Rochester Knockings (25 page)

The missionary Alexander Cruik, who had volunteered as a chaplain in spite of being banished by his congregation for his measured defense of spiritualism, experienced hell every day on the front lines and in the country hospitals, where young men's limbs were being amputated, having been shattered by bullets coming from grooved musket barrels, the recent invention of a French gunsmith. In the middle of pitched battles, even at the risk of being taken as a target, the evangelist wandered like a
harvester of souls in the bloody fields where the dying moaned, wandering from a Southerner with a blown-open stomach to a dismembered Unionist. Obsessed by the abomination of mass murder without offense or insult, he saw the disadvantages and defeats of his side facing the Confederates, who were inferior in number but fiercely defending their territory under the banner of aristocratic officers. When Lincoln had resumed the offensive by proclaiming the emancipation of slaves long before the hour of victory, thereby increasing the war effort tenfold through the mass conscription of Blacks and the intensive use of rail and water transport of troops, the horror of the battlefield also found itself multiplied. Armed only with his faith, carrying only his word or his silence, Alexander Cruik could no longer tell what was at stake in all this carnage. How could he find any difference between a massacre displaying Yankee prowess and a mass grave in honor of a generalissimo? In the snow or the mud, uniforms were too torn and stained to recognize which side they belonged to. Therefore, between two dying adolescents, was it necessary to tend to one first before the other? Were their souls brothers or enemies at the moment their armor of passions and identities dropped away?

During the move from one position to another, with the cavalry and artillery wagons preceding the advancing infantry battalions, the wounded at the back letting out cries and moans, Alexander Cruik believed he was watching the dead walking in dense rows and kept hearing the wild screams from the attacks. They all called for their mothers, those who fell. Children were playing at killing each other and believed they were only playing. At Chancellorsville, after four days of shelling and bayonets, the army of the Potomac suffered such setbacks that Cruik saw a band of defeated Yankees lynch one of their own because he was black
and therefore the cause of the war. General Robert Edward Lee, in triumph, then pushed his cavalry of apocalypse up to Pennsylvania. Uninformed by the military advisors, the disoriented infantrymen grasped little of these advances and setbacks, other than from the hoarseness of the bugles after the fighting.

Cruik, who had witnessed the consolidation of the North under the leadership of General Grant, no longer reacted as he watched the Confederate troops, now on the offensive, plow the front line with artillery between two hills south of Gettysburg. Considering the sky-blue uniforms of those on the lookout, he couldn't help but speculate on the survival or imminent death of such and such recruit nearby who, for the moment, was squinting his eyes at the enigma of the horizon, one of them gently touching his ear and the other smiling at some dreamed-of face—all of them on the edge of the abyss, so full of slender eternities.

But there was a shudder, and sighs spread out at the sight of those enigmatic flickers quickly surrounding Little Round Top, countless, on the front line of enemy guns. Rather than giving command to use the artillery, head of the Maine regiment Colonel Chamberlain and his counterparts from New York State ordered their troops to charge. Hidden behind the 48- and 64-pound howitzers, which had been shipped to them by rail and which the bomb blasters surveyed with a rogue tenderness, Alexander had the feeling he was participating by his trembling in every limb at the immense devastation being committed, from this distance similar to a game of colored figurines. A great clamor swept by winds from the west swirled through the hills, where muskets and repeating rifles crackled while artillery sporadically thundered with a kind of phlegm. Already, stretcher-bearers on duty and fellow soldiers brought back the first of the torn-up to
the tents. From his point of view overlooking the hills, Alexander discovered beyond this monstrous duel of bayonets, a multitude of other engagements as far as the eye could see, where cavalry and footmen were intertwined in dust raised from the force of their impacts. Called in by a nurse, her arms red with blood, he entered the ward of the field hospital, the odor of chloroform and entrails seizing his throat. At the bedside of a mortally wounded Negro calling for Christ's help, he began to entreat the unknown powers to come to his aid. Astonished on the brink of his dying, the man had the time to tell him, vomiting his guts, that he wanted only for his name, Ben Crosby, to be written on a piece of paper and pinned to his shirt. Seeing him do that, a wounded man in a bed nearby, who was about to be amputated, asked the same favor in a low voice, adding the name of his village. “Gangrene will set in,” he said, “and I will only get the common grave.” A young woman in a smock who was assisting the surgeon at work on another pallet had turned toward him a worried face, of a feverish beauty. He smiled at her desperately and rushed out of the tent.

Guns and howitzers now thundered forth over a crackling of muskets and one could see here and there, without a plausible link to these sustained shots, fallen groups of soldiers or spurts of earth and stone carrying numerous puppets blown to pieces. The fighting shook the most beautiful slopes under the impeccable azure. A lark shrilled, inaudible. Alexander Cruik remembered the hidden miracles of sight and speech. He raised his head toward the bird perched on its summit and cried out, his eyes filled with tears: “Don't prophesy! One mustn't prophesy such things!” Although half destroyed, the Union battalions were at this moment retreating in good alignment to their outposts while the dislocated enemy columns ebbed in disorder beyond their positions, leaving
room for a few scattered soldiers who, severely shocked by the intensity of the charge, were still firing in isolation, unable to come to their senses. A non-commissioned officer with flaming hair, face pockmarked, his uniform stained with blood, appeared suddenly before him like a handsome devil, bayonet high, staring perplexedly at him in passing. Those in his company followed him with heads down so as not to count the missing comrades.

With the steps of a sleepwalker, despite the calls from the returning sergeant, Alexander rushed toward the deserted battlefield that the relief workers, waiting for the signal of a truce, had not yet entered. As he stepped into the open field, imploring God's mercy, his dark silhouette stretching over a pile of corpses, a Southerner wounded in the legs and head, thinking he saw a vulture circling above him, had the strength to lift his musket and shoot before rendering up his own soul. Hit in the chest, Alexander Cruik fell to his knees, hands on the ground, face to face with his murderer. He thought to himself that this dead man resembled him like a brother. Sobbing for the first time since he was a small child, he kissed that bloody face full on the mouth.

The sergeant had observed the scene from the shelter of a cannon breach. After a moment of disbelief, he stepped over the fascines and tangled remains, crouched down, and came quickly to join him.

“It's not worth it anymore,” said the chaplain.

“I recognize you,” William Pill cried out. “You are the evangelist of the Redskins, the friend of the Fox sisters!”

The officer raised Cruik's head up off the ground to moisten his lips with his alcohol flask. “It's going to be all right,” he said, “I'll take you back . . .”

“Useless, you'd just be bringing back a corpse. I remember you too,” the chaplain added, leaning on one elbow. “But come closer. I have loved only one woman in my life. We could have done such great things, she and I . . . Listen: I'm wearing an amulet of no monetary value around my neck. Promise me to give it to Kate Fox. It came to me on the day my mother was killed by the Cherokees, right before my eyes. We had been heading west like so many others. The Indians discovered me at the bottom of the carriage, but they didn't hurt me. Before abandoning me to my kind they tied this amulet around my neck, I don't know why. It has never left me . . .”

William Pill brought the cadaver back anyway. And it was in front of a witness, recording the last will of the chaplain Alexander Cruik, that he pocketed the iron chain and amulet.

In the meadows and hills battered with the holes of shells, where disemboweled horses rotted in the sun, tens of thousands of soldiers from both sides lay who hadn't had the time to write their names and addresses on a scrap of paper. Mass graves were dug throughout. Faced with such carnage, the governor of Pennsylvania subsidized a sanitation committee for the site as well as the construction of a cemetery. However, the battle of Gettysburg gave the advantage to the Unionists and Sergeant William Pill, taking his chances at each new engagement, won his lieutenant's stripes there. The front line delimiting the warring territories moved like a snake in its cage for months, from one region or state to the other: no victory brought about a truce and the two camps were by now tallying their martyrs in the hundreds of thousands. In April of 1865, President Lincoln who, thanks to the
war effort, had raised the Union to the status of industrial power, was finally and triumphantly able to enter Richmond, the capital of the Confederates that General Grant, his chief of staff, had just conquered.

With one finger on his left hand blown off by a Minié ball, his chest slashed by a bayonet, and having miraculously survived a fire provoked by a famous general enthusiastic about scorched earth, William Pill left his uniform without regret. Not an hour of his life since his recruitment in the first months of the conflict had passed without his thinking of Pearl Gascoigne. Despite his ordeals, the Union's victory mattered less to him than the possibility of seeing Pearl again. He had watched his companions die fighting, and himself had killed without fail, carried by a single thought: of one day seeing again the woman he loved more than God or America. Pearl, however, had left him, she'd betrayed him for a chimera, a figment of the imagination, the worst of insanities: to be a free woman, to write books, to be accomplished.

Barely off the train, Pill reclaimed his American Quarter Horse from a breeder in Monroe County to whom he'd entrusted it three years earlier. The animal had also aged, but still turned on itself like clockwork, and it was at a gallop that the demobilized lieutenant headed back to Rochester, determined to forget the recent troubles and grumbling, unable to get out of his mind an air that the black recruits loved to hum in hoarse voices before the fight:

               
Oh, Babylon's falling, falling, falling

               
Babylon's falling to rise no more

               
Oh, Babylon's falling, falling, falling

               
Babylon's falling to rise no more

II.

Livermore's Good Influence

N
othing more appears after one pulls out her first white hair—age must wait for the second. Kate put on her golden fox coat and crossed the sparkling, dewy park along a flowering path that intersected the road. Walking from the gamekeeper's house, which had been converted into a small office and salon next to the Livermore mansion, there was hardly time to breathe in all the beds of roses and lilies that were the pride of the grounds-keeper—an almost-black Jamaican with a cockney accent who Charles Livermore kept in service in memory of his wife. Was there any object or custom that wasn't being kept in memory of Estelle? The financier had settled into his memory, and mourning for him could only be an acute form of attention paid to the absent woman. From then on, his banking career on Wall Street had in no way been troubled, business only being an abstract way to occupy his time, an opportunity for circumstantial oblivion that not even sleep could provide better.

Kate had accepted the widower's proposal in the middle of the Civil War, one year after Estelle's death. The years of studies lavished on her by Horace Greeley couldn't add up any longer. The
more one learns, the heavier the tray of ignorance becomes. The exclusive engagement proposed by Livermore had been nothing more for her than an opportunity to untie herself from a singular alienation—for what music theory or philosophy could restore the medium eye-to-eye with the other world?—without which she was under the same constraint to follow the example of Margaret who, disinherited by her in-laws, had resumed touring city to city in the grip of an unscrupulous manager, or else of Leah Underhill, who for her part only practiced spiritualism for the additional fame and fortune, in hostage to a sterile pride.

In this unspoiled corner of Manhattan Island, close to the development work of a giant park and acclimatized gardens with wildlife reserves, Kate forgot the fever of New York City, where all the world's wars seemed ready to break out at any time in miniature. Her employer and a trust of businessmen led by Mr. Greeley were even strongly opposing the hare-brained idea of Fernando Wood, the mayor of the city who, under the guise of economic dealings with the Southern States, was plainly recommending that New York be the next to secede.

Unaware of the disorders of politics and finance, Kate spent the war in her little island of green, preoccupied only with what was expected of her. As she did each morning, despite the coldness of the air, she left the mansion first thing, curious about the dying colors of the Portland roses, the scarlet Rembrandts, or the dwarf double-blooms with the ridiculous name of Pompon Perpétuel. The autumn roses were certainly the most exquisite. Mr. Livermore left her free to roam at this hour—during the week a carriage would have already delivered the banker to Wall Street—but it was her pleasure to go visit the manor house, a large colonial building on two floors with an exterior staircase
and peristyles, in order to have lunch or tea and cookies in the office, in the company of the cook, an old Caribbean vendor of roast meats, and sometimes with the Jamaican gardener who came swigging a jug of fresh water. The other employees of the house, a German chamber maid with six arms, a Calabrian porter, and Mrs. McCords, a housekeeper with multiple functions, kept their distance from her, one of them out of superstition, the others from jealousy or mistrust. By far the oldest servant of the mansion, the cook told what she knew whenever she felt like it, by instinct and even bluntly, without taking the time for clarifications, considering the least question indiscreet. Kate gladly listened to her while contemplating the tea leaves at the bottom of her cup or the flames licking the throat of a huge cast-iron stove with its two ovens and three cooktops. From distracted scraps of conversation or obsessed soliloquies, she had gleaned much more from the cook than from the small tearful confidences of the widower.