Bishop Hughes said nothing.
“Fires seemed to be a mania with me.”
Still no reply from Dagger John.
“No one at all died in those other fires, Excellency,” Duff said, “not one person. I took precautions always. And I helped extinguish them as well. At one I saved a man and a woman from death.”
His confessor remained silent.
“I am grievously sorry for my sins, Excellency. I wish to be reunited with God the Father and Jesus. I do.”
Finally the Irish voice returned. “You have sincere sorrow and contrition and purpose of amendment?”
“Yes. Oh yes.” A couple of seconds passed. “I have…a question for you, Excellency.”
“Ask it, then.”
“I fought in the war, and I killed men there, in Mexico.”
Many of the priests in the diocese were hearing such confessions now from the returning troops. Bishop Hughes had a reply at the ready.
“Of course, my son. I expect you have concerns about the sinfulness of your acts as a soldier, and whether the war was a just one.”
Duff hesitated. “I did have those questions. I had, I had a…crisis. In Vera Cruz.”
“Yes.”
“In Vera Cruz, that is a city down there, a beautiful little city, which we bombed and bombed and burned.”
“I know of it.”
“Well, I prayed to God and he made me understand that I must no longer follow the orders of my officers to harm innocents.” Unspoken but understood by Bishop Hughes, embedded within Duff ’s pronunciation of officers, were heartless and Protestant.
“I see.”
“Innocent Catholics we were murdering, Excellency. What choice had I but to try to stop those murders?” Like your heroic Irish brothers now rising treasonously against their savage English overlords. “I had to stop if only in order to protect my own soul from damnation.” His apologia was sincere.
“I see. I see.”
“I took up arms against my fellow Americans, Excellency.”
“The Lord does not recognize the flag or the bullet of one nation as better or worse than any other, my son. War is wrong. Even when we must wage it.”
“Yes, Excellency, yes, that was—that was the way I thought of it, too.” He struggled to open his throat and stop the tears.
“My young sinner…You are now truly sorry for all the sins you have committed?”
“I am,” he sputtered, “grievously so. Yes.”
“And you have confessed to each and every serious sin, everything which in your heart separates you now from our Lord Jesus Christ?”
He sniffled, and tried to catch his breath. And in that moment Duff thought of one of Zeno Lucking’s sayings—not destruction and creation, but what he always said with a wink when he decided to camp out overnight in the woods with Duff so they could keep digging for buried gold in the morning, or to take a second piece of mulberry pie after dinner, or to instruct Polly to draw yet another patent forgery: May as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.
“No. There is another.” He paused. “A mortal sin, when I was thirteen. I told you about the abuser, the vile old banker who ravished my sister when she was a girl? I avenged the crime, Excellency. I killed the man. And I am sorry to God for that sin, as I am for all the lives I have taken—in the war, I mean, in Mexico. And deaths I may have been responsible for. And for all of my other sins. I pray and promise I will never take another life again. I am a repentant sinner, and I wish with all my heart for God’s forgiveness.”
Would Bishop Hughes want details of that remarkable morning eight years ago in Nathaniel Prime’s house down on Bowling Green? Duff had watched the house almost every day for weeks. He knew that at five each Wednesday afternoon, a wagon arrived and a scullery girl left open a cellar door for ten minutes while the iceman lugged in his twenty big blue-white blocks. Duff knew that each trip took the man a little longer than the one before, as he tired out, so that the chance to slip inside unseen would be best after the eighteenth or nineteenth ice block. If anyone spotted him, he had planned to announce himself truthfully—“I am Duff Lucking, I have worked for the Primes at Hurlgate”—and say that he was there to let Mr. Prime know that his mother was ill and the family needed a small loan. But none of the staff spotted him as he ran and hid, ran and hid, from mudroom to pantry to nook and up the back stairs, as if he were playing a game. Would he do it? He was not absolutely sure until the moment he saw the old man sitting by a window in the library with the Journal of Commerce laid over his belly, snoring. All alone and asleep—Duff took this stroke of luck as destiny’s pat on his back. By the time he was standing over him he had drawn the razor from his pocket, and by the time Prime’s blood was soaking the newspaper Duff had placed the razor in the dying man’s right hand and run back to the door, seeing if the way was clear to make his escape.
But Dagger John demanded none of that. Bishop Hughes instructed Duff that for the rest of his life he must say an entire rosary twice each day, the Act of Contrition twice each day as well, and a novena once a month. And he was to perform “works of mercy in the name of Jesus Christ to please your Lord God and Savior. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Excellency.”
“And no more fire-setting, eh? You’re finished.”
“Yes, Excellency.”
Duff waited for some additional penance. But he heard only an energetic clearing of Hughes’s throat.
“O my God,” Duff said, “I am heartily sorry for having offended thee. I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell. But most of all because they have offended thee, my God who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve with the help of thy grace to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.”
“Ego te absolvo,” replied the bishop. “I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
DUFF HAD NEVER imagined that Mexico would be all cornbread and fiddle music, ruddy boys on holiday in the tropics. He had been only nineteen when he’d enlisted in the summer of ’46, but not stupid, or, he thought, naïve. Hadn’t he attended school for eight years? And was it possible to grow up a half orphan a mile from the Five Points burdened with a lot of sweet, creamy illusions about life being painless or pretty? But he’d figured that “the Mexican difficulties,” as everyone called the war at the start, would be more or less familiar. As he had chirped to the bald, sweaty recruiting sergeant that morning two summers ago at Fort Columbus on Governors Island, “I’ve marched for four years with a target company—Bobo’s Sharpshooters?”
“A target company, eh?” The target companies were clubs that had sprouted during the thirties. Each autumn the target companies put on their costumes, some playing the parts of soldiers and others of mountain men, and paraded into the parks to fire muskets. A smile broke across the recruiting sergeant’s face, which Duff misapprehended as encouragement.
“Yes, sir, and for many years I’ve run with one of the finest, bravest machines in town—Engine Company Number 15?—so yes, in answer to your question, I think I do have a strong hunch about what it is I’m volunteering for. I have seen men fall in battle, battling the flames.”
“Have you, now? A lot of them?”
Duff now heard the doubt in his voice. And, in fact, in all the time Duff had lived in New York City up to his enlistment in ’46, only three firemen had died fighting fires. Yet on one night back in 1840, just after Duff had become a full member of Engine 15, he witnessed one of the deaths, amid the rubble of a collapsed wall.
Duff had looked straight into the army sergeant’s eyes, unflinching. “A single death is plenty if you love the man,” he’d said.
The army man’s smile had lost its sarcastic skew. He’d asked if Duff was born in America, if his parents were living, and if he was married; yes, no, and no had been the right answers. After Duff said he had attended school until age sixteen, the sergeant asked how many inch
es were in twenty-six feet, and Duff had replied “Three hundred twelve. I’m a gas fitter, sir, and we cut lengths of pipe all day long.” The sergeant had handed him a book of army regulations and instructed him to read any paragraph out loud.
Finally, he had asked if Duff also happened to be an experienced hand at digging holes in the ground. When Duff had replied that half his boyhood was spent shoveling ditches with his father through the woods of Dutchess County, part of a perpetual search for buried Spanish gold, the sergeant had laughed. And then announced that he was enlisting Duff Lucking as the seventy-eighth and final private in the Corps of Engineers’ new Company A, the so-called Company of Sappers, Miners, and Pontoniers.
“You will be a pioneer, Mr. Lucking,” the sergeant had said.
Duff had sensed he was meant to be grateful, and thanked the man, although at that moment he had had no good idea what a sapper, miner, or pontonier did. Nor did he know the original military meaning of pioneers— the troops who march ahead of the main army to ready the terrain for conquest by destroying enemy earthworks.
It was a few days after he’d signed up, when Skaggs had explained to Duff his understanding of sappers and miners (“I believe you will be burrowing and blowing up”), that he realized he did have experience in precisely the work Company A was being assembled to perform. Early one morning a year before his enlistment, as an awful blaze spread from a sperm oil warehouse, threatening to incinerate half the city, an older engineer had pulled Duff and another young fireman aside, handed over canisters of black powder and fuse, and pointed them toward the cellar door of a saltpeter warehouse. When the warehouse exploded, a fire engine was hurled across the street, two adjacent buildings crumbled, and the blast shattered windows a mile away. At the end of the day, the fire had burned hundreds of buildings to the ground. Nine people had died. But the engineer told Duff afterward, as he swore him and the other boy to secrecy, that it would have been twice as bad if not for the firebreak they blasted. He also said that Hart, the fireman from 22 Engine, had suffered only a sprained ankle. Hart had been standing on the roof of the building next to the saltpeter warehouse at the moment of the blast. He was blown through the air across the street to the roof of another building, as if carried by an angel.
The events of that day in 1845 had had several marked effects on Duff. They confirmed to him the virtue of taking great risks for the greater good, and of performing heroic, dangerous, violent deeds secretly. He began to believe in the possibility of just and happy endings, as in the books he had read as a boy. And Hart’s survival was the first miracle he had ever encountered personally. For the year after the Great Fire, until he left for Mexico, he had attended Mass with renewed enthusiasm.
HE HAD CROSSED with his company into Mexico in October of 1846, and crossed back into the States, all by himself, in October of 1847. For Duff the war had lasted exactly one year. But whenever he revisited his memories of Mexico, that middling term—a year—seemed all wrong. It was an accurate lie. When Duff thought about Mexico and tried to fit all of it into his retrospective gaze, it consisted of a pleasant three-month preface (training, sailing, marching, construction, demolition) followed by The War—which he remembered as either one careening, roaring, explosive nightmare, or else an interminable sentence in hell, either a confusing, sickening instant of blood and terror and anguish, or an eternity.
But it had lasted a year. In the beginning he had enjoyed the army. It was like the church and the firehouse both, as strict and serious as the former and as bluff and manly as the latter. He had reveled in his weeks of basic training in sapping and mining at the military academy up the Hudson. He had adored the nightly lights-out ritual of the bugler’s tattoo. He had not gotten sick at all on the voyage south, and picked up Spanish easily. He’d respected and envied his officers their West Point educations. Lieutenant McClellan was no older than Duff. In Texas he had helped construct—in only four days, under Captain Lee—a magnificent, 300-yard-long rubber pontoon bridge across the Rio Grande, which remained the single proudest accomplishment not only of his time in Mexico, but of his whole life so far.
Not his happiest moment in Mexico, however. That had come the following month, when he and a small detachment of engineers had been dispatched to destroy an arsenal in Michoacán, west of Mexico City. The depot, in a forest of pine and fir on the side of an extinct volcano called Nevado de Toluca, had been empty when they reached it, and they’d decided to camp overnight. When Duff awakened before anyone else early the next morning, he’d decided to hike a mile higher to take in the sights—a pair of little lakes filled the dead volcano’s crater, according to the map. And there they’d been, deep blue and cool and gorgeous in the very first light of dawn.
As soon as he’d begun his walk back down to camp, he’d realized he was uncertain of the way. At half past six the trail looked very different than it had in the darkness of five. He’d stopped to decide which fork of a path to take, and noticed the lower limbs on the evergreens around him were bowed, and covered from trunk to tip with what appeared to be some odd fungus. He’d stepped closer for a look and shook the end of a branch. Hundreds of butterflies had arisen—no, thousands—fluttering off their perch, startling him. Fairies, he’d thought for a moment. And then tens of thousands more, all of them orange and black monarchs, left a hundred other branches of that tree, awakened by the rustle of their airborne brothers and sisters. They’d formed a swarm, gathered their bearings, and all at once flown off together to find a new, uninhabited tree on which to spend the rest of the Mexican winter unmolested.
Duff had been ecstatic, and without thinking he’d run and stumbled after the butterflies. As he’d raced through the woods, keeping an eye on them as they fluttered through the shafts of morning light above and ahead of him, he’d seen that the whole forest was filled with millions upon millions of monarchs, covering not only trees but much of the ground as well. He’d felt as if he’d come upon a miracle, some reassertion by God and nature of their power and wonders, heedless of arsenals and enemies, miners and sappers, guns and war…and then he saw that he had returned directly to his camp.
Then, as he’d watched the butterflies rise together and hover near the treetops, beautiful as a dream, he’d decided their appearance was both a providential gift and a warning. For they could have led him anywhere—to the Mexicans, or over a cliff, or deep into the woods, like a lost boy in a fairy tale. He’d given thanks, and made the sign of the cross.
BUT AFTER THAT, Mexico had no longer seemed like a camping expedition and became a real field of war, with men he knew dying all the time. At first, Duff ’s responsibility for killing had been modest and shared, the violence he caused delayed and distant. He’d helped arrange destruction—by filling caissons with powder, sneaking them at night under a Mexican rampart or lookout tower, laying fuse. It was not until the Battle of Buena Vista that he’d shot men, and seen the men he’d killed after they died.
Making Buena Vista even worse was the grim, disillusioning winter that had led up to it. Most of their meat had been rancid. The coffee tasted of vinegar. Nearly everyone caught the dysentery they called “diarrhea blue.” Duff pitied the ragtag volunteer militia troops, who dropped like dogs from injury and disease. But he grew also to despise them when they stole chickens and corn from Mexicans and then shot the poor people dead if they raised a fuss.
He had begun praying for guidance. Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: Wait, I say, on the Lord.
Duff and the other army regulars had a better time of it than the volunteers. But the Catholics among them—a third of the regulars had been born in Ireland—were subjected to insults and gratuitous whacks from their officers, called “papist clowns” and “Romish dogs.” The fact that Duff lacked an Irish name or accent meant that he escaped the catcalls and thrashings, to his everlasting shame.
Jesus, prince of all heavenly truths, you have commanded the virtue of honesty, it is the power agains
t all deceptions. Direct your spirit of honesty upon me…
Duff had known deserters. Everyone had. By the end of the winter a tenth of the regulars had run away. Most just disappeared, and scuttled back across the Rio Grande to their lives in the States. But a small fraction—nearly all of them Catholic, most of them Irish—had stayed in Mexico and formed El Batallón de San Patricio. It was at Buena Vista that Duff had fought against the St. Patrick’s Battalion for the first time. In one minute at the beginning of the battle he’d watched a volley from their twelve-pounders fly in with incredible accuracy and disintegrate the wagons of a company of Kentucky volunteers, as if God were firing the rounds. He had never seen such artillery skill.
Even while he’d tried to kill them for twenty-four hours, and vice versa, he’d admitted to himself that he regarded the St. Patrick’s boys as…not heroes, but certainly not cowards, either. They weren’t risking their lives and reputations for the Mexican money and land they’d been promised, but because they sincerely believed that the Mexicans, fellow Catholics and fellow peasants, had more right on their side. He’d been happy, of course, when General Taylor had arrived to save the day at Buena Vista. But he’d also been happy when he’d heard that nearly all the San Patricios had gotten away.
PREPARATIONS FOR THE great landing at Vera Cruz began only weeks after Buena Vista. Duff had been dispatched with a platoon from Company A to go ashore and divert several streams by means of explosives and timbers. As they’d pulled their surfboat onto the beach, Duff had finally asked the most congenial sergeant the purpose of blocking streams—were they navigable? Nah, the fellow had said with a chuckle, this is a siege, Lucking. Their orders were to cut off water to Vera Cruz. Water to the forts, you mean? Duff had asked hopefully. The sergeant had looked at him, but for a long moment made no reply. Reality outran apprehension. The scheme was to deprive the whole local population of drinking water for the duration. Duff had ached to raise objections, to demur. But he’d said nothing as they spent days going about their business of making life impossible for the people of Vera Cruz.
Heyday: A Novel Page 22