Acoustic
Shadows, John Matthias (Forthcoming from Shearsman, May 2019)
Acoustic Shadows, book cover image by Jean A. Dibble
excerpts
from Acoustic Shadows,
Section IV,
“Acoustic Shadows”
1
. . . and it’s not analogical at all—
for in mirage you see the line of troops that isn’t there
and vanishes at your
approach, whereas
Great-grand-sire Albert C.
could hear the voice
of Ambrose Bierce from far
away, deep in an Indiana outfit late
to join in the advance, but,
like Grant and Sherman,
not the cannonades &
fusillades that slaughtered thousands,
would have signaled
strategies obscured in shadows
of the mind obscured by inability
to hear
cannonades and fusillades
that shattered adjuvant brigades.
No one heard the screaming
wounded, Rebel yells, although
they saw well enough, in
terms of awe and terror, all—as if some
silent movie, not yet
technically achieved, played before the eyes
of Edward Shiloh, named by
Albert C. for the balls-up horror of the
battle
before Chickamauga and retreat to Chattanooga after that. Sidebar
1
Albert C. enlisted at
sixteen, McComb, Ohio: Company K,
65th Ohio Volunteers. Ambrose
Bierce, born in Meigs County, same state,
and just a little older . . .
It is possible they met.
It is possible they met
through an acoustic shadow, which allows
a man at great distance, now
and then, to hear quite well what a man
up close to the event itself
cannot—
For example, me; for example,
now.
And maybe Albert C. just
there, just then; Biercings audible enough,
but not the roar and crash of
civil war.
*
Ambrose Bierce, we need you
at this hour!
But not in the version of The Old Gringo, Carlos Fuentes,
and the movie—no acoustic
shadows—staring
G. Peck and J. Fonda—box
office failure I’m told—for which
some text from The Devil’s Dictionary
on a billboard all
illuminated by
archaic gaslight might well
serve anticipation.
Almost arbitrarily I put my
finger down on Valor:
“Why have you halted,” roared the commander
of a
division at Chickamauga, who ordered a charge: “Move
forward
sir at once.” “General, said the commander of the
delinquent
brigade, “I am persuaded that display of valor
will
bring them into collision with the enemy.”
We need you, Ambrose Bierce,
man who disappeared.
Sidebar
1
Short
news story, graphic
with the
highlights of
a major
one, something
incidental,
conference
with the
judge, lawyers,
sometimes
the parties in
the
case, which the jury
doesn’t
hear. Listen up.
What I
saw at Shiloh, Shiloh,
wasn’t
what I’d name my
own
offspring for, I can
sure
tell you that. Came upon
the
dregs of failed advance,
several
thousand wounded
and
defeated, beaten, cowed.
Deaf to
duty, dead to shame.
All
unconscious of their clay.
You may
have built a family
on this
chaos; me, I built a
style:
None escaped, least
of all
the earth. Bits of iron
stuck
out of every tree,
knapsacks,
swollen biscuits,
blankets
beaten into soil
by the
rain, rifles bent and
splintered
stocks, waist-belts,
hats,
heads, arms and legs, a
a foot
left running by itself,
an ear
pinned to a wagon by
a broken
bayonet, eyes of
one
clutched in his open
hand as if
on offer to us as
we
passed him by and heard
the
bugle-call, “assembly.”
“All
rise,” says the bailiff
when the
justices march in.
What
justice for the dead?
No one
rose, your honor, once
they
fell upon the field, though
many
prayed to god, the devil,
or (like
me) the dictionary.
2
A file of troops is not like
a line of verse
or a mirage in its
advance/retreat and shape-changing
quatrain:
Shiloh
Stones River
Chickamauga
Resaca
A troop is not a trope though
Grant and Sherman
sought to make a metaphor of
early blunders
rather than to face a fact in
plenary: a little boy with
wooden sword playing among
casualties
and lost to what they both
could hear and see but
then forgot—
A. C. Matthias & Lt. Ambrose Bierce,
child private and the brash
volunteer recently
promoted to the tent of
General Hazen as the new
topographical engineer,
riding out alone to take the
measure of terrain, the good
fields and bad
the good and bad
possibilities of an advance, retreat
a retreat observed by the
child with a wooden sword
an advance likely to become
retreat
a treat for Christmas or his
birthday, a wooden sword
although the engineer carried
his sophisticated tools
he wrote, Common paces 18:
50´ = 2 7/9´ 2 7/9´ = 2´ 9 1/3
& preferred to pace
rather than to use the chain
but liked his compass,
leveling stick, circumference,
with the brass plates and
tube to mount it.
Mountains were the worst for
both of them, the enemy
dug in, entrenched. “Taking
the high ground” was not
a figure of speech like
shadow in acoustic shadow.
It was not a situation where
one wanted to encounter,
for example, grape shot from
artillery. Some commander might
insist one take the hill—
some commander like the one
they called “Oh, No!”
or “General Prayerbook,” the “Christian
Officer” who managed
to outflank himself, his
actions covered up at first but
called in good time “The
Crime at Pickett’s Mill.”
Before that my forebear wrote: We are very poorly clothed
I have
one blouse in rags, one pair of pants all full
of
holes, and one pair of stockings which are always wet.
I feel
sometimes that we ought to give the Rebs the South.
And we
may have to do that anyway with generals
like our
own who do not manage things. I advise, I do,
all men
to stay at home, hiding if they must. We
forage
here for all our food. Some have died of thirst.
The news
is that Jeff Davis is in Murfreesboro—
while jumping backwards over
time and space, the voice
jumping an acoustic shadow,
his who had enlisted as
he left Ohio, trudged south
from Elkhart—
These were men.
They
crept upon their hands and knees. They used
their
hands alone, dragging their legs.
They
used their knees only, their arms hanging idly
at their
sides. They came by dozens
and by
hundreds, made gestures with their hands,
spread
their palms upward in a kind of prayer.
But
there was no help for these men
except
for the child who walked among them
with a
wooden sword and seemed unable to speak,
Unable
to hear. He made unholy sounds—
Gabbling
like a turkey, chattering like an ape—
All the wounded took this as
the voice of doom, Goddamn
death itself, dandified in
costume, toy soldier come
to life, bearing
upsidedowndrawn cross.
3
God damn
the Goddamn damn.
Edward Shiloh used to shout,
stuck on an “opinion.”
Was he his father’s son?
Dear
Son, wrote Albert C., dedicating
William Hinman’s Story of the Sherman Brigade.
Carefully
preserve this book that future
Generations
of descendants
read and
profit by it. I pray your generation
may know
peace. But this is a story
of our
suffering and tribulation. As
Edward Shiloh
cursed and tore his hair, I’d
open Hinman’s book
and align my lead soldiers in
configurations based on
battle maps: Shiloh, Stones
River, Chickamauga
and Resaca. I collected
hundreds of these poisonous toys,
and sometimes even licked
them with my tongue,
loving them so much I’d want
to taste them. I’d make
the hills and mountains,
placing objects
underneath a carpet, then set
up artillery and units of
reserves at the rear of both
defenders and
the ones who would advance
into the gatlings & grapeshot.
Then the cavalry at
unexpected angles for
anticipated hit and run. With
care I would align
Albert C’s poor infantry,
lines and lines of them, and then
some snipers in the trees. Finally,
gray defenders
took their places in the
hills. E. S. M.’s stone house was
on San
Juan, named for yet another battle. Shiloh on San Juan. Sidebar
2
I think my grandfather had a
kind of writer’s block.
He could no more advance
against his obstacle than my
lead version of his father
could. I would never proceed to
the battle. I’d set them up
according to my strategy,
which sometimes took me hours
with the maps.
Goddamn
the goddamn damn.
The house was so big, and I was
so far away, that
sometimes I’d see him in a
window where the walls
turned back on themselves,
outflanking sense,
but not hear the blasphemies.
I was in the library,
surrounded by three thousand
books. Do not lend was
stamped on the Ex Libris plate of The Story of the Sherman
Brigade. In Van Wert, before the family moved
to the capital, his books
outnumbered those in public
collections. I loved the
smell of them. I still do.
Edward S. outlasted all of
his contemporaries
on the court, setting records
for tenure. He was remote.
His opinions are still read
today. He killed himself
by jumping out the window
where I’d watched
him pace and curse. At about
the same age Ambrose Bierce
disappeared in Mexico. Or so
they say.
Sidebar 2
Dear
Justice E. Shiloh—
fuck you
and your Jingo
vets.
Ambrose Bierce here.
Here,
there and up your—
well,
whatever. I know
full
well you never got
beyond
some kind of
scout
camp in Ohio,
but I
knew your old man.
There
was a brave hombre!
You, I’ve
no idea. You were
Commander-in-Chief
of what?
United
Spanish-American
War
vets? You, who never
fired a
shot, were never
fired
upon. Here’s a bit I
wrote
just for you. You
and John
Marshall, your
son;
John Edward, your
grandson,
and even Ian
Bendoly,
your great-grandson.
I was no
leftie, Commander-
In-Chief,
far from it, but the
Loss of
the Old Republic that
T. R.
and you and Hearst
achieved—talk
about “fake news.”
Said
Citizen Hearst, my boss
at the
time: “You write the stories,
I’ll
provide the war.”
You fell
for all of it. Granted,
you were
young. But when you
were
very old you still believed
the shit
you thought when
you’d
recite “A Toast to the Flag,”
in much
the spirit Maoists waved
the “little
red book” when your
grandson
was in college.
Before
the Journal made me
change
my tune, I said “the
warmongring
press has already
broken
out like a red rash
in the
papers, whose managing
Commodores
are shivering
their
timbers and blasting
their
top lights with a
truly
pelagic volubility.”
Here’s
the opposite of
an
acoustic shadow: noise
precedes
events, sound moves
faster
than light, blather,
blather,
bosh, and blah blah blah.
Watch
this column for
another
sidebar soon.
4
My mother used to claim, “It
jumps a generation,” and
that is, unlike mirage,
analogous—I mean it’s like the notion
of acoustic shadow in its
way.
I will explain. Or maybe I
already have
but failed myself to hear, as
a result of concentrating
on the explanation in the way
“Oh. No!”
actually outflanked himself
in spite of Bierce’s
work as master of topography,
frogs of leaping neurons
all befogged by conscious
thought and not the fog
of war, attempts of will to
jump the synchronizing
synapses, crossing over
Oostanaula River in the night,
or jumping now a generation. It was the habit of
a magpie Song of Self derived
from cuts and clippings.
We were our own press agents,
Edward S. and I,
with scissor blades made for
just the purpose of assisting
young poets and distinguished
jurists in pursuit of
newspaper reference, blades
almost the length of swords
that now reside among my
fireplace tools on the
imitation Delft tiles that I
unsheathe now and then
just to poke and prod a
winter fire.
We both, Edward S. and I,
would cut and slash,
pile the clippings in a box
or paste them in a book.
My father didn’t do this; his
was the generation skipped.
Oostanaula River was below
Resaca.
On a visit in my youth, I
skipped stones across it.
Albert C. and Ambrose Bierce
did not have
time for such child’s play—
nor to download and print out
a clipping from
abroad telling me again it skips
a
generation as it
skips across the sea out of
entombment in the
etymologies: “deadline,” for
example: a pile of mortal men
beyond which
no advance is possible. Cf. “Lime
pit,” dug by survivors
after battle into which the
rotting dead were heaved.
5
Albert C. downloaded a small
ball and masticated wad
to hold it in the barrel
while he peered
around a tree looking for an
enemy to shoot.
But he was shot himself, his
forearm left all dangling
from the elbow. Hillman
writes that
Corporal
Matthias, who was scarcely more than a boy
Was
wounded fighting only fifty yards from the
Confederate
lines, but Albert C. himself
has written in the margin: Our position was a mere
Twenty
paces from their stone fort.
So his last battle was Resaca.
The wounded arm
lasted, hanging paralyzed,
for many years,
as he practiced medicine,
sometimes riding
with a sidearm out to
vaccinate
Ohio skeptics against
smallpox and against their will.
In time, they cut the arm off
at the elbow. He put
it in a bottle of
preservative and wrote
a will, Goddamnit, saying
that the arm must be
buried with the rest of him.
Ambrose Bierce,
also wounded and experiencing
hallucinations, migraines,
double vision, and the PTS
they didn’t understand
when they told him, “Goddamn
it, pull your socks up,
soldier!” didn’t march with
Sherman to the sea.
For a while, he couldn’t see
to march.
Nor could Albert C. “get a
grip on himself,” as he
Was told—unable to move his
hand or feel his arm.
“I’ll wait till I see what I
hear,” Edward S. would say,
preparing for an oral
argument, putting down the brief.
He’d come downstairs,
exhausted, browse
Among his books, thumbing
favorites absent-mindedly,
while I, waiting to hear what
he saw, continued crawling
on the floor and moving toy
soldiers in accordance
with the paragraphs about
campaigns that I
only understood as fiction,
sometimes confounded by
some facts my Grandfather
mumbled when he
took in all my strategies—“Father,
Johnny, wasn’t
where you’ve got him there.
He was only twenty
paces from the stone fort of
the enemy . . .
You’ve put him too far back.
Goddamn lucky
(blasphemies of a judicial
origin applied)
“he saved his life to start
our clan.”
Later, “Bitter Bierce” as he
was called when
he began to write, was quoted
in the Hangtown Gibbet
or the Weekly Howl saying, for example, in obits:
the
cause of death was galloping Christianity of the
malignant
type . . . or: After church last Sunday afternoon
a
Chinaman was stoned from the steps of the
First
Congregational Church. Other Christians drove
a
crowbar into yet another’s abdomen out of
sheer
amusement. One arm was riven from its socket
by some
great convulsion of nature. As the deceased
was seen
enjoying his opium pipe and his usual health
just
previous to the discovery of his melancholy
end, it
is assumed he came by his death by heart disease.
This was San Francisco, where
Bierce arrived, marching
to the sea in a direction
opposite of Sherman.
By the time I pulled his Devil’s Dictionary from the shelf
of Edward Shiloh’s library, I
could laugh at “Regalia”—
the Justice had so much of it
that I’d try on,
admiring myself in the mirror
on his closet door:
Knights
of Adam; Visionaries of Detectable Bosh; Ancient
Order of
Modern Troglodytes; League of Holy Humbug;
The
Blatherhood of Insufferable Sloth; Associated Sovereigns
Of
Mendacity; Dukes-Guardian of the Mystic Cesspool;
Order of
the Undecipherable Scroll—“the distinguishing
insignia, jewels and costumes
of such”—
and many more along with
Edward Shiloh’s Mason’s
robes, his Captain’s uniform
as failed soldier
in the Spanish War, and in
the backmost darkmost
depths of secret walk-in
closet’s secrets—Reliquary:
arms and legs, ears and eyes,
fingers, teeth,
the beards of many generals,
a penis, a pancreas, a spleen.
6
Splenetic, sometimes,
Albert wore his sanguinary
arm just like a gifted relic,
hanging at his side. There
wasn’t much
a doc could do, even with
both hands, for the sick
in Gilboa or McComb, towns
where he set up
his practice having learned
most of what
he knew from a long
convalescence from the wound
in Nashville, Jefferson,
Cleveland and the office
of a Dr. Dean where he
apprenticed when
still a patient himself. But
for diphtheria, typhus,
even measles, there was
little to do but watch.
Dean told him, “They feel
better when
I walk in their door, but
then they understand
we can’t do anything but be
there.” It was
Dean who told him, “Pack a
gun when
you vaccinate in the
countryside. That way
they’re less likely to keep
you from their kids.
The hell with stupid parents.
If they want to
die from smallpox, let them
die.” Bierce would
have liked this last remark
and maybe even have
quoted
it in his Town Crier column, or under
his Sidebar
3
pen name, “Ursus,” in the Grizzly Papers as he
started being read. Even
Albert C. read him
in Ohio, knowing him as
veteran of the
battles he himself had fought
and knowing him as
former resident of Meigs
County. In McComb
and Gilboa, Bierce was read
by some
who knew him or his
reputation: One paper
called him “wise, witty,
lively and severe.”
Another was shocked at the “Rabelaisian
audacity
of his homicidal prose.” Albert
C.’s books
ended up among the hundreds
that I browsed
on Edward Shiloh’s shelves.
Right next
to Hinman’s The Sherman Brigade, Bierce on
Shiloh, Chickamauga, Coulter’s
Notch, Resaca,
and the hanging at Owl Creek
Bridge.
His journalism flayed the
privileged and the
stupid and the blind,
especially if they happened
to be Christian. Albert C.
was Christian
but not dumb. He wanted to be
paid. He had
a card for patients headed “Your
Physician,”
reading thus: He is a friend when a friend
is most
in need. He does not like to disturb the ill
by
collecting through the law. Make him feel
that he’s
appreciated. Promptly pay
his fee.
He is a skilled and tired and busy man.
A copy of this card marks a
place in Bierce’s
book. He’s drawn and doodled
in the
margins of his card: A wading
marsh bird with
a long beak holds a kind of
dangling banner
saying: “Ambrose Bierce. I
met him after Chickamauga.”
It marks a place where the
handwriting changes
in the margins of the book
itself. There’s a story called
“Killed at Resaca,” and A. C.
M. has written his
familiar and insistent “Twenty
paces from the enemy.”
E. S. M. has written under
that: “Not killed, but gravely
wounded. In and out of
hospitals for months.
He always said he’d lied
about his age.” Blood ran from
the doctor’s practice and
from Bierce’s books: In one
story swine stand on the
bodies of the dead
and wounded, eating off their
faces, one by one.
Sidebar 3
Some
telegrams (later to
be known
as “tweets”): For
example
(dictionary): Realism,
The art
of depicting nature as it
is seen
by toads; the charm of suf-
fusing a
landscape painted
by a
mole; a story written by
a
measuring worm. Reality, I
say, is
the dream of a mad
philosopher
or what would
remain
in the cupel if one
should
assay a phantom—or
the
nucleus of a vacuum: Rear
in the
military is that exposed
part of
the army nearest to the
Congress
while To reason is to weigh
probabilities
in the scale of
desire. And
then there is Ink:
a
villainous compound of tan-
nogallate
of iron, gum-arabic and
water,
chiefly used to facilitate
the
infection of idiocy and
promote
intellectual crime. It
may be
used to make reputations
and
unmake them, to blacken
them and
to make them white, but
it is
most generally and acceptably
employed
as a mortar to bind
together
stones in an edifice of fame,
and as a
whitewash to conceal
afterwards
the rascal quality of the
material.
All of this for you, A. C.
M.,
E. S. M., J. M. M., J .E. M.: Gilboa, Columbus,
Elkhart,
South Bend, other towns of
the
great American Midlandmind
unhinged
on hinged porch swing
&
madly swung by some phantom
swinger
pushing patent medicines
and
shouting arm, to
arms, to arms.
7
Bierce courted an unlikely
girl. Who would have guessed
he’d be smitten by a
debutante, and even swear
to friends he was in love? “Love”
in his Dictionary: “A temporal
insanity that’s cured by
marriage.” It’s not even clear
that he enjoyed sex, though
Mollie did—and
possibly at first she liked
his tales. Eros, for him, manifested
in his monologues, although
eventually he told his stories
to his drinking friends and
the pages of his books.
As Railroad Baron Jingoes
took up absolute command,
he brooded, gasped for breath
when asthma hit him
in the chest like bullets
from a firing squad. He felt the full
force of panic, something
Albert C. treated efficaciously
in Edward S. and might have
treated in his friend from
Chickamauga. But who would
start another war so soon after
the catastrophe that nearly
killed the Union? Cuba,
the Philippines, Dewey’s
battleship . . . Bierce told his
wife about “A Horseman in the
Sky,” “Four Days in Dixie,”
“One of the Missing,” “Coup
de Grace.” When he met
Teddy R., the Rough Rider
told him that his story called
“The Son of the Gods”
inspired him on San Juan Hill,
up which he crawled on hands
and knees like all the others
gasping for their breath, no
equestrian at all, a question
maybe for E. S. who ended up
with all the books
but
never learned their lesson. Nor did I when I abandoned Sidebar 4
toy soldiers on the carpet
and put on the uniforms. Death
to the
Old Republic, I
might have cheered: Hurrah
for the
Empire being born and my
grandfather’s trek
as far as training camp, but
not beyond. It was a short
kind of war. Unlike Albert
C., he never fired a shot,
was never shot at. Still, I
loved the uniforms.
As for the Reliquary, Bierce
omitted one left arm.
The Dictionary, though, lists
the ears of Balaam’s ass,
The lung
of the cock that called Peter to repent,
a
feather from the Angel of Annunciation, and the head
of Saint
Dennis, arrived in Canterbury to explain
that it
was seeking a body of doctrine, but thrown into
the
Stour. Another head was ordered straight from Rome.
As for the arm, my own belief
is that it took on life
and spent no time at all as
relic in the closet, but after
amputation gave, ahead of its
time and fully avant-garde,
a Fascist salute. Viva la Muerte was in fact a slogan
of Falangists. Oh severed
arm, you had your own ideas
in spite of the will and
determination of Albert C.
I see you stand up on your
hand and walk toward the
horizon. Which side are you on? the old labor movement
song enquired. I ask again,
but cannot hear a reply
as I see you wave, salute. Eventually
I hear
when the acoustic shadow
lifts: Didn’t I say, old boy,
Viva la
Muerte, Viva la Muerte, Viva la Muerte.
Sidebar 4
. . . a
bar where I ordered Sarsaparilla,
not the
straight shot of whisky that the
gunslingers
downed before a
shootout
on some dusty crossroads
in a
movie set, or, acoustic shadow,
in
slow-mo, TV. Me, I grew up with radio,
and that
seemed miracle enough.
Half-asleep,
I’d half-hear the extra
innings
of a baseball game, waking in
the
morning half-remembering who won.
On radio
there’s no acoustic shadow,
and you
either listen or you turn it off.
I’d turn
off kids outside my room
who
called me to go biking down the glen.
More and
more, I stayed up in my room.
I
understand, long after, that family
members
were “concerned” about me,
that is,
about my isolation from a normal
childhood.
They wanted me out playing
with the
others on the street. I did
that now
and then, but something was
always
missing. I tried to see what
it was,
but only later heard it. It was
a
summons to the past. Every other kid
was
looking forward, only I was hearing
back.
The voices grew familiar, but
broke up
in storms with inexplicable
noises,
sometimes static simply due to
awkward
fingers on the dial. Who had won
the
game? Who had won the war? Who
conquered
history and parsed the past?
I did,
now and then, have the sense I’d seen
some
things before the words arrived to
tell me
what they were: The breasts of
the girl
next door, the boy with a
broken
nose running home without
his bike
shouting some abuse about
the
bully down the glen. The sound,
the
sense of it, came late. Many things
I saw
confused me, and so I shut myself
in my
room to listen, waiting for a
door
into the basement, time. Down
there my
father shoveled coal, my
mother
washed my dirty clothes
by hand.
But when they rose into
the
present and I saw them with
the
others, why did they strike poses,
war-memorial
like, why were they
walking
in broad day? I listened to
the
radio and opened wide my eyes.
“Infidel,”
said Ambrose, reading
from his
book: “you who fail to revere
the
cenobites, vicars, rectors, robots,
fufis,
pumpoms, acolytes, imams,
beneficiaries,
clerks, confessors, beadles,
fakirs,
fakers, motherfukers, parsons,
Persons
of Importance, priors, padres,
canons
and divines. You hear, my brother,
who will
wait to verify, you sleepy eye?”
8
I’ve ordered the CD from
Netflix, put it on, but turned off
the sound: and there he is, Gringo Viejo, complete with
acoustic shadow. It’s clear
there’s another war, there always
is, and massive casualties,
there always are. Mexicans are
falling off their horses,
people getting shot. Some
hacienda’s set on fire, and
there’s the hero, or I suppose
the anti-hero, Bitter Bierce
himself, Mr. Peck straight
from his gig as Atticus Finch
in To Kill a Mockingbird.
This time crows and vultures
do the mocking, Oh, and
there’s the Virile
Revolutionary, straight from central
casting, and his Poncho Villa
cadres, all very fierce
in their sombreros. Jane
Fonda’s the schoolmarm, come
to teach the kids of Mirandas,
teaching, or so it
seems, the poor who have
inherited, if not the earth,
the ranch. Peck’s a little
old for her, but she allows
one kiss. There seem to be
prostitutes following
the progress of the
volunteers, and plying their trade
from an empty railroad car.
Jane takes some
lessons from them in art of
sex, ends up of course
with the “General,”
self-appointed, leaving Gringo Viejo,
Bitter Bierce, as father
figure, not a lover.
To figure all this out
requires no sound at all, unlike
those battles where acoustic
shadow led to
catastrophic military errors.
And this is how the past
comes at us, overwhelming us
in image without
sound: old photographs,
portraits, battle maps, nightmares
and silent films. I’d sit
with others watching
home movies in my grandfather’s
house, and the
oldest would say: Oh, there’s Granny Crouch, there’s
Uncle
Jim. We kids would shrug at
these unspeaking dead,
walking there as if alive. We
watched them talking
to each other, but of course
we couldn’t hear.
What did they say? What does
Fonda say to Peck
and the Virile Revolutionary
who, I think, may
be the black sheep of the
Miranda clan who had owned
the expropriated hacienda.
Me, I’d rather
sleep with the pretty whore
than the schoolmarm.
That’s what Bitter Bierce
does in the end, gifting Jane
To “the revolution.” At least
that’s what it looks like.
There are photographs of
Albert C., but no scenes
with him in the movies. We
only know what he said
from his letters and his
dedication of
The
Sherman Brigade. And
there are newspaper clippings
in a box. We know what Bierce
had to say
from his published stories
and his rants. We don’t know how
he ended up, and it’s only
speculation that he went to
Mexico at all. Still, why not
think so? Writing this, I see that
the Virile Revolutionary’s
shot Mr. Peck in the back.
Jane is horrified, holds the
dying man in her arms. If
I turned on the sound, I’d
know what they were saying.
She maybe calls him “father.”
Peck couldn’t
get his pecker up, although
the whore let him feel
her breasts. Jane’s “real”
father died in Cuba
in the Spanish War. I can
tell that from a flashback
without sound. Or did he? Maybe
he just left
her mother for sexy Cuban
girls and disappeared in dust
left over from the Spanish
War. I turn on the sound
and Las chicas cantan, girls and whores. Shadow
blows away in a wind that
gathers on the dry
horizon. Jane will bury
Bitter Bierce in what
was meant to be her “real”
father’s grave. Peck
died at sea in Moby Dick, but this time no such luck.
This time he’s Bitter Bierce,
not Ahab.
Though already dead, he’s
tied up with the virile chap
who is, like revolutionaries
everywhere, eaten by the movement.
Villa has them shot together,
son and father one
is meant to think. What’s a
girl like Jane to do? She knows
little about Cuba, less about
the Spanish War. Villa has
the gringo and the bastard
Miranda shot together: what fun,
the end of a story, end of an
Hacienda’s line.
Unlike the others from my own
Hacienda, I’ve no
love of Edward Shiloh’s
memory, just his house
and library, both now
destroyed or lost along
with all my toy soldiers and
his uniforms.
The war he trumpeted, like
William Randolph Hearst,
was the end of something
beautiful: The Old Republic,
saved by his own father,
Bierce, and others
from Ohio and Indiana, ripe
for betrayal by the
New Imperialists. Remember the Maine, they sang.
But Las chicas cantan. It’s a different song
and one I’d rather sing. The
Filipino jungles look
to me like those in Vietnam.
In both they used
the water board, often just
for fun. What would the good
doctor, A. C. M., have said
about it all?
I’d throw his severed arm at
the whole jingo lot of them.
The movie ends with Jane and
Bierce’s body on
a bridge over the Rio Grande.
It’s sunset, of course.
We are the stuff that beams
of light are
made of; the stuff of reams
of paper printed with
the ambiguities of words. We
don’t
hear very well. At least not
what we see.
—John Matthias
