The Wreckage of Eden Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  Norman Lock and The American Novels series

  “In each [American Novels series] volume the first-person narrator functions as a kind of refractive lens, bending and blending together a generation of texts and ideas within a single mind, and yielding a spectrum of impressions on the development of American culture and identity.”

  —Millions

  “A Fugitive in Walden Woods manages that special magic of making Thoreau’s time in Walden Woods seem fresh and surprising and necessary right now. . . . This is a patient and perceptive novel, a pleasure to read even as it grapples with issues that affect the United States to this day.”

  —Victor LaValle, author of The Ballad of Black Tom and The Changeling, on A Fugitive in Walden Woods

  “A mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered homage to a pioneer of American Gothic fiction.”

  —New York Times Book Review on The Port-Wine Stain

  “[Walt Whitman] hovers over [American Meteor], just as Mark Twain’s spirit pervaded The Boy in His Winter. . . . Like all Mr. Lock’s books, this is an ambitious work, where ideas crowd together on the page like desperate men on a battlefield.”

  —Wall Street Journal on American Meteor

  “A glorious meditation on justice, truth, loyalty, story, and the al-chemical effects of love, a reminder of our capacity to be changed by the continuously evolving world ‘when it strikes fire against the mind’s flint,’ and by profoundly moving novels like this.”

  —NPR on The Boy in His Winter

  “[Lock] is one of the most interesting writers out there.”

  —Reader’s Digest

  “One could spend forever worming through [Lock’s] magicked words, their worlds.”

  —Believer

  “[Lock’s writing] lives up to Whitman’s words . . . no other writer, in recent memory, dares the reader to believe there is a hand reaching out to be held, a hand to hold onto us.”

  —Metro Times

  “Lock’s writing is smooth and precise, braiding the worldly and the spiritual together in a lucid, elegant balance.”

  —Colorado Review

  “Lock is a rapturous storyteller, and his tales are never less than engrossing.”

  —Kenyon Review

  “One of our country’s unsung treasures.”

  —Green Mountains Review

  “A master of the unusual.”

  —Slice magazine

  “A master storyteller.”

  —Largehearted Boy

  “[A] contemporary master of the form [and] virtuosic fabulist.”

  —Flavorwire

  “[Lock’s] window onto fiction [is] a welcome one: at once referential and playful, occupying a similar post-Borges space to . . . Stephen Millhauser and Neil Gaiman.”

  —Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  “[Lock] is not engaged in either homage or pastiche but in an intense dialogue with a number of past writers about the process of writing, and the nature of fiction itself.”

  —Weird Fiction

  “Lock’s work mines the stuff of dreams.”

  —Rumpus

  “You can feel the joy leaping off the page.”

  —Full Stop

  “Lock plays profound tricks with language—his is crystalline and underline-worthy.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[Lock has an] uncanny ability to inhabit historical figures and meticulously capture the vernacular of the time like a transcendentalist ventriloquist. . . . Offer[s] profound insights that sharpen our understanding of American history.”

  —Booklist

  “[Lock] successfully blends beautiful language reminiscent of 19th-century prose with cynicism and bald, ugly truth.”

  —Library Journal

  “Lock’s stories stir time as though it were a soup . . . beyond the entertainment lie 21st-century conundrums: What really exists? Are we each, ultimately, alone and lonely? Where is technology taking humankind?”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Lock’s American Novels series engages creatively with nineteenth-century literary classics.”

  —Foreword Reviews

  OTHER BOOKS IN THE AMERICAN NOVELS SERIES

  A Fugitive in Walden Woods

  The Port-Wine Stain

  American Meteor

  The Boy in His Winter

  ALSO BY NORMAN LOCK

  Love Among the Particles (stories)

  First published in the United States in 2018 by Bellevue Literary Press, New York

  For information, contact:

  Bellevue Literary Press

  NYU School of Medicine

  550 First Avenue

  OBV A612

  New York, NY 10016

  © 2018 by Norman Lock

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, events, and places (even those that are actual) are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lock, Norman, 1950- author.

  Title: The wreckage of Eden / Norman Lock.

  Description: New York: Bellevue Literary Press, [2018] | Series: The American novels; 5

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017014712 (print) | LCCN 2017020737 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Military chaplains—Fiction. | Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886—Fiction. | Women poets, American—19th century—Fiction. | United States—History—19th century—Fiction. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction. | Historical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3562.O218 (ebook) | LCC PS3562.O218 W74 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014712

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.

  Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.

  This publication is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.

  First Edition

  135798642

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-942658-39-9

  For Dorothy Hub, who, in her time, also withdrew behind the hedges, though she left no words for posterity

  She dealt her pretty words like Blades—

  —Emily Dickinson

  Dear Emily,

  We were together perhaps a score of times—alone, just half as many—frank, as frank as our New England reticence would allow, less often than that. Once, I had foolishly hoped for affection, even intimacy. Do you blush? It could not have escaped your notice that my interest in you was more than a passing one. I admitted as much. But you have retired from the world, even as narrow a one as Amherst, and I have resigned myself to your indifference and my own inadequacy.

  Your last letter (it had the finality of a judge’s gravely gaveling after sentence had been passed) seemed as absolute as the Arctic, which not even poor John Franklin could overcome, and was quite as cold. Cold may be too harsh a judgment on you. But certainly there was no warmth. It was—how do I describe the feeling that came over me after I had read it through a second time and returned it to its envelope? Austere. I would think you were a Calvinist if not for your poetry, which is sometimes irreligious. I prefer your verses on t
he hummingbird, the oriole, the bee, even the dank and nocturnal toad to the somber ones that can inspire me with a nameless dread, as though I were officiating at my own funeral.

  Because you will admit me no farther into your house than its anteroom, where the light is dim, I am writing these pages to remind you of who we once were. I expect no answer, except as my own mind can supply, knowing you as well as any mortal can. (Or am I still guilty of the old vanity?) If this reminiscence should be read by others, who may not have heard of us, I can only hope they will judge us kindly. We are no other than we could have been.

  Robert

  CONTENTS

  The Mexican War

  The Mormon Rebellion

  Harper’s Ferry

  Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  Permissions

  About the Author

  THE MEXICAN WAR

  He will refund us finally

  Our confiscated gods—

  —Emily Dickinson

  –1–

  AFTER CHAPULTEPEC, I SUCCUMBED to vainglorious fancies unworthy of a man of the cloth, but even an ordained minister ought to be forgiven one of the lesser transgressions to which youth is liable. Frivolousness weighs scarcely more than a feather on the scale of moral conduct. I was only twenty-four and backward in the ways of the world when I put myself at the service of God and General Winfield Scott. Before that, I had been to Boston and, once, to Concord for a meeting of the Female Anti-Slavery Society. There I’d heard Mr. Emerson and William Lloyd Garrison speak and had caught a glimpse of Henry Thoreau, who seemed a clownish fellow. When I was a small boy, I’d been taken to Philadelphia to the coal wharves on the Schuylkill River, to cheer the striking workers, by an uncle who believed in the rights of man. Much later, I attended the seminary at Gettysburg to learn the ways of God. But mostly my travels prior to the Mexican War had been confined to Hampshire County: I had been as far south of Amherst as the confluence of the Connecticut and Chicopee Rivers, notable for brown bullhead, pumpkinseed, and shad. I’d been north to Greenfield, east to Pelham, and west to Chesterfield, there to view working conditions at the tanneries—also with my egalitarian uncle, who, during his own youth, had been enflamed by Robespierre and the Jacobins. Of the great and sprawling world, only a corner was known to me; the rest was as blank and mysterious as Terra Incognita on old Ptolmey’s map.

  When I embarked on my Mexican adventure as an army chaplain, I half-believed that my religious zeal and character would be tested as David’s had been when he went among the Philistines. I did not bear arms against Nicolás Bravo and his swarthy troops, not even so primitive an instrument of destruction as David’s sling. Instead, I carried the Gospels, as the Franciscan friars had amid the Aztecs of Montezuma’s empire three centuries ago.

  I refused to admit to myself that the likely reason for my having enlisted in “Old Fuss and Feather’s” army was conceit. The national pastime of annexation and the personal trial in which I hoped to have my faith and manhood assayed were, both of them, vanity. In truth—by now, I ought to be able to distinguish it from falsehood (except for the lies I tell myself)—I was like a boy parading before a mirror, dressed in his father’s uniform. I’m afraid that even then, in 1847, I was unworthy of my calling. I’ve often wondered if He did, in fact, call me, or if I might have misheard Him. Did He whisper “man of God” in my ear? Perhaps He meant me to be a farmer—a man of sod . . . or a schoolmaster, bricklayer, or fisherman: a man of the rod . . . hod . . . cod.

  I can almost hear you laugh at my simple rhymes. Yours are sometimes odd, Emily! Shall I send you Walker’s Rhyming Dictionary at Christmas? In return, you can send me an ear trumpet, so that I’ll never again misunderstand the Lord’s wishes. If only uncertainty could be so easily removed!

  In truth, I feel as hollow as a termite mound.

  In truth—in truth—in truth! How I’ve come to loathe the phrase!

  On one occasion when we spoke together frankly—frankness is nothing if not intimacy—you said, “There is neither an absolute truth nor one true faith. Or do you think that God does not love the Mussulmen or the immodest butterflies, which decline to keep the Sabbath, except as pagans do?” I became indignant in the way smug young men will who hear their ideas, acquired secondhand, flouted. I felt myself stiffen inside my seminarian’s black frock coat. My throat tensed in righteous anger. I recall having simpered platitudes, and, when you took no notice, shaking a finger at you as if I were Cotton Mather admonishing a backslider. You called me “obnoxious,” which I knew I was. I could see myself strutting sanctimoniously on the bank of Mill River, as though I were watching an actor perform in a melodrama. A not very good actor who would and did “tear a passion to tatters, to very rags,” as Hamlet said. Much later, I realized the correctness of your remark; moreover, it did not cheapen truth, but, rather, it exalted faith by introducing a necessary doubt. When truth is absolute, faith perishes. Religion requires a heresy to oppose if the faithful are to taste the honey of salvation.

  Did I believe when we marched into Molino del Rey to reduce the citadel?

  The question is better put “in what did I believe?” Was it God, the sacraments and articles of faith, the union, or merely in the gaze I saw each morning reflected in my shaving mirror? The meaning of that glance was too ambiguous to decipher. I know its meaning now. Nearly two decades later, I can read the lines in my once-smooth face with the canniness of a phrenologist. If you were here with me, you could read it for yourself, Emily. The secrets of a person’s character, like the shining words spelled out by snails on philodendron leaves, are legible to your eyes.

  On my face, you would read the weariness, cynicism, and jadedness of a man much older than my forty-two years. A legion of souls was winnowed by war; the kernels were swept into an ash pit, and dry husks are all that remain of youth and high ideals. A young seminarian, I had fancied myself a man of principles, but, like seed sown on stony ground, they did not thrive.

  This recollection is fast becoming a confession. Better that you are not here to hear it; otherwise, I might not have the will or courage to make it. In fairness to you, Emily, I’ll make room for your “remarks” as though I had you before me.

  My belief in what have you was tested immediately following the Battle of Chapultepec, accounted a glorious victory for the United States, when thirty San Patricios—named for the mostly Irish immigrants who had joined with the Catholic Mexicans against us—stepped off into eternity or nothingness. The thirtieth of the condemned men, having lost both legs, had to be helped on his way. The gallows was placed where the traitors could watch our marines tear down the Mexican tricolor and raise “Old Gory” in its stead. The patriotic spectacle was the last thing they saw of earth. (The sky above Mexico City is radiant in September.) The Irishmen didn’t wait alone on the rough platform to hear their final departure called. German immigrants and a contingent of negroes also stood like passengers with train tickets in their pockets.

  Clothed in a youthful certainty, like the freshly ironed gown of a seminarian, I was nonetheless troubled by the hanging of those deluded renegades, but there was nothing I could have done for them, except to offer up a silent petition to an equally silent God. I was an army captain under orders, as well as a chaplain. The fit belonged to the United States, the sick and wounded to the army surgeons; only the men’s souls were mine. I applied the balm of salvation, or, if too late for an infusion of grace, I helped to bury the dead with prayer and tenderness. I often watched myself with satisfaction and approval.

  You must be appalled, Emily, but you were always stronger than I. When the Christian revival at mid-century thrilled many a soul in Amherst, you were as unwilling to make a show of your faith as a modest woman is of her petticoats. You chose to be shunned, together with a tiny faction of “no hopers,” rather than be enrolled among the “saved,” who paraded their faith like a new hat.

  Mount Holyoke Female Seminary

  Dear Mr. Winter,
<
br />   Grace refused to visit me—though my classmates swooned in droves, as if at the arrival of a handsome swain bearing Chocolates & Valentines. I would not put on Piety for fashion’s sake.

  Emily

  While you were wrestling with God and Euclid in South Hadley, I was standing in a scorched ruin in Huamantla, a Mexican town in the state of Tlaxcala, rich in dust, heat, scabby dogs, dirty children, and idleness, which is everywhere apparent among the dusky races. You could have reasonably expected the town to pass into oblivion unnoticed even by its inhabitants, who seemed half-asleep. I would not have been surprised had they lain down for their siesta one afternoon never to awaken. Huamantla, however, was to have a tragedy, although one too sordid for an ancient Greek to have considered worthy of pen, parchment, and the Athenian stage.

  On the preceding day—that would have been the ninth of October 1847—soldiers under the command of Brigadier General Lane had ransacked the cantinas and, becoming stupendously borracho, had parted women—señoritas and señoras both—from their clothes. A number of dark ladies had also been “outraged,” a quaint expression, as though they had suffered nothing more grievous than a rude remark. Next, inflamed by liquor and lust, Lane’s men set a portion of the town ablaze and murdered a number of Mexicans to avenge the death of Sam Walker, a captain in the Texas Rangers.

  Huamantla would be buried under history’s grim accrual, which seems to consist largely of broken pots and bones. Soon, our army would pass like a scythe along the National Highway, from Mexico City to Veracruz. In December, we would begin to reap all murdering, thieving Mexican soldiers and rancheros. With the war in its second year, the Polk administration was impatient for a final victory. The “greasers,” after all, were no match for America’s men at arms, the uniformed archangels of its Manifest Destiny.

  But on that blue October morning, standing amid the wreckage of Huamantla’s main street, I was interested to hear a lieutenant of marines belittle the previous day’s massacre. You couldn’t call it that, not according to him. It was nothing next to the Battle of Bad Ax in 1832 or the Cutthroat Gap Massacre in ’33, when two tribes did their damnedest to slaughter each other down to the last redskin.