“Skaggs!”
“I know I failed to keep up my end of our conversation, but Latin is the only foreign language I have, apart from my pathetic bits of—”
“You bugger! You goddamned son of a dog!”
“Don’t come any closer,” Skaggs said, now pointing his walking stick at Duff ’s face, “or I swear I’ll shoot. And at this range, it’s unlikely I’ll miss.”
Duff swatted the cane out of his hand and into the street. “I nearly crapped my pants, you fool!” Passersby were looking at them now. “Damn you, Skaggs. I ought to thump you.” He was panting. His face was bright red.
Skaggs felt bad about embarrassing the boy. “Forgive me, Duff. Honestly, I meant no disrespect. I’ll buy you a brandy, or two. We’ll celebrate the victory indoors. I mean to say, your victory.”
“I don’t want a drink. I don’t need a drink.”
“Please, man, do not tell me that you have taken the pledge and sworn off liquor. You have not joined some gruesome temperance fraternity, have you?”
Duff shook his head. “I want no blunting of my anger,” he said with the even tone of a man who had spent time pouring and measuring his vitriol. “Not tonight.” He raised his right hand, finger pointed like an orator. “Understand—it is no true victory these windbags and fools are celebrating.” He continued walking. “When it began, you know, when I enlisted, we understood ourselves to be fighting for a Mexican revolution.” He was angry. “Such a lie.”
“Yes. Yes it was.”
“Your friend Whitman, in the Eagle—”
“Yes, I remember.”
“‘Mexico must be thoroughly chastised,’ he said. ‘America knows how to crush, as well as how to expand…’” Duff was frothing. “Now this ‘peace’ is nothing but the end of a successful…of a transaction.”
“It’s Polk’s Mexican gratuity has you riled up, eh?” Skaggs said. “The six-bit tribute for the damage you and your fellows wreaked down there.”
Under the terms of the peace treaty being celebrated, the United States had agreed to pay Mexico $15 million in reparations—seventy-five cents on behalf of each American man, woman, and child, the six-bit tribute. Just before the war started two years ago, President Polk had offered $20 million to buy California, Texas, and the rest of the 338 million acres of Mexico the U.S. wanted.
“It was nothing but a deal of business,” said Duff. “Forty thousand dead men nothing more than…garnish. A means of reducing the price five million dollars. Twelve dollars per corpse.”
Skaggs knew that, in fact, $5 million divided among the 40,000 war casualties amounted to $125 for every dead man, not $12. And almost $400 apiece if one made the calculation using only the 13,000 American dead—that is, U.S. dead, since a majority of the force were not Americans at all, but Irish and German immigrants the army had purchased and scooped up like so many musket balls to fire across the Rio Grande. But Skaggs thought it best not to correct or clarify just now.
“In the end,” Duff continued, “it was all a negotiation for some real estate, wasn’t it? American bankers and Mexican bankers using men with cannon and rifles to bargain hard.”
Yes, Skaggs further refrained from saying, and why should this war be different from any other?
“I do not blame you a bit,” Skaggs said instead, hooking his right arm through Duff ’s left. “If it were me that my own country had misused in such a fashion—” His hand happened to press against the thick coil of cord in Duff ’s pocket. Skaggs patted and grabbed it through the cloth, as if to ask, What is this?
“Fuse,” Duff said. “Forty-second-a-foot safety fuse.”
“Ah. Gas fitter’s matériel.”
Duff shook his head.
“Aha,” Skaggs said, “for your own illuminations! So then I take it you are not altogether in the dumps about tonight’s festivity?”
“I’m not blue now,” Duff said.
He had swallowed two double doses of the little pills he took to fight off his depressions—Blue Mass, little gray-blue balls of mercury that tasted like licorice and roses. He had found himself crying in bed that morning even before he was entirely awake. Exactly one year ago he had made his choice in Mexico, after watching for forty-eight hours as they blasted Vera Cruz with their cannon.
And this afternoon in the Vauxhall Gardens he had hidden behind an oak tree and finally run away down the Fourth Avenue after he spotted a corporal from his company, a Pennsylvanian named Pishey Wetmore, roaming with a group that included Fatty Freeborn. Duff had not known Wetmore well, and was one of the few in Company A who had never teased him about his name, but ever since Duff ’s return from Mexico he had lived in dread of encountering men like him by chance.
With the Second Regiment volunteers back in the city and mustering out, his chance of encountering some inconvenient former associate was increasing by the hour.
“Are you hungry, then?” Skaggs asked. “I was headed to Budd’s—I’ll buy us a big fry of oysters.”
From somewhere nearby they heard a bull’s deep, long, sad bellow. For a couple of seconds the sound bounced from stone to brick to stone, and the echo provoked the answering cries of a half dozen more animals, then a chorus of moos beyond numbering.
The men exchanged a look. Duff ’s expression did not include surprise.
“The beeves’ parade,” he said. “The spring march.”
Now Skaggs inhaled to catch the aroma, and nodded. It was a Saturday, and only three days until the vernal equinox. The weather had been unusually warm, and the river ice was fracturing and bobbing and disappearing all the way up to Albany. The season’s first boats, steamers and sloops with cattle cribs lashed and bolted to their decks, had arrived at the city’s piers loaded with fattened animals from upstate. As it happened, tonight was the night hundreds of head would be driven through Manhattan’s streets in celebration of the thaw and the spring, a remnant of the time before railways, when all livestock walked or boated from the countryside to their deaths in New York City.
The animals appeared. Ten, twenty, fifty, and then more, a widening herd of chocolate-brown Durhams and reddish Devons coming into West Broadway a block below where Skaggs and Duff stood. They were a clattering rather than a thundering herd. On the tip of every horn was some seasonal decoration: a daub of green paint, a red ribbon, the spiraled peel from an orange. They were gay beasts.
“I suspect,” Skaggs shouted, “that no one thought to inform the visiting herdsmen about tonight’s Mexican War gala.”
Duff smiled. It was a mischievous smile, entirely uncharacteristic. “Come on,” he said as he darted left down Reade Street, ahead of the cattle. “You are going to see your first stampede.”
“My what?”
The cattlemen, wearing leather pants, walked quickly along on each side of the animal mob, snapping their sticks against their beeves’ shoulders and barking “Yo, yo” and “Yah, yah.”
Their intended route would take them north to Greenwich Village, and finally all the way west to Abattoir Place, the riverfront block of Twelfth Street. Before dawn these animals’ blood would be pouring into the very river current that had floated them down to the city today.
By the time Skaggs caught up with his friend, Duff held a burning match in his left hand and one end of the stiff black safety fuse in his right.
“Duff? Is that wise, just now?”
“What, are you a copper now, Skaggs? Are you going to march me over to the Tombs?”
“With all these animals in such unfamiliar territory…”
The cattle were just about to turn north into Church Street, a long block away from the mobs of musicians and merrymakers and speakers’ platforms that filled Broadway.
Duff touched his fire to the fuse and threw the whole coil onto the stones just behind the herd’s lead animal, a large Durham bull that sniffed the air, made a full stop, turned its head to see the snake of sputtering fire a yard from its rump, snorted, and began running—not up Church but straight
toward Broadway.
The nearest drover saw the sparks just as the bull did, and leapt into the street to stamp out the fuse, but the animals’ panic was quicker than the man’s. In an instant there was an impassable wall of bawling cattle cantering east. When the unlit end of the coiled fuse looped around a Devon’s foreleg, turning that bull into a one-ton firework, the drovers’ task became hopeless. All they could do was run after their animals toward the urban throngs on their illuminated boulevard.
Duff was walking calmly in the opposite direction.
“What have you done?” Skaggs asked.
“As long as America wants to own half of Mexico, well, they ought to know the customs of the place, oughtn’t they?” Duff turned, stretched out his hand, and pointed toward the marauding herd. “A stampede.”
The Broadway crowd parted and the cattle rushed through the sudden channel. One cow stepped into a drum and dragged it along with her, as if she’d been outfitted with an elephant’s peg leg. Several animals kicked at dropped trumpets and flutes, which spun like whirligigs in the street. People screamed. People laughed. Horses reared. A beer cart was upset, sending bottles tumbling across Broadway like tenpins. A block farther down Broadway, the melee spread.
The lead bull, followed too closely by too many of his fellows, was pressed against one of the giant illuminated windows of Stewart’s department store. The glass shattered, and suddenly the bull and two other animals were inside the display cabinet, thrashing and yelping, smashing the Viennese bentwood chairs and precious English china, blood from the cattle’s gashes splattering onto French tulles. When the last animal to escape Stewart’s leapt to the sidewalk and bounded all alone across the street into the Park with an American flag wrapped around her horns like a bandanna, the crowd nearby, only moments out of harm’s way, cheered, as if it were a grand finale.
FROM TWO BLOCKS away, Duff and Skaggs heard the shouts of people and cattle recede, and the band music resume.
“You are a strange outlaw, Duff Lucking. Have you no desire to go and see the trouble your mischief provoked?”
“That would be vanity.” He remembered something. “Tell me again your Latin phrase…?”
“Vanitas vanitatum—”
“No, no, the one—‘Beware the fictitious fire’…?”
“Cave ignis fatuus.”
“Yes, exactly.”
Skaggs looked at Duff, awaiting some elaboration, a coherent quod erat demonstrandum about the clownish new American imperialists and revel-routs.
“You know,” Duff said instead, “there are too many people hereabouts.”
“What, do you mean tonight, in this neighborhood? Certainly, and too many cattle, and I’ll wager that your stunt—”
“No, Skaggs, I mean in the city.” Duff was thinking again about Pishey Wetmore, and the hundreds of other veterans whom only luck and prayer had so far kept from crossing his path in New York.
“Ah well, yes, now you’re speaking of sociology.”
“Sociology?” Duff thought he knew all the ologies.
“So many people crammed together in our nest, we’re the same as bees in a tree or ants underground or bacteria teeming in a drop of spittle. We are, in cities, insects of a more monstrous kind, obeying rules we do not even realize we are obeying as we crawl and slither through our days.” Skaggs was virtually reciting a piece he had written for The Subterranean. “In these last fifty years New York has doubled and more than doubled again three times. At that rate—why, the city of our grandchildren will contain eight millions.”
Duff wanted to remember bacteria and write it down later. “So, then we are agreed,” he said.
“We are? Agreed on what, precisely?”
“Our manifest destinies,” Duff said.
“What? Are you joking, Duff? Not a moment ago you were railing at everything which that ridiculous phrase—”
“Not the nation’s destiny. I can’t pretend anymore to understand a nation’s destiny. But mine, yours—those we can figure.” His scar itched. “We ought to leave, the both of us. To light out.”
“For the West? I have been there, and found it overrated. My dream of pilgrimage runs easterly—if it is morning in America,” he said, stealing a phrase from his former editor at the Mirror, “and high noon in England, then in Italy it is evening with the human race. The mellow early evening, as you know, is the part of the day of which I am fondest.” Skaggs had mused about becoming an expatriated daguerreian in Rome.
“I mean beyond Illinois,” Duff said, “beyond the Mississippi and the Missouri. Out to the Territories, I mean.”
“Ah, my cowboy friend…”
“Where it’s still pure. Blank.”
Skaggs smiled lovingly, skeptically, and said nothing.
“It is ours for the taking.”
“Well, here we are, the wild-blazing grog shop appears at last.” They had arrived at Budd’s, and when Skaggs opened the cellar door they were enveloped by a warm blast of saloon fumes—ale and brine and burning tobacco. “After you, sir.”
But Duff was agitated, insistent on making his murky meaning clear. “All of it is all of ours,” he said, gesticulating with his hands. “Out there we can make of it whatever we wish. It’s you who talk of ‘living life as a perpetual experiment.’”
Skaggs used the phrase generally to justify some minor personal mischief.
“Out there,” Duff said, shouting now, “we can experiment! It’s a frontier of, of—of infinity.”
“‘A frontier of infinity,’ eh?” He pulled on Duff ’s hand. “My restless lad, you need a drink.”
They had each finished three brandies and two dozen oysters by half past eleven when a squad of newsboys burst into Budd’s, their arms full of papers, and started shouting.
“Revolution in Europe!”
“Extra Herald!”
“The king is gone!”
“Extra Sun!”
“Got the last news from Paris!”
Men actually left the food table—abandoned the platters of free sardines and black bread—to get the news. In a few minutes, fifty of the newsboys’ papers were being devoured by the patrons of Budd’s.
Here and there a man whooped as he read, or chuckled. An actor Skaggs knew was reading aloud from the Herald. At the bar a workingman stood on his stool, raised his glass of porter, and cried, “America welcomes the republic of France into the world of the free!”
A cheer rose up.
Duff stared into his glass. Skaggs tapped a finger on his head. “No happy huzzahs from my young democratic hero? One of the old empires has fallen. Despots running for their lives from the people.”
“Huzzah,” Duff said quietly, and took another swallow of brandy. “As an old one falls our new one rises up. What kind of fool celebrates the vanquishing of Mexicans at ten and the freedom of the French at midnight?”
“An American fool,” Skaggs replied. He shrugged. “In any experiment, there are surprises. That’s part of the point.”
A MILE AWAY, at Heilperin’s Studios in the Bowery, the news from France gave Polly Lucking an inspiration. She would not portray the Venus de Milo at tonight’s second performance. Instead, she borrowed the Heilperin boy’s red woolen cap, and into the muzzle of Mr. Heilperin’s broken musket wedged a kitchen knife as a bayonet. For the French tricolor she tied red, white, and blue scarves to a broom handle. She had worn her oldest, plainest buff calico dress out tonight—perfect, as it happened, for the costume she was improvising.
In honor of the revolution, she had decided to play Marianne, the symbol of French liberty heroically leading her insurgents into battle. Before she took the stage, Mr. Heilperin announced the news from Europe and showed the gathered “artists” the front page of the night’s extra Sun. And when Polly appeared in the famous pose—holding the gun in her left hand, the French flag hoisted in her other, the dress pulled down to expose her chest—the fourteen men put down their drawing papers and pencils and crayons and stood. “
Hurrah,” they shouted, “hurrah for the republic of France,” and applauded for a full minute. Several of them cried.
10
March 25, 1848
New York City
SIXTEEN YEARS EARLIER, when Timothy Skaggs was deciding to leave Dartmouth and enroll at Columbia’s medical school instead, his father had warned him that New York City “has the air of the permanent carnival about it, as if half its population were on a spree.”
New York really had taken on the air of a permanent carnival this spring, and now there was another happy mob, even larger than last Saturday’s Mexican War gala. A slow-moving eighty-foot-wide herd of New Yorkers—a Festival of the Peoples celebrating the European insurgency that the newspapers were calling the Springtime of the Peoples.
“Must we really go all the way up to Madison Square?” Polly had asked Skaggs. “Why are they starting the rally so far north?”
“To frighten the rich,” Skaggs had said.
At twelve o’clock they spotted Duff, a member of the Order of United Americans and an official marcher. There were some women in Broadway, but Polly remained on the sidewalk, arm in arm with Skaggs. The crowds passed Union Square (where dozens stooped down to drink from the new fountain) and through the neighborhoods of the well-to-do.
As the first marchers approached City Hall and the Park, various factions began trying out various three-syllable chants—“Death to kings” and “Anti-rent” and “Liberty.” Duff was a Liberty man.
“Your brother seems to have passed out of his funk,” Skaggs said, remembering Duff ’s mood at this very spot a week earlier.
“Spring,” Polly replied. “And I do believe that this allows him to feel like a kind of soldier again, as if he’s doing righteous work, a member of a movement.”
“Then he’ll need to let his whiskers grow and buy some country clothes. Duff doesn’t look the part of a rad.”
She smiled. A large fraction of the crowd wore beards, and most of those with cravats had them hanging loose around their necks, flapping in the breeze like banners. Skaggs had not seen so many rough, broad-brimmed hats since he left Illinois. Were the New Yorkers impersonating the European democrats? Or were the European democrats impersonating Americans? Polly found herself moved, both by the passionate fraternal fever and by the events prompting it in cities thousands of miles away.
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