by Kent Wascom
Around this time there was a spate of articles about groups of children who shared the same dreams. Sometimes, she read, the children were found to be half siblings, the products of secret infidelities, but more often no relationship could be determined other than, say, attending the same school, and the mystery of the communal dreams sank into the backpages of the newspapers, unable to hold a public imagination gripped by news of the war. And was the war, which her country now eyed hungrily, the dream or the waking? You heard talk then of renaming streets, villages called Germantown became Washington or Lincoln overnight, things that seemed silly at first, but then there were beatings and the formations of patriot groups that sought to root out dissent as ugliness and outrage went from something that happened elsewhere to a fact of daily life, and the German café where she and Isaac had eaten with Guillory had its windows broken, and vaguely Teutonic families were evicted from their homes. You heard of a young man in Tennessee who cut off his hand in order to avoid conscription and who had bled out and died. You heard old women speaking outside the dentist’s office in Biloxi, saying how the man inside was doing a right smart business now that some boys had heard a soldier was required to have a full set of back teeth. You tried not to hear or see young men in fits of patriotism beating other young men, without molars perhaps, and the drills and parades and endless brass-throated music. But, for better or worse, the South was still a touch suspicious of the war, if only that it would enrich the industrial North. Among the six senators who voted against entering the war and against the Selective Service Act was one James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, who publicly pledged that if maintaining white supremacy meant lynching every negro in his state, he’d have it done, and as governor once choked half to death an inmate of the state farm then serving as a butler in his mansion. The senator’s decision against bloodshed on a global scale, though his own state was ruled by bloodshed on a scale of centuries, was as dry an irony as the fact that the beaten, strangled inmate went on to save Governor Vardaman’s life when the latter rode in to quell a riot at the prison. When she read of the vote, Kemper would wonder whether these were lights in the near universal darkness of the history of the state or merely a deepening of the dark. A darkness they were, inescapably, a part of. The war abroad, which was coming, and the war at home, which they and so many others had put out of their minds, hiding behind art and beauty. They were young and white and had money, and this combination could put you a good ways out of the path of the world’s great reaping. But not in every case. She read the editorials of the dissenters, which were printed less and less, until the signing of the Espionage Act, when dissent disappeared entirely from the papers, replaced by accounts of valor and the numbers of the dead. She read the news aloud to Isaac, who would stare blankly into the middle distance or get up and walk down from the porch into the yard. For a while they comforted themselves with lies, but only for a while. You tell yourself a terrible change has come over your country and that everything is different, then you wake one day and realize you’re living in the country as it’s always been.
That spring Isaac discovered a small grove of red mulberry at the rear of the property, planted by some distant husbandman who must have dreamed of silk, and which in early spring had grown berries pale green as geckos’ bellies which ripened after the rain and became a beacon to cowbirds, blackbirds, thrashers. The berries so ripe they rained down from the negligible weight of the hollow-boned, winged bodies that lit in the branches or with the brush of your hands, as they did when Isaac led her there one evening not long after he received the order to register for the draft. Within the tree and the leaves flecked with purple birdshit they ate the berries and the tender green stems that clung to them until their hands were gloved, their mouths purple smears. They sat together as the night came alive.
He told her about something he’d seen in the Yucatán, when he’d hiked out of Santa Elena, trying to find the Kabah gate. He hadn’t found the ruins, but after a week caught a ride back on a truck owned by International Harvester, which took him through the fields of henequen. The spined arms of the henequen plant hacked by men in rags who were themselves flogged with watered ropes by other men. It made no difference that the men who held the ropes were Korean (so he learned from the driver) and the men being whipped were Mayan or Yaqui; what he saw then was the history of his homeland, the passing of the whip from one hand to another, and whether someone held the whip for you or you held it yourself was meaningless. He’d looked away, here in Mississippi, as much as he could. But now they were holding out the whip and saying, It’s your turn.
—I won’t be a part of it, he said. I won’t go die for that.
She said that she would be with him, that he was brave. But he didn’t sound brave. He sounded very much afraid, as was she.
In the morning she would find their traces, winepress footprints on the porch steps, leading back to the house. The shapes of their feet alive with sugar ants. The stains would not lift until the third flood of that summer, so that his path was there, visible to her when she looked out from the kitchen window, even after he was gone.
January 1919
S.S. Sud
Sister,
Now that you know that I’m alive, maybe the next thing you should know is how I died.
I left Nicaragua two weeks ago, and it’s been days since I last slept. In the pitch and roll of the Pacific I could close my eyes and almost be gone, but now that the ship has crossed the isthmus and come into the calm, I can’t even do that. Nights I pace the deck with an antique pistol in my pocket. I watch the men on their watches smoking cigarettes and staring out at what for me is only emptiness, a distance to be crossed, but for them is something filled with possibility. Spaces and silences are like that. Certain eyes can see in them, certain hearts wish to.
You’re one of those people, I think, little sister. You wrote me for years, sending out messages across the space of my silence. I could lie and say I never got your letters, but I did. Most of them. I read them in batches, little bundles every few weeks, sometimes longer, and I can trace down to the month how long it took for you to finally give me up. How the letters grew less and less frequent until they finally stopped. I waited for that time the way you wait for a loved one at the edge of death to pass over, a hope with guilt at its heart. A hope I know too well now, like so many others in the world. When the first month went by with no word from you I was glad, glad for you but also because your silence balanced mine out. So I began to imagine you, what happened in your silence, just like you must have imagined me, even after you heard I was dead.
It happened like this. On the night of 4 October 1912, though my body wouldn’t be found until the next morning by a detachment of U.S. Marines—a corpse with a ruined face crumpled behind the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption in the town of Masaya, in Nicaragua. A pretty town of weavers and craftsmen, canopies of citrus, grass growing in the road, or at least it was before the shelling. I doubt they were surprised to find me, the Marines. They know as well as you or I how wars in the center and south of the Americas tend to be salted with North American corpses. Because when you’re a country that’s bound to the United States, as Nicaragua is, with Wall Street owning the measure of her imports and exports and indebted from here to doomsday, it means not only that you’re chained to a monumental, munificent b—h, but that you’re bound to suffer her wayward children too. I like to imagine that once I was identified by the papers in my pocket the Marines tossed the body into the oxcart they used to drag the corpse of our last general, Benjamín Zeledón, down the Catalina road to his burial farther south. People tell me it was a sight. The Marines trotting their horses, the General’s head lolling.
The General had been killed sometime in the night, at the fortress of the Coyotepe, some miles north of the town. We knew he was dead and that the fort had fallen when shells started to fall and the guns of the fort across the gorge turned on us in Masaya. Now Masaya had seen fire before. There is
, or was, an icon of San Jerónimo there that some priest a century ago, when the volcano woke, had taken out and marched with at the head of his congregation to face down the fireballs and clastic flows. Imagine that, believing that you can stand before a mountain or fire and will it to stop. Our grandfather was like that, our father was like that, and there is some of that in us. The stupidity to believe that the impossible is something you can do, and the wildness to try. The icon, charred by some spat volcanic rock, was kept in the church near where the boy was found. Now it’s all burnt, and that night, when it was clear we had lost, I was sitting in the barroom of the Hotel Ascarate, just across the plaza from the church of the burnt saint, and drinking, not alone.
In the years since I left you, four men have come looking for and found me. The first I paid off, the second I lost, the third I killed in British Honduras. My conscience is untroubled, at least on these counts. The fourth was sitting across from me in the hotel barroom, sipping from a dented pewter flask while the bombs shook sheets of plaster from the walls and you could hear the roof tiles shatter in the square.
He was, the fourth man, my age and American. Said he was an attorney from Mobile, Alabama, though he lived in Nicaragua now. Said his name was Jefferson Davis Edwards and that today was his lucky day. I’d seen him lurking around the hotel for days, but thought little of him, believing he was one of those salt grains I mentioned earlier, until that night when he stepped into the bar and strode over to where I was and sat down like he’d been invited.
The shells were coming more and more now. The whole hotel shook, and the door that led out onto the plaza hung by a half-broken hinge.
“Mr. Woolsack,” he said, laughing like people do when they come finally to some much-discussed monument, something you just have to see.
I told him he was wrong, but he grinned and said he had proof. Took from some inner pocket of his soiled jacket an enlarged print of a snapshot taken many years ago, in my early twenties. Our father paid for it, as I recall, the original on the table beside our mother’s bed. The man smoothed out the creases and slid the photo across the table, and then I was facing my own face. Or what used to be mine.
“So,” I said. “What happened to him?”
“He vanished, about two years ago.”
“Vanished,” I said, liking the sound of the word.
“Ordinary people are abandoned, taken, killed, even lost,” he said. “But people of property, the sons and daughters of money, they vanish. Poof. And their families look and look, or if they’re like most rich families, all squabbling over who gets what money, they have these vanished persons declared dead so they can cash out indemnities taken out on that life when that life was much newer. But the Mutual Insurance and Indemnity Corp., and some other interested parties, believe it is within what’s called the ‘balance of possibility’ that you, Angel Woolsack, are alive.”
“And you came here in the middle of a war to find out.”
“Shit,” he said. “There’s always a war. You should know that better than anybody. Far as I can tell you’ve been present at every bloodletting this place has seen since you were about eighteen years old.”
“I’m an investor,” I said. “I’m here overseeing my investments.”
“I don’t doubt it. You just invested in the wrong side this time.”
At that moment some officers came down the gallery bearing crates and bags and, between two of them, an enormous Gilder typewriter, which they hefted onto the bar while one officer found a bottle and they passed it back and forth. They saw me sitting there, saw that something was wrong, but I gave them a look that said, Go on, don’t worry about me.
It seemed like the shells were falling just outside the door, which somehow still hung on. Dust and smoke and pieces of stone wafting in, the breath of bombs.
“I don’t blame you,” the Alabaman said. “I came here to vanish too. It’s not much different from home: Same bugs. Same heat. Minus the language. Minus the wars. Minus the mountains. Different niggers, though, don’t you find? Down on the coast they like white folks, hate ‘de Sponish.’” He laughed. “Then you got these men coming down from California talkin’ ‘greaser’ this and ‘spic’ that, but if you’re from the South it’s like home or better—a home where no one knows you.”
For a moment I thought of saying something true, but there’s a point in the life of many a white Southerner, maybe it’s come to you, when you’re so sick of disabusing your piss-ignorant countrymen of their more closely-held notions that you just quit and get up and take your chances with whatever the hell is outside.
So I did. I stood with my bag and of course so did the man, so that I saw the grip of the pistol at his side.
“You want to tip the balance of possibility,” I asked.
The Alabaman’s face brightened. “To be honest,” he said, “I don’t care if Mutual pays out. They paid me to make a report, and I’ve already sent it. For them, you’re officially, as of three days ago, alive and in this town. But to the United Fruit Company, who you have flat out egregiously f—d for almost a decade, it matters quite a bit.”
I remember how he said it and the change that passed over his face. And I wonder what he saw in mine at that moment. Did he see what I was willing to do? What I would do without a second thought, because I might be better than some in our family but I still have that gap in me where care should be about ending the life of someone in your way. But before I could, a shell hit the front of the hotel and everything was smoke and splinters.
You told me once that you hoped we were happy, meaning me and whoever I loved. I know from your letters that you and the man you love have been happy, or were, and that’s good. Why is it easier for me to write the second sentence than the first? Now that the war they say will be the last is done and the ’flu is finished with us, what took a clear quarter of the world, and the quarantines are lifted and I am freed by the awful certainty of my own survival to consider all that I have lost, what’s left to fear?
The first Angel Woolsack said he saw the end of the world, and it may be that he did in his God-wracked mind. But we, sister, have seen it with our eyes, felt it or reared back from it in horror. What have the times taken from you? In our father and his father’s time, they lost the honesty of slavery, lost brief violent countries.
Our grandfather wrote like an American prophet. All soaring hope and demented glory. I’ve tried, but just don’t have it in me. Everything sounds weighty if you write it like the Bible.
Now our father’s gone to join him, and I’ve heard by the same channels that your man’s been taken from you. Well, so has mine. But like our father mine is never coming back.
All love is risk. Without risk love is worthless, the dead, dry bed of a long, uneventful marriage. Maybe I’ve risked more than some—the risks of discovery, of death—but that’s what it takes to be happy. No, I still haven’t put it right. “Risk” makes it seem as though the stakes are equal for all parties. And they aren’t.
What I’ve done, I’ve done for myself, for greed, for anger sometimes, for Gulf Shipping, for our father, who told me once that the first corporations were chartered by God—the Church and its ministries—and ours was no different. Only rarely have I done something because of love.
The year of the revolution, in 1912, I’d left León and my lover to fight for a side that I knew in my heart was going to lose. Knew because I’d fought on the other side, the government side, more times than I can count. This doesn’t make anything right except in my own small soul, and really it wasn’t even for that, or because I believed in the Liberal Party, but because I wanted to be something I couldn’t.
Do you remember the poem I read that night at Christmas? I heard it first in 1906, not long after it was written by the great Rubén Darío in protest of our snatching of Panama from Colombia, searing verses against the country we come from. This was in León, in a house of some landowner’s son who hosted gatherings of literary and moneyed types. I lis
tened with them while a young man I didn’t know read the poem aloud. His voice, you could almost hear where adolescent cracks had been. He read, scanning the room with his head inclined, dark eyes darting up from the page to fix on one listener and then the next, but when he was done he was looking straight at me. His face was round and razor-burnt at the jawline, his nose boxer-broad. I didn’t know his name yet, and then the others were asking what I—the only Yanqui there—thought of the poem. When I was younger I used to go on about how the borders of the United States had fallen over our state, how we were from a Catholic, Latin place too, a place of slavery and defeat. I used to try and make whoever I was talking to down there understand that I felt no more American than they did, which is to say exactly as American. Some of men there that night had heard me talk this way before, but I couldn’t find it in me then. I felt revealed, naked, and yet irrevocably separate in my wish for belonging. And maybe this is the problem of being American, your birthright is nothing but motion, your nativity goes back only to the point of the great theft, so we are always looking to be something we never can. Maybe that is why we’re always reaching, taking, in the hope that the next thing we grasp will be truly ours. I go into these places, I am hungry for these places in the center and south because a part of me hopes to find or maybe to make a country that matches the country I carry inside me.
