffed out the candle. I shut my eyes, hoping to quell the riot in my brain, but the oblivion I had wished for eluded me. I wanted to pray again, but failed, although I chastened myself by kneeling on the stone floor and once—desperate for peace—lashed myself with a leather belt. Years later, by the Mississippi River, I would see a negro slave’s flayed back and recall the night of my mortification and feel ashamed.
Whenever I was in earshot, Lieutenant Colonel Hitchcock liked to say, “There’s nothing more useless to an army than a chaplain.”
He was right. In the end, I could do little else but pray over a corpse.
The Mexican War is said to have been a magnificent victory for the republic. By the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase five years later, we came to possess Texas north of the Río Grande, the territories of Arizona and New Mexico, and Alta California, an area larger than Europe. We acquired a western border on the Pacific and had only to await the fullness of time and aggression to fill in the blank spaces between two great oceans in order to own a continent. Nothing stood in the way except hostile Indians and an immense geography. I know, without benefit of Captain Walker’s prophecies, that the Indian problem will be finally solved and geography subdued by ax, plow, black powder, Hood’s theodolite, iron rails, and war—always more and more war.
When I returned to Amherst in February, Austin showed me a letter you’d written him. It betrayed that impudent way you had—so charming to me—before you became “peculiar.”
Mount Holyoke Female Seminary
Thursday Noon
My Dear Brother Austin,
News of the War has been slow to arrive in South Hadley. I wonder if we have won, or lost. Miss Lyon refuses to confide the crumbs of intelligence shared at High Table to the infants in the Nursery. Several of the Seminary’s Young Ladies have purloined tableware to defend their honor—though I do not think spoons & butter knives will be of much use against the Aztec horde.
Your Affectionate Sister,
Emily
You were not yet eighteen and can be forgiven your frivolity. No doubt you’ve sobered after what the recent war has cost us in men of a generation lost; in the corruption of our national virtue, assuming virtue and nationhood are not incompatible ideas; and in the blighting of the human spirit. The vast annexation of Mexican territory made us worthy of fraternal slaughter.
On the boat trip north to Boston, I engaged in little self-reflection except for the kind that happens in a mirror, int
o which we gaze in admiration (if we are handsome or comely) or to assure ourselves of our existence (if we are of a metaphysical bent). I was boastful and boorish like the rest. I know that I gave no thought to the spectral night on the battlements, with the ghost of Captain Walker, and I tried with some success to forget Manzanero and my folly. Mostly, I dwelled on you, in anticipation of our meeting at the house on North Pleasant Street, which, as I said, turned out to be a disappointment.
–5–
“YOU’VE COME FOR YOUR PICCALILLI,” you said in answer to my knock at the door. “I expected you first thing! Your delay speaks ill of your character, sir. Next time, I shall blow my bugle at dawn, so that you will think yourself whisked back to some dreary garrison or that Saint John’s Horsemen are on their way to prize up the dead like so many mealy potatoes.”
When in a galvanic mood, you would often jolt me senseless, until I could but stammer a reply, usually insufficient or beside the point. Worse were your impertinences, which might have made a lady blush and a gentleman squirm.
“I’m afraid you’ve shown yourself unworthy of my piccalilli, Robert. We’ll see if you can redeem yourself in my eyes, which, according to Austin, would have been uncommonly pretty if only they’d been more pleasingly arranged. My features do seem a trifle skewed, as if they’d begun to migrate and, having grown weary of the effort, came to rest in transit. There is no help for it. I am as God made me. Isn’t it wonderful that He makes so few mistakes when He is about His creation? I’m the exception that proves the rule. Does that make me living proof of God’s existence? You must save your answer till we’re alone, so as not to shock the grown-ups. Father is waiting in the parlor, where the rack and thumbscrews have been prepared.”
