The crew on the cannon were swabbing out the barrel with water when the mortar went off. The carriage seemed to crush into the earth from the recoil, and he heard the huge iron ball begin to arch out of its trajectory and slip downward through the air like a peal of thunder. The heat and the vacuum from the explosion made his head ring and his skin burn, as though someone had opened a furnace door next to him. He looked up, his eyes filled with sweat and dirt, and saw a deep crater where there had been twenty feet of embankment and track. The wounded and the dead were half buried in the dirt and splintered ties, and one soldier sat on the edge of the hole with both palms pressed against his ears.
“Here they come!” someone behind him yelled.
The Federals began advancing in broken lines across the fields, their bayonets fixed, while their artillery fired over them. Their line seemed to waver in the smoke that drifted ahead of them in the wind, and then it would re-form again in a brilliant wash of twilight. One of the hospital cars was hit, and the dry, wooden frame burned into a collapsed, blackened pile on the wheels within minutes. Then an odd, long round from a cannon burst next to the ammunition wagon by the edge of the woods, and blew it, the mules, and the driver into one flame that scorched the tops of the pines. Wesley rolled onto his back and slipped his bayonet into the groove on the end of his Springfield.
“That pigsticker won’t do you no good now, boy,” the Texas soldier said, his head just below the level of the track. “Wait another minute, and give them a rose petal between the eyes.”
He didn’t hear the soldier or even the canister crossing through the air and thumping into the wooden sides of the train. The lieutenant was still mounted, the carbine held at a right angle to his body, the bit sawed back against the horse’s teeth, and there was a rip in the dirty cloth of his sleeve and a wide area of blood that ran to the elbow. The horse’s eyes were wide with fright, and he twisted his head against the bridle and tried to turn in a circle.
“Get down, Lieutenant! Get off him!” Wesley yelled.
The weight of the Springfield rested across his stomach, and he had to raise his head on the incline to speak.
“Lieutenant, they’re going to cut you out of the saddle.”
The two convicts, who had been crouched behind the wheels of the locomotive, broke for the trees with their shoulders bent low. The lieutenant aimed his carbine across his forearm and fired, and one of the tall convict’s legs jerked violently under him, and he went down on his buttocks in the grass. The other convict kept running for the timber.
“You better stop worrying about that crazy man up there and start shooting,” the Texas soldier said.
Wesley turned on his stomach again and slid his rifle over the edge of the grade. The first line of the Federal advance was much closer now, and there were hundreds more in the swirling smoke behind them. The line seemed to bend and break apart momentarily with each hard volley, then other Federals filled their ranks and stepped over the dead. Wesley balanced his rifle on the track, cupped his left hand over the stock, and sighted on a white flash of undershirt below a man’s throat. The shot dropped and hit the man full in the chest, knocking him backward in the field with his arms stretched out by his sides. He pulled back from the track to reload and looked into the dead face of the Texas soldier. There was a small hole in the crown of his skull, and his wooden teeth had fallen in the dirt.
Wesley slammed the breech shut and squeezed off the trigger into the Federal line without aiming. The hammer snapped dryly, and he had to pry loose the bad cartridge with his knife. Far down the line he saw men rising to their feet with their rifles in front of them while Yankees leaped across the tracks.
His fingers were thick and shaking when he put another cartridge in the breech, then he heard the lieutenant shout behind him: “This is it, gentlemen. Hurrah for Jefferson Davis. Let’s put them in hell tonight.”
The lieutenant cut his spurs into the horse’s flanks and thundered over the embankment with his carbine raised in the air. His flop hat flew back off his head, and his hand on the reins was scarlet and shining with blood.
They followed him into the field, screaming out of some memory from Chickamauga or New Hope Church or Chancellorsville, their faded brown-and-gray uniforms almost lost in the haze of smoke and vanishing light. Wesley felt them fall on each side of him, then he saw the lieutenant sit straight in the saddle, as though he had remembered a forgotten thought, and the carbine drop loosely from his hand onto the ground. The horse shook his head against the collapsed reins and bolted out of the smoke toward the railway grade. The lieutenant fell backward off his rump and remained motionless in the field with one boot twisted under his thigh.
Wesley fired straight into a man’s face three feet in front of him and pushed his bayonet into the breastbone of a sergeant who was already hit and falling. Then he heard the distant cough of a cannon in the pines, a peeling rip across the sky, and the blunt edges of the shell breaking out of its trajectory. Whistling Dick, he thought. Why are they throwing it in with their own people here?
The shell burst in front of him, and in that second’s roar of light and earth he thought he felt a finger reach up and anoint him casually on the brow.
LOWER ME DOWN WITH A GOLDEN CHAIN
The American priest and two nuns who ran the orphanage in the Guatemalan village of San Luis said they had never actually seen the rebels. Sometimes at night they thought they could hear a firefight in the mountains, a distant popping like strings of firecrackers, and two labor contractors had been shot to death in their truck by the rebels on a nearby coffee plantation. But the most direct contact that Father Larry and the nuns had with the war was the occasional visit to the village by the army—steel-helmeted Indians in camouflage fatigues—and the overhead flights of American-made helicopters that caused the children to scream in terror because their villages had been strafed from the air.
“Sometimes after I’ve fallen asleep I think I hear people out there in the banana trees,” Father Larry said. He pointed across the red, dusty road to the thick stands of banana trees and the jungle that climbed gradually toward low, blue mountains and a dead volcano. The volcano looked black against the cobalt sky. “But maybe it’s only animals. Anyway, they don’t come here. At least, not in a way that we recognize them.”
He was a kindly man, still somehow more gentleman than priest, an exile from Boston money, a quietly fanatical Red Sox fan with a taste for Jack Daniel’s rather than local rum. I supposed that his reluctance to speak of unpleasant things was more a matter of breeding with him than fear of the possible.
“Why do they always kill them in their underwear?” I said.
“I haven’t seen that here.” His face was round and Irish with light liver spots under the skin. His black horn-rims made his bald head look larger than it was.
“You saw it in El Salvador.”
“I don’t know why they make them undress. Maybe to humiliate them. I think you’re probably a good journalist, but don’t try to find these things out. Spend a few days with us, write a story about the children or the gunships or whatever you want, and then go back home. The rebels won’t harm us and we have nothing the army wants. But you—” He pointed his finger at me. “They’re not getting the guns they want and they blame the American press.”
We were sitting on the porch of his small white stucco house with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s between us. The sun was blazing on the bougainvillea and the tangle of red and yellow roses that grew along the porch rail.
“I’m a Catholic, too, Father. Maybe I want to be here for other reasons.”
He lit a filter-tipped cigar to hide the irritation in his face.
“This is not a place where you play with ideas. If you’re interested in discovering your identity, join an encounter group in the United States. You are presently surrounded by people who are morally insane. They kill their victims in their underwear because they often burn and mutilate them first.”
In Wi
chita, Kansas, where I taught creative writing at WSU, people worried about the spread of humanism. The city was surrounded by eighteen Titan missile silos. No one ever mentioned them. Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit ex-con who did three years for splashing chicken blood on draft files, came to town while he was out on appeals bond after vandalizing some missile components in a General Electric plant. He was a serious man, maybe the best speaker I had ever heard, jailhouse tough but with eyes that seemed to see darkly into a terrifying prospect. He said our monstrous inventions might impose a suffering on the children of the earth that even Saint John’s Revelation did not describe adequately. He was obviously a reasonable, compassionate, and sane man. There was no television coverage of his talk. Half of the audience was made up of the 150 people whom we could assemble at a maximum at one of our antinuke rallies. Our small coalition of nuns, Mennonites, socialists, and Catholic Worker lefties was looked upon tolerantly.
North of Wichita a religious group burned rock-and-roll records and copies of Playboy magazine. Local businessmen voiced their concern when the Defense Department announced the Titans might be removed from Sedgwick County by 1985. The city voted down the gay-rights ordinance and banned musical concerts in the parks, and a group complained when a local high school chose the name Blue Devils for its football team. The sunsets in Kansas were like blood across the western sky. The countryside was so green in the spring, so soaked with melted snow and bursting with new wheat, that I gave up talking about Titan missiles, too, and drank 3.2 beer in happy bars with the people who worked at Boeing.
Three days later and fifty kilometers down the road from Father Larry’s orphanage, Captain Ramos told me he liked Americans, that he had lived two years in Miami and would like to go back again when this war was over, but that we Americans were too critical about human rights in other countries.
“You should understand our problems. You had them in Vietnam,” he said. We were parked in his jeep on a dusty, red road that bordered a long meadow that ended at the base of a mountain. The grass was tall and green and waving in the breeze, and in the center of the meadow was a crooked irrigation ditch that gaped like a ragged surgical incision in the earth. Divots of grass had been blown loose from the ditch’s lip. Two dozen enlisted men in camouflage fatigues were in a kneeling position by the road. On each flank an M-60 machine gun formed part of a floating, mobile X that could tear apart anything that tried to raise up out of the ditch.
“You see what we have to deal with?” he said. “They won’t surrender. They’re Marxist fanatics and they understand nothing but the gun.”
“What would happen to them if they surrendered?” I said.
“That’s a matter up to the prisoners.”
Behind his back Captain Ramos’s men called him Huachinango, or Redfish, because he was a big, dark man whose face turned a coarse red when he drank rum. He wore prescription blue sunglasses and a mustache and smelled of cigars and hair tonic. He looked impatiently over his shoulder for the 105 that was being towed on the back of a truck from the army barracks in town. To pass the time he asked me if his name would be in Playboy or Esquire magazine. I answered that I would probably end up publishing an article or two in a Catholic publication.
“The Catholic press in the United States is leftist. Like the Maryknolls,” he said.
I felt uncomfortable.
“I don’t think that’s true,” I said.
“They claim to be missionaries but they give sanctuary to the rebels. Your priest friend at the orphanage, what does he tell you?”
“He doesn’t talk politics. His only interest is in caring for the children.” My words were too quick.
“I suspect otherwise. But as long as we get no reports, he’s of no interest to us. We do not interfere with innocent people.”
“Will those guys out there surrender when they know you’ve got a 105?”
“At a certain point options pass,” he said.
Later, the enlisted men unhooked the howitzer from the U.S. Marine Corps six-by, clanked a gleaming artillery shell into the breech, and fired. When a young Indian soldier jerked the lanyard, the gun roared forward on its wheels, lifting a small cloud of dust into the bright air, and a moment later the round exploded in a black geyser of dirt on the far side of the ditch. Blackbirds rose in a frenzy from the tall grass. The gunners were good, and with two more rounds they had the ditch registered. The soldiers waited on Captain Ramos’s order. He lit a fresh cigar and puffed reflectively as though a deep philosophical consideration were working in his mind.
“Captain, I’m a neutral. I could walk out there with a white flag,” I said quietly.
But he wasn’t listening. I had thought he was weighing the lives of the people in the ditch. He called a private over to the jeep and told him to put all the spent shell casings in the truck. I was told later that the captain owned half of a scrap-metal business in Puerto Barrios.
For fifteen minutes they blew parts of people out of the ditch. A soldier with an asbestos mitten threw the smoking shell casings behind the gun; a bare-chested soldier whose bronze skin was covered with pinpoints of dirt and sweat slammed another shell into the breech, locked down the handle, and the gun roared with a force that left us opening and closing our mouths. There was coral under the loamy earth, and when a round burst on the ditch’s edge, shrapnel sang across the field and a pink cloud of powdered rock drifted out over the grass.
The rebels tried to respond with some bolt-action Enfield junk. Through my binoculars I saw their heads and shoulders shred in the M-60 cross fire from the flanks. A barefoot man in a T-shirt and blue jeans leaped from the ditch and ran through the tall grass toward the mountain. His spinal column was arched inward as though he expected an invisible and deathly finger to touch his skin at any moment. There was a terror on his face that I had seen only on the faces of those who had been tortured by death squads before they were executed. One of the machine gunners turned his sights casually on the running man and blew the T-shirt off his back.
When it was over Captain Ramos offered me a sip of white rum from his flask.
“Do you want to take pictures?” he said. “We are not ashamed of what we have done. Nothing dishonorable happened here today.”
I told him I didn’t.
“This is a sad business,” he said. “Do you remember what Adolf Eichmann said before he was hanged by the Jews? A man must serve his prince, and an unfortunate man must sometimes serve a bad prince. I think there’s great wisdom in that.”
“I think it’s Nazi bullshit,” I said.
“Ah, my friend, you can afford to be a moralist because you are not a participant.”
I drive my rented car to a village outside of Quezaltenango to interview some distributors of American powdered-milk formula. Baby formula gets the hard sell down here. The people who push it wear white jackets like nurses or medical technicians wear, although none of them are medical people. The missionaries try to encourage the Indians to continue breast-feeding their infants rather than use the formula, since they often mix the formula with contaminated water and the children get sick and die.
On this bright morning the baby-formula people have packed their van and blown town. A death squad was working the area last night, and it was time to get out of Dodge and look for new horizons. For various reasons no one likes to find the victims of the death squad. The bodies are usually mutilated; the tropical heat accelerates the decomposition process rapidly, and the rancid smell hangs in the underbrush like an invisible fist; and often the victim’s body has a note fastened to it that threatens the same fate to anyone who buries the remains.
Five sugarcane cutters were shot at close range on the riverbank. They all wear purple-and-orange Jockey undershorts, and their thumbs are tied behind them with baling wire. My guess is that they were shot with .45-caliber dumdums, probably from a grease gun. Large greenbottle flies hum thickly in the hot shade of the canebreak where their bodies lie, and the blood from their torn wounds
has leaked into the stream. The local police will not come to the riverbank. Instead, a tear-streaked man backs a truck through the broken stalks, and he and a group of women snip the wire on the victims’ blackened thumbs, wash their faces and chests with wet rags, and lift their bodies onto the pickup.
Nobody can understand why the five cane cutters were killed. The youngest of them is sixteen. His mother is hysterical and will not let the village carpenter measure him with his yardstick. I use a wide-angle lens to photograph the bodies and the weeping women under the colonnade in front of the empty police building.
Maybe the baby-formula pushers retained a measure of decency by blowing Dodge. I feel like a voyeur in search of misery with camera and pen. I hear on the news from Guatemala City that the marines are kicking butt and taking names in Grenada. It seems that on this morning the world is dividing itself more distinctly into observers and participants. Provide, provide, Robert Frost said, or somebody will provide for you. I convince myself he meant two glasses of white rum before attempting lunch in the village’s only café, which is within earshot of the burial procession to the village cemetery.
I was raised in New Orleans by a gentle aunt who lived in the Garden District. I never knew any black people who were not servants or yardmen. There were none in our parish church or in our schools and neighborhoods. Along the moss-shaded and brick-paved streets where I grew up, people of color were servile visitors who showed up at back doors early in the morning and disappeared across Magazine Street by suppertime. They had only first names unless they had reached a sufficient age to be called “Auntie” or “Cap.” Even at Mass I never questioned the presence of only one race in the cathedral. William Faulkner once said that for southerners segregation was simply a fact, it was simply there. It had always existed, it always would. We gave it no more thought than we would the warm, magnolia-scented climate in which we lived.
The Convict and Other Stories Page 13