by Norman Lock
By this time, I had sold the Springfield house and, after taking Charlotte east to live with Tess, moved into the fort. My needs were few. I never felt the itch to acquire or possess. I had been a divinity student and was then an army chaplain, two occupations that discouraged luxurious living. I’d been fortunate to have had a wife who was neither vain nor a spendthrift—a robust farm girl used to hardship and privation.
Otherwise, the years leading up to the Mormon Rebellion passed uneventfully for me. Sunday mornings, I would preach to the troops, then ride into town to repeat the sermon to my Lutheran congregation, which may have been startled by a gristly figure of speech apposite for the cavalry. After Ruth’s death, my manner coarsened, and I grew my beard to the limit of army tolerance. I looked as the “prophet of loneliness” might have, if he had exchanged his sackcloth for a blue serge suit and gold buttons.
Was I lonely?
Yes, but no lonelier than the other men at the fort—or, for that matter, the people of my civilian flock. No lonelier than Ruth must have been before our marriage (and, perhaps, during it) or, as I suspect, than you are now in a Homestead without your ally Carlo. It would be banal to say that we are all lonely, but it is the truth notwithstanding and one that poets, for all their fine words, cannot make any more endurable. Most can put aside their loneliness and carry on with the life given them to use and then to forfeit. Soldiers seem gifted at forgetting.
My ministry to the men was becoming more and more about ceremony. I’d repeat the words of the service for the dead without feeling their significance. In the tomb, the “rock of ages” where we’ll spend all that’s left of time in waiting, words die without so much as an echo to recall them. Far from home, men die; no words can help them; no tears are shed over their corpses. Blood and salt—these are the human residue.
During my first year in Springfield, I rode with the cavalry south into “Little Egypt.” Renegades had jumped a reservation and captured the saltworks on the Saline River, near the town of Equality. The tribe had ceded the Great Salt Springs in 1803. Still rankling from the treaty’s terms, the renegades were demanding its return. They hadn’t a hope in hell of getting the land back. They were just one more band of discontented redskins. In those days, there were many such, even among those whose lives had been given over to whiskey and idleness.
I did not care for Indians. I judged them to be less civilized and more inscrutable than the Mexicans we’d hunted. In that the savages had gods of their own, I considered them outside my remit. I told myself that the deities to whom they prayed should look after the red men and their souls, if they had any. At the Saline River, my care was for the soldiers and the whites living in Equality.
The soldiers finished off the Indians in two hours. We lost five men; one, a private from Ohio, took twenty minutes to pass from this world into the next. I had time to hear him talk—between groans—about his wife and child, his grocery store in Greenville, and his sins, which were trivial. I said the words of my trade and, pressing his hand in mine, assured him of the glory to come—once he had been “raised above the sorrows and temptations of the present world.”
Do you see how impossible it would have been to have Charlotte with me? The country was becoming dangerous.
That night, we camped by “Nigger Spring.” Since few white men were willing to mine salt, the work was largely done by slaves. In the morning, the sentries shot deer that had come down to the river to lick salt from the rocks.
I overhead a soldier say, “It was good sport,” and didn’t know if he had meant the deer or the Indians.
After breakfast, I rode some distance to the Garden of the Gods Wilderness. The place was wondrous strange, and what gods might have once roamed there must have been fearsome. Gigantic slabs of sandstone thrust upward, amid pinnacles and spires, caves and imposing arches of rock. The mysterious formations reminded me of the moai, the Easter Island statues described by Captain Cook in his journal. The gods of the island paradise proved helpless against smallpox and consumption, which exterminated the inhabitants in spite of their prayers and sacrifices.
Speaking of Cook’s journal, I penned my own account of the Mexican War. After Ruth’s death, I felt at a loss and cast about for something to distract me. Having few merits beyond the attractive light it shed on me, the manuscript deserved to be put into the stove, but I couldn’t bring myself to destroy it.
You would have been enthralled by the Gods Wilderness, its otherworldly canyons, bluffs, and ridges. I recall your girlish interest in geology and your sketches of volcanoes. That was a long time ago, and time, in its slow passing, erodes and deforms more than rocks. It tells eloquently and appallingly on a human face. I wonder if it has finally told on yours.
You must think me hard. Life is hard, and the heart grows mineral the longer it beats time within it. In your corner room, safe within your father’s house—regardless of his severity—you can have no conception of what people alive in the world outside the pages of your books endure—the scrabbling for necessities, the clutching at what they don’t need but nonetheless want, the moral dilemmas all but the meanest of them face. I was privy to it; I had learned to see inside the hearts of men and could not, in conscience, turn away, though what I saw there often offended me. That is the pastor’s dilemma. A prophet can call down ruin on his people, but the pastor must chasten and forgive—or play his part so well that none suspects that he has perjured himself.
“What of mercy?” I can hear you ask in a voice a timid nun might use to interrogate the beast inside a man.
Mercy takes a terrible toll.
Seven years after we rode against the saltworks, I put Ruth into the ground with small hope of resurrection. Although I had pronounced the requisite words with the persuasiveness of a conjuror, I could not then nor can I now picture her dressed in heavenly raiment, singing Hallelujah in her flat midwestern voice.
I’m reminded of the Sunday morning that Ruth impudently altered the Easter hymn to express an irreligious joy:
“The dough has risen! Hallelujah!
In the oven the loaf will go!
Sing yeast’s praises! Hallelujah!
Soon our bellies will be full!”
I took comfort in the army, in which a man can satisfy a desire for solitude and mitigate its loneliness among other men. At the fort, I befriended an Indiana man a few years older than I, named Arnold Tauber. Born in Wittenberg, Saxony, he’d emigrated when he was twenty. That he came from Martin Luther’s native town pleased me, even if I no longer revered the heretical German. I sometimes wished I could purchase the remission of my sins—not those of the flesh, which scarcely interested me, but the sin of a doubting mind.
For a soldier, Tauber was quiet and scholarly. He considered himself “a student of time” and carried with him Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. One or another of its volumes would be in the pocket of his sack coat or, when he was on horseback, in his saddlebag. He relished the idea that, by Gibbon’s light and his own saturnine disposition, the United States was already in decline—the golden age of the republic debased past redeeming.
I disagreed. We’d won vast territories from the Mexicans; we had discovered the richest gold fields in history; railroads were beginning their slow progress across the continent. Two thousand miles of an untouched empire lay between Council Bluffs, on the Missouri River, and the Pacific Ocean. Wherever aborigines stood in the way of our unyielding westward advance, they would be removed by historical necessity. Necessity relieved me of moral qualms. My disturbing recollections of the Mexican War had been absorbed by the national memory of glorious battles won.
I said none of this to Tauber. He could be contentious, an aspect of his character I didn’t care for. Nodding, I would hear him out and, now and then, interject a catarrhal sound to prove that I was listening. I disliked controversy, and, when it loomed, I’d challenge Tauber to a game of backgammon, played according to Edmond Hoyle’s treatise, a
book which also belonged to the eccentric cavalryman.
Having few vices and those few being venial, Tauber was a suitable companion for a parson. We drank spirits, but not immoderately. We swore like gentlemen, not like troopers. We wagered pennies and never flew into rages over our losses. We went to the saloon but sat at a table rather than leaned against the bar like the roughnecks and hooligans. By our frowns, we made known our disapproval, which meant no more to them than it would to a boy chastised by his teacher for rude noises. Periodically, but without unreasonable frequency, Tauber would be overcome by “passion” and visit a house in which such pressures as beset even a Christian man could be relieved. Afterward, he returned to the barracks and, by a smiling absence of remorse, I knew that he’d been innocent of lust and had taken a woman “medicinally,” so to speak.
“Men are nothing but whiskers and socks in constant need of darning,” you once chided me when I was preening over some virtue I imagined I possessed.
Your low opinion of my sex has oftentimes seemed to me correct.
My wife’s death aside, I recall those days in Springfield fondly. The world had yet to enter an age of universal jangle and uproar. On Sunday mornings, the choir sang of a “Jesus, meek and gentle,” who had not yet “loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword” or been “trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” We fretted over the hostiles, who were interested in collecting scalps rather than in staking claims to what, in their minds, belonged to them. They could be subdued, without too much trouble, by a company of cavalrymen. We believed that the Indians were of a degenerate race and worthy of the lice infesting them.
So I thought then. Most people did. Most still do. It’s easier to belittle and defame. We can resolve moral issues with less soul-searching if the cards are marked, the terms of the debate manipulated, or the points in a chain of doubtful logic deliberately smudged like a decimal in an embezzler’s ledger book. While each of us believes he keeps his own accounts, in actuality the books are held by a power greater than congresses, parliaments, presidents, kings, and emperors. We carry on like warrior ants, which believe the universe is contained in an anthill, and the outcome of their great wars decides the fate of all.
What power, you ask, could possibly be greater than that wielded by despots?
Enmity. Hatred as the primal urge and prime mover, capable of toppling all forms of government, even the most tyrannical. I sometimes thought that you had been infected with that same nihilism; your verses, in their disregard of grammar and sense, could be the warrants of anarchy, the symptoms of a disease. But then I remembered your words: “Ecstasy is ungrammatical, and never more so than in our faithless age.”
In the spring of ’56, Tauber and I decided to use our furlough to see the prehistoric teeth unearthed two years before by Hayden during his exploration of the Upper Missouri, on exhibit at the Chicago History Museum. I’d read an extract from the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, in which paleontologist Joseph Leidy identified them as the dental remains of a dinosaur, the first to be discovered in North America. I recalled your pencil sketches of footprints made by primeval beasts that reigned long before the Flood drowned our hens and cows—even, in your words, “before God descended from His heaven to create our world, since saurian monsters are not reported in Genesis.” That was also Tauber’s notion. He could be as fantastical and blasphemous as you. I speculated that dinosaurs might have been the aboriginal inhabitants of the Gods Wilderness, which everywhere bore evidence of titanic strain.
“These teeth confirm Gibbon’s theory of rise and fall on a geologic scale,” said Tauber while we stood peering through a glass case, in awe of the monstrous teeth.
What emotion would I feel were I suddenly confronted by the creature itself? Something other than awe—terror, more likely. A terror greater than I have ever felt for Him.
“They belonged to a dragon,” I said, half in earnest, half in jest. I finished the thought in my unspoken voice, which will often speak the truth: a dragon on which the Whore of Babylon might have sat. I blushed at my imaginings.
Later, as we were idling among the exhibits concerning great civilizations of the past, Tauber said, “It was not only Rome that had its rise and fall.”
I grunted, having grown tired of Mr. Gibbon and his theory.
We walked slowly through the ancient world, past the Sumerians, Egyptians, Minoans, Hittites, Babylonians, Greeks, Etruscans. Each of those vanished empires had been condensed and neatly fitted into a diorama. One day, vestiges of our own aboriginal civilizations will be gathering dust inside display cases, forgotten by an America mad for progress and the new.
Life is continuous action, I thought. Memory and history are tableaux.
Leaving the museum at closing time, we went to an eating house and ordered beefsteaks, which, the waiter assured us, “only yesterday were on the hoof at the slaughterhouse.” We sat nonchalantly among the “gentry,” miners and gamblers, mostly, who’d been lucky, disdaining them for their fancy clothes. Ours were travel-stained, and our beards were not in the least á la mode. The room was gilt, marble, and leather, but the steak tasted suspiciously like buffalo, and the four-bit cigars stank.
Afterward, we went to a minstrel show at McVicker’s Theater on Madison. We laughed at the antics of Jim Crow and Zip Coon, their blacked-up faces greasy in the glare of the calcium footlights. Less amusing acts followed, whose indecencies incited the gentlemen to throw coins onto the stage and the ladies to blush into the depths of their décolletage. The sly innuendo made me squirm, and I was relieved when John Wilkes Booth performed Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. If I’d known that, on an April night to come, he would shoot Abe Lincoln inside Ford’s Theatre, I’d have killed him then and there—God’s commandment to the contrary be damned!
If I had killed him, what then? Someone else would have risen to take his place like a figure in a piece of clockwork. At Harvard, I once saw a mechanical model of the universe. Small brass balls revolved in lunar and planetary orbits around a brazen sun. I cannot picture the Creator’s hand on the crank.
“It sounds like one of Mr. Poe’s tales,” you said after I had described the mechanism.
“How so?” I asked curiously, being fond of his fiction.
“The plotting is inexorable and pitiless, like a railroad timetable or the guillotine.”
“You’re being whimsical again.”
“Whimsical is a word that people use to belittle their less conventional neighbors,” you replied, as wide-eyed as the Sphinx in a blast of desert sunlight.
–9–
THE TIMES WERE BLOODY. Whether or not death will be ample in the future, none can tell, unless Carlo were to break its seal and send you word in “Dog” or Morse. Dogs are said to be alert to the vibrations of the spirit world, and no dog could be more so than Carlo now that he’s no longer with us. I would not write about those years if I did not think that, in your reclusion, they might have escaped notice. They were momentous even for me, who had no part to play in the Kansas–Missouri Border War, which was both a rehearsal and an accelerant for the war whose outcome would be the destruction or the preservation of the union.
What made them momentous?
My predestined encounter with John Brown. He was the needle and the scarlet thread that stitched a gory seam that led from Kansas to Harper’s Ferry and to our most reckless, costly civil strife. His was the thread that strengthened me in a calling that did not answer to God, but to man, although, in my weakness and my fear, I have wavered.
What do you know about the Border War? If reports of it were heard in your scriptorium and the pantry where you sometimes hid among the jars of peaches, plums, and piccalilli to escape your “pontiff’s” dogmas, you may skip my brief history of those troublesome times. Besides, that was one war that took place without me, for which mercy I am grateful.
In May 1856, seven hundred proslavery partisans sacked Lawrence, K
ansas, destroying two abolitionist newspapers (deemed “seditious”), the Free State Hotel (a “fortress” and an “arsenal”), and the home of Charles Robinson, commander in chief of the Free State militia (a “nigger-lover”). As if Lawrence were Jerusalem, John Brown, together with his sons, rose up like a vengeful prophet and hacked to death three slave catchers and two militants with swords at Pottawatomie Creek.
Men love the taste of other men’s blood. Hasn’t it always been so, Emily?
That August, John Reid’s Border Ruffians, armed with guns, cutlasses, and a cannon stolen from the United States arsenal at Liberty, Missouri, seized Osawatomie, on the Osage River, where “Captain” Brown and his sons had been staying with the Reverend Samuel Adair. In retaliation, Brown attacked Reid’s four hundred men. Outnumbered ten to one and evidently forsaken by the Lord of Hosts, Brown’s “army” retreated. In reprisal, the Ruffians brought “fire and sword” to the Kansas town before advancing on the antislavery stronghold at Topeka, hoping to raze it, as well. Brown’s son Frederick was killed in the skirmish. Other of his sons would follow him, until the old man himself died “on the rugged cross.”
When he returned to Osawatomie and found it reduced to char and chimney stones, Brown told his adherents, “God sees it. I have only a short time to live—only one death to die, and I will die fighting for His cause. There will be no more peace in this land until slavery is done for. I will give them something else to do than extend slave territory. I will carry this war into Africa.”
I detested slavery as much as did Thoreau, Emerson, or Garrison, but I was sworn to uphold the Constitution and took my orders from the colonel at the fort, who, according to the chain of command, took his from President Pierce. God whispered no contravening order into my ear. I gave thanks to Him for His silence. Neither side of the Border War, or the issue of popular sovereignty versus federalism, was guiltless. The proslavery gang wanted to get rich, using slaves to cultivate the territory, while much of the antislavery faction—called “Free-Soilers”—objected on economic grounds: Human bondage, a source of free labor, was unfair competition. The preservation of the union ought to have been—as it would be during the War of Succession—the aim of government and the chief duty of the army. But in the case of Bleeding Kansas, Franklin Pierce and his administration wished to see slavery thrive. I saw Pierce once, in a sick tent, during the capture of Mexico City; he’d been struck down by the flux. It was the nation’s misfortune that he survived.