“You know, in all of forty-five,” he said, “only a hunderd Americans jumped off, and now the Society believes it’s that many every month like. The Society wants gentlemen such as yourselves to keep going, like it says, and let it rip out there. Before all the best opportunities is grabbed.”
“‘Let it rip’?” Ben asked, prompting a hard glance from the man, who was no older than Duff.
“Our western territories?” Skaggs added.
“If you boys is maybe headed to set up shop in Iowa or Minnesota, let’s say, then the Society wants to assist you to go on further west, past the Missouri, and settle in the lands out there free for the taking.”
Duff was nodding as the fellow spoke.
“Free for the filching, do you mean, from the Indians?” Skaggs asked. “Tell me, is your society sanctioned by the Indian Office in Washington?”
“Sanctioned? I don’t know for sure, sir, but they—”
“Because it makes great sense. As you know, the Department of War also operates the Indian Office, and your society enlists desperate romantics such as us to be…volunteer auxiliaries, an avant-garde to help conquer the unconquered Indian lands between Iowa and California…to create our rude little back settlements that the Army of the West will then be required to defend, by shooting Indians who are angry about all the new white squatters.”
“Well…sure,” said the promoter, thinking he had a live one hooked.
“If y’all want to have a good fight with some red Indians, sure, hoss!”
Duff could no longer contain his curiosity about the fellow. “When did you live in New York?”
The young man was flattered by the question. “Naw, I’m from Owensboro, just across the river to Daviess County, but…did you truly think I was? From back east?”
“Well, I—I only wondered…”
“Your colorful manners of speech and dress,” Skaggs told the boy, “are indigenous to the natives of a hundred acres of the Sixth Ward of New York City, six hundred fifty miles from where we now stand.”
“Well, I got real friendly with some New York boys in camp at Cerro Gordo, down in Mexico.”
There is no escaping the past, Duff thought as all the blood in his body seemed to rush toward the ragged oval on his right cheek.
“Duff,” Skaggs said, “you fought at Cerro Gordo as well, did you not?”
“Yeah.” It had been his first battle after he’d made his awful decision at Vera Cruz, nineteen days after he’d taken off his blue U.S. Army coat for the last time and walked away from the American massacre of his Catholic brothers and sisters.
“Well, hey!” said the local boy, extending his hand to shake Duff ’s. “Private Sponge Carpenter! Kentucky volunteers!”
Duff had managed to avoid an encounter like this for the better part of a year in New York City. Lord, why here…
“I’m Duff.”
Carpenter shook his hand a long time, and chattered away all the while. “I was under Captain Gilmore? Cavalry? He was the one replaced our Captain Clay, y’know, after he and half our boys was taken by the greasers at Encarnación.”
“Is that Cassius Marcellus Clay?” Skaggs asked the boy, “the emancipationist?”
“The famous nigger-lover Cash Clay, yes, sir, the very one. A great man, honest to God.”
Captain Clay… Then Duff remembered. The recollection dredged up with it an awful sense memory that made him feel like vomiting—the airlessness of the Mexican high summer, the stifling cage in which he awaited death…Was this another coincidence? Or were these encounters messages from God, arranged to remind Duff Lucking of his divine omniscience? Or maybe there was no difference between coincidence and fate, as Father Varela used to say, and “coincidence and Providence share more than their last six letters.”
“And you, Duff,” Carpenter asked, “who was you with down there?”
“I was a regular, Engineers,” he mumbled. “Company A.”
“Yeah? Under Lieutenant Smith?”
“No.” He paused for too many seconds. “No, McClellan,” he said finally.
“Whoa! You are one lucky dawg, with the raking you boys took on that road at Cerro Gordo.”
Duff nodded. In fact, he had been fighting from south of the National Highway, doing the raking, pulling the lanyard on an eight-pounder in one of the batteries firing against Lieutenant McClellan and his men.
“But we took Fat Hill in the end, didn’t we, hoss? And not even six dozens of us made a die of it in the whole two days, huh?”
Duff nodded again. But a thousand Mexicans had died at Cerro Gordo—and Duff had been among the defeated, forced to run and run all alone to a hiding place in a little arroyo.
Carpenter mentioned the names of New Yorkers he had known down there, none of which, thankfully, Duff recognized. But Carpenter admitted he also knew how fashionable b’hoys dressed and acted in the city because he had seen A Glance at New York three times here in Cincinnati. It had played to a sold-out house at the National Theatre, he said, before the troupe steamed on to St. Louis and then up to Chicago.
“Thus helping to settle and civilize our savage middle-western territories,” said Skaggs. “You realize, sir, that in my lifetime, southwestern Ohio was savage western territory.” This was only a slight exaggeration.
The boy winked. “C’mon, you ain’t near sixty.” He pointed up to a banner directly overhead. “This city is ancient by now.”
Walking up Main Street this morning, the three visitors had noticed the long red and white flags strung from the tops of the gas-lamp posts along Main Street. QUEEN CITY OF THE WEST, the banners declared, and ATHENS OF THE WEST and IN CELEBRATION OF OUR FIRST SIXTY YEARS! The city was advertising itself to its own citizens, cheering itself on.
“Ancient at sixty,” Skaggs said. “Perhaps you, Mr. Knowles, should undertake to organize an anniversary celebration for London. ‘The Queen City of Europe…the Athens of the British Empire…in celebration of our first two thousand years…”
The Cincinnatian now turned to Ben suspiciously. “An English, are you, buddy? Well, I guess that figures, why you just stare and don’t say nothing. We know what you English think of us hereabouts. From your books.” During the rest of Ben’s hours in Cincinnati, he would encounter two more huffy Cincinnatians, still aggrieved, years later, by Charles Dickens’s and Fanny Trollope’s infamously snobby depictions of their city.
“Sir, I am already very fond of Cincinnati—of America,” Ben said, “and I sincerely apologize if you have been offended—”
But the b’hoy plugged his cigar in his mouth, nodded goodbye only to his fellow veteran, and stalked off.
DUFF’S BODY WAS moving along Main Street in Cincinnati in the summer of 1848, but his mind and spirit had gone elsewhere. He had stumbled into a memory well, fallen back a year to the previous summer. And there he was trapped, jerked backward and forward and backward and forward, time’s orderly sequence gone.
In early September, crammed with nine other captured Americans into a prison cell in Mexico City—the very cell, one of the Yankee guards remarked, in which the Mexicans had earlier held “an American hero, Captain Clay of Kentucky.”
Then back to August, and the convent outside Churubusco, where the two hundred surviving San Patricios—by then the Legion of Foreigners, la Legión de Extranjeros—had gone to make their last stand, aiming cannon at the short white monkey jackets of the American officers (at Lieutenant McClellan himself), firing grapeshot from eighty yards, seventy yards, sixty yards…as the Yankees advanced through the mud, close enough to see white faces before they turned to red splatters.
Forgive us, Father.
Forward again to September, convicted at the court-martial, condemned to hang, ready to die—Forgive them, Father—but then he and a score of his fellows pardoned by General Scott…pardoned, ignominy of ignominies, shame heaped upon shame, only because he had been drunk when he’d run off at Vera Cruz, and the U.S. Articles of War named inebriation as a
defense against the charge of desertion.
Standing for hours shackled in the sun outside Mexico City, watching thirty others choke and jerk on the gallows (including a boy who had already lost both legs to cannon fire); getting his fifty lashes; and finally, the red D, for Deserter, so hot it singed his eyelash as it came close, then pressed against his right cheek, and the smell of burning flesh as he rocked his face into the scalding iron, in order to muddle the scar and make the D an unreadable oval; and finally his own sobbing surprise at his terrible gratitude—not thanks for his life being spared, but for the redeeming pain of the whip and the hot iron.
Then back to August again, the unending shrieks and sweat and blood of battle, on the parapet of the convent at Churubusco alongside his pal O’Donnell, both of them furiously pulling down the white shirts some of the Mexicans had raised up on sticks, desperate to avoid the dishonor—that is, the unbearable mortification—of capture by their fellow Americans. And the worst and final memory, minutes after they’d pulled down the flags of surrender: sitting in the dirt with half of O’Donnell’s skull and brain on his lap, suddenly surrounded by four bayonets from the Ninth Infantry of General Pierce’s First Brigade.
Forgive me, Father.
SKAGGS AND DUFF took a cab past Little Africa, around the slaughterhouse district, and then through northeastern outskirts to the top of Mount Adams. Skaggs had promised Duff “a panoramic view of the whole valley,” but in fact he was fulfilling his ulterior motive for stopping at Cincinnati. In his amazing Society Library lecture last winter, Edgar Poe had mentioned the city’s remarkable telescope—a giant new refractor, the second biggest in the Americas and the third biggest on earth. Skaggs wanted to see firsthand how professional stargazing was conducted and inquire whether his wild fancy—to make telescopic photographs of the moon and stars and planets—was possible.
The observatory’s director, Ormsby Mitchel, was a man about Skaggs’s age but precisely his converse professionally—“a poor astronomer,” he said, “attempting in middle age to become an amateur editor.” He showed Skaggs a copy of his magazine, The Sidereal Messenger. Skaggs pulled out a dollar to buy a subscription on the spot.
Duff, who had not uttered a word since Main Street, was peeking past the vestibule into the darkened depths of the observatory. The telescope, pointed high, looked to him like one of General Scott’s artillery pieces in Mexico—its 60-degree angle, Duff imagined, set to blast 64-pound iron balls the size of human heads five miles into the houses and markets of Vera Cruz.
“And you, son?” Professor Mitchel had turned to Duff, surprising him. “Are you one of us as well? An astronomer?”
“No, I only—only a mechanic, sir.”
“The lad is too humble,” Skaggs said. “In addition to fighting fires and saving lives and assisting me in my photographic endeavors, Mr. Lucking pursues two occupations, in the gas-illumination field as well as in advertising.”
Duff blushed.
“What is more,” Skaggs added, having noticed some military bric-a-brac on the wall near Mitchel’s desk, “young Mr. Lucking is a brave veteran of the late war.”
“Is that right?” Mitchel asked. “New York volunteers?”
Duff shook his head. “Regulars. Engineers. A private.”
“Is that so? In Mexico? Under Robert E. Lee, by chance?”
Duff continued to redden. Christ Almighty, not again. “In the same regiment as Captain Lee, yes, sir.”
“Lieutenant Colonel Lee now, eh?” Mitchel replied, smiling broadly and making a quick two-fingered salute. “In recognition of his adventures at Cerro Gordo and Chapultepec—your adventures, I should say.”
“Right.” Duff had known nothing of Lee’s promotions. His scar itched. “Yes.”
“Isn’t it a small world indeed! Marble Man and I were at West Point together, class of ’29. Only the other day I received a letter from him in Washington. In my reply I shall say that I had the honor of meeting one of his good young engineers.”
Is there no escape, no refuge at all from the past? Duff could conceive of nothing to say. It was as if he had forgotten English.
Finally, Skaggs broke the silence. “Bashful young fellow, as I warned you, Professor…”
Duff was breathing rapidly and staring at his feet, still saying nothing.
“Are you all right?” Skaggs asked. “Do you have any of your medicine?”
Duff nodded, embarrassment now added to his panic. He had a packet of Blue Mass in his pocket.
Mitchel put a hand on his back. “Would you like a seat?”
“No, no thank you, sir,” Duff said, “I need some air is all, I need to walk, I’ll walk back down to town, Skaggs, I’ll meet up with you boys on the dock there by Irwin and Foster’s at six, bye.” And he shot out the door.
“A bit of a nervous condition since the war,” explained Skaggs as Mitchel led him into the rotunda.
The telescope was as big as a sewer pipe or a pier piling, but it also looked fine and meticulous, like a bibelot in Tiffany, all shiny brass and chocolate mahogany. It made Skaggs smile. The telescope’s very configuration—affixed firmly to the earth atop a mammoth granite plinth ten feet tall, but pointing at a gallant angle upward, always upward—struck him as…noble. When he stepped close and saw the engraving on the brass plate encircling the eyepiece—Merz und Mahler, München—he smiled again, thinking of his camera, and the Merz lens he had bought for it last year in Munich.
Mitchel checked his watch. “The moon is up. Do you wish to have a look?”
“Oh yes, sir. Very much indeed.”
Together they heaved the rope that slid open the dome above them on a set of enormous iron ball bearings. As they pulled, light from the sky burst into the darkened space and then swelled to fill the great room. It was like an artificial, ultrafast sunrise, from gloom to daybreak to the glare of forenoon in ten seconds.
Mitchel turned cranks and dials to adjust the angle and aim of the telescope, looking up through the little finder scope as he worked. He installed an eyepiece and turned a knob to focus it just so. Skaggs removed his glasses, stepped up, and bent over.
He gasped. He had seen the moon through the little nickel-a-peek instruments at night on the streets of Manhattan. But the waxing gibbous moon he saw now looked incomparably close and sharp. This daytime moon was not just startlingly beautiful, its craters tinted sky blue, but appeared both more profoundly real than ever before, yet also more like some impeccable trompe l’oeil painting of the moon. Never under the influence of opium had Skaggs seen anything so wondrous. He was greedy for more. Two minutes passed before he took his eye from the instrument.
“Silent, upon a peak in…Cincinnati,” Mitchel finally said, adapting the end of Keats’s famous sonnet.
Skaggs had been required to memorize “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” in school, and now recited the relevant line: “‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken.’” He looked up through the open slice of dome at the sky and the moon. “Until this moment, I have always considered Keats ridiculous, and ‘Chapman’s Homer’ a perfect lampoon of a romantic poem.”
“I assure you that when even a tiny new piece of a planet does, in fact, swim into one’s ken,” Mitchel replied, “one reels. Now, sir, have you the time for a refreshment?”
They talked through an entire pitcher of iced tea and a plate of bacon and sliced tomatoes. Mitchel talked about the night he had discovered a mountain range near the Martian south pole. Skaggs posed question after question. In order to capture a picture of the heavens on a plate, Mitchel told him, he would have to arrange to use a fine, large telescope. (This one had cost—Mitchel’s voice caught—nine thousand dollars.) And it would have to be outside New York City: given the city’s smoke and lights, the more rural the better. To make the necessarily long exposures, the telescope mount would have to be equipped with a clock drive that continuously moved the scope to track the subject—the moon or particula
r star or planet—across the sky. But yes, Mitchel said, he thought it was possible. “Perhaps destiny has brought you here,” the astronomer said, to which his visitor made no reply.
DUFF RAN THE whole way down to the city, where he gulped a beer, devoured a sausage, and stumbled into a large amusement hall. A lecture by a New Englander named Dr. Colton was under way. He had finished demonstrating a telegraph and several spinning, flashing, tinkling electromagnetic marvels, and was now describing the “new medical wonder” of nitrous oxide. At a table at the side of the stage, his assistants were preparing canisters of gas fitted with rubber tubes, and Duff was among forty or fifty men, women, and children who stood in line to inhale what the doctor called “chemistry’s invisible, invigorating, and harmless ambrosia.”
It tasted sweet—Tastes like heaven itself, Duff thought—and quickly made him feel very much happier. Indeed, he remained at the nitrous oxide table after all but two of the other members of the audience had returned to their seats to watch the next demonstration. Duff paid another ten cents for a few more minutes of bliss, and then another, and now his last dime just as Colton unveiled an enormous painting onstage, as high and more than half as wide as the proscenium. It was a picture of a luxurious cavern filled with ancient people painted large as life. Duff wanted to stroke the garments and kick the rocks and kiss the neck of the kneeling, bare-breasted woman…until the effects of the gas started to wear off, and he noticed that most of the people in the painting were distraught or frenzied, and he finally made sense of what Colton was saying…that “presiding over this painted court”—the shadowy hooded figure “at the center of the uneasy assembly”—was Death.
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