MJCwriting.htm

THE INFREQUENT VISITOR:

     A STORY OF ORIGINS

 

 

 

 

PART ONE
Introduction of the Subject

 

 

I.

 

It is good to be able to look inside things to understand them.  But sometimes it is not enough to look inside things.  Sometimes one must look away from things to understand them.  Sometimes one must look at the clouds, at the ocean, at the face of a beautiful woman.  Sometimes the picture one seeks is not in the object being studied, but it is reflected in some other object (a reflection), which cannot be seen clearly except through the intermediary of another form.

     The dream is the olfactory nature which presents to the unseeing eye the stuff of unseen thoughts.  It presents in symbolic motion the naked realizations which are, in themselves, something precise but somehow invisible, except through the intercession of the dream grid, by which their tenuous material is made explicit and, for a moment, apparent.

      The grid of seeing: it is a very thin material, almost like gauze but with no texture of gauze.  It is a texture of something smooth and deep, ever deep, darkened by shadows, almost cubic at times.

    

The atmosphere means something, for it is inside this atmosphere that thoughts are projected (small images), in which one sees his own ideas, reflected back, reversed once, like small thoughts in a mirror, held within a private atmosphere or envelope, which thoughts become visible dependent upon the level of  light one can generate to illumine them.  As the light grows brighter, the thoughts grow more clear, for better and for worse.

      In this way one reads his own ideas, or becomes aware of his own ideas, only after they have been thought.  The ideas are projected onto this material, this atmosphere, which holds the ideas in a sort of negative sequence (negative in the photographic sense), awiting light to illumine them.  The light must come from the thinker: he essentially analyzes his own photographs.

 

At least, so it is said by those who know these things, who understand the deep nature of trees and frosty mornings and ways of men in this deadly waterless land of high heritage and the winds of disease.  I know not such lofty things as this.  I long for small items, for small blessings, down here where the liberty of this lost wasteland in the small harbor of trees lies in wait for the next storm to attack it and render it small again.

      I know about the visitor who came.  The earth shook when he walked, it was said; he acceded in this tradition, of course, this legend.  The earth wept when he was born, in that other waterless space down further south in the unharmony of Texas.  We are 7000 feet high, in this sweeping coarseland of Red Desert and winter avalanche.  We look down at our feet, at our boot toes, to see Texas.  But he came striding in one day, larger than a fat cow ready for urging.  He was a big man, six foot five inches tall.  Strong, with a long jaw, a spirit of combat.  His hair was short.  He would make an impact on the world: it was in his stars; he knew it as he knew that the world was no longer flat, and that men could fly.

 

I live in Sinclair.  I have lived in southern Wyoming all my life, since the first days of post-war birth, in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains on this plain stretch of arid beauty.  I am your narrator, of course.  I am not the infrequent visitor; nor is the man I have introduced, the Texan, the infrequent visitor.  But that part of the story still needs to be unwound.

 

 

II.

 

It is a dry story indeed, for those who live in the less vast hamlets along the upper valleys or the endless corn and grasslands of the Midwest, let alone the canyons and building terraced metropoliti along the two coasts of this immense continental nation.  It is brought to me (the story that is) by a middle-aged man named David Ruth, a crippled man, with a shrunken appearance, a limp, a sometimes surly wit, prone to fits of angst, and drunken bouts of reading in the genre mostly of science fiction, occasionally of Eastern philosophy.  He visits me because he believes that we are companions in some way, as if he and I were partners in this spatial galaxy of southern Wyoming, somehow lost together in this dry hole of human enterprise, much greater than our very apparent limits, much more chosen by the gods who unrandomly order appearance and moving pieces on this landscape, moving checkers into squares of conflict.  He and I both write; he knows this.  That is, I write, and he wishes to write.  He brings me ideas for stories.  He is the infrequent visitor--at least, one of the infrequent visitors.  Never really invited, never encouraged to come exactly, yet always expected, always capable of appearance; in some ways he is always here, lingering, when not in my room then down the hall, talking to Rick, the manager of the Hotel, or Raoul, Rick's lover.  Raoul has recently been released from the penitentiary, for assault and theft.  Rick met him, offered him a job (the hotel is empty, shut down, with only my room and Rick and Raoul's room occupied).  David is even here when he is not here, for his presence is such that he leaves behind thick scents wherever he has been.  He is like Mercury, ever bringing messages, ever bringing fragments of light.

 

Rick allows me to live in my second story room, above the hotel sign, charging me no rent, feeling he is encouraging artistic accomplishment by donating to me my "studio."  He drinks; and takes cocaine.  Then he and Raoul fight; Rick is marked in the morning, but happy, euphoric, whether from love or combat or an ocean of snow I do not know: perhaps a bit of all these.

      I do not trust Raoul.  He knows this.  He never comes near me, when Rick is not along.  I keep a pistol in my drawer, near my typewriter, in case Raoul comes too close.

      I am an odd man.  I am the town's historian, the town's idiosyncratic claim to fame.  One of them at least.  I have had stories published in several national magazines: they love stories from the heartland.  This makes me famous in some way, in the way that men of small notoriety seem quite large in the ocean of non-notoreity.  Many people consider me a great success, because they have seen my name in national publications.  They do not read my stories of course; very few read my stories.  They do not know why I am famous exactly.  They wonder why I am not rich, and why I would spend my life in a run-down hotel in the presence of discredited company.  Still, they treat me with respect, for two reasons really: first, because they have heard that I have talent; and, second, because I am one of them, born and raised and living in their town.

      It is evening.  I watch the summer world from my open window, down below on the main street of Sinclair: before me stands the plaza, with its fountain of stone, with seven sculpted bearcats in relief, spitting invisible water into the basin; there are two civil war canons, one pointing east, one pointing west, protecting the town if you will, protecting the town from invasion by outsiders.

 

David comes quite often, several times a week.  He is my most frequent visitor I suppose, except for members of my family, who wonder why I live in this damp, dying hotel.  It is damp and dying now; once, when it was built, in the early 1920's, it was the finest hotel in the west.  It was based on a Moorish palace.  Executives of the Sinclair Oil Company, headquartered in New York City, would fly to Sinclair, land in their jets on the private airfield north of the town, beyond the acid pit and the town dump, drive to the Sinclair Hotel (it was legendary at the time); they would hold summer board meetings in the Fountain Room, downstairs, an elegant dining hall, with a small fountain of inlaid jade and goldfish swimming in the emerald pool.  They would spend several weeks in our small town, journeying into the hinterlands to enjoy the pleasures of outdoor life: hunting, fishing, boating, climbing, horseback riding.  We would watch them, as children, from our grassy haunt on the plaza, not far from the water-gurgling bearcats (the company which built the town and refinery in the early twenties was the Producers and Refiners Corporation, the town was named Parco then, and the symbol of the company was the bearcat, long before the Sinclair takeover, and the transition of symbols moved from the bearcat to the dinosaur).

 

David brings me stories.  He is a gadfly.  He pokes his brittle little Scandanavian head into private drawers and petty resources in every house in the town, and draws from the exaggerated privacy of each life pretty morsels intent on literary shaping.  I am his agent of actualization, for he is a talker, cannot write, is wrecked by the critical faculty: criticism is much more his forte than is creation. 

      Last night he visited, filled with urgency, asking me: "How can I write about an experience I have not had?  How is it possible?  How is it real?"  When I replied: "Through Imagination," he replied: "But is it real!"

      It has been years since that question mattered to me.  Perhaps it once did, as did the driving dilemma and requisite Berkelean imagery of fireplaces and doors closed and fires still burning and the self-limiting need I once felt to prove that I was not free to choose, that I was a prisoner of my own "tastes," if you will.  Free will: it once mattered to me.  "It is all real, yet is real in a different way, as a different realm.  So it does not matter."

      "Does not matter!  What are you saying!" he cried.

      He continued: "If it is imagination only, then it is not real!"  He was agitated, wishing for me to strike him with my thoughts.  "Imagination, itself, is our doom.  For we are tricked by imagination; we live in the past or in the future (in Imagination that is), rather than in the Now, in the Present, where we have our greatest potential for action, for power, performance.  We cheat ourselves through imagination.  We steal from our own living in the Present!"

      "Can you imagine Life without imagination?"

      "Yes.  It would involve living life for each moment.  And, as a corollary, it would render writing about experiences one has not experienced, that is, which one has experienced only through imagination, false.  I was pondering the Great American Novel on my way over here.  I had a thought: it concerned a great idea, in which a woman murders a man, apparently for justifiable reasons.  I am not sure why: but she is justified!  Yet, when I tried to plot the scenario, I could not conceive of writing such a book, for how does one feel when one is a murderer, when one kills another human being?  I do not know.  How can I pretend to know?  But it became as clear to me as glass that one could not write about a thing which one had not personally experienced!"

      "That throws out a whole genre to which you are devoted: Science Fiction."

      "Yes, that is true.  Painfully true."

      "Why do you even ask yourself these questions, pose these insoluable burdens of thought for yourself, except as a way not to have to write the stories you imagine?  Do you believe that Shakespeare ever killed a man?  Yet he wrote Julius Caesar, and MacBeth, both of which are patently concerned with murder.  And Doestoevsky: need he commit a murder, in order to understand and portray the psycology of the murderer?  Or can the power of imagination, itself capable of great manifestations, great miracles, for what is history but the storehouse of human thought, human imagination: can it portray to us emotions, and, as such, realities, which lie even deeper than everyday reality, hidden inside the mechanisms of our rituals?"

      He smiled.  He loved our conversations.  "And another thing," I added.  "It is no accident that you are trying to help the woman kill the man in your novel, and are, at the same time, trying to murder Imagination as a viable asset of thought.  The two are related."

      "Ahh, very subtle," David replied.  "You have raised a whole set of webs with that question."

 

"How is your story on Bedford coming?"

      "It is stalled.  I need your help, I need more information."

      He smiled.  He wanted most to be needed.  I was his mouthpiece, even if I did tell each story in my own hand, my own voice, my own set of monakers.  Still, he could believe that I was his creation, that I was dependent on his eyes to find my sounds, which, thereafter, became phrases, thought-patterns, town histories.

      "Well, " David said.  "What do you need to know?  What more I can I tell about the man?"

 

 

III.

 

Hugh Bedford came to Sinclair in the Summer of 1964.  He brought a family of two daughters, one out of college, separated from her husband, the other a year younger than myself; also, a son, Thomas, two years my junior.  His wife, Florence, a big woman, somewhat overweight, who, for years after her transfer, lamented the decision to ever leave Texas.

      Our town was full of transplanted Texans.  There was a Sinclair refinery in Corpus Christi; the company decided to close the plant, in the mid-fifties some time.  Because some of the men at the Corpus plant had seniority over some men at the Sinclair plant, many Corpus men used their seniority to bump our fellow townsmen; they took their jobs, forcing our friends and neighbors (the unlucky ones, for the refinery job was the best job in the area), to leave town in search of new work; the Texans came swarming into Sinclair, like locusts some of the town wags would say; as many as fifteen new families appeared, all Texans, all with the view that they had been subject to a great fall; to be ejected from Corpus Christi, God's land, God's territory, with its warm summer days and its beautiful blue city line on the gulf, and to be transported to southern Wyoming, to a town of no more than 700 people (there were times when the population reached as many as 1300), a town of dry features, dry resources, a hinterland of bad winters and bad futures and 500 miles from the nearest real town, Denver, Little D (Dallas, of course, was Big D: even in the competion of urban "D's" apparently this latest fate was still inferior to their former state). 

      The Texans never really accepted Wyoming.  Florence Bedford was not unique in this; although those who did develop affection for the area did come to call it, as no small compliment, "Little Texas." 

      Florence was a sad woman, a lonely woman.  Her husband's nature and his position naturally alienated potential friends.  Hugh was a brass man, tall, forceful, full of his own sense of grandeur and destiny.  His nickname at the University of Houston, where he player football on the Houston Cougars team (a tight end), and completed a degree in petroleum engineering, was "Bigfoot."  Bigfoot Bedford.  The first day he appeared at work, after assuming the reins of the Sinclair Refinery, after much proclamations of the new era recently begun by the purchase of Sinclair Oil by Atlantic Richfield, and the assumption to the throne by Mr. Bedford himself, transfered from ARCO headquarters in Houston by the Board of Directors with specific orders to transform the sleepy little producers refinery into a powerful unit of processing and profit.  Little did it matter that the Sinclair Refinery was one of the smallest refineries in the state of Wyoming,  and, at the same time, one of the most productive.  Little did it matter that only about 7% of the oil reserves of the Lost Soldier Oil Fields, near Bairoil, north of Sinclair, has been consumed in nearly a half-decade of operation; that the Sinclair Refinery was the most modern in the state.  Bedford spoke of it as one would speak of a feeble relative, living at one's home, who had become such a burden to the entire household that each person in the house secretly prayed each night that the tired old phantom might merely fade so far into a dream as to never return.  Yet, Hugh Bedford had the power to, not destroy the old invalid, but to resurrect him.  He spoke of the pathetic condition of the plant, of the town, of the inhabitants of the town, as though they were dying patients, when, in fact, they were not dying, knew they were not dying, knew that this new man of words and slogans and proclamations, and pretentions to spiritual surgery, was more Barnum than Jesus certainly, more jester than heroic reformer.  He had replaced a man as manager, Brick Hausner, who had worked in the yard, who had worked his way up the local ladder, who had a reputation, even among men who did not like him, for being fair, for working hard, for never expecting more from his men than he was willing to give himself.

      On the first day of work, Hugh announced that the signs to the bathrooms in the office would no longer read "Men" and "Women."  Henceforth they would read "Bigfeet" and "Littlefeet," in obvious homage to the new leadership, and in reference to his glory in the gridiron pits of Southwest Conference football.

 

The tradition in Sinclair had been to elect the Refinery Manager as the Mayor of the town.  The refinery owned the town, payed exhorbitant taxes to fund town maintenance and other projects; the town existed because of the existence of the refinery.

      Hugh Bedford leaped at the idea of political activity.  It would look good to the administration in Houston if the local Wyomingites took Hugh so deeply into their busom, in such a short time, as to overwhelmingly elect him as mayor of their town.  Hugh launched a campaign to win the mayoralty.  He promised to revitalize Sinclair.  He promised an olympic-sized swimming pool, miniature golf course, he promised to re-open the local movie theatre, and to have the refinery subsidize it.

      The town was excited by such promises.  Bedford was overwhelmingly elected.  The town waited; it was Autumn.  People wondered if the construction of the swimming pool, already planned for the open lot on Sixth Street, later named McCulloch Park, for Jake McCulloch, a Corpus native who eventually came to embrace Wyoming, and the town of Sinclair, would begin with the first thaw in Spring.  The town waited.  Questions were asked; answers were insinuated.  The miniature golf was a tremendous idea.  The town waited.  Studies were being done.  The plan must first be presented to the Board members; it would need to be approved by the Company, for it was quite a sum of money involved.

      Of course, the swimming pool never was built, the miniature golf course became an inside joke among the people of Sinclair.  Whenever Hugh announced his intention to initiate some boon for the town,  which he did regularly, at nearly every city council meeting, old residents would smile, some times cough, and make some passing comment, out of ear-shot of Mr. Binford, about how wonderful this new project would be if it proved to be as exciting as the miniature golf course out on Sixth Street.

      The lot, destined to be the foundation of the olympic pool and the miniature golf course, before long, was swallowed up by weeds.  Jake McCulloch, who lived across the street from the vacant lot, began to spend his weekends and his evenings planting flowers on the grounds, pruning the trees, pulling weeds, watering the grass.  He would maintain the lot until the great dream of his fellow Texan came to fruition.  He had faith that it would happen.  His stewardship of the land was only a temporary condition.

      In 1980, after almost two decades of stewardship, the park was officially christened Jake McCulloch Park.  By that time Hugh Bedford had disappeared in disgrace; his family has fractured, splintered into parts, moving to Laramie and Denver to the east.  The park had become an even better park than it had been a swimming pool.  Occasionally teen-aged boys could be seen chipping plastic golf balls across the grass, toward some imaginary pin, or some seedling tree, unaware of the history so fertile and near, so fertile and so distant, which came to be remembered, by older residents of Sinclair, as Hugh Bedford's first big lie, in a series of big lies which would provoke even his harshest of critics to amazement at his capacity for fabrication.

 

IV.

 

Rick Melnick is a lanky boy, about thirty-six years old, with blond hair falling in his face across one eye.  He owns the hotel; his mother bought it for him, for the family is quite wealthy, mainly through investment in Western Nuclear stock.  Nearly all the wealthy families of Rawlins are wealthy because of Western Nuclear; Bob Adams family, the Newmans, Doc Jeffrey.  Bob Adams would fly to Perth, Australia, several times a year.  His uranium mines in southern Wyoming had led to further consolidation in uranium investments in western Australia.

      Rick Melnick was an effeminate boy, with a history of what the men of southern Wyoming would consider unmanly behavior.  Rick denied being a homosexual.  The town believed the stories it heard about Rick; believed what they saw in his manner, however.  He was not accepted.  Rick's father, Dean Melnick, was an athlete at Rawlins High School.  Rick had been his first-born; then came a family of four daughters.  Rick was surrounded by sisters; he spent too much time in the company of his mother, did not respond to his father's sense of masculine development: he never hunted, never played sports, did not date women, at least not seriously.

      I remember one story, told by my mother, of how Rick threw a party at the Sinclair Hotel (it was a few years ago, after the purchase of the hotel).  Many people were present, in the bar, spilling into the lobby.  A huge cake was cut; there was dancing, a live band.  Rick's father came in about eleven.  He sat in a side booth, far from the head of the bar where his son sat, in the bright light, cutting and serving the birthday cake.  Dean Melnick drank alone, in a booth which had no light.  Finally, when Rick began to be embarassed, for his father quietly drank, said nothing, did not look at Rick, he called to his father: "Dad, come over and have some cake!  It's your son's birthday!"  Dean finished his drink, rose from the booth, picking up his hat; he turned back to a man sitting at the bar, as he walked toward the front door, and said, loud enough for everyone to hear: "That cock sucker's no son of mine!"  Then he was gone.

      Of course, this was after Rick had sank into the depraved.  He no longer tried to hide his associations.  He had a tendency of finding young men without work, rough men, often drinkers.  He wanted to give them a chance, to let them work, that was all.  He still had women friends; and he told his father that they were lovers, he and Julie Parish, he and Patrice Larmer.  His father knew it was not true.  Rick continued to lie to him, speaking of marriage plans, of his desire to make the hotel work, to have a serious income before he was married.

      Raoul Bernal was a drifter.  He had been in jail since he was seventeen; he was twenty-six now, a tough Mexican, squat, with a scarred face.  He had Rick buy prostitutes from Rawlins for him.  Rick would call them.  One or two would drive to Sinclair, park in the lot behind the hotel.  I would hear them on the staircase, late at night.  Raoul and Rick had been drinking; Rick was an alcoholic, drinking a bottle of whiskey a night.  He also bought cocaine for Raoul. 

      Raoul would offer the women Rick's cocaine.  Then he would have sex with the women, and force Rick to watch, to stay in the room while Raoul had the women.  Rick would give the women money as they left.   Then Raoul would strike Rick, in a drunken fury.  Knock him about the room (they were down the hall from my own room).  Then the night would become quiet.  The night policeman Jack Stanton would drive below my window, down Lincoln Street near the Plaza.  The bar would be busy until about two, on the weekends.  The McCanns would be the last to leave; when their panel truck pulled away, it was a sign to me that the bar had closed.  I could set my watch by it.

      The silence was an eerie silence.  I wondered why I lived there.  I wondered why such a bizarre landscape of depravity and self-abuse should have become my own haven.  And why I didn't leave.

 

Rick was an infrequent visitor to my room.  He would knock quietly at my door, after nights of poisonous contact.  He would apologize.  He would be wearing sun glasses, to hide his swollen eye.  His lip would be swollen sometimes, but he would say nothing about his wound (a badge of honor, for Rick seemed to think that Raoul' violence toward Rick was a sign of his love).

      He would apologize.  He would ask if there was anything I needed.  He was driving in to Rawlins.  He would be back later in the day.

      As I have said, Raoul never entered my room, or approached me at any time, unless accompanied by Rick.  He understood that I had no friendship for him; that I considered him a vermin, a sick coward who fed off a damaged boy. 

      Rick would insist that he and Raoul spend time away from the hotel after a night such as I have described.  Sometimes they would drive to the Melnick cabin, on Elk Mountain.  Sometimes they would fly to Denver, for a weekend in the city.  They would disappear.  Rick felt guilty, feared that I would leave; he would give me three or four days, alone, in the hotel, to give me a sense of privacy in my world.

 

Rick was very proud of the fact that I was a writer, and that he was helping me.  It was probably his greatest source of pride.

      Rick's mother died in 1980, from a cancer in her lung.  That was when Rick became an alcoholic, by ideology.  He drank before that, seriously, began some time after high school.  Yet he drank socially, to laugh and to forget himself.  After his mother's death he began to drink to destroy himself.  His father cared nothing for him.  His sisters tried to help him; yet he was determined to wipe himself off the face of the earth.  He despised himself; he was lonely; he could never touch anyone, move someone; and so he chose, instead (perhaps he was chosen) perverse self-destruction.

 

One must understand that this was a different Sinclair, that I am describing now.  It is not the Sinclair described in the definitive history of Wyoming, written by the wiry, bespectacled, wry T.E.Larson, as "the wonder town of Wyoming," much as the hotel itself, once the wonder of the Plains, headquarters of New York oil executives, with its three-stories and twin towers and red piping roof, in California style, so popular in the Twenties, had fallen into reproof, now the haunt of a spoiled queer, a criminal Mexican, and an erstwhile writer most expert at inertia, with visitors including mostly prostitutes, section gang workers (friends of Bernal), and a strange young man from Minnesota bringing stories into room twenty-two.

 

V.

 

This story is about outsiders.  Rick Melnick is a Rawlins native.  Rawlins, although only six miles west of Sinclair, is, in terms of tenor, situated millions of miles from Sinclair, more close to Hell's opening than any other western town, with the possible exception of Butte, Montana, and Lewiston, Idaho.

      Rawlins is a fighting town.  Rawlins had the choice of being the home of the state's university or the state's penitentiary.  It chose the penitentiary.  It is a town of violence, a frontier town.  There is significant racial strife here: whites and Mexicans.  The Mexicans live on the South Side of town, mostly in run-down shacks where crime is high.  The whites and the Mexicans operate under a tenuous truce at best.  Often, it boils over; sometimes rumbles at the high school develop.  Street fights often occur.  One cannot go to a high school dance without the serious threat of someone, for no obvious reason, issuing a challenge to a fight in the lightless parking lot.  It is a town of tension, a town of frustration.

      Sinclair, on the other hand, is an oasis in the wasteland.  It is a quiet town, with quiet people generally.  There a tree-lined streets, with lawns well managed, some even quite beautiful, especially during the flower-growing seasons. 

      There is little violence in Sinclair.  In 1948 an escaped convict (who escaped from the penitentiary in Rawlins) was shot and killed by County Sheriff Johnny Penland as he tried to pump gasoline into a stolen car at the Parco Garage.  Johnny shot Bill Schram once in the leg.  He bled to death before the ambulance arrived from Rawlins.

      In July of 1963 a man named Tom Kennedy, who lived on Eighth Street, down on the south side of Sinclair, below S Hill, was shot and killed in his kitchen on a hot summer night.

      Those were the only two major acts of violence in the history of the small town. 

 

When I was a boy, only the families of men working for the refinery could live in Sinclair.  There was no such thing as an outsider.  Everyone worked for the same end, the success of the company, for a mutual benefit.

      With the so-called "merger" of Sinclair and Atlantic Richfield (Sinclair being bought by ARCO), the new company sold the houses and the major properties in the town.  It sold the houses at great savings to the workers who lived in them, who had rented them for years, counting the total rent paid over those years as down payments on the houses, leaving only the current balance as the paying price.  Many families paid less than $10,000 for a $25,000 house.

      The company unloaded the holdings; outsiders, or, if you prefer, infrequent visitors,  began to appear.  Since there was no requirement that employees only could "rent" company houses, now that the houses had been sold, and since many new owners of bargain houses decided to capitalize on the sale, by charging a new buyer $30,000 for a house they had bought for $5,000, the composition of the town began to change.

      Hugh Bedford symbolized that change.  He, in fact, was the ARCO official to announce the new policy, which made him, in the beginning of his tenure (he had recently begun to promise a swimming pool and a miniature golf course), a very popular man indeed.  He had placed in the pockets of these working men, with his announcement of the new policy, several thousand dollars, as an initial act of his insouciant presidency.     


 

PART TWO
THE POWER OF THE WIND

 

I.

 

The beauty of David Ruth's friendship with myself is that it helps reestablish my contact with the real town of Sinclair.  David Ruth was born in Sinclair, lived here until he was about nine.   Then his father quit his work at the refinery, moved the family to Minnesota, where he worked in a copper mine.  David never recovered from the move.  He was a young man in exile.  He remembered the heavenly days of youth in the small town where nothing changed, where the Winters were easily forgotten, and the Summers were spent on bicycles and in baseball fields chasing towering flies.

      When David finished high school, he worked in Duluth long enough to make the money he needed to return to Sinclair.  He has been here ever since.  He is the town mayor.  He is trusted and loved by the permanent residents of Sinclair, who open their houses and hearts to his rather frequent visits.  He has a family; met a local girl upon his return to Sinclair.  He has two daughters and a son.  He loves Sinclair, would never consider leaving.  In this he is much different than most of the friends our age, who, upon graduation from high school, set sail on some adventure that carried them far from the placid confines of their home town into the world.

 

David brings me a newspaper.  That is an excuse, so that he can visit me.  We sit in my room, the window open, a breeze coming through the curtain.  It is June, and is beginning to be Summer.

      "Where are you in the Bedford story?" David asks.

      "I don't know.  You know how I write: a spiral turning on an urn," I replied.  "I have introduced him, I have reported his first great lie."

      "Have you written about your own father yet?"

      "No."

      "You must introduce your own father.  So much of the story must come from his eyes."

      "Yes.  You are right."

 

David was scheduled to eat dinner at the Spicers' house, down at the Pump Station.  He couldn't stay.  He just wanted to bring the paper by.

      "How are things with Rick and Raoul?"

      "Two sirens came by and then Raoul battered Rick to a pulp, and now they're best friends again.  Out on a cruise at Seminoe, I presume."

      "I saw Rick yesterday.  He looked terrible.  Oh well, I've got to go."

      He was off.

 

He is correct of course: in this he is correct.  My father must be introduced in this story.  My father was the Chief Clerk at the refinery, under Brick Hausner.  That was when my father liked his job, worked regular hours, coached the town baseball team and basketball team, which were legendary for their skills, establishing dynasties in both sports, to the bitter envy of the Rawlins residents, for the Sinclair team would play the Rawlins teams, would win almost always, and then return to the haven of the small town six miles away considering itself, as individuals and collectively, in almost every way, better than the residents of Rawlins.

      My father played basketball for the University of Wyoming, shortly after the National Championship Team.  He was a left-handed first baseman, graceful, with a compact stroke.  After World War II he even tried out with the New York Yankees, who felt him to be excellent defensively, but not strong enough as a hitter.

      He married my mother, had three children in three years (my sister Laura, my brother Bill, and myself), worked at the refinery, in the office.  Over time he was promoted to, essentially, office manager.  He coordinated the office administration, working under Brick Hausner, managing Personnel, Payroll, and Employee Benefits.

      When Hugh Bedford arrived, my father received a new title: "Director of Personnel, Administration and Records Division"--up to that time he had been "Chief Clerk".  Bedford immediately liked my father.  Both had been athletes, knew sports: this mattered to Bedford.  He saw that the other office workers admired my father.  My father was a quiet man, did not perform, was fair, worked hard.  The office staff benefitted from his example.  Hugh decided that my father was made of the right nature for success.  He called him in to his office several months after assuming the throne to announce to my father: "I have decided that you are the one here, Jake, who can move up the Company ladder.  I'm going to do everything I can to see to it that the Company knows who you are.  If there is an opening in one of the major offices, I think I'll recommend you.  It may mean a transfer, but it will be a real step up for you, both in terms of money and responsibility.  And also prestige."

      My father told Hugh he would think about it.

      A week later Hugh called my father in to his office.  "Well, should we go ahead with this?  This plan to move you up the ladder?"

      "I've thought about it, Hugh," my father said.  "To tell you the truth, I think I'd rather not transfer.  I like this town.  I want to spend as much time with my family as possible."

      Hugh was in shock.  Part of this shock came from his assessment that every man was, secretly or otherwise, doing his best to gain promotion, success; in part this shock grew out of another assumption Hugh had made in early life, and which, as far as he was concerned, had been proved over and over again in his rise up the Company ladder, that any man could be seduced by the offer of power.  My father had refused his seduction.  If my father had said yes, then he would have become dependent upon Hugh Bedford.  Hugh hated independent men.  He did not hate them personally: he feared them.  The truth is: he loved them, admired them; yet, he needed to break them, for they represented some quality which threatened his capacity to rule.

      My father did not need Hugh's help: that, essentially, was the message.  Of course it was offered (the message) in such a way as to not be alienating.  My father did not wish to alienate the manager.  He merely wished to have his own life.  And, as he later told me: "Hugh likes nothing so much as to be able to play God with people.  He never gives anything without taking something away.  He never gives anything without keeping an IOU in his wallet."

 

This assessment of my father's regarding Hugh Bedford came years later, after watching the refinery manager, from close quarters, for several years.  In the beginning, my father tried to adjust to the boisterous, arrogant man.  My father tried to find the best in each man; with Bedford, he had trouble finding the positive qualities.

      Bedford immediately settled on scapegoats in the office.  Joe Jordan, the Projects Manager, was one of his first scapegoats.  Jordan was a peripheral man, always ill-defined, unnoticed.  He lived with his wife and one daughter, Brenda, on Eighth Street, on the corner, two blocks from our house.  When I rode by this house I almost never remembered who lived there.  Each of the other houses on the blocks had life spilling out on to the street.  The Parmens, the Arnolds, the Halpiaus.  The Musgraves, the McCartys, and, across the street, the Stipes.  There was noise in these houses, children, movement in the yard, the noise of lawn mowers, voices, trucks being started.  Joe Jordan was an outsider himself, even though he had lived in Sinclair for years.  He was religious, fundamentally so.  His wife rarely appeared in the yard.  Brenda was a strange, straight young woman, with straight black hair.  Joe could be seen, at times, in his yard, usually wearing his company hard-hat.  He moved about in a vacuum, silent, detached. 

      Because Bedford sensed that Jordan was alone, without real friends, and, as so, vulnerable, he began to persecute Jordan.  He gave him the worst possible tasks, impossible tasks.  Then, when they could not be accomplished, at the Thursday office meeting, during which all the department heads met to report to Bedford, he would publicly castigate Jordan, sitting at the long table in the boardroom.  He would laugh, cruelly berate Jordan, glance about the room to see if others were laughing with him, enjoying his belittling of this small man.  Several laughed, out of fear.  None, as time went on, respected Hugh Bedford's judgment.  Fear in the office began to grow, because of the cruelty to which the man was prone.  He was too powerful in the Company to alienate without risk; he was too large and powerful physically to challenge after an insult, if the men in the office might have been so prone.

      He was a large man and he pushed the world.  Pushed it because he felt physically capable of pushing.  Physically capable of exerting his will.

      Joe Jordan remained one of his scapegoats throughout his tenure in the office.  My father told me about an incident in 1973.  Work was being done on the units in the refinery: 780, 680, the reformer.  General maintenance work; and retainer walls were being constructed.  Bedford had bought land down on the Platte River, not far from the Golf Course.  The land was on a cliff, overlooking the Platte which wound below.  He was building a house on his property.  It was like a castle, a big house, in a dramatic setting.  It was the talk of the town.  Who was building it?  The contractors who were doing the work inside the refinery were ordered by Bedford to work half-days out at his house, on the construction site.  Material was transported from the refinery out to his new house.  Of course, because of this, the work at the refinery was not being completed on time.  The costs had soared above the projected figures.  Company headquarters contacted Bedford for an explanation of the delays, the cost overrun.

      At the Thursday office meeting that week Bedford spoke of his call from Houston.  There would need to be an explanation.  Because Joe Jordan was the project manager, he was asked to explain the problems.  Everyone in the room knew the reasons for the delays and the cost excesses.  None dared to speak the obvious.  The office staff was frozen.  Joe Jordan could not speak.  He said something about the contractors being available only part of the day, but Bedford cut him off.  He lacerated Jordan, before his co-workers, accusing him of laziness, inefficiency, drunkenness, threatened his job, and then gloated as Joe Jordan sat in his chair speechless.

      It was a grand performance by Bedford.  It was a performance, with others to be sure, which led my father eventually to take an early retirement.  He never belittled my father; but he had his targets, men my father liked and respected, whom he belittled regularly, as a part of his regular standard work-week fare.  It was a game to him, a kind of banter, often with the same surface charm one might see in the flirtations of love, for he was a charming man; yet, the surface banter did not hide the violent ridicule he weilded inside his charm.  People feared him.  He enjoyed being feared.  My father did not fear him, despised him, did his job, usually quietly, turning more inward, now disliking his work, wishing it would end.  The workplace was poisoned by Bedford's presence.  The office staff began to live, in a professional sense, for his regular trips to Houston, New York, Los Angeles, or any other place where he traveled under the guise of Company business.  He milked the Company regularly; he understood that this was the game and the rules of the game.  He felt no remorse.  He had the Company pay for trips around the country.  He could always justify it.  The office staff did not really resent this form of dishonesty; they resented the prerogative of the dishonesty, but not the effect.  For it got him out of the office, cleared the air, as if a cancer had been removed, and the living tissues of the office, again, were allowed to function.  Their humor returned.  It again became a good place to work.  Until his shadow returned; and his edgy Houston voice came slanting through the halls again, announcing his return.  And the office again became icy.

 

There were other scapegoats.  Bob Woodhouse, a thin, bizarre man, who once lived two houses from our house, with his pretty wife Pat, who spent every Summer afternoon in her blue one-piece bathing suit, on a chaise lounge, sunning herself in her backyard.  This went on for years, until Pat developed skin cancer; only then did her ritual end.  Not long after this, the Woodhouses sold their house to the Arnolds, and moved to a singles apartment house in Rawlins, to escape the sounds of children, which apparently drove them to distraction in Sinclair.

      Bob was a vegetarian, thin, to the point of perversity, a health fanatic, who walked everywhere, and pronounced his walking, in his gait, an act of sainthood, an act of intelligent living.  He had few friends.  He and Pat had each other, and their knowledge that they were living correctly.  He was the Chief of Payroll, worked under my father.  My father liked Bob alright; they worked together well.  Even remembering the calls my father received from Bob, when my brother and I were just lads, when we, with our friends, would run pass patterns across Scotty Massey's front yard (later the Parmen house), cross the invisible barrier separating the Massey and the Woodhouse yard and streak down the sideline and make catches reminiscent of Lenny Moore hauling in a Johnny Unitas pass against the Green Bay Packers on the ten yard line and racing into the endzone.

      Bob Woodhouse did not understand moderation.  He was a fanatic, also, in his lawn care habits.  He cut his yard twice weekly, using the hand push mower with the grass-catcher on the back.  We were not allowed on his yard.  This was the law.  Whenever we crossed the magic barrier (the Masseys had already given up trying to regulate our wild manners), that is, whenever the Colts crossed the fifty yard line, the telephone rang in our house.  Less than ten seconds would pass before the front door would open and our mother would call: "Bill and Mike Clark, get in here right away!"  On the orders of our father, who was talking to Bob Woodhouse, promising him again that he would keep his two sons off Bob's well-tended lawn.

      My father endured such childish indiosyncracies. 

      The world was quite small; people in the world were small.  My father was very philosophical about life.  He did not philosophize; he was a quiet man.  He did not read philosphy, or literature, or history.  He had a profound understanding of how to live, however.  He was a gentleman.  He had an inborn quality of knowing, much deeper than intellectual cognition, to be sure: more instinct than speculation.

      He thought Bob Woodhouse, generally, a fool.  Yet, he respected Bob as a worker.  He put in long hours, was conscientious, had a difficult job and did it well.  When Bedford decided to include Woodhouse in his group of wounded birds, to be pecked by the chief bully, my father resented it, not out of any real love of Woodhouse, but more out of a sense that Bedford had breached all acceptable human behavior.

      He made Woodhouse the laughing stock of the office.  Whenever a difficult job arose, he would say: "Give it to Woodhouse!"  He ridiculed his appearance, so stick-thin in his white shirts and his thick sun-tan; his facial features sagged, he had lost so much weight, as though his skin drooped on his face, for all the substance of the facial structure had been lost.  He ridiculed his masculinity.  Made comments about what he would do for Pat that Bob could not do.  Then he would laugh, spread his arms out, throw himself back in his black leather chair, guffawing his false laugh, watching to judge his reaction from the others.  "Be careful you don't end up like Woodhouse," he would say.  "That's where celibacy gets you!  That's where sterility gets you!"

 

II.

 

My best friend in childhood, other than my brother, was Ralph Huntington, a fat boy, self-conscious, pampered by his mother.  The Huntingtons were a family of men, one over seven foot tall, all big.  They lived, first, when we lived on Ninth Street, in the wooden houses reserved for foremen and intermediate management (there was a hierarchy of house-types: stucco, wood, brick), one house north of us, across from the old vacant lot which served as the town's first baseball field.  Then, after we moved two houses away, to the yellow brick house on Eighth Street, they lived one house west of us.  We somehow moved around them, moved into a larger house; they were our best friends in town.  They were fellow Catholics, in a town largely Protestant, or Lutheran, or Baptist (the Texans); there were few Catholics.

      Ralph was an overweight young man, self-conscious about his weight, yet athletic, as were all the boys in the family.  Ralph was the first-baseman on our baseball team, a devastating hitter.  One year, in Babe Ruth, he hit over .900, with almost a home-run a game.  It was the stuff legends are made of.  He was not very ruthless however.  He played football on the high school team, tackle.  Bedford, upon watching him play, guaranteed my friend a full-ride scholarship to his alma-mater.  It would all be taken care of.  Ralph would be a football player at Houston, and not have to worry about financing his college education.

      Of course, that was hot air.  Nothing happened.  He was working on it.  Ralph was not a great football player; he was too gentle.  He could not have played football at Houston.  Still, Bedford lied about his intentions, about his ability to move the world.

      Ralph's father, George, had been a yard foreman for years before the appearance of Hugh Bedford.  George was a strange man.  He was a tyrant in his own home, a bitter man.  He had married young, the woman of his dreams.  He had begun to raise a family with her: three sons.  Then his wife died.  He married her sister, Edy.  He did not know why he married Edy, probably because she reminded him of his first wife.

      George never recovered from the tragedy.  Edy did not banter with him, did not oppose him, the way Ruth had.  Edy submitted to him, to his moods, to his drinking.  George would sit as his dining room table, alone, drinking a shot of whiskey, a glass of beer, reading Saga and Old West magazines.  The television was in the other room, the living room, some thirty feet away.  He watched television, read magazines, drank.  When moved to exert himself, he would rise from the table, pass out to the back door stoop.  He would sit on the concrete steps, staring at his boots, watching the cars pass occasionally, looking out into the space of Wyoming.  Shark's Tooth Ridge was not far off.  Desert.  Hills and a landscape of sagebrush.  An occasional robin would land on his yard, or on the wire above the street.

      If you rode by on a bicycle and saw George sitting on his stoop, a dethroned king, almost homeless, always alone, and called out "Howdy, George!" the chances were good that he would only twist his face a bit, look at you, look back down at his shoe, say nothing.  He was bitter.  He was a sour tyrant.  His children feared him, tried not to cross him.  His wife was a bundle of nerves with him.  Their house was haunted by his gruff presence.  A living ghost he was.  He had lost his capacity for youth it seems, lost his capacity to laugh, thereby releasing his burden.  Instead he drank.

      It was no secret that he drank.  The word at the refinery was that he drove home several times a day, during his work shift, to drink, before returning to work.  As a foreman, he had the use of a Company car.  He needed a car to oversee work being done at many different locations in the refinery.  He did drive home several times a day; we saw the car parked beside the house, and learned to avoid entering the house on these occasions.  Ralph was deathly afraid of irritating his father.  He went out of his way to patronize George, increasing the alienation on both sides.

      Ralph adopted my family in place of his own.  He idolized my father, who seemed to Ralph all the things that his own father was not.  Years later, after he was married, and his wife gave birth to a son, Ralph named him Jake, in honor of my father.

      Bedford disliked George Huntington from the very beginning.  He had heard stories about George's drinking while on work.  George seemed soft to Bedford, his will and character seemed to lack some necessary moral quality.  Yet there was something strong in George Huntington at the same time.  George was tough.  He did not back down an inch from Bedford; unlike many men at the refinery who shrank when confronted by the plant manager, George stood his ground, argued his case, was not easily swayed, was certainly not defeated by the word of his boss, Hugh Bedford.

      Bedford disliked George Huntington even more because of this defiance.  George did not fear him.  Hugh called George in to his office to warn him about drinking on the job.  He had heard rumors about George.  He did not want to hear any more about George's proclivity for the grain.  George denied drinking on duty.  He challenged Bedford to prove it.  It ended in raised voices.  He warned George.  George warned Hugh.  It was an impasse.

      Bedford took a liking for George's wife, Edy.  She was a strong woman, strong in some ways, fragile in others.  He counseled Edy that he, Hugh Bedford, was the man to help George with his problem.  He knew what George had put his family through.  Edy could count on him.  He was going to help George.

      Edy defended Hugh Bedford to my mother, and to friends.  He was charming.  He was trying to obtain for Ralph a scholarship to play college football in Texas.  He was going to help George defeat his drinking problem.  He was genuinely concerned.  If anyone could help George it would be this man with such concern for his workers.  Hadn't he said to her: "Edy, if a man isn't happy and productive with himself, he can't be happy and productive working for me.  My desire to help George isn't entirely unselfish now.  I want the best men I can find working for me.  George is a good man.  We've only got to help him remember how good he can be.  That's the whole point, isn't it"?

      He seemed like a saint to her.  Maybe he could be the one to make her life again seem constant.

 

It was a late night during the Summer of 1968.  My father received a long distance phone call.  It was George.  He was in Meeker, Colorado: in jail.  He had been arrested for drunk driving, had driven off the road and wrecked the company car.  Could my father come to get him?

      My father drove the several hundred miles that night to retrieve George from the Colorado State Police.  The car was badly damaged.  It was really the end for George Huntington, at the refinery.  Instead of helping George, as he had promised Edy, Bedford called him into his office and immediately suspended him for a month.  There would be a hearing.  It was a very serious offense.  The Company could not tolerate such behavior from one of its senior employees.

      Relations between George Huntington and Hugh Bedford became even more strained.  They could not talk.  George would not simply quietly accept a lecture from the boss.  He would snap back at Bedford.  He would not let Bedford push indefinitely; at a certain point, where a line was drawn, invisible to Bedford, but absolute to George, he would begin to struggle with Bedford.  Bedford decided to get rid of him.

      He threatened to fire George.  Eventually he did fire him, although it was not considered termination.  George was forced to retire.  Before his benefits accrued full value. 

      Almost over night, George was out of work.  George had no life other than his work.  The only other part of his life, that of sitting at his dining room table, drinking whiskey and beer, and reading Old West magazines now became his entire life. 

      The family had no money.  The three older boys were all married and living away from home.  Ralph was finishing high school.  The house had been paid off.  They had few real needs; they had enough to cover these basic needs.  George had worked almost thirty years for the Company; now, by being forced to retire early, he was eligible only for about one-quarter of the benefits he would have received at full retirement.

 

George would rise early each morning and sit at his dining room table.  He would have breakfast, rise, sit on the back porch, until about 10:30 (during the warm months).  Then, after being home long enough, George would go to work.  He would drive his car out to refinery, sit in his car outside the main gate.  He would sit for hours.  Then, he would drive along the refinery fence, slowly, watching the distant activity, smelling the smells, the ammonia of the Alky Plant, the sulphur, the tar smell of the Crude Unit.  He would feel the steam, and the steely crashing of pumps on the units.  The box cars would pull in to load and unload finished product and supplies.  The Newman Transit gas trucks would fill up at the Truck Rack.  They would be filling four trucks at a time, on some days.  George knew each truck, each owner, each driver.  All his life had been bound within the tight fabric of this town, this industrial mechanism, a living being, with moving parts and moving human parts, a clock, an organism as chaotic as it was organized, regulated by Time and regulating Time.  He needed this place.  He needed the men inside the gates, the human contact, the struggle, the sense of purpose.  He had nothing now.  He had nothing to tie him to his youth, to tie him to some vision of beginnings.

      Each day he drove around the gates, outside the refinery yard.  Men working in the plant saw him and commented on it.  George was not a very popular man.  He was gruff, had no sense of humor (that was not true.  He did have a sense of humor.  Only, he almost never showed it, except to my mother).  They pitied him.  He had become a symbol to them.  George Huntington was what could happen if you crossed Bedford too often.  George was a victim, but a victim as much suicide as homicide.  For George had gone too far.  His drinking had become too much.  There was no way that Bedford could let him stay.  George had made his own bed.  That he had to sleep in it was just the way of the world.  There was nothing anyone could do.

 

George developed a cancer not long after that.  He lingered.  He was too bitter against Life to die quietly, to give it up with grace.  And perhaps he was just too tough, too strong to give in to Death.  He lingered.  His family suffered.  He was more bitter than ever, because he became dependent on them, and was disgusted by his own need for support.

      Bedford told Edy, when he saw her again, at a Christmas party at the Recreation Hall, that he had done what was best for George.  George couldn't work any longer.  The problem had really become too great.  George would need professional help now.  There was nothing more that Bedford could do.  He had tried everything.  George would not allow Hugh to be his friend and help to save him.  Everything would be alright for them.  If Edy needed anything all she had to do was to call Hugh.  He would take care of everything.

 

There was a tradition at the Sinclair refinery that Summer jobs would be available for any children of refinery employees attending college.  The jobs would be a way to help defray the cost of completing a college education.  Bedford continued this tradition, with one exception.  My friend Ralph Huntington was not offered a job with the refinery.  We attended the University of Wyoming in Laramie together.  There were about ten men and women, Sinclair natives, studying at a college or university.  Each was offered a Summer job, except Ralph, who, because of his father, was blacklisted by Bedford.  This was the same man who had promised him a scholarship to the University of Houston when he was a sophomore in high school.  (That promise had died as silent a death as had the original promise of the swimming pool and the miniature golf course.)  Now, when he really had a chance to help Ralph, with something tactile, and to help Edy, as he had promised, for the Huntingtons could not afford to help send Ralph through school, he did nothing.  He held his grudge against that old man who had been so foolish as to stand up to him.  George was coughing up blood in the back bedroom of his home; I could see him and hear him, as I stood behind our house.  He was dying.  Still, Bedford felt the need to teach him a lesson; George was stubborn, that was his main problem.  He had to be shown.  There could be no leniancy.  It wasn't possible for him to bend now.  He had no obligation to support the son of a man who, technically, did not work for the refinery any longer.  Yes, he would support the children of those who worked for the Company, helping them with Summer employment.  That would not be extended to Ralph Huntington simply because he no longer was qualified.

 

 

III.

 

Hugh Bedford had three children: Jackie had been married three years, had a daughter named Belinda; she was divorced, and lived, alternately, in Denver and in Sinclair, with her family.  Mary Sue was one year younger than I, a cute brunette, with braces, very much a Texan in accent, a decent young woman, with a sense of humor, slightly embarassed by her father's position of power.  Thomas, his only son, was a year younger than Mary Sue.  Thomas would be Hugh's protogee; he would study petroleum engineering, probably at the Colorado School of Mines, a pretigious academic institution, especially with relation to the petroleum sciences.  Thomas would be a successful athlete (a quarterback), a scholar, like his father before him; he would be popular, the Rawlins High School Outlaw Day King, to escort the Queen; he would, perhaps, succeed his father in his position as refinery manager at the Sinclair Refinery.  No, that would not be enough.  Hugh, himself, would not remain at Sinclair for long; he had ambitions, political ambitions.   Washington D.C.: that is where Hugh's ambition would lead him eventually; as for Tom, perhaps returning to Houston would be the correct direction, after school at Colorado Mines, and then graduate school, perhaps at an Ivy League school.

 

Florence was a portly woman, attractive in a sort of stately way: proud, with a sense of humor that could be stilted, sophisticated.  She was the daughter of a wealthy man, Horace Kilburn, a Texas oilman.  The Kilburn family was one of the best of Texas families.  Hugh Bedford met her in school, courted her with a zeal which produced an affectionate reaction from Miss Kilburn.

      The marriage was a great coup for Hugh Bedford, whose own family had been poor, unsuccessful, socially unexalted.

      Hugh's father was a wildcat oilman.  His mother was Edna Randall, the grandaughter of Irving Randall of the Virginia Randalls.  The Randall family, in Virginia, had been wealthy (agriculture first, then horse-breeding), and socially prestigious.  The Texas Randalls were a branch of the Virginia Randalls; in fact, they were a branch which had met financial ruin in Virginia (a series of bad investments), had moved to Texas to regain its footing, did not really regain its footing, lingered in Texas, making small gains, trying to resurrect its standing through wildcat oil production.

      Clayborne Bedford met Edna Randall (the baby of the family) in Dallas at a political convention.  They dated for several months.  She informed Clayborne about her aristocratic past.  He proclaimed his own; he felt he was a prince in disguise, like in the fairy tales.  They spoke of recapturing old glory, one that was demolished by bad luck, the other which was mythological, perhaps had never been, but was carried in the memory, or in the cavity of dreams, a photographic negative, perhaps the photograph itself, an image of the future.

      They married, as much out of shared longing for some distant vision, some actualized romance which was, essentially, themselves and their own dreams, individually, much more than for love of a mate.  They had children.  Clayborne struggled with his investments.  Dry holes were very numerous for him.  Yet he did not quit.  He got some luck.  A hole came up.  They had some money.  Their children were growing.

      Hugh was the oldest of six children, and, from the very beginning, he was an achiever.  He had no place in his world for failure.  He was intolerant of missed opportunity.  What his father had not managed to attain, Hugh, the first-born son of Clayborne, would achieve, one-hundred fold.

      He was a straight-A student, gifted most in math and science.  He was an all-state basketball and football player.  Schools all across the South--Baylor, Texas A&M, SMU, Alabama, LSU--offered him a scholarship.  Since Houston University had the best petroleum engineering program (this could be argued), he chose Houston. 

      He played both football and basketball at Houston.  He was a better football player, however, than a basketball player.  He continued to excel at school, making the Dean's List regularly; he came to be known as "The Dean" by his teammates.

      He was called "Bigfoot" by his coach however, the line coach, Salty Barrows.  He was a tough player, enjoying the nature of the game, enjoying the aspect of physical intimidation.  He played defensive tackle and tight end.  He lettered three years, was honorable mention All-Conference in his senior year.

      He met Florence.  She was perky, not beautiful, not, in herself, especially desired.  She was the daughter of Horace Kilburn however.  That made her interesting surely.  The Kilburns were large landowners near Houston and also Austin.  She was a catch; she would pave Hugh's way to financial and political ascendancy.  Hugh pursued her with flowers, candies, rides in his car, dances, trips to New Orleans.  She was surprised he was so interested: there were many pretty girls he could have.  Hugh was not as interested in love or sex as the was in this "future."  He was a man with a plan.  He asked Florence to marry him, during his senior year (her sophomore year).  How could she say no?  He was handsome, big, smart, vain, to be sure.  He was desired by all the co-eds at Houston.  He had a good "future"; everyone agreed.  She presented him to their family; everybody liked him.

      They were married that year, that Summer after he graduated.  Florence never did finish school.  Hugh went to work for a small oil company in Houston, Atlas Oil.  He helped turn a struggling independent company, owned by three partners, with two oil fields and one manufacturing plant, into a serious small local company in the oil rich Houston area.

      He quarreled with the ownership.  He wanted more control over the operations.  He took full credit for the gains they had made.  They resented his ambition.  He resigned; and went to work for an ARCO refinery in East Houston, as one of their corps of engineers.

 

Jackie was born by that time.  Hugh was making a name for himself.  People were beginning to notice this towering, talking man.  He was an egoist.  This was obvious.  He believed himself marked for greatness.  Nothing else mattered.

      He quickly made an impression at the ARCO plant.  He was quick, smart, understood each detail of the operation.  He worked long hours.  He was eager for responsibility.  One afternoon, after working two successive shifts, covering for another engineer who had called in sick, Hugh was called in to the administrative office building.  He was asked to call on Will Stringer, the refinery manager's assistant.  He entered Stringer's office, tired, dirty, eager for sleep.  "We've been watching you closely," Stringer said to Bedford, after urging him to sit in a large naugahide chair, near the window.  "We like the way you're made, Hugh.  Doug and I have decided that we're going to help you climb the ladder.  We think you got the right kind of guts, man.  We're always looking for some new blood!"

 

It was a Summer morning, a Saturday, in 1973.  Hugh had been out late that Friday night.  He was building a new house, down by the river.  Florence did not understand why he was building a new house.  The family lived in the spacious manager's house on Seventh Street.  It was a large clean brick house, with five bedrooms, a nice yard, nicely furnished.  Hugh had decided, however, without discussing it with Florence, that he needed his own house, a castle; he was tired of living in the little dump on Seventh Street.  He wanted to live out of town,  down by the Golf Course.

      He began to build it.  He asked Florence nothing about her desires for the new house, what she would want; and, of course, he never discussed finances with her: that was his business.  He would take care of everything.

      She did not always know where Hugh would spend his nights lately.  She had heard rumors.  She had seen a young blonde woman, an athletic woman, speaking excitedly with Hugh at the ARCO annual dinner at the hotel Fountain Room.  Hugh was smiling, charmed, instead of charming.  Florence understood this look, this smile: Hugh was having an affair.

      They were eating breakfast; it was Saturday morning.  It seems they had less and less to talk about.  Hugh read the paper: sports, and the financial page.  Florence told him stories, what she'd heard from the women in town.  It was a boring life, she decided.  But that wasn't new.  It had been boring all along really.  She could live with boredom.

      Hugh was reading his paper, eating toast, with strawberry jam.  He looked preoccupied.  Finally, he looked up from the paper.  "I have something to tell you, Florence," he said, matter of factly.  "I've decided that you aren't management material.  If I'm going to go anywhere from here I'm going to have to have a wife who is management material!"

 

Hugh continued to live at the house on Seventh Street.  When the new house was finished he moved in with his girlfriend, Susan Harper.  They had met at a ski lodge in Vail, Colorado.  She was young, blonde, shapely, charming.  She had just finished college, studying business at the University of Colorado, in Boulder.  She was engaging.  She could manipulate him.  Love was new for them; she came to live with him, in his castle above the Platte.

 

IV.

 

The story goes on.  Each story goes on.  The story of Rick and Raoul: they have returned from Las Vegas.  They drove all night together, to reach Las Vegas, to gamble, and see a show with Wayne Newton.  They made over $300 at the blackjack table.  Rick apologizes, again, for the trouble the other night.

      He knocked lightly on my door.   Raoul was standing behind him, smiling like a saintly child, quiet, peeping in.  On his best behavior.  On orders from Rick, who does not want me to leave. 

      They have mended fences, I suppose.  Rick still wears sunglasses to cover his eyes.  They have been taking cocaine.  Rick has wasted the family money, the legacy left to him by his mother.  She bought him the hotel, after it closed, was a corpse of a building, after the new highway (I-80) bypassed Sinclair and effectively dried up the tourist trade which had, up to that point, kept the hotel busy.  For eight years it was empty, deserted, only the bar in operation.  The drug store, cafe, barber shop, busy foci of active Sinclair life when I was a boy, all were closed, boarded up. 

      Rick's mother forwarded him money from her estate when he decided to resurrect the hotel.  They poured money into the old dinosaur like gasoline into an edsel (please excuse the metaphor); repairs were made.  The mines at Hanna were booming.  There wasn't enough housing in Rawlins.  The power plants at Rock Springs; the trona plants at Rock Springs and around Green River.  The area was being flooded by new workers.  It was a new boom.  Rick would open the hotel for commuters to the new jobs opening up all over the county, as well as the neighboring counties.

      It was a grand plan.  And it worked, for a while.  The hotel was full for a time.  They the energy glut came.  The Hanna mines stopped running thirty-nine trains of coal to Dallas, Texas every day.  Oil became cheap again.  The energy boom became a bust.  Workers were laid off.  Housing opened up, as people left the area to find work.

      Rick went bankrupt.  He had no business sense.  His father was disgusted.  His mother was dying of cancer.  Rick retreated even further into alcohol, and, occasionally, drugs.  He was trying to die, trying to avenge his father, so disgusted at the compulsions and character of his only son.  Before long the hotel closed.  Rick lived there alone.  David tells of a time, last Winter, when the power company shut off heat and water to the hotel, for back bills; Rick lived alone in a building without heat, seeing his breath in the air, dressed in layers of sweaters, sitting in his sleeping bag, refusing to leave, having no where to go; now that his mother was dead, his home was not available to him; his father would not let him come home.

      There was no water, no bathroom facilities.  David said that Rick had a supply of baggies, in which his kept his bodily waste, carrying them out to the garbage bin in the back of the hotel once a day.  The town complained to the power company.  The hotel was being destroyed, frozen out; the pipes were breaking; the property was being destroyed.  Finally, the power company gave in.

      Rick, presently, is trying to sell the hotel to a couple from California who had plans to turn the hotel into a retirement home.  They have an interest in the building, for its historic value.  Rick really doesn't want to sell the hotel, for it is his home now; if he sells it, however, he says he will move to Arizona, to live in the sun.  He has no place to go in Rawlins now; his sisters don't wish him to move in with their families.  That is understandable.  His father won't let him near his home.  If he does not sell the hotel he will probably continue to drink in this skeletal haven, until the drink kills him and solves his problem of existence, which was huge in the beginning for Rick, and has lost all proportion since he entered adolescence and found no escape from his adolescent experience.

 

They wondered if I would like to go to dinner with them--at Bob Adams' restaurant, in Rawlins.  I said no.  I watched them skip, like innocent children, to Rick's Datsun sports car parked down below my window.  Raoul is never far from killing Rick.  It will end badly.  It cannot end gracefully.  It is doomed to some violent end, some perverse scenario.  Nothing can be done about it.  Nothing can be done for Rick.  He is marked.  He has no skills and no discipline, and he cannot say no.  That is his great failing.  He cannot say no.  Mostly, he can't say no to himself.  And everything he does is saboutaged by his guilt, which guilt will not allow Rick to achieve anything beyond his own persecution.

 

PART THREE
NEWSREEL: THE HISTORICAL DIGRESSION

 

I.

 

I have spoken nothing, up to this point, about the great beginnings of Sinclair, Wyoming.  It existed, in the beginning, after the centuries of Crow and Shoshoni wars, and the Arapahoe and Sioux wars, back in that dim time, nearly as dim in its own way as the wars of their predecessors, the ungainly saurians, who fought against Time for continued dominance, back in the epoch when Wyoming was a savannah and not a wasteland, back when the land under my house stood very near the Pacific Ocean, was beachfront property in a sense; the swamp gave way to heat and to the appearance of the Mongolian tribes across the Bearing Strait, and to the usurpation of the traveling Asian continental bookend, which we now understand to be the modern West Coast. 

      I do not intend to recapitulate the entire history of the precious turf (to call it sod would even be a generous exaggeration) under which I got my own bearings as a child and, eventually, as a young man.  Sinclair existed as a railroad spur on a Union Pacific Railroad map in the late 1800's, named Grenville, after the Civil War general Grenville Dodge, Indian fighter, and chief engineer of the UP's epic transcontinental railroad venture.  The entire length of southern Wyoming became dotted with supply depots to support the creeping westward expansion of the iron rails, which depots became, in time, the major towns of southern Wyoming: Cheyenne, Laramie, Rawlins, Rock Springs.  Other supply depots merely died, unable to sustain themselves after the passing of the construction crews.

      The railroad needed a water supply, for their station in Rawlins.  A booster pump station was erected six miles east of Rawlins, to carry North Platte river water pumped up from Fort Fred Steele.  This was Grenville.  It was 1867.

      Nothing changed in Grenville over the next fifty years.  However, in 1922, Frank Kistler, director of the Producers and Refiners Company, out of Denver, began scrutinizing southern Wyoming for a suitable site for an oil refinery.  The bulk of the Producers and Refiners Company crude production came from the Ferris and Lost Soldier oil fields over sixty miles distant from the railroad.  The Company needed to build a refinery near the railroad and in proximity to the two oil fields.           

      Grenville was chosen.

      In October 1922, ground was broken for the refinery.  Officials of the Company stayed in the Ferris Hotel in nearby Rawlins.  Men building the refinery lived, many with their families, in primitive shacks and tents on the south side of the tracks (soon called "Rag Town" by the residents), or in bunkhouses by the refinery.

      The Producers and Refiners Company, meanwhile, bought up all the land adjacent to the refinery to keep outside interests from entering Grenville, to raise land value in speculation or in competing with PARCO should expansion of the refinery become a requirement.  This land would be used for development of the town site, where the workers would live, in a kind of medieval kingdom, a town of guilds and tradesmen, all working for the common end: a self-sufficient community.  An island, in a desert of memories mostly, and wind and snow.

      In the late Spring of 1923, the Denver architecture firm of Fisher and Fisher drew up the designs and the blueprints of the town.  White posts began to appear on the site.  These staked out the sewer and water trench lines of the town.  Digging began.  An army of workers worked from dusk to dusk; and, within weeks, the desert land, which had not changed in centuries, became a city of trenches.  Trains arrived daily, laden with supplies: steel pipe and sewer pipe, with hundreds of men waiting at the depot to help transport the supplies to the building sites.

      On March 13, 1923, at 3:30 PM, the refinery started up.  A fire was lit under the first completed still; the process of refining had begun.

      In April, the Parco Post Office was opened.  The name of the town had quietly been changed from Grenville to Parco.

      All work on the laying of water and sewer mains along the side streets of the skeletal town was completed in late July.  On August 1, ground was broken for the first home.  While some workmen erected the first lot of homes, others established the grades of streets and sidewalks.  By the time the first houses were ready for occupancy, in November of the following year, every street in the townsite had been surfaced, all curbing had been installed, cement sidewalks had been laid, and a lawn was planted at every home.

      On October 1, 1923, Superintendent Arch Robison and his assistant R.L. Mitchell, drove a Dodge to Rawlins from Parco, six miles total, powered by the gas from the new cracking plant which had just been completed.  The gas used was the first produced by the refinery.  Construction of the cracking plant had begun just 157 days before.

 

The building went on, through the Winter of 1923-24.  It was a relatively mild Winter.  There was one fatality in Rag Town: Will Bennett's wife, Lucille, contracted pneumonia, resulting from exposure.  She had been living with her husband in a sheepwagon during the Winter.  Will was working on a home which would be their own about a year later.  Lucille was a delicate woman, more geared for poetry and tea than a Wyoming Winter inside a wagon laced with canvas.

      She was the only fatality.

      Curt Riessens was burned when a boiler blew up near the operational still (680).  He was treated by Doc Sanden at the Parco Hospital (the refinery First Aid Station), and recovered fully from his injuries.  He was the first worker injured while on duty at the refinery.

      The work went on, through the Winter, even when the ground froze.  Fires were burning in the cooking pits in Rag Town.  It was early morning, and the men had risen and gathered wood and begun to build fires and start coffee pots.  Ernie Kiehl's wife, Amanda, was hurrying about in her Winter coat and her white apron, with her boots, trudging in the snow.   Bimbo, the Rag Town mascot, a german shepherd dog, who seemed to belong to everyone, was following Amanda Kiehl as she went from door to door, from sheepwagon to tent to next tent.  The coffee was ready.  It was almost time for work.

 

The first building actually completed was the First National Bank (which later became the Sinclair Credit Union), which housed, as well, the Parco Mercantile on the ground floor, and the executive offices of the Producers and Refiners Company on the second floor.   Executives of the Company were eager to have a real headquarters from which to direct both the operation of the refinery, as well as the creation of the town.

      The next building completed was the Parco Motors Company, later called the Parco Garage (outside of which, in the late 1950s, Les Schram would be killed by the County Sheriff as he tried to fill the tank of a car he had stolen from a house on Madison Street).  It was located on the Lincoln Highway, directly across the the Bank and Mercantile store.  It was large enough to store 100 cars, had two gasoline pumps, and was managed by Gus Flieschli, an experienced garage man who lived in Rawlins.

      By the time Easter arrived, the community church had been finished.  The church was a present to the town from Frank Kistler's wife, Florence.  The town turned out for Easter services; the patrons spilled out on the street, for the church was too small for all the townspeople celebrating Easter.

 

Parco was a town of trees.  It was an oasis, in a desert wasteland.  All around the town existed scrub brush, small cactus, sage; down in the Dugway, and around the Platte, were groves of cottonwoods.

      Architect E.E. Millard of Denver, working for Fisher and Fisher, conceived of an Eden, a modern town as a kind of paradise.  There could be no paradise without trees.  In May of 1924 he directed the work of planting thousands of dollars worth of nursery trees along the streets and throughout the townsite.  Joe Burke, a citizen of the new town, spent his evenings driving to the Platte River, near Fort Fred Steele, digging up seedling cottonwoods and transplanting them in Sinclair (Parco at the time).

      It was a labor of love.  The town grew in bursts.  An image of the plant, truly.  That the refinery was called "the Plant" was no accident.  A field of buildings and sprouting houses.  The next to grow, to rise up as an entity of the town, was the two-story building housing the theater and the library.  The town had been conceived, by the planners and architects, as a self-sufficient community.  Every conceivable need would be answered by the design, which would include everything from stores, barber shop, tailor shop, bowling alley, baby clinic and doctor's office, a single men's dormitory: all with the most modern conveniences, in a most modern style, California-Spanish style.

      The theater was called the Riviera; it could seat 300 people; the seats were the most modern, nine-spring seats, considered the most comfortable model in the world at the time.  Tom Love owned the movie house; in August of 1925, he changed the name to Love's Theater, since no one seemed able to spell "Riviera."

      The library was on the second floor of the theater building.  Its hours were posted as 3-5 pm and 7-9 pm Mondays and Fridays.

 

On July 5, 1925, the bank opened.  P.J. Quealy, of the First National Bank of Kemmerer, was hired as bank president.  Superintendent of the refinery, F.E. Richardson was named the bank's vice-president; Otto Frederick, who for the previous ten years had been chief cashier in Hanna, was named the bank's cashier. 

      Frank Kistler was a director of the bank, as were A.H. Marble (president of the Stockgrowers National Bank of Cheyenne) and J.J. Hilpirt (purchasing agent for PARCO).

      During the Summer months two baseball teams were fielded in Parco, the Oil Cans, made up exclusively of refinery employees; and the White Sox, made of of men employed by the J.White Engineering Company.  The Oil Cans, by the end of the season, had won 16 of 20 games and were generally conceded to be the finest team in Wyoming.

 

Teams of horses and scrapers were used to excavate a foundation for the hotel in July of that same year.  The C.S. Lambie Construction company was in charge of the construction, scheduled to be finished in 90 days.  Denver architects Fisher and Fisher drew up the plans for it; and, as all the town's office and business buildings, it was to be built in the Spanish style. 

      The interior of the hotel was to suggest an unmistakable Moorish influence; the architects used, for their precedent, the Ducal Palace of Savoy,  in the inner organization.  The hotel was to be a monument in good taste, with the sensuous ascent of stairs through fluctuating qualities of light, the gallery, with high ceilings, surrounding a huge fireplace, with throne chairs set up at odd angles to one another, like pieces on a chessboard.  The main dining room, to be called the "Fountain Room," would serve 300 people.  The room  would revolve around a fountain of inlaid jade, in which would swim a wide variety of exotic fish.

 

In the Fall, seven men employed by the refinery decided to start a dance band.   The band, the "Oil Can Serenaders," later to become the "Parco Music Producers," played August 17 at the newly completed town gynasium (the Recreation Hall), with over 100 couples attending.  Later in the year, the band traveled to Snake River for a dance.  The Snake River Sentinel later reported that "it was the unanimous contention of the large crowd present that the music furnished by the Parco artists was the best any ever heard on the Snake River.

      Time went on.  New buildings arose.  The refinery continued to expand.   Ten Dubbs process cracking units had been erected, a chemical treating plant, contact filtering and dewaxing units, boiler and power plant, water-cooling tower system for condensing vapors, a pump house, a tank farm, a car loading rack for transportation of gasoline plus a building that housed both the office and the laboratory.  Nearly 1000 men were working

constructing the refinery and town; in addition, about 350 men were employed directly by the refinery.  The refinery, in the beginning, was producing 10,000 barrels of oil per day, in a state whose oil reserves far outstrip that even of Saudi Arabia.

 

In August and September, several additional houses were begun; construction started on the two-story Union Pacific freight and passenger depot; a barber and beauty shop opened up in a building adjacent to the hotel structure.

      On September 16, 1924, a daughter was born to Mr. and Mrs. Sam Sannes, whose name was Helen.      On October 27, 1924, Jane Sannes was born to Mr. and Mrs. Martin Sannes. 

      In November, before the first major snows began, twelve houses were completed for occupancy, four were more than half finished, and a warehouse next to the mercantile store was completed.  The pool hall was finished, and furnished with five tables; enthusiastic workers built up the banks of the town skating pond, atop the last Summer's baseball diamond.

      Jesse Osborne established a "Driverless Ford and Taxi Service" in November, with headquarters in the Parco Club House, which had been completed for nearly a year.

      The first national election in Parco was held November 4, 1924, with 392 ballots cast, mostly Republican.  In the national election, Calvin Coolidge was re-elected President; the Honorable F.E. Warren was re-elected U.S. Senator from Wyoming; Mrs. Nellie Taloe Ross was elected Governor of Wyoming.

 

II.

 

Frank E. Kistler was born in 1882 on a plantation home in Greenboro, North Carolina.  In 1893 his parents sold the home and moved by covered wagon to a farm in Van Buren, Arkansas.  There, Kistler went to school with a red-headed freckle-faced kid named Bob Burns, who became a nationally fabous comedian.  It was in Arkansas that Kistler landed his first job, sweeping out a general mercantile store for $1 a week.  At the end of four years he was a clerk in the store, making $40 a week.

      His father died in 1895, and the family sold their farm and moved to Claremore, Oklahoma, where Kistler participated in his favorite sport, baseball.  Here he met a grinning kid called Will Rogers, later to become America's beloved wit and entertainer.  They were steadfast friends until Rogers' fatal plane crash.

      Kistler left home for St. Louis, Missouri, in 1901, and took a handyman job for a newly-formed oil company called The Texas Company.  He soon moved up to the job of leasing and operating.  Until 1917, Kistler leased thousands of acres of oil land for The Texas Company.  That year, he resigned and formed his own organization, The Producers and Refiners Corporation, with an initial capitalization of $20 million.

      As president of the corporation, Kistler was on his way.  He leased thousands of acres in Wyoming, and drilled one of the world's biggest gas wells, in Big Sand Draw, 17 miles south of Riverton.

      In 1925, Producers and Refiners Corporation was worth an estimated $50 million.  Kistler's personal fortune amounted to $12 million at that time.

      But with the depression, Kistler went broke.  His private fortune vanished and his debts piled up to $1.5 million.    Although some men, depondent over the loss of their fortunes, committed suicide, Kistler never considered such a thing.

      "None of that suicide stuff for me," he said.  "Life is worth more than money."  Friends urged him to declare bankruptcy.  "To hell with that," Kistler growled.  "I'm going to pay back every cent I owe."  In 1957 he had paid his debts in full.

      He then began a $2 million dollar resort development at Redstone, Colorado.  He lived there until his death in 1969.

      Kistler was married in 1903 to Florence Hughes, whom he divorced in 1929.  She presented the community church to residents of Parco.  He married again in 1929.

      Although Kistler did not live in Parco, he always kept in touch with the activities of the people there, visiting the town regularly.

 

In the fall of 1926, employees of the refinery and members of the town's civic organization contributed money to the Kistler Memorial Fund.  After several committee meetings, citizens decided to build a found on the plaza in his honor.

      By November, excavation work was well underway.  In order to pour the concrete foundation, in the cold weather, workmen erected a large protective structure over the site.

      All through the Winter the work continued.  Wyoming Winters are savage, with snows usually arriving some time in October, with the brutal winds, a constant presence on the high plains.  By February 3, 1927, only the flood lights and water connections remained unfinished.

      The water supply for the fountain was furnished through a recirculating reservoir, which was located in a tank in the basement of the hotel. 

      May 5, 1927, it was completed and tested.

      The fountain is made of a light brown Denterco stone.  Its basin is 18 feet in diameter.  Rising from the center of the basin is an octagonal column, 12 1/2 feet high.  Eight figures are carved on the column.  The newspaper described four of the figures as male lions, the other four as female.  However, Kistler said the animals were half-bear, half-cat.  He was active in the BearCat Gasoline Corporation at the time, and reasoned the sculptures were the symbols of the Bearcat Corporation.

      Water poured from the mouths of the animals, into the basin below.  Four large floodlights, concealed in the basin rim, illuminated the fountain at night.

      The fountain, erected on the plaza in Parco, in honor of Franke E. Kistler, founder of the town, was dedicated June 30, 1927, at 5:30 pm.

 

 

III.

 

The building went on.  It was a time of dreams.  The World War had been over almost a decade.  It was a time of hope.  There was direction in the world.  There was a sense of limitless horizons.  America was merely a child, merely beginning its ascent to manhood.

      Parco became of symbol of this aspiration: the strength of creation.

 

On November 13, 1924, H. Larsen of Rawlins completed the brick and tile plant.  It was capable of making 800 bricks per hour with two machines working at once.  The discovery of large bodies of a rare refractory kyanite at Encampment, Wyoming, some 60 miles southeast of Parco, foreshadowed the development of a refractory industry at Parco, where an abundance of natural gas insured the best possible ceramic fuel at low prices.  Experiments near Parco showed the presence of not less than six important shales, in unlimited quantities, ideal for brick-making.  Bricks manufactured at the new plant were used in the construction of Parco hotel, as well as several of the brick houses in town, including the house which came to be reserved for the refinery manager.  .

      On November 24, all Wyoming Division Headquarters offices of PARCO that were located in Casper were closed down.  The move of offices to Parco included the pipeline division, telephone and telegraph division, gas department and production department.

      One of the largest electric signs in the country was installed on the power house of the refinery on November 27.  The sign was lighted with 700 ten-watt bulbs spelling "Producers and Refiners Corporation-Parco Petroleum Products."  It weighted 2,500 pounds, was 25 feet long and 8 1/2 feet high.

 

By January 8 all the houses in Parco that were recently under construction were finished and occupied.  The new hotel work was progressing well; brickwork and steel work was nearing completion; heating and water systems were bing installed.  The Lube Plant at the refinery was completed.

      On January 15, the apartment house on Third and Madison was under construction.

      The first annual "Fireman's Ball" was held January 21, 1925.  The Parco Music Producers, formerly the Oil Can Serenaders, furnished "Refined Music in a Refining Town."  The dance was one of the biggest events of the season, with over 500 couples attending.  E.L. Hamm won a five-tube radio set given away as a grand prize during the dance.

      Nelson K. Moody, chairman of the Board of Directors for PARCO, gave a liberal cash donation to the town library February 5.  The money was to be used to buy technical books on the features of the oil refinery.

      The first 100 homes constructed in Parco were completed by February 5.

      The Parco Music Producers staged a Winter Carnival February 17, 19 and 21.  Each dance held a different theme; and a beauty queen was chosen to reign.  One of the dances was a Hard Times Barn Dance, and all attending wore ragged clothes.

      By March 5 the hotel was nearly completed.  Adjacent to the hotel at that time were the drug store, beauty shop, barber shop, millinery shop, haberdashery store, shoe shop and a tailor shop.  All the stores could be reached through the main lobby of the hotel, permitting the guests to do their shopping without going outside the building.

      Articles of incorporation were filed April 1, 1925.

      April 23, work began on the new baseball diamond.  April 30, Ralph Squires was appointed scoutmaster of the local Boy Scout troop (unchartered) in Parco.  Arthur Allen was the patrol leader; Carl Chaffin was his assistant; and Francis Johnston, scribe.  There were six boys belonging to the troop.

      May 6, 1925, the State Highway Commission accepted a bid from H. Larsen, of Rawlins, for the grading of 5.6 miles of new highway between Rawlins and Parco, and for the construction of a new cement bridge over Sugar Creek, four miles from Rawlins.

      Parco's first city officers were elected May 12: R.E. Wertz was chosen Mayor, F.E. Richardson, Otto Frederick, Moe Mercil and Gus Fleischli were voted councilmen.  Dannu Spremo was appointed fire chief.  The fire department boasted three pieces of apparatus: a pumper, and two combination hose and ladder watons, where were motorized.  Members of the fire department were all volunteer firemen.

 

The Parco Hotel opened for business.  It was May 31.  There was a formal opening planned for July 1-4.  Mr. and Mrs. George Fiser were the managers.  The Fountain Room was open from 5 to 8 pm, and dinner was $2.00.  Over 170 guests were served that first day.  The Rawlins newspaper reported: "Quantities of beautiful pink roses adorned the tables and fountain.  The Parco Music Producers furnished music and later played for a dance that followed dinner.  It was such a success that the management plans to have dinner-dances at least twice a month."  The menu for the first dinner served in the Fountain Room was:

 

Fresh Lobster Cocktail Netune

      Salted Almonds                                 Hearts of Celery

Olives

Cream of Chicken Croutons Souffle

Minions of Sandabs au Beuere

Pommes De Terre A l'Julienne

Punch de Parco

 

Filet Mignon Pyramid

or

Roast Milk-Fed Turkey with Chestnut Dressing

Bar Le Duc

           Green Peas                                   Parisienne Potatoes

           Salad Epicure                               Cheese Straws

           Strawberry Sundae             Petit Fours

           Roquefort Cheese                          Toasted Crackers

           Cafe Noir

 

 

IV.

 

I walked through the halls of this hotel last night, after Raoul and Rick had laughed their way through the night, watching Johnny Carson, drinking beer, with the great tumult of men who are bored with their existence, who drink to fight the depression created by their boredom, and by the desperation they feel that their lives are seeping out, into a great ocean of nonexistence, while the word they might speak to stop this dissipation, the action they might perform to break the spell, is a word, an action, which would, in itself, annihilate their sense of identity, and make the hell they choose no longer palatable or even poisonous, not even possible, would disarm their tension, making their salvation worse than their sorrows; they cling to their desperation, for the desperation itself is the very quality which justifies their lives.

      And so they laughed.  They laughed themselves sick, weary.  Then they disappeared into some bed of shame, silencing their self-accusations, seeping into a well.

      I walked through the hotel halls, into the rooms, downstairs into the lobby, the wonderful gallery, patterned on a Moorish heaven.  There was dust; the great portrait of Big Frank Kistler, which hung for years on the high wall above the fireplace, a proud man, noble in feature, yet common, not an aristocrat surely, a man of sweat and foundation and aspiration to rise, for the sake of height and the quest of greatness, the quest of challenge, not to rise above others but to encourage others to rise also: the portrait had been removed.  It was removed years before; I heard from David that Chet Foster had removed it one night.  He had been ashamed that an outsider, a homosexual outsider, now ruled the great hall in which the Petroleum Masters had walked and breathed and played chess with the elements of finance.  Kistler, and Harry Breitenstein; and then Harry Sinclair, a guardian of a dream; Bob Howe, Brick Hausner, all men of stature, men of caring, strong men, capable of anger and harsh judgment, but men of a shared dream, men of fairness.

      Now, the castle was ruled by a boy who had never become a man, who never would become a man, who squandered an inheritance given to him by his mother, squandered it on frivolous investments, and on a drug habit, and on obscene luxuries in a den of sin with brutal, criminal lovers.

      Chet Foster had a key to a back entrance to the hotel.  He was an honorable man, trusted in the town, a gentleman.  He was over seventy years old, still was vital, even now, even after the death of Daisy, his wife for over fifty years.  Chet entered the hotel one night with his grandson Jack, and some of Jack's friends.  Together, by flashlight, with one young man garrisoned at the bottom of the staircase, watching for intrusions, they lowered the portrait of Big Frank Kistler, and carried it to a haven, undisclosed.

      The portrait is gone.  A large landscape painting was purchased by Rick's family, to cover the void left by the disappearance of the great king of creation, Frank Kistler.  No one noticed it.  Now, as I wandered through the hotel last night, even the landscape painting is gone.  Raoul, in a drunken fit one night, rampaged through the hotel, seized a large ornamental poker situated near the fireplace; he used the poker to lever the painting away from the wall; it fell with a wild crash.  Rick rushed down the stairs to find the painting frame smashed and the canvas torn.  The next day it was destroyed and trucked out to the dumps.

 

There were ghosts in the hotel, last night, as I wandered here.  Whitey Stewart's ghost, who managed the hotel, when I was a boy.  A white haired, thin man, intense, straight.  He ran the bar at night.  He was a tyrant of a man; did not tolerate laziness.  Eddie Loby's ghost was in the kitchen, a retarded man, who cooked sometimes, washed dishes, lived in a basement room, surrounded by wooden boxes in which he kept mementos from his life and on which, always, white candles burned.  He never spoke.  He never let another enter his thoughts, approach his sanctuary.

      Larger ghosts were there too.  And smells: the filet mignon pyramid; and the cafe noir.  Black coffee by any other name still is black coffee.  The executives from New York, dressed casually, but with the tense manner of men of fortune.  There was a private airstrip out toward the golf course.  It was the Parco Airport in the beginning; later it was sold to the Arnold family, as grazing land.  But the airstrip remained.  And there, late in the Summer, the Sinclair jet would land.  The refinery manager would have a Company van there to meet them; they would drive back in to town, register at the hotel, where they would spend two weeks discussing business.  These men were still in the hotel, moving, as if a wave had been parted by the movement of their coats, their walk, their laughter at the table, set up inside the fountain room.  On these waves of protean plasma, these echoes of men did vibrate for ever, sounds stretched and re-shaped, movements, smells, the leather of their shoes, the brightness of their silk ties, their briefcases, and their talk of fishing at Seminoe Dam, a trip planned to Flaming Gorge.

      It was all there, still, though distant now, somehow boxed in, boarded up by mismanagement, boarded up by some grainy fatality.  All the ghosts had moved inside the walls, seeking depth from the present moment, seeking some harbor in a memory, some association of brick and gas, of paint and sweat and labor of building an empire.

 

Through the efforts of Harry Breitenstein, a buffalo head was acquired for the hotel.  In the Fall of 1924, Cullen Commercial Company in Rawlins bought a large buffalo from the government and sold the meat over the counter at their butcher shop.  They sent the head away to be mounted, and it was returned in June, 1925.  The Rawlins paper reported: "It was a very unusual speciment, and has been very excellently and beautifully mounted."

      On June 10, the hotel took over the management of the barber and beauty shop.  On the 18th, live trout were placed in the pool of the Fountain Room.  Guests could order the freshest fish dinner in Wyoming.  A bronze statue in the fountain, of Dapne, standing in rocks by a stream, with birds landing on her shouder, was a gift to the town by Frank Kistler, who purchased it in England.

      Harry Breitenstein was elected manager of the Parco Band, which had 35 members, made up of Parco and Rawlins men.  Frank Kistler bought the band new uniforms, sheet music and instruments.

      Cullen Commercial Company, of Rawlins, purchased the lease on Parco Mercantile, July 1, 1925.

      On July 3, two babies were born in Parco, William F. Briggs, was born to Mr. and Mrs. C.F. Briggs, at 6:30 pm.  William weighed seven pounds and one-half ounce.  An 8 3/4 pound boy, named Andrew Joseph, was born to Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Kimetz, at 8:20 pm, in the Rawlins Memorial Hospital.

      The first child born in Parco had been Wendell Bond, who was born in Rag Town, June 11, 1923, delivered by Doc Sanden and Amanda Kiehl, in Will Bond's tent.  He was over two years old now, had a baby sister; he was living with his family in their three bedroom house on the corner of Ninth Street and Madison.

      On July 9, the first case came before the police court in Parco.  Jimstone Bennett was sentenced to sixty days in jail, suspended, and was given two hours to leave the town.  Bennett was convicted of vagrancy; he was last seen hitchhiking east, toward Rawlins.

      Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph put in four new lines from Parco to Rawlins.  There had only been one line to handle all calls.  Station to station Ralwins-Parco cost 10 cents; specific party calls were 15 cents.  Tom Neuman edited and printed the January-December 1925 phone book.  It was the first directory in Parco and listed 84 phones, including the refinery.  By the end of 1925, every house in Parco had a telephone hooked to the central switchboard.  The exchange was located in a room on the ground floor of the $300,000 hotel.  Three experienced operators managed the exchange.

      On July 9, construction began on a building (the Annex) one block long and two stories high, located north of the hotel.  It was to be used as a dormitory for hotel employees and had ample space for the development of new Parco businesses.

      Monday, July 13, at 10:00 am, the temperature was a sweltering 100 degrees.  At 11:00 am, it reached 112 degrees, the high for the day.  Eighteen hours later, at 5:00 am, the temperature was 54 degrees.

      By July 15, the new freight and passenger depot located south of the hotel, by the railroad tracks, was in use.

      Harry Free moved from Casper, July 16, and opened offices in the hotel.  He handled the sale of property and the building of new homes under the title, "Parco Development Company."

      The first bond election in Parco was Monday, July 20.  It was for the issuance of water and sewer bonds.  The measure passed overwhelmingly; the town then owned and controlled its own water and sewer systems, and the surplus water agreement with Rawlins was terminated.

      Rag Town was to be demolished.

       The Rocky Mountain News, of Denver, reported: "Unheralded and unsung, Rag Town, a community of box car shanties and tent cabins, has, during the two years growth of Parco, attached itself as a sort of suburb to the prosperous and beautiful refinery town.  There, in the early days of the growth of Parco, lived workmen and employees working on building the refinery.  With the growth of the town proper, and the advent of modern residences, Rag Town failed to keep pace with the times.  No modern homes were built; no sewer lines were put in.  The shacks remained , even though their original occupants moved out, into newly furnished Company homes.  Other people moved into them; rents were cheap, and odd-jobbers lived there.  The housewives of Parco called upon Rag Town for laundry helpers, domestic help.  As Parco grew, the residents of Rag Town started calling it Rag City.  Despite this display of civic pride, PARCO has ordered the abandonment of the section.  As soon as residents of Rag City find suitable living quarters in Parco, workmen will dismantle Rag City."

 

A celebration was planned, an open house, celebrating Parco.  It was three weeks away.  A large crowd was expected.  The date of the celebration would be August 6-8.  Frank Kistler had personally invited 650 people, including industrial kings, oil officials and railroad managers.

      The celebration was three weeks away.  There was still much to be done.  The townspeople felt as if the whole world was watching them.  There were write-ups in all the state papers, the Denver papers of course.  Also, the national papers.  Stories were heard on the national radio news shows.  Parco was in the spotlight, felt itself in the spotlight.  Everyone was serious about hosting a proper celebration.

      On July 23rd, installation of new street lights began.  Gene Breniman,  a Parco resident who was supervising the installation, when asked by a reporter how many lights were being installed, replied: "They're running clear out to Seventh and Plum."  The reporter, not knowing the town well, or the street layout, asked: "Where is Plum?"  Breniman replied: "Plum out to the end, all the way out of town."

      Also on the 23rd, Western Union was installed in the hotel; and the dining room began serving a 65 cent businessmen's lunch.  Contracts were signed that day too, for the decoration of the town and an elaborate display of fireworks, as part of the August celebration.

      Fred Thornton, formerly of Rawlins, opened a dry cleaning plant in Parco, which was located on the ground level of the Hotel employee dormitory.

      On August 1, Wilford C. Irving was appointed Parco's first Town Marshal.

      The Zenith Radio Corporation brought their 100 Watt portable broadcasting gear to Rawlins; it was the first broadcast which had ever originated from Rawlins.  Between 8 pm and 10 pm was a program featuring the Parco Music Producers, the Parco Quartette, and the Parco Band.  It also did a feature on the upcoming Parco Celebration.

      To accommodate the crowds expected in Parco during the celebration, the Union Pacific Railroad began construction of a spur track adjoining the depot, of sufficient length to accommodate 20 pullman cars and diners.

      Work quickly began on a new baseball diamond and grandstand, to be finished by August 6.  It wa slocated just northwest of the tank farm, and in the same general area as the airplane field, which was especially constructed for the celebration's airplane race.  The grandstand seated 1,500 people and had a roof.

 

Acres and acres of level table land were smoothed out for the reception of transcontinental aviators, airmail pilots and others who the air lanes of the country.  It had a pilot light for night flyers.  Because it was so near the Rawlins field, the government had not yet designated it as an airmail station, although it had been used as such by airmail pilots.

      Before the celebration, Continental Supply Company established a branch store in the west end of the new hotel.  They handled oil field and refinery supplies.  Also a tourist campground, complete with lights, fuel and water, was constructed over one whole block at the west end of Parco, along the Lincoln Highway.  Parco Club Manager John Hilpert erected four large tents housing 185 cots just days before the celebration.  The cots were to accommodate guests during the celebration, since the hotel had only 65 rooms, and the Club House, housing 100 people, was full.

      Just prior to the celebration, the Rawlins Republican printed a 7-page Parco supplement.  The Denver Post printed 16 pages on Parco's celebration.  The Denver Rocky Mountain News filled 12 pages with news of the planned Parco celebration.  The Rocky Mountain News story began: "The Producers and Refiners Corporation respectfully requests the presence of the world at the formal opening of Parco, Wyoming, the new $10,000,000 oil refinery town of Wyoming on August 6, 7 and 8.  At that time, Parco, the wonder town of the universe, the newest, liveliest, the best and fastest-growing town in the United States will celebrates its second birthday, and, at the same time, will invited everyone interested in the town and its future to become residents and property owners.  Visitors to Parco, on its opening days, will fidn the most modern city to be found anywhere in the United States.  Its wide streets, entirely curbed, and its wide cement sidewalks, represent improvements not found in many towns of the country years and years older.  The beautiful and imposing structures, all following the same general Spanish architectural plans, both in the business and residence sections, provide a pleasing change for the visitor from the general unartistic appearance of towns without number to be found in all parts of the civilized globe."

 

At 9:00 am, Thursday, August 7, Parco's celebration began.  Approximately 10,000 people attended.  The town had secured Bernardi's Exposition Shows, a carnival, which ran continuously from 9:00 am until late at night during the three-day celebration.  Bernardi brought in 18 railroad cars and employed 180 people.  They advertised a $20,000 merry-go-round; Princess Violet, the smallest mother in America; Floyd Collins Entrapped, Direct from the Kentucky Caves; big dog shows; a pony circus; a separate tent named "Teapot Dome," in which was served tea and refreshments.  In addition, there was a portable boxing ring, where wrestling and boxing champions took on all comers.  There were a ferris wheel, a whip, and giant seaplanes for rides.

      Tours of the refinery were conducted at 9:00 am, 11:00 am, and 2:30 pm, every day during the event.  Over 300 men were taken through the refinery, during tours.  A reporter for the Denver Post wrote: "A veritable river of crude oil flows into the Parco Refinery and out as finished gasoline, helping to keep supplied the 17 1/2 million motor cars in use today.  The gasoline from the crude oil is as crystal clear as the melted snows of the mountains of Wyoming.  So thick is the crude oil received at the Parco refinery from Lost Soldier oil field that when the crude oil is dumped into large storage tanks, workmen oftentimes through huge planks into the mass and use them for platforms, in working about the pipes from which the crude is draining.  Were it not for the fact that Parco and the refinery are actually there, to be seen with the eye, the story would sound as though it were written for the special production of a movie to be put on the screeen, something dreamed and not realized."

 

At noon every day, there was a huge free barbecue, attended by thousands who were lavishly fed roast beef with all the trimmings.  At 2:00 pm, each day of the celebration, the Parco Music Producers held a concert on the park blocks between the hotel and the railroad depot.

      At 2:30 every afternoon, the Oil Cans played baseball at the newly erected granstand and baseball diamond.  Reporters estimated a crowd of 2,000 watched the games.  Of course, the Oil Cans won each game.  Thursdays score was 11 to 2; Fridays score was 7 to 0; two games were played Saturday, with scores of 16 to 1 and 9 to 5.  Again, in 1925, the Parco Oil Cans were the best baseball team in the state of Wyoming, some said in the entire Rocky Mountain area.

      At 2:30, 7:00 and 9:00, Love's Theatre showed moving pictures entitled "Charley's Aunt," "Sally," and "Peter Pan."

      Thursday and Friday nights, at 9:30, the Parco Music Producers played for a dance, stretching deep into the morning, at the Parco Recreation Hall.

 

Saturday morning, August 8, dawned clear and bright.  The sun almost always shines in southern Wyoming.  Even in the winter, when the storms come shouting in from the northwest, or straight down out of the Arctic, through Canada, over Montana, the Sun is rarely in exile for long. 

      On August the 8th, 1925, the Sun was high and the sky was cloudless.  At 11:00 am the parade began.  The Parco Music Producers led off the procession; floats followed.  Parco Motors featured a Standard Six Studebaker touring car with the famous duplex top.  Gus Fleischli was at the wheel and the car carried nine men riding on the top and seven inside, giving the spectator a real idea of the strength of the Duplex top and the power of the car itself.

      Each department of the refinery entered a float in the competition.  The Material and Purchasing Department featured a small warehouse built out of pipe and sheet metal.  The Engineering Department float pictured engineers working in the field.  The Geological Department float had geologists running levels; the Pipeline Department was represented by a group of pipeliners screwing joints of 8-inch pipe with what was commonly referred to as "hooks."

      The Production Department effort in the parade showed the use of a miniature oil derrick fully equipped and working with the driller and tool dresser at their respective posts.  Max Dawson, rig contractor, had a float showing the actual building of a standard derrick in progress as the float drew down the street.  Onlookers were quite impressed with its originality and completeness.

      C.S.Lambie Construction Company had a float bearing various instriptions: "Kistler Dreamed It"; "Fisher and Fisher Planned It"; "C.S. Lambie Built It."

      Autos with banners stating "Uses Parco Oils Only" were followed by a vintage auto whose banner read "Uses Any Old Oil."

 

      At Noon, there was another free barbecue.  At 1:30, everyone gathered out by the tank farm to watch for the arrival of the aeroplanes due in from Denver in the big air-race sponsored by the Denver Post.

      As Doug Randall, the m.c., explained to the audience: "Six National Guard aeroplanes, one of them carrying the judges of the contest, are to fly from Denver to Parco, leaving the former place under 'sealed orders,' which will be handed to the pilot of each plane before he hops off at 9:00 am on Saturday morning.  The sealed orders are, in fact, sealed instructions to the pilot, giving him a timed flying schedule of landings and take-offs that he must follow during the 500 miles race over the Continental Divide."

      At 12:15 pm, Lieutenant Charles L. Reavis landed at the makeshift landing field by the refinery.  He was 18 minutes ahead of Captain Bruce Kistler, nephew of Frank Kistler, wo places second.  Reavis had left Denver at 10:30 am.  He was presented the trophy by Big Frank Kistler.

      After the arrival of the planes, pilots took residents of Parco up in their planes, to view the new city from up in the clouds.  The whirring of plane engines could be heard all afternoon, turning and soaring magestically above the celebration.

      Baseball, a band concert, and movies took up the rest of the afternoon.  At 8:30 pm, the town watched a spectacular fireworks display which was released from the hill south of Parco.

      The hotel and Fountain Room were lavishly decorated with freshly cut flowers, and silk wall-hangings, on Saturday night.  Brightly colored balloons were scattered through the large room.  There was a huge banquet.  Liquor was flowing freely.  It was a boistrous group, happy, proud of its own good fortune.  The celebration was ending; it had been a proper kind of festival, with much good humor, companionship, little or no violence; a colorful celebration, with the beautiful women of Parco, dressed in becoming Summer dresses, colorful as flowers, gracing the streets and the parks of the newly-born town  . 

      The great adventure of the creation of Parco, in a land which, a century before, had been the hunting grounds of Shoshone Indians, which fifty years before had been witness to the devastation of George Armstrong Custer in the northern reaches of the state, and which had been, only decades before, made "visible" by the great labors of men like Grenville Dodge, whose dream of a trans-continental railroad, a dream of men such as Abraham Lincoln and John Charles Fremont, connecting two coast lines and all the land in between, into a great confederacy, a great indissoluable union, a marriage of peoples under One God and forever united, gave temporal existence to the vast stretch of southern Wyoming, a waterless wasteland, a land of ghosts and elemental natures, of twisted droughted cottonwood trees, and dramatic mountains rising up from the imperial geology of Wyoming, the microcosmic "history" of shale and fragments of shale, in Time's great gallery of developments: the great adventure of the creation of Parco was rightly recognized for what it was, a monument to the capacity for men and women, working together, sharing a dream, sharing a common incentive, to produce something lasting out of rough contours, rugged latticeworks of ground and sage and wind, to hammer out of the plasmic Potential, inherent in Nature's curtained inexhaustibility, existing for ever with its bridegroom,  Inertia, a pair of opposites and complements, each a god and each a demon, a world produced of brick and red clay, of oil and the bones of dinosaurs, of brains and artistic conceptions, a planned world, as exact as any thought, as ritualistic as any prayer, as if God Himself had spoken the word, and the word itself had taken on a privileged character, a privileged flesh, a body of grace, a nature of essential consequence.  The world was good.  Perhaps it would not always be good.  But one celebrates his triumphs even as he mourns in time of strife.  Now was a time to smile, a time for handshakes; for friends has resurrected Belief; and they had clothed him in a kind of grandeur.  And recognition of this was not vanity, but, indeed, was an act of thanksgiving.

 

At about 10:00 an unexpected visitor arrived at the Fountain Room.  It was Nellie Tayloe Ross, the new Governor of Wyoming.  Mrs. Ross had been invited to the celebration, but had refused the invitation.  No one expected the governor-elect.  She was a notorious tea-totaller.  The drinking and joviality in the banquet hall paused for a moment, with the news of Mrs. Ross's appearance.  How would the drinking affect her?

      After an awkward moment, Frank Kistler stepped forward, took the hand of Mrs. Ross, led her up to the head table, near his own chair; he spent the rest of the night charming the governor, both existing in sober contentment.

 

V.

 

The celebration ended.  The building did not end.  The work had just begun.  Kistler had a dream of a thriving metropolis, one capable of attracting outsiders to live in Parco, to invest, to continue building, a city in the desert.

      On September 3, Doc Sanden examined 40 Parco babies at the opening of the first baby clinic in Parco.  According to Doc Sanden, the results showed an unusually high per cent of babies were healthy, and normal.  This was due, as Doc Sanden saw it, to the high standard of living, which was almost universal in the town.

      On September 14, the town council passed an ordinance stating all dogs had to be licensed in Parco.  The cost was $2 a year for male dogs, and $5 a year for female dogs.

      Two rooms, each 26' x 28', were added to the existing school house, to accommodate fifth and sixth graders.  A bit later, 25 kindergarteners were also attending school in these rooms.

      Parco Sand and Gravel incorporated in September.  It was managed by Andrew Cartwright.

      An addition to the new hotel dormitory building was completed in September.  Additional warehouse space for hotel commodities was needed. 

      On the 17th, a new oven was installed in the bakery department of the hotel.  It took 16 days to heat the oven, before it was ready for use; after this start up procedure, three hours heating would be required each day to maintain sufficient temperature for baking for the full 24 hours.  John Dawson, former banquet chef in the Muehlenback Hotel in Kansas City, became the Parco chef.

      Kistler, a long-time baseball player and fan, entertained the Oil Can baseball team in the hotel with a dance September 24, in appreciation for their outstanding record.  The team finished the year with a 13-4 record, wining the unofficial state title for the second year in a row.  Team member were: Andy Sickes, Larry Cummings, Key Powell, Webb Wakeman, Ernie Welsh, Jay L. Southcots, William Turner, Billy Morgan, Vincent Williams and Robin Simpson; the manager was Earl Waite.

      On October 1, the Parco Women's Club, formerly the Community Circle, applied to the National Federation of Women's Clubs for their charter.  They had 25 members.

      Robert Galbreth of Pine Bluffs, Arkansas, was the holder of lucky number 3166, which won him the lot in town given away by the Parco Development Association in a national lottery during the celebration.

      Work began on the modernization of the brick plant, with W.J. Buckles, of Coffeyville, Kansas, as supervisor.  Frohling Shoe Shop opened a store on the ground level of the hotel dormitory.  And Fred Thornton moved adjacent to Frohling's new store with a celaning and dye works.

      Parco's first auto accident occurred October 15, 1925.  The Rawling Republican reported: "Charles Berger's Buick touring car became obstinate and jumped the curbing in front of the Parco Barber Shop, crossed the sidewalk, smashed two plate glass windows, and demonlished some of the brickwork on the building.  The accident occurred between 6:30 and 7:00 pm.  Berger cranked the car while it was still in gear, and, as luck would have it, it immediately started, and plunged into the entrance of the barber shop.

      John and James Massey, formerly with Parco Mercantile, opened a grocery and meat market October 22, on the east wing of the main office building.  On that same day, all the lots in South Parco, wher Rag Town had been, were taken off the market by Parco Development.  All the lots that had been sold in that area were bought back, together with all the buildings that had been constructed on the lots.  Parco Development cancelled all plans for South Parco because the cost of putting in water and sewer lines to that area proved prohibitive.

 

Halloween, 1925, was an especially brilliant production, held in the gym as usual.  The Parco Music Producers were masked and dressed as pirates for the occasion.  The Rawlins paper gave the following account: "There were more Spanish costumes than anything else, Spanish cavaliers, toreadors, matadors, and senoritas.  Plus, there were Arabs, Chinese, Hindus, young people dressed as old people, and vice versa.  Also sighted were George Washington and his better half, cutting a mean Charleston together.  First prize went to the sheik and sheikess of the desert, C.W. Whitehead and his wife.  If was one of the greatest international settings ever witnessed in CArbon County."

      November 12, Glen H. Fletcher was put in charge of work on the golf course.  Nine holes were planned, with a yardage of 3008 feet.  The greens and hazards were almost finished, and the course was finished in four days.  This golf course (the later, more ambitious one would be built down near the Platte River) was situated on the outskirts of town, not far from the soon-to-be constructed rifle range. 

      On Thanksgiving Day, the Parco Hotel served a sumptuous dinner from 5:30 to 8:00 pm.  On the menu were roast goose, turkey, duck, chicken, possum, baron of beef with yorkshire pudding, saddle of lamb with oranges, frozen eggnog, genuine plum pudding, and pumpkin pie.

      Violet Feller, employee of the Telephone Exchange in Parco, won the Music Producers Beauty Contest, December 3rd.  She drew 158 votes out of 340, and was presented with a silver loving cup.

      December 3, Mrs. Mary Ellen Ingersoll of Cheyenne opened a ladies ready-to-wear shop in Parco.

      The bakery at the hotel was making 500 loaves of bread each day, plus pies and assorted pastries.  Five bakers were employed by December 10.  Townspeople bought all their bread from the hotel at that time.

      The Christmas Part was, again, in the gymnasium; a gigantic Christmas tree was raised and decorated in a party given by the refinery for all the townpeople.  Hundreds of people took part, with their children, who received gifts from the Company.

      The New Year's Eve frolic was held in the Fountain Room, complete with dinner and dance.  When Midnight arrived, horns were blown, friends kissed, lovers danced; it was with some sense of regret that the old year was put to rest, for it had been a good year, a productive year.  Parco had taken shape in that year.  The dream was a legitimate one.  The town had proven itself.

      Yet, there was no need to look back.  The building would continue.  The town would expand.  The dream would complete itself over and over.  Where there was a need for gasoline and oil, there would be a need for this oasis in the desert.  1926 would be as good to the small city as 1925 had been.  There was no reason for it not to be. 

      The citizens of Parco made their way home, in small groups, many on foot, January 1, 1926, early in a morning of wind and drifting snow.  Winter was as harsh as always.  The street lights blew and left an eerie feeling in the night.  Blowing snow lit up the sky; slightly and severely intoxicated parents, as the case may be, made their way slowly over ice, to their homes throughout the town, preparing for a long day's sleep.  Very few would be working.  It was a holiday.  There was general agreement that this year had been a great one.

 

VI.

 

I don't know what is true any longer, in terms of value perhaps, in terms of essential completeness: the mythological beginnings or the tragic era of decline.  Whether Hope is a language in itself, creating mythologies (demiurgonies of motion) through the motivation of will, belief, power to act, precision of thought.  I do not know whether tragic eras of decline are built in to Life as Winter is built in to Earth's nature; or whether tragedy is, as some believe, a conspiracy of darkness, a lack of dedication to principles of work and family and God and proportion.  Or whether both beginning and end are mere concepts, without reality in Life, but merely a means of comprehension, a manner of speaking about some unspeakable reality, through which (the concepts themselves, not the reality) we get some grasp of the hidden entity we wish to describe, and gain some power over this ineffable grace, through that description.  And whether we ever rise above merely describing ourselves, etching out our mortalities.

      It is hard to deny nature, and nature's programmatic structure, when looking at the miracles of man.  It is hard to deny the ecclesiastical precision of nature's thoughts, if, indeed, nature thinks, as seems, to my mind, to be beyond denial.  Nature thinks, and, by her thoughts, evolves creation.  And the tragic (the venial self-love of the tragically flawed?) is a time wherein God's creative enormity is not present, but sleeps, building another dream, to further existence, when the next Dawn is presented.

 

David and I talked about the story last night, when he came to visit.  I told him about the newsreel.  He shook his head.  "You are presenting a context in which Hugh Bedford's impact can really be felt," he said.  "That is obvious.   But what if you lose your reader?  What if the history of Sinclair is something you treasure, but something which is not universally valuable?"

      "As metaphor, you mean?" I asked.  "As a metaphor, it is universally valuable.  For it presents the very act of creation; and is, itself, the creation myth.  It is, in its own scale, the creation of the world."

      "Yes," David said.  "But everything is metaphorically valuable.  I am speaking about the reader's interest.  Why would the reader, who begins to treasure the story of Hugh Bedford, if he ever does reach that point of involvement, agree to retreat to 1922; and then be forced to make a recirculation back to the present, back toward Hugh Bedford.  And why would Violet Feller's being elected the Music Producers' Beauty Queen even matter in this recirculation?  You may lose your reader, if he doesn't care as much about metaphor as he does about narrative currency?"

      "There is no story of Hugh Bedford, without the creation of Sinclair, without the history of the town."

      "When De Maupassant writes about the pearl necklace he does not need to tell the history of France first, or even the history of the woman who loses the necklace.  He takes a frame, a single frame, of the history of the world, and explores the one frame."

      "The one frame was not enough.  Because Hugh Bedford is not the story.   The town of Sinclair is the story.  Hugh Bedford is like a piece on the chessboard; even if that piece is the King, who some would argue is the strongest piece: still, without the chessboard, the King can't exist."

      "I understand your logic," David said.  "I am thinking about the integrity of the story."

      "The story has no integrity if its central image remains while its relationary imagery must vanish."

      "No.  That is true.  It's your technique which worries me.  It is a great story by itself.  I am afraid that the Bedford story which lose its impact I guess, by your diluting it with an ocean of personalities."

      "But it is only one story in a myriad of stories.  That is a philosophical statement: a core theme in the story.   The names and faces which appear, achieving their moment upon the stage, in the years which lead up toward the appearance of Hugh Bedford, are very much like Bedford himself: players, who have their moment; who vanish is Time's culinary monstrosities."

      "A strange phrase indeed," David said.  He lived for these outbursts, urging me, goading me,  watching me defend my ideas.  He was seated on the edge of his chair, the imp grinning in his eyes.   He had raised my dander; he had performed his assigned duty.  He would be able to leave in a few minutes, content that, if nothing else, I was seriously working, forging out his story .  He worried less about the "integrity of the story," and perimetrical themes than he did about my seriously working at my creation.  If I would fight against his intrusion into the story, then surely I still loved it; hence, I would continue to push it out, giving it the form which only it could demand.  For it, essentially, would continue to create itself, if given help by its "maker."

      "I think your presentation of Frank Kistler is necessary, by the way," David said.  Giving me credit finally: a sugar-cube before he departs.  "Kistler is the alter-ego of Bedford of course.  They are parallels: one in creation; the other in decay.  It reminds me of Greek tragedy: where the two men prove to be one man, with two masks, each portraying the other, opposite attributes, but correlative natures."

      He had to leave.  He was having dinner with the Johnsons, at their house.  He would stop by to see my mother after dinner.

      "How are Juan and Panza?" he asked, in parting.

      "Quiet.  I haven't heard much."

      "Panza watched me come up the stairs, standing in the open door.  I wonder if he's killed Rick, and Rick's lying in his room."

      "That's a perverse comment to make before you leave."

      "It's just another story, friend.  If I could only write as fast as you, I'd be the one with stories in magazines.  As it is, I think faster than I can act.  That's always been my flaw."

      I walked him to the landing.  He started down the staircase, turned, asked: "Where does the newsreel end?"

      "Where do you think?"

      "Probably at your birth."

      I smiled and returned to my room.

 

VII.

 

The history continues, for, as I told David, the history is, itself, the story.  All the rest is mere magnification of that history, distortion in scale; the blowing up of the single frame, slowing it, taking it out of the river of events for detailed inspection.  Any one of these events could be blown-up, magnified, glorified and condemned singly.  The format requires individual items, even as the items spring from the format for the sake of definition.

 

It was a new year, 1926:  on January 1, the theatre took on a new name, "The Rialto."   The Rialto ran a Paramount film, titled "The Iron Horse," which depicted the town of Benton, Wyoming.  Benton was a booming railhead of 2,000 people in the year 1868.  It was located about 7 miles due east of the refinery; relics from the past may still be found there.

      Patrons of the movie were able to buy fresh popcorn, buttered or plain, for the first time at the Rialto.

      On the 7th of January, a 400 ton ice house was under construction at the east end of the Parco Development warehouse.  All of the houses that had been constructed on the south side of the railroad tracks (the old Rag Town community) were moved, by January 7, to the northwest section of town.  Most of them were remodeled at the time, gas, water and sewage lines were hooked up.  All were immediately occupied.

      Doc Sanden left Parco, and was temporarily replaced by Dr. Barber from Rawlins.  On March 18, Dr. Charlie Newbecker became the town's physician.  His office was located on the ground floor of the hotel building, one door west of the coffee shop.

      On April 29, L.M. Johnson was appointed superintendent of the refinery.

      In June, James Ater put in a $5,000 pool hall, located at the extreme west end of the hotel block, to the rear of a large storage room.

      Joel L. Kelley, Earl Bradshaw and J.V. Mueller opened the Kelley Service Station, July 1.  It was designed in the same Spanish style as the rest of the business buildings in Parco, and was located on the corner of Lincoln Highway and Eighth Street.

      In July, Frank Emery arrived from Laramie to take over the management of the Rialto Theater.  On September 30, Mr. and Mrs. Carl Bates became the new proprietors of the Rialto Theater and Tea Room.

      In August, construction began on ten new homes located on North 7th and 8th Streets.

      Also that Fall, Tom Weadick replaced Gus Fleischli as manager of the Parco Garage, and Dr. Dennis Lord replaced Dr. Newbecker as the town physician.

      November 11, 1926, Bill and Lola Tucker were married in Rawlins.

      By the end of the year nearly every house in Parco was equipped with a family radio.  Aerials could be seen on nearly all the roofs of the town: radio had become the great national entertainment.

      Christmas came and went.  The celebration at the Recreation Hall; New Year's Eve at the Fountain Room again.

      On January 1, 1927, Clayton Danks was appointed the Chief of Police.  Wilford Irving had accepted an appointment by Governor Emerson as assistant law enforcement commissioner.

      Three one-act plays were presented by local people at the Rialto in January.

      On January 17, the B.P.O.E. (Elks Club) sponsored the sporting event of the season, a mammoth rabbit hunt.  The main hunt was to rid the area of rabbits, which were robbing sheep of valuable and very rare grazing land.

      Towns divided up in teams.  Rawlins and Parco joined forces against Hanna and Medicine Bow.  The hunt was limited to Sunday, but any number of people could hunt from each town.  Rabbits had to be drawn and turned in by 8:00 pm, at the L.E. Vivion barn.  People wanting to cook the rabbits could have all they wanted by coming to the barn Sunday or Monday.

      Medicine Bow killed 1,547; Hanna killed a total of 656.  Rawlins killed 468, while Parco killed only 54.  To honor the winners, the losers hosted a free dance at the Parco Gym.  In all, 2,724 rabbits were counted in the Vivion barn, most of which ended up in rabbit stews in each of the four Wyoming towns.

      On February 17, a branch of the National Rifle Association formed.  By March 10, membership had swollen to 44 members, and plans were made to establish an outdoor range immediately.

      The tennis courts were constructed in March.

      In April, an expansion increased Brick Plant production to 300,000 bricks a month.  W.G. Buckles was in charge.  The first homes built entirely of Parco brick were located on North Eighth Street.  By July, twnety homes had been constructed of the local product.

      On May 5, Dr. C.L. Wills was put in charge of medical services for Producers and Refiners Corporation.  Dr. Lord had resigned and planned to open new offices in Hanna, to the northeast of Parco, which was booming with increased coal production.

      On May 19, a new flag pole was erected in the center of the park blocks, between the fountain and the railroad station.

      On June 30, at 5:30 pm, the fountain, erected on the plaza, in honor of Frank Kistler, was officially dedicated.  The ceremony was held late because the annual Board of Directors meeting between Producers and Refiners Corporation and Prairie Oil and Gas had been in session all day.

      At the same time the directors were meeting, Mrs. R.W. Wertz honored their wives at a luncheon and bridge party.  About thirty Parco women were invited by Mrs. Wertz to meet the guests; one of them was Mrs. H.R. Ashley, who recalled that bridge was being played at nine tables all afternoon, and, when it came time for the dedication ceremony, the women folded up their bridge hands and went out to watch the ceremony.  When it was over, she said, the women came back to the tables and resumed their game.

      The actual dedication ceremony was brief.  Mayor Roland Wertz introduced William S. Fitzpatrick of Prairie Oil and Gas, who praised Kistler highly.  Then Frank Kistler expressed "his very deep appreciation of the kind thoughts of Mr. Wertz," and asked to see a copy of the generous list of contributors, so he might personally thank each of them.

      On June 16, a bronze tablet was mounted on the side of the fountain stating "Erected in honor of Frank E. Kistler, founder of Parco, 1927."

 

Wednesday, April 6, 1927, at 5:15 am, Dubbs Still Number Three exploded in the refinery.  A number of Parco residents were thrown from their beds by the blast, and tremors were felt in Rawlins.

      Twenty-two men were on duty in the area at that time: fifteen men were instantly cremated by the fire and heat.

      Kenny Sickles and Tom Whiting were working in the receiving house when the balst occurred.  The blast threw Whiting into the flames across the room.  Sickles threw a blanket around himself and leaped across the room where Whiting was lying.  He threw the blanket around Whiting and dragged him half a block to safety.  Somehow Sickles escaped injury and Whiting received only minor burns.  The two men, along with Bill Turner, and Johnny Pitts of Rawlins, were the only ones to escape hospitalization.

      Johnny Pitts was working beside George Curry, when the still exploded.  They were between the chamber of the receiving house, immediately behind the still battery.  The blast knocked Curry unconscious.  In some unaccountable way, Pitts escaped a like fate.  As sheets of fire swept down upo him, Pitts seized the unconscious Curry and dragged him through the inferno.  Then he dropped.  His efforts were in vain.  Curry died Wednesday night in the Rawlins Hospital, the sixteenth victim of refinery explosion.

      Volunteers hurried to the refinery, in hopes of aiding the trapped workers.  The intense heat from the stills and tanks made it impossible for the volunteers, and, later, the Rawlins and Parco firemen, to rescue the men within the fire, who, it was believe, were all knocked out by the detonation.

      At 6:00 am, two bodies were recovered; it wasn't until after 7:00 however that all the bodies were recovered.  Forty-five minutes after the explosion, Ralph Baird, A Denver Post photographer, flew over Parco in a National Guard plane piloted by Lieutenant Dan Kearns.  After taking several photographs, the two men landed.  Baird wrote the following account of the catastrophe:

      "A great smokestack, blackened by fire and a huge hole ripped out of its once graceful slenderness, seemed symbolic of the tragedy that had stalked Parco.  The streets were littered with debris, sobbing groups of women and children clustered amid the litter.  Broken windows stared stark at us from all buildings.  It was a sight to sicken a stout heart.

      Lieutenant Dan Kearns and myself were the first Coloradoans to reach the disaster.  The plane landed and Kearns and myself drove into town over streets that looked as if an earthquake had spewed the accumulations there.

      The firemen of Parco worked between great tanks of gasoline and other stills, regardless of the fact that other explosions threatened them.

      We saw destruction on all sides.  A steel pipe twenty feet long was driven through a house two blocks from the refinery.  A 300 pound bar of steel was hoisted 350 yeards by the blast.  Fragments of steel and glass littered the town.  I was told $20,000 worth of glass alone had been smashed in Parco."

 

Most of the window panes and glass fixtures in the downtown buildings were destroyed.  AFter the initial explosion, the flames spread rapidly to the other nine stills and, in a few mintues time, two oil process storage tanks caught fire.

      Men battled the flames with streams of steam and fomite, quelling the blaze by 7:00 am.  The Rawlins Republican reported the highway past the refinery was closed to travel because the huge smokestacks, which were torn by the explosion, were tottering on their foundations and in danger of toppling over.

      Crews of carpenters were put to work repairing window and door frames and installing new glass in the downtown district, Wednesday afternoon.  Other workmen cleared away the debris at the refinery.

      On April 7, PARCO officials announced the exact cause of the catastrope was still unknow, but that a thorough investigation was being conducted.  They announced that all widows and children would be beneficiaries under blanket insurance which PARCO carried on all their workmen.  In addition, women and orphas were to be paid under the Wyoming Workmen's Compensation Law. The disaster cost the State of Wyoming about $100,000.

      A total of 34 children lost their fathers in the explosion.  The Dubbs Operating and Cleanout crews on duty at the time of the explosion follow:

      Arthur G. Ayala, of Rawlins, dead.  George E. Curry, of Parco, hospitalized, died.  William W. Dodd, of Rawlins, dead.  Fred Jessmer, of Parco, dead.  Victor Montoya, of Parco, dead.  Orcelo Martinez, of Parco, dead.  Victor Nickerson, of Parco, dead.   J.P. Dalmer, of Parco, dead.   J.H. Pitts, of Parco, unhurt.  George B. Polk, of Parco, hospitalized.  Clarence Posey, of Parco, dead.  R.M. Sherman, of Parco, dead.  K.R. Sickels, of Parco, unhurt.   Albert C. Smith, of Parco, dead.   Calvin Smith, of Parco, dead.  F.C. Speyerer, of Rawlins, dead.  Frank Taylor, of Parco, dead.  W.C. Turner, of Parco, unhurt.  G.G. Turpin of Parco, dead.  E.R. Welch, of Parco, hospitalized, died.  T.W. Whiting, of Parco, hospitalized.

 

 

VIII.

 

The dream was blackened.  The sky became fabled with smoke and hurtling bits of steel, and men lay broken by the splintered still; the fire's fury ate them up and left nothing.

      The town was in shock.

      How could this have happened?  They lived with danger, the residents of Parco: it was never far from industrial existence.  Yet Parco had been so graced; the explosion left the town searching for a fragment of knowledge, for the capacity to peer down below the skin of circumstance, to understand the meaning of this, to understand its cause.

      There had been heroism.  Kenny Sickles, Johnny Pitts.  Bertha McClanahan, the telephone operator whose own father had been working at the plant.  She never left her position; she called the Rawlins operator and had her notify all Rawlins doctors, the hospital and the Fire Department.  She handled call after call, as the switchboard was flooded with requests for information, unsure, all this time, that her father was not one of the victims.  He was not.  Her father was unhurt.  She was working at her post when a neighbor brought her the news.

      There were other acts of heroism, unnoticed, not applauded; for in times of disaster, heroism flows naturally, becomes the rule, much as boredom becomes the rule when Life evolves into empty ritual.

      The town was empty.  There was no place to bury the dead.  In all the spectacular planning for the model town of America, the perfect modern town, one small feature was neglected in the plans.  No cemetery was planned.  There was no place to bury the dead, save the cemetery in Rawlins.  It was not an oversight, I believe, this lack of a burial ground.  There was to be no death in Parco.  It was to be a town without limits, a town without even the broad limitations of nature, a town of immortal capacity, a city of gods; no graveyard was needed in a town where no one died.

 

The men were buried in Rawlins, at the Pioneer Cemetery.  It was a great ceremony.  The men who died were recognized by both Parco and Rawlins.  Both towns mourned the loss of their citizens.  Rawlins, no doubt, felt some satisfaction at the tragedy, as it had come to resent (the citizens of Rawlins, I mean) the overbearing notoreity of their sister city.  There would always be a competition between the two towns; Parco residents always felt somehow blessed a bit more than the residents of Rawlins, not because of inherent natural abilities in the residents themselves as much as because of some quality in the air, in the largest sense, some natural grace flowing out of the soil itself perhaps, and out of the special covenant involved in the act of creation from which Parco had sprung.  Parco was the heaven pole of the two towns; Rawlins was the hell pole.  Rawlins had more crime, more racial strife, was famous for its gallery of houses of prostitution.  Sinclair was the peaceful oasis, removed from the problems of Rawlins, removed from nearly every problem, save that final problem involving the ritual of internment.

      The men were buried; Time again began to heal.

      In July, the pool hall was moved into a new building, adjacent to the Recreation Hall.  Continental Supply moved into the west end of the hotel block, occupying the entire depth of the building which had housed the pool hall.

      The year seemed to be a year of mourning.  There was not as much building as before.  Rumors began to circulate that PARCO was losing money.  That a collapse of the national economy was approaching.

      Such talk was more potent in Rawlins, and in some of the other Wyoming communities, than it was in Parco however.  The dream had not yet died in Parco.  Birth had been so recent:  the child of affluent progress had just begun to flex its cumulative resource.  There would always be a need for oil, for gasoline.  As long as there was Time, and technology, and the love of motion.

      Still, ghosts were in the town some nights.  Explosions reverberated down by the refinery gates; one could still hear the echoes, could still feel the repurcussions, even weeks after the victims of the actual explosion were resting in the Pioneer Graveyard.

      Sometimes, at night, always at night, the skin of the world would open up its treasury; the vault of memories, in which all Time must reside, these memories also in skins, in depth-membranes, descaling from the Present, would proclaim themselves; voices could be heard, screams, the great explosion, shattering glass, commands from running men, metal street-light shades  shaking, fire trucks and a sky of flame; the cooling tower would be ripped in two, the topmost section falling, its cables snapping, breaking like steel bones as a giant toppled among the audience of thought.  The memory was even more dramatic, more tragic, than the initial explosion.

      It was Fear walking in the air; Fear, expectant of a repetition of beliefs, an eternal repetition of occurrances: waiting for the next extravagant chaos.

      Yet Time healed even grim walks down by the refinery gates.  The Summer passed the way of all hungry youths, from muscled territoriality (the Sun's romantic solutions), to the cool fragmentations of Autumn.

      The Parco Chamber of Commerce came up with a surprise for its residents on September 8, 1927.  Colonel Charles A. Lindberg, in his famous plane, the "Spirit of St. Louis," spent five minutes putting on a flying exhibition over Parco, as he flew across the country.

      Oliver L. Clarke, manager of the telephone company, called everyone in Parco Friday night to say that Lindberg was flying over the next morning.  The Rawlins Republican published the following account of Lindberg's visit:

      "Everyone was up early waiting for him, craning their necks, trying to get a first glimpse of the plane.  A large group had gathered on the hotel roof, and all eyes were cast eastward, through the strong sunlight of a clear Wyoming morning.

      "At 7:58 am, Buster Boyer, who was on the hotel roof, called: 'Here he comes!', and, almost in line with the refinery stacks, Lindberg was headed for Parco.

      "He made many circles over the town and flew low enough that many could see the 'lone eagle' himself; and the plane could be seen in detail.  He was generous with his act; and everyone was thrilled with his flying and the apparent ease with which he handled his plane, sweeping down, making sharp curves, then mounting again almost perpendicularly.

      "As Lindberg made a low sweep over the front of the hotel, he dropped a cardboard tube in which there was a handwritten meassage of greeting to the town of Parco.  This document is now posted in the window of the Chamber of Commerce, where all can see it.

      "At 8:04 am, he was off toward Rawlins.

      "The people here were impressed with the simplicity of his craft, which is not nearly as pretentious as the larger mail planes.  This simplicity brought more forcibly to mind the great feat of the Lone Eagle himself; in watching this simple plane, one could not well imagine it in mid-ocean without shuddering, and without realizing that to start off on such a long a hazardous trip took nerve beyond imagination."

 

The appearance of Charles Lindberg brightened the mood of the town considerably.  He was a sort of harbinger, a magician, whose fortunate wand, in the form of a gasoline-powered flying machine, had appeared out of nothing and had bestowed upon the town a blessing, a return to grace. 

      Lindberg was an individual.   The town was a collection of individuals, many with as much courage as Lindberg, certainly inspired by the courage of Lindberg.  Individuals made history, took chances, made endeavors succeed, against whatever odds.  The history of a town, and, on a larger scale, a nation, was the aggregate thought and momentum of individual wills, combined, in chemical compounds, in social fabrics, in emotional and sexual configurations, projecting those individual desires and drives and aspirations into that web of vision from which the All Potential (which some call the Future) could be given an actual shape, a defined quality, in which that precious resource Life could reside, could refurbish itself, could become History's director and driving nature.

 

The town began to regain its sense of direction.

      In July, Parco resident Johnny Roberts began construction of a greenhouse and residence on the corner of 11th and lincoln Highway.  It was built of Parco brick, and heated by steam.

      In October, the new barbecue sandwich grill at the Rialto Tea Room was completed.  The chimney of the grill was made of Parco brick.  The Coffee Shop in the hotel began to close at 9:30 pm that month, but restaurant service was available at the Tea Room until 2:00 am.

      In November, 1927, PARCO installed radio aerials on each house in town.  The telephone company put out a new directory, printed on cardboard, urging users to "call by number."  Parco now had 325 phones.

      Time passed.  Another Christmas party at the Recreation Hall.  A new year: 1928.  Some of the elation of the passing decade was waning.  People were worried about the financial stability of PARCO.  There had been reports in the Denver newspaper that Frank Kistler's empire was shrinking.  There was fear that there might be layoffs, if the economy didn't recover; if people could not afford to buy cars, then the need for gasoline would fall off sharply.  An era of limitations was apparently succeeding the decade of new horizons.  There was more talk about what was wrong with the world; people continued to look for some hopeful vision of the Future, some ground upon which to build a solid progression into Life's enormity.

      The Parco church was full each Sunday.  People seemed a bit more sober now.  It had been the tragedy, no doubt.  That had been the beginning of something, some turn in fortune.  Parco residents looked toward the 1930's with an unsettled feeling; they wondered which figure of brains and ambition might emerge from the mass, as Frank Kistler had done, to lead the town through adversity, through Doubt, allowing them the private dignity to continue in building their dream.

 

IX.

 

The world came creeping in, ineluctibly at first, almost unnoticed.  The aerials on the red and blue shingle roofs brought the world in basso impressions into the living rooms of the people of Parco.  There were problems in the world.  There was entertainment too.  Over 150,000 boxing fans had jammed Chicago's Soldier Field to watch Heavyweight Champion Gene Tunney fight ex-champion Jack Dempsey.  In the seventh round, Dempsey hit Tunney with a right hand and dropped him to the canvas.  The referee, following a special Illinois law, refused to start the ten count until Dempsey retreated to a neutral corner.  Dempsey stood over Tunney, waiting to hit him if he tried to rise.  The referee sent him to a neutral corner.  Four seconds had elapsed before the official count began.  Tunney, shaken, slowly recovered his wits, rose at the count of eight.  Tunney came back to score a ten round decision in what came to be known as the "Long Count" fight.  Graham McNamee brought the fight into the living rooms of Parco, Wyoming.  The next day the entire town was alive with discussions of the long count, and its justifications, according to the rules.

      On September 30, 1927, Babe Ruth had hit his sixtieth homerun, in the 8th inning in a game between the Yankees and the Washington Senators.

      There was other news too.  Sacco and Vanzetti, anarchist immigrants, convicted of murdering two men in a payroll robbery, were executed after having spent seven years in prison.  There were demonstrations against the execution in Belgrade, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Havana, Melbourne, Moscow, Warsaw; in Paris, fighting with police broke out when 150,000 people demonstrated in front of the U.S. Embassy.

      Calvin Coolidge was the President, a quiet man, a man who once quipped to a newsman: "If you  don't say anything, then you won't be called on to repeat it!"  He loved fishing, was notoriously stingy; William Allen White said about him: "He is an economic fatalist with a God-given inertia.  He knows nothing and refuses to learn."

 

The world had become smaller.  Parco played a role in this, in an abstract manner: the production of oil and gasoline, to aid the increased speed of movement and privacy in the family automobile, tended to shrink the world into a unit for complex understandings; the radio brought the world into every house.  The newspaper still was read, almost more for local news than for national and international news.  The evening radio news brought stories about Lindberg's international flight, the opening of The Jazz Singer at New York's Warner Theater, the first talking motion picture; it brought news about the Arab-Jewish conflict which destroyed most of the town of Safed, near the Sea of Gallilee; and the death of Rudolf Valentino, who died of a perforated ulcer.

      News was entertainment.  Men would hurry home from work to listen to the evening news, to find out ball scores and other important happenings in their nation and across the seas.

 

On March 1, 1928, a large sign with the word PARCO was painted on the warehouse roof.  It was designed to help air pilots determine their location.  The name of the town had been painted on the rocks on a hill south of town several years earlier, for the same purposes; the new sign promised to be even better, as it was finished in aluminum paint and was illuminated at night by flood lights.

      Also in March, the Parco Civilian Rifle Club and the Parco Refinery Rifle Club consolidated to form the Parco Rifle Club.

      On April 26, the Parco Development offices were moved from the Lincoln Highway apartment building to general offices above the Cullen Commercial store.

      On May 11, station WGY, in Schednectady, New York, began the first scheduled television programming, three times a week.  Three months later, the same station would televise the first remote pickup, covering the ceremony in Albany which officially conferred on Al Smith the Democratic presidential nomination.  In September, the same station would present the first televised play, The Queen's Messenger.

      Also in May, Al Capone, once Chicago's Number One Underworld boss, was arrested by Philadelphia police as he emerged from a movie theater.  The next day he was indicted by a Grand Jury for carrying concealed weapons; he was tried, convicted, sentenced and placed in jail, from which he continued to run his underworld empire.

      On May 17, the Parco Refinery day schedule changed from 8:00 to 5:00 to the new hours of 7:00 to 4:00.  It allowed an extra hour of sunshine for recreation of the employees.

      On May 25, Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly the Atlantic, took off from Boston with two passengers in her airplane Friendship.

      In July, a system of fire signals was put into effect by the Parco Refinery.  The refinery work whistle blown three times meant a fire in town.  The siren was used only in case of a fire in the refinery or the loading rack.

      Also in July, the streets of Parco were oiled, as was the Rawlins-Parco road.  The Parco Golf Club was organized; Andy Dana was elected president; Harry Hazen was elected secretary.  Annual dues were $10 a person.

      The Parco Airport was cleared of sagebrush, and was a square mile of perfectly level landing surface.  The Airways Division of the Department of Commerce installed a 60-foot tower and beacon light.  The field boasted a one-plane hangar, as well as a gasoline and oil storage house. 

      In London, England, John Logie Baird transmitted the first color television pictures at his studios.  In Rochester, New York, one week later, George Eastman demonstrated color motion pictures.  Film subjects included flowers, butterflies, peacocks, goldfish, and pretty girls.  Later in the year, Walt Disney would release his first Mickey Mouse cartoon entitled Plane Crazy.  Also, in 1928, Disney would produce Steamboat Willie, the first animated cartoon to use a sound track in its production.

      On August 27, fifteen nations, including all the major powers, signed the Kellogg-Briand Treaty (the Pact of Paris), binding the contracting governments to "renounce war as an instrument of national policy."  Sixty-two nations eventually ratified the treaty, including Germany, Italy and Japan.  The only countries refusing the ratify the treaty were several South American states and Yemen.

      The main issue in Wyoming politics in 1928 had been raised by Congressman Charles E. Winter as early as 1926.  This issue concerned transfer of public lands in the eleven western "public land" states to those states, to be administered by the individual state governments.  Winter, in 1928, in his third term in Congress, tried to unseat Democratic U.S. Senator John B. Kendrick; Perry W. Jenkins aspired to fill the seat being vacated by Charlie Winter.  Both Republicans, Winter and Jenkins, made public land cession their principal campaign plank.  Senator Kendrick rejected the proposal of cession, claiming that such bills had been introduced in congress over the past decade, each time being referred to committee where they were allowed to die.  Early in the year, Jenkins set out to visit other western governors in an attempt to win their support.  Arizona and Utah quickly joined his efforts.  The eight other public-land state governors were less supportive.  Winter, in the Summer, had tried to organize a western state united front, seeking support from senators and congressmen throughout the west; his attempt had been fruitless. 

      In November, incumbent Senator Kendrick defeated Congressman Winter by more than 6,000 votes.  Perry Jenkins had been defeated in an earlier primary by Republican Vincent Carter, who was elected to Congress in the November election, defeating W.S. Kimball by more than three thousand votes.

      In the national election, Herbert Clark Hoover was elected over Catholic Al Smith by 6 1/2 million votes, and by 444 electoral votes to Smith's 87.  Hoover had been born in West Branch, Iowa, August 10, 1874.  He was a graduate of Stanford University, worked for twenty years as a mining engineer, building up an international business empire, and a personal fortune of over $4 million.   At 24, he married Lou Henry, a Stanford co-ed, who shared his interest in minerals.  (Later they would collaborate on a published translation of an ancient treatise on metals.)  Together they had two sons; by the time Herbert Jr., the oldest, was four, he had circled the globe three times with his mother and father.

      During World War I, Hoover coordinated worldwide efforts to provide relief for starving civilians, and served as American Food Administrator.  In the Cabinet under Harding and Coolidge, he served as Secretary of Commerce and "Assistant Secretary of everything else." 

      He was 5'11'' tall, with broad shoulders, a round face, hazel eyes, a ruddy complexion; his straight hair was parted near the middle.  He was a deeply religious Quaker; and, as such, was a stickler for detail, and a compulsive worker.

      In his first try for elective office, Hoover defeated Al Smith and assumed the Presidency of the United States.

     

The radio played.  There would be a new president.  The Winter had come in hard in October, and even harder in November.  The Winter was a surly master in southern Wyoming.  Several people had died on the road in from the Sun Ranch that November, caught in a freak snowstorm which cut off the road and left the car stuck, with the blizzard only beginning.  The wind began to blow.  The three people in the car, Julius Runyan, his wife Alice, and a friend, Allan White, tried to walk together over the hills back to Tom Sun's place.  They wandered in circles.  The ground swells made visibility zero.  The snow fell for three days.  Friends knew they were lost; it was not possible for rescue squads to find them.  Their car was discovered the day after the blizzard stopped, by ranch hands from the Sun Ranch, who had been alerted to the Runyans' disappearance.  The bodies were not found until the next Spring, when the thaw came.  They were found huddled together, in a snow cave they had made.  Julius and Alice Runyan had been holding hands when they died.

      Wyoming is a harsh land.  It is dry and hot in the Summer; Winter often lasts nine months.  I have seen it snow in every month of the year, even August, a storm during which whole trees collapsed from the weight of snow collected in their fully-leaved branches.  It is a land of wind, of biting cold, often-times around 40 degrees below zero, in January and February, with the wind.  It is a high desert, nearly 7,000 feet high, yet semi-arid.  It is a land, at least in the south, with little agricultural potential, yet with high mineral content.  When the ranchers brought sheep and cattle to Wyoming, they were forced to bite off ranch lands of a thousand acres, for there was so little forage in the brush and plains grasses that thousands of acres were needed to support a large herd of livestock.

 

In November, 1928, activities of the Little Theater in Parco were suspended for lack of directors.  An appropriation of $100 from its treasury was authorized to purchase books for the Parco Public Library.

      Also in November, road construction began on a new Walcott-Parco road.  The Rawlins Republican reported: "Coming west, the new road will leave the present course of the Lincoln Highway about a half-mile west of the Saratoga and Encampment road.  It will run south of White Horse Canyon to the Platte River, crossing the river about two miles south of Fort Steele, proceeding practically in a straight line to Parco.  It will cross the railroad tracks with a viaduct just at the east limits of Parco, and will there again come onto the present highway.  The new road will be two miles shorter than the present route on a much better grade with no curves of consequence and the dangrouse railroad crossing just east of Fort Steele will be eliminated.  Often traffic was congested at the old one-way bridge at Fort Steele.  The road is scheduled to be open to traffic over the entire cut-off on May 10, 1930."

 

X.  

 

"It may be justified in an intellectual sense, in an artistic sense, this prolonged digression," David said, seated on the edge of his chair.  "But that isn't the only issue.  Almost anything can be justified in art, if you merely understand what your are doing.  My questions is: who will publish it?"

      "That is a good question," I replied.  "And I don't have an answer."

      "The New Yorker won't publish it, not if it loses its borders and becomes, instead of a narrative of a derelict Texan,  a newsreel of historical items, year by year.  History isn't art, my friend.  History is the accumulation of events.  Art is the delineation of events, the drawing out from a sum of information a streamlined and precise account of a significant set of informations."

      "You have defined art very carefully, I see; you have made it, I suppose, impossible to accept another definition.  You are a reductionist it seems, seeing Life as an immense cauldron, which, when boiled down to nothing, when evaporating all textures and all superfluities, all hegemonies and all mere accidents, if there are such things, leaves some true essence, which you call art.  Yet, let me offer another view.  Let me offer the view that Life is a great pool of circumstance; time, or individual events, moments, are, in an isolated sense, very rarely a true reflection of the pool, since the pool becomes a pool, not by isolating pearls of water but rather by approximating them, by drawing them together, adding them to the sum, which, this addition of peripheral elements, creates a view which, the more acquisitive it becomes, more closely reflects the nature of Life.  It is an expansive view: that art is not the scaled down essence of Life; rather, art is the process of expansion, the process of quest, for, like Life itself, a work of creation has a beginning, perhaps has an end, but does not have a program which determines the minute experiences which become the sum total (Life) along the way.  Art is a journey; it is not a reduction to some seed element.  It begins in the seed, and explodes out, taking its own form, taking whatever form it demands, to express itself, to tell its own story.   I don't write this story.   I cannot stop it from growing.  Even if I wanted it to be a simple story of a man who appears on the horizon to leave a black hand on a small town in Wyoming: how can it be that now?  New elements have been added.  Water beads, running down a string, at the end of which is a barrel, collecting water, becoming a pool of water: water beads collide, and this, itself, is Life.  I cannot deny that process, in the interest of some well-defined artistic format, which requires simplicity where there is none, which requires definitiveness where there is floundering, stretching, expressionism, searching."

      "Yes, I understand what you are saying," David said.  "But how am I going to be able to approach publishers with this?  That is my question."  (David is my literary agent, something I have not mentioned.)  "I don't deny that it is interesting, as a concept.  Yet execution is everything."

      "What do you suggest?" I asked.  "Do you suggest I stop now, and try to scale this down to some manageable form?  To make a pleasant short-story out of it?  A rose will not be a cabbage however it may try.  And if this is more like a cabbage than a rose, whether in form or only in aroma, then it is so because it must be a cabbage.  I am not in a position to tell it what to do; to tell it what shape to take.  I assist in the birth of the child, I don't control it.  I cannot control the appearance and the nature of the child as it expands out of the womb; even if I was able to theorize on the nature of "children" and "birth," in a general sense, prior to the actual beginning of Life.  And that says something about speculation (viewing Life through generalities) as opposed to living (which, essentially, is particular, in the midst of conformities and laws and general customs of thought)."

      David sat quietly in his chair (no one else sat in that chair, an old recliner, brown leather, seated to look out the window).  The wind blew in: a July evening, warm wind, a pleasant sunny day.  He rarely was so quiet.

      "I know I can't change your mind," he said finally.  "I am just afraid it might become unmanageable."

      "So am I," I admitted.  "Yet, it has refused to be a simple story.  It wishes to have some epic scale, and I cannot convince it otherwise."

      "I am glad you have brought the larger world in to the story," David said.  "In some way, I am glad.  Parco had to be touched by the world of events outside itself.  And I understand the thematic implications you are approaching: the Heaven World, and the fall into Time.  The local and the universal.  The cycles of creation and destruction.  I can see these developing.  But for how much longer will the newsreel form be appropriate?"

      "I learned long ago that writing a story can really have no formula," I said.  "Each story is different.  There is a formal consistency: I know roughly where I begin; I know the general direction where I am going; perhaps I even comprehend the end of the voyage.  Yet I don't know the nature of the journey; I can't predict the experiences along the way, or if I will even make it to the end of the story.  That's what makes writing vital to me: that it is a journey, a live experience, with no script, only with broad parameters or sign posts to help my direction.  Time, in this story, seems to be providing the broad parameters.  In fact, the story, and the story's structure (they are the same, of course, that is, never separated), seems to be a story of the structure of Time."

      David was worried.  "This is no longer Bedford's story."

      "It never was his story.  This story belongs to no one yet.  He is not the infrequent visitor.  You are not even the infrequent visitor.  This story is larger than any one man; because this is the story of an era; and because this story defies the reader to still believe in tragedy."

 

                                    *                                  *                                  *

 

On January 8, 1929, the millionaire manufacturer Beele Carroll of Saginaw, Michigan, walked in to the Parco Hotel lobby and was so impressed that he had detailed photographs taken of the interior.  He planned to model his drawing-room after the lobby.  Frank J. Meyers, of Rawlins, took the pictures for Mr. Carroll.

      In 1929, the first American experiment in the creation of a garden community was attempted in Radburn, New Jersey.  Homes, parks, schools, playgrounds, safe walks without traffic crossings were set amid natural surroundings for health, safety, and aesthetic pleasure of the residents.

      On February 14, seven lieutenants of the Bugs Moran gang were waiting for their boss in a warehouse on Chicago's North Clark Street when a black sedan pulled up.  Four men got out, two in police uniforms, two in plainclothes.  They raided the warehouse, which was used as a liquor drop for illegal alcohol coming dwon from Canada; they ordered the seven Moran hoods to line up and face the wall.  Then, with machine guns and sawed-off shotguns, the "cops" cut them to pieces.  The getaway was clever enough to fool eyewitnesses outside.  The two civilian hit men marched out with hands up in front of the two "arresting officers," and the quartet, agents of Al Capone, sped off to freedom.   They were never caught.  This episode later became recognized as the "St. Valentine's Day Massacre."

      It was an era of voices.  Graham McNamee, Phillips Carlin, Ted Husing, Milton Cross, NTC, Norman Brokenshire, Jimmy Wallington.  The voices became the personalities of the air-waves.  Almost everyone had a favorite voice.  They were becoming, these voices, the structure of American life, the sometimes hidden, then emerging elements of consistency, the network of familiarity, establishing a daily family of rituals, be it the overvoice of a news report, or of a variety show: the shows and performers came but the announcers remained, sterling, vocally sure, touching each house with a reassuring tempo, a stabilizing chord. 

      Amos 'n' Andy was aired in 1929, sponsored by Pepsodent, starring Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, developed from their blackface act performed at minstrel shows and revues.  Gosden and Correll had worked, since 1925, as Sam and Henry, performing weekly at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago.  They were paid a free dinner as wages for their performance.  Eventually, WGN signed them for a daily Sam and Henry show; two years later, they signed with WMAQ.  Since WGN had the rights to the name Sam and Henry,  Gosden and Correll became Amos 'n' Andy, and the show became radio's first big hit.

      Later in the year, Rudy Vallee hosted radio's first full hour variety show.  Vallee presented acts such as Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Bob Burns, Alice Faye, Frances Langford, and Joe Penner.  The shows The Aldrich Family and We, the People were given regular radio spots after appearances on the Rudy Vallee Show.

      The Mormon Tabernacle Choir made its first broadcast from Salt Lake City.

      A more modest show, The Goldbergs, premiered.  It featured a warm Jewish family, presided over by Mama Molly (Gertrude Berg, who wrote, produced, directed and, of course, starred in the show).   Its popularity was astounding, and endured, as the show eventually made the transition from radio to television.

      A 26-year old cemetery plot salesman, billed as "the Warbling Banjoist," Arthur Godfrey, sang into the mike for the first time in 1929.

 

The radio was what the wheel had been, the steam engine, the railroad, the Lincoln Highway.  It was a means by which space could be conquered, in the name of a unified vision, a unified national mission and identity.  If the railroad, and later the automobile, tied distant spots together, in physical approximation, the radio tied people together by helping to create a tangible shared history, through the mechanism of voice.  As the railroad appealed to the foot, the radio appealed to the ear.  As the foot was tied, inextricably, to the eye, for it contained within its metaphor (if metaphor is the appropriate word) actual physical motion through space, for which sight was required, the ear was tied to another nature of the brain, far more metaphorical than the foot, far more sedentary, more visionary, in a true sense.  The train could travel forty-five miles in one hour; whereas, the radio impulse could travel thousands of miles in mere seconds.  It could pervade the entire globe, theoretically; it could touch hearts in Houma, Louisiana, in Pass Christian, Mississippi, at the same time as it touched hearts in New York City, in San Francisco, even in Peking, China, given the proper encouragement.  A unified historical-cultural context, through which the nation would flourish in independence, and, at the same time, fraternity, continuity.

      That was the dream.  The dream made flesh.  The dream made of electricity.  And sound.  And sport and weaponry.

 

Not all news was good.  The nation experienced tragedies together, as a nation, in one house, at one moment.  One such moment appeared, October 24, 1929.  On Wall Street, the New York Stock Exchange recorded some unusually large sales of Kennecott Copper and General Motors stock.  Brokers began to ask why, talked to their clients; by 11:00 AM stock prices had plunged dramatically, reflecting a "seller's panic."  Shortly after Noon, five of New York's leading bankers, with Thomas W. Lamont of J.P. Morgan and Company, raised a $240 million emergency fund to steady the market.  The effect was temporarily encouraging; yet doubt and fear continued to pervade the market; and panic took over within a few days.  Stocks dropped $40, $50, $60  per share on Tuesday, the 29th.  And prices continued to drop thereafter.

      The losses, at least on paper, during that first day of panic selling was $26 billion; 16 million shares were traded.  General Motors was cut in half; U.S. Steel was down over 100 points.  Montgomery Ward, at the end of trading, stood at 49, after starting the day at 138. 

      The panic spread across the country, through the air-waves, through the harmonious voices of men like Huling and Cross and Niles Granlund.  Men who could be trusted were telling America that a dream had vanished, that an era of prosperity had vanished, that an era of chaos was approaching: that Black Thursday had wreaked havoc on the community which was the guardian of America.  That a time of fear was approaching.  A time of testing.  A time, perhaps, of destruction. 

 

The Roaring Twenties were over.  A new era was beginning.  It was a time not for the faint of heart.  It was a time for fortitude.  A time for belief.  President Hoover was at the helm; and America must pray for wisdom in its leaders.  A national soberness was instantaneous.  A new dream must be forged, endured in its precondition, even as the old dream receded, was beginning to rise into legend.

 

 

PART FOUR
THE BIRTH OF THE HERO

 

I.

 

On March 12, 1913, John Henry Clark was born into a family of four.  His father was James Abraham Clark, one of the New Jersey Clarks, whose distant relative, Abraham Clark, had signed the Declaration of Independence.  The New Jersey Clarks were related to the Virginia Clarks, emigrants from Wales, initially, back when the seas began to part under the spell of the words of Moses and Solomon and Daniel and the Archangel Michael, back when the new continent had been raised out of a state of chaos, out of a fundamental sleep, and the New Jerusalem, promised by the Old Testament Lord, through the New Testament Son, had appeared in the West, like a road out of Egypt.

      Europe had become decadent, in the largest sense; rigid, shackled with family-heritages which no longer expressed excellence nearly as much as they merely codified conditions.  The road out of Egypt was traveled in ships carrying cargo of refugees to the New World.  The Old World had become old, dry, undistinguished, like an old shoe, like a corpse feeding off its own corpulence, resistent to birth and to generous creation.

      The Clarks came in waves to the New World.  They settled along the Eastern seaboard, formulating strongholds in New Jersey and Virginia.  The Virginia Clarks would generate the brothers William Clark and George Rogers Clark; later, General Mark Clark, the liberator of Rome in 1944.  The New Jersey Clarks, like the Virginia Clarks, spread rapidly westward.  Walter Van Tillberg Clark, the writer, and Attorney General Ramsey Clark, were descendants of the New Jersey Clark line, as was Abraham Clark, the New Jersey representative in the Continental Congress which helped draft and then approved the Declaration of Independence.

 

James Abraham Clark was born into a family of three brothers and two sisters (two more brothers would come, and one more sister).  His father, Henry Adams Clark worked in a foundry in Scranton, Pennsylvania.  His mother was Eva Louise Ryan, a red-haired Irish woman, who met Henry Adams Clark one day while walking beside her father along the banks of the Monongahela River.  It was a Summer afternoon, warm, a sky as high as eternity.  Eva Louise was dressed in a white dress, with navy blue iris patterns; her father walked beside her, holding the hand of his youngest daughter, Leslie Ann.

      Eva's father, Cotton Ryan, was an inventor, a machinest, and a foreman at the foundry.  He was a big man, with dreams of a financial empire.  He was working on developing machinery to cheaply and effectively harvest cotton.  His father had owned a plantation in Houma, Louisiana, near the Gaidry plantation.  Cotton Ryan's father, Ecclesias, had come to the South directly from Cork County, Ireland.  He brought his wife and a family of two daughters.  The British police in Ireland had affectively harassed him to leave Ireland.  He had been involved in revolutionary political movements; had spent time in prison.  When he received word from an old political ally, Seamus O'Connell, in Charleston, South Carolina, that he had established himself in the shipping trade, as a partner in a growing concern, and that Ecclesias should join him, that there was plenty of opportunity, and a land uninhabited by British lords and police of the established kings (the letter contained money to cover the cost of the Atlantic crossing), Ecclesias loaded his family on a ship at Bristol and sailed for Charleston.  When he arrived Seamus had found him work, as a machinest on the docks, and began to make arrangements for Ecclesias to assume administrative duties in the Lucas-O'Connell Shipping Enterprise.  Earlie Lucas, a Southern gentleman from Past Christian, Mississippi, welcomed Ecclesias into the business.  Lucas-O'Connell Enterprises shipped textiles (cotton products) to Europe, through England.  Later, under the name of Octagon Shipping Incorporated, they became involved in the transportation of black slaves from the West Indies into Charleston and New Orleans.

      Ecclesias became the chief business manager of the Lucas-O'Connell textile trade.  He was a man of great force, a tireless man.  His family moved in to a beautiful house along Magnolia Lane, an addition to Charleston for the nouveau riche, a long stretch of proud white mansions, great lawns, surrounded by eucalyptus trees, cherry trees, of course those sweeping Southern Magnolias, which, according to the legend, could produce a single magnolia blossom so large as to fill a large dining room table.  Magnolia Lane smelled like a perfumed arbor.  Ecclesias's wife, Erin, bore two sons while living on Magnolia Lane.

      Ecclesias wished to buy land.  On a trip to New Orleans, investigating the purchase of sugar beets from several old families in southern Louisiana, he met Antonio Gaidry, the off-beat son of Charles Gaidry, of the Houma Gaidrys, a wealthy family of landed aristocrats whose sugar plantation had brought riches to the family as early as the beginning of the Eighteenth Century.  They were one of the fine old families of Louisiana, along with the Charleton Jones family, the Thompsons, to the east of the Gaidrys, and the Beauregards, nearer still to New Orleans.

      Antonio Gaidry met Ecclesias in New Orleans, invited him out to the Gaidry plantation to meet his family.  The Gaidrys took to the Irishman.  He spent several days with them, counseled by both Charles, a serious man, with eyes that narrowed down to steel whenever he spoke about agriculture, and by Charles' father, Mitchell, a laughing man in his eighties, who understood more about cotton and other crops than any man Ecclesias had met.  It was Mitchell Gaidry who suggested that Ecclesias consider purchasing the plantation to the west of their own, that of Holton Wilcox, who was seriously in debt, needed money almost immediately to pay of gambling debts, who did not understand farming, and who had no chance of making the Colfax Hundred, as it was called, a profitable venture.

      Ecclesias bought the Colfax Hundred, with money borrowed from Seamus O'Connell, Earlie Lucas, and borrowed also from the Gaidrys, at the insistence of Mitchell Gaidry, as well as with money he had saved over the earlier years from his generous salary and investments in his own company.  For several years he tried to maintain two residences, in Charleston and at Colfax Hundred, working at two consuming professions, doing neither as well as he would like.  Mitchell Gaidry finally convinced him that, to avoid the fate of Holton Wilcox, of draining one pocket to fill another, he must work the plantation as a way of life, not as an avocation.

      Ecclesias finally sold his house in Charleston and moved his family to the Colfax Hundred, not far from Houma, Louisiana.  The year was 1847.  The cotton crop was good.  Ecclesias owned over 30 slaves to work the fields.  Ecclesias did not support slavery.  He resented the institution of slavery.  All his instincts told him it was wrong; his religion told him it was sinful.  Still, because Time had no alternative, and because he had a family to support, and a profitable plantation to manage, he did not desist in his use of slave labor.

      William Ryan, later called Cotton, was the first-born son of Ecclesias and Erin Ryan, the third child of their union.  Laura was the first-born child, their first daughter; Elizabeth was born one year before William.  Both Laura and Elizabeth had been born in Dublin; Cotton was born that first year in Charleston, 1840.

      Colfax Hundred soon became a profitable plantation.  Sugar beets were grown.  Erin kept a great family garden near the old Wilcox plantation house, a two-story Georgian, with peeling paint and damaged stairs.  Ecclesias mended the existing house, and began building a new family dwelling, across from the Wilcox house, in a grove of cypress trees, near Starluck Creek, a small stream on the property.  Antonio Gaidry rode over in the morning, with his cousin, Lewis Bontemp, and two slaves from the Gaidry plantation, Oliver Crow and Ishmael (Ishmael had no last name).  Together these men, with the foreman of the Ryan plantation, a creole named Isaac Pillesant, and with Ecclesias (and Cotton carrying water, helping in other ways), began to push, in plank and peg, in sweat and little conversation, the dream house of Ecclesias and Erin Ryan up out of the ground.

      Erin worked in her garden, her long red hair tied up under her straw sun-hat, with Elizabeth and Laura working beside her, and Lizzy Shaw, the daughter of the parlor servant, a mulatto girl, whose father was Bassie Shaw, a land agent in Houma; he had made the ride from Houma to Colfax Hundred for years, to meet Rhea, the cook and house slave of the Wilcox family, in the woods down by the Lafourche River, there to have sex with Rhea and to drink whiskey made by his brother Erskine whose family lived outside of Raceland.

      The house went up.  There was a housewarming, with the entire Gaidry clan invited; Mitchell Gaidry was almost blind then, but insisted on riding in the buggy, driven by Oliver Crow, a muscled black man, in his mid-thirties, who would match quotes from the Bible with old Mitchell Gaidry, as they rode.  The Gaidrys invited the other landed gentry of the region, families whose ownership of southern Louisiana stretched back at least a hundred years: Charleton Jones' oldest son, Herbert Grimes Jones, led a contingent of Joneses, riding his buckskin mare along a train of covered carriages, each of which contained a half-dozen delicacies of female grace and charm, on loan from the Jones' plantation, which was called Largesse.  Charleton was in Texas, buying land near Houston, which, everyone said, would make him even richer, for there was oil in the land near Houston.  Mahaley Thompson, and his brothers Buck and Sumpter, rode beside the Thompsons and the Billy Hill family.  The Thompsons' eldest daughter, Roulette, had recently married Casey Hill; it was a marriage of alliance, for Billy Hill was the director of the Lafourche Bank in Houma, the only bank really, for the other banks had been forced to close, or had been bought up by Billy Hill and made branch banks of his central bank, on Larson Street.  The Thompsons and the Hills were probably the two riches families in the county.  The Gaidrys were wealthy, but their power lay more in their style of life, and in their heritage, whereas the Thompsons were rich in land, and also owned ships in New Orleans and taverns and some said whore houses.

      Other local people came: Sheriff Clayton Jones; the Richard Steeles, Ecclesias's lawyer and his new bride, from Florida; Earlie Lucas, and his family, for he was spending the late Summer at his home in Mississippi.  Others from Houma, people the Ryans had met over the year, also came.

 

Cotton watched it all: the high style of Southern custom, the taffeta gowns, the frozen smiles of the women, the kindly flirtations, the slaves pretending to be stupid.   The thick fields of cotton; and the bent black backs, naked to the waste, sweating in the open fields, their bodies twisted, warped into new configurations, singing, sometimes gospel songs, other times lewd folk songs which always set the young women in the fields to laughing.  The older women didn't care for the songs, especially because the young men singing them had eyes on their daughters and nieces and not on themselves.  The very black nights, and the cottages down in the hollow, on the down side of Starluck Creek.  The smoke rising from the chimneys, when the cooler weather came on in the Winter months.  The songs pouring out from the thatched roofs and the opened doors.  He would steal, with his friend Dabs Gaidry, down to the Slave Alley when night came on; they would peek through the uncurtained windows of the shacks and watch the men and women making love on the floor or on the featherbedding.  It was such a strange world.  Such strange sounds and horrible smells.  Cotton and Dabs agreed that it was a stroke of good luck that they had been born white.

 

II.

 

Erin Ryan did not approve of slavery.  She was a quiet woman, a religious woman; yet, in the presence of others, generally the men friends of her husband, the Gaidry men, and Mahaley Thompson when he visited, with his brother Lancaster, and Sheriff Jones, and even Seamus O'Connell, when he made his annual pilgrimage to Colfax Hundred, with his family, to celebrate Christmas, and the coming of the New Year, Erin would often speak her mind when the conversation was led toward slavery, inevitably justified as an institution vital to the Southern lifestyle.  The Northerners were trying to crucify the South, with their hypocrisy and their misunderstandings.  The landowners of the South were dependent on labor, to harvest their crops.  Their way of life was threatened by men like the fire-eaters Wendell Philips and John Brown, and the radical, fresh from his journeys into the West, John Charles Fremont, all of whom felt it was his duty to tell the South how to live, what to eat, how to dress, who to take for their wives.

      There was talk, even in 1848, of secession.  The North was travelling a road, with its capacity for technology, its commercial recklessness, its corrupt political maneuverings, which did not bode well for the Southern culture.

      Erin Ryan was more an Irish Catholic mother than a Southern plantation queen.  She did not accept what she saw.  She demanded that Ecclesias grant his slaves freedom.  He refused.  She stood firmly against slavery in her own parlor when visitors made comments on the virtue and importance of slavery, or made rude comments about her own slaves.  She developed a reputation of being (and this was spoken with tolerance, even some admiration, by the visitors to Colfax Hundred) the Irish Woman With the Northern Mind, the Southern Grace, the Western Courage, and the Eastern Forthrightness.  She was a lovely woman, with a cream-textured face, red-hair, darkened with some black, so as to be really red, not orange like some Irish red-heads.  She was admired by her neighbors; although some did feel that her work in her garden, and around her house, befitted more a serf's wife than a gentleman's beloved.  She was new to the Southern customs however, and, so, could be excused for her energy; for, if this was her only vice, and it seemed to be, with the aforementioned capacity for mental combat, which was not necessarily a vice, for it enlivened evenings otherwise stretched silly by the sound of mosquitos and moths pounding at the screens, and rendered slightly twisted by the exegencies of plantation whiskey, then she was, for Ecclesias Ryan, a wife of exceeding honor and undeniable beauty, the mother of five athletic and handsome children, and the mistress of a rejuvenated cotton plantation.

 

Cotton grew up in this strange land of dreams.  It did not seem strange to him, at the time.  Everything was serene.  Everything seemed golden.  Even when the picturesque splendor of life at Colfax Hundred was broken momentarily by something brutal or something irregular, such as the hanging of a runaway slave from the Runtalion farm in June1852, who had killed an overseer named Marks on the nearby Largesse Plantation, after Marks had caught him hiding in a hay loft early one morning, still, the serenity seemed more real than did the abberrant moment, the dream seemed more real than any stark creation which might oppose it. 

      Marks had tried to stop the fugitive slave; he struck Sergeant Marks, as he was called, in the throat with an axe which he was hiding in his shirt.  Other slaves at Largesse saw it; they chased down the Runtalion slave, named Barber Blue, and tied him to an elm tree down below Beech Hill.  The youngest slave, Charlie Harper, ran to get Charleton Jones himself, back at the mansion; while they waited for the master of the house to arrive, the four other blacks who had run down Barber Blue took turns throwing rocks at the bound man.  They were angry, for Sergeant Marks had been a good man, and they feared that his replacement might make their lives much worse.  So they threw fist-sized rocks at the man they had tied against the tree, hitting him in the head and chest, drawing blood, splitting his lip and eye-brow. 

      Ecclesias had traveled to visit Charleton Jones with regard to a contract which would allow the Lucas-O'Connell Shipping Company, formerly working out of Charleston only, now shipping out of New Orleans also, to carry cotton and other goods produced on Largesse to England, and, through England, to Europe; and also to some cities on the Northeast Coast, especially Baltimore and Washington, D.C.  This involved the breaking of an old partnership with Elegy Humes, whose shipping business in New Orleans had made his family one of the wealthiest clans in that city; it would alienate a pretty powerful family in Louisiana business and political circles for Charleton Jones to shift his alliances to a new company, merely at the word of a poorer neighbor.  Yet, Elegy Humes had used his considerable influence with the State Legislature, the past year, in an effort to consolidate power in the urban regions of the state, to pass a re-apportionment plan which would steal (I use the term from the perspective of the gentry) influence away from the land, and from the old established families.  This betrayal of the gentry was a personal blow to Charleton Jones, for it was he who helped secure for Elegy Humes, and before Elegy, for his father, Proteus Humes, contracts to ship with all the major plantations in the south Louisiana region.  He needed to retaliate against Humes; and, so, was considering using his influence to persuade the other major landowners in and around Houma, indeed, throughout southern Louisiana, to negotiate transportation contracts with the same company which had been responsible for the establishment of Ecclesias Ryan and his family in the New World.

      Cotton had accompanied his father on this ride, some thirty-five miles, through the foothills southwest of Houma past Lake Hatch and Lake Theriot.  Cotton and his father were in the sitting room with Charleton and his wife, Eulalia, and Charleton's brother, Landin, and Charleton's eldest son, Herbert Grimes, when the young slave Charlie Harper came running to the door with a story about a murder of the Sergeant and the capture of a runaway murderer from the Runtalion Farm.

      The men saddled their horses, Cotton with them, then a boy of about thirteen, and rode to the auxiliary barn, in the western quarter of the plantation, where they found Sergeant Marks, the overseer, lying in the hay loft, his throat cut to the throat bone; they rode down to the hollow below Beech Hill and found the slaves sitting together away from the prisoner,  Barber Blue, whose face was punctured from stone wounds, and one eye swollen shut, and blood pouring from a split lip, his front tooth shattered from the missiles hurled by his captors.

      Charleton Jones tried to talk to the captive.  Barber Blue would not talk.  Charleton Jones asked his own slaves what had happened.  They had seen the fight; the Sergeant didn't know what hit him, it happened so fast.  Barber Blue had murdered him.  Charleton Jones asked all the slaves if that was so.  They all agreed.  Charleton Jones turned to the eldest slave there, Curley Two (his father had been Curley One), and said to him: "Take this rope, Curley Two,  and hang Barber Blue as punishment for his crime."

      Curley Two took the rope, threw one end over the elm tree under which Barber Blue was tied.  They put the noose around Barber Blue's neck; one slave, a very muscular slave, named Hercules, pulled the rope from behind Barber Blue, over a strong limb; the other slaves lifted Barber Blue off his feet, and then helped Hercules pull the rope even stronger, lifting Barber Blue almost ten feet off the ground.  He screamed, thrashed, for what seemed like a half-hour.  Finally he became silent.  Charleton Jones commanded Curley Two to bury the slave beneath the elm tree; he would inform August Runtalion about the matter, and pay Runtalion the cost of his slave. 

      The men, along with Cotton, rode back to the Jones mansion.  It was almost time for dinner.  Cotton rode in silence, and wondered what it was he had just seen.

 

The dream went on.  Cotton grew older.  His mother wished him to attend college in the East, at Harvard or at Yale.  Erin wanted Cotton to see life away from the South, which she felt to be unreal, and, somehow, corrupted by the unreality.

      Cotton was very much influenced by his mother.  He remembered long nights of discussion in the family parlor, with piano music played by Elizabeth, and reading by all the family beside the fireplace.  His mother read Uncle Tom's Cabin aloud, much to her husband's discomfort.  Erin taught her children that slavery was wrong, had to be changed, abolished, legislated out of existence.  The country could not go on with some men free and other men slaves.  Her understanding of America was that it was a land of the free of all nations, all colors; and that the only justification for which a man might lose his freedom was as punishment for a crime, which must be perpetrated by an individual and so must be punishment against an individual, and not against a race of individuals who were not responsible for the lives and crimes of any other, save themselves, as individuals.  It was hard to argue against such logic.

      Cotton had always had a knack for machinery.  He understood the principles of moving parts; he grasped instinctively the need for machinery, to do the work which man had hitherto done; which slaves must do until man might invent the machinery to take their place.  There had always been slavery.  The black Africans had enslaved other black Africans.  It was not racially-based, in its origins.  Yet there was a solution.  The solution was that machines might do the horrible work which had been, throughout history, reserved for slaves .

      Cotton determined that he would attend college in the Northeast, to study engineering, to work on a machine which would harvest and plant cotton, thereby working to free to slave from his toil, to fulfill his mother's dream, at the same time preserving the land and empire of his father.

 

Cotton Ryan was nineteen when he boarded a train in New Orleans with his father.  The entire family had taken the wagon (Ecclesias had rode his bay, Lager, behind the wagon, with Isaac Pillesant, who would drive the family back to Colfax Hundred).   Cotton drove the team, with his mother and two sisters, and younger brother Merit, over the rutted road from Houma, northeast, past Lake Salvador and through Crown, into New Orleans.  It was a sign of respect, that Ecclesias allowed Cotton the responsibility of driving the family; Ecclesias acknowledged that Cotton had grown to manhood.

      They spent two days together in New Orleans, staying in an apartment owned by Dixie Gaidry, the unmarried daughter of old Mitch, who was in Paris, France, for the Summer.  Then, on a Sunday, Cotton and his father boarded a train bound for Charleston.  Ecclesias would visit his old friend Seamus O'Connell, and introduce his son to his old business partner.  Ecclesias was proud of his son.  He wanted Seamus to meet young Cotton.  He wanted to see Seamus.  He sensed that he had lost something; he hoped that Seamus could show him what it was that was gone.

 

III.

 

The war came.  It did not come suddenly, overnight, with the inevitable speed of a storm on the plains.  It unfolded as a flower unfolds.  It spread itself out over several decades, allowing the men of each succeeding year to modestly prepare themselves for death, and killing.

      Cotton Ryan was studying in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He was a new man, a southern man, but with many principles of his mother, a love of freedom, a sense that slavery was wrong.  He loved the South.  He loved his father.  His mother had cousins living in Boston.  She visited now several times a year.  She and Ecclesias were estranged.  The war was coming and Ecclesias did nothing to stop it.  They both could see its horrible outcome.  She wanted him to speak out, to strike down the beast before it could rise.  Ecclesias went each day to work the fields, to ride his proud Lager over the land he had come to love.

      Ecclesias Ryan hated slavery, detested the violent degradation of the black man.  Yet philosophy rendered him impotent to change.  His early years, in Ireland, of raging against injustice had now passed to an understanding that Time has many features, unfolds slowly, with its own reasons and regulations.  It was God's plan, which drove the chariot.  Everything had a certain course, as had the planets.  He walked in an ocean of circumstance.  He could not hold back the war, not by shrieking or cursing or by shaking his fist at God.  He knew that the plantation he had come to love would be destroyed.  He foresaw the burning of his crops, the pillaging of his house.  His wife took the children to their aunts to live in Boston.  He loved his wife.  She was a good woman, an admirable woman.  Each night, when he finished dinner, to light the fireplace, or to sit on the porch and play checkers with old silent Isaac, the pillar of Colfax Hundred, he would weep quietly out of loneliness.  Isaac would say nothing.  Isaac felt his pain.  Isaac had known pain before, had watched his mother and three brothers die of scarlet fever, when he was only eight.  Isaac understood.  Isaac's face seemed cut from stone.  Isaac had been born in Texas.  He had come to Louisiana to find his father who gambled in New Orleans: that was the story he heard.  He never found his father.  He found instead the Wilcox Plantation; he had been there ever since, the very soul of Colfax Hundred, unmoving, eternally waiting.

      He would join the war, as he knew Ecclesias would.  He did not know why the war was coming, not really.  He heard the fiery speakers, with their logic and their clever hatreds, paving the way for annihilation.  They were not real.  They were like puppets, driven by some voice, not their own, driving for the sake of History perhaps, driving for the sake of drama.  He smoked his cigarette, quietly, never speaking.  He did not know why he would fight exactly.  There would be no choice really.  It was all just happening.  No one could control it.

      Ecclesias would look up at him, still strong, even in his weeping: "This war is not for slavery," he would say.  "It isn't for state's rights or anything else.  This war is for our own sanctity somehow.  This war is for the coming of the Lord."

 

Erin Ryan would not allow Cotton to return to the South.  He did anyway, even after the firing on Sumter.  War was declared.  Still, there was passage between North and South. 

      Cotton took a train to Nashville, through Cincinnati and Louisville.  From Nashville, he went south through Birmingham, to Biloxi.  From Biloxi he took a horse on the straight past Ponchetrain to his father's plantation at Houma.  His father was gone.   Isaac was gone.  Most of the slaves were gone.  Maria Pedigree, the house mistress, a rotund, happy creole, welcomed Master Cotton to his home.  Where was everyone?  His father and Isaac had ridden off together, about a month before.  They were with Beauregard someone had told her.  They were headed through the swamps to Virginia some believed.  The South believed it would win the war.  Some said the war would be over in months.  Cotton asked what Maria believed.  "I believe," Maria Pedigree said, "that we's in fo' a long an' horrible winter, sir.  I believe the good days on this plantation lies back when my father was a baby.  An' back when I was a baby.  There's nothin' good to come of this.  Except fo' the undertaker.  An' except fo' the preacher."

      "Where are all the slaves?" Cotton asked, for the plantation was empty, silent..

      "They's free slaves," Maria replied.  "Yo' father, befo' he left, made ev'ry one of us a free slave."

 

IV.

 

Ecclesias Ryan rode with Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard early in the war.  Beauregard rode up one afternoon with about fifteen men from southern Louisiana.  He was on a personal recruiting tour.  It was February, 1861.  It was raining.  He asked Ecclesias if he would serve against the North.  Ecclesias had already packed his bedding, some hardtack and jerky.  He had two rifles, his Winchester repeater and a shotgun, and two Colt 45 handguns.  He asked Beauregard to stop for tea.  The men fed their horses, decided to spend the night.  A bit later Isaac Pillesant showed up with about 35 men, from around the county.  Ecclesias had heard that Beauregard was coming to Colfax Hundred.  He sent Isaac out to contact backwoodsmen whom Isaac had known over the years.  They were all well armed, prepared for the war.  They spent the night at Colfax Hundred, quietly, without any celebration, most of the men sleeping out in the open yard, near the old Wilcox House, still well cared for, a visitor's house since the main Ryan house had been built.  Three big fires burned into the night.  The men were sober: there was no song, little talk, mostly sleeping.  Beauregard and Cliff Hudson, Beauregard's lieutenant, Ecclesias, and Handel Rude, a state legislator from Baton Rouge, now wearing a gun, stayed in the plantation house.  They talked until about 2:00 AM, discussing prospects for the war.  Beauregard said that they were commissioned to gather an army and ride to Virginia.  He had been told that his destination was Fort Sumter, South Carolina.  He had orders to march there, post haste; and that further orders would be delivered upon his arrival.

 

At 4:30 am, April 12, 1861, General P.G.T. Beauregard gave the order to Captain George James at Fort Johnson to fire the first canon at Fort Sumter.  Union troops had been ordered to evacuate the fort.  They had refused.  There had been an attempt to reinforce the fort with Union troops and supplies.  The first battery, at Fort Johnson, was answered by a second, on Cummings Point.  The Union fort was under siege.  The bombardment lasted 34 hours.  Eventually, Major Anderson, the Union commander at Fort Sumter, was forced to surrender the 48 guns and 84 men at the Union base.  No one was killed in the bombardment.  Later, when the Confederate forces celebrated the victory, with a 50 gun salute, on the 50th re-loading, a spark accidentially ignited a premature explosion, killing Daniel Hough.  Hot embers from this explosion fell on cartridges below the gun, igniting these, wounded five other men.  Hough was the first man killed during the war.

 

Ecclesias fought beside Beauregard at Manassas Junction, along Bull Run, in Prince William County, Virginia.  It was July, 1861.  Beauregard was guarding against a potential Union thrust into Virginia from Washington, D.C.  On July 18, the Federal troops contact the rebels.  The fight was on.  There were many casualties.  Men were removed by the hundreds to Wilmer McClean's big barn; then Union gunneries began to shell the barn.

      Ecclesias did not see the men drop.  He was riding Lager, and beside him, watching over him, like a guardian angel was, of course, Isaac Pillesant.  Beauregard got in trouble once, by riding too near the front, being cut off by a Union charge; Ecclesias Ryan, Pillesant, and other Confederates broke through the swaming charge, turned its tail, and drove the Union soldiers back beyond the earthworks which had been built up earlier in the month.  The Union soldiers were routed.  There were commendations.  Ecclesias Ryan was mentioned, received a promotion in rank: Colonel Ryan.  Yet war to him was not glory, certainly not manly beatitude.  It was work, something which must be done, as clearing of land must be done before planting.  He received no pleasure from conflict, or from recognition of his courage.  He was alone, during battle.  There was a circle of light around him; he moved in a half-trance state, seeing bullets with his mind's eye, as if reality became muted somehow, and Chance became some special precognition, some magical ability to bend reality.

      He fought, not to kill, although he killed, not to win really, although certainly never to lose; he fought because he had no choice; he fought well because he wished to do everything well; he was good at war because others, who wished to be better than he, if they succeeded, would take a life which was the dearest of gifts to him, which he did not wish to lose, for he still dreamed of a time, somewhere after the madness passed, when he would look across his farmland, see Elizabeth running in her white dress across the porch, see Erin bent at the waist in her garden, her broadbrimmed straw hat shielding the Sun, watch Cotton on his horse, galloping a proud walker.  He wished to see the Sun golden over a field white with cotton.  It was all a dream to him now; he could not cry about his loss now; he merely fought, stepped aside when Death came sweeping with his blade.  He killed his enemy because it was expected of him; he expected it of himself; his enemy also expected it of him.  The war might last for several centuries.  It began to feel as if it would never end.  He looked far in to the dawn when he rose: each day seemed to last a thousand years.  He missed Erin most of all.  He missed her lying in his arms, her red hair twisted on his chest, over the white sheets.  There was no door open that would let him leave; there was only the front door; and to reach that door he would have to conquer the demon who stood before it.

 

V.

 

Cotton Ryan attended Harvard College, studying engineering.  He was a good student, with natural ability.  As a Southerner, he was not accepted by most of the students at the school.  There were other Southerns at Harvard; but many, as 1861 drew near, and as the war became tactile, predictable, when men were enlisting, understanding that the war would begin in a matter of days, months at most, began to withdraw from school, returning to their homes.

      Harvard was not as popular with Southern gentlemen.  It was considered effete, the domain of rich Yankees, spoiled children of spoiled, unprincipled entrepreneurs, the nouveau riche, without understanding of culture and true breeding.  Most Southerners, if they sent their children to college in the North at all, considered West Point as the only school in the North to consider.  West Point was filled with Southerners, even as late as 1861, before the bombardment of Sumter.  Many of the best students at West Point were sons of the landed gentry in Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia certainly.  There were Texans also at West Point. 

      Lincoln offered Robert E. Lee the command of Union Forces, when Lee was an exemplar officer at West Point.  The brass of the Army considered Lee the greatest leader and tactician at West Point.  When war broke out, over Beauregard's aggression, Lee tearfully bade farewell to friends in the North: West Point, Washington, D.C., Boston, Massachusetts.  He did not approve of the war, did not approve of slavery.  He was a military man.  He believed in the union of states.  Yet, the prospect of armed Northern soldiers invading his beloved Virginia was too much to consider.  Like Ecclesias Ryan, the thought of his state, of his regions, of his own land, being overrun by strangers, by armed vagabonds, who had no love of the Southern way of life, rather, who were sworn to destroy it, motivated Robert E. Lee to fight in a war the supposed main issues of which, slavery and states' rights, moved him very little.  When men tried to inspire Lee with fury in the cause, by involing the catch words "our right to choose," Lee would turn and say: "I am fighting for the right of Virginia to be Virginia.  Slavery is not the issue.  Slavery is not healthy; and will die soon of its own dead weight."

 

Cotton was essentially alone at Harvard College.  The Northern boys did not accept him; and he felt different from them.  He was a Southerner.  He wished to be back in the South, the warm Summer evenings, the butterflies emergine, crickets and the sound of Guernsies.  Then his mother sent him a letter: she was leaving the South; war was imminent; the people were gearing up for a war, believed they could win; she did not believe in the Southern slave domain; she had insisted that Ecclesias oppose the war; if this was not possible in the South, then the whole family must leave.  Ecclesias looked at her with amazement.  He was amazed at her naivety, at her innocent morality, which touched him, made him love her even more deeply, yet every separated them now; for Ecclesias could never leave.  He had sunk himself into the rich Southern soil.  He was an American now.  Ireland was dead to him.  The North was another world, as foreign as Ireland.  The South had given him Life, had given him hope for the future, a place to feel at home at last.  He did not support slavery; yet he would not uproot himself again.  He could tolerate the folly of slavery, in the larger context of his own discovery of self: he had found himself, in this swampland, this bayou country; the men he had met here, come to know, who had extended themselves financially, who had taken him in like a brother, were, indeed, brothers to him.  He did not like them all; but he sensed a duty to them, as they were family now, they were in danger, whether of their own making or not made no difference to Ecclesias.  He had no individual will to oppose the war, to oppose secession.  He was them, with different views to be sure, in some issues; but he was a Southerner; this was his land, his home, and he would fight and probably die for this abstract duty to his neighbor; he would never be able to run simply because he did not agree with the nature of the hunt; he had run from Ireland, to a better land; there was no better land than America.  It had given him everything.  It did not matter who won the war really.  It would need to be fought well.  Let the survivors walk proudly home.  Let everyone say that the soldiers had had courage.

 

Erin moved in with her cousin in Boston.  She took the younger children with her, on the train.  Elizabeth, engaged to a New Orleans banker named John Stroud, had moved, first, to New Orleans, then, after two months in that city, joined her mother in Boston.  John Stroud had joined the Confederate Army.  They had not been married.  Elizabeth had no doubts about his returning; she had an innate sense of the tragic, as if it were some line in a face to be read.  John Stroud would not return.  He was being lured by Death into the ritual of Death; he was transfixed, as if watching some beauty, who was calling him to love, calling him to pleasure, for adventure was of a sexual nature.  She dreamt of him lying in a camp, with no food, with boots rotted and torn, with a campfire dying and snow on the ground.  Men were dying from sheer fatigue; there was a route of escape, if they could only see it.  They could not.  They only could see the fatal nature of their campfire; and so they did not move.  They waited for the fire to go out.

      Cotton resented the fact that his mother had deserted his father.  He was alone in Cambridge, not a Yankee in fact; he did not feel at home in his Aunt Eileen's house, for they were vocal abolitionists; Eileen's husband Jerod's nightly persecutions of the South made Cotton disgusted with the North.  Everywhere he went he heard accusations which were untrue, generalizations which did not reflect reality, about Southern life, about the nature of the Southern soldier.  Cotton's father was a Southern soldier; he was a man of honor, as good a man as Cotton had ever known, certainly more noble than Jerod O'Reilly, who was a fat whiskey salesman, living in a comfortable two-story home; this, while his father rode the roads of Virginia, or South Carolina, living in a tent, living close to Death, close to combat.

      When he heard that Beauregard had given the order to fire on Sumter (it was in all the papers), he visualized his father standing at the right hand of the general.  And, at the right hand of his father, he could see Isaac Pillesant.  And it made him proud.

      Yet, he did not support the Confederacy.  He did not believe in the destruction of the United States.  He knew his father did not either.  His father had taught him, as a boy, that the United States was a sacred land, that it was God's land, and must be defended, and preserved against disunion.  Cotton understood that.  The South was in the wrong; it was not clear, however, not an issue of the Good North and the Evil South.  Much of the Southern lifestyle was superior to the North.  Yet, America was a sanctuary, a home for the homeless of the world, a place of new beginnings, a place of origins, of re-fashioning of worlds, a place where the evil clingings of the old world could be shaken from wounded beings, enabling them to climb again the mountain of Life, the mountain of Hope, and Individual Destiny.

      Yes, the union must be preserved.  The black man must be freed.  But those who said that the South must perish, must be crushed into the dust: these men were wrong; and Cotton would not fight beside them.

 

Cotton, when he spoke of joining the Army, was ordered by his mother to continue at Harvard College, to finish his education.  There were others who could do the fighting.  It was his job to complete his education, to build the dream he had fashioned from his youth, to improve the world through the power inherent in his mind.

      But Cotton stopped listening to his mother.  He did not wish to fight with the Yankees in the North.  He had no bond with them.  He packed his bags one Summer night in Cambridge; walked to the train station, bought a ticket for Cincinnati, Ohio.  He would go West.  There was space there; the fighting was real in the West.  In the East they talked war.  McClellan sat in his tent and read books about Napoleon.  He wrote treatises on the history of French strategy.  In the West the fighting was fierce.  He wanted something fierce, something deadly; he wanted to feel danger, to drive his own pain out through violence.  His family had been destroyed, torn apart by political mechanisms.  There was no Ryan family now, no life at Colfax Hundred.  For all he knew, the Plantation House might be burning.  He had no contact with his home now, with his memories of home.  Nothing but the angry Present was left.  He must dominate it.  He must put a mark on it, establish his will as stronger than his neighbor's will, to ensure that his vision, and not his neighbor's, would triumph.  Maybe, after it all finished, maybe he would see his father again.  He prayed that it would happen this way.  He prayed that he would be able to shake his father's hand and tell him how proud he was to be his son, to be of the same blood as Ecclesias Ryan.

 

VI.

 

Cotton Ryan fought with valor against the rebellion.  He was in the Western Army, commanded, eventually, by General Grant.  Grant was the only Union commander willing to fight.  He took his army deep into the heart of the Confederacy, in Mississippi.  He laid siege to Vicksburg.  The war was a war of attrition.  All the young men of the South would be killed.  Then the war would end.  So it must be.

      Cotton Ryan was helping to kill the young men of the South.  His own brothers could be there, for all he knew, inside the citadel city of Vicksburg, overlooking the Mississippi, a natural "fort" built in the hills and the rocks.  If Vicksburg fell, the path would open to Atlanta.

      Grant was doing what all the other Union generals had refused to do: he was pressing for decisive engagements.   He understood that only a war of attritition would sap the will and resources of the South.  He was willing to sacrifice his own men to reduce the Army of the South.  There was no other way to end the rebellion.

 

Cotton Ryan knew the land around Vicksburg.  He had traveled the area, with his father, years before.  Cotton was a good soldier; he was very good on his horse.  Always, in the back of his mind, when out on patrol, he thought: "What if I meet my father?  What if I meet one of the Gaidrys, or Charleton Jones?  Must I kill them; or be killed by them?  Could I live if I killed one of them?  I would not kill my father; I would kill those who tried to kill my father.  But what about Mahaley Thompson?  What about Isaac Pillesant?  What would I do if confronted with such a decision?"

      Of course, when skirmishes did break out, there was no time to ask oneself such questions.  When shots were fired, one either broke and ran, or turned and met the charge with fire of one's own.  Cotton had been taught to turn and meet the charge.

      One day, in the late Spring of 1863, Cotton Ryan's platoon was riding on scout patrol near Waltersville, northwest of Vicksburg.  There had been a report of Confederate riders in the region.  Cotton's Ohio Brigade sent the Seventh Platoon out to investigate.  Cotton had established himself, over the preceding year, as a courageous member of the Seventh Platoon.  He had fought, with the other Westerners, at Shiloh, Tennessee, the year before, April 6 and 7.  A total of 77,000 young American men, mostly raw recruits, some so inexperienced as to be unable to use the Army rifles, met at Shiloh and picked one another apart for hours, stretching into two days.  Of Grant's 38,000 men, about 12,000 were killed or wounded on the first day of battle.  Cotton survived the first day of withering fire.  He watched blood fill the soil; heads were blown off.  A canon fire crushed the cook through a tree, very near Cotton.  Men screamed.  A knee-cap was hit.  It was Orville Cummings.  He was a good man, from Toledo, a cobbler, with a family of six daughters.  He screamed and screamed.  There was nothing to do.  Everyone was pinned down.  It was like shooting squirrels, only the squirrels had guns and were shooting at the hunters.  Orville Cummings screamed most of the afternoon, until he lost consciousness, lying amid other bodies.

      Night fell.  Still men screamed.  Orville Cummings had his leg removed, but was dying from infection.  Bob Klingman had been shot through the throat; he was still alive, still ready to fight; although, when he tried to talk, only a squeak came out of his vocal chords.  One stepped on corpses wherever one moved.  Death was everywhere.  Some of the young recruits were broken; some shook on the ground, could not rise.

      Some of the Ohians had wondered how Cotton Ryan would respond.  There was some mistrust, in that he was obviously a southern boy.  His father was fighting for the Rebs, was becoming quite famous among the Confederate soldiers.  There was not as much bigotry against the South among the Western men as there had been in the East.  The Westerners were more eager to fight, harder men, more heroic probably.  They hated the South, as an enemy, as a force of destruction to be stopped; yet, it was a national issue in the West, whereas it was a cultural issue in the East.  So the Westerners fought harder, with more purity of motive; but the vindictiveness of the East did not endure or have sustenance in the West.

      Cotton had been brave that first day at Shiloh.  He had fired well; he was an established marksmen.  He did not flee, not even when a flank of Union soldiers collapsed and was overrun by a detachment of Confederates.  Cotton kept his position, continued to fire; when the Rebels penetrated the Union line, Cotton fought with his knife, hand-to-hand, until the invaders were driven back.  Cotton did not cry that first night.  Cotton did not pretend to hate the South; he and the other men had talked about it.  Many of the Westerners did not oppose slavery.  To them the real issue was that the South was making war against the country, against the Union.  They opposed this disunion.  Cotton opposed the same; he spoke eloquently of his beliefs.  And when others were weeping and shaking that first night, after the slaughter at Shiloh, Cotton was quiet, motionless; he slept among the corpses, helping his friends to eat and have faith; and when the time came the next day to charge and to drive back Johnston's and Beauregard's men, Cotton Ryan stood solid with his new friends.  He knew that his father was on the other side of the line.  Ecclesias Ryan had become famous, as a colonel with Beauregard.  Cotton wondered if he would see his father; he looked for him; the smoke was very thick when the lines touched, and the bayonets began to twirl, and flash.  Cotton was wounded at Shiloh: he took a knife wound across his left arm.  It was not serious.  He continued to battle.  The man who had wounded him was dying, in a pile of men; as Cotton walked by, in the fog of smoke, the man thrust up his rifle, and the bayonet pierced Cotton.  Cotton felt it enter his skin, felt a moment of pain, more surpise than anything else; he turned, leveled his gun at the man, saw that he was dying, pinned beneath a cavalcade of limbs; Cotton pulled the rifle away from the man, threw it on the ground, and continued his movement against the hills of reinforced Rebels.  It wasn't until after the day's fighting had ended, hours later, that Cotton remembered that he had been wounded.

      Cotton looked for his father that day; he asked prisoners, Beauregard's men, if they knew Ecclesias Ryan.  They knew him.  He was a hero in the South.  What had happened to him at Shiloh?  No one knew.  "Aren't you a Southern boy?" an old man asked him.  "Yes."  "Where'd you grow up?"  "Outside of Houma."  "My God, boy, what you doin' on their side?"  "God made America a sanctuary for the world," Cotton said.  "We had no right to try to destroy it.  I love the South, sir.  I love Louisiana and Mississippi.  But we never shouldda tried to rebel.  It was against God's law to rebel."

 

In May, 1863, Cotton was riding on patrol near Waltersville, Mississippi.  Colonel Reed led the patrol, circling through a series of wooded hills toward Thomastown.  The patrol divided, broke in to three arms, to sweep the hills toward the Mississippi River, to the west.  Cotton was riding with seven men, the right wing of the unit, when he heard gunfire, over a hill toward Thomastown.  Cotton and the other men rode over the hill to find a party of about forty Confederates; they had been hiding in the thick woods along the Mississippi; they must have come in late the night before, because the Union Army swept the Mississippi bank each day.  They had ambused Colonel Reed's men, killing and wounding them in a single barrage, as they neared the bank; they had circled the left wing of the patrol, forced them to dismount and fight from the thicket of cottonwoods edging the oak groves along the river.  The Confederates had been ferried across the Mississippi the night before, to stage a raid at Dusk on the headquarters of Grant and the rear eschelon (that is what the captured Confederate soldiers admitted after the skirmish). 

      When Cotton and the other seven appeared in the battle, the Confederates who had circled the broken Union wing, scattered, confused by the quick appearance of Union troops, apparently believing that the seven were the front force of a larger reinforcement.  They tried to ride back in to the oak grove, but the Union soldiers cut them down with pistol fire before they made the trees.  Cotton and the other Ohians pursued the fleeing Confederates in to the trees along the river.  The fighting became especially close.  Cotton could handle his horse very well, having learned to ride in dense Bayou country.  His pistol shooting was especially accurate.  The Confederates panicked; instead of turning on the handful of bluecoats riding wildly in the dense woods, they fled, trying to cross the Mississippi again.  Some tried to hide in the fallen trees; they were seen, and either killed beneath the trees or captured by the Ohians.  Cotton rode down a Captain Butler and ordered him to stop; he turned to shoot; Cotton recognized him, from his school days; Artemus Butler had been in Cotton's grade school, the son of a Baptist minister, Ewell Butler, whose church was the biggest in Houma.  Cotton shouted to Butler: "Artemus, don't make me shoot you!"  "What the hell are you doin', Cotton?" Butler cried back.  "I have to shoot you, don't you know that?"  "You won't get away Artemus.  Why the hell did you come over here?  You can't do any good here.  There are thousands of us."  They faced one another, twenty feet apart, each mounted with his pistol drawn.  "I can't be captured, Cotton," Artemus cried.  "It aint honorable to be captured by a Yankee."  "I aint a Yankee," Cotton replied.  "I'm for the Union, but I aint a Yankee."  Other Ohians rode up to Cotton, but he cried for them to stop, to go back and help their wounded friends.  They agreed, with some uncertainty, leaving Cotton and Artemus Butler still facing one another.  "Are you gonna let me go, Cotton?"  "I can't, Artemus."  "They'll kill me as a prisoner, you know that, don't you?"  "No they won't, Artemus.  You'll be alright."  "I can't let you take me."  "You don't want to die, Artemus.  What about Cynthia Brown?  Aint you gonna marry her?"  "Hell, there aint gonna be no South left, Cotton.  The Yankees are gonna burn us to the ground.  There won't be no Cynthia Brown.  They're gonna do to every Southern town what they're doin' now to Vicksburg."  "This thing has to end, Artemus.  We shouldn't have tried to break the bond, Artemus.  We should have let slavery go.  It's going anyway.  There's gonna be machines to pick the cotton."  Artemus looked at Cotton with resignation.  "What do you want me to do, Cotton?"  "Drop your gun, and ride into camp with me.  I'll treat you with honor, Artemus."  "Alright, Cotton.  How's your dad?"  He dropped his gun in the ferns.  "I haven't heard."  "I hear he's riding with Lee now.  Lee asked for him.  He felt Beauregard didn't know what to do with him.  He's a brave man, your poppa."  "Yeah, I know."  "How's your ma' doin'?"  "I haven't heard.  I don't think she even knows where I am."  They rode together, out of the trees.  Union soliders were everywhere, mounted, circling the hills.  Everything seemed quiet, like it had been a dream somehow.  Two Confederates were being executed by a group of Ohians, down at the river's edge, blindfolded, against two trees.  Cotton and Artemus rode away, as if invisible.  Cotton rode with Artemus straight in to Grant's camp.  He rode up to Grant's tent, where he met General Rawlins, standing near the entrance.  He said: "I have the pleasure of presenting to you, General Rawlins, and to General Grant if he be here, a gentleman and a friend of mine, and a Captain in the Confederate Army, Artemus Butler.  I have guaranteed him proper treatment, sir; I have staked my name and my honor on that guarantee."

 

Cotton was something of a celebrity.  His father was notorious now, on both sides of the line.  And when Grant was informed that the son of Ecclesias Ryan was serving in his own army, and this same son had rode up to Grant's own tent, giving orders to a Union general to treat a Southern captain, on a mission to assasinate Grant, with dignity as a prisoner of war, he had to meet the young man.  Cotton Ryan's record had been spotless.  His charge that afternoon had perhaps saved as many as twenty Union soliders; and their discovery of the hidden Confederates had no doubt thwarted a bloody attack on Grant's headquarters.  Grant sent a messenger to bring Cotton to his tent.  It was dinner time.  Grant invited Cotton to eat with him, and with his officers.  Cotton sat next to Grant.  Cotton answered Grant's questions politely; most questiofs were about Cotton's youth, his father, his life on the plantation.  Grant seemed like a moody man to Cotton, a lonely man.  He talked with some animation about Cotton's father; apparently he respected him.  He asked about the skirmish that afternoon; he asked what should be done about the Confederate assassin who Cotton had captured.  Cotton merely said: "I promised him decent treatment, sir.  I told him the Union Army was an army of honorable men.  And he believed me."  Grant laughed.  "You oughta be a politician, young man," Grant said, lighting up a cigar, pushing his plate away.

      After dinner, Cotton met with General Grenville Dodge.  Dodge had been told that Cotton had been a student of engineering.  Dodge was commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, in the Western Army.  Cotton told him about his plans for a cotton sowing and harvesting machine.  Dodge listened, gave him a pencil, and had Cotton sketch his ideas on a napkin.  He looked at the drawings with some interest.  "When this damn war is done," Dodge said to Cotton.  "I intend to leave the service.  My great dream is to see this continent linked, coast to coast, with a railroad line.  It can be done, dammit.  It must be done.  We're fighting this rebellion for the same reason that we must build the railroad.  There is no difference.  You have a dream of your cotton machine.  I have a dream of the transcontinental railroad.  If it weren't for our dreams, son, life would be barren, would it not?"

 

VII.

 

The siege of Vicksburg lasted 186 days.  A city of 13,000 people was reduced to grubbing roots, living off rats.  The city dogs had long since vanished.  Finally, on 4 July 1863, Vicksburg surrendered.  The armed fortress guarding the serpentine Mississippi was now in the hands of the Union Army; the way to Atlanta was blocked by a force of Confederate Soldiers no more than 70,000 strong, under the command of General Braxton Bragg.

      Cotton Ryan was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant, for his defense of the general headquarters, and permanently assigned to Grant's army.  He fought in the Battle of Chatanooga, on Lookout Moutain, near Missionary Ridge, in November of 1863.  A Union force of 60,000, under Grant, Sherman and Thomas routed a broken Confederate army under Bragg, two months after Bragg had fought an undermanned Union force under Rosecrans and Thomas at Chickamauga, Georgia.  The Battle of Chatanooga permanently ceded to Union forces control of the Mississippi; and opened the way for an assault on Atlanta from the west; the eastern front seemed, as always, a stalemate, centered in Virginia.  In July of 1864, Sherman began his march through Georgia.

 

When Grant assumed control of the Eastern Army, as Commander in Chief, Cotton Ryan's division followed him into Virginia.  Cotton fought in the Battle of the Wilderness, in May of 1986, and then again, two weeks later, at Spottsylvania Courthouse, where he was hit in the chest by Confederate fire.  He led a mounted charge against a Confederate stronghold.  He had come to believe that the war was his maker, that he had some graced power over events when in his saddle; he led a force of twenty-seven riders against a Confederate artillery position, which was keeping the left wing of Grant's forces from advancing.  Cotton believed that a dramatic action was required; he had always been untouched in war before, except for the wound he had received walking in a mountain of corpses: he had never been wounded on his horse, he reasoned.

      Cotton called from other Ohio cavalry to prepare a charge.  He bolted out of the ridge east of the courthouse, with the other riders, and was cut down before he had ridden fifty yards.  The heavily defensed position opened up with a hurricane of fire.  Cotton fell first, back, landing on his shoulder, crumpled by the concussion.  He did not feel the pain.  Everything became unreal.  He felt the fall on his shoulder more than he did the tearing open of his chest; he lay in the grass below an open sky for hours; he remembered watching horses pass over him, as he looked up; he remembered watching his Ohio division fall out of the sky, cut down by a barrage of fire, into which he had led them.  They fell next to him, around him, some crying, yet the sound was turned down; he could hear the cries of the men, and their collisions with the ground, but it did not seem real, it seemed so distant, as life became dream-like now, as his throat filled up with warm liquid, his own blood, and the sky was revolved on great poles, turned by midgets, turning the sky like it was a parasol.  The guns exploded.  Artillary fell.  Whistling.  Some men were crying.  He heard his name called.  He did not know if it was a male or a female voice.  He remembered a face: it was Nina Beardsley.  He had met her while at Harvard.  She was beautiful, graceful in her carriage.  She had come east from a ranch in the west.  She rode a horse wonderfully.  She was like clear water to him; when he spoke to her it was like drinking from a fresh stream.  He could talk to her for hours, and never use her up, for she was real, warm, beautiful but unaware of her beauty, intelligent but not intellectual, with a natural genius, which was as much body as mind, as much soul as analytical opinion.  She appeared before Cotton.  He was lying in his own death, his chest torn open, bones broken, drowning in his own blood.  She was there, in the sky.  He knew he would die.  He saw his father in a cloud, his father's face.  His father wore a beard, seemed tired.  "Get up, Cotton!" his father said.  "I can't move!" Cotton replied.  "Nina is waiting for you to return!" his father said.  "Why?"  "She loves you!"  "Why does she love me?"  "I haven't the faintest idea!  She is tolerant, I suppose!"  Cotton almost laughed.  His father's face seemed thin; he seemed tired.  "Why has this happened?" Cotton asked.  "We will meet again," his father said.  "Not here, not in this life.  We will meet again."  "When?" asked Cotton.  "When we're ready to.  When we're ready to."

 

Cotton awoke five days later in a hospital tent.  He was not far from Washington, D.C.  He had been hit by three bullets, two had missed his heart by less than an inch.  His spinal chord had not been hit.  His wound was not infected.  He had lost much blood.  He had spent the night on the battlefield, for the Southern soldiers kept the Union forces pinned down into the night.  He did not care about that.  He dreamed about Colfax Hundred.  He dreamed about his mother in the garden.  There was not the sound of a rifle, the sound of an artillery shell anywhere.  There was a nation of silence.  He loved his life there.  Everyone moved in slow-motion, as if they were sleeping, dreaming, untouched by the hell of combat.  He dreamed of Elizabeth in her crinoline gown, running across the porch without shoes.  And the watermelon feast with the Gaidrys.  Natalie Gaidry in her riding clothes.  Dreams seemed somehow more real than the news of battles, the sterility of the air.  He dreamed of Nina again, often, walking down the streets of a city, asking where she might find him.  Her hair was brown, sometimes an auburn, and othertimes black.  Her face seemed to laugh.  She was a queen of beauty.  He wanted to kiss her.  He wanted to make love with her, to have children with her.

      He had a strange dream of a man with a beard and a large hat.  And he was watching a play.  He was acting in a play; and the bearded man walked up a backstaircase with a cane.  Jesus Christ was in the play, but he was playing Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln was in the play, playing the father of the child who was trying to be born; and Cotton understood that he was the older brother of the child, and, at the same time, the child itself.  He stood looking down at the manger.  The Archangel Michael came down and became Abraham Lincoln and turned to watch the audience.  There was much laughter, and applause.  The man with the cane came closer; and Cotton tried to stop him, but could not, because he had no voice, because his throat was filled with his own blood, and he was paralyzed on the floor, looking up, out of the manger.  The man approached Lincoln, who was Jesus Christ again, but not him, for Lincoln became Ecclesias Ryan, who was smiling down on his son when the man struck, his cane became a pistol; he raise it at Cotton's father and shot him in the back of his head.

 

Cotton dreamed, and his dream-world became very vivid, very real.  The world of his waking days, a world of white canvas, and men without arms and without sexual organs and without eyes and with faces distorted by burns and by shrapnel, a world of doctors and nurses and the shell of disinfectant, was, if real, totally unacceptable; the dream became more pleasant, more meaningful to Cotton, as the waking-world became more hopeless.

      He dreamed of his father no more.  He dreamed of Nina Beardsley, once in a wedding dress, standing beneath the tree where the slave, Barber Blue, had been hanged.  Cotton did not understand why she stood there.  In the leaves, higher up the tree, Barber Blue, sat on a limb and watched, laughing.  Cotton led Nina away from the tree, away from the whole meadow; they were walking in a city, far away; she was still in her wedding dress; and when she said, "Cotton, didn't you see it all along, that you and I would be wed?," Cotton understood that he had lived because of his decision to marry Nina Beardsley.  Lying in the grass, with his chest blown open, Death had invited him in; he was very close to the land of the Dead; he was at the gate.  And Nina Beardsley came to him; she called him to choose Life, for he was not done, and she awaited his return, to give him love, to give him children; she had called him back; his father had called him back, for he desired longevity, for his son to give the father Life through the blood and limbs of a grandson; so, when Nina Beardsley appeared in his tent, dressed in a black dress, with her dark hair combed back, a natural, informal manner, but with her beautiful face lit up, bringing him candy and a book, Walt Whitman poetry, Cotton was not surprised.  They talked.  It was hard for Cotton to talk.  She did not want to tax him.  She was staying nearby.  She would come to visit him again.  She prepared to leave.  He said: "Nina, I almost died.  I decided to live because I wanted to marry you."           

      She smiled. 

      "I know," she said.  "I'll visit you tomorrow."

 

Ecclesias Ryan rode with Robert E. Lee.  Lee had met him several times, at meetings with Beauregard's general staff.  Lee and Ryan became natural friends.  Both were unpretentious, gentlemanly, as much concerned for their nation's as for their own lives.  Each, tacitly, knew that the war had been a mistake.  Each felt driven by fatality to play the role each had assumed; each understood that the South and their own families would be ruined by the war.  They did not talk about this.  They merely enjoyed one another's company.  They talked about farming, about the pleasures of living in the saddle, of raising children, of love their wives.  Each longed for those days of heaven to return; they would not return.  The door was still open before them, a door on the other side of which some new acreage of Life awaited.  Perhaps they would go through together. 

      They exchanged military correspondence, when Ecclesias was still with Beauregard, at the insistence of Lee, which correspondence became less strategies of war and more personal observation, philosophical query, remembrances of Eden.

      After the great slaughter at Shiloh, Lee ordered Ecclesias Ryan to join his own army, as general staff.  He respected Ryan's courage, his understanding of men's limitation, and also his fatalism, which was somehow linked to courage, linked also to human understanding, which gave him a power to inspire men, which Lee also possessed and sought to draw to himself in others.

      Ecclesias was with Lee during late June of 1862 when McClellan, the great ponderer, the historian of conflict, tried to push through Confederate defenses with his great army, large, best armed and supplied, but static, weak from too much waiting, like its commander, to take Richmond.  Seven days the battle lasted.  The Union Army was routed, forced to retreat; McClellan retreated to Malvern Hill, drawing back his massive, wounded army, incapable of effecting the great drama he believed he lived.

      In August, Pope sent his 65,000 men against the defenses of Lee and his best field-general, Stonewall Jackson.  Union Army officers felt that the seven days battle with McClellan's swollen army had weakened the Confederate forces around Richmond enough to allow the capture of that city.  Yet Pope's forces were repelled, in what the Confederacy referred to as the Battle of Bull Run.

      In September, Lee invaded the North, at Sharpsburg, Maryland.  McClellan was not even aware that Lee's forces had moved, until it was reported that the Confederacy had taken possession of much of Maryland.  Union forces met Lee's much smaller army at Antietam.  This was one of only three major battles during the entire war fought on open ground.  It was a battle in which artillery played a major role.  General Ambrose Burnside led Union forces of about 75,000 against Lee's positions.  He lost over 12,000 men, partly because of poor judgment.  He insisted on crossing Antietam Creek on a narrow, three-arch bridge (now Burnside Bridge), which was covered by a battery of Confederate guns, in the heights just above the bridge.  Burnside lost over two regiments rushing the bridge, drawing enemy fire; he could have crossed the creek downstream, in many places, for it was shallow enough to wade in many places and the only significant opposition was above the bridge.

      On December 13, Burnside, the new Union Commander of the Army, sent 113,000 Union soldiers, in six frontal assaults against a heavily fortified Marye's Heights near Fredericksburg, Maryland.  Thousands of men were cut down by the withering fire.  Blankets of dead and broken men.  Screaming.  Hooked together in a dance of death.  Lee watched the fighting from Marye's Heights.  He sat astride his white horse, Velvet.  Ecclesias was mounted beside him.  Lee turned to Ecclesias Ryan, seeming somehow shamed, and said: "It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it."

      Lee was stopped at Antietam, and driven back at Fredericksburg, with horrible losses on both sides.  The first attempt by the Confederacy to invade the North had been repelled, not so much due to the Union reaction to the invasion, which was not especially swift or decisive, as much as due to the sheer impossibility of such a strategy, of holding a position in the immense North, of holding ground and fighting the war on Northern soil.

 

Ecclesias rode with Lee, and fought with him, and admired him as a great leader.  When the war broke out, Lincoln nealry begged Lee to command the Union forces.  There was no secret at West Point who was the greatest officer in America; Winfield Scott, the commander in chief in Lincoln's first year, urged the President to select his fellow-Virginian for the position.  No one else was even considered.  Of course, Lee chose his native Virginia over Washington, although not without sorrow, for Lee loved his country, had served his government nobly.  He wept when bidding farewell to his friends who lived in the Capitol.

      Ecclesias requested that Lee give him command of his own army.  He felt naked in the East, with the open plains.  He wished to be stationed close to his home.  He wished to be close to Louisiana.  But Lee refused his petition, telling him: "I wish to have you near me.  I need a reasoning mind nearby, to compare with my own.  We have many good men in the field, in our Army; we need better men, more thoughtful men, who administer the orders handed down to our soldiers.  And so you are more useful to me where you are, Colonel Ryan."

      They played chess together.  And received the bad news, during the year 1863, of losses in the West, the first real losses of the war for the South.

Lee told Ecclesias to watch Grant, for Grant was a dangerous opponent.  Once, at West Point, Lee had come upon Grant sitting alone beneath an elm tree in an open meadow near the small Hourglass Lake, to the east of West Point.  Lee had asked Grant what he read so dilligently.  "Shakespeare," Grant replied.  Grant was considered a frail boy at West Point, a young man of no consequence.  "What do you hope to learn from Shakespeare?" Lee asked the young man.  "I intend to learn about Life," Grant said.  "A man's destiny is unwoven from his youth outward; and takes shape from the truths he discovers in his isolations; and from others, like Shakespeare, who discover truths in their isolation."

      Lee had remembered that.  He did not take Grant lightly after that; although Grant never, apparently, showed that nature to others at West Point.  Perhaps he admired Lee; and wished to show Lee a more developed, if secretive, man, inside the boy-frame of the soldier named United States Grant.

      "Watch him," Lee told Ecclesias Ryan.  "For, of all the Union pretenders to the throne, Grant alone may be worthy to be our adversary."

 

VIII.

 

The greatest sorrow in the life of Ecclesias Ryan was in his separation from his wife.  His life had ended when she stepped aboard the train to take her to the North.  Everything he had done, each step he had taken with Destiny as his guide, was done for Erin, was done because of Erin.  Colfax Hundred was Erin's house; when she left, the plantation became cold, like a corpse had entered it.  No longer the warm presence of the mistress of the house, the bringer of children and food from the ground; her great garden, near the plantation house, which had been the talk of the county, deteriorated when she left, as if it too grieved, overspread itself, as her husband did, let itself fall into disorganization.

      Erin was Life to Ecclesias.  He knew, when she left, that he would never see her again.  Life was a strange category of actions, reactions, meetings, disintegrations, regenerations.  He had spent over twenty years with the woman who, one day, walked out of his life without looking back; she had her reasons, very strong principles against the very life he had built for her.  Oh, slavery was wrong; he knew that.  But love exists even in the midst of wrong.  She lost respect for him, because she knew that he knew that slavery was wrong; still, he did not oppose it.  Life was more than right and wrong to Ecclesias.  To Erin, however, this was the essence of Life.  So, she left him.  She did not look back.  She tried to write him letters.  She feared she had made a mistake.  She wrote for him to join her in Boston.  She tore up the letter; it was a silly request.  He would never leave the South.  As she was driven to oppose that way of life, so, he was driven to defend it, not because it was right but because it was his, as one defends his own brother against accusations even if one knows his brother may be guilty.  It was family.  Ecclesias was fighting because it was his family which was threatened.

 

Ecclesias heard from Jeremy Jenkins, a spy, posing as a Baltimore newspaper man, that his son, Cotton, had been seriously wounded at Spottsylvania Courthouse.  Ecclesias had not been far from him when the volly brought him down.  It was all dust and blood and bones.  Ecclesias had heard that Cotton had come East, with Grant.  He knew that Grant's forces would strike with Lee's forces; that Grant would not back down, who spare no cost to break the back of the South.  Ecclesias fought hard at Spottsylvania.  He rode into Union troops with his revolver blazing.  His own men fell around him.  He was not with Lee, but was leading a maneuver on Lee's right flank.  The closeness of Death made him vitalized, for he sensed his own mortality; Life was magnified, with the endearments of drama.

      He heard later that Cotton had been killed there.

      He did not know what to believe.  The Baltimore newsman then reported to him that a Washington, D.C. paper had printed a list of the wounded; Cotton, apparently, was not dead, but had been wounded.

 

The war was ending.  There was no life for Ecclesias Ryan after the war.  He had been told that his plantation had been burned by looting Union soliders in late '63.  He had not returned to survey the ruins.  It did not matter now. There was no one to take back to Colfax Hundred, no one to make it live again.  His children were estranged from him.  His wife had walked away.

      He began to have premonitions about his death.  He began to see a man with a beard, carrying something under his coat.  These images came to him in dreams mainly; yet they also existed in his mind, when awake, as if forcing themselves on him, forcing him to understand that some danger would appear soon before him; he must be prepared.

     

 

 

VIII.

 

The greatest sorrow in the life of Ecclesias Ryan was in his separation from his wife.  His life had ended when she stepped aboard the train to take her children to the North.  Everything he had done, each step he had taken, with Destiny as his guide, was done for Erin, was done because of Erin.  Colfax Hundred was Erin's house; when she left, the plantation became cold, like a corpse had entered it.  No longer the warm presence of the mistress of the house, the bringer of children and food from the ground; her great garden, near the plantation house, which had been the talk of the county, deteriorated when she left, as if it too grieved, overspread itself, as her husband did, let itself fall into disorganization.

      Erin was Life to Ecclesias.  He knew, when she left, that he would never see her again.  Life was a strange category of actions, reactions, meetings, disintegrations, regenerations.  He had spent over twenty years with the woman who, one day, walked out of his life without looking back; she had her reasons, very strong principles against the very life he had built for her.  Oh, slavery was wrong; he knew that.  But love exists even in the midst of wrong.  She lost respect for him, because she knew that he knew that slavery was wrong; still, he did not oppose it.  Life was more than right and wrong to Ecclesias.  To Erin, however, this was the essence of Life.  So, she left him.  She did look back.  She tried to write him letters.  She feared she had made a mistake.  She wrote for him to join her in Boston.  She tore up the letter; it was a silly request.  He would never leave the South.  As she was driven to oppose that way of life, so, he was driven to defend it, not because it was right but because it was his, as one defends his own brother against accusations even if one knows the brother may be guilty.  It was family.  Ecclesias was fighting because it was his family which was threatened, adjured by the North.

 

Ecclesias heard from Jeremy Jenkins, a spy, who infiltrated the North posing as a Baltimore newspaper man, that his son, Cotton, had been seriously wounded at Spottsylvania Courthouse.  Ecclesias had not been far from him when the volly brought him down.  He did not see it of course.  It was all dust and blood and bones at Spottsylvania.  Ecclesias had heard that Cotton had come East, with Grant.  He knew that Grant's forces would collide with Lee's; that Grant would not back down, would spare no cost to break the back of the South.  Ecclesias fought hard at Spottsylvania.  He rode into Union troops with his revolvers blazing.  His own men fell around him.  He was not with Lee, but was leading a maneuver on Lee's right flank.  The closeness of Death made him vitalized, for he sensed his own mortality; Life was magnified, with the endearments of drama.

      He heard later that Cotton had been killed there.

      He did not know what to believe.  The Baltimore newsman then reported to him that a Washington, D.C. paper had printed a list of the wounded; Cotton, apparently, was not dead, but had been wounded.

 

The war was ending.  There was no life for Ecclesias Ryan after the war.  He had been told that his plantation had been burned by looting Union soliders in late '62.  He had not returned to survey the ruins.  It did not matter now. There was no one to take back to Colfax Hundred, no one to make it live again.  His children were estranged from him.  His wife had walked away.

      He began to have premonitions about his death.  He began to see a man with a beard, carrying something under his coat.  These images came to him in dreams mainly; yet they also existed in his mind, when awake, as if forcing themselves on him, forcing him to understand that some danger would appear soon before him; he must be prepared.

 

Erin lived in Boston, the tragic matriarch, the madonna in exile.  She loved Ecclesias deeply.  She prayed for the war to end.  She spent each morning in the Catholic Church two blocks from her home.  Elizabeth had been married in the church, to a young man from New York, who worked in the publishing business.  He was blind in one eye, and the sole support of a widowed mother, so he was not drafted into the Union Army.  They had gone to live in New York.  Erin grew old.  She had a small garden behind her apartment on Cole Street.  It was not the same.  Some afternoons, always afternoons, as she worked in the garden, ignoring the noises on the street, deeply embedded in her memories of evenings pulling weeds and nourishing tomatoes in the rich heat of Louisiana Summers, she would look up, down the alley toward Adams Street, and see Ecclesias coming toward her, carrying something in his arms, a present for her, flowers perhaps, it was too distant for her to be certain.

      Days became years.  Her hair became gray.  Cotton was in the West, under Grant.  He had written her several times.  The letters were not effusive.  She knew that Cotton blamed her for the separation, that he felt a wife should stand beside her husband, that he, and she, and the other children, had abandoned Ecclesias when he was most in need.   She understood this.  She blamed herself for the same sins.  She prayed to God, each morning, begging Him to allow her to see Ecclesias again, to be alone with him, to ask his forgiveness, to make it up to him.

      When Cotton came East he did not visit his mother.  That hurt her greatly.  When he was wounded, she traveled with Nina Beardsley by train to Washington, D.C.  She let Nina visit him first, for she knew that love would be the greatest healing force toward the recovery of her eldest son.  Also, she was afraid to approach her son; she felt the guilt of abandoning her husband, and feared Cotton's accusations; as well, she felt responsible for the pain of her son, as if she were somehow responsible for the war, as much to blame for her son's critical condition, for the outbreak of the war, as Jefferson Davies, or the fire-eaters of the South who had called out for a war of separation.  She did not want to see her son near death, for it made her feel a thousand years old; the realities of the war were brought in to her front yard, were no longer abstract, as principles of abolition, but were real, as the blood was real on her son's bandaged chest, as the men without legs and in wheel chairs were real.

      When she saw him, Cotton did not blame her.  He wept; she sat on his bed and held his hand, and wept also.  She stayed with him for five days; then he insisted that she return to Boston.  Nina was returning; Erin should return with Nina.  He told Erin that Nina and he would be married, after his recovery.  He told her that he was happy, that the pain was not so great; he told her that he loved Nina very much, and wished to have children with her; that he wished to continue building the dream that his father had built, and Ecclesias' father before him.

 

IX.

 

In May, 1863, 40,000 men under Lee met a superior force of 60,000 under the command of Fighting Joe Hooker at Chancellorsville, Virginia.  Hooker had been bragging about taking Richmond, as though Richmond were the target and not Lee's army, which defended Richmond.  Lincoln worried about Hooker's overconfidence, about his misunderstanding of the nature of the war.  Richmond was nothing really.  Commands could be moved.  Cities might be captured, but if armies escaped to fight again, then the possession of cities might be as much a burden as a boon.  It was Lee's army that must be trapped, battled, taken; Richmond would come when the Confederate Army was defeated.

      Lincoln had lost hope of a decisive Union victory; his great fear was another Confederate invasion of the North, up from Richmond to Washington, D.C.  The Northern Capitol could not be taken; it must be defended at all cost.   Yet, the only sure defense of Washington would be an offensive movement to drive the Southern forces deeper south; to cut off Lee's army; to defeat them in a major battle and render them impotent to move against the North.

      Lincoln had not yet found the commander to strike Lee and back him up.  McClellan had waited in his tent on the Potomac, surveying maps of enemy positions, calling for more men, more supplies; his army was excellently trained, supplied.  Yet, it did not move.  Lincoln tried to light a fire under McClellan, who was well-respected in the field, by his fellow officers and his soldiers.  Yet, nothing happened.  McClellan's army was better armed, much larger than Lee's; McClellan was frozen by the "slows" as Lincoln called them.  Eventually, after many bungled battles, and especially after Lee's first invasion of the North, Lincoln replaced McClellan.  It especially angered Lincoln that, when McClellan finally did react to Lee's invasion, and drove the Confederate Army southward, McClellan did not pursue his damaged foe, but took up residence along the Potomac, as though the work were done; the invader had been driven off; his position, apparently, was one of policing the Potomac, of keep Confedate forces from penetrating the Capitol.  Lincoln demanded that he pursue the enemy, which was hurt, and destroy it.  But McClellan found excuses not to move, to settle in again to the lethargic command he knew best.

      Lincoln replaced McClellan with Ambrose Burnside.  Then came Fighting Joe Hooker.  Burnside had been ineffective, did not want to replace McClellan, felt inferior to McClellan, an adjutant of McClellan.  His men did not support him.  When he led an assault on Lee at Fredericksburg, losing 10,000 men in the battle, an unspeakable slaughter of Union troops, with the result that many of his own men began to express severe doubts about his ability to lead the Union forces, Lincoln turned to Joe Hooker.  Hooker was a swaggering little man, who had a record of bravery in both the Florida Indian wars and the Mexican-American war; he had fought with aggressive gallantry in the early parts of the Civil War, had been wounded at Antietam.  His men respected him.  Lincoln worried about his loud expressions of disdain for the enemy; the South, up to this time, had certainly been deserving of respect as an adversarial fighting force.  Hooker seemed somehow out of touch with reality to Lincoln.  Yet, hoped that Hooker would be what McClellan and Burnside had not been: aggressive and self-confident.

      He led his troops in to the Battle of Chancellorsville.  The Union forces heavily outnumbered the Confederates.  Yet the Southerners struck savagely in counter-attack.  The Union Army seemed confused about the response to the attack.  Hooker apparently had planned to scatter the Confederates, then sweep toward Richmond; Lee's forces would not be able to re-assemble in time to effectively defend the approach to Richmond.  Yet Lee knew that Hooker's Army was coming.  There was little of surprise in the major battles of the Civil War. 

      The Confederate counter-attack sent Hooker's Army reeling, scattering.  Lee's intentions were similar, to shock Hooker with the power of his counter-force, with the result that Lee would not re-group to defend Richmond, but would push Hooker back and proceed into Maryland, again invading the North, to make an attempt to capture Washington.  Lee understood that time was on the side of the Union.  That a decisive Southern victory was needed, which might allow the South to win concessions in any peace proposal.  He knew the South could not defeat the North in an extended military operation.  The North was too rich.  The South had lost its major port of supply, New Orleans, when Farragut and Butler, in a surgical blockade by sea and by land, forced the gulf city to surrender.  That was in April of 1862.  A year later, the Confederate forces were short of every supply, including military hardware.  They could not export cotton to Europe, because of the blockade, and because of the Northern Navy's ability to cut off trade with England and Europe.  Because the cotton did not go to Europe, no money came back.  The South was bankrupt, had no way to pay for the war.  It could not endure a protracted battle; the North could, for it was a powerful financial entity, with many open ports, and even, after Vicksburg, access to the Mississippi.  Nearly all of the major battles of the war took place in the 50 mile stretch between Washington, D.C. and Richmond.  The South defended, even made a strike into the North; generally speaking, the war had been a stalemate.  Now, however, since Grant's first successful strike against Fort Henry, in Tennessee, to his destruction of Vicksburg, and with the Union capture of New Orleans, a stalemate in the East was not enough; the forces around the Potomac could hold the Confederate Army up, in stalemate, while the Western Army of the North swept in through Tennessee and Kentucky, Mississippi and Georgia, striking down the Confederate force like a ball striking a pin.  Lee needed a dramatic victory; then he needed to sue for peace.  There would be no victory.  Perhaps, at best, with a clear and savage strike, which might break the will of the North, he could achieve a ture stalemate, in the war's course, which would lead Lincoln to accept in treaty what the South could never win in battle.  The election was drawing nearer; Lincoln, no doubt, understood the impact a settlement of the war would have on his candidacy for re-election. 

      Also, Lee hoped to win, on the field of battle, recognition of the South by foreign governments.  England and France were eager for the war to end; the textile industries of both countries were adversely affected by the continuing war and the embargo of trade with the South administered by the Union navy.  England and France were prepared to recognize the Confederacy as a separate nation, even though, in both of these nations, popular support in the war was with the North, mainly because of its anti-slavery stand.  Of all the major powers of Europe, only Russia stood firmly in support of Lincoln's policy.

     

Hooker struck; Lee struck back, and kept moving forward.  Hooker's army disintegrated. 

      Ecclesias Ryan was present at the planning of the battle, with Lee and Jackson, Pickett, and others of the general staff.  He saw the desperation in Lee, which never really exposed itself to others; yet there was despair in the white-haired master.  He and Ecclesias had talked often about the South's prospects in the war; they had talked, also, about the hope for a settlement within the year.  Lee feared a total destruction of the South, if the Union armies in the West broke through under Virginia.  Sherman and Sheridan were already showing signs of a vicious invasion of the deep Southern states, which, without a settlment, might carry them all the way to the coast.

      The Southern boys were dying.  Even in victory, the South was losing.  They could not afford the war of attrition.  The South had benefitted most under McClellan's sluggish generalship.  What the South could afford the least was protracted, constant conflict, which would eat up its manpower, no matter what the result in terms of territory held or gained or enemy men killed.

      Ecclesias fought close to Lee, and led an army of men in counter-attack against Hooker's collapsing offensive.  As always, Isaac Pillesant fought beside him.  What Ecclesias was becoming to Lee, a nearly invisible guardian, Pillesant had been for Ecclesias Ryan during the war.  Two hearts fighting in tandem, somehow stronger than any one enemy which might appear, individualized in a mass of blue coats.

      The South pushed forward, into Maryland, toward Washington, D.C.  Lee assumed that Washington was well defended.  In fact, it was not.  Lincoln went out on the White House grounds after hearing of the news of Chancellorsville, and of the Confederate Army's approach to the gates of Washington; he looked out toward the Potomac, and realized there was no defense; if Lee had wanted to walk in to Washinton, there would have been no opposition.  Lincoln looked around the White House grounds; there was no personal guard; any man could have walked in to the White House, and taken Lincoln prisoner.  There was no force there protecting the president of the North.  And he was aghast.   He felt, in the streets of Washington, a corpse, a presence of defeat, of disease.  He retreated back into the White House.  He stood be a window in the East Wing, dejected, feeling abandoned; no one could help him; the job had become such a burden.

      Lee did not push in to Washington.

      Hooker resigned, disgraced; General George Gordon Meade was named to replace Hooker, as the Union Army scrambled northward to try to check Lee's advance through Maryland and on in to Pennsylvania.

 

Chancellorsville represented Robert E. Lee's greatest triumph as head of the Confederate Army.  Yet, all was not well with the Confederate command.  The South's greatest field general, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, truly the right arm of Lee, as important on the field of battle to Lee as Ecclesias and a few other hand-picked companions were to Lee at the dinner table, in discussions about the war generally, had been shot on the night of May 2; his arm was removed; he seemed to recover, only to suffer a relapse and die of pneumonia.

      Thomas Jackson was born in Clarksburg, West Virginia.  He attended West Point; he then served with distinction in the Mexican War.  He retired to civilian life, teaching military history and strategy at the Military Institute at Lexington, Virginia.  At the outbreak of the Civil War, he was appointed Brigadier General in the Confederate Army.  At Bull Run (Manassas), in 1861,  he stood like a stone wall in the face of Union wave attacks; he was the first hero of the Confederate war.  To all the South he became "Stone Wall" Jackson, and remained, throughout the war, the foremost war hero of the Confederate states.  He became a Major General in September of the same year; he defeated General Banks at Front Royal in 1862; he fought an indecisive battle with John Charles Fremont at Cross Keys; commanded a corps in the battles of Gaine's Mill and Malvern Hill; he again defeated Banks at Cedar Mountain; he captured Harpers Ferry with 11,000 Union prisoners; he commanded a corps at Antietam; and was made a Lieutenant General for his contribution to the defeat of Burnside at Fredericksburg.  At Chancellorsville, Jackson made a clever flanking move against the 11th corps of Hooker's Army, and cut them to ribbons.  That night, while celebrating the victory, Jackson was shot in the dark by a patrol party of his own men, 33rd North Carolinians, who mistook him and his staff for a detachment of Union cavalry.  He was rushed into surgery at a Confederate hospital tent; his arm was removed, where he had been hit; he began to make a recovery, but Jackson asked a servant to apply cold towels to relieve his recurrent "dyspepsia."  The moist packs encouraged pleurisy and pneumonia.  A short time later he was dead.

      Lee received the news of his able general's death with resignation.  He was not surprised.  He sensed, within himself, a growing despair, a feeling of hopelessness.  His army had never been so strong, had never penetrated so deeply into enemy territory.  They were approaching Pennsylvania.  There had been much Confederate sympathy in Maryland.  Jackson was dead.  Lee was being pursued.  He could not hope to take Washington, D.C., and hold it.  He could strike at Washington, inflict major wounds, but he could not hold it long enough to encourage an armistice.  He would have to stand and fight his pursuer.  He, perhaps, could inflict another major defeat, more shame than debilitation, on the Northern command.  Yet, inevitably, he would proceed again back toward Virginia.  The chessmatch seemed fixed.  He could not indefinitely ravage the mid-northern states without risking a major offensive against the South from both north and west.  The North had more soliders than did the South.  They could fight on three fronts.  The could trade man for man, simply defeating the Confederacy through endurance.

 

The two armies, Lee's and Meade's, met at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  It was an accident, this battle.  Lee wished to fight Meade at Harrisburg, 30 miles away.  Meade wished to meet Lee's forces at Pipe Creek.

      Lee's men were ragged, short on supplies, as they had been for a year or more.  Most of General Pettigrew's North Carolina brigade were marching barefoot, their shoes having long ago disintegrated.  It was July 1, becoming hot.  Confederate scouts had read in the 30 June edition of the Gettysburg Compiler an advertisement for fine men's shoes and boots.  Pettigrew was ordered on a nine-mile march from Cashtown to seize the footwear in Gettysburg.  The North Carolinians contacted a Union detachment.  The battle began.  Reinforcements were rushed in.  The Confederates captured the town of Gettysburg on the first day of fighting, forcing the Northerners to retreat to the hills south of town.

      On the next day, July 2, the Union Army formed a convex front, running from Culp's Hill, in the north, down to Cemetery Ridge, then to the south and Little Round Top Hill.  Lee spent that day unsuccessfully striking at the flanks of the Union positions.  Major General George Pickett arrived in Gettysburg with 15,000 fresh Confederate troops.  Lee would use Pickett's men to devastate the center position of the Union configuration, Cemetery Ridge, which had been weakened that day in providing reinforcements to the two wings which Lee had primed with his series of maneuvers.

      Lee would need to annihilate the Union force, to break Northern resistance, to raise to power those political forces which were beginning to indicate a willingness to negotiate with the South.  This would be the battle whereby the South could gain concessions, could gain an honorable settlement of the war.

      At 1:00 pm, on July 3, the Confederate artillery began pounding Cemetery Hill.  Lee had positioned 159 cannons and Pickett's soldiers on Eminary Ridge, a mile from the union central axis.  At 3:15, Pickett began his celebrated charge against Cemetery Hill.  Unfortunately for the Confederates, the two-hour shelling of the Union's central position had been miscalculated, most of the ordnance falling in the rear of Hancock's troops.  In terms of strategy, Lee had badly misread the movements of the Meade's men.  They had not siphoned off troops to the flanks; Meade had read Lee's intentions, probing the flanks to weaken the center.  Instead of being thin when Pickett charged, from the shelling and from the reposition of troops, the center position on Cemetery Hill was fortified with 80 canon and 9,000 men, well entrenched. 

      The attack began slowly, with Pickett's three brigades assembling in parade formation below Seminary Ridge.  It was a one-mile approach from that position to the steep ascent of Cemetery Hill.  The Union force under Hancock began decimating Pickett's men at the bottom of the hill, with rifle fire and cannonade, and continued slaughtering the Confederate cavalry as it rode up the hill toward the trenches of Union soldiers.  Only a handful of Pickett's men reached the crest of the hill, where they were quickly killed or captured by the Union forces. 

      The commander of Lee's right wing at Gettysburg, Lieutenant General James Longstreet, a friend of Ecclesias Ryan, had argued against the attack, feeling its objectives impossible to achieve.  Ecclesias Ryan had agreed with Longstreet: he sensed death everywhere.  A darkness settled in on him and made him shake, break into small convulsions.  It was as if a cloud had settled over a Summer day, a cloud so strong as to turn the Summer day into Autumn, preparatory to snow.  It was a cold wind.  It was Death's wind; he had felt it before, never this strong; he had met it before, that day when the slave had been hanged on Mahaley Thompson's land.  It was a wind of ice: he had felt it sweep inside of him, and present to him a vision most horrible to admit to; it was that afternoon, as he watched (?) Blue swing from the limb of the old elm tree, hearing his neck crack like a tree limb itself, that he visualized really for the first time the coming of war and the inevitable departure of his wife.  He saw it leap before him, in his mind's eye, as clear as if it were a photograph he had held; and he felt a cold wind come inside him, as if the wind were inside him, trying to blow itself out, to get outside of Ecclesias's own dark thoughts, to escape from his paralyzing fixation, to be freed and warmed by the Summer Sun and the sky without blemish and without recognition of Death's immediate preoccupations.

      He felt the wind again that day, July 3, before Pickett's charge.  Lee had not listened to the objections of Ecclesias, and the others, most notably Longstreet.  He had looked at them with the strong blue eyes and the patriarchal features, as if saying with his look: "I know that your objections are sound.  I know that it is a long shot.  We must play this hand however.  For only a great victory will save us, will lead us out of this terrible condition of waiting for our own demise through sheer fatigue and vanishing sons."

      He ordered the attack.  It was his worst moment in the war.  Pickett's men were slaughtered.  Reinforcements entered the battle.  Ecclesias Ryan was with Longstreet on the right wing.  They struck Little Round Top Hill, hoping to alleviate some pressure on Pickett, force the North to drain some troops to the wings, or, even better, to flank the wings, and to strike at the Union force from the rear.  But the Union flank held its ground.  The fighting was fierce.  Ecclesias sensed his own death as he rode into the dust and gunfire; never before had he felt Death so close.  He led his men into a gulley, to the south of Little Round Top Hill, was met by a small Union charge; he fired a volley, then reached for his second pistol; as he reached for his gun, the world became very slow.  He watched Isaac Pillesant place himself between Ecclesias and the hilltop; a group of infantry riflemen had placed themselves in a knoll, below the crest of the hill; they were prepared to fire at the Confederate cavalry; everything was slowed down minutely; Isaac Pillesant positioned himself very much as a Knight might be moved on a chessboard, to protect the King or Queen; it took long minutes for the scene to unfold.  Every man was a piece on a chessboard, somewhat conscious of his own condition, the capacities inherent in his qualities, that is, the piece he had become.  Each was bounded by the logic, the mythology of the piece, which was, itself, a breadth of knowledge.  Each played its own logic with the greatest skill and grace possible; it was in this way that pieces and robes and histories were exchanged, for the highest clothes were given, eventually, to the best actors, the best at their position; there was a ladder upon which some moved up and some moved down.

      Ecclesias looked up the hill.  There was a volley.  Ecclesias felt as though he could see the plugs hurtling through the air.  He tried to cry to Isaac.  There was no sound.  There was stilted, drugged noise everywhere; but there was no distinct sounds.  Isaac turned to face the firing.  He was hit in the chest, the head, his hat flew off, a large chunk of his skull and brain struck Ecclesiastes in the face.  Then everything became fast again; the noises became deafening.  Isaac fell from his horse.  He dropped down out of sight, below horses' hooves and falling shirts and falling animals.  Ecclesias was somehow not hit.  He tried to find Isaac.  He rode through the littered field; but there was panic and more shooting; his horse was driven away by a flood of horses.

      Over 30 men were killed or wounded in that barrage alone.  Ecclesias fled, racing back toward his initial position.  When he stopped, no one had followed him.  There was blood all over his chest and shoulder.  A piece of bone from Isaac's skull had pierced his cheek, protruding below his right eye.  Pieces of hair and membrane were stuck to his face, in his beard; he tried to pull it out.  He could not catch his breath.  The wind was colder, stronger, louder.  There was no one else on the hill, no one else in the world.  It became very still, until he could hear only the wind, blowing and whining through the abandoned meadow, as he sat on his horse and cried for Isaac and saw the wildflowers and thought of his home.  He was an old man now, all at once.  He wanted to return home, to Louisiana, once before he died.

 

When Lee retreated into Virginia, he took with him 17 miles of ambulance wagons.  Meade did not pursue him.  Twenty eight thousand of Lee's 70,000 men had been killed or wounded.  Twenty-one generals on both sides had fallen.  Meade could not pursue Lee.  His men were in shock.  The South was beaten.  Never again would they enter the North.  The war was over, but for the retreat, the invasion of the South, the burning of Atlanta, the brutal resistance in Virginia, the destruction of crops by Sheridan, in retaliation for Moseby's guerrilla expeditions against the North.  It was over, except for the final surrender.

 

In November, a national cemetery was dedicated at Gettysburg.  President Lincoln, a hulking man, with a sense of humor and a clownish aspect, and a gift for self-deprecation, a defense he employed to establish distance between himself, his true fears and doubts, and the public side of the Presidency, stood on a platform before hundreds of men, women and children, most of whom had lost family members in the Battle of Gettysburg.  His speech was simple and sincere.  He said, in a somewhat halting voice:

      "Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

      Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.  We are met on a great battle-field of that war.  We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.  It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

      But in the larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.  The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.  The world will little note nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.  It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work, which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.  It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us: that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the Earth."

     

X.

 

Ecclesias was not the same man he had been before the war.  All the chaos had changed him.  All the wind and power and concussion and the killing had made him different, more tired, more capable of attrocity.  He picked Isaac Pillesant's brain out of his beard all day, on July 4, as he rode back toward Virginia.  He remembered that it was the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  He wanted to celebrate it.  He loved America.  He loved the country which had stood up to England's autocratic rule.  He wanted to cry, as he retreated with Lee's general staff.  All the generals had been killed.  There were a few left, a few not wounded.  He rode in a trance, abstracted from the passing hills, the Northern borders, comprehending something dark, some futility, some cave into which he was passing.

      He never came out of the cave.  He had lost his guardian angel.  He stood naked before the elements of war.  Somehow Pillesant had saved him.  Somehow Pillesant had made him invisible in the war, larger than the fears that dogged ordinary men in war, making them victims of the strategies of Death.  Without Pillesant, he became seen, became visible; hence, he became marked, stalked by the force of Death, who saw in each vulnerability an avenue of conquest, a portal to the heart through which he might rule.

 

The South was not defeated at Gettysburg.  Yet, even victories cost them dearly.  For they were a limited capacity.

      In September of 1863, at Chickamauga, Rosecrans met Bragg in the northwest corner of Georgia.  Bragg's 71,000 men were blocking the way to Atlanta.  Rosecrans, in viewing the formation of his troops, noticed a regiment slightly out of allignment.  He snapped at Major Bond, serving on Rosecrans' staff: "Tell General Woods to close that gap!"

      Major Bond quickly wrote the order: "To General Woods--The general commanding directs that you close up on Reynolds as fast as possible, and support him.  Bond."

      Woods was a West Point man.  In strict military language, to "close up" meant to eliminate any gap in battle line; whereas, to "support" meant to take up a position behind a battle line, ready to advance if ordered.  On his left flank, General Brannan's troops were properly alligned; General Reynolds's men were in line on Brannan's left.  The order did not make sense.  Bond was not a West Pointer; hence, he did not understand the technical questions he had raised in his order.  Woods decided to "support" Reynolds.  He pulled his troops back from the battle-line, marching them to the rear of Reynolds.  When General James Longstreet saw the gap being created by the movement, he led his Confederate forces, some 30,000 soldiers, through the gap and routed the Union formations.  Only General George Henry Thomas, a native Virginian, like Lee, later nicknamed the "Rock of Chicamauga," held his left wing against the Confederate charge; this enabled the Union forces to regroup and avoid a total collapse.

 

The Battle of Chickamauga was followed by the Battle of Chatanooga, some twenty-five miles to the northeast, in November of 1863.  Generals Grant, Sherman and Thomas led a force of about 60,000 against Bragg's 40,000, around Lookout Mountain, a steep ridge rising to 2100 feet, overlooking the city of Chatanooga.  The summit commanded a superb view of the Tennessee River Valley below, and of seven Southern states beyond, to the east and south.

      On July 4, Vicksburg, Mississippi, had finally surrendered to Grant, after 186 days of siege.  Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton and his army, ragged, sick and hungry, had presented itself to Grant and his staff; Grant had given orders to his own army "to be quiet and orderly as the prisoners pass, and make no offensive remarks."  His men obeyed his orders.  In all, Grant took 31,600 Confederate soldiers prisoner; he had captured the city of Vicksburgh,  the City of a Hundred Hills, which Jefferson Davis had called "the Gibralter of the West," now a ruin, and with it 172 cannon, and 60,000 muskets of the finest make. 

      South of Vicksburg, on the Mississippi, General Banks led a Union force to capture Port Hudson, taking 6,000 prisoners, 51 cannon, and 5,000 muskets.

      Of those captured at Vicksburg, four were major generals, fifteen were brigadiers, eighty were staff officers; Pemberton was one of Jefferson Davis's favorite generals.  Grant pardoned many of the prisoners.  He wrote to Lincoln: "They are largely from the Southwest.  I know they are tired of the war and would get home just as soon as they could.  A large number of them had voluntarily come into our lines during the siege, and requested to be sent North where they could get employment until the war was over."

      Grant would soon regret his largesse; many of the Confederate soldiers he took prisoner at Chatanooga he had taken prisoner at Vicksburg; they had not gone home as promised, but had looped to the south and became reinforcements in Tennessee.

 

Grant moved with his army, during late Summer and early Autumn, through Mississippi up to Chatanooga.  It was a hellish journey, an army of men, with wagons and cannons and munitions, through brutal heat and then into the rains, mud, laying pontoon bridges, clearing steamboat routes.  Ten thousand animals, in the few weeks of passage, had died hauling rations overland to besieged Chatanooga before a river route was opened.  Now, after Vicksburg, the Union forces were in control of every stretch of the Mississippi.

      Rosecrans was in command of the Union Army at Chatanooga.  The Union Army was in possession of the city, a railroad center and manufacturing city, situated on the south bank of the Tennessee River.  General Braxton Bragg was in command of the Confederate forces, controlling the heights and the hills surrounding the city.  Bragg was a commander considered by many of his associates to be second-rate.  Some Confederate generals urged Jefferson Davis to replace Bragg, but Davis refused, expressing significant confidence in Bragg's ability to lead men to a vital triumph.

      Meade sent 20,000 troops from the Potomac as reinforcements to Chatanooga; Lee sent 30,000.  Jefferson Davis visited Bragg personally; Chatanooga would be the chance the South needed to retake Tennessee and Kentucky, perhaps even Vicksburg, to gain control of the Mississippi again.  If the South lost control of Chatanooga, then the way to Atlanta, and really through all of the Deep South, would be opened to the Union Army.

      George Thomas, the "rock of Chickamauga," and Philip Sheridan joined Rosecrans at Chatanooga.       The Union forces had been under siege at Chatanooga for months.  Bragg's plan was to starve them out. When Grant arrived with his army, and spread out below the heights of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, south and east of Chatanooga, with its back to the Tennessee River, Bragg and Davis spoke quite excitedly about the possibility of capturing Grant's entire army, as Grant had captured Pemberton's at Vicksburg. 

      Bragg's men were dug in with cannon and rifle pits amid rocks, timber, gulleys, caves.  Below in the flat land, within rifle shot of the Confederate soldiers, having formed a large semi-circle beneath Lookout Mountain, were Grant's men.  Grant understood, as did Grant's men, that there was no path of retreat; any attempt to give ground would be blocked by the Tennessee River, and would leave his men hopelessly vulnerable to counter-attack from Bragg's cavalry and artillery.

      On November 23, the Confederate pickets saw a wave of blue shirts start up Lookout Mountain.  The skirmish had begun, primarily with rifle fire and swift advance up the mountain by the Union forces.  The Confederate soldiers had watched the Union troops below on the plain, marching as if on parade, or in drills.  Soon, however, the troops formed into storming columns; they started up the mountain, exchanging fire with the first line of Confederate defenses.  In a matter of minutes, that first line of defense had fallen into Union hands.  It was foggy, misting.  Union troops kept pouring up the hills.  Orders had been for the storming columns to take only the first line of rifle pits.  Orders were forgotten.  Union soldiers continued up the mountain.

      Grant, at Orchard Knob, saw his soldiers pushing up Lookout Mountain.  He turned to General Thomas and asked: "Who ordered those men up the ridge?"

      Thomas had no answer; he turned to General Granger, asking: "Did you order the men up the ridge?"

      "No," Granger responded.  "They started up without orders."

      Little Phil Sheridan, with the Union forces on the ridge, had sent back for orders to continue the advance and to take the crest of Lookout Mountain.  The orders were unclear.  Sheridan waved a whiskey flask toward the enemy, took a drink, and, with a wild shout, continued up the ridge to join the men leading the assault.

      The fighting was ferocious.  Like most battles in the Civil War, subtleties were not the nature of the contest, the capacity to kill and maim in waves was.  Hundreds fell.  As the Union forces rose up the mountain, the fighting became above the clouds.  The soldiers on the valley floor could not see the battle, but could hear it, sense it, somewhere above the clouded sky. 

      There was howling, a kind of celebratory ascent by the Union army.  Soldiers seemed dazed, drunk with power.  They ascended into the fire of a heavily entrenched and armed adversary.  Fighting in the fog and rain and, later, in the moonlight, had an eerie, almost holy quality. 

      The Union soldiers overpowered the Confederate positions, one ring after another; the Confederate defenses broke and ran.  It was the first time in a major engagement that Confederate forces had panicked and run.  In all, Missionary Ridge was carried, simultaneously, at six different points.  Eighteen thousand men had been involved in the ascent.  Later, responsibility for the order to attack was laid at the feet of Generals Sheridan and Wood, who, caught up in the spirit and success of the earliest battles, apparently had merely never given the men an order to pause in their attack.

      There was some speculation, after the battle, that the Union troops had fought so gallantly partly out of a sense of desperation; the positioning, by Grant, of his army below Lookout Mountain, with its back to the Tennessee River, had given the Union soldiers a potent sense of dread.  If the Confederates attacked, with any substantial force, the Union Army would be pinned between two unyielding points.  Tension had been great in the Union camp.  Grant's positioning of his army in such a location told his men, uncategorically, that there would be no retreat.  When the early assault on Missionary Ridge began, the Union soldiers truly believed that no retreat was possible, that any lapse in their assault might lead to a Confederate counterattack which, if successful, might drive their army in to the Tennessee River, into captivity, or sure annihilation.  Because there was no hope of rest or safety until the entire mountain and its deadly arsenal was taken, the Union army poured up the slopes intent on its own salvation.   

     

On November 27, Grant telegraphed Lincoln: "I am just in from the front.  The rout of the enemy is most complete.  The pursuit will continue to Red Clay in the morning, for which place I shall start in a few hours."

 

 

XI.

 

Ulysses S. Grant was a strange, hulking man, with a reddish beard and clear blue eyes.  He was born April 27, 1822, in Point Pleasant, Ohio.  His father ran a tannery.  Ulysses' brothers all worked at their father's tannery.  Ulysses hated the smell of the dark workshop, the noise, the insistence on haste.  He read novels and walked the hills, through the woods outside of town, to his father's disgust, through the influence of his mother.

      When he came of age, Ulysses was sent to West Point, against his own wishes, at the urging of his father.  He was an unimpressive cadet, uninterested in military schooling; he always seemed a bit dreamy to others who knew him at West Point.  He could ride; he could shoot.  Yet, he was always removed from the world there, always detached, as if belonging no where really, as if merely biding his time, waiting for some moment of expression which might free him, which might reproduce him.

      In 1843, he graduated near the bottom of his class; he impressed very few people at the academy.  He received a commission and fought under General Zachary Taylor in the Mexican War, up to the capture of Monterey.  His regiment was then transferred to the expedition under Winfield Scott; he took part in every action from Vera Cruz to Mexico, was breveted first lieutenant and captain for meritorius conduct at Molino del Rey and Chapultepee.  He did not fully appreciate the role of the U.S. Army in Mexico, felt that political exigency had led to an unfortunate war with America's southern neighbor.  He sketched the Mexican countryside; wrote letters home to his wife about the poverty of the Mexican people, the exotic young women with their colorful dresses and their flowers and dark hair.

      Grant became fiercely dependent upon his wife and family.  In 1854, after the Mexican War had ended, Grant was transfered to Oregon; his family stayed behind in Missouri.  A combination of tedious work, overcast and damp weather, and separation from his wife and family, led Grant into severe bouts of depression.  He drank to alleviate his depression.  The drinking was not so great a problem as was the depression.  Yet, it was this stint in Oregon, which led to Grant's periodically heavy use of alcohol, subsequent demotion in rank for drunkenness, and, finally, his resignation from the Army, which later fuelled his reputation as a drunkard, which reputation followed him throughout his military career and even later into his political life.

      Grant was not a drunkard; but, when he did drink, he had little tolerance of alcohol.  He was an emotional man; yet, he kept his world of feelings bundled tightly within himself.  When he drank, much came out, much which he kept constrained, in more sober hours, inside his unspoken private thoughts.

      Grant resigned his commission, moved back to Missouri to be with his wife and family.  He unsuccessfully attempted to build a life as a farmer, and in real estate ventures.  At the age of 38, without prospects, he turned to his father, who gave him a job as a clerk at the tannery.  It was a humiliating circumstance for Grant.  He had failed.  He had gone to the world of adventure and gain, as an independent man; he had been forced to return to his father, his pockets empty, begging his father to take him back in, back in to a life and to work he had abhorred, work to which he had once felt superior.

      The Civil War saved Grant.  Had there been no war he would have passed his life in quiet bitterness; he felt all along that some great fate was in store for him.  Perhaps we all feel this.  He could taste it; and, when his life became sour, as it was, at times, at West Point, and had become in Oregon, or now, working at his father's store, he always had some inner nourishment to relieve the despair.  That nourishment was a sense of private vision: he had a sense of some destiny, something large, some historical role.

      Had there been no war, perhaps he would have wasted away in bitterness.  He was not a man for peace.  He was a family man, loving his children, loving and needing his wife.  Yet he could never find public expression during peace time.  He was no business man, no politician; when the war would end and he would become the most popular man in America, even more popular than the martyred Lincoln, and the most admired American in the world, appearing before huge crowds when he traveled with his family through Europe, when he would be overwhelmingly elected President of the United States for two terms, still, he was not in his element in peace time.  He was a man of war, a man who thrived on the quest, on the testing of courage, the instinct for survival.  Approximation to Death perhaps.

      He once told his friend, neighbor, and guardian angel General Rawlins, who watched over Grant during the war, kept him from sinking into despair, assauging despair with drink: "The art of war is simple enough.  Find out where your enemy is.  Get at him as soon as you can.  Strike at him as hard as you can, and keep moving on."

      This philosophy was more than chatter.  Grant, unlike McClellan, was a man of few words; his words tended to describe his actions, rather than to supercede them, actions which were usually unannounced, methodical, unyielding, at least in warfare.  He did not go for the ceremony of war, again, unlike McClellan.  He went for success in war, that very boon which, in peace time, had seemed so alien and elusive to him.

     

Grant volunteered, in 1861, and was appointed colonel of an Illinois regiment.  In August of that year, he was appointed brigadier general, commanding the important post of Cairo.  He occupied Paducah, and led an expedition on the Mississippi.  Then, in February of 1862, he distinguished himself in the capture of Fort Henry and then Fort Donelson, on the Tennessee River., coming to close the northern frontiers of Tennessee and Kentucky, gaining control of the upper Mississippi and the Tennessee rivers.

      Grant was one of the few forces of motion in the Union Army.  The Eastern Army, under McClellan, was a performance army, a ceremonial force.  It existed, primarily, or so McClellan understood it, to defend Washington, D.C.  It was not an offensive force, was not capable to pressing the war into the rebels own yard.  Grant, on the other hand, understood that the war must be fought on Southern soil.  The enemy must be found, struck, devoured where it stood; an army which waited to be struck, and responded only to attack, was like a boxer capable only of the counterpunch; the counterpuncher might win a battle here and there, but he would never win a war, not fighting always on his adversaries terms.  And so Grant attacked.  He pursued.  He sought contacts with the enemy, sought collisions.  Grant understood that the South must be taken; the Confederate soldier must be uprooted, otherwise the war might go on for several decades, might never end, might end in some stalemate which would be devastating to the future of a nation no longer united.

      Grant soon caught the eye of Abraham Lincoln.  The only good news for the Union in the war came from the West.  In the East, the Confederates were dominant.  Too many Union officers and soldiers felt that the cream of the West Point leadership was serving with the Confederates; that the South had better soldiers than the North.  Many Union soldiers were beginning to feel that the North could not defeat the South, no matter how much a manpower advantage they might have.  Yet news from the West belied this fear.  Grant took Fort Donelson.  Then, on April 6, after having been promoted to Major General, he led a major Union victory at Shiloh, defeating Johnston and Beauregard., driving the Southern forces further south and back behind Vicksburg.

      Lincoln appointed Grant to succeed General Halleck as Commander of the Western Armies.  Grant had been a failure all his life.  His star was now rising.  He understood the mechanism of war.  The engine of war, once started, must run.  To sit and to wait is folly; force the enemy to move, to think, to respond.  Strike and show courage.  Impress the enemy with your resolve.  Show a willingness to take casualties in order the achieve valuable objectives.  Establish a momentum, through motion, which can keep one's adversary off balance, responding to, not directing, the action of a conflict.

      Grant penetrated deep in to the heart of the South.  He cut off Vicksburg, set it to siege.  He fought running battles deep in enemy territory, to keep reinforcements from lifting the siege, breaking through his tightening ring.  Union officers and Northern civilians watched him with a mixture of awe and horror, a whole army swallowed up in the vast appendages of the American South, surrounded by hositility, by a more skillful enemy; expecting to hear at any moment that the mountains and swamps beyond Mason-Dixon had absorbed Grant's army as a payment due Grant's brashness.

      Lincoln also watched Grant.  There had been a committee of Baptists who visited Lincoln at the White House, demanding that Lincoln remove Grant from command of the West, for he was a drunkard, and, as such, set a bad example for the youths of the country. 

      "He is my only general who will fight," Lincoln replied.  "It wouldn't do to fire the only general who fights, now would it?"

      Grant had enemies.  Lincoln resisted each attempt to force Grant from his command.  He had never met Grant; he knew him only from battle reports at the War Office, and through assessments of other commanders.  Grant was the hands and feet of Lincoln.  Both understood that the war could be won only through fighting.  That casualties hurt the Confederacy more than the Union, with regard to resources.  That war was an ugly business; but, once enjoined, then one must be good at it.

      Each wished to preserve the union, Grant seeing in this sacred union some moral force akin to the marriage of man and woman, the marriage of himself and his own wife.  Grant was so dependent upon his wife, and his marriage, as a means of expression, as a road to destiny, that the thought of the dissolution of such bonds was unthinkable, such dissolution being self-destruction to both parties.  To Lincoln it was not so personal a matter; afterall, Lincoln's marriage was a mixed blessing, at best, for his wife was a possessive, brooding woman, capable of indecent tyrannies, which Lincoln came to understand, and tolerated, as abberations in the woman he loved.  Lincoln's tolerance was monumental.  His commitment to the union of states was not so much reflected in personal understandings as it appertained to his vision of American destiny in the world.  He was the father of a new-born son, who, when only beginning to stretch his limbs, was threatened by a paracite, a bodily ill, a cancer, as much ignorant separatism as slavery, as ignorant cells, when infected with cancer, will try to steal life from their neighbor cells, for their own justification.

      In 1862, Lincoln's son Willie had died in the White House.  Lincoln had sat beside his bed, holding his child's hand.  There was a ball in the White House that night; Lincoln had, of course, been forced to attend, to act as host.  He hurried upstairs later to be with his son.  There was so much potential in the boy, so much heroic goodness in his vitality, in his innocence.  Lincoln could not bear the thought of such potential being wasted.

      The Union was like his boy: unlimited potential; inherent virtuosities of Youth.  It was the greatest dream the world had, America.  Lincoln could not bear the thought of it being wasted, being still-born.  He fought to crush the cancer cell, the selfish ignorance which would destroy the boy before the boy could become a man, find himself, find his own greatness. 

      There was the Negro, to be sure.  Slavery was dead.  It should be abolished in the New World, as an act of leadership, by which the New World would begin to assert its legitimacy as the new leader, the new creator, of the world.  Lincoln was the midwife; he would be the mediator, through whom the New World would be born, through whom the son would find life.  He would not allow the dream to die while in his garden.

 

Grant would be the means to the preservation of Lincoln's vision.  After the magnificent triumph of Grant's army at Chatanooga, the miracle at Lookout Mountain, Lincoln understood that only Grant could lead his army.  Grant: the unimpressive, almost slovenly man, who ate cucumbers soaked in vinegar for breakfast; Grant who was shadowed by a guardian angel, General John Rawlins, who watched over him to be sure that he did not return to drink; Grant, who had failed at everything he'd tried in life, except war: Grant would be the feet of Lincoln, by whom the war would be ended in two years.

      Grant was the head, and he had two arms: the swift arm, Philip Sheridan, and the powerful arm, William Tecumseh Sherman.  After the victory at Chatanooga, Grant sent Sherman with an army to relieve Burnside, who was under siege at Knoxville, surrounded by Confederates led by James Longstreet.   Sherman relieved Burnside in a swift, clean operation.  When he returned, he and Grant began to lay plans to drive a wedge into the Confederacy, through Atlanta, separating the rebellion into unequal parts, cutting off re-supply and communication between Virginia and the Deep South.

      Grant and Sherman were close friends, intimates, who shared a similar view of warfare, a similar view of the Southern soldier.  Sherman had written a letter to Abraham Lincoln in August of 1863, in which he described the most treacherous and the most dangerous of the Southern combatants: "These men must all be killed or employed by us before we can hope for peace: the young bloods of the South, the sons of planters, lawyers about town, good billiar-players and sportsmen, men who never did work and never will work.  War suits them, and the rascals are brave, fine riders, bold to rashness.  They care not a sou for niggers, land, or anything.  They hate Yankees, per se, and don't bother their brains about the past, present or future.  As long as they have good horses, plenty of forage and an open country, they are happy.  This is a larger class than most men suppose, and they are the most dangerous set of men that this war has turned loose upon the world."

 

The war had turned loose upon the world a class of men who loved the adventure of war, who thrived on the violence of war.  These men did not, alone, serve in the army.  Some had deserted, finding the following of orders did not suit them.  Rarely did these men desert out of cowardice; rather, it was out of independence.  Many did not wish to die following the command of a man they felt their inferior.

      Bands of men were roving the countryside.  There were reports of gangs of men, robbing households, claiming to be Confederate guerilla warriors, moving through the backroads of Mississippi and Louisiana.

      In August of 1863, William Clark Quantrill, with a band of gunman, including Frank and Jesse James and Cole Younger and his brothers, swept through Lawrence, Kansas, killing every man in town and burning 185 buildings despite the fact that they had met no resistance.

      Killers were on the loose.  The war had cut their bonds, even deified them.  Now bands of men rode the open country of the northwest; guerilla bands flourished in the South.  They were somewhere between regular soldier and thief, somewhere between assassin and military hero.  Yet they had not the discipline of army regulars.  There was not the same structure of order.  The law was their enemy, as much as were the Yankees.  They spoke the creed of rebellion, spoke the ideals of the Southern cause.  They fought only indirectly for the Confederacy; they fought more directly for their self-interest.  They were justified in their brutal actions only in the fact that their special hatred for Yankees sometimes took the form of violence against enemy targets.  They were murderers with a flag mostly.  Dogs from hell, cut from their leash by well-meaning orators, fire-eaters, firebrands.

      Eclesias Ryan was no longer a soldier at heart.  Too much had been lost; he had been cut loose from his soil, and his family, and his friends.  Too much death and blood and fire had swept him in to a nightmare and back out again.  Some men held some icon in their minds, which allowed them to walk through the destruction, as if graced by some image.   Family, love, property; hope of some sort.  Ecclesias Ryan had no hope.  He did not believe in a Confederate victory; he never had believed in that.  He believed not in the mythology of war and rebellion; he was as if sleep-walking, driven to war more out of a sense of resignation than of destiny.  And when his family disappeared, and when, later, he heard his son had been shot and was near death, as as the memories of his plantation and his world before the war grew dimmer and dimmer, as if clouded by smoke now, which smoke just might be the actual condition of his plantation, burned, wasted, he had no future to move toward, nothing wholesome, nothing hopeful: he had no wife, no son, no children at all for all he knew, now Northerners, driven north by a wife who had turned away from him; he had no delusions that he would see her again.  He believed in signs.  Isaac Pillesant's death had been more to him than merely the loss of his best friend.  A world had crumbled with old Pillesant.  The plantation had burned.  The hope had been rattled.  The South had been crushed.  Lee did not believe in a Southern triumph.  He believed that the Confederate Army was superior to the Union Army.  He had pride in the skill of his soldiers.  But the North could not be defeated.  He had pinned his hope on the offensive which ended at Gettysburg, to gain recognition as an independent nation from the foreign nations of Europe.  This had not occurred.  Gettysburg had been a great tragedy.  It had undercut the growing notion that the Confederate Army was untouchable, could move at will against an inferior Union force.  It would not do, for the nations of Europe to recognize a military force and nation which would subsequently fall to the massed power of the North.

      Ecclesias Ryan grew away from Lee, tended more and more to isolation, to dreaming.  There were gaps in the Confederate unity.  The Davis administration was inept.  Davis had supported his friend Braxton Bragg against Grant at Lookout Mountain.  Lee and the other general staff of the Confederacy had warned Lee of Bragg's incompetence.  The entire western front was unraveling.  Grant grew in the esteem of the Southern command.  Lee had known that something animated Grant, some power for motion, some natural ability at war.  He had sensed it.  Others who had doubted the Union capacity watched Vicksburg fall, and then the series of pins swept down toward Lookout Mountain.  The entire western defense had been shattered.  The Union Army, led by Grant, and by the twin furies, Sheridan, the lunatic red-haired Irishman, and Sherman, whom the Confederacy feared, for his legend as Grant's right arm, the arm of power, as Sheridan was the arm of speed, was growing.  Some power existed within Sherman which could be felt by Lee, and by his fellow commanders, as if a force which had been held at bay, leashed by some incompetence, or some quirk of geography, was about to be set loose.

      Ecclesias Ryan was battle-scarred.  He had been wounded several times.  His mind no longer was accustomed to conflict, did not thrive on it, as had been the case only a year before.  He was becoming tired.  He often felt that he belonged only at his plantation, on his porch, watching the cotton turn silver in the sunset.

      Lee let him drift.  Lee knew instinctively that the war was over.  He would not surrender.  Many more would die.  Many Union soldiers would die, trying to take Richmond.  But the South could not win.  It was not in God's plan.  He could not will a Southern victory, any more than he could will the resurrection of his staff, which had been so mutilated at Gettysburg.  Any more than he could will a peaceful settlement, which Lincoln rejected, demanding total surrender, and, with total surrender, the destruction of a way of life, which had been good for him, which had flourished, and which had made the South a great culture.

     

Ecclesias began to dream of his plantation.  He would lapse into long reveries, memories perhaps, part memory, part fantasy.  The world around him had so little clarity.  It was not like his youth, not like his fine days of freedom.

      Zebulon Vance, a thirty-three old Governor of North Carolina, had broken with the government of Davis.  North Carolina was a state of mountaineers, farmers, fishermen.  It was not a plantation state, it had no real need of slaves.  A peaceful settlement of the war interested many in North Carolina.  Also, the presence of bands of guerilla warriors, bandits in many cases, was unacceptable to North Carolinians; and the participation of Confederate regulars in violent acts against supporters of Vance further alienated citizens in North Carolina from the Davis administration.

      Ecclesias felt a need to return home.  Perhaps Death was near.  He felt a need to see his home again; there was a picture of Ecclesias and Erin, shortly after their marriage, taken in Ireland, which hung on the dining room wall.  Ecclesias needed to see it again.  He became obsessed with the picture.  He had dreams about it, dreams that it had been stolen, dreams that the plantation home had been burned, but the picture had survived.  He began to plot a strategy of desertion.  His mind wandered.  He wanted to be alone.  He rode often into the woods around Richmond, trying to find solitude.  There seemed to be people everywhere.  He tried to talk to Lee.  One evening, after dinner, Lee asked the other general staff to leave he and Ecclesias alone for a moment.  Lee was pensive; he looked at Ecclesias with compassion. 

      He said: "Ecclesias, what is it you need?  You've been trying to tell me for days."

      "I can't do this anymore," Ecclesias said.  "I've lost my shield.  It isn't fear which holds me: it's sorrow.  And it isn't Death which courts me as much as it is fatigue.  I don't know what comes next.  I don't know where I am anymore."

      "Is it Isaac that did this?"

      "No.  It's lost," Ecclesias said.  "The world is lost and never was.  It's not my war.  I don't even know why I'm fighting.  My wife has left me because she despises what I'm fighting to help preserve.  There's no way we can win.  We're just grinding ourselves up, trying to kill ourselves in very small bites."

      "And what do you need, Ecclesias?"

      "I need to see my home again, Robert E.  I need to visit my plantation.  I need to smell it again, the sod, and the garden, and see the Sunflowers and sit on my porch and read."

      "We all need that, Ecclesias."

      "I need my wife back, Robert E."

      "I know you do, Ecclesias."

      "I need to go back there."

      "It's not safe.  It's in Union hands."

      "I know."

      "How will you go?"

      "Along the coast, I suppose."

      "I'll send some men with you.  You better not wear your uniforms.  I'll send a party of men with you.  That's about all I can do, Ecclesias.  You've been a good soldier; you're right, it's a time of killing now.  No more can be done."

      "I thank you for hearing me."

      "You've been a good friend.  I'll miss our talks, our games of chess.  I want you to go home, to see your home; then I want you back.  You've been good luck to me, Ecclesias.  I will need some more good luck.  I feel like I'm steering a wounded boat.  We may not sail the seas again.  But, if we do have good luck, maybe we'll find our way back to harbor."

 

Ecclesias Ryan left Richmond on January 1, 1864, with a company of six men.  He carried a letter from Lee to Jefferson Davis, who was visiting friends in Atlanta.  The letter carried no profound information.  Those at command headquarters, as well as the guard which accompanied Ecclesias Ryan, were given the impression that the letter was of serious import.  It was a way Lee had of paying homage to Ecclesias Ryan, of paying respect to the man who had fought gallantly for the South, of raising Ecclesias Ryan in the eyes of his compatriots.  Lee was expressing trust in the physical abilities and judgment of General Ryan; the fact that the letter was not of profound importance, was, indeed, an amplification of a message sent earlier, which, in and of itself, would change in no way the management of the war, or Jefferson Davis's understanding of Lee's position or strategy, was known only by Lee himself.  He gave Ecclesias orders to deliver the message to President Davis in Atlanta; he gave orders to the six officers sent with Ryan to protect the deliverance of the letter carried by General Ryan.  Assumptions were made, as they were bound to be made, that the letter was singularly important.  The seven riders rode out of Richmond on New Year's Day, early in the morning; there was a light rain falling, and fog shrouded the road to the south, toward Atlanta.

 

The ride was uneventful through southern Virginia.  In Greensboro, the riders were met by a delegation sent by Governor Vance.  They dined with the governor.  They talked very little about politics.  Governor Vance wished to learn more about the war, from the men who had been involved in the battles.  When one officer, riding guard with Ecclesias Ryan, suggested that Vance might sue for a separate peace, Governor Vance cut him short, replying that North Carolina had supported the war of rebellion and would continue to do so; he recited a long list of heroic actions in the war performed by North Carolina natives; he insisted that his concern was for the security of his citizens and for the just government of the Confederacy.  He had never suggested, nor would he suggest, North Carolina sue for peace.

      A large contingent of North Carolina regulars escorted General Ryan and his guard through North Carolina into South Carolina.  Apparently news of the important letter had preceded Ecclesias Ryan.  Regulars met Ryan in South Carolina, escorting him through Columbia, southwest, across the Savannah River.  In conversation with the soldiers, Ryan became aware of the fact that the Confederate Army was now being used to fight bands of bushwackers, living in the hills, stealing from their own people, killing and robbing small parties of Confederate soldiers.  Ecclesias Ryan was being protected, not from the Union Army, but from criminals living in his own society.

      General Ryan and his party took the road through Leesville, Ridge Spring, and Edgefield, entering Georgia through Clarks Hill.  They camped that night at Clarks Hill Lake, a sprawling leaf-like configuration, named after Elijah Clark, a pioneer in eastern Georgia. 

      The next morning, they rode through Thomson, then angled to the southwest, through Warrenton, toward Sparta.  That night they camped along the banks of Lake Sinclair, to the north of Milledgeville.  There had been a rumor, relayed to the guard riding with Ecclesias Ryan, that Union guerillas had struck a supply depot near Union Point; the riders had decided, on the basis of this report, to bypass the main road into Atlanta, to take the secondary road to the southwest, to enter Atlanta from the south on the following morning.

      The rumor, of course, was untrue.  The riders entered Atlanta on the following morning.  That afternoon Ecclesias Ryan delivered to President Davis the letter from Lee, which surprised Davis, for he had heard that the letter contained important news; he realized, after reading it, that the letter contained no news at all; he had feared the news would be grim; so the fact that the letter was merely a restatement of an earlier report from Lee rather pleased Davis.  He held a dinner for General Ryan, who had been quite heralded in the early months of the war for his heroism.  There were fewer heroes now.  Battles were being lost now.  There was dancing.  An orchestra played.  Ecclesias Ryan did not dance, but sat beside Jefferson Davis, quietly, and observed the ball.

      There was something profoundly sad in all of this, for Ecclesias.  It all seemed so empty somehow, as if the players, the dancers, were pretending, were merely nostalgic.  Hours before, Ecclesias had been dodging a reported invasion of Union soliders against an army supply depot fifteen miles from Atlanta.  Hours before that, Ecclesias had been riding with a large guard to protect him from scavenger Southerners, murderers, who infested the woods.  The dancers before him wheeled across the dance floor as if sleep-walking, as if choosing not to see the portentious circumstances brewing all about them.

      So, too, did Ecclesias miss his wife.  He had not had a woman since Erin had left.  He had not held a woman, had not slept with a woman.  Something inside of him was dead, without the softness of a wife, someone to hold, someone to please with his body.  He would have loved to dance with his wife that night.  Even he could have been able to delude himself, to blind himself to the coming catastrophe of the South, had he had his wife's slim waist to hold within his arms.  His loneliness created his despair.  Despair was a sin; he understood this.  Loneliness, too, was a sort of crime against nature.  Yet he was lonely.  He was losing things to hope for, circumstances which might free him.

      Some say that Sorrow draws Death to itself, as the means to a desired extinction.  A man's love for a woman is, itself, his anchor to Life.  Without it he drifts; deprived of it, he becomes perverse, he becomes nihilistic.

      Ecclesias endured the ball at President Davis's quarters as a condemned man might endure his last meal, with detachment surely, with no real impression of its flavor.  He remained in Atlanta two days; during the evening of the second day, he wrote a letter to his wife, in Boston.  He arranged for a friend in Intelligence to have the letter delivered to his wife.  Then he quietly left Atlanta, leaving behind his six riders.  He traveled south, toward Macon.  At Macon, he took the road west, through Roberta, to Talbotton.  He entered Alabama through Ladonia.  Several times he heard shooting, as he road along the wet trail, which led through hamlet after hamlet of shanties and other modest homes.  There was no real sign of war here.  He occasionally met  Confederate patrols.  When he told him his name, they saluted proudly and called him "Sir."  His reputation apparently was still strong here; the days succeeding Gettysburg, days of his wandering and obsessive solitude, of his loss for the taste of command, had either not been circulated or were paid no heed.  He rode on, killing rabbits along the way, for dinner.  The weather was bad, wet, windy, cold.  He traveled alone; he drove his horse hard.  He needed to get home, to find his memory still intact, to find the house standing and the slaves still moving about the grounds in their sleep-walking habit.  And the picture on the wall above the dining-room table: that sustained him, that thought, the hope of finding Erin's picture.  He thought, in a kind of delirium, that he might find passage out of New Orleans to Boston, to meet with his wife again.  He would not return to General Lee.  It was clear now.  He would need to find his family, his wife; he could live in Boston if he must.  He needed peace, he needed quiet in his family home.  He had no fear of the Union Army; the entire rebellion was a mistake.  He had known this from the beginning; he merely had no will to oppose the tide of history then.  Now, still, he could not stop history; he understood this.  But he could walk away, he thought.  He rode on.  Would he find the slaves, the eternal slaves, still performing their daily labors?

      Alabama seemed huge.  Huge and green, wet, wild.  There seemed to be terror in the people.  None saluted him as he passed by.  He slept near Society Hill.  He traveled at dawn, toward Montgomery.  He did not feel at home here.  Near Shorter, he heard gun shots.  The rode into the woods, off the road, approaching the sound of the guns.  Near the road he saw six bushwackers standing over two fallen bodies.  One bushwacker was stealing the boots on one victim; another was taking a coat and pants.  Their pockets had already been checked, their money and watches taken.

      It was raining, cold.  Ecclesias felt a cold chill come over him.  He watched the scum before him, the murdering class, who killed more for fun than for profit even, who had gleaned a taste for killing in the war, and a taste for freedom through their desertions.  Ecclesias considered charging the men, considered trying to cut them down.  If he were killed it would not matter.  But he was weak; he had no strength.  He felt a cold coming on.  He hadn't felt right for weeks.  He let them have their booty.  In time, they rode away, west, toward Montgomery.  Ecclesias, after waiting to let the band disappear, and waiting even longer to be certain they were far gone, rode up to the two corpses.  They were naked, lying in the mud.  They were two old men, townsmen from the look of it.  Perhaps affluent.  Pictures in a wallet had been scattered around them, pictures of a family, small children, daughters.

      Ecclesias would have felt sorrow, but he felt nothing really.  He was numb.  Cold and arid and without feeling.  Tired.  He was tired.  He needed to get home.  He rode on, leaving the corpses in the road, being washed by the cold January rain.

      Ecclesias became increasingly wary.  He did not trust human movement.  He rode ridges overlooking the roads.  He by-passed Montgomery, angled southwest, toward Mobile.  He did not trust his fellow Confederates, who had been somehow twisted by the years of conflict.  He knew now that he would have to leave the South; he would board a boat in New Orleans.  New Orleans had been held by the North for many months now.  He would need new clothes, civilian clothes.  Margaret, the house slave, who cared for his children, and her husband, David, the valet: they would still be in the family house at Colfax Hundred, and when he rode up, and asked for a set of civilian clothes, they would bring out his finest suit, cream-colored, with a fine straw hat.  He would take the buggy to New Orleans; he had connections in New Orleans, from his days in the shipping business.  Passage to Boston would be arranged in a matter of hours.  Yes, he was certain it could be done.  The world would become better.  The air in Alabama felt mutilated somehow.  And mad.  There was madness in the air, a kind of pre-invasion denial.  Everyone pretended to be asleep, dreaming.  It had been like that in Atlanta too.  The Union Army was perched on the roof, ready to crawl in through the window.  Some sort of mad expectation filled the air.  It made his skin crawl, the madness, not the expectation, not the fear of invasion.  No, he changed his thought: he could not leave.  He was not leaving from fear of death.  He wished to see his wife.  His children: Cotton and Elizabeth and Laura and little Brendon.  He wished to sleep with his wife.  He wished to find her warm body.  He did not fear death.  He did not fear a Union invasion.  He needed love; his constitution was breaking down.  He could no longer fight, could not longer live without comfort.

      Death was close to him.  He knew its feel, its clammy aspects, its hands of brittle contagions.  Then, the realization: he would not make it to his home, he was being stalked, eyes were following him this very instant.  There would be no journey to New Orleans.  There would be no David or Margaret, no slaves at all.  The house had been burned.  He could see its cinders.  He did not know who had burned it.  He did not see the Union Army there.  He saw no one; but he saw the slaves being bundled away, in a group.  He saw the Union Army there, doing that.  He saw the picture of his wife and himself, which had hung on the wall near the dining room table: he saw a black hand take it down and put it in a knap-sack.  He did not see the face.  He was riding in to Mississippi.  He was crossing the border: already the air seemed fresher, more real.  He had crossed the Tensile and Mobile rivers.  His clothes were still wet.  His horse was a handsome friend, to carry him so well, to carry him so far.  He did not enter Mobile.  He rode hard, toward the border, across from Seven Hills, at Hurley.  The day seemed better now.  He was closer to his home.  Mississipi felt better than Alabama.  He would skirt down toward Pascagoula, head toward Orange Grove, northwest of Biloxi.  He was not far from Louisiana.  Louisiana was held by the Union soldiers, much of it.  He would need to change clothes in Mississippi, to civilian clothes, if he hoped not to be caught in Louisiana.  He rode on.  Days passed.  He swooped below the forest, below Airy Lake.  He shot three birds, quail, for dinner.  He would steal if he had to, from the farmers; he heard roosters in the mornings.  He slept on the wet ground.  He was getting old; he felt older every day.  He wore a beard; he felt scruffy.  He had always been well-groomed, before the war.  Now he felt old and sloppy, and his stomach was beginning to protrude.  He never believed a thing like that could happen to him; he remembered himself a thin, strong lad in Ireland, then in Charleston.  He was a handsome man then; all the women would watch him; they could see he would come to something.  Now, racing in the rain and mist, over the ridges looking down at the road, through the woods, racing toward Louisiana, being followed by something, some force which smelled of destruction, becoming fat, becoming thin, thin in his face but fat in his torso, he no longer cut such a gallant figure.  He had no woman.  He had no grace now.  His angel was gone; his guardian angel had fallen.  He rode along Wolf River, toward Poplarville.  There was a grove of cyprus trees.  He cut through them.  What time was it?  He should stop.  He had some strange feeling.  Something was close, some chilling person, some fatality.  He rode into a gulley, a swamp; mud clung to his horse's legs.  Ecclesias whipped the horse.  Ecclesias was sweating badly.  He needed to get home; there was something he should know about his home, something he must see.

      Emerging from the swamp, straight up a hill, he met another man, a rider sitting astride his horse.  "Slow down, General," the man said, smiling.  "What's your hurry?"

      Ecclesias reined in his horse. 

      "My God, you're wet, probably cold," the stranger said.  "Where you goin' so fast?"

      "Louisiana," Ecclesias replied.  "I need to get home, to see my family."

      "You can't go like that.  The damn Yankees are all over Louisiana."

      "I need to get some civilian clothes.  I need to see my family.  There's been a death in my family."

      "I'm sorry to hear that, General."  The man seemed genuinely moved.  He was thin, smoking a small cigar.  He was wearing rain-gear, a broad hat, propped on his horse under a wide cyprus.  He wore a black beard; he seemed well-groomed.  "I've got some clothes at my camp.  I can give you some clothes to wear."

      They rode to the man's camp together.  Ecclesias liked him, trusted him, for some reason.  He was not sure why.  The man offered him beans and wild meat; the meat was cooking on a stick over a low fire.  The man must have heard him coming, ridden out to greet him.  The man's name was Oliver Duschene.  He had fought with the Mississippi Riflemen, had taken a ball in the shoulder at Antietam.  He hadn't fought since.  Some people thought him a coward not to go back.  Ecclesias said that was his business; Ecclesias had no reason to judge him.

      After Ecclesias ate, the man brought him the dry clothes he had promised.  As Ecclesias was taking off his wet uniform, the man drew his gun and told Ecclesias to undress entirely.  Ecclesias did as he was told.  The man forced Ecclesias to lie face down in the grass.  The man told Ecclesias that it was nothing personal; he had to rob Ecclesias: that was how he made his living.  He told Ecclesias he was going to have to take his horse too.  He told Ecclesias that he was going to have to take his gun and uniform and all his money.  Ecclesias said nothing.  The man told Ecclesias that he would have to kill Ecclesias, because he could not let any witnesses live.  He stood above Ecclesias, put his foot on Ecclesias's back, and shot him in the back of the head with his Colt pistol.

 

 

XII.

 

Cotton Ryan slowly awoke from his death sleep. Faces came and went.  He was no longer in danger he was told.  The doctor believed that there would be no permanent damage to his lungs.  The bullet had missed his heart by less than an inch; ribs had been broken and had pierced his lungs.  He had drunk in a great deal of blood, lying on the battlefield for hours; yet, his recovery seemed certain.

      His mother appeared; Nina Beardsley appeared with her, with her long blackish hair, her athletic movements.  She was such a strange creature, part woman, part girl, part confidence, part intimidation.  She was so alone in many ways.  Her beauty made her uncomfortable.  Yet she sat beside him, and felt so close to him, and admitted to him that she loved him, had always loved him, wished to be his bride.

      He wanted to reach out to her, to make her permanently a part of him.  But they were two beings, separated, close assuredly, but separate.  She departed again.  He returned to dreams.  He dreamed of his father often.  Why had this happened?  Principles!  What did his principles matter now!  He should have stood beside his father.  No one had wanted the war--no one in his family.  His mother should never have left.  He sensed that his father was dead.  A darkness descended on him one afternoon.  It was late evening.  There was a storm, with an hour of lightning and thunder.  Cotton remembered the battlefield.  He feared it more now than he had when he had been there.  Now it seemed more real than it had when he was surrounded with such concussion, such death and desperation.  He feared going back. 

      The thunder passed.  The rain came.  He slept.

      He did not remember his dream; he awoke in a chill, curled up in his covers.  A strange darkness was in the room, a cold air.  The other men did not seem to notice it.  Where was Nina Beardsley?  He wanted her to be there.  The nurse, Emma Livingston, saw he was shivering. She brought him another blanket.  She sat on his bed and held his hand.  He felt nauseous.  He wanted to cry.

      He slept.

 

Nina Beardsley came every weekend.  He was able to walk with her eventually, in the garden, later out along the river.  There had been fear that Washington would be taken.  Lee had been in the North, had rode with his men through Pennsylvania.  There had been a great battle.  Lee had been defeated.  But he had escaped.  There had been a great slaughter.  Grant had won in the West.  Vicksburg had fallen.

      The news did not move Cotton Ryan.  He did not care who won the war.  He wanted the war to end.  He wanted to return to Louisiana, to find his father, to have his family again gather at their home.  He told Nina this.  She understood.  She walked with her arm around his waist, or held hands with him.  They would drink tea at an outdoor cafe along the Potomac.  It was Spring.  The smell of sweet blossoms was in the air.  Cotton would look at Nina, look into her face.  How did he merit her?  Was she not too beautiful for him?  He felt dismembered, mutilated.  When he looked at himself in the mirror, after bathing, and saw the raw flesh and the blackened stitching in the scar, he felt sick.  The pain had not been so real to him, until he saw the wounds.  Then the pain became greater; he felt as though he had lost something, as though he had had something valuable stolen from him.  The war was some disgusting thief.  His youth had been stolen.  His beautiful young body was no longer beautiful.  Something in his heart sank.  He felt cheated.

      He did not read the papers about the war.  He did not want to talk about it.  He wanted to blank it from his mind, as though it had not happened, as though it were a bad dream which would vanish merely if ignored; life would return to normal; he would take his bride to the South; he would discover Colfax Hundred as he had left it, untroubled by warfare, untouched by the apocalypse.

     

Time was something unreal to him now.  He felt apart from everything.  He was discharged from the army.  He traveled with Nina and his mother by train to Boston.  He moved in with his mother who owned a small apartment near downtown.  Cotton did not like Boston.  He did not accept the snobbish nature of Boston society.  There was a virulent anti-Southern atmosphere.  Also an anti-government fever.  Both of these indulgences Cotton found abhorrent: first, he loved the South, for it was an essential part of his existence; second, he loved the American form of government, for which he had fought (the Constitution), in opposition to his homeland.  The people around him seemed to despise the very things he found most of value.

      He talked of this with his fiancee.  She understood his restlessness.  He needed to regain his strength; if, after their marriage, he wished to move, she would of course be willing to move away from Boston.  Of course, the war must end.  That was the first order of business.

 

MJCwriting.htm