American Meteor (4 page)

One day, when I will keep the long hours of eternity below my island of grass, I expect to trade stories with dead folk of every kind, color, and previous occupation. In the cemetery, all men and women are contemporaries; all, the comrades and intimates Walt Whitman praised in his
Leaves
, with a foolish optimism born of an infatuated heart (you can die of such a heart!)—foolish, because only after we’ve passed into glory or oblivion is the perfect comradeship and intimacy he espoused possible. I’ve often thought how splendid it would be if I could talk to Whitman now. I’d ask him if it is really just as lucky to die as it is to be born. But there is a continent flung between us, whose great divide is more obdurate than granite. One day, when day is meaningless
and indistinguishable from night, I hope to find answers to the questions that have vexed me—unless oblivion does win out over the Rapture and eternity is as silent as the tomb.

One question concerns me, myself: Why did I often find it necessary to lie?

Take the story of how I came to lose my eye. Between you and me, it wasn’t the fault of a Confederate shell, as I like to let on, but of my ignorance and panic during the charge at Five Forks. A Union rifleman beside me dropped, with a minié ball through his heart. The Johnny Reb who’d fired it stood ten feet away, preparing to do the same to me, regardless of my tender years and noncombatant status as a bugle boy. I picked up the dead man’s Enfield, poured black powder down its throat, chased it with a lead ball, and then— hands shaking—rammed ball and powder home. Next, I set the percussion cap, cocked the hammer, and fired. I made a mess of it, however, and the spark burned my eye. When it became infected, an army surgeon spooned it out. But I’ll tell you this: My manhood hinged on the idea—call it a “fact”—that a rebel howitzer put out my eye. Much of what followed and added up to my life had its origin in the tale I told later on to Whitman. Anyway, it makes a better story— the way I always told it. Don’t you think?

The rebel I had meant to shoot stepped toward me over gray stubble and dead men of both factions, intending to brain me with the butt end of his musket. I still recall how his eyes—they did not shine—looked dead and goggled, like those of a fish at its last gasp. I think he resented me because he was obliged to kill me. I reached toward him with my bayonet, idly, as you might fork up a last morsel of meat, though your appetite was lost; touched the place
where his vital spirits congregated; and watched him dangle a moment (long as eternity) and then drop. I had killed my first man. I wonder if I meant to. No, I don’t think will or even wish entered into it. I pierced him as mindlessly as a dead frog will jerk when given a galvanic shock. It was a case of murder by accident.

Five Forks, Virginia, April 1, 1865

I’ll describe, as well as I am able, the Battle of Five Forks and then be done with the war, except for its aftermath. I say “as well as I am able” not to make a show of modesty but, rather, to acknowledge the befuddled senses of a man in battle, where fear, misery, noise, cannon and musket smoke make for each combatant a kind of bell jar. Think of an insect trapped under glass. What must it feel—if so lowly a creature can be said to feel—to find itself all of a sudden cut off from the world it knew? That’s what it’s like for a man in a fight for his life. To be separated profoundly from his intellect; to exist solely in his body; to be preoccupied entirely with the body’s survival. To hell with the mind! Inside the bell jar, a man has no more to do with thoughts, doctrines, a cause célèbre, his previous sentiments and affections than a bug would. Life, its color and complexity, is reduced—like a mess of stew bones boiling in a pot—to an elemental dish whose simple flavors are rue and terror, hatred and self-love.

There are heroes—I would not tell you otherwise. But the dish they eat at what might be the hour of their death is the same. Willingly or reluctantly, we went to be tried; eagerly or tearfully, we marched for union or abolition. But the moment when we stood on the scaffold raised over the abyss, we were deaf to Lincoln’s proclamations and the orders of
the generals—hearing only the bestial noise of the shambles or what sound a gigantic maw might make opening wide to receive us. There is no reliable witness to a slaughter, just as none die happily or well who die in war.

I remember smoke—how it lazed above us, like a low-lying cloud or like the bluish gray mist fraying above wan fields after the morning sun has burned off the dew. In the old woods bordering the field, ruts clogged with April mud, torn bandages of smoke clung to the bones of the leafless chestnut trees (a species soon to be no more). The gloomy aisles were treacherous with thickets and downed branches turned gray, like the deer and squirrels, by winter. Dropped leaves left to rot above the thankful grubs were slick with recent rain. Knowing no way to say how war is, the qualities that make it a thing wholly unto itself, I must resort to a literary language that denatures it. What birds and animals claimed Five Forks as their habitat had fled, panicked by the hobnailed armies of Sheridan and Pickett, met in those dun woods and fields—the one to strike the vital Southside Railroad, the other to defend it at all cost for Lee and the Confederacy.

That afternoon, we threaded our way through underbrush that tangled us in thorns and whipcords, as if the vegetation sided with the Army of Northern Virginia against us Yankees. Out of the woods at last, we charged the entrenchments set along White Oak Road, only to find the enemy’s center had moved during our painstaking march through the trees. We shambled in confusion until Warren flung us recklessly against the rebel line—this time from the north— while Sheridan swept Pickett’s left with his cavalry, destroying it. You may have seen the famous lithograph.

As a result of that April day in the year 1865 (I will not call it the Lord’s), Pickett lost a third of his army, Lee lost Petersburg, Jeff Davis lost Richmond, the Confederacy lost the war, and I lost my eye. Before that day, I had not thought blood could be so red! It lay in crimson drops on the palms of dead leaves, like that from Christ’s own wounds; it dripped garnets from the briar thorns; it turned to scarlet the sodden furrows cut in peaceable days by plowshares (abandoned, since, to rust—blood’s other color), as if Aaron had walked among them with his vengeful rod. I tell you the fields were soaked, the stubble blazed with it! I’d never seen what a garish thing blood is until my eye socket brimmed with it! The Battle of Five Forks halved my sight and did as much as any of that uncivil war’s campaigns to stitch up the Union.

This blab of mine isn’t meant to be a history of the Civil War and what followed it: I mean the wrong turnings made in realizing a destiny consecrated by deception, fraud, murder, and profit. No, I wish only to study the sickness of the degenerate age in which I lie at night, listening to the boasts and grievances of the dead: a faculty forged by blinding headaches that beset me after the death of Crazy Horse. Your headache powders would’ve been useless against them, Jay, and you’d have had to look elsewhere for their cause than a clinch knot in the brain. I doubt your arts take in the supernatural. No, you’re a hardheaded Yankee doc and can’t credit what your science won’t allow— but indulge me awhile. What I have to say makes for one hell of a yarn, if nothing else.

Armory Square Hospital, Washington City, April 13–21, 1865

I could not have known that the train that carried me from Five Forks to the army surgeons in Washington—the first I’d ever ridden—would herald, with a noise of tortured iron and escaping steam, a future delivered up to the railroads. I was too enthralled by the novelties of speed, felt by my muscles and nerves as a reluctance, and motion, seen by my unbandaged eye as a blur of woods and fields, rivers and marshland, to think what this journey might portend. Besides, I was not then gifted with foresight, as I’ll seem to you to be later on when I recount my days in light of time to come. Wreathed funereally by coal smoke, the train arrived in Washington at the Baltimore & Ohio Depot, where, four years earlier, his life threatened by secessionists, Lincoln had slunk, incognito, into the capital to take his oath. From that same station of his cross, he would leave on a funeral train after having departed this life for the next on Saturday, the fifteenth of April.

On Thursday, I was driven to the Armory Square Hospital and liberally dosed with rye whiskey before my eye socket was cleaned, cauterized, and bandaged. I’d already concocted the story of my heroic charge against a rebel battery, armed with nothing but a B-flat bugle. (Sadly, no lithograph was made, commemorating my musicality and derring-do.) That afternoon, Walt Whitman sidled up to me where I lay on a cot among the wounded, watching cigar smoke write in Persian letters prophesies of my coming life as a man.

Looming like the moon in a fog of mosquito netting, Whitman’s face got in the way of my destiny, which, in any case, I couldn’t decipher. His countenance was intelligent,
kind, but underlain by a fierceness that would blaze up into his tired eyes. Five years earlier, when I’d watched him shout his verses into the evening breeze, his hair, beard, and mustache had been unfashionably neat for that manly age of facial barbarism. They were indifferently kept now, as if pain and sorrow had made the least act of self-regard frivolous to his mind. At Sheepshead Bay, he had resembled the picture of Jesus in the testament later given me by the Christian Sanitary Commission. Now, he appeared as Moses must have after hearing the Almighty speak from the burning bush. His eyes bore into a man, as though he meant to assay the ore of his character. I’d have shivered had his look not also conveyed so large a store of pity. Wrath for what the war had taken was mostly dampened by the better angels of his nature.

I’ve heard the talk concerning Whitman’s depravity, but I never believed it. When he laid his hand gently on my brow, I felt the tenderness of a benevolent man, nothing else. If I had been well and he’d thrown his arm over my shoulder and embraced me—even if he’d kissed me with his bearded lips and called me his sweet comrade—I would not have been ashamed. In my childhood, I had grown beyond shame, and nothing could embarrass me. I’d walked the squalid streets and alleys of the Five Points and the Bowery; passed—an unnoticed boy—among filthy dens where whores, thieves, and cutthroats consorted. I’d seen most every variety of human and bestial conjugation and suffered the hardships of our kind’s most ingenious war. There will be others, even more ingenious and brutal. I mean to say that I was not naïve, nor was I the least afraid of this man whose love for men and women seemed perfect Christian zeal.

I knew no other faith; knew of Christ and the mother of God, of His saints and angels only what my Irish mother had taught me before typhoid took her to Abraham’s bosom or only to the sure and certain corruption of the body, packed with little ceremony in the impoverished earth of Ward’s Island, on the other side of Little Hell Gate. I don’t believe in hell, except as it was spread daily before my eyes from Canal Street to Pearl, squeezed into Manhattan’s rancid tit between the East River and the Hudson. Hell is for the living. And heaven? A boy, I pictured it as a field of fireflies on a summer’s night—each tiny yellow light a blessed soul. If my childish fancy is true, then the end of days for hosanna-hymning bugs lies in the bloated belly of a bat.

“Poor boy,” Whitman murmured, as if he had looked into my mind with his all-seeing eyes and found there the common tragedy of the poor.

Grateful for his sympathy, which I knew to be genuine, I nodded my thanks. Like love, it was a delicacy rarely served in tenements where creatures (call them people for old time’s sake) swarmed like ants on a stale cake, in spaces (I will not call them rooms) with a dearth of light and air but a plenitude of misery and disease. I had a brother, Sean. Too young for war, he stayed behind in Bushwick with our useless souse of a father. After I left, he went bad (a word used also for spoiled meat beloved by maggots), preferring a roughneck life to the oyster trade. Small and wiry, he excelled as a pickpocket until a porter found his hand inside his dungarees and broke it. Versatile, he took to waylaying swanks on Wall Street and looting Fifth Avenue kitchens of silverware and plate. Sean moved into the “Bloody Sixth” near the seaport so that he could rob the Irish just off the boat “to give them
a taste of equality.” When my uncle Jack broke his neck, falling from a streetcar, I had no further news of Sean or of my father. Uncle Jack had beautiful penmanship—strange in a man with fists like beef hearts—and he liked to write letters. Once he’d gone, I would get no others, though envelopes would pass through my hands—links in a chain holding the continent together—while I sorted mail, in motion between Santa Fe and Independence, Missouri.

Ten years ago—it must have been—I was leafing through a book of pictures taken by Jacob Riis, when my hand was stayed by a photograph of “Bandit’s Roost” in New York City. In the foreground, my brother stands with swaggering nonchalance, a hand in the pocket of his dark suit. From the shadow of a derby hat, his eyes confront the camera with cold and insolent certainty. His mouth is cruel. Behind him, another man appears to be leaning on the barrel of a rifle, unless it’s only a length of steel with which to batter down doors or break heads. In the wet, somber recesses of the alley, between two Mulberry Street tenement houses, overhung with ragged, dingy wash, other roughneck men stare down the interloper, while, from out a window, a sharp-faced woman glares. I wondered then if Sean had died since his picture’d been taken and—for a moment—I hoped he had.

“Were they able to save your eye?” Whitman asked, his voice so drenched in melancholy that my unbandaged orb began to weep in pity for its lost twin.

“No, sir,” I said, touching the ravaged place.